The Second Coming: Is the World Righteous Enough?

by Autumn Dickson

In the readings for this week, Joseph Smith helps us glimpse into eternity so we can see a portion of what it looks like. Understanding what eternity looks like can help us more fully take advantage of what the Lord has given us with this mortal experience. He covers a variety of topics. Here is one of the things that Joseph Smith taught.

Doctrine and Covenants 130:14-15

14 I was once praying very earnestly to know the time of the coming of the Son of Man, when I heard a voice repeat the following:

15 Joseph, my son, if thou livest until thou art eighty-five years old, thou shalt see the face of the Son of Man; therefore let this suffice, and trouble me no more on this matter.

Before I went to bed last night, I had a very clear thought pop into my head. I knew it was revelation, and so I rolled over and wrote it in my phone quickly before rolling back over and falling asleep. When I woke up in the morning, I couldn’t remember what the Lord had whispered to me until I opened my phone to reread it. It said this.

“The Lord is not waiting for the world to become wicked enough in order to come again. He is waiting for us to be righteous enough. We seem to be waiting on the world to grow wicked enough rather than ardently focusing on becoming righteous enough.”

The scriptures often speak about how the world will grow more and more wicked and scary in the last days, and yet, I don’t think that’s a product of the Lord’s minimum level of wickedness before He’s willing to come. I think it’s merely a prophecy about the state of the world when we finally become prepared to receive Him.

The Second Coming is not a waiting game for us. The Lord is waiting, but we should not be. We should be building.

I studied Elementary Education in college, and one of the courses you take is how to design assessments for your students. When you’re trying to build a foundation of knowledge for your students, it’s important to understand where they’re at. If you skip steps in the foundation, there will be shakiness as you continue to build. If you keep trying to pour the same layer, you’re going to be wasting time. It is essential to understand where your students are at so you can take them where they need to go.

I actually loved this class for a lot of reasons and one of those reasons included the fact that my idea of what assessment truly looked like was immensely expanded. When we think of assessing our student’s knowledge, we often picture traditional multiple-choice questions. This class taught me that the most powerful way of assessing a student’s knowledge and skill was to design an assessment that put them as closely as possible to a real-life scenario.

Isn’t that what we’re trying to prepare them for as teachers? We’re trying to prepare them for life. Maybe they can use a formula that you repeated over and over and over, but if they run into a problem in real life, will they know to use that formula and how to plug the right information into that formula?

That is the ideal kind of assessment. If your goal is to prepare your student to function in real life, then designing an assessment that is close to real life is your best shot at understanding whether you succeeded and how far you have to go.

So what is God’s goal? To bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.

Immortality? Check. Thank you resurrection of Christ.

Eternal life? Well, let’s read a verse from th