If the Ephraimite Gentiles will be “as much mistaken” about Jesus’ second coming as the Jews were about his first (JD, 8:115), it will be because they assume Jesus’ second coming will vary from scriptural patterns of the past. That is, there will occur no traumatic events like those at his first coming to the Jews and also to the Nephites and no key actors involved. In short, it will be because even the spiritual kings and queens of the Ephraimite Gentiles will then have need to see “what was not told them” and consider “what they had not heard” (Isaiah 52:15; 3 Nephi 21:8).
It will because they assume there will be no prophet such as John the Baptist to prepare the way before Jesus or no prophet like Enoch to establish the Zion to which he comes to dwell. It will be because an insidious prevalence of “precepts of men” will influence them to choose the wrong side in an everlasting division—“on the one hand or on the other.” While such persons will deny Christ and be “cut off” from his people at the very time of his coming, others will inherit “peace and life eternal” (1 Nephi 14:7, 22; 2 Nephi 28:24–32; 30:20; 3 Nephi 16:10–15; 21:9–11).
Another sign of the servant’s coming is the increasing necessity of an entire reconfiguration of the Lord’s operation in his vineyard. At a time when the mother tree and three daughter trees are full of fruit but “none of it which is good” (Jacob 5:32, 39, 42), a new procedure is required. The Lord appoints his servant to call others servants to graft branches from the daughter trees into their mother tree and from the mother tree into the daughter trees. Then, even as the trees of the vineyard once again bear good fruit, the wicked are “burned with fire” (Jacob 5:51–75; 6:1–3).
That the trees’ bad branches are “hewn down and cast into the fire” when the Lord “sweep[s] away the bad out of my vineyard” (Jacob 5:66) attests to a general apostasy that required his intervention in the vineyard by appointing his servant. Under the symbolic imagery of a second allegory, the shepherds’ abuses and scattering of the Lord’s sheep similarly causes him to raise up his servant who gathers and restores them to their fold (Jeremiah 23:1–8; Ezekiel 34:1–31; 1 Nephi 21:1–26). Until that moment, his servant remains “hidden” from the world (Isaiah 49:2).
That is how we discern counterfeits of the servant among the false prophets and messiahs Jesus predicted would precede his second coming (Matthew 24:4–5, 11). The “strong delusion” Paul said would cause his people to “believe a lie” or falsehood (2 Thessalonians 2:11), attests to a lack of depth of scriptural knowledge that should anchor their souls in days of uncertainty. Their “line-upon-line” mode of learning—parroting back what their leaders say—will prove fatefully insufficient, as Isaiah and Nephi note, who saw our day (Isaiah 28:9–13; 2 Nephi 28:25–31).
On the other hand, what the servant and his associates accomplish within a short time before Jesus comes is remarkable. The Jewish saying that they will know God’s end-time servant David by the things he does, not says, will put the many David wannabees who are popping up in our day to shame. The Lord’s great and marvelous work of gathering and restoring Israel’s natural lineages that is an integral part of the “restoration of all things” (Matthew 17:11; Acts 3:21; Doctrine & Covenants 77:9) will resemble but far surpass all former great and marvelous works.
