“Armed with righteousness and the Power of God”
The Spirit teaches Nephi about his father’s vision, and as a result, Nephi teaches us far more about revelation itself than he ever did about the dream of Lehi.
I’m Mark Holt, and this is Gospel Talktrine.
Welcome to Gospel Talktrine. This week’s lesson is Number 4: “Armed with Righteousness and with the Power of God” 1 Nephi 11-15.
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Well this week’s lesson is 1 Nephi 11-15 and it’s Nephi’s interpretation of his father’s vision. Last time we talked about Lehi’s dream and exactly what he experienced when he saw the tree of… what we’ll come to understand in this week’s lesson in Chapter 11, we’ll come to understand as the tree of life. What Lehi saw was just a tree. Remember we didn’t know the interpretation.
So the tree of life has a specific meaning: it’s the tree from the Genesis, it’s the tree from the Garden of Eden. The fact that Lehi sees a tree doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the tree of life. It’s Nephi that says this is the tree of life.
So it’s hard to know what to call this dream other than the Dream of Lehi, because if you call it the Dream of The Tree of Life you’re actually talking about the dream of Nephi.
So let’s go over Nephi’s… the chronology of what happened to Nephi. First of all, I think it’s interesting… here we are in Chapter 11. Nephi is caught away in the Spirit, but to me, the first thing that caught my attention was that this happens not while he is praying, but actually while he sits pondering. And one thing that I find interesting is that we have similar accounts, for example, Joseph Smith and I can’t remember if it is Oliver Cowdery or Sidney Rigdon, but the vision that they have in Doctrine and Covenants Section 76. They were meditating upon the things of the Spirit. And then Joseph F Smith’s great vision of the world of spirits, and Christ’s ministry in the world of spirits in Doctrine and Covenants 138. That happened while he was pondering. And so, for me, I’ve always thought that, and we have one example in the Book of Enoch coming up in a few books of the Book of Mormon, and he received a vision while praying, so I’ve always thought of visions occurring while a prophet is praying, and here we have an example of a vision occurring while a prophet is pondering.
So it’s a good reminder I guess, that’s the only reason I bring it up, a reminder that pondering can also be an invitation for God to open our understanding. It’s often the case that while we’re pondering, it’s not just while we’re praying but while we’re pondering, the truths of God will be made manifest to us.
And in Nephi’s case he is caught away in the Spirit, [1 Nephi 11:1] and he describes where he goes as being on “an exceedingly high mountain,” which is very interesting, because, I still remember, some of you may remember Yoshihiko Kikuchi, who was a much beloved member of the Quorum of the Seventy. I remember a talk he gave while I was in the MTC. He came and visited us, and he called it… in the Book of Mormon it’s called “an exceedingly high mountain,” and he called it a “high exceeding mountain,” so every time I read this passage I think of that experience, and how much we love Elder Kikuchi, even though he mixed up the order of those two words, and so it’s always stuck with me that Nephi’s caught up in a “high exceeding mountain.”
And there the Spirit shows him the vision of his father, and many, many other things. First of all, I’ll just point out, basically I hope you read, and this is true every week, I hope you read the chapters in question before you listen to the podcast, because my assumption is that you’re listening because you want more than just a recap of the events, but you want find, you want to know what I would pick out and then, I’m also open to you emailing what you would pick out, what you find notable, in the scriptures for this week’s lesson.
So the next thing that stuck out at me was that Nephi, just like Lehi before, he knows what the tree is, he knows that it’s “precious above all”. So in verse 9 the Spirit asks him, “What do you want?” and Nephi says, “I want to know the interpretation of it,” but at this point he already sees that the tree is quote “precious above all.”
So he doesn’t know what it is, he’s about to be taught the interpretation, yet somehow he has a feeling, he has a intuition, that the tree is “precious above all.” And the angel said, “Yes,” and he doesn’t say: “most joyous to the soul,” he says, “the most joyous to the soul” (verse 23). Here we learn the various interpretations of the tree that Lehi saw, and the fruit of the tree as well.
They are, first of all, the condescension of God, the love of God; and according to the Spirit, this love is “the most joyous to the soul” of anything we could possibly receive. Now, the actual impact of those words is impossible to convey. Much like the prayer of Jesus Christ, as described in the book of 3 Nephi, when Christ appears to the Nephites and then he prays for them, a couple of times he prays and the words are written in the Scriptures there, but then the third time he prays, what’s written is: “no tongue cannot express, neither can be written by anyone the things we both saw and heard Jesus pray for us to the father.” [3 Nephi 19:32-34] And you wonder how is that possible, I mean he prayed something, so just write it down. First time I read that I thought I’d really like to know what that is, I wish they would have tried at least, to convey some sense of what it was that Jesus said.
Here we have part of the reason. So, what the Spirit is saying here is, the tree, the fruit whatever it represents, this love of God is “the most joyous thing,” the most joyous reward, to the soul, that we could possibly receive. And if you fill the rest of the golden plates up with exclamation points, you’d just begin to convey the import of what the angel or what the Spirit has just said to Nephi.
And this is really important. We can’t understand, just by talking to someone who has experienced the love of God, exactly what it feels like. And I think that’s probably all I’ll say about that, but if you’ve got the opportunity to feel the Holy Ghost, that’s… you’re scratching the surface of what the love of God feels like.
We all think that what we want in this world is… well let me put it another way. All of the temptations of Satan are basically an invitation for us, to fill the hunger that is naturally in us. The hunger for the love of God. We don’t understand what it is that we miss, what we feel the lack of. We’re all homesick to be with our Father in heaven. We miss his love, as his spirit children, we felt it so constantly, that here on earth that’s where all of our vulnerability to temptation comes from, is to feel that distance between us and God.
So, the lack of the love of God is really the test of mortality, and it is possible, as we see in the scriptures, it is possible to bridge that gap. Lehi tasted the fruit. I’m sure many of you have friends who have talked to you about experiences where they felt the love of God, an I’m sure many more of you have had those experiences yourself. And those experiences are as powerful as they are fleeting. That’s what Nephi is here experiencing, that the love of God is the most precious thing.
The promise of the scriptures, the promise of the Gospel, the whole promise of the Plan of Salvation that the Spirit is about to unfold to Nephi, is that we will one day have a reward that will make everything worthwhile. So we think, “Oh man, I didn’t get that promotion” or “I didn’t get that relationship,” or “I didn’t get that recognition, I didn’t get the glory that I wanted, I didn’t get the money that I wanted, I didn’t get the pleasure that I wanted.”
And so, I’m going to seek for some sort of consolation prize in an addictive behaviour, in a sinful behaviour, in going after the things of the world, the glories of men. And this is where all of the… well, the Spirit will explain all of the patterns that will result. But this is where addictions come from, this is where people are willing to sell their souls, as it were, or become part of an evil organisation, or work against the Church of God; it’s all because they’re trying to find a way to fill that hole that they have in their soul.
And Satan makes a counterfeit that says, “Here, use lust, use greed, use the will to power as a substitute for this hunger that you have inside you for the love of God.”
So right at the beginning of today’s lesson we read the scripture that explains the motivation behind every person that will follow God. They believe that at the end of their journey, there is something that makes it all worth it, it is “the most joyous to the soul,” it is worth sacrificing every other thing. And if that weren’t true, then it really wouldn’t be worth going through so much to follow the will of God, it wouldn’t be worth sacrificing earthly pleasures, if the love of God wasn’t “the most joyous to the soul.” As Nephi puts it, in verse 9, if it weren’t “precious above all.”
It’s worth mentioning, in verse 11, Nephi describes that it’s the “Spirit of the Lord”, and he’s speaking to them in “the form of a man, as one man speaks to another.” I’ve almost said “angel” several times, because this is… this narrative does have the same form as a vision with an angel, and there are many visions in the scriptures that are just like this, where an angel is talking to a prophet. But in this case Nephi says this is the Spirit of the Lord. And it’s the only vision I’m aware of in which the actual Holy Ghost, the third member of the Godhead, appears to a prophet. Now I may be misinterpreting this, but that is how I read this chapter, that it is the Holy Ghost himself.
So, Nephi is having a vision of God, and it’s every bit as valid a vision of God as the vision of Joseph Smith seeing God the Father and Jesus Christ, the vision of Paul having Christ appear to him in a cloud, any of the other numerous visions of God. All of the throne theophanies of the Old Testament Prophets, and we’ll talk about whether Nephi had that same experience a little bit later in today’s lesson, but in any case whether or not Nephi does come to see God the Father on his throne the way his father Lehi did, here he is acting one-on-one with a member of the Godhead, and describing that vision. At least that’s how I read… I couldn’t find anything in Church doctrine or Church literature on this interpretation, but it does seem he had a vision of the Holy Spirit in the form of a man.
So, getting along a little further. Now you remember, all of you I’m sure have learned from primary time on up, if you have been a member of the Church your whole lives; if you’re a convert then it’s probably been taught to you as well; any time this vision comes up the first thing people say is the fruit of the tree, or the tree itself, it means the love of God. But it’s a little more complicated than that.
So the first thing the angel does, Nephi says, “I want to know the interpretation of this fruit.” He is shown the fruit… before he asks for the interpretation, he’s shown the fruit. He says, “I want to see the things my father saw.” Then the Spirit asks him again, “What do you want,” and he says, “I want to know the interpretation thereof.”
Before the angel gives him the interpretation, he shows him a couple of things. First, he says, “Do you know the condescension of God?” And then Nephi sees the birth of Jesus Christ. And then he says, “Do you know what the fruit means?” The Spirit says to Nephi, “Do you know what the fruit means?” And he says, “Yes, now I know, now that you’ve shown me the birth of Jesus Christ and the ministry of Jesus Christ, you’ve shown me saviour of the world, living among men, I know the meaning of the word condescension. I know that God himself will make himself subject to a tabernacle of flesh and come down and live among us. And this is the highest possible manifestation of love that could possibly exist, and now I understand what the fruit is.”
We have to read between the lines a little bit here, because Nephi is obviously having a non-verbal communication with the Spirit. He’s seen a lot and I’m sure he’s feeling a lot, and there’s probably pure knowledge being transmitted between the Spirit and him. So some of that is not recorded verbatim, but it does seem clear to me that once he sees the life of Christ, he understands that that condescension is the greatest form of love, and the love of God that sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of men, also, right, it’s one and the same thing. Or to put it another way, in verse 21, you can see Nephi talking about the Lamb of God, and the Lamb of God is the condescension and the love of God.
So this phrase, the Lamb of God, we first discover it in the Book of John, when John the Baptist… in the Gospel of John when John the Baptist sees Jesus he says, “Behold the Lamb of God.” And an Observant Jew would understand that to mean, alright, we all have lambs. When we go to the temple the priest will sacrifice a lamb, and that lamb is our atonement on the Day of Atonement, that lamb represents all of us, and takes away our sins. But the Lamb of God is God himself performing the sacrifice. So it is a lamb on a much higher level. So even though that wasn’t a phrase that was well known, they would have understood. Lamb of God, they would have known what that meant and they would have thought, “Wow, that’s quite a claim to make that someone is the Lamb of God.” It means he’s perfect he’s flawless, because these lambs had to be without spot or blemish. And it also meant that he would be sacrificed for many.
So Nephi sees something quite clear about the mortal ministry of Jesus Christ, and that is, that it would end in his death. That it would not be a triumphant ministry, which so many Jews expected that to be, at the time of Nephi and later. My point is this, that the Book of Mormon shows that it was revealed to prophets long before Christ, clearly, the nature of the ministry of Jesus. Now later in this very vision we understand why it is that that clarity is not preserved in the Bible, but right now I’ll just say that it wasn’t preserved.
Jesus explained in Luke, Chapter 24, he explained to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, he said, “Don’t you think it was expedient that the Messiah should suffer, in order to enter into his glory?” And then he explained those passages from the scriptures that would prove his point. And from that we can infer that those passages are there. I did a special episode last year on what they might be. The fact that we don’t know what they are… let me put it this way: we can presume that those passages are in the scriptures that we have today, but we also can presume that from what Nephi undergoes here that there were many more that were lost to us.
That plainness, according to the Spirit of the Lord, was in the scriptures when they were originally written, as Nephi testifies. But then, because of the wickedness of men, it eventually was lost. The plain things and the precious things: they’re plain because they’re clear. Nephi is very clear here what kind of ministry that Jesus will have. And then it’s precious because, when we understand that, we can worship him appropriately. We won’t make the same mistake the Jews did, at the time of Jesus, of looking beyond the mark.
So now we come to a question that Charlie asked. She wrote, “In 1 Nephi 8:20 it says the strait and narrow path went to the tree and by the head of the fountain, to the large and spacious field. 1 Nephi 11:25 the rod of iron went to the living waters or to the tree of life, both defined as a representation of the love of God. Yet 1 Nephi 12:16 names a fountain of filthy water and a river with the depths of hell. So how many fountains and rivers are there in this vision? Is there one filthy and one the love of God? Is the fountain and the river the same thing or two different bodies?”
Wonderful question, and it is true that this is not a clear description; the clarity in this description is missing with regard to the bodies of water. So let me give you my interpretation. First of all: in Lehi’s vision there is one river, and it does seem to run parallel, and in all the graphical and visual representations of this dream, you can see the river run in parallel to the rod of iron. So the question remains, what’s going on here, in 1 Nephi 11:25, when he says that the rod of iron leads to that fountain of living water, which is the love of God. I also beheld that the tree of life was a representation of the love of God.
Now it’s my opinion, it’s not entirely clear what’s going on, because later on Nephi does in fact explain to his brothers, and this is in Chapter 15, he says, “Look, our father was so caught up in the other aspects of the vision, he didn’t see how filthy this water was, but it’s a representation of those temptations and the awful hell that’s prepared for the wicked.” [1 Nephi 15:27-29] So there are definitely two different bodies of water here. The question is, are those two bodies of water both present in Lehi’s vision?
Now it’s my opinion, the way I read this is, and I’m going to back it up a little bit with some facts, the facts are that when people talk about aspects of Nephi’s vision, that also occurred in Lehi’s dream, that say, “That tree, which thy father saw,” or “that tree which my father saw.” And the Spirit might say, “I’m about to tell you about that great and spacious building which thy father saw.” But when Nephi speaks about the fountain of living waters, he doesn’t say that.
So my interpretation of what’s going on in verse 25 [1 Nephi 11:25] is, that Nephi pushes the pause button on his father’s vision for just a moment, and uses another metaphor, which is well known, which is that God and Jesus Christ the Saviour of the world, the redeemer, is a fountain of living water. And we heard Jesus, we studied many places in which Jesus uses that metaphor to describe himself. And if memory serves, I believe it was John Chapter 10 or 11, [John 7:37-39 or John 4:10-14] the most straight forward example of that teaching.
But my personal opinion is that what Nephi is doing, he’s saying: the rod of iron leads unto the saviour, the fountain of living waters. I also beheld the tree of life is the representation of this same idea. Right, so he steps out of the vision and uses another metaphor that wasn’t part of the vision, and then steps back into it and uses a metaphor that is part of the vision, the tree.
So the water, the fountain of living waters, is not part of the dream of Lehi. It’s just part of the way that Nephi is trying to explain his interpretation. It’s a rhetorical device introduced by Nephi, not even seen by Nephi in his vision, just something introduced by him.
Of course now, another interpretation would be that there is a second body of water, but this would be the only mention of it, but that would be… we just don’t have enough data to say that would be the case. And there are other possible interpretations: for example, the fountain is pure when it leaves the source. A fountain is a source, right? A fountain in our modern usage means something inside of a city where there’s a pump somewhere presumably. It powers the water to flow through some sort of decorative sculpture and into a pond. But in Nephi’s time, what he meant by fountain was: the source of the water flowing out of the earth. That’s a fountain, it’s clear, it’s clean. You know that water has not been polluted when you get it at the fountain.
So perhaps the water flowed from the tree, but then the further it got away from the tree, the more filthy it became. That metaphor would actually be instructive, and so it may be that that’s the case. My personal interpretation is that this fountain has nothing to do with Lehi’s dream. It was just a rhetorical device, introduced by Nephi, to illustrate the point. But the real meaning, the real location to which the rod of iron led was the tree of life.
So I may be wrong on that Charlie, but that’s my best guess, and thank you for your question.
So then the Spirit gets into a little bit more about the great and spacious building. What happens when Jesus is killed then the multitudes are gathered around to do battle against the saints of the Lamb and the twelve apostles of the Lamb. Now it’s interesting to note that half a continent away in Babylon… and probably 50 years later, Daniel, the prophet Daniel is going to have a similar vision. He’s going to have a vision, well a few visions really, one is the dream of Nebuchadnezzar which he’s going to interpret, which is this great sculpture, this figure of a man made out of all these different materials, and a stone cut out of the mountains without hands which will crush it. And that’s a vision of the wickedness of the governments of men, followed by the superiority of the government of God. Later on, Daniel has a vision in chapter… so I believe that was chapter 1 or 2, then later on Daniel has a vision in chapter 7 of the beasts coming out of the sea and trampling men underfoot, and then the Ancient of Days ruling over them. Again he is given to understand that this is the wickedness of the governments of men and the superiority of the government of God.
And here Nephi is having a similar vision. He sees that the pride of the world and all these wicked systems of government and wicked associations… I want to use the word associations because that figures into it later, for me at least… these wicked associations among men. They do war against God, and then in so doing they make up the great and spacious building and then that great and spacious building will eventually fall, and great will be the fall of it.
And so the superiority of the government of God is demonstrated to Nephi. That was really the main idea, the whole point of the Book of Daniel, and Nephi has a similar vision, and to teach him a similar lesson. So first Nephi has first an Old Testament style vision, and second he has a New Testament style vision. It’s interesting because the vision that Lehi had was very much an Old Testament style vision. We went over that. Really this lesson today is the second of a two-part lesson about this dream of Lehi. So if you missed the first part, I very much recommend it. I very much loved making that lesson and it was very much fun for me to prepare. I felt that I learned a lot making that, so I recommend going back and listening to that if you missed it.
But the main point was that Lehi had this Old Testament vision, and Nephi begins with an Old Testament vision and transitions into the New Testament. So we learn from Nephi so much of the doctrine that we did not get in the Old Testament. So much of what Nephi teaches in this vision are things we could not have learned if we did not have the teachings of Christ, the ministry of Christ, the mortal ministry of Christ, the Apostles of Christ and their writings. So he talks about how Jesus saved the world from sin and how he’s the Saviour of the world.
And it goes beyond, right? He gives us an even more clear doctrine about Christ (as does the entire Book of Mormon), than does the Bible itself, for reasons that he explains within this very vision. Very soon thereafter… after he sees the interpretations… I don’t know that we need to go through all of them, but very quickly, the rod of iron is the Word of God, it leads to the tree of life which is the love of God, it leads by the river of water which is hell and sin, it leads through the mists of darkness which are the temptations of the devil, and on the other side of that river of water is the great and spacious building which is the pride of the world.
As we mentioned last time, this is a narrative. This is an entire set of interpretations to place upon facts, if you choose. When you see these attitudes demonstrated, if you want to be a follower of God… this is the message to Lehi… if you want to be a follower of God, you may place this interpretation on those facts, and if you do so you will see the world through a certain lens. And this is a lens given to the children of Lehi by God. If they want that lens, if they want to believe, then they can choose to see the world through the lens of the dream of Lehi.
I gave an alternative lens, it was just one idea, it may be a little bit simplistic but it was my best effort, an alternative lens that modern people could use to sort of be in opposition to the dream of Lehi. So there are several lenses that we can use and the dream of Lehi is one of them. And Nephi is here saying here’s what they all mean. And my descendants now have this lens available to them, if they want to take these glasses of the dream of Lehi and put them on, and look around them. And any time they see contempt for someone who believes in God, they can know, oh, I know where this fits in my life’s interpretation, in my personal narrative, I know right where it fits. That person is across an impassable gulf, over the river of filthy water, from where I want to be. And so I can separate myself from that attitude.
Now I was speaking to my wife about what exactly is the great and spacious building. And the way that I put it with her was, that, the great and spacious building, and the tree of life, our choice to be in one or the other, is an attitude. And therefore, it’s actually quite quick to transition between to two of them, even though there is an impassable gulf. What that means to me is, you cannot do them at the same time. You cannot have an attitude of reverence to God, and humility, and the willingness to receive blessings from his hand, which is right in line with feeling his love, at the same time as you’re feeling the pride of the world, and you’re feeling like you have all the answers and that you’re willing to mock the things of God, you’re willing to have contempt for sacred things. They are totally irreconcilable attitudes.
So generally, there is some period of great personal shift in order to transition between the great and spacious building and the tree. It’s not like we can easily go between one and the other. But it’s definitely true that someone can visit one, and then find their way to the other. I’ve seen that in my own life, I’ve seen that in the lives of many people that I know, transitioning in both directions. And so my belief is that the great and spacious building, or our presence, our location in the great and spacious building, or in the hill where the tree of life is, is what attitude we choose towards sacred things.
So when we get to chapter 14, we’re going to talk a little bit about the great and spacious building versus the great and abominable church, so that’s why I went into detail about that.
So here we are still in chapters 12 and 13. The Spirit is showing Nephi a vision of the future history of all of his descendants, the descendants of his brethren, so all the descendants of Lehi and of Zoram, and of Ishmael. These people that are going to be on the boat of Lehi that travel to the New World. What is going to happen to them? Basically, we know if we’ve read the Book of Mormon, that it is a history of struggle, it is warfare between those who follow God, and those who oppress them, or seek to oppress them. And eventually those who follow God… I mean it’s a thousand years down the road… but those who follow God are defeated. And we’ll see in chapter 15 how this emotionally affects Nephi. Of course, you may imagine, it’s devastating. It would be almost impossible to maintain hope if you know that… I personally imagine that this would make everything seem a little bit fruitless, if you know that in a thousand years from now it’s all going to crumble into dust.
However, that’s not entirely true, we’ll discuss the reason why that’s not necessarily true. Nephi also sees a vision of eighteen and nineteenth century history. And a little bit fifteenth century history. So he sees a vision of a man that we today know as Christopher Columbus, and he’s worked upon by the Spirit of God to cross the ocean. I want to say a few words about this, because Columbus has a very much mixed reputation today, or we might say he’s become a much more controversial figure than he’s been in the past. And rightfully so to some extent. He was not an angel, right? Columbus had his mistakes, he definitely by today’s standards, he participated in some acts of cruelty and there are those who firmly believe that everything that resulted from Columbus’s explorations was a stain on humanity. Now I do not go that far, but I would say that we do have accounts of Columbus mistreating the natives that he discovered, in the lands he discovered.
So how do we reconcile that with the fact that Columbus was a man wrought upon by the Spirit of God? Basically, you just have to do the work to reconcile it, because he did perform acts that we’re perhaps cruel and he was wrought upon by the Spirit of God. In his time it was seen as less cruel, it would have been less of a burden on his conscience than it would be for someone today. He was a product of his time and that’s just a fact. And that’s true, incidentally, of every scriptural figure you’ll read about. They were a product of their time and things were different… if read about something and you’re scandalised by it, we already have had an example from the Book of Mormon, the killing of Laban by Nephi. If you’re scandalised by it, understand the acts, the decisions, they appeared differently, they had an entirely different lens, to use a metaphor that we’ve already used in this podcast. They had an entirely different lens than we have today.
So Columbus is no different. It is well understood that Columbus’s unifying motivation, you might say, or grand vision, was not to be a world explorer, although he loved voyaging on the sea. His grand vision was to be a crusader, and had he his way, there seems to be little doubt that Columbus would have led a fourth Crusade to the Holy Land, and re-established the Temple in Jerusalem, but this time for the worship of Christ. That was his ultimate goal. And if you haven’t studied Columbus in depth, you might be not aware of that, but that was something that very much animated him.
And so he was hoping, it was sort of a toss-up whether he was going to use the energies of his life to go east or to go west. It was sort of a toss-up which direction he’d end up going. And when he was outfitted by the King and Queen of Spain to go west, that sort of decided the issue, but his hope was that he would be able to capture enough resources by sailing to the Indies for his King and Queen that they would be able to then take an army and go east and conquer Jerusalem.
Incidentally, it was known at the time of Columbus that the world was round, it wasn’t a revelation. But the people who were nay-sayers in Columbus’s voyage were not the ones who were wrong. They were right, they were telling Columbus that the world is so big that you’re going to try to sail all the way to the Indies and you’re not going to make it. And had the Americas not existed, that would be entirely true. He would have had to sail across the Atlantic Ocean, and then an ocean that would have filled the land mass of what today is North and South America and then the entire Pacific Ocean to reach the Indies. And this calculation had been accurately done by the contemporaries of Columbus, and they assumed that the entire other side of the world was just water. And so, the only way you could sail to the Indies would be to go east. What they hadn’t foreseen was that there was another continent in the way, and if you tried to sail west you would eventually hit it and then there would be land there.
So it wasn’t the fact that the world was round, that Columbus discovered, quote unquote discovered, because there were other people further north who had travelled there centuries earlier, but discovered to his society, it wasn’t that it was round that he discovered, but that the fact that there was land there.
In any case, Nephi gives a description of how the Spirit of the Lord saw Columbus’s mission. And again, the Spirit of the Lord has wrought upon many people who are imperfect vessels to perform the work of God. For example, prophets and apostles have described many religious figures in that same way, to say, from Mohammed to Martin Luther, to say that they were wrought upon by the Spirit of the Lord to do the work they did, to do the best they could, at the time they lived, according to the light that they received. And that’s what Columbus did. And so because he’s an imperfect man, we shouldn’t see these versus in the Book of Mormon any differently. And we shouldn’t doubt that he was wrought upon by the Spirit of God, because if this is the history of what we can presume is the United Stated of America the founding of it.
Now that’s my reading of it. That’s the most common understanding of chapters 12 and 13, that when he describes the gentiles, the great gentile nation that had been promised that if they were righteous they would receive this land and they were gathered against their mother gentiles and they escaped bondage and captivity on one side of the ocean and came across the many waters and did battle with their mother gentiles. It seems so clear that it is an account of the American Revolutionary War.
And so therefore the upshot of all of it is, is that the Spirit tells Nephi that no people will ever be blessed to live upon the land of promise, which is presumably the American continents, North and South America, no people will ever be blessed to live there unless they follow the same covenant that we talked about in the introductory lesson, right? The covenant given to all the people which is, “In as much as ye obey my commandments, ye shall prosper in the land, and in as much as you obey not my commandments you will be cut of from my presence.”
So that’s the covenant that governs the American continents, and you can see it at work today, you can see it at work where there are nations that as a whole, as a culture, they don’t obey the commandments of God, they’re being cut off. You can see it happening, and you can see nations across north and south and central America that do obey the commandments of God, or at least have it as an ideal to obey the commandments of God, and they prosper in the land.
So this is an inspired history, you might say, or a summary of history, up to that point, up to the point of the nineteenth century, of north America, of the American Revolution. So kinda fascinating, but again, in the context of the idea that the governments of men eventually become corrupt, and they’re described by Daniel as being beastly, and they’re described by Nephi as being part of a great and spacious building. And later on, Nephi… so that’s chapters 12 and 13, later on in chapter 14, Nephi uses the metaphor of the great and abominable church.
So the first thing the Spirit tells Nephi is, “So then in that last day, God will do a marvellous work and a wonder among the children of men.” [1 Nephi 14:7] Now you and I have heard that phrase before to describe the Restoration. But if you read this carefully, it’s not a one-to-one correspondence with the restoration of the gospel, the marvellous work and a wonder. There is a significant amount of overlap. But the marvellous work and a wonder is God preparing everyone, the entire world, to be sorted into one of two buckets.
Now we know there are plenty of buckets where people will spend their afterlife, Now I use the word bucket; that’s not scriptural at all, but it’s more of a computer science term; a piece of memory or a piece of data is a bucket, or a place to hold data is a called bucket often when you’re learning about programming.
So we’ll be sorted into our eventual rewards, you might say, and the Spirit says this in many different ways: the justice of God, and Nephi says it at the end of chapter 15: the justice of God will restore good to those who are good, of chosen good, and evil to those who have chosen evil. That each person goes to his reward according to the justice of God. [1 Nephi 15:30, 1 Nephi 14:4-7]
Now that entire system of rewarding is the great and marvellous work. It’s just that, in this time frame, the time frame after the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, that’s when God, you might say, embarks on his marvellous work and a wonder, or you might say that it begins to be a great and marvellous work, because people can now see it, they can see the evidence of it. It’s beginning to appear marvellous. So something is great and marvellous when people notice it. So now it’s the topic of discussion, it’s noticeable and that work is moving forward.
Now it’s very much, so far, it’s very much aligned and overlapping with the Restoration, but there will come a time when it includes everyone, includes the entire earth, people who will have never heard of the Restoration. So it definitely encompasses the Restoration and it also encompasses every purpose of God, whether or not it involves the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Along those lines, I want to talk about the identity, the identification of the great and marvellous church, and then the Church of the Lamb of God, with regard to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I think a very common attitude among members of the Church, Latter-day Saints, is that the great and abominable church is every church that’s not the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And I would like to challenge that perception.
So here’s my opinion, and you can think about it, and work it out in your own mind what you believe. So just as your presence, membership, in the great and spacious building is an attitude, they way I read these scriptures is, the great an abominable church is, the whore that sits upon the whole face of the earth and covers everything, I used the word associations earlier… Now the fact that it’s called a church means that it’s an organisation, there are people that… one person can’t do it by him or herself, can’t do the work of the great and abominable church. So I would like to use two words: association and action. Wherever two or more people are gathered together to oppose, deliberately, the purposes of God, and then act in such a way, then they are making up part of the great and abominable church. That is the definition to me of what the great and abominable church is.
Now, you may notice in that definition, it could include those who call themselves Latter-day Saints. I don’t see a one-to-one… again there is no one-to-one correspondence between this great and abominable church and the Church of the Lamb of God. These are two mutually exclusive entities and they’re also collectively exhaustive. You are either part of one, or part of the other, and not both.
Now, can you be part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and be opposing the work of God? Of course. Can you fail to be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and be very much, in your associations and in your actions, engaged in the work of God? I would say absolutely you can.
For example, there is a writer, a Christian writer who is probably more quoted than any other non-Latter-day Saint in General Conference, and that is C.S. Lewis. If you asked any member of the Church, “Is C.S. Lewis a member of the great and abominable church?” They would say, “No, of course not.”
C.S. Lewis was probably part of this Church of the Lamb of God. And if you examined your opinions on that you’d realise, ok, if he was accomplishing the work of God, if he was understanding the mind of God, if he was explaining the doctrines of God, if he was making it easier for other people to believe in Jesus Christ, then he was embarked upon the work of God. He may not have understood that God had a religion upon the earth that he could worship in and get a little bit more truth and perhaps be subjected to the authority of the priesthood and have those benefits, but he was very much accomplishing the work of God. He had a sphere where he was actually more useful: because of the fact he was not a Latter-day Saint, he had much more credibility among mainstream Christianity. And therefore, the work of God had a wider circulation in his writings, than they would have, had he been a Latter-day Saint.
So God has ways to use all kinds of people, in and out of his Kingdom on Earth, you might say. So it’s dangerous… the reason I’m going into detail on this, is, I believe it’s dangerous for us to feel like, “Oh wow, we make up part of this Church which is the only organisation to escape the great and abominable church.” And there is a certain amount of pride in that, and pride is an attitude, and if you have an attitude where you are showing contempt, where you feel contempt for those who are actually engaged in the work of God, guess what? According to the way that I have interpreted these scriptures, you’re actually now in the great and spacious building, even though you thought you were just celebrating the fact that you’re not part of the great and abominable church.
So that’s the danger: if you don’t recognise that you don’t have to be part of one particular religion to be following God, and to be serving him, and for God to be well pleased with you, for that matter, then you run the risk of actually having so much pride that you find yourself in the great and spacious building before you know it.
And so, as you interact with those who are not of your faith, remember, that they may make up part of this Church of the Lamb of God, they have every bit as much claim to that Church, as you do, if their associations and actions are furthering the work of God, making it easier for others to believe in Christ and follow him. That to me is the definition of the Church of the Lamb of God.
And the opposite of it, is the definition of the great and abominable church. So, there are organisations, there are attitudes, there are doctrines of even Christian churches, but all kinds of organisations and denominations, that are Christian, non-Christian, around the world, there are all of those viewpoints that do indeed contradict the doctrine of Christ, and they do indeed seek to frustrate the purposes of God, and therefore they definitely make up part of the great and abominable church. And yet, so many people have a genuine love of Christ and a genuine willingness to sacrifice for him, and they have dedicated their lives to him, for you and I to feel superior to such people because we had the good fortune to find a church where there was genuine authority, is not warranted. We should be grateful that there are many people fighting on the side of Christ, both in and out of the Church, instead of feeling prideful that we have some sort of monopoly on his will, or knowing his will, or following his will. That is my personal take on what the great and abominable church is, and what the great and spacious building is.
So the great and spacious building, in my opinion, is an attitude, and the great and abominable church is a set of associations and actions, that seek to frustrate the will of God. And so it’s important to recognise when you find yourself steering towards the great and spacious building in your attitudes; you have to watch for it all the time. As we saw in the dream of Lehi, Laman and Lemuel, although they were part of what was God’s Church on the earth at the time, they were constantly steering in their attitudes, they were steering towards the great and spacious building, and so therefore at the end of their lives, that’s the choice they made, to be part of the great and abominable church. Eventually they took action to frustrate the purposes of God. Even thought they were members of God’s Church on the earth, the Jewish faith, Judaism at the time.
Further on, in chapter 14, Nephi explains that he saw many things that would one day be written by one of the apostles of Jesus. He sees that Jesus will have twelve apostles in the old world, then he would have 12 disciples in the new world, and that the descendants of his father and his own descendants, they would be judged, whatever that means, the descendants of Lehi would be judged by the 12 disciples of Jesus when he comes to the new world. But they themselves will be judged, as will the rest of the tribes of Israel, and the rest of the world for that matter, by the 12 disciples of the Lamb in the old world.
An interesting correlation there, and I’ll leave that as an exercise to the listener what that exactly means. Whether there is some sort of deeper significance to Jesus’s disciples judging his followers.
But this is where, in my opinion, if Nephi did have what we know as a throne theophany, where a prophet sees God on his throne surrounded by angels in the attitude of glorifying and worshiping God, if Nephi did have such an experience it would have been in this part of the vision that he could not relate to us. This vision is very similar to the apocalypse of John, what we know as the Book of Revelation. And in that apocalypse John also had a throne theophany. This was very common, especially among Old Testament prophets: the prophet Jeremiah, the prophet Isaiah, the prophet Daniel, the prophet Ezekiel, the prophet Lehi, to name just a few.
They all had these throne theophanies, so I personally believe that Nephi would have had one as well. And, that if he did have one, it usually comes at the beginning of a prophet’s ministry, and therefore if he did have one, it probably would have been here during this vision, this first grand vision of his. And we have his own account that there was much that was forbidden to him to write down. So it also may be that he experienced that hallmark of a calling of a prophet. And it may have been among these parts of the vision that he was not allowed to relate.
But we are given to understand that what he saw paralleled very closely what John the Apostle of Jesus, John the Beloved, John the Revelator would see, centuries later. And therefore, it wasn’t necessary for Nephi to relate all of it for our benefit.
Now the only consolation, I think, to the despair that must have come upon Nephi in seeing his people destroyed would have been the later redemption of his people and the land, the promised land, centuries later, almost a thousand years after their destruction and dwindling in unbelief. Nevertheless, that would be quite a blow to take.
So, into chapter 15, Nephi has this vision, and it was wonderful and glorious, but eventually all such things have to come to an end. So he returns to earth, in whatever form that takes, whether it’s spiritually or physically, and he walks back out of his tent, or he walks back out of wherever he was, and he talks to his brothers. And they’re squabbling and they’re saying: what does this vision mean? And he just gets so depressed, and I use that word, that’s my word, obviously that’s not a word in the Book of Mormon. But he gets so sad, because he sees, in that very discussion, he sees the seeds of the conflicts that will rule his father’s descendants for a thousand years, and cause their utter destruction. He sees the evil and he sees their lack of humility, sees their pride, their unwillingness to go before God and plead their case.
So it seems a little bit impatient when they say: Nephi, what does this dream mean? And he answers a little bit what to me seems a little snappy, he says: Why are you so wicked? Why won’t you just ask God about these things? So read chapter 15 from this perspective. To me it does seem that he’s a little short with them. And it’s totally understandable, in light of the fact that he just come out of this vision, he’s seen what kind of upbringing they will give their descendants, and where it all leads. And then he sees the same attitudes evident in the behaviour that he witnesses the second the vision is over. And of course, it hurts, it hurts so much, because he’s seen so much suffering as a result.
Incidentally, I recently had cause to speak about a family member with someone that I know, and this family member said: I don’t believe in God because, if God exists, why would he say I punish the non-believers, those who disobey me, I punish them even to the third and forth generation. But also, why would God say: we’re all of us, we’re only accountable for our own sins, not, for example, Adam’s transgression. So why would God promise that? I can’t believe in the God of the Bible.
Now here we have a perfect example of why they’re both true. On the one hand, it’s pretty easy to understand that if God punishes one person for another person’s choices, he’s not very just. And therefore, believing in a God like that would not make sense at all. You would have to believe the God is fundamentally unjust. And incidentally, many people throughout history have believed that God is unjust. They believed that they were chosen, and they felt very lucky because of it, we have evidence of one such people in the very Book of Mormon that we’re studying. But they were hardly unique. There were many Christians who believed that, and many modern Christians believe that today. They believe that they have learned about Christ and they’re so lucky to have done so, and those poor people who have never learned about Christ, they have their own rewards coming to them. But God just chose the people who know about Christ to be lucky, and to receive the highest rewards.
Now that belief is irreconcilable, it is fundamentally inconsistent with the idea that God is not a respecter of persons. Now that is language that is used throughout the scriptures: God is not a respecter of persons. This is one reason why I can’t imagine myself, no matter what happened with my testimony, just logically I can’t imagine myself joining any church other than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Because the doctrine of redeeming the dead is so essential to the understanding of God as a just god, that I just don’t know where else the justice of God make sense at all.
In every other religion there is some sort of belief, there is an inescapable conclusion, or an inescapable implication of their beliefs that they were somehow chosen, and they just got lucky. So what we’ve learned here is this is exactly what happens when the ancestors of a population make poor choices. Their entire posterity is influenced by the lifestyle that they’ve chosen. In the case of the Lamanites, Laman and Lemuel and some of the sons of Ishmael, their descendants become so wicked that they lose all of the light they’ve been given. They lose access to the scriptures, they lose access to the ordinances of the priesthood, they lose access to the Holy Ghost, and they become a dark and loathsome people. They live in tents and they hunt wild animals, they never really create a civilisation that would raise them up.
One of the refining attributes of a people of God is that their civilisation, their government becomes better. The descendants of Laman and Lemuel and those who follow them are actually beastly in every sense of the word. Therefore, of course children are punished for the sins of their parents. And yet, the justice of God tells us, if God truly is just, then what conclusion do we have to reach? If God is just, then God doesn’t hold that against them. They have a more miserable life, and therefore God takes that into account.
Now that’s not so hard to understand, that’s not so hard to imagine, how God would do that. All he has to do is say: Well, you didn’t sin against that great of a light, and therefore I can’t really punish you very much at all. In fact, you have a good heart, you did the best you could, given what you were given, and therefore you can enter into the rest of the Lord. And you, on the other hand, you had all the light in the world given to you. You had the ordinances of the priesthood, and you sinned against all of that, you didn’t choose any of it. And therefore, you can’t enter into the rest of the Lord. And there’s no further opportunities for you to learn.
That doesn’t seem to me to be very hard to imagine. In fact, it seems like the most logical thing in the world.
So anyway, right here we’re getting an example, we see a thousand years of history compressed into this one moment, when Nephi walks out of his tent, and he sees his brothers squabbling.
So enough about that, but let’s talk about their conversation. One of the things that is really interesting, later on, the most extended allegory in all the scriptures is Jacob chapter 5, where he talks about this olive orchard, and the lord of the vineyard is going to scatter these branches, and graft them in over here, and then bring them back, and the trees are going to grow in a certain way. It’s actually this extended allegory that has an interpretation of the history of the migrations of the people of Israel.
And it was hinted at by Lehi in chapter 10, so last week’s lesson we talked about it. Lehi said: Ok, look the olive branch must be grafted in. And so Laman and Lemuel wonder about that, they’re wondering and they’re saying: what did our father mean when he talked about these olive branches? The natural branches of the olive tree, what does that mean?
Now, if you were with us when we studied the Old Testament, you know that time after time after time, these Old Testament prophets are looking forward to a day in which… first of all they’re prophesying about the exile, the scattering. They’re saying: Israel, you’re so wicked you’re going to be scattered. Then they can hardly wait to talk about the day when eventually they’ll be gathered in great glory. And not just the children of Israel, but all of the gentiles as well. All of God’s children, all of the people of the earth will make up this new creation of heaven and earth, this New Jerusalem. And this grafting back in, Nephi specifically mentions Isaiah, this grafting back in spoken by all the prophets, is what our father was talking about when he talked about the olive branches.
So later on, presumably, Jacob, Nephi’s little brother who has yet to be born, when he grows up and becomes a prophet, he’ll read Nephi’s account of these teachings on the plates, the plates of Nephi, which we know that we’re reading, from 1 Nephi 9, he’ll read these and be inspired to come up with this great extended allegory that we’ll study in just a few weeks, about this olive orchard.
So now we have the “roots” (quote unquote), if you will, of that great lesson about the olive trees and the olive orchard. So Nephi gives the first interpretation of that, and you and I are thus prepared to understand Jacob’s allegory when he teaches it.
One other thing: so Nephi… it’s interesting and I think I alluded to it last week, Nephi doesn’t say to his brothers, “Alright, I’m the prophet, I’ve been called as a prophet just now, I’m just coming out from my prophetic vision, I’ll tell you guys what our father’s vision meant, I’ll tell you what his dream meant. Here, here’s the interpretation of it. Let me give it to you. And let me give it to you in a way that you can’t misunderstand it, and then you’ll be responsible for it.”
He doesn’t say any of that! What he says is, “Why haven’t you asked of God yourself?” So I’ve just been examining my own attitudes and my own decisions about my limitations in my ability to receive revelation from God. And what I hear from the prophets and the apostles of God is, “Seek after your own revelation.” You should never really be trusting me more and stop listening to your own intuition, stop listening to the voice in your head which sounds like the Holy Spirit. Instead what they say is, “Take what I am teaching you and take it before the Lord, and learn for yourself.”
And this is very consistent with what Nephi is saying here. He’s almost to the point of impatience, he’s saying, “Why haven’t you asked of God?” The implication being, “I’ve just had this wonderful experience where I’ve seen, at least, the Spirit of God, if not God himself, and you can also have this experience!” Now how many times have you wished that you could have the wonderful experience with God and with angels that you read about in the scriptures.
And here is, very soberly given, and I think very sincerely given, the testimony of Nephi that we can have those experiences. In other words, there is no reason that we can’t. If Laman and Lemuel could have, and Laman and Lemuel had already tried to kill their brother on more than one occasion, right, so they weren’t poster children for obedience. But Nephi is telling them, “If you will just ask, you can have these revelations, you can have the truth of all of these things revealed to you, the same way I can. Who am I? I’m just a guy who asked God and was willing to receive.”
Now this is a hard thing for me to accept because I’ve felt many times in my life… and that’s one of the reasons why I’m making a big deal out of it… I’ve felt many times in my life that God just doesn’t speak to me. So, the reason that Laman and Lemuel give is, first of all I said, “Why haven’t you asked the Lord,” and they said, “Well, God maketh no such thing known unto us.” So they’ve presupposed that there will be no answer, so they haven’t asked.
I’m going to stop talking about this subject right there! Because Nephi was as impatient with that as I presume our modern prophets would be. God doesn’t make things known unto me, and that’s why I haven’t asked. And therefore, you’ve made the decision for God before he could even weigh in on the subject. And I’ve been guilty of this so many times in my life. Rather than ask God, I think: Well, God doesn’t talk to me the way he does to so-and-so. And therefore, I won’t ask. I won’t ask for more revelation. I won’t prepare myself; I won’t receive that little prick of the Spirit that says: You’re not quite ready for this yet. Maybe you need to repent, maybe you need to get more in tune with the Spirit, and he’ll guide me along. Line upon line, perhaps, until one day maybe I’ll be caught into a high exceeding mountain, as Elder Kikuchi said, and be exposed to a great vision.
But maybe I’ll just be taught in ways that are unmistakeable to me, in my own heart. And that would be good enough. Or maybe I’ll be privileged enough to feel directly the love of God, interact with God one-on-one on a spiritual basis. That would also be enough. Any interaction with God would be enough, because God is choosing it.
So finally, one point that I wanted to make. At the very end of chapter 15, Nephi tells his brothers… I shouldn’t say the very end… In chapter 15, verse 22, he tells them what the tree that his father saw is. He says this is a representation of the tree of life. And we have just learned, a couple of things. First of all, it’s a representation of the condescension of God, meaning God’s willingness to voluntarily step down from a higher rank or a higher dignity, to make himself one of us.
In Genesis… I believe it’s chapter 12… it might be 15… [Genesis 15] God makes a covenant with Abraham, and this is actually quite a difficult passage to understand unless you read some scholarly work on it. There are animals that are divided in half, and Abraham has a vision of a lantern that passes between them, and it all seems a little weird. Most people read it, and figure that they can’t understand it, and they move on.
Now it was a common way of making a military treaty, at the time, to divide things in half, to divide animals in half, and then the two parties to the treaty would walk between them. And the implication was: if either of us breaks the treaty, we’ll be divided in half the way these animals have been divided in half. And so in line with what was then the custom, in a way that Abraham would very much understand, he has this vision. And in the vision God levitates this lamp; the Spirit of God, or the light, is the one who is passing between the halves of the animal. And Abraham is not. In other words, it’s a one-sided covenant.
And the point I’m getting at is, the condescension of God means this: God promised Abraham that he would be God to Abraham, that if he did not keep his word, he would be divided in half the way these animals that Abraham saw in his vision had been divided in half. God, in other words, made a strong and unbreakable promise, that he would be a faithful God to Abraham and to all of his seed. And he would keep this covenant that he made with Abraham, to give him posterity and blessings forever.
But Abraham was not party to that covenant. It was only God who was making a promise. And the condescension of God means this: that God could couldn’t trust man to be a faithful partner in that covenant, in any sort of agreement, as we discovered, as Jeremiah puts it very succinctly, in Jeremiah 31: 31, he says, “there will come a day when I make a new covenant. It won’t be like the old covenant I made with the children of Israel, which covenant they break. But it will be a new covenant.” And the reason it will be a new covenant is because God himself would come down and become a man, and he would be the other party to the covenant. God would therefore be on both sides of this agreement. On the one hand he’d be in heaven, keeping his part of the agreement to bless us forever, and on the other hand he be on earth, sacrificing himself for us. And being a faithful covenant partner with his heavenly aspect, redeeming us from our own imperfect nature. That’s the condescension of God, and that’s what Nephi saw in his vision.
Now, that was a little bit of an aside, but Nephi doesn’t say, “That’s what the meaning of the tree is.” They ask what the meaning of the tree is. He doesn’t say, “It’s the love of God,” and he doesn’t say, “It’s the condescension of God.” He just says, “It’s the tree of life.”
Now, why is that interesting? To me… I don’t know if this is correct, but to me it’s interesting because: Laman and Lemuel hadn’t done the work to understand all the context that they needed to understand in order to know what the condescension of God even meant. Nephi wasn’t ready to talk about the glorious truth of the redeemer. And he knew they weren’t ready to hear it. He wasn’t ready to share that with them. In the way that it had been shared with him, at least. And there was a certain part of understanding what the love of God was, that he knew they weren’t prepared to hear.
And therefore, he told them something they could understand: “It’s the tree of life.” It’s this tree that you know about, because you’ve read about the Garden of Eden account. You know about Adam and Eve, and the fact that they had access to all the trees, and the tree of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, and the tree of life was another tree that was there, and that’s what this tree was. So when we read tree of life as Latter-day Saints, quite often we think, “Oh, the tree of life was the tree that Lehi saw in his vision,” and we don’t think about it anything further than that. But it was… when Nephi says it was the tree of life, they would have gone, “Oh, yeah, the tree from Genesis. Ok, what else do we need to know.”
And so, the point is this: because they hadn’t sought revelation from God, a big part of the truths that they could have known, were withheld from them. And that was just a natural penalty. It wasn’t because Nephi was trying to be mean to them, it was just a natural penalty of them not being prepared, and not having asked for the truth from God.
So that’s where I’ll end the lesson, with that admonition, the same admonition that Nephi had, and it’s an admonition to you and an admonition to me. Which is, rather than reply with, “God maketh no such thing known unto us,” when the prophets ask, “Why have you not asked of God?” Let’s change our attitude, come out of the great and spacious building, be willing to be humble, grasp onto the rod of iron, make our way to the tree and say, “I will ask of God,” the way Nephi did, so that God can open up his truths to us, line upon line, precept upon precept. It may be dependent upon our repentance, and upon our humility, but those answers will come. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.