Zeezrom began the conversion process. He was “harrowed up.” To harrow is to plow over hardened ground in order to break it up and make it receptive to planting. Zeezrom’s heart was, in effect, plowed and broken. He felt godly sorrow and tried to repair what he had earlier wrought among the people. But the damage was not so easily undone. This is an important lesson: while true repentance guarantees that the Lord remembers sin no more, sometimes it is not possible to reverse completely the consequences of past choices in mortality. On one occasion Brother Skinner interviewed a man for advancement in the priesthood. He had made very poor choices earlier in his life but had fully repented and was by then a stalwart. Yet the earlier choices had cost him his wife, his children, his home, and his employment. Even though he had fully turned to the Lord, he could not get back the things he had lost earlier. That would have to wait until a future day of restoration. Ironically, Zeezrom suffered the persecution he had earlier instigated. And he had to live with the knowledge that he had caused women and children to be cast into the fire.
Why doesn’t choosing God here in mortality shield us from pain and suffering? When a righteous person is killed, is that death necessarily a tragedy? What are the reasons God permits the righteous to suffer? Verse 11 teaches that the Lord sometimes allows the righteous to be killed as a witness against the wicked (see also Alma 60:13; D&C 136:39). Joseph Smith declared, “It is a false idea that the Saints will escape all the judgments, whilst the wicked suffer; for all flesh is subject to suffer, and ‘the righteous shall hardly escape.’” 28
It is important for us to understand things from an eternal perspective. Though a temporary loss to us, the righteous go on to a better world and enter into God’s glory (see also D&C 42:46). President Spencer W. Kimball wrote: “If all the sick for whom we pray were healed, if all the righteous were protected and the wicked destroyed, the whole program of the Father would be annulled and the basic principle of the gospel, free agency, would be ended. No man would have to live by faith… . Should all prayers be immediately answered according to our selfish desires and our limited understanding, then there would be little or no suffering, sorrow, disappointment, or even death, and if these were not, there would also be no joy, success, resurrection, nor eternal life and godhood.” 29