Transcript
Duration: ~58:30

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[0:06] It’s so beautiful to see you all walking in. It’s like rain, the rain to me.

[0:16] So today we are doing First Nephi thirteen through fifteen. And it’s the chapters thirteen and fourteen are the second half of Nephi’s vision. So we did the first half last week.

[0:47] Because it will all end with John, I’m gonna start with John, the apostle. This is John 1:1.

When all things began, the Word already was. The Word dwelt with God, and what God was, the Word was. The Word then was with God at the beginning, and through Him all things came to be. No single thing was created without Him. All that came to be was alive with His life, and that life is the light of men. The light shines on in the dark, and the darkness has never mastered it.

I want to read that last line again, because of our chapters. The darkness has never mastered it.

[1:48] So that is John the Revelator, who the angel tells Nephi in his vision to write the things concerning the end of the world, and also many things which have been. That’s in 1 Nephi 14:21. John is to write them, not Nephi, although Nephi also saw them, and that’s what happened.

[2:21] I read a comment about these chapters 13 and 14, that they’re not easy reading, that they’re like walking through sand. And the word that came to me is that they are thick. They’re very thick.

The stuff of the teachings or what happens in these chapters, they’re all over the place. It’s like a play with entrances and exits of people and events along with prophecies and doom. It’s world history seen through the lens of the house of Israel.

But it’s not Nephi’s doing. He’s just describing the vision he was given and what the angel, who is his guide, is telling him. So he is trying to recreate this spectacular vision that begins in chapter eleven and goes through the end of fourteen. It’s this huge sweeping vision encompassing the tale of the house of Israel and the movement of the Gentiles and their interactions with the house of Israel as God moves them, almost like chess pieces, to bring to pass somehow what he needs to happen.

There’s my chessboard. And when one plan doesn’t work, God pivots to another one. And because of course he’s working through willful and unbelieving humans, he has to bring in other pieces.

It’s more than an allegory of the olive tree, although that’s also in our chapter fifteen, where the branches are taken off and grafted in again. And then Nephi talks about this allegory at least four more times in his books.

[5:04] It’s not Lehi’s gentle vision that Nephi relates in these chapters. Lehi’s is in chapter eight.

Muhammad, as he was having his… well, let me ask you first, how long do you think Lehi and Nephi’s vision lasted? We don’t know, so you can guess. But Muhammad and his important and fundamental vision for Muslims said that he spilled a glass of wine as he went to sleep, received his vision, and when he woke up, the wine was still spilling from the glass. So these experiences are without time. I brought my glass and I forgot the wine. No, I’m just kidding.

[6:25] Open your books if you have your books to thirteen, First Nephi thirteen. The angel talks about two books. This is in verse forty-one. And these books will come out at the end of time, kind of the end.

They must come, this is verse forty-one, according to the words of the Lamb, and the words of the Lamb shall be made known in the records of thy seed, as well as in the records of the twelve apostles of the Lamb, wherefore they both shall be established in one, for there is one God and one shepherd over all the earth.

So we’ll get two books. When Nephi is writing all this down, does he realize that what he is writing will be in one of these books? I thought that was an interesting question.

[7:35] When our children were growing up, my husband John would bring them together at night, all of us, and read scripture and have a prayer, a family prayer. And our number two daughter, Lissa, would sometimes lock herself in her room by shoving a three-ring binder under the door, about this big, but it worked great because she didn’t have a lock.

My husband would get somewhat annoyed about her refusal to come up until one day when I said to him, if you keep doing that, you’re gonna lose her. So sometimes it takes two experimenting parents to remain calm.

Then John would go down and read one verse to her: “Jesus wept,” or “remember Lot’s wife,” or “pray without ceasing,” or “thou shalt not murder.” And then he would leave her alone. It’s not like she was doing drugs. She was studying for AP biology. She just didn’t want to come.

She’s the child who stowed her friend’s split lip together with dental floss at a cabin one winter night when they went sledding off a cliff. This is a very unusual child.

That was all about reading the books.

[9:31] So in First Nephi twelve, when it ends after we see the great and spacious building right at the end, Nephi sees his people overcome by the seed of his brothers. And it says the Lamanites and the mixture of people left, so they were Nephites mixed in, right? Continue fighting in wars and rumors of wars through many generations. In other words, they just keep killing each other. That’s in twelve, twenty-one.

And Nephi sees them dwindle in unbelief and become a dark and loathsome and a filthy people, full of idleness and all manner of abominations. They didn’t start out that way; they became that way.

[10:47] Scott Peck, who wrote The Road Less Traveled, also wrote this interesting book called People of the Lie. It’s older, but he’s a psychiatrist, and it is the hope for healing human evil. It’s about people who are evil. And it’s not easy reading.

But he said that laziness or sloth—remember this verse just said that the people had become full of idleness—laziness or sloth is the most basic of sins. That it is boredom with divine things. Inertia that cannot be troubled to repent, even though it sees the abyss into which the soul is falling.

[12:09] So that’s our stage for chapter thirteen, where the angel who is Nephi’s guide turns Nephi’s focus to the Gentiles and their nations and kingdoms to the world. And this great sweep of history begins.

And right away in thirteen and five, the angel shows him the formation of a great church. And the angel said unto me, Behold, the formation of a church which is most abominable of all other churches, which slayeth the saints of God and tortures them and binds them down and yokes them with a yoke of iron and brings them down into captivity. And I saw the devil that he was the founder of it.

So that is the great and abominable church. Well, the definition of a church is a gathering of people. It’s not a building. And it’s not just one church.

John in Revelation calls this abominable church Babylon, where everything is for sale, including integrity. And I suppose that’s why it’s called the whore of all the earth, the great and abominable church.

[13:53] This is 14:10 and 11, and the angel said unto me, there are save two churches only, the one is the church of the Lamb of God, and the other is the church of the devil, wherefore whoso belongeth not to the church of the Lamb of God, belongeth to that great church, which is the mother of abominations. She’s the whore of all the earth, and she sat upon many waters, and she had dominion over all the earth, among all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people.

In other words, there are two great forces battling for humankind and their souls. C.S. Lewis said there is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.

[14:59] But God is merciful to the Gentiles and they are blessed by him and he begins to move. Here’s one of the entrances. This is thirteen and twelve.

And here it starts. The spirit of God comes down and wrought upon a man and he went forth upon the many waters into the promised land. So who is that? Yeah, Columbus.

[15:39] Thirteen and fourteen, and all these Gentiles scatter and smite the Lamanites because the wrath of God is on the Lamanites. And fifteen, the Gentiles prosper and obtain land, and the spirit of the Lord was upon the Gentiles, and then seventeen through nineteen, the mother Gentiles were gathered together upon the waters and upon the land also to battle against them. The power of God was with them, and they were delivered by the power of God out of the hands of all other nations, which were… what nations? England, but also Spain and France. George Washington had to fight them all.

Richard Bushman said that the American Republic makes only a cameo appearance in the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon allows just nine verses to the deliverance of the Gentiles from English rule, and the rest of the book concentrates on the deliverance of Israel.

[17:03] So what do we believe is happening with these Gentiles coming? A lot of bad things happen to the native people, but we believe that God was moving, don’t we? He was preparing the promised land for the restoration of the gospel. Because Joseph Smith was born in 1805, fourteen years after the Bill of Rights secured religious freedom.

And I might add, and this is just me, but it took a while, but in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment passed finally, which was the abolition of slavery.

[17:58] So one of our patrons in the temple served a mission in Russia and told us of a man she knew in Russia who was searching on the internet for jobs in America and later on the street. He’s arrested and is still in prison. So it’s good to be reminded that despite all of our many problems in this great country, we have so much we can be thankful for.

And it does seem that there are times when God moves and intervenes in human affairs and also in individual lives.

[18:52] So my granddaughter, Catherine Carlston, and Cara, why don’t you come up and you can help me tell this story quick. I haven’t asked her before. This is my daughter, Cara. This happened to her daughter, not my daughter. She’s my daughter.

So I’ll just start: has moved into an apartment at BYU and was assigned a girl to be her actual roommate. Go ahead.

[Cara:] She’s from Guatemala. She speaks Cachiquel, also Spanish and is learning English. That language is the Mayan, what the Mayan people in the highlands speak of Guatemala.

[Teacher:] Her parents were… go ahead, you can read it if you want.

[Cara continues the story of the roommate:] She came from a broken family… came with her dad across the border illegally… living with him and about six or seven other men… I think there was abuse… uncle met the missionaries and was converted… brought her to church… Colombian family took her in and taught her Spanish… baptized… then financial trouble… another family took her… then they couldn’t keep her… invited by a visiting family from Florida (parents both psychologists)… adopted at fifteen… sealed… now at BYU.

[Teacher:] So that was my end that, here I’m saying to Cara, oh, she’s lucky to get Catherine as a roommate. And Cara says her parents were praying that she would get a good roommate and used Catherine. So think of God moving for that young girl in her life.

I know that not everybody is delivered, saved, so we have to… and I know we’re not chess pieces either, but we have to believe that he knows what he’s doing. Thanks Cara.

[24:13] So Nephi in thirteen and twenty is shown a book and the book is carried forth among the Gentiles. This book verse twenty-three is from the mouth of the Jews and it contains a record of the Jews and the covenants of the Lord with the house of Israel as well as many prophecies and it’s like the plates of brass but something happened to that book as you know the book is the Bible right. And it became altered.

Verse twenty-four and on. When it came from the mouth of a Jew, it contained the fullness of the gospel of the Lord of the Lamb of God. It was plain and pure. But verse twenty-six, after it goes through the great and abominable church, it has many parts which are plain and most precious, and also many covenants of the Lord have they taken away.

So Nephi uses those two words, taken away or taken out, eight times. I think he’s trying to emphasize something. It means that things were not changed on purpose. They were removed from the book. There would have been errors of copyists, right? As it was copied and copied and copied, but that’s different. This is what was taken out.

So when did this happen? It happened during the infighting of the Christian church in the one hundreds and two hundreds, really starting when the last of the apostles died. It was the apostasy, the falling away, and it culminated just quickly in the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325, when the Roman Emperor Constantine said, this has to stop, we have to decide what’s happening here, and they did.

We could talk about this a long time, but I’ll just say that many treasures were removed, taken out of the book and lost. Many doctrines were changed at that council. The literal resurrection was denied. Ordinances and ceremonies were made up because there was nothing in the Bible about them, and revelation was denied, and the concept of Trinity became cemented, as you know.

[27:35] So in thirteen and twenty-nine, at the end of the verse, over the page, because of these things which are taken away out of the gospel of the Lamb, an exceedingly great many do stumble, yea, insomuch that Satan hath great power over them.

Nevertheless—verse thirty, I just love that word—nevertheless, the Gentiles will be lifted up by the power of God above all other nations. Thirty-one, and here’s the promise, repeated by the angel to Nephi, the Lord God will not let the Gentiles utterly destroy the seed of your brothers and also of yours that are mixed in.

So destroy, the basis of that word comes from destruere, which is archaic and means to break down the structure, to scatter in all directions. So to destroy is not to obliterate but to scatter, to confound. So there would still be Nephites in there. In fact Mormon in Mormon 1:5 says he is a descendant of Nephi so we know there were.

[29:09] Look at verse thirty-eight. Here’s a really important verse. Nephi sees the remnant of his brothers and also the book of the Lamb of God and it came forth from the Gentiles to the remnant of the seed of his brothers. So he sees that the Gentiles will bring the book of the Lamb back to his people.

I hope you don’t mind if I have a personal experience. I was once a little worried about these things that were taken out of the Bible. I would think, was it ruined? This is not how long ago, and my dad was at that time in an Alzheimer’s home. I couldn’t ask him about it as I always had done… I went down to where he was living, went in his room and picked up his scriptures and I opened it up to First Nephi thirteen and thirty-eight and written at the top of the page in big red letters it said “The Bible is the book of the Lamb of God. The Bible is the book of the Lamb of the whole Bible.”

And I looked up at him and said, Dad, you are still teaching me. And he started to cry. And me too.

So the Bible, the Old Testament, is the book of the people that God chose through which to bring his promise, through whose seed he would bring his own son. That was Christ’s inheritance. What he studied, what he quoted and used to teach in his ministry.

Origen, one of the early Christian fathers of the three hundreds A.D. said, it is not the Old Testament which gives authority to the New Testament. Rather, the New Testament gives authority to the Old Testament. The prophetic writings, the law of Moses shone out when Jesus came. It was the coming of Jesus that set them in plain light.

So I hope you will remember that as you read that this year, the Old Testament, how important it is.

[32:20] Thirty-nine, there will be other books which will come out to convince the world that the records of the prophets and of the twelve apostles of the Lamb are true. So then we get the New Testament as well that will be coming, but not yet, right? It wasn’t written yet.

And about this later book, the Book of Mormon, Christ says in verse thirty-five, He will manifest himself unto thy seed, and they shall write many things, which I shall minister unto them, which shall be plain and precious. They will be hid up to come forth unto the Gentiles by the gift and power of the Lamb. And that’s our book, right?

[33:15] So in chapter fourteen, we are told in one and two that the Gentiles will be numbered among the house of Israel. If the Gentiles hearken unto the Lamb of God, harden not their hearts against the Lamb of God, they shall be numbered among the seed of thy Father, yea, they shall be numbered among the house of Israel.

Who are the Gentiles? You are, sorry to say, you are the Gentiles. And anyone who has received the fullness of the gospel, Joseph Smith was a Gentile, but we are also now numbered among the house of Israel, if we harden not our hearts, if we hearken unto the Lamb of God.

Listen to this strong verse about those who would harm those people. This is verse three of fourteen.

And that great pit which has been digged for them by the great and abominable church, founded by the devil, that he might lead away the souls of men down to hell, shall be filled by those who digged it unto their utter destruction, saith the Lamb of God. I kinda like that verse. They’re gonna dig a pit and then they’re gonna be in it.

[35:00] Here’s one more thing about the church of the Lamb of God. I hope this is all interesting to you. It is dense, I know…

This is fourteen and twelve. Nephi says, I beheld the church of the Lamb of God and its numbers were few. I beheld that the saints of God were also upon all the face of the earth and their dominions were small. They are few, and they own few things.

Jeremiah said in three, and I will take you one of a city and two of a family, and I will bring you to Zion. Just a few, just one or two.

So it’s a bit comforting to me to know that that is how it has always been, that there will always be only a few. But you do have to ask yourself, why so few?

With Jesus, it also happened, he stood alone. He tread the winepress alone. This is Isaiah sixty-three. I have trodden the winepress alone, and of the people there was none with me.

So John 1:11 and 12 where we started says he entered his own realm and his own would not receive him but to all who did receive him he gave the right to become children of God. Only a few received him so righteousness, goodness, it’s not always readily received, is it.

Nibley once said eternal life in the presence of God is not bought so cheaply.

[37:20] And here’s this gorgeous verse. This is verse fourteen of chapter fourteen.

I Nephi beheld the power of the Lamb of God that it descended upon the Saints of the Church of the Lamb and upon the covenant people of the Lord who were scattered upon all the face of the earth. And they were armed with righteousness and with the power of God and great glory.

So for the saints of the Lamb of God, their weapons are righteousness and the power of God, which is quite a combination. And that will be something instead of hatred and avarice and greed and power being used as weapons, won’t it?

[38:19] So in chapter 15, we have a total pivot. Nephi is wrapped up his vision at the end of 14 and fifteen and one, he says, I returned to the tent of my father. And when he gets there from this otherworldly experience, he walks into a big argument going on with his two older brothers.

Verses two and three, they’re arguing about the things which their father had spoken unto them, which were hard to understand. Say the man, this is Nephi speaking, right, should inquire of the Lord. And they being hard in their hearts, therefore they did not look unto the Lord as they ought.

So verse eight, Nephi says, well, have you asked of the Lord? Have you inquired of the Lord? And they give him this weak sauce answer. We have not… the Lord maketh no such thing known to us. The Lord’s not gonna tell us anything. Why should we even ask?

Well, there’s this story of this old woman… who prays that the hill behind her house will be removed, cause she doesn’t like it. And in the morning, she gets up, looks out the window, and says, huh, I knew it wouldn’t move anyway. So maybe they had no faith.

[40:13] Anyway, 15 and 4, Nephi tells us what’s in his head about all of this. He is grieved because of the hardness of their hearts, and because of what he has seen. And also, and here’s this word, and also because he knew these things must unavoidably come to pass because of the great wickedness of the children of men.

That is a strong statement. They’re gonna happen. It’s unavoidable.

Do you remember when the Lord says to Enoch in Moses seven, I can stretch forth mine hands and hold all the creations which I have made. And among all the workmanship of my hands, there has not been so great wickedness as among thy brethren.

So it’s something to think that in worlds without number, our world is the worst. But of course that is why the atonement had to take place in this world, I think.

[41:49] So here are a few questions. How did Nephi know that the things he had seen must unavoidably come to pass? What did he see in man to make him think this? What can people never change? When do people reach the point where God’s wrath is unavoidable?

Heraclitus who lived fifteen hundred years ago, a philosopher wrote, a man’s character is his fate. A man’s character is his fate. In other words, we determine what happens to us, what we are.

Can we change our character? Or maybe a better question is, what is the agent of change? Who is the agent of change?

In 15 and 4, we just read that Nephi is grieved because of the hardness of Laman and Lemuel’s hearts. What makes a heart hard? It becomes cold and angry and entitled and unwilling, disbelieving, cemented in its own thought. Not open to possibilities, no imagination, as Tolkien said to C.S. Lewis. He said, you’re just not imagining anything, C.S.

So can a heart become soft again?

Scott Peck again… what causes burnout in psychotherapists is not the tragedy in their patients’ lives, but their patients’ attachment to that tragedy. So people sought help claiming they wanted to change, but no sooner was it underway than they started behaving as if the last thing on God’s earth that they wanted to do was change. Their patients’ attachment to their tragedy.

[44:48] So I think there is an answer about changing, but before we go there, Nephi, the brothers asked Nephi what the Gentiles and the branches of the olive tree stuff was all about in his vision. I mean, what was going on here, they say to him.

So Nephi has this urgency about the deliverance of Israel… no one else in the book has that urgency and talks about it so much, that Israel will be delivered. He will bring it up many times more, as I said.

So Laman and Lemuel begin asking him questions about all these things. And here’s where you really read and see that Nephi’s vision is different than Lehi’s in tone. When he starts answering them, we can see that the whole tenor of it is darker and sadder, which is him anyway, but there’s a reason. Why is it different? Why is his vision, which was the same vision that Lehi saw, when he repeats it, why is his darker and more sad?

Here’s why. I think it’s because Nephi doesn’t just want to see what his father saw. He wants to know what it means. He wants knowledge. He wants understanding and depth.

The spirit, this is back in eleven, asks him what he wants, and he says he wants to know the interpretation thereof. So knowing brings a lot of complications, doesn’t it? And they’re not always happy. It’s not always happiness to know things.

But just to emphasize this juncture for Nephi when he asks for knowledge, not just to see the same vision. The spirit leaves, this is back in eleven, the spirit leaves and the angel comes. So why does that happen? That’s a little weird. And it happens when he says, I want to know. Well, I think it’s cause angels bring knowledge, and so they, the guide comes.

[47:43] And they start asking him, his brothers, this is twenty-two, what is the tree? You can just hear him asking him, what’s the tree?

So I brought all my trees of life. There are many. This one is a Brazilian rain tree. So often, bonsai trees represent the tree of life. And it was at night it goes to sleep and its leaves go like this and then it wakes up but when I put it in the car it went… so you can’t tell me that it does not have… it has a spirit in there. It was mad. Okay.

So when they ask him what the tree is he says it’s the tree of life. There’s no mention of love. There’s no mention of the love of God at all in his vision.

What does the iron rod mean? The word of God that you hold fast or perish.

What about the river of water which our father saw, this is verses twenty-six and twenty-seven, and Nephi says, I said unto them that the water which my father saw was filthiness. And so much was his mind swallowed up by other things that he beheld not the filthiness of the water. Isn’t that interesting? He probably was worried about his kids not coming. But that water was filthy.

[49:47] So why does it matter to know that the water in that river between the great and spacious building and the path to the tree was filthy? Verse twenty-eight, because the water, the filthy water is an awful gulf which separated the wicked from the tree of life and also from the saints of God. It’s a representation of hell and the justice of God. And out of it comes a flaming fire that goes up to God.

So the water and the fire coming out of it separate the wicked from God, and that is a terrible thing. I read the word harrowing. Harrowing. Which is a strong word. It’s a horrible thing. And if you have ever felt his presence leave you, you know what I mean. How you feel.

[51:07] Will Steger was still alive, the greatest living polar explorer. He’s now in his eighties, and he would take these five hundred mile treks on foot from the North Pole over the ice. And one year, he cut short a trek, and he wrote a dispatch with his satellite phone, and he said something that has haunted me for years. Here’s what he said: The conditions are sobering. There is always moisture and an eternal silence that I have never heard.

[53:04] Separation and all of that are temporal or spiritual and this is verse thirty-three. His answer is very insightful. He says it’s both. It’s both temporal and spiritual. It will happen in the spirit and in the body.

In other words they are saying do we have to worry about it now in our bodies… and then he says when they are brought to stand before God to be judged if their works have been filthiness… they must needs be filthy. If your works have been filthy, then you are filthy inside.

President Oaks, having his important October 2000 General Conference address, he said basically, we can only take with us what we have become.

So Rachel Naomi Remen, that wonderful author, said that our lives are holograms. Like in Star Wars, where you see in the light the image of a person. That holograms are the pattern of our most fundamental beliefs is reflected in the smallest of our behaviors.

So if our works are filthy, says Nephi, then we must be filthy. Everything we do is a reflection of what we think and believe inside, from earning a living, to changing diapers, to going to the grocery store, to how we treat people. It’s all like a hologram out there, because it adds up, it makes up who we are.

[55:32] So we’ve talked about a few pits, and I’m almost done, and gulfs, but I want to end with this story of another pit, and I know I’ve told this, but it’s worth repeating.

So this is the rabbi’s story. They tell this wonderful story that Jacob the patriarch long ago asked his sons to bury him in Canaan not Egypt. He died in Egypt where Joseph was. He wanted his bones buried in Hebron with Leah his wife and his parents Isaac and Rebecca and his grandparents Abraham and Sarah.

So Joseph as he goes back to Canaan with his father’s bones to bury them there, on his way Joseph passes the buried pit into which he was thrown by his brothers and stops to make a blessing over it. This was the place of despair for him but you understand the rabbis say the pit is really the place that saved his life. If he had not been thrown in, his brothers would have murdered him.

Can the pit, they say, your hardest place be transformed into a place of redemption? Can the place that we feel the most damaged become the birth canal through which we are reborn and perhaps recreated?

I would add, can we become a new person? And who is our agent of change?

I think that is what most of the Book of Mormon is about.

This is Isaiah 12:2 and 3. Behold, God is my salvation. I will trust and not be afraid, for the Lord Jehovah is my strength and my song. He also is become my salvation. Therefore, with joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation.

In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

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