Week 28 - Looking Back

The prophesied destruction came. Many were killed. There was darkness everywhere. And then a voice. The voice – declaring “I am Jesus Christ.” And later, another voice announcing, “Behold my Beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, in whom I have glorified my name – hear ye him.” And then, there He was, “descending out of heaven; and he was. . . clothed in a white robe; and . . . came down and stood in the midst of them;” And then He said, “Arise and come forth unto me, that ye may thrust your hands into my side, and also that ye may feel the prints of the nails in my hands and in my feet, that ye may know that I am the God of Israel, and the God of the whole earth, and have been slain for the sins of the world.” And this they did, “one by one.”

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland wrote that the appearance of the resurrected Lord to the Nephites and His declaration of His messiahship “constituted the focal point, the supreme moment, in the entire history of the Book of Mormon. It was the manifestation and the decree that had informed and inspired every Nephite prophet for the previous six hundred years, to say nothing of their Israelite and Jareidte forefathers for thousands of years before that. “Everyone had talked of Him, sung of Him, dreamed of Him, and prayed for His appearance – but here he actually was. The day of days! The God who turns every dark night into the morning light had arrived” (Christ and the New Covenant: The Messianic Message of the Book of Mormon [1997], 250-51).

Elder Holland also declared, “However dim our days may seem, they have been a lot darker for the Savior of the world. As a reminder of those days, Jesus has chosen, even in a resurrected, otherwise perfected body, to retain for the benefit of His disciples the wounds in His hands and in His feet and in His side – signs, if you will, that painful things happen even to the pure and the perfect; signs, if you will, that pain in this world is not evidence that God doesn’t love you; signs, if you will, that problems pass and happiness can be hours. Remind others that it is the wounded Christ who is the Captain of our souls, He who yet bears the scars of our forgiveness, the lesions of His love and humility, the torn flesh of obedience and sacrifice.

“These wounds are the principal way we are to recognize Him when He comes. He may invite us forward, as He has invited others, to see and to feel those marks. If not before, then surely at that time, we will remember with Isaiah that it was for us that a God was ‘despised and rejected . . .; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief,’ that ‘he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed’ (Isaiah 53:3, 5)” ( Ensign, January 2003, 42).