Arise From The Dust

“O that ye would awake; awake from a deep sleep, yea, even from the sleep of hell, and shake off the awful chains by which ye are bound, which are the chains which bind the children of men, that they are carried away captive down to the eternal gulf of misery and woe. Awake! and arise from the dust, and hear the words of a trembling parent, whose limbs ye must soon lay down in the cold and silent grave, from whence no traveler can return; a few more days and I go the way of all the earth.” (2 Nephi 1:13-14). “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” (Genesis 3:19). I think that sometimes when we imagine falling into the captivity of the devil, that we are somehow being dragged down to hell as some lower plane of existence. It seems as though we are free and unchained in our natural state, but through sin and corruption, we can add more and more chains of iniquity. But the truth is that it is our mortality itself that is binding us and restricting us. We are eternal and infinite souls that have been confined to a weak and flawed and finite temporal existence. To be so limited runs contrary to our divine nature and thus the challenge of our mortal experience is to do everything we can to shake off the chains of mortality that bind us down and arise from the dust. Our bodies might be made of dust and unto dust our bodies must return, but we do have the opportunity to arise from that dust. When we give into temptation, we are wrapping ourselves more thoroughly and completely in this mortal coil into which we have been born. But when we resist Satan's lies and embrace the liberating power of Jesus Christ's Atonement, then we start to break our divine nature and our immortal souls free from the shackles of the natural man that is tying us down. Only a part of us is made of dust and must return to the dust. Only a part of us is limited and confined and held captive by greed and selfishness and pride and vanity and stupidity and short sightedness. We can either embrace our limitations and tell ourselves that to be chained down in the dust is our natural and inescapable fate, or we can arise from the dust and shake off the chains and unleash the divinity that is locked up inside of us.