3 Nephi 21

Okay, I know you’ve had enough of signs. But that’s me, that’s how I work. So here’s another one. When I’m about to round up my friends from everywhere and start Zion here, I’ll make sure your descendants hear about you by white-skinned Gentiles telling them, giving them your books, not in this language but some mongrel tongue that doesn’t even exist yet. Look, you have to have some kind of stake in this real estate to which your ancestors sailed. These white Gentiles I mentioned will tell your descendants all about it. Because, frankly—and you should be ashamed to admit it—they won’t know a thing about any of this. Totally clueless. Sin scratches away at people’s memory like your bookkeepers scratch away at gold plates. So when your kin’s memory comes back, through Gentile intervention, that means I’m about to pull all my people from their happy homes around the world and bring them together here. A big reservation, you might say, that is, a place reserved for them to pool their possessions and build something great.

Put another way: when your distant children’s children hear about my covenant with you, that is the sign it’s about to be kept.

Earth’s aristocracies will shudder to see what happens then. My Father will pull no punches to dazzle high-class onlookers, some of whom still won’t believe their own eyes or ears. They’ll hear things from news-carriers that will make them say, “That’s fake.” But I’ll look after anyone who dares tell the story. They might get a piece of him. But he won’t die. And I’ll spontaneously heal anyone who gets beaten, just to show off. I’m king of all molecular structures.

Whoever doesn’t believe me, Jesus—remember that name—and all the words I say and all the people who say all the words I say, which are words my Father gave me to say, will essentially existentially vanish. Or at least be so alienated he or she will wish not to have existed.

Now you, my people, will terrorize the Gentiles who invade your nation, as if you were a lion and they some young, freshly shorn lambs, their neck veins throbbing in your eyes.

So start wailing now, you unrepentant Gentiles. I plan to hack apart your chariots and cut the legs from their horses. I will knock over your towers as if they were children’s blocks. I will annihilate witches and fortune-tellers—not to be confused with prophets, mind you, who usually have meaner things to say than fortune-tellers. Your statues and paintings I’ll burn up with my annoyance. Groves for worshipping tree-spirits: plucked out of the ground. Cities: twisted from their foundations.

Lying, cheating, jealousy, envy, ecclesiastical abuse, prostitution—where to stop?—I’ll snuff out like old candles.

I really have nothing more to say to you. But I can’t stop talking about it. You’re condemned like an earthquake-ravaged high-rise.

If you don’t listen it’s the same as if you can’t hear. Obliviousness = deafness.

If you do listen, though, I’ll sidle up to you like a young pup. I get cozy with the openhearted.

Good Gentiles will team up with good Jacobites and build the replacement city for Jerusalem, which I find somewhere on the map between Boring and

Exhausting. They’ll also team up to boat in fresh immigrants who love me. I’ll be supervising all this, of course, though probably not visibly. I’m very modest, though you wouldn’t know it from most of my rhetoric.

The message will go out to the remnant of your lineage: I live, I love, pay attention, obey. I’ll make sure other tribes get it too. A universal call to spiritual arms. I’ll draft the whole world into the army of penitence.

My Father and I will also team up to get this done, especially that gathering of tribes onto this continent, whose logistics almost frighten us, which is saying something. In that process, one of us—Father and I—will lead the tribes, the other follow. I don’t know yet who will do which. And besides, you have to remember this leading is all symbolic in one way or another.