Solid As a Rock
I have been thinking for several years about how the events of the Savior’s second coming will play out. The images portrayed in the scriptures are filled with symbolic representations of seemingly impossibly strong things being utterly destroyed or changed. It isn’t easy to imagine how powerful institutions will be taken down, and what is more inconceivable is what it will take to change people’s hearts and convince them to change course.
I know that the world as we know it must cease to exist so that a new and better one can take its place. The entire landscape of societies has to change. Every corrupt foundation will fail, and the buildings which are built on them will fall. It does not matter how magnificent the structures may appear or how long they have stood; all of them will fail. The picture that came to my mind is that of the stone pinnacles of Monument Valley that have been left standing after all of the loose soil around them has been washed away by water and wind.
Things made of stone endure longer than everything else. Wood rots, iron rusts, and plastics become brittle and break. But rock is not as robust or reliable as you may think. Stone can be very hard or soft enough to crush in your hand, and it can be solid or permeable, appear monolithic, and be riddled with microscopic fissures.
In ancient times, cisterns were carved out of stone. As someone who works with stone every day, I can’t imagine the time and effort you would have to expend to find an acceptable block of stone and then carve something large enough to store water for an extended time. Many cisterns probably had to be abandoned because they broke or leaked because of unseen defects in the stone.
Jeremiah 2:13 reads, “For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.”
I have chosen to focus on this verse because we know that we need metaphorical living water to survive just as much as we require actual water. I like trivia and watch Jeopardy for fun. One of the answers was: It is the one element that all living things need. My initial response was oxygen; I was wrong; it is water.
Water is the one thing needed to sustain life, and that is why water is the perfect metaphor for the words of Christ. The perfect metaphor for the world in which we live is a desert. Most of us do not live at the oasis where water constantly flows. We have occasional storms, which we could equate to life’s trials that batter us with lightning, thunder, and wind. However, accompanying the difficulties of our trials comes the rain, the living water. If we are to survive in the desert of the world, we need to carve out cisterns to hold that water to sustain us.
Our cisterns must be carefully constructed. We need to find solid stone without cracks and impermeable as possible. Then we have to expend considerable energy to carefully chip away the stone into a shape that holds water, keeps out contaminating elements, and keeps the water from evaporating in the heat of the day. If we are clever, we design a system that collects the rainwater when the storms come. Most of the time, however, we must go to the well to fill our reserves. However, if we are careless in how we carve out the stone, it will not hold water. When the living water comes, it runs out of our vessels as fast as we can fill it.
Think again about the world as a high desert, millions of years ago, basically flat ground with a few outcroppings of stone. What we see seems unchangeable, but when the torrents flow and the wind batters, the earth, the sand, and the soil wash away, leaving only the stone. I think this will happen as the world is prepared for the coming of the Savior. Only those who build on the rock of revelation will be left standing like monuments towering above the shifting sands of false gods, philosophies, ideologies, politics, and institutions.
I believe that the destruction of wickedness is accelerating. One blessing of technology is that corruption is being exposed. Those who have controlled information can no longer harness it. Those who have been oppressed by ignorance will look for answers and find them in God’s words. This knowledge of God will flood the earth and wash away anything that is not built upon stone, and the world will be prepared for the Second Coming of Christ. Corruption and wickedness will not go down without much war and bloodshed, but they will go down because the cisterns of the wicked are broken and can hold no water.
I like to end my messages with something hopeful and optimistic. Today, I think the message is that we have hard work to do. When you work with stone, nothing about it is easy. The work goes slow and is tedious, but when it is carefully completed, it will endure over time.