This whole chapter constitutes Mormon’s commentary on the nature of fallen man. How quickly we forget God when things are easy and smooth in our lives. At the very moment that we bask in comfort and prosperity we tend to get hardened, we put our trust in our things, and we forget the real source of our prosperity (see also commentary at 1 Nephi 8:26). Therefore, the classic lesson: “And thus we see that except the Lord doth chasten his people with many afflictions, yea, except he doth visit them with death and with terror, and with famine and with all manner of pestilence, they will not remember him.”
The Lord chastens his people because he loves them (Helaman 15:3), and he wants them to repent and return to him. Hundreds of years earlier Enos taught the same principle: “And there was nothing save it was exceeding harshness, preaching and prophesying of wars, and contentions, and destructions, and continually reminding them of death, and the duration of eternity, and the judgments and the power of God, and all these things—stirring them up continually to keep them in the fear of the Lord. I say there was nothing short of these things, and exceedingly great plainness of speech, would keep them from going down speedily to destruction” (Enos 1:23).
Modern prophets add a warning voice about the potential dangers of prosperity.
President Ezra Taft Benson: “Do you know what peace and prosperity can do to a people—it can put them to sleep.”20
President Brigham Young: “The worst fear that I have about [members of this Church] is that they will get rich in this country, forget God and His people, wax fat, and kick themselves out of the Church and go to hell. This people will stand mobbing, robbing, poverty, and all manner of persecution, and be true. But my greater fear for them is that they cannot stand wealth; and yet they have to be tried with riches.”21
President Harold B. Lee: “We are tested and we are tried, we are going through some of the severest tests today and we don’t realize perhaps the severity of the tests that we’re going through… . Today we are basking in the lap of luxury, the like of which we’ve never seen before in the history of the world. It would seem that probably this is the most severe test of any test that we’ve ever had in the history of this Church.”22