"I am not complaining,” my father wrote to my mother from war-ravaged Europe during the closing days of World War 2, when he finally reached the safety of American lines after three years as a POW. “I would not appreciate comfort if there were no hardship. We cannot appreciate joy without sorrow, health if we have never felt pain, or peace until after a war. All things must have their opposites, and we can learn from both."
My father was well-versed with Christian teaching, but as far as I know never read extensively of Buddhist thought, or classical Chinese or Greek philosophy, all of which address the idea of the essential conflict of opposites as do many other cultures. In Latter-day Saint scripture – which I am confident my father never encountered - it's expressed this way:
"For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so … righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad..." (2 Ne. 2: 11).
Should God have intervened to stop World War II? Then what about smaller wars? Regional conflicts, perhaps? How about family strife in which a mother or children might be abused? What evil is too big, and which is too small, to warrant divine intervention? What about disease and natural disasters? Should God have made a world without opposites, a world in which there is no striving, no suffering, therefore no overcoming, no learning, and no growth? Should he intervene in arguments, eliminate the common cold or even stop someone falling off a ladder? Are we wise enough to attempt to draw that line?
A world without hardship is thus a world in which there is no choice, where everyone is forced to do good. Yet inseparable from the idea of opposites is the principle of moral agency. Men and women will be judged for their choices between good and evil. They will also be judged when they curtail someone else's agency. Mormon doctrine teaches that men and women came to this earth endowed with that agency, knowing while still in pre-embodied spirit form that the world in which they would be tested would be at once beautiful and horrifying. We still chose to come.
Joseph Smith, who organized The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1830, penned this revelation in 1839 while a prisoner in miserable conditions in Liberty Jail, Missouri:
"And if thou shouldst be cast into the pit, or into the hands of murderers, and the sentence of death passed upon thee; if thou be cast into the deep; if the billowing surge conspire against thee; if fierce winds become thine enemy; if the heavens gather blackness, and all the elements combine to hedge up the way; and above all, if the very jaws of hell shall gape open the mouth wide after thee, know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good. The Son of Man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than he?" (D&C 122: 7-8).
Of course, logic can only take us so far. Faced with a child dying of cancer, or innocent lives taken in senseless wars, we can be forgiven for wondering if there isn't a better way. It's at such times we would do well to remember the voluntary sacrifice of Jesus Christ in Gethsemane and on the cross at Golgotha. Having taken on Himself the sins of every person who ever lived, there is nothing – absolutely nothing – He doesn't know about pain and suffering. And the Atonement was not for sins alone, but for "the pains and the sicknesses of his people" (Alma 7:11).
Mortal life is not the entire existence of humankind, but rather an essential learning and proving experience. Our Father in Heaven is not a capricious God, inflicting pain and misery on the human race. He is a loving Heavenly Father who has the eternal perspective of what his children can become, and who loves us enough to allow us to endure opposition for a season.
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