2 Nephi 7:11

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Reference Search: 2 Nephi 7:11

11 Behold all ye that kindle fire, that compass yourselves about with sparks, walk in the light of your fire and in the sparks which ye have kindled. This shall ye have of mine hand—ye shall lie down in sorrow.

Quotes for Discussion

Those who kindle fires and gird themselves with firebrands—that is, those who conspire evil and plan the destruction of the faithful or who walk by their own lights—shall be trapped by their own snares. They shall come to a sorrowful end.

Sidney B. Sperry, Book of Mormon Compendium, 158

Those who walk in darkness do so obstinately; they walk not by the light of the revelation of heaven but from sparks kindled by themselves (v.11). Thus they are their own revelators. Such was the folly of ancient Israel! Such is the folly of many today as we prepare for his Second Coming.

Leland Gentry

If there is any one group of people in the Church for whom I feel the sorriest, it is those who brand themselves as intellectuals. I believe that that class of people can go to apostasy along a broader road and through a wider gate than any other group….There is no man upon this earth, no matter how great an intellect he has or will develop, who can prove that there is no God. Any man who undertakes to develop the thesis of proving a negative just lacks the initial intelligence to know that you cannot disprove or prove a negative. From the time of Adam until this day there have been men who have known that God lives, and there is no intellectual who can disprove it to them or to the world.

And so this Church, which believed at the very outset that the glory of God is intelligence and has done more to encourage its membership to become intellectual than any other church upon the face of the earth, in any era, does not look upon intellect as its God. That is what these intellectual apostates do, and they are not sufficiently intelligent to know when they have apostatized. They live in darkness and, at the same time, they are under the impression that they live in an atmosphere available to you and to me who are not so “intellectual;” I am not willing to concede that they are any smarter than we are.

I want to tell you that I think the humblest elder in the Church who knows what he knows and has the courage and the conviction to testify to the world what he knows is just as intellectual as a man can be. Under the inspiration of the Spirit of the Lord, that man’s mind will develop, it will reach its maximum capacity, and he will accomplish more in mortality than the man without the Holy Spirit who strives, along man-made lines, to accomplish a mortal goal…your work is first, foremost, and primarily spiritual in nature; and except as you develop within you a compatibility with the Spirit and enjoy the manifestations of the Spirit in your work, you are not succeeding. Any man who does not have the courage of his convictions, who is willing to the slightest degree to compromise with anyone, anywhere, and under any circumstances in this world is, to that extent, unworthy of the priesthood he holds. And, certainly, he is on the way to losing his appreciation of the existence of God which forms, of course, the very foundation for the gospel of Jesus Christ, for our belief, for our existence, and for our intelligence itself.

There is nothing more sacred to us than our intelligence and, unfortunately, the adversary is conscious of that fact. Therefore, he will utilize our intelligence to destroy us wherever he can get a foothold, or even a toe-hold. It is a sign, it is the evidence of a wise man—the truly great intellect—to know what to do with his power of mind when he is so blessed. When we utilize these faculties of ours, which are God-given and which are our inheritance, in the mortal interest of man farther than to assist in the building up of the kingdom of God here upon the earth, we will fail and we will lose our testimony.

Elder Henry D. Moyle, Address to Seminary and Institute Faculty, Brigham Young University, June 27, 1962