To Defend Them By Stratagem

By Michaela Stephens

Feel like you’re losing the battle against Satan, but not sure how or why? Today the devil is more cunning than ever in his attacks, and we need top-level strategies to protect ourselves and our loved ones.

In To Defend Them By Stratagem, learn how the Book of Mormon war stories reveal the many sneaky tactics Satan wields to confuse, distract, isolate, weaken, discourage, frighten, flatter, manipulate, betray, enslave, starve, and poison us.

• Discover the many successful strategies your favorite Book of Mormon war heroes used to defend their people against their mortal and spiritual attackers.
• Find out how you can use their strategies to prevail against Satan today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lion's Whelp Publications, LLC
• Release date: Jan 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9780996873024

Michaela Stephens

Michaela Stephens has blogged about the scriptures at Scriptorium Blogorium (scriptoriumblogorium.blogspot.com) for over seven years.  She loves to read, write, rollerblade, and go on adventures with her cub scouts.  She has also made stained glass and played the bell tower on BYU’s campus.

Book preview

Chapter 1

King Benjamin’s Nearly Invisible Battles

King Benjamin is considered such a righteous king that it is easy to think that he had perfect peace during his reign. However, such was not the case, as these overlooked verses reveal:

12 And now, concerning this king Benjamin—he had somewhat of contentions among his own people.

13 And it came to pass also that the armies of the Lamanites came down out of the land of Nephi, to battle against his people. But behold, king Benjamin gathered together his armies, and he did stand against them; and he did fight with the strength of his own arm, with the sword of Laban.

14 And in the strength of the Lord they did contend against their enemies, until they had slain many thousands of the Lamanites. And it came to pass that they did contend against the Lamanites until they had driven them out of all the lands of their inheritance.

15 And it came to pass that after there had been false Christs, and their mouths had been shut, and they punished according to their crimes;

16 And after there had been false prophets, and false preachers and teachers among the people, and all these having been punished according to their crimes; and after there having been much contention and many dissensions away unto the Lamanites, behold, it came to pass that king Benjamin, with the assistance of the holy prophets who were among his people—

17 For behold, king Benjamin was a holy man, and he did reign over his people in righteousness; and there were many holy men in the land, and they did speak the word of God with power and with authority; and they did use much sharpness because of the stiffneckedness of the people—

18 Wherefore, with the help of these, king Benjamin, by laboring with all the might of his body and the faculty of his whole soul, and also the prophets, did once more establish peace in the land. (Words of Mormon 1:12-18)

Notice the two different types of battles King Benjamin fought, both physical and spiritual. King Benjamin gathered his armies and fought the Lamanites until they were driven out of the land. Then he gathered his armies of holy men and prophets and fought against the false Christs, false prophets, and false teachers among his people until their mouths had been shut and they had been punished according to their crimes. He fought his physical battles with the sword of Laban, and he and the holy men fought spiritual battles using the word of God—they did speak the word of God with power and with authority; and they did use much sharpness (Words of Mormon 1:17), meaning they used the sword of the Spirit.

What was the result? [W]ith the help of these, king Benjamin, by laboring with all the might of his body and the faculty of his whole soul, and also the prophets, did once more establish peace in the land (Words of Mormon 1:18). He established both physical and spiritual peace because he fought both types of battles.

What kind of battles are we fighting today? Lots of spiritual battles. And we don’t have to fight alone. If King Benjamin received help from holy men in his spiritual battles, then we can also get help from the many holy men in our day—living prophets, our leaders, and church teachers—and from those who have gone before us whose stories are in scripture. We can use the word of God, which is sharper than a two-edged sword, as we fight our spiritual battles.

These verses are important because they give us a tiny glimpse of the hard work King Benjamin did that led up to the wonderful converting experience of his people in Mosiah 4 near the end of his reign. It shows us that the Mosiah 4 experience did not come easily; rather, it was the culmination of a long life of hard work teaching the people and working with them. Without these verses, it would seem to us that King Benjamin’s experiences were effortless in comparison to Alma the Younger’s hard work in his multiple missions traveling around to teach the Nephites, and we’d wonder what King Benjamin’s secret was. These verses show us that King Benjamin had no special secret; he may have worked just as hard or even harder than Alma the Younger, but we don’t get to see the full scope of it.

How does this apply to us? This helps us realize that when we compare ourselves to other families in the Church who seem to effortlessly have perfect children, we haven’t seen all the effort they put in to teach their families. One such mom noted that we only see the peace parents have already established; we don’t see all the family contentions or the times parents had to speak with power and authority and with much sharpness, or the times a child’s mouth was shut, or the times children had to be punished according to their crimes. We don’t see when invading evil had to be driven…out of all the lands of their inheritance. Or, to use a farming metaphor, we only see the fruits without seeing the digging, hoeing, planting, pruning, and so on.

One strategy Satan may use to discourage us as we teach our families is to try to get us to compare our hard work with other parents’ seeming success. He wants us to make the unwarranted assumption that because we don’t see other parents teaching their well-behaved children, that they have it easier, or are better parents, or their families are perfect.

In reality, no comparison can be made without full information (e.g. living in both families), so it is best to refrain from comparison and simply study ways to improve.

Chapter 2

Strong as to the Strength of Men

Next we meet Zeniff, the Nephite king in Nephi-Lehi who had a fair amount of trouble with invading Lamanites. As Zeniff wrote the history of his reign, he made some observations about the Lamanites that are worth noting because it says something about the Lamanite strategy for living life.

11 Now, the Lamanites knew nothing concerning the Lord, nor the strength of the Lord, therefore they depended upon their own strength. Yet they were a strong people, as to the strength of men.

12 They were a wild, and ferocious, and a blood-thirsty people. (Mosiah 10:11-12)

Lamanite strategy was to be strong. It doesn’t sound like a bad strategy, except that it was accompanied by total ignorance about God.

As I read these verses, I found myself wondering how the Lamanites could be a strong people without knowing anything about the Lord or the strength of the Lord. When you have a testimony of the strength that comes from the Lord, it is hard to see how someone can be strong any other way.

But it becomes easier to see when we examine the implications of not knowing anything about the Lord’s strength. If I think there is no higher power to depend on, then everything depends on me. If I can only depend on myself, then the only way I can get anywhere in this world is by being stronger, faster, smarter, richer, and more ruthless than the next guy. Why do I have to be stronger? So I can control my life and what happens to me. (It’s easy to see this attitude today, isn’t it?)

What is the result of a society where everyone jockeys to become and prove that they are the strongest, fastest, smartest, richest, most ruthless, most dangerous, and most in control? They were a wild, and ferocious, and a blood-thirsty people (Mosiah 10:12).

The trouble with this way of thinking is that life has a way of showing us all that we aren’t totally in control, that we don’t have everything figured out. We aren’t the richest, our plans can come to naught, and we aren’t strong enough to do everything on our own. There are times when life just plain kicks our tail, kicks it good and hard, and kicks it for months at a time. Or maybe years. No one is immune to it, even the strongest.

What does a Lamanite do when everything depends on his or her own strength and life’s yogurt suddenly hits the fan? Lamanites dealt with it by getting angry and blaming. They fed off their anger.

. . . believing in the tradition of their fathers, which is this—Believing that they were driven out of the land of Jerusalem because of the iniquities of their fathers, and that they were wronged in the wilderness by their brethren, and they were also wronged while crossing the sea;

13 And again, that they were wronged while in the land of their first inheritance, after they had crossed the sea (Mosiah 10:12-13, emphasis added)

Notice how many times wronged was used in those verses. With no concept of forgiveness, feeling wronged leads to blaming. Then, when those responsible do not seem to be punished, that leads to a perception of injustice, which leads to anger. Anger was the only way they could deal with disappointments, setbacks, and tragedies because everything depended on them and their strength.

Further, showing weakness was dangerous; if they showed weakness, then everyone would take advantage of them. They couldn’t even develop the virtues of patience, long-suffering, meekness, kindness, humility, or forgiveness, lest those qualities be mistaken for weakness and invite oppression. (I have it on good authority that prison society is like this.) They couldn’t help others lest it give someone an advantage and create a formidable rival later.

So they were forced to be wild, ferocious, and bloodthirsty. No other behavior or attitude would survive. No other way would even seem possible if they didn’t know they could depend on the Lord’s strength.

But what happens when you know that you can depend on the Lord? If you know that, it is to your advantage to realize and admit your weakness as soon as possible and ask for help. Zeniff and his people were an excellent example of this. When the Lamanites first attacked them, not only did they flee to the city for protection, they asked for help from their leader and they all cried mightily to the Lord for deliverance from their enemies. Then they armed themselves with any kind of weapon they could invent and went forth in the strength of the Lord, driving the Lamanites out of their land and killing 3,043 Lamanites while only losing 279 of their own men.

Admitting weakness to others isn’t dangerous; it is a sign that you know the Lord’s strength and trust in Him. It shows that you are ready for help, whether it comes from God directly or from other people. It doesn’t mean you don’t try to do your best; it just means you know when you’ve hit your limits, and you realize your needs are greater than your strength.

Also, when you trust in God, you are excited to help others because it means you get to be an instrument in the Lord’s hands and can partake of the Lord’s strength. You understand that your talents and strengths are gifts and blessings from God, as are the opportunities to practice and develop these skills.

To someone who knows nothing of the Lord or the strength of the Lord, people who depend on the Lord’s strength seem very weak because of how much they admit weakness. Belief and trust in God will seem like a crutch. But it’s not; it is the key to obtaining greater strength.

When you trust in the Lord as the One with the power, it doesn’t mean the storms never come or that pain is avoided. But it frees you from feeling like there is something terribly wrong with you for feeling weak, inadequate, and bruised by life’s tragedies and troubles. You are free to admit that you can only do so much. You are free to admit your weaknesses, sins, and mistakes for them to be healed by Christ’s atonement. You are free to develop the more refined virtues. You are free to ask for help and ready to receive it.

Trusting God is just a better strategy for life.

Chapter 3

Clash of the Worldviews

Before Zeniff’s final battle against the Lamanites in the land of Nephi-Lehi, along with observing the Lamanite strategy of life, he presented his people with a sketch of the cause of the battle going all the way back to the conflicts between Nephi and Laman and Lemuel. Not only do we get to see what the Nephites believe about what happened, but we also get to see a sampling of the way that Laman and Lemuel had twisted the story and how that tradition had been passed down for generations.

12 They were a wild, and ferocious, and a blood-thirsty people, believing in the tradition of their fathers, which is this—Believing that they were driven out of the land of Jerusalem because of the iniquities of their fathers, and that they were wronged in the wilderness by their brethren, and they were also wronged while crossing the sea;

13 And again, that they were wronged while in the land of their first inheritance, after they had crossed the sea, and all this because that Nephi was more faithful in keeping the commandments of the Lord—therefore he was favored of the Lord, for the Lord heard his prayers and answered them, and he took the lead of their journey in the wilderness.

14 And his brethren were wroth with him because they understood not the dealings of the Lord; they were also wroth with him upon the waters because they hardened their hearts against the Lord.

15 And again, they were wroth with him when they had arrived in the promised land, because they said that he had taken the ruling of the people out of their hands; and they sought to kill him.

16 And again, they were wroth with him because he departed into the wilderness as the Lord had commanded him, and took the records which were engraven on the plates of brass, for they said that he robbed them.

17 And thus they have taught their children that they should hate them, and that they should murder them, and that they should rob and plunder them, and do all they could to destroy them; therefore they have an eternal hatred towards the children of Nephi.

18 For this very cause has king Laman, by his cunning, and lying craftiness, and his fair promises, deceived me, that I have brought this my people up into this land, that they may destroy them; yea, and we have suffered these many years in the land. (Mosiah 10:12-18)

The first tradition the Lamanites held was that they were driven out of the land of Jerusalem because of the iniquities of their fathers. For a long time, I thought their fathers referred to the people of Jerusalem. I was shocked when I realized that no, Laman and Lemuel had actually propagated the idea that Lehi and Ishmael (and their families) had been kicked out of Jerusalem, not because Jerusalem was wicked, but because Lehi and Ishmael were wicked!

Other traditions about that first narrative were about how Laman and Lemuel were wronged by their brethren in the wilderness, wronged while crossing the sea, and wronged in the land of their first inheritance when Nephi left them and took the records. Zeniff does not include how Laman and Lemuel twisted those incidents, but we can imagine that if Lehi and Ishmael’s goodness was made to appear evil, then Nephi was blamed for everything difficult that happened.

We can infer that Laman and Lemuel could not allow themselves or their families to believe they had sinned in any way, so they began to reconstruct their own view of the past around the premise that they themselves had been the righteous ones. Then they had to spin everything else that happened so that it all fit.

What Zeniff does is essentially place before the Nephites two different worldviews about whose ancestors were the righteous ones—Nephi or Laman and Lemuel—and the moral results of those different views. It is impossible to believe both at the same time.

Seeing how different the Laman-Lemuel worldview is from the Nephi worldview shows us that one of Satan’s strategies is to try to get us so hardened in sin that we begin to think that our error is right. He knows that if we are hardened enough, we will actually begin to change our view of the past in order to fit the lies we tell ourselves, and begin to resist any righteous efforts to dissuade us from our view until we call good evil and evil good.

In order to escape this trap, our best strategy is to keep our focus on the Lord’s commandments and eternal standards, while striving to keep our lives in line with them. This is why the Lord promises that those who treasure up the word will not be deceived and those who hold to the rod of iron will not fall away. Social forces may legalize and glorify acts that break the commandments, but if we hold to God’s perspective as contained in the scriptures and the words of the prophets, we will not be misled.

Chapter 4

King Noah’s Paranoid Panic Mode

Mosiah 19 is about how the consequences of wickedness begin to accumulate for King Noah and his people. There are some curious events in this chapter that I have always wondered about.

Just before this chapter, King Noah’s armies return from trying unsuccessfully to find and destroy Alma the Elder and his company. Then comes a host of unexplained events:

The forces of the king were small, having been reduced. (Mosiah 19:2) Reduced by what? Downsized? Killed by Lamanites back in Mosiah 11:16-18? Or had some of the soldiers been converted and left with Alma?

There began to be a division among the remainder of the people (Mosiah 19:2) with threatenings (Mosiah 19:3) and great contention, and even a vendetta by Gideon against the king (Mosiah 19:4). Why the division, contentions, and the vendetta? We are given no explanation for any of it! Clearly, a crisis of confidence in King Noah’s leadership arose, but on what grounds? Only a menace against basic security or livelihood can arouse anger to a fever pitch and make the cost of remaining silent greater than the cost of rebelling.

Right when Gideon is about to kill King Noah, the Lamanite armies invade (Mosiah 19:6). What bothered the Lamanites so much that they sent their armies? You may ask, "Do the Lamanites ever really need a reason to come and invade?" Well, yes they do. They’ve been beaten several times by these Nephites, so it has to be a good enough reason that they are willing to risk being beaten again. Plus, Lamanite armies seem to be driven by greed or grievance.

When the Lamanites finally have compassion on the Nephites, along with the tribute of half the Nephite goods (which satisfies any greedy motive), they set as a condition of peace that King Noah be delivered into their hands (Mosiah 19:15). Why? Their request is the equivalent of requesting extradition of a criminal.

The only thing I can think of as a cause for all of this is if King Noah’s army had been much more brutal in its search for Alma and his people than stated in the account or ever thought of before.

If King Noah thought Alma was conspiring against him with his church, he may have suspected neighbors of the rebels helped them escape. With a mission to destroy and a