On Reward and Punishment – Sunday, June 01, 1980
There are those who view life as a preparation for a kind of high and final court, in a literal sense, a supreme court. God is the judge who has carefully scrutinized our lives. Our deeds are laid before us as evidence of our good and wrongdoing. And punishment and reward is meted out accordingly with accompanying tears and cheers. It is all very grim and frightening and is the kind of perspective that makes us want to shrink before the Lord, avoiding Him and hoping that maybe He and His probing eyes will avoid us.
But the nature of mortality is not the legalistic one as so many think. We hear of the Lord’s judgement, “that he that is filthy shall be filthy still; and he that is righteous shall be righteous still; he that is happy shall be happy still; and he that is unhappy shall be unhappy still.”1 In other words, all the struggle, all the vacillation between fear and faith, the effort is leading us to one end. We shall be our own reward and our own punishment. Heaven is heaven partly because those of a heavenly disposition live there.
It is significant, then, that God does not have us call Him “Judge” but “Father,”—and the task He has designed for Himself is not weighing us in some cosmic balance but helping us learn to live with and love ourselves. With each small choice we make, some nerve ending, some pathway in the brain, some central part of us is changing. We are either becoming a creature more in harmony with ourselves and with eternal law, or a creature always at war, in a self-imposed conflict, our central parts rubbing against each other. In a very real sense, he who breaks eternal law, he who roams through life seeking only immediate pleasure, loses everything including pleasure. Eternal laws are not some arbitrary restrictions laid upon us to limit our fun, but the very laws of human growth, of human happiness. To resist them is to resist our own well-being like some delinquent teenager who doesn’t know better. The Lord is trying to spare us the misery of trial and error by giving us the blueprint for a happy life.
If we fail to understand that idea, we may find our rebellious selves always working against the Lord, instead of letting Him work with us.
1 Book of Mormon, Mormon 9:14
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June 01, 1980
Broadcast Number 2,650