A Marvelous Work and a Wonder

Liza, a new convert to the church, made some great chalk drawings on our driveway one day. They were based on stories from The Book of Mormon. One of them told the story of Ammon's heroic efforts to save the flocks of King Lamoni (Alma 17). There were the severed arms on the ground, along with the dumbfounded enemies of the king. The caption read, "I think I'm beginning to be astonished!"

We all got a good laugh at that. That one simple phrase seemed a huge understatement of the actual event.

Recently, though, I have been pondering that phrase. I was reading about Alma's and Amulek's public conversation with Zeezrom (Alma 10-13), and in chapter 14, the word "astonished" appears again in much the same context: as the sophistry of Zeezrom begins to erode before the sure tide of the revelation-founded prudence and authority of Alma and Amulek, Zeezrom is "astonished:" an evil man who has laid a cunning plan finds his secret laid bare, and is completely routed.

In the New Testament we are shown that the people were astonished because Jesus " taught them as one having authority from God, and not as having authority from the Scribes. (JST Matt. 7:28)" He confounded the leaders of the Jews at every turn in the simple majesty of truth and divine power: "Talitha cumi...And straightway the damsel arose [from the grips of death] and walked...And they were astonished with a great astonishment. (Mark 5:42)" Saul, the militant Pharisee, full of zealous purpose, blinded by the Light, trembled and was astonished. Perhaps Lucifer's hosts, cast out of heaven, "began to be astonished," all that precipitous fall to earth.

I can remember feeling astonished at various times myself, doing something "my way," and finding my purposes confounded. I imagine the creators and navigators of the Titanic and the Hindenburg "began to be astonished" as their mighty inventions sunk or blazed into nothingness, leaving unimagined grief and tragedy in the aftermath.

Pride, I gather, infuses the "natural man" with boundless confidence that his cunning plans are unstoppable; yet by what simple means, whether by a man whose father was given divine assurance that he could not be harmed, or by the word of testmony, or by nature's force, or by any number of providential ways, do the efforts of the natural man vanish into thin air. When you've put a lot of sock into a "foolproof" plan and it falls apart completely, and you are helpless to stop it, in the process fearfully "falling into the hands of the living God (Hebrews 10:31)," it is most emphatically astonishing.

If being astonished can lead to being amazed, to recognizing utter helplessness, to falling down in abject humility, calling upon God, to receiving his grace and his forgiveness, to leaping from one's bed of affliction, to becoming a mighty servant of the Lord [as it did at least for Paul and Zeezrom], then let the marvelous works and wonders come, and let us all be astonished!