The desolating scourge

The Word of Wisdom

A Word of Wisdom, for the benefit of the council of high priests, assembled in Kirtland, and the church, and also the saints in Zion—to be sent greeting; not by commandment or constraint, but by revelation and the word of wisdom, showing forth the order and will of God in the temporal salvation of all saints in the last days—given for a principle with promise, adapted to the capacity of the weak and the weakest of all saints, who are or can be called saints. (D&C 89:1-3.)

The Word of Wisdom is for the temporal salvation of all saints in the last days, but it has two applications:

Behold, verily, thus saith the Lord unto you: In consequence of evils and designs which do and will exist in the hearts of conspiring men in the last days, I have warned you, and forewarn you, by giving unto you this word of wisdom by revelation—that inasmuch as any man drinketh wine or strong drink among you, behold it is not good, neither meet in the sight of your Father, only in assembling yourselves together to offer up your sacraments before him. (D&C 89:4-5.)

The warning is in consequence of the evils and designs which do exist in the hearts of conspiring men in the last days, from the time the revelation was first given to Joseph Smith (February 27, 1833) to the time of the Elias who restores all things. The forewarning, however, is in consequence of the evils and designs which will exist in the hearts of conspiring men in the last days, which will be during the end times.

When Elias gets out of his box, he will initiate a church reset. This will reset the Word of Wisdom back to being merely a word of wisdom “to be sent greeting; not by commandment or constraint.” Thus it will no longer be binding upon the saints.

Moses as a repeating pattern

After his reset, Elias will go away for a time, perhaps even for a long time, to his hidden kingdom, to enjoy himself and to let the wheat and tares ripen. We will then get a repeat scenario of when Moses went away:

And Moses went into the midst of the cloud, and gat him up into the mount: and Moses was in the mount forty days and forty nights. (Exodus 24:18.)

While Moses was up in the mount, talking with God for such a long time, the people down below started to wonder why he was delayed so long:

And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him, Up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him. (Exodus 32:1.)

Aaron then made them a golden calf, had them get naked and dance and sing and worship the idol, as they engaged in revelry.

And when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation, and said, To morrow is a feast to the LORD. And they rose up early on the morrow, and offered burnt offerings, and brought peace offerings; and the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play. (Exodus 32:5-6.)

When Moses and Joshua came down the mountain, they heard the noise of the huge party the idolaters were making:

And Moses turned, and went down from the mount, and the two tables of the testimony were in his hand: the tables were written on both their sides; on the one side and on the other were they written. And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables. And when Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said unto Moses, There is a noise of war in the camp. And he said, It is not the voice of them that shout for mastery, neither is it the voice of them that cry for being overcome: but the noise of them that sing do I hear. (Exodus 32:15-18.)

Moses then blew his top, or as the record says, his “anger waxed hot.” He then made the idolaters drink the idol (which likely made them sick) and ordered them killed:

And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses’ anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount. And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it. (Exodus 32:19-20.)

And when Moses saw that the people were naked; (for Aaron had made them naked unto their shame among their enemies:) then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, Who is on the LORD’s side? let him come unto me. And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him. And he said unto them, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour. And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men. (Exodus 32:25-28.)

As with Moses, so with Elias

Elias, before he goes away, will cause a golden age of prosperity to dawn upon mankind, the likes of which modern society has never before seen. As the church will also be reset by Elias before he leaves, the Word of Wisdom will be a non-binding principle, making the people free to drink wine, strong drinks, mild drinks, hot drinks, smoke tobacco and so on.

In his absence a great apostasy will ensue, during which the wicked tares will take the abundance of their goods and throw continual parties, eating and drinking to excess, for the valleys will be fat with produce and plenty of animals to slaughter and the people will be engorged with riches:

Woe to the crown of pride, to the drunkards of Ephraim, whose glorious beauty is a fading flower, which are on the head of the fat valleys of them that are overcome with wine! (Isaiah 28:1.)

But they also have erred through wine, and through strong drink are out of the way; the priest and the prophet have erred through strong drink, they are swallowed up of wine, they are out of the way through strong drink; they err in vision, they stumble in judgment. For all tables are full of vomit and filthiness, so that there is no place clean. (Isaiah 28:7-8.)

And so they will become drunkards engaging in revelry and riotous behavior. At some point, Elias will come back, and like Moses, his anger will wax hot by what he sees:

Behold, the Lord hath a mighty and strong one, which as a tempest of hail and a destroying storm, as a flood of mighty waters overflowing, shall cast down to the earth with the hand. (Isaiah 28:2.)

Unlike Moses’s anger, which got appeased, the anger of Elias will be like a raging volcano, unable to calm down, and he will send forth a plague upon the people, a desolating scourge which will be an overflowing sickness:

For a desolating scourge shall go forth among the inhabitants of the earth, and shall continue to be poured out from time to time, if they repent not, until the earth is empty, and the inhabitants thereof are consumed away and utterly destroyed by the brightness of my coming. (D&C 5:19.)

And there shall be men standing in that generation, that shall not pass until they shall see an overflowing scourge; for a desolating sickness shall cover the land. (D&C 45:31.)

The wicked will attempt to protect themselves from the desolating scourge by quarantining themselves in above ground places of refuge and below ground caverns and facilities, but the destroyer will send forth hail and storm to destroy the places of refuge and a flood of waters to flush them out of their underground hiding spots:

Wherefore hear the word of the LORD, ye scornful men, that rule this people which is in Jerusalem. Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us: for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves: therefore thus saith the Lord GOD, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste. Judgment also will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet: and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding place. And your covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your agreement with hell shall not stand; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, then ye shall be trodden down by it. From the time that it goeth forth it shall take you: for morning by morning shall it pass over, by day and by night: and it shall be a vexation only to understand the report. (Isaiah 28:14-19.)

The difference between Moses and Elias

Again, Moses’s anger was eventually appeased. Not so with Elias. This sickness will be an ongoing event, going out day and night, from the moment Elias returns and blows his stack, until Jesus comes back and the wicked of the world are entirely destroyed. It will be a perpetual curse from that day forward until there are no more wicked. Only then will Elias’s anger be appeased.

Elias’s anger, then, is patterned after God the Father, and not after Moses. When the children of Israel worshiped the golden calf, God’s first instinct was to allow His anger to wax hot so that he could destroy the whole of them and make a new nation out of Moses:

And the LORD said unto Moses, I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people: Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation. (Exodus 32:9-10.)

In other words, the anger of the Lord is manifested by the destroyer acting. The destroyer does not discriminate, therefore if the anger of the Lord would have waxed hot, the now angry destroyer would have come down and killed every last one of them, both idolater and innocent bystander, both men, women and children, because the principle the destroyer acts upon is: wipe the slate clean and start over again.

But Moses intervened on behalf of the children of Israel, trying to keep them alive. Despite that intervention, the destroyer had already begun to become angry, requiring, at the very least, that those who refused to repent be killed, which would appease the angel’s anger:

And the Lord said unto Moses, If they will repent of the evil which they have done, I will spare them, and turn away my fierce wrath; but, behold, thou shalt execute judgment upon all that will not repent of this evil this day. Therefore, see thou do this thing that I have commanded thee, or I will execute all that which I had thought to do unto my people. (JST Exodus 32:14.)

The whole plan of salvation, then, is simply a way to appease the anger of the destroyer, so that he doesn’t act. Once God begins to get angry, the destroying angel also starts to get angry, and as he is the executor of God’s wrath, once he gets angry, he begins to act, and that’s the problem.

While the destroying angel is in the heavens, things are done so as to appease his (and thus God’s) anger, in order to save as many souls as possible. But once he comes to earth during his mortal probation, he must be incited to more anger than he’s ever before felt and then unleashed upon the populace.

Now it needs to be this way, for of all the emotional states, anger is the most energetic. Because the end-time work is infinite in scope, the destroyer needs all the energy he can muster to accomplish it. Thus it is through anger that the restoration of all things takes place. God allows His destroyer’s anger to rage endlessly so that the righteous get fully protected and the wicked get fully destroyed:

For the LORD shall rise up as in mount Perazim, he shall be wroth as in the valley of Gibeon, that he may do his work, his strange work; and bring to pass his act, his strange act. Now therefore be ye not mockers, lest your bands be made strong: for I have heard from the Lord GOD of hosts a consumption, even determined upon the whole earth. (Isaiah 28:21-22.)

God protects His people from the destroyer’s wrath

Just as God provided a means by which the children of Israel could survive the wrath of the destroyer, namely, the Passover, so God has provided a means to the Gentiles saints whereby they will be able to survive the coming desolating scourge:

And all saints who remember to keep and do these sayings, walking in obedience to the commandments, shall receive health in their navel and marrow to their bones; and shall find wisdom and great treasures of knowledge, even hidden treasures; and shall run and not be weary, and shall walk and not faint. And I, the Lord, give unto them a promise, that the destroying angel shall pass by them, as the children of Israel, and not slay them. Amen. (D&C 89:18-21.)

This, then, is the actual end-time purpose of the Word of Wisdom.

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