“Come and partake of the fruit”
In first Nephi Chapters 8 through 10, the Prophet Lehi gives his account of a vision that would shape the perspective of his descendants for a thousand years.
I’m Mark Holt, and this is Gospel Talktrine.
So glad to have you with me on Gospel Talktrine. This is a podcast where we discuss the lessons of the “Come Follow Me” curriculum of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This week’s lesson is Book of Mormon number 3, 1 Nephi, chapters 8 through 10, “Come and Partake of the Fruit.”
As always, if you have a question about any subject, scriptural of otherwise, for which you want a scriptural answer, email me at gt@gospeltalktrine.com.
We have a number of questions this week, so I’ll go through them as quick as I can.
First of all, we’ve had a few questions over the last couple of months about transcriptions. People asking “are you ever going to offer transcriptions on your website?” First of all, I should say I’ve been a little bit neglectful of the Gospel Talktrine website, and I meant to scan my notes at least and put them up there, but what I’d really love to do is transcribe the podcast and put it up there. This would have a number of benefits. It would allow search engines to index the content that we provide, and it would allow deaf members of the Church, and deaf interested people to read what we provide, rather than being unable to access it in any way.
I’ve had a couple of people volunteer to provide transcription for a single episode, and I just want to say, we’re totally open to that, and I would very gratefully accept that kind of thing. If you’re interested in transcriptions, or you would like to provide transcription, then please contact me at gt@gospeltalktrine.com. So that’s a little notification of something that we’re interested in moving into.
Michael from Sandy asks a question. It’s a long paragraph where he kind of talks about this question so I’m going to paraphrase, but he’s basically wondering about the authority, the priesthood authority that Lehi took with him to the wilderness and into the New World. And then Jeremy also asks the question, and I’m going to read this question from Jeremy. He says, “Mark, I heard a comment today that it was ok to sacrifice, as long as you were three days away from Jerusalem. What do you know about that?”
So these two questions, I actually found an answer to both in the same article. You may have heard me mention before Dr David Rolph Seely. He is a BYU Religion professor, and he was my Near Eastern studies professor, when I was living and studying at BYU Jerusalem years ago. A man for whom I have immense respect, and I just loved, in fact everyone loved, going to his class. I had the good fortune of signing up to the Isaiah elective, and he was also the Isaiah teacher at ?, and I found an article by Dr Seely called “Lehi’s Altar and Sacrifice in the Wilderness”. So I’m going to paraphrase his answers, but if you should care to read more, just google that title and his name, David Rolph Seely and “Lehi’s Sacrifice in the Wilderness”, and you can read a lot of interesting content.
So the quick answer is, first of all, it doesn’t say explicitly in the Book of Mormon what his authority was in the priesthood, but we have information in the Book of Alma that there were priests, they were called High Priests, but the way that the High Priests are described is very clearly a High Priest in the Melchizedek Priesthood, and not a High Priest in the Aaronic Priesthood sense.
So to clarify that a little bit, it the Temple in Jerusalem before the birth of Christ, there were priests and Levites providing sacrificing services in the Temple, administering those ordinances, and they were all Aaronic Priesthood holders. And the High Priest was not a Hight Priest as we know them today, like an office in the Melchizedek Priesthood; he was more like the Priests Quorum President, he was somebody who was the leader of the priests, which was an Aaronic Priesthood office.
Now, the High Priests that are described in the Book of Alma more closely resemble what we know today as a High Priest, because they’re high Priests forever, ordained before the foundation of the world. You can find that description in the Book of Alma, I’ll leave it to you for where to find it, but it is plain that the Nephites enjoyed for generations the Melchizedek Priesthood.
It’s also been said by a number of LDS apostles and prophets that the ancient prophets in the Old Testament, not the general population, but the prophets themselves – the prophet Elijah, the prophet Moses, and many others obviously – they held and probably either passed on from prophet to prophet, from father to son, or perhaps the way that Jesus Christ received some of his keys, by translated beings, they passed this priesthood authority and perhaps the keys from prophet to prophet. And these prophets in the Old Testament did indeed hold the Melchizedek Priesthood.
And Lehi being one of them, even though we don’t find him in the Old Testament, he was very much an Old Testament prophet, we’ll talk a little bit more about that. He’s in the tradition of an Old Testament prophet, and therefore, it seems very, very likely that he held the Melchizedek Priesthood, which does comprehend entirely – even an Elder in the Melchizedek Priesthood holds all of the authority, the ability, to officiate in all the ordinances of the Aaronic Priesthood. And so, as a Melchizedek Priesthood holder he would have had the authority to perform temple sacrifices and even construct an altar.
Now the question about whether it was ok to sacrifice. First of all, there is in the Book of Deuteronomy, I believe it’s Chapter 12, a proscription against performing any sacrifice that wasn’t in the Lord’s prescribed place. Now that prescribed place changed over time, obviously when the Israelites where travelling through the Exodus, that was in front of the Tabernacle of Moses. Later on, in Shiloh, Samaria, other places and finally there was a temple constructed in Jerusalem, then that was the only place where sacrifices were permitted. And in the Book of Deuteronomy it actually says once the Lord’s house is established then you shall bring all your sacrifices there. And there are even some who believe that the ancient Jews would have thought they would have to take every animal there to be killed, even if it was in a secular way.
And then that particular regulation or commandment was reduced because, obviously the entire nation can’t take all their animals to be killed by priests. And so there are a number of theories around about how strict they were with this, exactly who could perform a sacrifice, where did it have to be done and how often could they do it. Did everyone really have to travel to Jerusalem for every sacrifice? Dr Seely points out, first of all he makes the point I just talked about, about Lehi’s Melchizedek Priesthood authority, and he points out that in the Dead Sea Scrolls there is one particular item called the “Temple Scroll”, not part of our scriptures, and the Dead Sea Scrolls are records from the Essenes, which is a first century Jewish separatist sect.
So this Temple Scroll would suggest that it was a common belief that if you were more than three days journey from Jerusalem, then the Lord didn’t expect you to go to Jerusalem for your sacrifices, and under certain conditions you could have your own altar there. There does seem to be evidence that there were Jewish settlements performing temple sacrifices in Egypt, east of Israel in the former Babylonian Empire, other places were there where high Jewish populations, there were temple traditions in those places and whether that was sanctioned or not is a matter of some debate and uncertainty.
So that should answer your question there Jeremy. It is not known whether it’s ok to sacrifice if you’re more than three days from Jerusalem, but we can presume, without evidence in the Book of Mormon, we can presume that Lehi wasn’t acting against the will of the Lord, and therefore the Book of Mormon itself is the evidence that if you were far enough away from Jerusalem, or perhaps the Lord specifically commanded Lehi, then you could at that time construct, and if you had the right authority, you could construct an altar and perform sacrifices. And we’re not sure exactly the nature of the sacrifices. It could be he was authorised to perform some and not all sacrifices. We do know that when he reached to New World, the promised land, they did construct a temple.
Thank you for those questions.
Chad asks the question, “Listening to the last episode, I thought about Nephi and his courage and faith in stating, “I will go and do.” However, when they get outside the city of Jerusalem, he isn’t willing to raise his hand and step up and talk with Laban.
‘Instead, it came to pass when he’d gone up to the land of Jerusalem I and my brothers consulted with one another, and we cast lots for who should go into the house of Laban.’
I’m sure in the journey there was discussion on how, or who, would go to Laban, or if they should go together. Why was Nephi now willing to put that commandment aside and also to leave it to his brother Laman, who was not fully committed?”
Good question Chad, and I do think that, if you look at it in hindsight, it did turn out the best possible way. If Nephi had decided or volunteered or commanded, whatever attitude he took, that he was going to be the first one to try, and then failed, which in all likelihood would have happened, Laman could have blamed it on him, forever. But the fact that Laman was sent to go first meant that he couldn’t blame anyone, and he would be willing to side with his brothers in blaming Laban for their failure to get the plates.
That being said, if you look up “Lots, Casting of” in the Bible Dictionary in your LDS scriptures, you’ll see a reference to the beliefs that were held around the casting of lots, and the belief generally was that because it was random, that God would put his hand in, and you could make a decision that way, and know the will of God. The scripture mentioned there is Proverbs 16:33: “The lot is cast into the lap, but the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord.”
So that was a common Hebrew belief, that if you were to cast lots, the equivalent maybe of rolling the dice today, to choose who– it’s almost like a role-playing game – I don’t know, I just thought of that – it’s a little irreverent – I hope not. But yeah, they thought it totally appropriate to have a random chance to determine the outcome and they believed that God would involve himself in the casting of lots in order to make important decisions.
So thank you for that question.
Finally, Janelle has a point to make about my discussion on the killing of Laban. Now if you remember last week, I talked about the fact that it’s not easy to reconcile the decision that Nephi made to take the life of Laban, especially for someone in our culture. And so what Janelle points out is: “As I listened to the Meridian Magazine Come Follow Me podcast, the 1 Nephi 1-7 lesson has a little more information about Nephi killing Laban. I’m curious to know your take on this insight with what you know about ancient culture?”
I listened to that podcast, and what they said was, they related the account of Joseph Fielding McConkie and the lesson that he taught with American students and near-eastern students in attendance. And the American students were having a tough time, like I have in the past, and when the account was read about Nephi had taken the life of Laban, they had a discussion about it. They’re saying, “Yeah man he shouldn’t have killed him in cold blood like that”.
And Dr McConkie noted that the near-eastern students were getting a little unsettled and so he asked them what they were feeling, and they said, “We can’t believe it took this long for Nephi to kill Laban.” And so, the point was, that in our culture he’s threatened his life, he’s stolen his goods, Laban clearly deserves to die and it’s totally within our cultural norms that he would die, especially in the ancient world, even more so.
So, the point that I made last week was that there might obviously be exceptions for the proscription against killing someone. The Hebrew wording in the commandment Thou shalt not kill is actually Thou shalt not murder. So, when is killing murder?
Well we have our answer today, and they may have had a different answer then. Our exceptions to that are obviously war, and self-defence, and it may have been that Nephi’s culture clearly defined that it was ok, and that the only reason he baulked at killing Laban was because he had a personal, to his credit, he had a personal distaste for violence, he did not want to commit that violence, but he felt justified in doing so, and he still didn’t want to do it.
So that is the point that was made in that discussion, and I appreciate that insight, so thank you for that Janelle.
And thank you for all of those questions, they’re wonderful questions. Some of them will shed light on what we’re going to talk about today, so without further ado, we’ll get right into the lesson material for this week, and that is 1 Nephi 8-10.
What’s interesting about considering Chapter 8 without reading Chapter 11 is that you get the vision of Lehi without the interpretation, so when I first read the lesson material this week…
First of all, I should apologise for my voice, I’ve lost my voice. I just got back from my honeymoon this week and I happened to be on a very, very adjusted time schedule and jet lagged, and so I was unable to sleep most of the week, and so I think I got a little bit sick because of lack of sleep, but some of you may enjoy a more raspy voice, but, I don’t know, send me your comments if you’re interested in that. I apologise that my voice is very raspy.
So, I was actually a little bit confused that the lesson was set up that in one lesson we would read the vision of Lehi, but it would be a whole other lesson before we would read the vision of Nephi, were he gets the interpretation of Lehi’s dream.
And now having studied this I’m really grateful that it’s organised this way.
The reason is, I asked myself the question, given the fact that these two visions are separated even though they’re the same vision, I thought, well, alright, let’s imagine that I was reading the Book of Mormon for the first time, and I come upon Lehi’s dream, and I don’t know the coming interpretation that Nephi is going to experience the same dream and get all the meaning of it.
So, let’s say that I was a scholar studying the Book of Mormon, having only read the Bible, or better yet, let’s say that I was Laman and Lemuel, and I was hearing from my father his account of the dream, so I’m an ancient Israelite, and I live in this time, and I hear this dream, what am I going to think? How will I receive it?
This should really be our goal, when we’re studying the scriptures, we should first ask ourselves, how did the people who first received this word of God, how did they feel, how did they understand it?
So, I have some ideas on this. And the first place we’re going to go is to the Book of Genesis, Chapter 1. So, I’m going to relate to you some of the aspects of Lehi’s dream, and then we’ll get some insight on it from the Old Testament.
The first thing that happens in Lehi’s dream is that he finds himself in a dark place. And this place is a wasteland, there’s no-one around. He describes it as a “dark and dreary wilderness.” Now the word wilderness means that nobody lives there, right? It may mean that it’s unfit for human habitation.
One thing we now about where Lehi was at the time, or we can guess, is that he was in the Arabian Peninsula, perhaps the northern part. They were on the borders of the Red Sea, so there where two places they could be, right, they could be in Egypt on the Sinai, or they could be in Arabia, and it seems likely, given that the accounts that they travelled in a generally south, south-east direction and as he says later, scholars have done this work and it’s generally believed that they travelled along the west coast of the Arabian Peninsula along to what would be present day Yemen and launched from the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. That’s where they built their ship.
Now today this is very much a desert, and it probably was the same back then. So, given that, this is not just a wilderness like a jungle, this is a wilderness where it’s really hard to eke out a living, it’s really hard to find water, so Lehi is physically, before he goes to sleep that night, he’s already in a wilderness. Now in his dream he finds himself in a dark and dreary wilderness. So wilderness is wild, it’s unfit for human habitation, there’s no light in his dream and that’s where he starts, that’s his starting point.
He sees a man, a man dressed in a white robe, and “he came and stood before me.” So let’s go back to Genesis 1:2. The world before God creates it is formless, “without form and void” as it says in the Bible. The Hebrew phrase that is translated that way has a particular history behind it. The Hebrew phrase is tohu va-vohu, where the word va means and or but. So there are a number of ways that this phrase can be translated. The way that it is translated has given rise to, amongst some, to the belief that the world was created ex nihilo, which means from nothing, because it was formless and void, meaning it was completely… it was space basically, there was no matter there.
But this phrase tohu va-vohu it has a rhyme to it, it’s sort of poetic, and it means empty and it can also mean uncertain, it can mean chaotic, and it can mean uncertain. And the point is, there was confusion there. And what God did was that he came in, and he imposed order upon the chaos, and, as Latter-day Saints believe, that he organised these materials, right, he organised a world out of the materials he was given, God did, and that was the form that creation took.
So, if you interpret tohu va-vohu not to mean that it was completely empty space, but that it was disorganised matter, it was chaos, and that God imposed order upon it, and then the other part of the… the void part of it could mean that it was empty, it was not currently fit to be used for human habitation. That’s one way of interpreting that phrase.
And so, it means basically that it’s a wasteland, and wasteland means that it’s going to waste – that people can’t currently use it, and God rendered it habitable, he rendered it suitable. And when he looked at it afterwards he called it good, and good meant that it was suitable for the purposes of God, which was that humans were going to dwell there. So that’s an interesting way to look at Genesis 1:2, and specifically the phrase tohu va-vohu.
So, understanding that, and understanding that Laman and Lemuel, and Sariah, Nephi and Sam, before Nephi’s vision, they had this perspective; everything in their scriptures pointed to one of two places, I shouldn’t say everything, but the vast majority of the Hebrew prophets, if they had a vision, it pointed to one of two places, it was either Genesis Chapter 1 or it was Exodus Chapter 15 where the children of Israel are leaving the land of Egypt, and they’re fleeing across the Red Sea, and they’re going into the wilderness, and they’re wandering around Sinai. So these are the two important spiritual journeys that ancient Israelites went on, and it’s referred to again and again in the scriptures. So when we find ourselves in Lehi’s dream in a place that resembles one of those occurrences, we should take note, and we should realise that this is how they’re going to receive it.
So, Lehi begins his dream in a place that is very much tohu va-vohu, which is formless and void, it is chaos and it is unsuitable for human habitation. One biblical scholar, somebody I admire a lot, named Tim Mackie, he has put forward a quote and I don’t know if he came up with this translation, but he has put forward a quote in his podcast a number of times, which is “wild and waste,” and it preserves the kind of poetic… it doesn’t rhyme the way tohu va-vohu does but it does have alliteration, and it preserves kind of the idea that order and habitability are imposed on this chaotic place. So wild and waste is the translation we’ll use in this lesson.
So that’s where Lehi finds himself. And then, what does God say? God says, “Let there be light.” The first thing that Lehi encounters is a man in a white robe, and so we can presume – because Lehi sees the colour of his robe – we can presume he’s some sort of luminous being.
There’s an interesting video – the Church has done a fantastic job of filming or dramatizing the events in 1 Nephi, and they’re releasing these videos one at a time – and there’s a magnificent video which recounts the story of this vision of Lehi among the other stories that we’re discussing. And the Church had also, interestingly enough, released an augmented reality app, where they take the footage from the video, and you can look into your phone and impose the dreary waste and the great and spacious building, you can impose those images on whatever your phone’s camera is seeing, to get a perspective about what Lehi was looking at. So that’s kind of an interesting app you can download on your phone.
So, anyway, Lehi finds himself, in this very much a Genesis Chapter 1 situation, and then it’s almost as if someone has said “Let there be light,” but he doesn’t immediately find himself in Eden, right, the “creation” (quote unquote) doesn’t happen instantaneously. Instead, Lehi finds himself wandering for hours. It says in verse 8 of 1 Nephi Chapter 8:
“And after I had travelled for the space of many hours in darkness I began to pray unto the Lord that he would have mercy on me, according to the multitude of his tender mercies, and it came to pass after I had prayed unto the Lord that I beheld a large and spacious field.”
So, the first thing that Lehi encounters is a waste, then a man in a white robe, then a field. And then he beholds a tree, whose fruit was desirable to make one happy. My wife asked me an interesting question as we were reading this, she said, “How did he know, without eating it, how did he know that it was going to make him happy?” This is an important question, right? And so the surface answer is, well he knew it in the same way you know anything that you know in a dream. You don’t know how you know things; the knowledge just comes to you and it feels like it’s obvious. So that’s one answer, we don’t know if that’s the real case, of if he had… this is a revealed dream, actually a vision, not just a normal dream, so maybe it was a revelation from God that it was desirable to make one happy.
My deeper answer is, later on, there are people who choose not to eat of the fruit, either because they already ate it, and they’re ashamed, or because they choose never to go unto it. And so therefore, it’s not desirable for everyone, it was only desirable for Lehi and the people who agreed with him. And that’s an important aspect of this dream, which is that the fruit is desirable to make one happy, but there is an element of choice involved as whether it is desirable.
In any case, he sees a tree, and then he sees a river, and then he sees a great and spacious building across the river. So these are the aspects of the dream. And a little bit later he sees a path leading to the tree from the field, and the path has a rod of iron, and a mist rolls in, a mist of darkness.
Now, these are all images from the Creation, and they’re also images from the Exodus. And this is very interesting. A lot of you are probably reading this, especially those of you who grew up in the Church and have been studying these chapters since Primary, you’re probably reading this in a Latter-day Saint context, and what I’m trying to do is trying to shift you into an Old Testament context as you read this, and just pretend that you don’t already know the interpretation that you’ve been taught all you’re lives, and read this from the perception of somebody who grew up in ancient Jerusalem.
The contemporary prophets of Lehi that are most well-known are Ezekiel and Jeremiah. Even though they wouldn’t have written everything – certainly Lehi and his family didn’t have access to the writings of Ezekiel, but the point I’m making is that Ezekiel is a product of the same culture that gave birth to Lehi and his family. And they did have access to some of the writings of Jeremiah, in fact they’re on the brass plates, not all of them, but some of them.
And the writings of those two prophets are also allegorical, and they’re also – you can find evidence that they are influenced, and they want to influence, the people who they’re teaching, for whom they’re receiving the revelations – they want to influence them by images from the Exodus and the from the creation.
So let’s analyse this in this context, right? Let’s talk about the vision of Lehi in the context of the creation. So, after the Lord says, “Let there be light,” a certain period of time passes, and then finally, he sees a tree that is desirable to make one happy, and when he comes unto the tree, eats the fruit, now he’s in an Eden state. Now, if you’re looking at this as a creation narrative, he is on the seventh day, he’s after the seventh day, right? The creation is now complete. And man has the run of the garden, and he can eat all of the fruits of the garden freely.
Now, there’s another context we can read this in, which is “After the Fall.” Man has already proven that he is not equal to keeping Gods commandments, so he’s been separated from God. But God is willing to bring us back into his presence, and the people that Lehi observes from this time forward are kind of… they’re stand-ins for the people of Israel as a whole. Sometimes they are willing to be enticed by the Spirit of the Lord to do what’s right, and much like the ancient Temple, much like the Tabernacle of Moses which later became the Temple in Jerusalem, if you remember the structure of that edifice was, first, the outer court, which had its altar, then a veil, and the holy place. And the holy place had some furnishings in there and was also decorated in a style reminiscent of the Garden of Eden. And then another veil, a double veil this time, and inside that a smaller place, the Holy of Holies.
In modern terms, these three places or situations are rooms, they represented the three Kingdoms of Glory, And the progress the priest made in the course of a sacrifice ordinance represented carrying – especially on the Day of Atonement – represented carrying the nation of Israel, the Children of Israel, back from the world they lived in, the fallen world, their fallen state, into a state of union with God, undoing along the way the effects of the Fall, the spiritual effects of the Fall.
And you can see all of those elements in the story that Lehi is relating about his dream. There are people who follow this pathway back out of the lone and dreary waste, across the mist of darkness, which is the death that occurred to Adam and Eve when they were ejected from the Garden of Eden. And the Fall is being reversed from them as they go into this temple building, the Holy of Holies, the Tree of Life.
Now it’s interesting, because we call this the Tree of Life vision, but Lehi does not name it as such. It’s not until Chapter 11 that Nephi tells his brothers that the tree represents the Tree of Life. Now the Tree of Life was a tree in the Garden of Eden, that would provide eternal life, meaning if separation from God was death, then the Tree of Life meant togetherness forever, eternal togetherness with God, to the point that when Adam and Ever were ejected from the garden, the Tree of Life had to be guarded, so that they couldn’t partake of it, because they had lost that blessing. They had changed the fact that God had once given them permission to eat the fruit of every tree in the garden. And that permission was revoked and rescinded, and in fact an angel is set to guard the way so that they could never reach that Tree of Life again.
That was the nature of the Fall. And now Lehi is showing his descendants, and the descendants of Ishmael and Zoram, he’s showing all the people that are with him in the wilderness, that God has provided a way to return to that Tree of Life. Now this is the same vision that every prophet has, they’re talking about a time in which God will bring his children together and give them a new creation, a new heaven, a new earth, a new Jerusalem. So the Tree of Life is both the Eden state that we all want to return to, it’s the Holy of Holies in the Temple, and it’s the final state of the creation of God when he renews everything, in the presence of his Messiah.
This would have been the context in which… if Laman and Lemuel, we don’t exactly how religious they were, how learned they were in the scriptures, but if they were up on their Old Testament, on the five books of Moses and on the prophets that had come since, then they would have been very much receiving that in this way. That their father is having a vision that is quite typical of an Old Testament prophet, which shows that God wants to bring his children back, that there has been some sort of separation, God wants to undo it, he wants to provide a way, but people have to choose it.
So that’s the basic outlines of how we can receive this vision if we don’t have Nephi’s interpretation. We don’t need to hear specifically that the fruit of the tree is the love of God. The fruit of the tree is eternal life, and the tree itself represents the new creation, the new Jerusalem, and that’s enough, that’s close enough, I should say.
Now, Nephi’s interpretation we’ll discuss next time. It does indeed add a lot of insight. But what I want to say about it – how to contrast them – is that it’s very much a New Testament sort of perspective on this allegory. And Lehi’s vision is very much an Old Testament perspective. The teachings are the same, and the message is the same, that we need to repent, and we need to follow God, but the method of teaching, and the images used, the way it can be understood is almost like the difference between the Old Testament and the New. I thought that was very interesting, and I would not have had that insight had these two visions been part of the same lesson the way they always have been for me in the past. So I was really grateful for that.
Now, I talked a little bit earlier about how the perspective to see that the tree is desirous, the fruit of the tree is desirous to make one happy. I realise that’s a choice, and what it is, is a narrative. Now let’s talk a bit about what a narrative is. A narrative is an interpretation that we as people impose upon the world around us to better understand it. So, for example, your child goes to school, her friends don’t say hello to her that day, she imposes a narrative on what’s going on: “Oh, we got in a fight over a boy, and they’re mad at me, and they’re shutting me out.”
So the facts are: somebody didn’t say hi to her in the halls; the narrative becomes they’re mad at her and she has assumed the reason. I’m not basing this on anything real, that’s just the first thing that came into my head. But we all do this, we all impose narratives on the facts that we encounter in our world. And the vision of Lehi is no different, and in fact it’s explicit in the vision of Lehi that there is a narrative there, and not everyone shares it.
And this is important, this is an important lesson, that will be repeated throughout the Book of Mormon. Because, the narrative that Lehi embraces is that the tree is desirable to make him happy. And therefore, when he looks over and he sees this great and spacious building and everyone in there, we’re all sharing – as we’re going through this story that Lehi is telling – we’re sharing his narrative and we think, “Oh, those terrible people in the great and spacious building, how could they be in the attitude of mocking and pointing fingers at those who are partaking of the tree.”
But I want to give you a little bit more perspective of someone from the great and spacious building, because I think it will help us put it in modern terms.
So I tried, I sat down and I tried to come up with a competing narrative. And so this is going to be an imperfect effort, but this is the best I could come up with, in the time that I spent on this. So imagine, instead of a field, instead of a tree, instead of a river, instead of a rod of iron, a great and spacious building, imagine that you’re on a chessboard. And the chessboard, instead of being an 8x8 chessboard, it extends forever in all directions, or it extends until you can’t see any further, in all directions.
And you happen to be a chess piece on this chessboard and everyone you know is also on the chessboard. And you, sometimes you’re a pawn on the chessboard, and sometimes you’re a king, for whom other people will sacrifice their lives, to keep you in the situation where you want to be in. And sometimes you’re a queen, where you have power to move around to accomplish your goals and to take other pieces et cetera.
If you’ve never played chess, then I apologise, this might go over your head a little bit. But hopefully I’ll give you enough context so you can understand what’s going on. If you are a chess player and you finally realise, “Ok, I’m a queen, I’m the most powerful piece on the board,” and you notice some pawns are grouping together, and they’ve decided, these pawns have decided to tell themselves the story, that chess… And I’m going to back up for a second here.
Some of you may be familiar with the concept of a zero-sum game. A zero-sum game means, that when you add up all of the rewards that everyone gets at the end of the game, it all adds up to zero. So some people have a negative outcome, and some people have a positive outcome. And they all add up to zero.
And what that means is, your loss is my gain. If I make you worse off in the game, then I’m better off. Now this is true of chess; chess is a zero-sum game. There’s one winner, and his outcome is a one, and there’s one loser, and his outcome is a negative one. And they add up to zero. And there’s exactly one winner and exactly one loser. And if one person gets a better position in the game, it means the other person is worse off. That’s what a zero-sum game is.
There are games that are non-zero-sum games, the economy is one of them, for example. Sometimes people cast the economy as a zero-sum game, where it means that if you’re richer, then I must be poorer. But really, people are producing all the time, they’re producing wonderful things, so that we all get a little bit richer every time everybody goes to work. So, if we see that as a non-zero-sum game, then we can realise that everybody helps everyone else.
But chess is very definitely a zero-sum game. So, we’re back on the chessboard, and you’re a queen in this chess game, and you look over and you see a bunch of pawns discussing the game, and they decide that chess is a non-zero-sum game, and they can all work together. And if you are familiar with chess, if you are able to get your pawn across the board to the other side of the board, the pawn becomes a queen.
So these pawns are all discussing, “You know, we just gotta wait until we get onto the other side of the board, and then we’re all gonna be queens one day, we’re all gonna be the most powerful pieces on the chess board, and we can help each other, and chess is a non-zero-sum game.” And you as the queen, you realise these pawns are deluding themselves! Chess is a zero-sum game, and this is not a normal chessboard, it’s an infinite chessboard, and there is no other side of the chessboard.
Alright, so where am I going with this? That’s my narrative. Where am I going with this? In order to explain why I told you that story, I’m going to talk about the Book of Mormon; not Book of Mormon the book, but The Book of Mormon the musical on Broadway. The two guys that made up this musical are famous in the world, they’re Matt Stone and Trey Parker, they’re famous for coming up with the cartoon South Park. And South Park is, quite often, a brilliant piece of humour. And it’s also, more often, it’s an irreverent and even sacrilegious piece of art. And these guys have made a good living producing this cartoon, and there have even been times, there have been a couple of episodes featuring Later-day Saint people, and they’re depicted as, sortta dumb. They’re great people, they’re sincere, they have really good hearts, everyone loves them and their sortta dumb.
Because they don’t realise how stupid their beliefs are. And these two guys, they put their heads together, and when they chose to compose a play that would go on Broadway, it was Latter-day Saints that they chose to feature as the subjects of their ridicule. And that’s why they called the play The Book of Mormon. Because these guys are very definitely atheists. And the whole idea that God exists, and there are prophets, and you have to forego pleasures of this world in order to have a better eternity, is kinda dumb. It’s a stupid idea.
Now, I wanted to draw that parallel and that contrast, because there are two Books of Mormon, that there are two Book of Mormons - however you want to pluralise it! There is the Book of Mormon you and I read, and there’s the Book of Mormon musical on Broadway, and they’re two competing narratives. And one narrative is explained by a vision where there’s a lone and dreary world, there is a trackless waste, there’s something that’s wild and waste, and in there we see a reward that’s desirable to make one happy. And then, there’s a competing narrative where life is a chessboard, and it’s a zero-sum game, and we have to do the best we can for ourselves, and everyone who is banding together and saying it’s not a zero-sum game and that there’s some future reward, they’re kidding themselves, and they’re kinda dumb!
And then so the attitude we should have to people like that is one of mocking and pointing our fingers. That is the narrative of the people in the great and spacious building.
Now, there are atheists who are very respectful of theists – of people who believe in God – and there are atheists who have a very highly developed moral code. So, in saying this, I am not saying that atheists are bad, atheists across the board they have this attitude, they share this narrative. But I am saying that atheism is that narrative.
If atheists are good people, if they have adopted a moral code, they may not know it, they may not be able to say why, but their sense of right and wrong, the ethical laws they live by, and they think are inherent in their humanity, are in fact the result of the teachings of prophets and the fact that they live in a society that has evolved due to the Bible. And they owe their very morality to people who have believed in God and have passed this culture down to them. That is my assertion, at least. And so, the fact that they’re good people is actually due to the fact that they live in a good culture. It’s not due to the fact that they are human beings and that this is born into them.
God is the author of all things that are good, so they actually have not fully embraced the narrative of the great and spacious building, which is a good thing, even though they don’t believe in God. These narratives are diametrically opposed, this is my point.
So atheists can be good people; atheism as an ethos is diametrically opposed to theism, to the belief in God. These are our two competing narratives, and the reason that I wanted to tell this story is: this is the conflict that exists in the Book of Mormon. Now the children of Israel, they go into the land of Canaan and they’re surrounded by people who have religious beliefs of all different stripes, and so their conflict is: how do we tell the worship of the true God from the worship of all these false gods. The worship of fertility and the worship of weather, and the worship of war – how do we actually worship the Lord who is the creator, who is from eternity to eternity, unchanging, somebody who is outside of what we can do? How do we separate that from the worship of these idols that are the product of our own hands? That’s the Old Testament conflict.
The conflict in the Book of Mormon, when you think about it… there’s Nehor, there’s Korahor, there’s Gadiantan and Kishkuman. There are all these people who are basically nihilists who believe in nothing. And what Korahor said – and this is from Alma Chapter 30 – they’re called anti-Christs, and what anti-Christ means is not somebody… we kind of think when we hear the word anti-Christ, the image that is immediately summoned up is someone at the end of days who is the embodiment of Satan who fights against God and all of his people.
Sure, but, the word anti-Christ more accurately and more generally means someone who… So think about what Christ is – Christ means the Messiah, it means the Anointed One, it means the Chosen one of God – and an anti-Christ is someone who is saying there is no Chosen One of God. The Messiah, the Christ, is someone who embraces the first narrative, the narrative that Lehi tells in his dream, and an anti-Christ is someone who says, “No, there is another narrative, and that narrative is we should mock and point fingers over those who believe there is another side of the chessboard and we’re all going to be queens one day. That’s dumb, that’s a little bit dumb, and we should make fun of it, and we should live for today, and we should,” as Lehi says in another place, “eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.”
Those are the competing narratives of the Book of Mormon, and every anti-Christ who comes about in the Book of Mormon, espouses that second narrative, that opposing narrative to the belief of the Nephites, whatever form they might take as the history of the Book of Mormon progresses. There are those who believe the first narrative of Lehi, and there are those who espouse its opposite. And the opposite belief is never expounded upon by any prophet, because no God would reveal it to anyone. You have to make up your own narrative, but I think I’ve done a fair job of saying, “Here’s an opposing narrative,” and I tried to do it from the perspective of somebody who believed it, because if you’re playing chess and you believe you’re in a zero-sum game, you are in a zero-sum game.
And if you’re playing an infinite game of chess, and there is no other side of the board, and it would be stupid for a bunch of pawns to group up together and try to work together because they actually should be against each other. They can’t actually win by grouping themselves together. That’s stupid in a zero-sum game. Because if you help somebody else you’ve actually hurt yourself.
And, again, if you think that I’m unfairly characterising atheists, I’m not characterising atheists. There are many atheists who are wonderful people, and who do wonderful things all day long. I’m characterising atheism, I’m characterising the belief that we don’t need God in our world. And atheists, when they’re good people, they’re not actually consistent with what they believe. They don’t recognise that they’ve inherited a good belief from their society, from theists that came before them.
So that’s the contrast between Nephi’s vision and Lehi’s. Lehi’s is a concrete… If you notice that Jesus Christ doesn’t make an appearance in Lehi’s dream. And so Nephi sees a concrete and very Christ-centric allegory, but Lehi sees an abstract Old Testament style metaphor, with multiple interpretations. This has a temple layer that we can put across it, and it has a creation layer that we can put across it. You notice that some of the people go across, they fall into this stream, so it has an Exodus parting of the Red Sea layer that we can put on top of it. We can insert the history of the children of Israel into Lehi’s dream, and we can benefit spiritually thereby. And this is appropriate for the two audiences. Lehi is talking to Laman and Lemuel, and Zoram, the sons of Ismael; they’re all Jerusalem Jews, who would connect with the prospect of choosing Jehovah, or facing eternal exile. So that’s another thing, the mist of darkness represents exile, that’s what death is for the children of Israel.
And Nephi is talking to his posterity, he’s including in his audience everyone who’s going to choose the first narrative already, so he wants to give them a little bit further light and knowledge, that they can take this further and benefit even more. The way that Christ did, right? He took the Old Testament beliefs, and without making it pass away, he said “You’ve been told by those of old time that you shouldn’t kill, but I tell you go one step further.” That’s what Nephi does with Lehi’s dream. So that’s Nephi’s audience, his posterity, including the entire people of the Book of Mormon, and the modern Saints, all of whom would have a sophisticated understanding of Christ.
So that’s Chapter 8, and that’s the vision of Lehi. It’s very powerful, and it’s very much an Old Testament prophet’s vision. And it can be considered, profitably considered, separately from Nephi’s vision: they’re two separate visions. And they have two separate meanings, and the two meanings, while they complement each other, are not equivalent.
So let’s move onto Chapter 9, the next two chapters we’ll cover briefly. Chapter 9 is an explanation for… now this is interesting, because it’s actually an explanation for a modern-day event. It’s an explanation for the refusal of God to allow Joseph Smith to retranslate a portion of the Book of Mormon that he lost.
If you’re not familiar with this story, when Joseph Smith had translated a little over a hundred pages of the Book of Mormon, the first part of it, Martin Harris, who had been financing it, put pressure on him: “Let me show this to my wife, let me show this to people who are making fun of me for being willing to follow your mad scheme, and translate this ancient record. They’ve been telling me that I’m getting duped, and so I want to show them the proof by taking the pages of the manuscript that we’ve done, and showing it to them, and showing them that we have something real here.”
Now of course, Joseph got a “No”, and he got a “No”, and finally he got an “Ok, whatever, do what you want to do,” and so when he loaned those pages to Martin Harris, they never made it back.
The obvious recommendation for anybody outside observing this situation is, “Ok, if you are in fact an inspired translator, go back and translate the thing again, it shouldn’t be too hard for you to translate those 116 pages again, and then that will be the proof that you really are translating an ancient record, and not just making up the Book of Mormon from whole cloth.”
And, incidentally, those people who say that are 100% right. That would have been proof. If Joseph Smith had gone back and he had translated those 116 pages again, and he’d gotten exactly the same words… the manuscript pages he gave to Martin Harris were the only copy. If he wasn’t working from some master copy, we can presume he didn’t have those 116 pages memorised word for word. So if he’d produced the same manuscript again, that would have been proof positive that Joseph Smith was translating a record, rather than composing one. So we as Latter-day Saints should recognise that.
This is actually a weakness in our argument that Joseph Smith was not allowed to go back and translate those. Sometimes we see this story as a strength: “Oh Joseph Smith, wasn’t it wise of God to inspire Nephi to keep two records.” But somebody from outside the Church would look at this and say: “Well that’s very convenient, as soon as he loses the record, it happens to be right at the place where God provided two records. Very clever of Joseph Smith to come up with that excuse.”
And they’re right about that. It does look very convenient. And so, the point is, there is no proof. The Book of Mormon, in itself, does not contain proof. I’m going to end with that in today’s lesson. Just remember that: The Book of Mormon does not contain proof. Which isn’t 100% true, but I’ll explain why it isn’t 100% true in a few minutes.
So, Chapter 9 is sort of the explanation, that Nephi feels inspired, he’s kept a second secular record, or mostly secular record, and now he wants to keep a mostly spiritual record, and he’s explaining, “I’ve no idea why I would do it twice, but I just feel like the whispering of God in my heart is that I should do this.” And now, later on, we understand why; it’s that part of that was going to be lost, and rather than allow Joseph Smith to retranslate those pages, and provide proof, God knew that he had already covered this eventuality.
There had to be a consequence to Joseph Smith, the consequence was, “You had an opportunity that is now lost and can never be regained, to have this manuscript included in the final Book of Mormon.” Now the rationale given for that is that the people to whom Martin Harris took… among whom the record, the lost pages fell, the presumption was they would change them and then say Joseph Smith, “You tried to retranslate it, but really, you got it wrong.” And so therefore they would have found some discrepancies that they themselves introduced. And it is possible that they would have done that. But, I’m not sure that was God’s rationale. I think it was just the consequence to Joseph Smith for not listening.
In any case, that’s Chapter 9, and it is faith promoting and it’s also convenient. Again, this is the kind of thing that depends on your narrative. You choose the narrative, you chose whether this fruit is desirable to make you happy, or whether it’s a little bit dumb. Those are choices that we all make every day. And we don’t make the choice once, for all spiritual things, and then stick to it perfectly. There are times, as you see in the narrative Lehi tells, that people arrive at the tree and then they feel ashamed. At one point they make the choice, and at another point they doubt that choice a little bit. And we all of us are susceptible to that and we have to be wary of it. And that’s the message of Lehi’s dream.
So, Chapter 10 now. First of all I want to make one point, and that’s Nephi says, “I’m not relating all the words of my father.” There is a ton to this time period that we just have no account of, and all of this was done, as he says, “while my father dwelt in a tent, in the Valley of Lemuel.”
So, they are three days journey from Jerusalem, they’re in the wilderness. I want to make another point, that the image that we get of the great and spacious building: It is a tall building, it has many doors and windows, and it is built, as it were, on the air. Now if you’ve ever heard of a place called Shibam, it is a city in Yemen called the Manhattan of the Desert. They are mud-based buildings that are 100 feet or more tall, that arise out of the desert, that are 1700 years old. And some people date some of the structures as far back as 300 years before Christ.
Now the reason I bring up Shibam is, they are tall buildings, that were part of an ancient city and the first few floors are windowless. And looking at it from the desert, would have been much like seeing a building sitting on the air. You would have seen lights on the upper floors, and these buildings in some cases are 10 floors or more tall. I’m not saying that Lehi would have ever seen the city of Shibam or a similar city, but it’s possible that there was a similar place around there, it’s possible that there wasn’t.
But we do know that Lehi was in the process of becoming what is known today as a nomad. He had left a civilised life, he’d left a life where their food, their sustenance, was derived from agriculture. Now he was arriving in a place where they became basically hunter-gatherers. They became nomads, and they became savages from one perspective. They were living of the land, and they were hunter-gatherers.
And wherever people who live on agriculture encounter hunter-gatherers, there’s one result: that is that the hunter-gatherers are wiped out. We’ve seen that over and over in world history. And so that’s why, as you read the book of 1 Nephi, you recognise they couldn’t have fires, because the fires would have drawn civilised people from the lands they were travelling through, to come find out what was going on, and to protect their lands, These guys were nomads, wandering through the wilderness, and living off the land by hunting and gathering and carrying seeds and crops. And they planned one day to establish themselves in a permanent base, but there were years between their two civilisations.
And they left a city behind, and so one more layer to the narrative of Lehi’s dream is the narrative of a city-dweller becoming a hunter-gatherer, becoming a nomad. And so he’s looking from the joy that he’s found in the wilderness, he’s found this new creation where God is willing to talk to him as he travels away from the city and arrives at a mountain top. You know, the Temple of God, the prophet arriving at a place where God is willing to meet him. And he looks back at the city, and he sees this tall building where everyone is laughing at him, pointing the finger, and that is the very narrative that Laman and Lemuel… it wasn’t that Laman and Lemuel they hated their father or they didn’t want to be happy, it was that they had a totally different narrative. They were still in the city.
The reason why I bring up this city versus nomad idea is that we see it again in Genesis. In Chapter 4, Cain and Abel have two different offerings. Cain is a tiller of the ground, if you remember, and Abel is a keeper of flocks. So, somebody who is a keeper of flocks… that’s a description that fits very well with wandering prophets of the Old Testament, the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They were itinerant, they were nomadic, they were keepers of flocks, they were herdsmen. And the children of Israel, when they came out of Egypt, they were also nomadic. So this was seen as a more pure form of worship of living, of getting close to God, than living in a city, and relying on someone else raising crops or raising animals to sell to you. So specialisation of the economy, as the economy got more and more advanced and more civilised, they felt they were getting further and further away from God.
As so this is sort of a secular layer on top of this. There’s a Cain versus Abel, nomad versus city culture layer that we can realise is happening here. To reinforce this idea, I recommend another Dr Seely article to you, this time it’s written by Dr Seely and a man called Fred Woods, and the title of that is “How Could Jerusalem, That Great City, Be Destroyed.” Dr Seely and Woods, they explore the fact that Laman and Lemuel don’t accept the vision of Lehi, that Jerusalem would be destroyed, and they give six reasons why a typical Jerusalemite from that time period would not have believed the words of Lehi, and the words of Jeremiah, that Jerusalem would be destroyed. They would have thought it was impossible that Jerusalem would be destroyed. And they give six very good reasons, very convincing ones. I think that article describes perfectly the difference, the contrast between a city-dweller and a nomad in their world view. So Lehi is giving… his vision is very much the perspective of a nomad. It’s a perspective that he hopes that everyone else will adopt. It’s a perspective that God should be central in our lives, and people, and the love of society and being around a city, having a city mentality, should not be central in our lives.
So back to Chapter 10. Nephi tells us, “This is just one of several visions, several groups of things that my father told us while he dwelt in a tent.” The reason I said all of that stuff is, that verse is actually quite significant: “as my father dwelt in a tent.” I think it might be the shortest verse in the Book of Mormon. But it actually carries a great deal of meaning. It carries all the meaning that I just explained, and perhaps even more.
So he also says that my father taught us about the Messiah, right, and this is very plain language. Nephi relates Lehi’s prophesies of the scattering and the gathering of Israel, the mortal ministry of the Messiah, and does that in very plain language. In verse 6 he says, “mankind were in a lost and in a fallen state,” and he reveals clearly that the Messiah is not going to be a military messiah, here in verse 6 and in verse 11. He explains that the Jews are going to kill the Messiah, and then he’s going to come back to life. He explains the nature of the atonement.
So in this way we learn that Lehi had a clear understanding of the ministry of Christ, and it’s possible and even probable that there were other Old Testament prophets who had this same kind of view. And it may be that because that view contradicted the narrative of the Israelite culture, that they just didn’t record it, they weren’t willing to entertain the idea that the messiah would be something other than a Davidic king who would be militarily successful.
The final part of Chapter 10 is Nephi’s testimony about personal revelation. Now he doesn’t quite say, “I received personal revelation,” that’s in verse 1 of Chapter 11, but we’ve got to wait until next week to hear that. The final part of Chapter 10 is him saying “I desired to know.” [Verse 17]
“The prophet, my father, has told me something. First of all, he’s given me a vision, where he expounds his narrative about whether I should believe in God, how I should see myself in the story of our lives.” And that’s what a story is, really. Some of the most powerful storytellers are those who give us an interpretation for the events we see. After we get that story, we can’t see those events in any other way. Because that narrative is so powerful that we choose thereafter to see the events in that light.
It has a lot to do with our personal preferences and with our mindset that we’ve chosen. Do I want to see myself as a victim? Very well, I ‘m going to go out and find a narrative that reinforces that. But what Lehi says is that “You are children of God, to act and not be acted upon, and so therefore I’m going to give you a narrative that reinforces that view of yourself, where you can choose a fruit that is desirable to make you happy. You can make your way to it, through great difficulty if need be, and you can come out of exile, and you can come across the river and the waters will part for you, and you can find a rod of iron, an unshakeable source of stability that will carry you there, if you are willing to make that choice. And if not, you find yourself back in the city, back among the people the descendants, the spiritual descendants of Cain, who are tilling the ground, rather than the nomads out in the desert, wiling to travel far from civilisation to encounter their God.”
These are the subliminal… I want to say subliminal, but… the sub-textual messages of Lehi’s dream as he relates them. Nephi adds the admonition, “I wanted to know these things and so I started to ask God about them. I started to think, it might be possible that God would talk to me as well.”
I wanted to make one more point about this, and that is, if Joseph Smith were composing the Book of Mormon, I would think, I would assume, that he would have his main characters talk about how important it was to take a prophet’s word unquestioningly. Instead, what he has is a prophet, and as we’ll read in Chapter 11, he has a prophet who says, “I heard the words from a prophet, and I wanted to find out for myself. And then I prayed, and then I did. And then my brothers asked me about my father’s dream, and I told them. I didn’t say: ‘Oh, here’s my vision, and you should accept it without questioning.’ Instead I said: ‘Why don’t you ask God because he answered me, and he’ll answer you too’.”
Now this is an interesting teaching, for a man if he wants people to accept his words unquestioningly. It’s not that curious if he actually believes that God will respond. This is a part of the Book of Mormon… Number one, it’s a promise from God that we don’t have to take a prophet’s word for it, not forever at least. We do have also, on the other side of that, we do have the account that Lehi spent a long time in the wilderness travelling before he had an effectual prayer that led him to the tree of life. There was a long time spent in the wilderness.
There are these two aspects for personal revelation. One is we have to wait for it. But the other is, we have no excuse. The prophet doesn’t say: “Take my word for it and just go.” The prophet says: “Why haven’t you asked God? Why haven’t received your own account? I did! And just because I’m a prophet doesn’t mean you can’t. You can be a prophet too.” As Moses said, “I would that all Israel were prophets.” And this is what Nephi is saying right here. “There’s no reason that I should be special. The only reason I’m special is because I was willing to put in the work, and ask God.”
Now, I struggle with this, I struggle with this in my own life because I don’t get anywhere near the amount of revelation that I would like to receive. But that’s why I’m making such a big deal by talking about it, because I really want Nephi’s words to be true.
So as we finish, I want to say one more word about the anti-Christ. The anti-Christ was a man who said… He didn’t say, “There will be no Christ.” If you go back to Alma Chapter 30, and you read what he said, he says that “You can’t know that there will be a Christ,” (because we’re still, I believe, at that time, 90 years before the birth of Christ). He says, “You can’t know about the future birth of a being that hasn’t been born yet. I’m not saying there will be no Christ, I’m saying that you don’t know that there will be.” So that’s what that particular anti-Christ did. He said, “Look, we can’t know it.” It turned out that he knew all along that he was lying.
But an anti-Christ doesn’t have to be a liar. It just has to be somebody that chooses the narrative that life is a zero-sum game, that helping each other is a little bit dumb, banding together is a little bit dumb, believing in God, believing that one day there will be a new creation and that we will be renewed is a little bit dumb, and is worthy of mockery. And we have to mock it, because there is something empty about our lives the way they are. There’s no meaning beyond the current existence we see before us.
Recently there was an interesting, and kinda funny exchange, at the beginning of the Golden Globe awards, where the host, he said to everyone, before he really roasted the Hollywood celebrities, he said, “Remember as I’m saying these things, that they’re just jokes, and” (this is what he added) “we’re all gonna die soon, and there is no sequel.” So he betrayed, in that statement, what narrative that he believes in. He believes that, you know (and I agree with this sentiment), don’t take yourself all so seriously that you can’t take a joke. But the point he was making was, the reason you should not take yourself so seriously is because you’re not eternal beings; your life is going to be short and insignificant. And therefore, don’t take yourself so seriously.
And I would say the exact opposite, don’t take yourself so seriously, because life is eternal, so don’t take a momentary joke or a momentary offence seriously, because you are an eternal being, and because you do choose the narrative where there will be a new creation. And that makes all the difference, that makes everything so much more meaningful. Ultimately there is no meaning to a life that has no continuity.
If there’s no life after death… I have a friend who is an atheist, and a good person, not in every way. He describes himself as a moral relativist, in fact. But he is an avowed atheist. And I asked him, “Don’t you have a hard time feeling like life is meaningless?” and he said, “No on the contrary, because this is the only time I will live, it very much has meaning, it has all of the meaning.” And at the time I accepted that response, I thought, “Oh, well that makes sense.”
But lately I’ve been thinking about that, realising it has all of the meaning which is exactly zero, it has all of nothing. It has the entire meaning of my existence, which after I’m gone will be reduced to the memories people have of me, and then soon as they are gone, then it’s really reduced to nothing. Ultimately, my life is meaningless. And therefore, I can do what I want.
Now, to their credit, a lot of atheists don’t follow their beliefs to their natural conclusion. And that’s a good thing. Because the natural conclusion is: there really is no good or bad. There really is no reason to be good over being bad. The narrative of Lehi is actually that this voice you have within you, this feeling that you have, that you want to be good, that actually is a true voice. The idea that you should separate yourselves from the people who want glory and fame and money and the lusts of this world, and go out into the wilderness and find your God, and then count on him to keep his promises and create you anew, that’s a narrative worth following and it has all of the meaning in the universe, and you are a child of God.
These are the narratives that compete within us, every day, and I believe that all of us, because you’re listening and because I’m speaking, all of us are choosing the narrative of Lehi over the narrative of Laman and Lemuel, and those who would follow them spiritually. But, as we saw in Lehi’s dream itself, those narratives keep competing. We can arrive at the tree and then we can be ashamed.
We can also, and this is very important, we can also be lost in the mist, and we can find our way to the rod of iron. There are people in this very dream who did both. So you’ll have the experience of both in your life. If you feel like you’re in the great and spacious building right now, don’t give up. And if you feel like you’re at the Tree of Life right now, don’t rest on your laurels.
Every day, make a choice, to choose the narrative that brings you eternal joy, that helps you to recognise the Tree of Life as the fruit that is desirable to make one happy. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.