That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.
Matthew 5:45
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Ecclesiastes 9:11
And behold, all that he requires of you is to keep his commandments; and he has promised you that if ye would keep his commandments ye should prosper in the land; and he never doth vary from that which he hath said; therefore, if ye do keep his commandments he doth bless you and prosper you.
Mosiah 2:22
Comments 5
God is not a vending machine.
We need to define “prosper.” Cause I do not think it means what we think it means – except maybe in the most general way, across an entire population.
You could also have added scriptures – Hebrews 12 and John 15 come to mind – that suggest that the righteous are actually ‘chastened’, or that their time is made more difficult, in order to get them to even higher spritual attainments.
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Here’s another one that seems like it fits in with the above references: 2 Ne 2: 14 “And now, my sons, I speak unto you these things for your profit and learning; for there is a God, and he hath created all things, both the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are, both things to act and things to be acted upon.”
Thomas, I keep saying that anything worth contemplating can be referenced to Monty Python and/or The Princess Bride. Thanks for proving my point. 🙂
I always have read the obey/prosper conclusion in two ways:
1) as Thomas said, as a statement about what happens to an entire civilization;
2) as the observation of a historian looking back over nearly 1000 years of history – echoing what the founding prophet of his people had said. Nephi seemed to make his claim based on the history of Israel; Mormon seemed to take it, see the ebbs and flows of his own people and apply it liberally as his central **historical** theme.
I think it is ludicrous to apply it to individuals. It is clear to me that it was not meant to be interpreted that way, since it is never applied that way in the context of the book itself.
Propser doesn’t necessarily mean a natural prosper. God’s people prosper because they have faith in him through everything. The hold onto him through the tough times, when others would crack, God’s people prosper because they have fith in God through Jesus Christ. I think many times we see prosper and think money, wealth, health, and yet when we look at God’s prosperous people in the scriptures (Paul, Mosiah and the 4 sons of Alma, Nephi, Peter) you see people that prospered spiritually more than they ever prospered naturally
jrn