He saw our world before we were born to live in it

There is a term in the Book of Mormon that has been discussed in Sunday School classes for generations. Most members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have heard it. Many have a general sense of what it means. But I want to make the case in this article that the majority of us have not fully appreciated just how specific, how prophetically precise, and how urgently relevant that term is to the world we are living in right now. The term is secret combinations. And Moroni, writing over sixteen hundred years ago as the sole survivor of a civilization it had destroyed, was not recording ancient history for its own sake. He was writing a warning letter addressed personally to us.

Where It Begins: Two Civilizations, One Warning

The Book of Mormon documents secret combinations in two completely separate civilizations. The Jaredites, who came to the Americas from the tower of Babel, were destroyed by them. The Nephites, who followed centuries later, were also ultimately destroyed by them. Two distinct nations. Two different eras. The same pattern. The same outcome.

That repetition is not accidental. Mormon and Moroni, who compiled and abridged the entire record, were prophets who saw our day. They did not include both accounts because they were completists who wanted to preserve every interesting story. They included both because they understood that what destroyed two great civilizations would operate again in a third, and they wanted the people of that third era to recognize it before it was too late.

Moroni understood this with particular urgency. He had watched his entire civilization annihilated. Every man, woman, and child he had ever known was gone. He was writing as the last voice of a people who had refused to listen, and he was pleading with future generations not to make the same mistake.

The Helaman Blueprint

Before we get to Moroni's direct warning in Ether 8, we need to understand what he was warning us about. The book of Helaman provides the clearest operational blueprint for how secret combinations actually work. The Gadianton robbers are introduced there in detail, and the description is worth reading with your eyes wide open, because every element of it is recognizable in the world around us today.

These were not crude bandits operating on the fringes of society. They were sophisticated organizations with oaths, signs, and secret words that bound their members together across class lines. Politicians, judges, military leaders, and wealthy merchants all participated. What bound them was not ideology. What bound them was mutual protection. You protect me when I commit crimes; I protect you when you commit crimes. No one on the inside suffers consequences. Everyone on the outside is at their mercy.

That last verse is the one that stops me every time. Anyone who reveals their wickedness is not tried by the laws of the land. They are tried by the laws of the combination itself. In other words, the combination has created a parallel justice system that applies only to its members, and anyone who threatens to expose it is punished not through courts but through the mechanisms the combination controls.

Does that sound familiar? Whistleblowers who reveal illegal government programs are prosecuted while the criminals they exposed face no charges. Journalists who report on powerful institutions are discredited, financially destroyed, or worse. Anyone who threatens to reveal the inner workings of a system protected by powerful people gets punished through that system's own mechanisms: targeted audits, sudden legal problems, media assassination, destroyed careers. Tried not by the laws of the country, but by the laws of their wickedness.

How They Take Over a Nation

Helaman also shows us the mechanism by which secret combinations move from the fringes of society to its center. They do not conquer by force, at least not initially. They infiltrate. They place their members in positions of legal authority, judicial appointment, and governmental power. Once they control the courts and the enforcement mechanisms, they control everything. They can commit crimes openly because the people who would prosecute them are members of the same covenant.

Helaman 7 records Nephi's lament when he returned from preaching in the north and found the Gadianton robbers had ascended to the judgment seats. He sat on a tower in his garden and wept over his people, and the Nephites who passed by asked him what was wrong. His answer was essentially: the people who are supposed to be protecting you from lawbreakers are the lawbreakers, and they are untouchable.

Every generation that has read those chapters has imagined this was a distant tragedy from an ancient world. I no longer believe that. I think those chapters were written for people who would read them while watching something very similar happen on their own screens, in their own lifetimes, and wonder why no one seems to be doing anything about it.

Isaiah Named It Centuries Earlier

Moroni was not the first prophet to condemn this pattern. Isaiah saw the same corruption operating in his own era and pronounced God's judgment on it with language that reads like a transcript of our evening news. The rulers and judges Isaiah addressed were not a foreign enemy. They were the leaders of God's covenant people, insiders who had turned the system into an instrument of personal enrichment at everyone else's expense.

Isaiah 1 opens with God's indictment of a nation whose leadership had become indistinguishable from a criminal enterprise:

Princes who are companions of thieves. Officials who love gifts and follow after rewards, meaning bribes, financial arrangements, the quiet understanding that favorable rulings and policy decisions have a price. The vulnerable people who most depend on a just system, the fatherless and the widow, are the ones left with no one to hear their case. That description fits the Gadianton robbers perfectly. It also fits a world where congressional votes correlate with donor contributions, where regulatory agencies are staffed by the industries they regulate, and where the wealthy seldom face the same legal consequences as everyone else.

Isaiah 3 makes the economic dimension even more explicit, condemning leaders who had enriched themselves by consuming what belonged to the people they were supposed to protect:

That phrase has stayed with me since I first really sat with it. The image is not a whetstone sharpening a blade. It is a millstone. You know the kind: a massive wheel of stone pulled in circles by a donkey, crushing wheat kernels into flour. You throw the grain in, the stone grinds, and you get something useful out the other side. The grain has no say in any of it. That is what Isaiah saw God's leaders doing to the poor. Throwing them in like raw material and extracting what was useful while the stone did its work.

The grinding is not only economic, though it is absolutely that. Inflation, debt, wages that never keep pace, markets designed to enrich the people writing the rules. It is also the grinding of a legal system that protects those who can afford to be protected. The wealthy man who commits a crime hires attorneys who know the loopholes, who know the judges, who know how to slow-walk a case until the statute of limitations expires or the jury loses interest. The poor man who needs justice gives everything he has trying to get it, and most of the time the stone just keeps turning. Isaiah is not describing an accident of the system. He is describing the system working exactly as the people running it intended. The faces of the poor are on that stone by design.

And then there is the verse that may be the most recognizable of all to anyone paying attention in our time:

This is what secret combinations require at their mature stage. They cannot operate in the open, so they must control the language. They must make the people who expose corruption look like the criminals, and make the criminals look like the victims. They must call the destruction of the family progressive and call its defense hateful. They must call the surveillance state safety and call resistance to it dangerous. The inversion of moral language is not accidental and it is not a cultural trend. It is a necessary function of a system that cannot survive honest scrutiny. Isaiah condemned it as a divine woe, one of the most severe pronouncements in his entire ministry.

Moroni Breaks from the Narrative

In Ether chapter 8, something remarkable happens. Moroni is abridging the Jaredite record, which had documented an entirely separate civilization's destruction by these same combinations centuries before the Nephites even arrived in the Americas. He reaches the account of how secret combinations began among the Jaredites and then stops. He steps out of the narrative entirely and speaks directly to future readers. Not to the Jaredites. Not to the Nephites. To us.

He is not finished.

Four verses. One of the most concentrated and urgent passages in all of scripture. Moroni is not offering a historical footnote. He is delivering a commandment. "The Lord commandeth you, when ye shall see these things come among you that ye shall awake to a sense of your awful situation." He is not saying if. He is saying when. He knew we would see these things. He knew we would be tempted to assume someone else was handling it. And he commanded us not to sleep through it.

The Scope of the Warning

Notice the scope of what Moroni said these combinations seek to accomplish: they seek "to overthrow the freedom of all lands, nations, and countries." Not one country. Not a region. All lands. All nations. All countries. This is not a local crime syndicate. This is a global operation with a singular objective: the elimination of human freedom everywhere on earth.

That language is important, and it becomes even more important when you set it next to what John saw in Revelation. In Revelation 13, John describes a beast with seven heads and ten horns that is given authority "over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations." The scope is identical. The Book of Mormon calls it secret combinations seeking to overthrow the freedom of all lands. Revelation calls it a beast given authority over all nations. These are two prophets, writing centuries apart, describing the same system from different angles.

The Seven Heads of the Beast

John's vision in Revelation 13 describes a beast rising from the sea, and this beast has seven heads. Many interpreters have tried to assign those heads to a sequential list of historical empires, but that interpretation creates serious problems when you examine the timeline Revelation actually presents. The beast is a present and future entity, not a retrospective catalogue of history.

The seven heads represent the major power centers of the world operating simultaneously, the concentrated nodes through which the global system of secret combinations maintains its control. Central banking institutions that manage the money supplies of dozens of nations. Intelligence agencies that operate across borders with near-total impunity. International bodies that override national sovereignty through treaty and economic leverage. Military industrial complexes that profit from endless wars. Media conglomerates that control what billions of people believe. Technology platforms that surveil more of the world's population than any spy network in history. And governments, including our own, so thoroughly infiltrated by the people Helaman called the Gadianton robbers that they bear little resemblance to the constitutional republics they claim to be.

The beast John saw is the fully developed form of the secret combinations Moroni warned about. Same objectives. Same author. The dragon who gave the beast his power, his seat, and great authority is the same devil Moroni identified as the builder of secret combinations from the beginning. Satan does not change his methods because they keep working.

The Deadly Wound

Revelation 13 also tells us something remarkable about what happens to this beast system. One of its heads receives a wound so severe that it appears to be fatal, and then that wound is healed. The entire world, watching this happen, marvels after the beast.

This wound is not metaphorical and it is not minor. The Greek word translated as "wounded to death" indicates something that should be lethal. One of the seven heads, one of the major power centers through which the global system of control operates, is mortally struck. The mutual defense covenant that has protected this system for so long suddenly becomes worthless. And what rises from that wound is not a restoration of what existed before. What rises is something worse, more consolidated, and more dangerous than anything that came before it.

Who delivers that wound, how it is delivered, and exactly what emerges from the healing are questions the book addresses in considerable detail. What matters for this article is that John saw it coming. And so did Moroni. The system they both described has a beginning, a middle, and an end that God has already written.

The Record Was Preserved for This Moment

Mormon and Moroni did not include lengthy accounts of Gadianton robbers as cautionary tales about ancient Nephite politics. They included them because they had seen our world, our technology, our institutions, and our particular brand of corruption, and they wanted us to have language for what we were seeing. They wanted us to be able to look at the global network of power operating above and beyond national law and call it by its correct name.

The people running this system today wear suits instead of robes. They meet in boardrooms and private conference centers instead of caves and back alleys. They communicate through encrypted channels rather than secret signs. But the structure is identical to what Helaman described. Oaths of mutual protection. Punishment for anyone who reveals the combination. Control of the legal and judicial systems that would otherwise hold them accountable. And a singular driving purpose: power and gain at the expense of everyone outside the covenant.

Moroni's commandment to "awake to a sense of your awful situation" was not written for people who would recognize no danger. It was written for people who would be tempted to assume what they were seeing was simply politics, simply economics, simply the way the world works. He needed us to understand that it is something with a name, something with a history, something that has destroyed nations before, and something that God intends to judge.

Moroni Saw Our Day

In Mormon 8, writing as the last witness of a civilization that had destroyed itself, Moroni describes the conditions that will exist when the Book of Mormon finally comes forth to its intended audience. Every item in his list matches our world with a specificity that is impossible to dismiss as coincidence.

Secret combinations operating at the highest levels of government and finance. Churches defiled by pride, with religious leaders who have become celebrities envying the size of each other's platforms. Fires, tempests, and vapors of smoke in foreign lands heard of daily. Wars and rumors of wars. Earthquakes in divers places. Great pollutions on the face of the earth. Murders, robberies, lying, and the moral relativism that says it does not matter how you live because God will accept you anyway. Churches built up to take money in exchange for forgiveness of sins.

In 1830, almost none of those conditions existed in any recognizable form. Today, every one of them is a headline. Moroni was not writing about Joseph Smith's era. He was writing about ours.

The fact that he opens that section by addressing secret combinations is not incidental. He lists them first because they are the organizing principle behind much of what follows. The corruption of governments and institutions is not random. The suppression of truth is not random. The destruction of liberty is not random. It is the work of an organized system, built by the devil, operating through willing human agents, aimed at a single goal: absolute control.

What God's Kingdom Provides as the Answer

The Book of Mormon does not leave us without hope. The same Moroni who delivered the most sobering warning in the book also preserved a record that, at its heart, is a testimony of Jesus Christ and His power to redeem both individuals and nations. The same God who watched the Gadianton robbers destroy two civilizations is the God who has a plan for ours.

Revelation's beast system, for all its apparent invincibility, receives a deadly wound from which it does not ultimately recover. The seventh seal brings judgments that no human institution, no satellite network, no underground bunker system can withstand. The Political Kingdom of God that is established before the beast fully consolidates its power will stand when everything the beast built has fallen.

But between now and then, Moroni's commandment stands. We are to awake. We are to name what we are looking at. We are to understand our awful situation rather than explain it away. And we are to trust that the God who saw all of this coming and preserved these warnings across sixteen hundred years is fully capable of doing what He said He would do about it.

The blood of the saints who have suffered at the hands of these combinations has been crying from the ground. It does not cry unheard.

If you want to understand how all of this connects to the specific prophecies in Revelation, to the seven-headed beast, to the healing of the deadly wound, and to what the scriptures say comes next, the book The First Horseman: Donald Trump and Biblical Prophecy lays it out chapter by chapter in detail. The Book of Mormon and Revelation are telling the same story. Once you see how they fit together, you cannot unsee it.

You can also read more foundational context in the related articles below. The No Kings protest article covers how secret combinations operate through contemporary political movements. The Babylon article examines the economic dimension of the beast system in detail. And the article on Revelation's hidden structure shows how the entire book is organized around the beast system's rise and fall.

Moroni wrote for our day. It is time we read him that way.

Kelly Smith is the author of The First Horseman: Donald Trump and Biblical Prophecy. He is a lifelong student of biblical prophecy and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.