And now, we can behold the decrees of God concerning this land, that it is a land of promise; and whatsoever nation shall possess it shall serve God, or they shall be swept off when the fulness of his wrath shall come upon them. And the fulness of his wrath cometh upon them when they are ripened in iniquity.
I love messages of hope, but sometimes we need to hear messages of warning. When Moroni writes about God's decrees, he knows what he is talking about. He has the record of one people who have been swept off the land of promise, and he has been eyewitness to his own people's demise. When he says a whole nation can be destroyed, he means it.
And when does the Lord decide it is time to sweep away a nation? When they are ripe -- full of the juices of apostasy and pride, self-sufficiency and greed, when they have become weighed down with the love of possessions and they bend the branches with their ponderous grasping for power, when they are soft and mushy with self-gratification. In such ripeness they fall from the tree in great bunches with hardly a breeze or a shake of the trunk. God does not have to work hard to dislodge a ripened people. They fall practically of their own accord into the natural clutches of gravity.
Moroni's undisguised message to us is that the Gentile nation he has seen on the North American continent in the latter days is ripening quickly. If we think we are invincible, we are mistaken.
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