0:00:00 - 0:00:27 So often, the Lord did things on purpose to push the limits of what his audiences. Preconceived notions would allow because it, it was a test of faith. So his disciples ate grain from the fields on the Sabbath, for example. And they intentionally did not wash their hands before they ate. And today I'm 0:00:27 - 0:00:57 going to talk about a rather advanced topic while wearing a Captain America tank top. So you get to endure that test of your faith in all seriousness. Um It really is important to learn to discern great value when it's embedded in things of low value. That that's an extremely important attribute of holiness 0:00:56 - 0:01:23 on to the topic. This is an advanced topic. It, it will, it will apply to hardly any of you. But I need to make this for one person in particular. And I'm told to make it in this way in case it affects anyone else benefits anyone else. I want to talk about saving lives and miracles in general a little 0:01:23 - 0:01:52 bit and a little bit of context while preserving anonymity. I had an email exchange with someone who had the opportunity to save the life of a loved one through their own intercession. And there are a million different ways that that could look ranging from the extremely spiritual to the extremely temporal 0:01:52 - 0:02:21 . And if you are a spouse or a parent or there, there's so many different life situations where you may have experienced this. And I just want to acknowledge I'm using as general language as I can to encapsulate all of that. But that language might be a little excessive for your particular case, but 0:02:21 - 0:02:48 this applies to people who have intervened to save the lives of others. Now, on the surface, it seems like that would always be a good idea, right? Generalizing this a bit. If you had power from God to work miracles of whatever sort, shouldn't you just go out and do that all the time. Well, the answer 0:02:48 - 0:03:29 is no, and there are subtleties here that exceed what we can adequately cover in a video. But there are applications of this principle that are going to occur in the lives of at least some people before the full treatment of this and text is published. There are cases where it is better for someone to 0:03:29 - 0:04:06 die. That's the bottom line up front. There are cases from the scriptures that you can go and search out where it was God's will for people to die. And what his servants do in those situations will vary depending on their understanding. Our understanding of God's will is an estimate of his actual will 0:04:06 - 0:04:43 . And there are descriptions in the scriptures of the distance or fidelity to distance from or fidelity to God's actual will. So for example, when the Lord's speaking to Nephi, he says, you won't ask anything that's not my will. And then we have the case of Elman Amye where Amye, they're tied up and 0:04:43 - 0:05:08 they're watching Amulet's friends be burned by fire for their belief in God. And Amy says to Elma, we have God's power. Why don't we stop this? And Elma says, mm, no, no, we need to let this happen. And so if Alma were by himself, ex excuse me, if Amy were by himself, he would have intervened. But Alma 0:05:08 - 0:05:36 said, hm, no, we shouldn't do that. Now, Alma was much more experienced. He knew the Lord better than aye. Why was it that, that the closer estimate of God's will included the destruction of these people? Well, we're broaching a pretty enormous topic here or at least skirting one, which is that the purpose 0:05:35 - 0:06:00 of miracles is not to reduce suffering. It's to increase improvement. The purpose of life is improvement. It's not to avoid suffering. If anything, we're actually here to suffer more than we would if creation hadn't occurred because of what that affords in terms of increases in knowing God, which translates 0:05:59 - 0:06:34 into joy. So the suffering in life, the scaffold that allows suffering in life allows us to live in a way where our sacrifices is a free will offering to God in love in ways that help others, which will turn into a source of eternal joy. So getting rid of that is actually working against God's purposes 0:06:33 - 0:07:04 . This life is not where we come to have nice things. It's where we come to become better people. Those are two very different motives. So in my own life, God has placed, I, I would say he's deployed me to many situations where life was at stake. And there is a collection of people who are numerous enough 0:07:03 - 0:07:34 that I could not recount them all off the top of my head whose lives were preserved because of what the Lord did for them in situations in which I was involved and they would not be alive if it weren't for those miracles. And they all know about this and almost all of them believe it. But here's the 0:07:34 - 0:08:02 question. Would I do it again? Knowing what I know. Now, would I do it again? You see, as we live up to what we know, we learn more than we knew before. And if you're doing what you're supposed to be doing in life, you're going to think, feel and act differently than you did previously, you'll be able 0:08:02 - 0:08:26 to look back at your life and say, hm, with what I know now, I would have done something different in that position. If the same thing happened today, I would think, feel and act differently differently, how well, ideally you would act feel and think closer to how the Lord would actually in your place 0:08:25 - 0:08:56 , even if at the time, you sincerely did the best that you knew or in other words, what you sincerely believed he would think, feel or do in your place. But that's this world is, is a place where he teaches us more through the life that we live. John 717 is frequently invoked in the sense that you will 0:08:56 - 0:09:22 receive evidence, that what you believe is right if you do it and it is right. But one consequence of the structuring of that promise is that you will also come to see the limits of your beliefs by living them fully. And that's a blessing because it's the gateway to something more. It's the necessary 0:09:21 - 0:09:41 precondition to something better. You have to see the limits of what you have before you're going to be interested in or even able to perceive something better. There's a, there are limits there, there, there are tensions that work against each other in terms of your satisfaction with what you have and 0:09:41 - 0:10:06 your willingness to receive something more. So it's important to look back on life and to we could say this in soft ways and hard ways. The the hard way of saying this is to condemn your past self and say, you know what I didn't know at the time. But I know now and the present me is looking back at the 0:10:06 - 0:10:28 past me and saying that was not the best way to be. If I were to face this situation again, I'd have to do it differently. And here's what I do and why the softer ways of saying this are just, you know, we should always be better and think and improve and whatever. I'm not great at the soft ways. So 0:10:28 - 0:10:59 when it comes to saving the lives of others or working any miracle, the reason servants of God participate in miracles is because they're interested in benefiting other people and they're willing to pay a price to do. So when you do that and you find out that the benefit was less than what you thought 0:10:59 - 0:11:28 it would be, it changes your calculations and so you could fine tune this and that's ok. But in a much bigger sense, you want to help people and sometimes in helping them, you actually hurt them. And so you have to refine your model of what, how you help somebody because obviously helping them didn't 0:11:28 - 0:11:49 help. Now, I made a video about how older people ruin younger people. That was the title. This is actually the same theme. If you're a new parent, you do all this stuff above and beyond because there's nothing you wouldn't do for your kid. But then you have to knock a bunch of that off because there's 0:11:49 - 0:12:09 nothing you wouldn't do for your kid. You see because you learn that going, you know, like wiping down every single thing they touch with disinfectant it. You think you're helping them, but you're actually hurting them because then they don't build up an immune system. This is just an arbitrary example 0:12:09 - 0:12:28 or giving them every toy in the world. You realize that little toddlers actually aren't happy with an overabundance of toys. They get overwhelmed and bored. And so one thing that works really well is take the toys away and rotate them out and just give them a new one every day and put the old one back 0:12:28 - 0:12:49 and just keep rotating it. And then they, I think optimally excited about the toys. Plus you don't have a huge mess everywhere because toddlers will just take the toys out and drag them all over the house or whatever their little containment area is. So there are better ways of being and you learn these 0:12:49 - 0:13:13 as you go through life, life is supposed to instruct us in improvement. That's the way it's designed. If it doesn't do that, we're, we're using it incorrectly, not for its purpose, but something else. So something less. So it's a little strange to think that there would be cases where it's not that you 0:13:13 - 0:13:41 regret being a part of a miracle that God works. It's that you acknowledge that the Ben, the most of the benefit that came out of that. And this is crazy is an increase to your own reluctance to be a part of miracles that hopefully is mind blowing. If it's not, then I haven't done a good job here, an 0:13:41 - 0:14:21 adequate job. So when you transition from Amulet to Alma, you're less willing to do miracles in certain cases. Because the constraints of your understanding of when it would benefit, it becomes a tighter window. Here's an arbitrary example that I'm just plucking out of thin air. We know that Stephen 0:14:20 - 0:14:53 was martyred and he was a very righteous man who knows what all the details of that were as far as God's calculation of why that needed to be that way. I can make speculator guesses, but that's not helpful here. Whatever the truth might be, we're going to just engineer a totally imagined situation. What 0:14:53 - 0:15:25 if a week, a month or a year after that? If God had intervened, if Stephen would have gone off the rails, would it be better for Steven to die when he did if he would have turned away from everything after that? Now, suppose Peter comes along while they're throwing the first rocks and he, he, he performs 0:15:25 - 0:16:00 a miracle and saves Steven's life, but actually ends up taking his eternal life because he has taken him out of this situation that actually would have been the best for him. Now again, this is just contrived. But what if, what if, what if should we keep going with Stephen or pick someone else? Look 0:16:00 - 0:16:23 , there, there are going to be cases where people are being spared from challenges that are beyond their ability to overcome. There are going to be cases where people are removed out of situations where there will be a thorn in the side of someone doing better things. There are going to be cases where 0:16:23 - 0:16:57 that person just becomes worse and worse and worse and worse. And so the point with all of this is that it's not so simple as alleviation of suffering equals good or um continuation of life equals good. Sometimes the greatest good that can come out of a situation includes someone dying. This life is 0:16:56 - 0:17:25 not the end and it's not the purpose of everything. It's the means of something better. And we have to learn to look at these things in the bigger picture, not just in terms of the individual or time scales, but the world and eternity, I'm sure I've missed something that I intended to say here. But hopefully 0:17:24 - 0:17:51 this at least opens your mind to considering some of these ideas. But the truth is that very few people respond to miracles in the way they would need to in order for it to be a good idea. And the more power you gain from God. And we really should be thinking about that in terms of with God because there 0:17:51 - 0:18:15 is no power independent of Him. But the more like Him, you become the more of his power you will have because those things go together and the more you're going to have to learn to think like Him too. All those things are tied together. And so you have to, you have to think you have to build these more 0:18:14 - 0:18:45 sophisticated models of reality and move past the simplistic ideas of intervention equals good. That's not the case many, many times, it's not the case. And as you grow in character towards God and in power like God, you're going to find more and more situations where you're withholding that, not out 0:18:44 - 0:19:04 of a lack of courage, certainly not out of a lack of love. But because you have to honestly acknowledge that what others would see is helpful is often actually hurtful in the awareness of God.