496 Years Old

One of the most inspirational people in all of scripture to me is Mahalaleel. Mahalaleel was Adam’s great grandson. In D&C 107, it goes through the ten patriarchs and says when they were ordained to the priesthood and by whom and so on and so forth. Now, all of these guys lived to be almost a thousand years old, so from our much shorter lived perspective, it took most of them quite a long time before they were called to receive the priesthood. Seth was 69 years old, Enos was 134, Cainan was 40, and so on and so forth. But Mahalaleel was 496 years old. He was almost 500 years old before he was deemed worthy to receive the priesthood and answered the call to lead as a Patriarch of the human family. If Mahalaleel were 496 years old today, that would mean he would have been born in 1525. Imagine being alive when Copernicus and Galileo claimed that the earth revolves around the sun and then still being alive to watch man walk on the moon, and yet you still haven’t been called to receive the priesthood. The plan of salvation is one of eternal progression. While we should never give in to the temptation to procrastinate the day of our repentance, we should always keep in mind that God’s power is limitless, His atonement is infinite, and like the father of the prodigal son, He will never stop waiting and watching for us to come to ourselves and come to our senses and turn towards Him and when we are yet a great way off, He will see us and He will have compassion and run and fall upon our necks and rejoice. Christ is the victor of sin and of the grave and nothing is impossible to Him. It is never too late. We may not learn the lessons we need to learn as fast as those around us, we may not be answer the call as quickly as we or those who love us would like, but soon or late, as long as we answer the call, there is time enough left to be chosen. Like the laborers in the field who were called at the eleventh hour, the Master in all His generosity will pay us likewise a penny. It may have taken Mahalaleel almost 500 years to figure out how to answer the call, but He was still chosen out of all of his siblings to be one of the ten patriarchs of the whole human family.