Snatched

(Note: This is a talk I wrote during the Easter season, sometime around 1995)
Have you ever had the falling sensation before, the sense of impending collision, only to be snatched away at the last moment, and carried to safety? Literature, music, television and movies are full of this image: someone in jeopardy, unable to save himself, when suddenly along comes someone mighty -- some super hero, some lovely creature out of the best fantasy -- to the rescue. Thank goodness!
As we watch, hear, or visualize, we reach out empathetically: Oh no! Look out! Help! Somebody save him! Somebody save her! We feel this tremendous compassion; we’ve been there ourselves somehow, somewhere; that rescue is in some way a beacon of hope to each of us in our own moments of imminent danger.
I believe we feel this way because in each of us is an intense awareness, as spirit children of our Father in Heaven, of our own mortality, our fallen nature. We sense the current of mortal life leading us inexorably down into the whirlpool of mortal death. “Oh no! Look out!” something in us continually cries, “Help! Save me!”
“Now we see,” says Alma, “that Adam did fall by partaking of the forbidden fruit, according to the word of God; and thus we see, that by his fall all mankind became a lost and fallen people.” (Alma 12:22)
I believe we have an inborn sense of “fallen-ness”. It is said that the only things a baby instinctively fears are loud noises and falling. It is said that when a person dreams he is falling, he always wakes up before crashing, because if he sees that, he will die. Whatever the case may be, suffice it to say that we know, intrinsically, that we are in some kind of dire predicament that we cannot, try as we might, pull ourselves out of -- a nose dive that has no pull-out mechanism.
We try not to think about it too much. Some of us manage, as we grow up, to hardly think of it at all. We find other targets for our attention, other diversions that occupy our minds. Like Alma in his youth, perhaps, we opt for outright rebellion. “If I rage furiously enough against it,” runs the rationale, “it will go away.”
Alma had to face it, though; he had to face it really hard. You might say that Imminent Destruction walked right up to him with a glove across the face and challenged him to a dual. What was he to do? What could he do? Oh no! Look out! What Alma faced with that angelic warning to repent or perish, and what we all must face, are two specters: the death of our bodies, and the consequences of our choices.
“I was racked with eternal torment,” Alma told his son Helaman, “for my soul was harrowed up to the greatest degree and racked with all my sins. Yea, I did remember all my sins and iniquities, for which I was tormented with the pains of hell…” (Alma 36:12-13)
So, here we have the human predicament: plummeting toward death, and faced with destruction, body and soul. What to do, what to do? “Oh, thought I, that I could be banished and become extinct both soul and body,” said Alma. Small wonder that there are so many philosophies of men that label mortal life a mere cosmic accident, with no causal beginning and with an end which is best described as a mere “snuffing out.” Alma knew better. We all know better.
Help! Save him! Save me!
“And it came to pass that as I was thus racked with torment, while I was harrowed up by the memory of my many sins, behold I remembered also to have heard my father prophesy concerning the coming of one Jesus Christ, a son of God, to atone for the sins of the world. Now, as my mind caught hold upon this thought, I cried within my heart: O Jesus, thou Son of God, have mercy on me, who am in the gall of bitterness, and am encircled about by the everlasting chains of death.” (vs. 17-18)
In that moment of overpowering anguish, on the very brink of hell, Help arrived - not on a galloping steed, not whizzing though the air, cape flowing in the wind - but in a way so real and so intense as to not be properly described, the Lamb of God himself reached down into the swirling abyss and caught that helpless, falling child in the gentle, mighty palm of his own hand.
“I was in the darkest abyss, but now I behold the marvelous light of God,” proclaimed Alma to those who, fasting and praying, had gathered around his inert body for two days and nights. “My soul was racked with eternal torment, but I am snatched, and my soul is pained no more.” (Mosiah 27:29)
Thank goodness! Thank God. For when Adam and all mankind fell, and “it was appointed unto men that they must die, and after death [[that] they must come to judgment” -- when that horrendous edict was pronounced, “God did call on men, in the name of his Son, (this being the plan of redemption which was laid), saying: If ye will repent, and harden not your hearts, then will I have mercy upon you, through mine Only Begotten son, unto a remission of [your] sins; and [you] shall enter into my rest.” (Alma 12:27,33-34)
So, onto the stage of mortality entered a precious Babe, in a stable (what more obvious symbol of mortal life could there be?), the Only Begotten Son of God, born, you might say, to die; because only He, mortal via his mother Mary, and God via his Immortal Father (“For as the Father hath life in himself so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself’) -- only He, perfect and sinless, could submit himself to that awful Fall, and then - can it be? It is! - climb back out again: Victor, forever, over both death and hell.
He made it! He made it!
And behind Him, blinking incredulously in his Son-light, come all the rest of us. We, like Alma, are snatched, snatched by his resurrection from physical death, and by his Atonement, from spiritual death, conditioned only upon our faithfulness. When we go down into the water in baptism, it is as if we are going down into the grave; and when we come up out of the water, it is as a living symbol of the Resurrection, being brought out by virtue of his redemption, in “the hollow of his hand.” Every Sabbath day, we witness our willingness to continue in that state of grace as we partake worthily of the sacrament.
“O how great the goodness of our God,” exults Jacob, “who prepareth a way for our escape from the grasp of this awful monster; yea, that monster, death and hell…And because of the way of deliverance of our God, the Holy One of Israel,…death…shall deliver up its dead; which death is the grave. And…spiritual death [which] is hell…must deliver up its captive spirits,…and the bodies and the spirits of men will be restored one to the other; and it is by the power of the resurrection of the Holy One of Israel.”
Thank goodness! Thank God. We are snatched! Praises be unto him as we celebrate this Easter season, and forever and ever after.