# Endure

Endurance means pressing forward under burdens toward completion—rooted in Greek hypomonē and the doctrine of Christ as a disciplined, hope-filled journey.

[Image: The Greek phrase *eis telos, *alluded to in Matthew 24:13, frames enduring to the end as persevering until an ultimate, purposeful destination is attained.]

To endure is to remain beneath a burden without giving way, bearing it until it has accomplished its work or passed. The Greek verb behind the New Testament’s “endure,” *hypomenō*, joins *hypo*, “under,” to *menō*, “to remain,” and its noun *hypomonē*, usually rendered “patience” in the King James Version, denotes the steadfastness of one who stays beneath the load. The scriptures describe a discipline directed toward a goal, in which the one who endures advances while carrying the burden.

## Unto the End

The Savior told his disciples that “he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved” (Matthew 24:13). The phrase “unto the end” renders *eis telos*, and *telos* names an end that is also a goal. Its relative *teleios* means complete or full-grown, and the epistle of James sets the two families side by side: “let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing” (James 1:4). The “patience” of that verse is *hypomonē*, and “perfect” twice translates *teleios*. In the Greek, James unmistakably presents endurance as the work by which a person is brought to completion.

Nephi names enduring to the end as the culminating element of the doctrine of Christ, after faith, repentance, baptism, and the gift of the Holy Ghost, and the verb he attaches to it is easily overlooked. “Ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope,” he wrote, and those who “press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ, and endure to the end” receive the promise of eternal life (2 Nephi 31:20). Endurance in Nephi’s account is motion along a path, sustained by hope and nourished by the word. The fullest revelation on enduring well, strikingly, came to a prophet held motionless in a prison.

## If Thou Endure It Well

[Image: In Doctrine and Covenants 121:7–8, God tells Joseph that adversity can be “but a small moment” if it is endured “well.”]

Joseph Smith spent the winter of 1838–39 confined in the jail at Liberty, Missouri, and a letter he dictated there in March 1839 records the Lord’s answer to his plea: “thine adversity and thine afflictions shall be but a small moment; And then, if thou endure it well, God shall exalt thee on high” (D&C 121:7-8). The conditional clause carries the promise. Exaltation follows an endurance qualified by the adverb “well,” which implies that adversity can also be endured poorly, in bitterness, and that the manner of bearing determines what the bearing produces. The answer catalogs every extremity a prisoner might face and closes with a purpose: “all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good” (D&C 122:7).

The images of that catalog recall earlier servants of God who passed through confinement. The prophet might be “cast into the pit,” as Joseph of Egypt was by his brothers, and that very Joseph descended from the pit to an Egyptian prison before he was raised to rule over Egypt and preserve his family. The phrase “cast into the deep” echoes the prayer Jonah offered from the belly of the fish, “thou hadst cast me into the deep,” and Jonah too emerged to deliver the word of the Lord. Joseph Smith, whom the Book of Mormon identifies as the latter-day namesake of Joseph of Egypt, thus received in his own prison a typological pattern in which descent precedes elevation and endurance prepares the servant for a larger work.

The Apostle Paul set out the sequence the revelation presupposes: “tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope” (Romans 5:3-4). The “patience” is again *hypomonē*, and the word rendered “experience,” *dokimē*, denotes proof or tested worth, a term lexicographers associate with metal proved genuine in the furnace. Read in this light, the experience promised to the prisoner at Liberty is character that has been tried and found genuine. Paul’s chain ends in hope, while Nephi’s “perfect brightness of hope” stands at the outset of his path, so that if the two passages taken together, hope both sustains endurance and grows out of it.

## Relief, Resilience, and the Body

George Bonanno’s studies of bereavement and trauma found that most people exposed to such losses continue to function in a stable and healthy way, and many survivors report growth afterward. Biologists describe a related phenomenon in hormesis, whereby moderate stresses such as exercise provoke repairs that leave an organism stronger, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb has extended the principle to institutions and economies, which he calls antifragile when they gain from disorder. An abolitionist strand of transhumanism nonetheless proposes to eliminate suffering altogether by redesigning human biology. The Mormon Transhumanist Association shares the hope of relief and expects medicine to remove a great deal of pain that earlier generations could only bear.

Adam S. Miller, addressing the association, argued that in Restoration thought agency and the capacity to suffer belong together, since an embodied life enlarges both what a person can do and what a person can undergo. The risk runs in two directions. A faith that sanctifies suffering may refuse relief at hand, mistaking avoidable pain for a divine curriculum, while a technology that removes every difficulty may leave people less able to bear the losses no medicine can reach. Radical life extension sharpens the question without settling it, since a longer life lengthens the course along which a person must press forward. Endurance would remain a virtue even for persons who never age, because bereavement and the burdens of agency would accompany them.

## The Joy Set Before Him

The epistle to the Hebrews urges its readers to “run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame” (Hebrews 12:1-2). The “patience” of the race is *hypomonē* once more, and “finisher” renders *teleiōtēs*, the one who brings a thing to completion, a noun from the family of *telos*. The epistle presents the Savior in one phrase as an exemplar of endurance and completer of faith, and it names the joy beyond the cross that sustained him, so that endurance in this verse becomes a race toward a prize the runner can already see.

The *telos* of the Savior’s promise, the person whom James calls “perfect and entire, wanting nothing,” and the joy set before Christ converge on the exaltation promised to the prisoner at Liberty who would endure it well. Mormon transhumanists expect that exaltation to be embodied, and they count the relief of pain and the lengthening of life as labor toward it. Within that hope, endurance retains its place, since the body that can be exalted is also the body that can suffer, and losses beyond medicine’s reach must still be carried. To endure, in the full scriptural sense, is to remain beneath such burdens while pressing toward the joy that completes the one who bears them.

*See also*: [Affliction](/topical-guide/affliction), [Exaltation](/topical-guide/exaltation), [Hope](/topical-guide/hope), [Joy](/topical-guide/joy), [Overcome](/topical-guide/overcome), [Patience](/topical-guide/patience), [Probation](/topical-guide/probation), [Suffering](/topical-guide/suffering), [Theodicy](/topical-guide/theodicy)