Mosiah 16

Abinadi stretched his arm out and said: “At some point the whole earth will know God and love his ways, confess that they’re correct. And then evil souls will have to sob and wail and scrunch their faces in pain just knowing their good days have ended. I speak of those whose spirit is filled with the devil like a bottle of ink, or swallowed by that ugly python that fooled Adam and Eve and left us all stained in some way, shackled—or at least tethered—to Satan. That’s how God lost us or we lost ourselves, unfindable without a Redeemer. The worst people are those who can’t see they’re lost and so keep falling, no bottom in sight. To them no Redeemer is needed and so no Redeemer can help. If you’re God’s enemy, you’re no better than the devil.

“Christ has to die and rise from death. Without that, death squeezes you into pulp, dries you into dust. But he will die and rise. And that lets him be the python that swallows death. If death itself dies, then life lives. No stopping it. It’s like light, no distance it can’t conquer. And isn’t distance really the great fear we all have?

“Christ covers dying with living, coarseness with fineness. And when that’s happened to each of us we’re ready for a fair judgment as God reviews what we did all our days—good, bad, indifferent or in-between. If the scales tilt toward good, the gate to happiness swings open. If the opposite, the gate snaps shut and we have to go in another gate, slaves to Satan. Why do people do that to themselves? Follow their whims, hormonal or pecuniary, not even thinking they need mercy, the kind God holds out always. Even warned, they snort their disdain.

We should all shake a little at the thought. Look ourselves in the mirror. Come to Christ. If you teach Moses’ law, teach that it only foretells something better. I don’t need to say any more about what that is. Amen.”