2 Nephi 27

That makes it easy to identify who will be drunk with sin in the world’s final days: everybody. And the earth will react violently, as if it were hung over: thunder, earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires.

Still, all the nations that fight against my people, the ones who remember my laws and such, will be like a man who dreams he’s eating, wakes and he’s still hungry. We’ve all been there, right? But I return to my drunkenness metaphor: sin makes you stagger, slurs your speech, knocks you out. If you keep sinning and ragging about prophets, God will pour sleep on your heads like a coach pouring beer on his team’s heads at the end of a game. It’s a kind of revelry of neuro-depressants. That’s the nature of sin and its consequence.

Okay, let me mix it up some more. If you keep sinning, God will give you a book written by people long dead but you won’t be able to open it. It’s world history that takes you from beginning to end. God gives the book, I say, but won’t let you open it because he doesn’t want you to read it. That’s your punishment.

But one man will be its caretaker and he’ll pass along the part that’s able to be shared. No, wait, he’ll not share the book at all. Someone else will have to do that. I’m getting this messed up. But it’s a major book.

Anyway, when God’s ready, people will read the book aloud on their roofs. The only people who can do that are disciples of the Lamb. Only they get to know what this earth is about and where it’s going and how it’s going and how it will turn out. The righteous will get a library card for it. The wicked need not apply.

The man who will be the book’s proprietor before it’s released will let three others look at it, so they can say it exists, should that become a question. They’ll validate it in their own way. The book will be in, as we say, limited circulation for a long time. But it, like every book ends up doing, will carry the words of the dead like a casket carried their bodies. And running their words through your mind lets them speak as if they were still alive. Which, in a way, I guess they are when that happens.

I know this all sounds cagey. But God will have a chain of custody over this book that involves only a select few, whom he will pick for reasons he’s not explaining. (And none of them better reject the privilege.) One of the chosen will take some of the book to a professor who knows some foreign languages. (Did I tell you this book will be in a language different from the proprietor and the friends he shows it to?) Anyway, the professor won’t be impressed and will joke about the whole thing. “I don’t like mysteries,” he’ll say. Pretty flip.

So God will give the book to an admittedly unschooled reader with no foreign language experience at all. When he tells God as much, God will say, “Too bad, because I don’t want an intellectual to read it. I’d rather have you.” So the book will get translated for the first time by someone basically taking dictation from God, who in fact does know a number of languages.

God’s point in all this is to show that he can be as inscrutable in how he operates from one era to the next. He’s got to play his cards close to the vest. That’s his nature. Secretive. He’s gotten burned so many times.

He’ll tell that book proprietor that talk is cheap. He’s not interested in the typical “Yes, I’m listening” God-head-patting rhetoric most folks give him, when really they’re thinking about anything but.

So he wants to get the goat of stuffy professor-types, who are the best at promising attention and delivering none. Not to mention promising wisdom with little to show for it.

God can be secretive. That’s his right. But don’t try it on him yourselves.

He not only sees it all, he’s seen it all before. His memory is pretty good. Yours, not so much. So he has ways of reminding you. Usually these are not pleasant.

He likes to turn tables, too. So abandoned vacant lots will sprout into full-blown gardens, deaf people will hear his words ringing in their ears, blind people will get moments of imagery flashing in their heads.

Anyone who’s been put down will suddenly feel like they’re the most important person on earth because of how much he’ll bless him or her. People doing the putting down, on the other hand, will blow away like dandelions. Especially people who are nitpicky about proper language, the ones who look for oh-so-proper diction.

God wants you to know that Israel, for all its faults, won’t end up as ashamed as one might expect. And they’ll recognize that and thank God for the favoritism. Justice only gets you so far.