Thoughts on Digging a Pit

This week's lesson in my Fundamentals of Religion class was on 2 Nephi 28-33.  These are the last few chapters that Nephi wrote and they contain an amazing amount of information for the latter days.

I began reading in Chapter 28 using my newly-learned study skill of symbolism. There are not as many symbolic references in this chapter as in our prior reading block of Isaiah. However, there are still quite a few.  Some are familiar, some are not. Nephi is writing of the vain and foolish doctrines of men. The one verse that stuck out to me was a reference to digging a pit for your neighbor in 2 Nephi 28:8.  Here is the verse in its entirety:

And there shall also be many which shall say: Eat, drink, and be merry; nevertheless, fear God—he will justify in committing a little sin; yea, lie a little, take the advantage of one because of his words, dig a pit for thy neighbor; there is no harm in this; and do all these things, for tomorrow we die; and if it so be that we are guilty, God will beat us with a few stripes, and at last we shall be saved in the kingdom of God.

I wondered what Nephi meant by "dig a pit" so I looked up all of the references associated with it. The references suggested it meant dig a pit to hell. But, how can you dig a pit to hell for someone else? As I pondered this I thought of several ways in which this could be done.

The first was by persuasion; using flattery, lies to convince someone to move away from the gospel. The second is by ridicule. I thought of 1 Nephi and Lehi and Nephi's vision of iron rod.  People holding fast and moving along the rod being ridiculed by the people in the large and spacious house.  some fell away from the gospel and were lost.  Both persuasion and ridicule could be used to remove someone from the gospel; it could be considered digging a pit for them. Both of these scenarios play out today.

My thoughts then turned to bullying and how insidious it is.  It can lead its recipients to despair and even to suicide.  I think it could be considered digging a pit for your neighbor also.  The implications of this are far reaching and immense.  These thoughts led to many questions.

If you are the one who commits suicide under this kind of extreme duress, would you still be held accountable to normal judgements of our Heavenly Father? Are most suicides committed when people feel they are under extreme duress, despair or persecution? Would a suicide prompted by bullying or persecution be a different or mitigating circumstance? My final question was; If you are the perpetrator of the bullying and the recipient ultimately takes their life, what implications does this have for you?

I do not have the answers to these questions as yet. I will have to make them a subject for prayer. For now I only know how I feel about it.  Although I am working on having more charity in my life,  I feel like the abuser should be judged severely.  They, literally, dug the pit that swallowed up and damned a precious child of god.

I would like to think, no, I hope, that Jesus Christ would be able to mitigate on behalf of that beautiful child of God that is no longer a part of this world. I hope.

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