“A Marvelous Work and a Wonder”
Nephi reports his vision of the reaction his writings would get, not just in his day, but in our day.
I’m Mark Holt, and this is Gospel Talktrine.
Welcome to Gospel Talktrine, a podcast that follows the “Come Follow Me” curriculum of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This week’s lesson is 2 Nephi chapters 26 through 30, “A Marvelous Work and a Wonder”
And before we begin, I’ve got a question. This question comes from Lindsay. She says, “In an episode, I believe in November, and one in January, there was a discussion of the condescension of God, and in those episodes, you said things in way that implies that God is the one that came to earth. Now, I could have just misheard, or I didn’t understand what you were saying, but what we know from the restored gospel is that God and Jesus Christ are two separate beings, just one in purpose. Now maybe because the topic is condescension it changes things or something, but I’m just very confused about that specific area.”
Thank you for your question Lindsay, I think there are probably many people who find this confusing. And I think at the beginning I should say, I didn’t misspeak. I said exactly what I meant, which was that God came to earth.
Now, don’t take my word for it. I’m going to read to you Mosiah 15:1. This is Abinadi testifying before the priests of the wicked King Noah, he said:
“Abinadi said unto them: I would that ye should understand that God himself shall come down among the children of men, and shall redeem his people.”
One thing you have to understand about Jesus Christ, is that Jesus Christ is the God of the Old Testament, he is the one referred to as God throughout the Bible. So, any time the children of Israel have dealings with God, it’s Jesus Christ in his pre-mortal identity as Jehovah that they’re dealing with.
And before he had a body, before he came to earth, Jesus Christ, under the direction of the Father, but through his own power, created the earth. And so, Jesus Christ is rightfully called the Creator, as well as all of his other names, he’s known as our Creator and our God. So, he is in fact… you can read further in that chapter in the Book of Mormon to learn that we can rightfully call him our Father as well.
So it gets a little confusing when you realise that God the Father and Jesus Christ can both be rightfully referred to as God. And I think the important thing is to know that Jesus himself, he instructed us to pray to God in his name. And that is the dealing that we have with God the Father, he’s the one we pray to. And other than that, Jesus Christ is generally the person who the prophets are speaking of when they say I saw God on his throne.
I know that sounds probably not like what you expected, but that is the case when Isaiah, for example, sees the vision of God on his throne, the God that he saw was Jehovah in the temple. In fact, there are only a couple of instances in the scriptures of God the Father appearing. One is at the baptism of Jesus, when God the Father says, “Behold my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.”
The other is in Joseph Smith’s account of the first vision, when he says that he saw God the Father and the Son; and God the Father said about Jesus Christ, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Hear him.”
And that’s one of the reasons, incidentally, why the first vision is so exceptional, because not only did Joseph Smith see God, the way that many prophets have, but he saw God the Father testifying of Jehovah, the God of this world.
And so I can understand, Lindsay, it’s totally natural why you would be confused about that, but that is the doctrine of the Church, and it’s a wonderful doctrine, it’s an amazing doctrine, so I appreciate your question.
Should you have a question, please send me an email at gt@gospletalktrine.com.
This week I’ve got a shout-out. This one goes out to Olly, and he may possibly be my youngest listener. Olly gets baptised this month, and so I’m very excited for him, and in fact, I don’t know him personally, but he invited me to his baptism because he listens to the podcast. And so, I’m not sure if I’m going to be in town, but if I were in town I’d love to go. Olly, thank you so much for listening.
And incidentally, Olly’s mother, a shout-out goes out to her as well. Her name’s Kim, we’ll just call her “Rock Star Kim”, because she’s pretty much a rock star. But she discovered recently, in a trip to the temple with her sister, that they are both listeners of the podcast. So it just so happens they were having a gospel discussion within the temple, and Kim asked her sister Stacey why she thought the way she thought, and she said, “Well, I’ve been listening to this podcast, Gospel Talktrine,” and so there you go.
What can I say? When I hear a story like that, it just makes me smile from ear to ear, because there’s nothing I like more than to hear about somebody who heard about the podcast from somebody other than me. And so that makes my day. Thank you so much for listening, and Oliver congratulations on your baptism.
Well we have five amazing chapters to study today. The thing I like about them is, they’re clear, they’re short, relatively short I should say, and so, if you were trying to get your reading in this week you would have had no problem reading it multiple times, and also understanding what Nephi is saying.
Notwithstanding the fact that he has extensive quotes in this week’s lesson, of the prophet Isaiah, as he did, not as extensive as the quotes from last week, there’s a lot of Isaiah in this week’s reading. And nevertheless, it’s so clear.
So chapter 26 is Nephi’s prophesy of the days of Christ’s life and ministry, and how it will be experienced among the Nephites. If you remember, in 3 Nephi, the Nephites experienced great destruction, at the time of Christ’s death. And at the time of his birth they experienced a sign in the heavens; they experienced a day and a night and a day as if it were a single day. So those are some of the signs that attended the birth and death of Jesus Christ.
And then obviously the culmination of the Book of Mormon is that Christ visited the Nephites. So Nephi saw these things in vision, and chapter 26 is where he talks about how it will be for those of his posterity who experience the ministry of Christ who are on the earth at that time.
And I just want to point out something. There’s a particular phrase that is used a lot in the Church, and the phrase is “a marvellous work and a wonder.” So last week, – actually it’s in 2 Nephi 25 – we learned, Nephi taught us what this phrase means. We use it a lot, and it can mean anything from the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, to the restoration itself, but Nephi uses it in a specific context. To me, what Nephi was saying is the marvellous work and a wonder is actually that God will prepare everyone to be judged.
And what that means, to be prepared for your judgement, is that you get an opportunity to make choices. So the marvellous work and a wonder is the Plan of Salvation. God brings about our test, and then he brings us to judgement, to stand before him and to find out what the results are.
And that is truly an amazing work, when you think about all of the generations of people that have lived on the earth, that they would all go through the capability, the process, of having their eternal choices given weight and value in front of their maker. What an amazing work, what a marvellous work and a wonder. So that’s my reading of what “marvellous work and a wonder” means.
And here he’s talking about it again, He’s saying that the point of these things coming forth is that the Jews and the Gentiles must be convinced of the calling… that Jesus is the Messiah, but not just the Messiah; they’re convinced of his calling but also of his divinity. So Jesus is both Messiah and God, and the Jews and the Gentiles have to learn that, and accept that. That is the process that history will take, according to Nephi. That’s what he sees.
And he sees the apostasy of the Lamanites, all of his people become Lamanites, and the posterity of his brethren and his own posterity, they intermix, and eventually everyone becomes Lamanites. And he sees this apostasy and then he sees the apostasy of the world in general. He sees the wickedness and the secret combinations among all the people of the earth. And as we get into in chapter 28, he also sees the wickedness in religion.
So as he’s talking about the wickedness that will exist in the earth, then he immediately shifts into a quotation of Isaiah chapter 29. So that’s kind of the end of chapter 26, and he goes right into this quotation. Now there is something very, very interesting, this is probably one of the more interesting passages in the whole Book of Mormon, this chapter 27 of 2 Nephi, verses 1 through 4. And here’s the reason.
These verses do exist in Isaiah, but they exist in a slightly changed form. And specifically, there’s a part added to the beginning, there’s a part in the Book of Mormon, there’s a particular part of this passage that exists in the Book of Mormon, that does not exist in the Bible. So if you were a naysayer, someone who believed that Joseph Smith made up the Book of Mormon, this would be a great way to put Joseph Smith to the test.
Joseph Smith actually added content to the words of Isaiah? Did he get it right? That might be one of the questions you might ask. And the answer is, that this is a fascinating passage, it is so informative, because, this passage as it is in the Book of Mormon, it has a poetic structure that is much truer to an actual Hebrew form, than the passage that we have that has come down to us in the Book of Isaiah.
Most specifically, if you read it in the Book of Mormon, I won’t go through and analyse it verse by verse, but you can notice there’s a chiasmus that’s very specific. And it doesn’t exist in the Bible, not in the same way. There are many people who, after studying the Book of Mormon, are, if not convinced, at least their minds are opened because these verses alone, if they are scriptural scholar or a scriptorian in any sense, and they’re studying the Bible and then they see that Joseph Smith in the early 1800s somehow came up with this missing chiasmus in the Book of Isaiah. And chiasmus was a literary form that had not yet been discovered – and incidentally we’ll be doing a special episode on chiasmus in just a few weeks, stay tuned for more information about that – but chiasmus was a literary form that had not been discovered.
Joseph Smith would have had to invent it, perfect it, then create one, compose a chiasmus, and then add it onto Isaiah and not say anything about it. Not teach his people about it. So, a very, very fascinating quotation from Isaiah 29 here.
And the idea is that the people of earth will be drunk on their own sins and iniquities in the last days.
Then after that, he continues quoting Isaiah 29, but there’s a loose correlation, it’s not verse-for-verse. And this loose correlation proves a couple of things. It’s very strong evidence that Nephi had a copy of Isaiah, number one, with this chiasmus still in it, or he was comfortable enough with chiasmus to create his own. Right? So it’s powerful evidence that somebody made up a chiasmus, it was either Nephi, or it was Isaiah, or it was Joseph Smith. You can’t think anything else when you read this. So, either Nephi got it from Isaiah or he made it up himself. Myself personally, I cannot imagine, that somebody with Joseph Smith’s circumstances, education, this is aside from any spiritual consideration at all, I can’t imagine that he could come up with that.
So I love this passage for that reason, because it’s a powerful witness of the prophetic calling of Nephi. And much like Mormon, he was a prophet-historian. Nephi did the same thing Mormon did, he abridged the history of his people and wrote it down on plates. So this is Nephi at his best, and I just love this passage.
Now it’s proof of one other thing, this loose correlation here, and that is that, Nephi, as I mentioned when we studied the Isaiah chapter, Nephi may have been comfortable changing Isaiah’s words to fit his topic. Now I mentioned that it’s a lot of work to copy over, to transcribe scriptures from one set of plates to another. Why would he do that?
And part of the answer, I speculated, might have been that Nephi wanted to liken the words to his people. Well we can see him doing that in an extended way, here in chapter 27. Nephi is changing Isaiah 29 around; he’s not changing the meaning of it, but applying it to fit the situation of his people. And this chapter is powerful prophesies about the translation and publication of the Book of Mormon.
So this marvellous work and a wonder. Now, we hear more about it. And we realise that the marvellous work and a wonder is: everyone gets a chance to hear the truth about God. And then justice comes upon all, as we learned in chapter 25.
And these chapters just continue on, much like in Isaiah when the chapter breaks were inserted after. We don’t have an indication on some of these chapter breaks that Nephi thought of them as separate chapters. It might have been part of the same set of writings or the same discourse.
So chapter 28 just continues on, and he’s now prophesying about the same religious revival that we hear about when Joseph gives his descriptions of the First Vision. He’s talking about how many religions will use the same set of scriptures, and interpret them in different ways. And he points out some specific false doctrines. One of them is that miracles will have ceased.
So Nephi looks into the future and he sees that in the day when the Book of Mormon comes to light, the general belief will be that God no longer does miracles. So people who have no problem, people who can accept that Joshua, for example, who is battling the Canaanites, and he calls on God and God causes the sun to stand still in the sky until the Israelites can be victorious in battle, they can believe that. They can believe that Moses stretched forth his rod, and the waters of the Red Sea parted asunder, and the Israelites walked through on dry ground, and the waters crashed back in on the Egyptians behind them.
They can read that, and think, “Ok, I can believe that God can do that,” but then also believe that he would not do it today. Not for me, not for us, not in my time. Now think about that, because Nephi was a witness to the miracles of God on many occasions. For him to imagine a time when people would think the miracles of God had ceased must have been very surprising. He must have thought it was just such a silly idea. In much the same way that many people today think it’s a silly idea that miracles would not have ceased.
To many in our world today, that seems like a very silly idea; that we’re still living in the age of miracles, that God can cause miraculous events, healings, the gift of tongues, and other miracles. That there could be a living prophet on the earth. Those things are done away with. And that is just the accepted wisdom. To Nephi, this was a very, very strange idea, and so he talks about how that this is an aspect of the pride of man. And if you think about it, that’s true.
Now it doesn’t mean, Nephi even points this out, it doesn’t mean that each individual person who believes that idea is prideful. He says there are some people who are very righteous, and yet, because of the deception of Satan, they have been led astray, because there are so many different ideas floating around, and because pride is basically rampant in the world of religion. This is the entire story of chapter 28, is how pride rules the practice of religion.
He talks about three strategies that Satan uses. And I think it’s very profitable for us to think upon these, from time to time. Number one: he stirs men to anger one against another, and against, specifically, that which is good. And you can see this, incidentally, all you have to do, and I’m not going to go into specifics, because it would probably get political, but all you have to do is open a newspaper, and you will see people being stirred up to anger against that which is good. It happens every day, it happens all over the world, I know it happens in the United States a lot. But I also read the world news and I see it happening everywhere. And you don’t have to look far, you don’t have to wait long, and you’ll see it happening. Satan is stirring up the hearts of men and women to anger, against that which is good.
Secondly: Satan pacifies us, saying “All is well in Zion. Yea, Zion prospereth, and there’s no need to worry.” And then this is where that passage comes from, it’s so descriptive, and I think, I don’t know if you’re like me, but you get a mental picture, where he says, “He leads them carefully down to hell.”
Meaning that, he never wants them to get an indication that there’s any coercion involved. And yet he’s leading them the whole time down to hell. So, he’s flattering them, and he’s pacifying them. So that’s his second strategy. The first is stirring men up to anger, then pacification.
Then the third one is to lie, and say, “There is no hell. I am no devil, for there is none.” And thus he gets a hold of them with his flaxen cords until he can bind them in his awful chains. So Nephi is talking about the plan of Satan here, the cunning plan of the evil one.
And incidentally, there are all different kinds… we haven’t discussed much about the latter-day belief in the devil, but there are all kinds of beliefs about what the Bible means when it says the devil did this, or Satan did that. As you may know, in Hebrew, the word satan means, and it’s usually ha-satan, which means the prosecutor, the opponent, the adversary. We also call Satan the adversary.
The Jewish idea is best found in the Book of Job, when God and Satan are talking, and Satan is accusing Job. And “the Satan” can be translated as “the accuser.” And Satan is accusing Job of being a fair-weather servant of God. He’s saying, “God, you know that Job is only following you because he’s been blessed, right? Job doesn’t actually have any backbone to follow you.” Incidentally, you shouldn’t take this as a literal report of an actual conversation that occurred between God and Satan. The Book of Job is highly metaphorical. So that’s the Hebrew idea, that God and Satan could get together and talk, and they could compare notes on a person on earth, and Satan would be the accuser. And that was the belief.
And Joseph Smith clarified that, when, number one, long before he brought forth the Book of Mormon, when he had an experience directly with the resistance of Satan to the first vision, and then also with all of the resistance that occurred on several occasions, sometimes indirectly, and sometimes even directly, to resist the bringing forth of the Book of Mormon and the restoration of the Church.
And now Nephi is teaching this doctrine, very clearly, that Satan is not just the accuser, he’s not just a prosecutor in the courts of heaven. But Satan is an actual enemy who desires our misery. And if you’ve been a member of the Church for a long time, or for all of your life, you may not realise that that doctrine is actually not universal. There are plenty of Christians who see Satan the way we do in the Church, and there are plenty of Christians who do not. They don’t know what to make of a belief in an opponent to God, they don’t know why God would allow that sort of thing to happen, and so they put Satan in sort of a different category, where he’s seen as metaphorical. So there are all different kinds of beliefs about Satan, just as there are about God.
So that’s what Nephi is talking about. You may read this and think, “What does he mean? Why would we think that Satan doesn’t exist?” but it’s important to remember that there is an enemy to your soul. Someone who doesn’t just not care if you fail in your God-given assignment of making your way back to Heavenly Father, but is actively seeking your utter destruction.
And there is no depth to which he will not drag you. This is no sin so horrible or so vile that he would not rejoice that you had committed it. Think about somebody who exists like that, and how much protection that you and I must be receiving every moment of every day to escape his power. And that is what God is doing, he’s watching over us all the time, so that Satan does not have the power to tempt us, beyond what we’re capable of resisting.
So this is not only a vision of the religious people in the future, but of Satan himself, and the influence that he will have. We have to remember that pride rules the world in the vision of Nephi, and therefore if we want to spot these three strategies of Satan, these three methods that he uses to trip us up, then we have to be very vigilant, we have to watch for them. We have to watch for when we could be stirred up in anger against something that’s good. We have to watch for when we can be pacified; for those listening to this podcast, that’s probably our biggest danger. And then we have to watch for when our beliefs are maybe lulled to sleep, where we think, “You know, is Satan really working that hard. Like, how real is all this stuff anyway?” That’s the third one, right? When we are convinced that there is no hell, the stakes are not that high.
And that’s Satan whispering that you don’t need to worry about your eternal soul so much, you don’t really need to worry about your eternal progress, because none of it really matters.
So the message of Nephi is that it’s pride that causes people to reject, on principle, more of the word of God. So he’s describing people who are going to say, “Look, I don’t want to receive more of the word of God. We’ve already got all of the word of God.
And this to me, chapter 28 and 29, which continues, we’re going to start talking about 29, but they’re both the same, it’s the same speech, it’s the same lesson. Which is, there will come a time when people are resisting more of the word of God. And Nephi points out, and I think it’s very, very logical – I guess I should put it another way – the logic is almost inescapable, that this is because of pride.
If someone refuses to accept more – they claim to love God, they say they love God, they love to read his word – yet they won’t accept more of his word. Nephi says pride is at the bottom of that. So think about that. You may have a reaction to that, and I welcome your comments on that. But personally, as I was reading this in preparation for this lesson, I thought, “You know, that’s really right. That is the reason, at its foundation, that is the reason someone would resist receiving more of the word of God, rather than rejoicing.”
Now, obviously, you don’t want to receive something as the word of God, which isn’t. And that’s a different issue, right? So the question isn’t: “Ok, so you claim to have a scripture, but I already know, without reading it, that you don’t.” That’s one reaction. That’s a very different reaction from: “You claim to have a book of scripture. I rejoice in the idea that God has more to say to me. I’ve read your book, and I don’t accept it. It doesn’t seem to fit with what I believe about God.” That’s a totally different reaction, right?
I’ve read plenty of books that fit that description, that are not the Book of Mormon. There are plenty of people who claim to have scripture, and I rejoice. I rejoice in the idea that God speaks to man. And, not every book that claims to be scripture can be. Obviously, Satan is going to have his counterfeits. So, if the attitude is: “No you don’t. Before I’ve looked at it, I already know you don’t, because God doesn’t speak.” Nephi’s point is; that’s pride. That can come from nowhere else but pride.
And he takes it a little further, and I actually think that this is one of the best passages, this is one of the most convincing passages for Latter-day Saint theology in all of the Book of Mormon. And I’ll tell you why.
He says, “I, God,” so this is God speaking to Nephi, and Nephi says, “I, God, talk to this group of people, and this group of people. I esteem every nation as equal. Why wouldn’t I? They’re all my children, and I love them, and eventually I plan, I’m going to establish my word, by sending it to these people, and to them. And when they come back together, then my words will come together and support each other.” And you read that, and you think, “Ok. The God I believe in…” I may not be a Latter-day Saint, but I’m reading this chapter and I have to be thinking, “The God I believe in does think that way. He has to work that way. Because he loves us.”
And he wants us to succeed. He didn’t set us up to fail. And so therefore, if he does have some people who are cut-off, for example: the lost ten tribes, we know they were carried away, and we know they had prophets among them. So, if those prophets were to write something, would those words not be considered scripture, if they ever made their way back into general common knowledge? Of course they would!
And so then what is the difference between that and the Book of Mormon? There really is no conceptual difference. The only difference is the way that the Book of Mormon came about. People can’t accept the idea that Joseph Smith was guided to do it. But they can accept that prophets were guided to such things in the past.
And so this is a brilliant discourse by Nephi on the pride that will keep people from accepting the coming forth of more of the word of God. That’s chapters 28 and 29.
Incidentally, our proper attitude towards the Jews, for bringing forth the Bible, this is where we get that famous verse, “A bible, A bible, we have a bible, and there can be no more bible.” Our proper attitude toward the Jews for the coming forth of the Bible is gratitude.
And I wanted to read also, in chapter 29. One of the things I love about using the Gospel Library app is that you can create your own footnotes. So you underline something, and then it’s almost like writing in the margin, except you’ve got a ton of room. You’ve got as much room as you want; you can write a whole text there. So I wanted to read the note that I have in my scriptures, in 2 Nephi 29. This is attached to verses 1 and 2. I don’t know when I wrote this, but I’m going to read it to you.
So I’m going to introduce it a little bit more. The beginning of chapter 29 in verse 2, God says to Nephi… well, I’ll just read part of 1, and then 2.
“1… I shall proceed to do a marvelous work among them, that I may remember my covenants which I have made unto the children of men, that I may set my hand again the second time to recover my people, which are of the house of Israel;
2 And also, that I may remember the promises which I have made unto thee, Nephi, and also unto thy father, that I would remember your seed…”
So, I was reading that, and I was thinking, “That’s right!” When Enos kneels down to pray, one of the reasons why he’s… when he prays about the Lamanites, one of the reasons why he’s given the answer that the Lamanites would be protected, is that God promised to his fathers that he would. And I remember thinking, “That must have been a powerful prayer, to get a promise from God that he will treat generations of people a certain way.”
So, here’s what I wrote:
“The Lord’s reasons for doing his mighty latter-day work are many, but not least among them is that he covenanted with Nephi and Lehi to remember their seed. The prayers of these two prophets affected millions of people. What will God do, what changes will he make to his plan because of my prayers?”
And I think that’s a worthwhile question. And when I say “changes to his plan,” I don’t mean that God is going to change anything about his ideas. But if you believe that prayers actually bring blessings – now stay with me here for just a minute – if you believe that prayers work, you pray for a blessing and it comes, then the corollary for that belief is, if you don’t pray, then there are some blessings that you just won’t get.
I know that seems hard to accept, but if you believe that prayer brings blessings, then you also believe that not praying means that there are some blessings, that you otherwise would have received, that you just don’t get.
So the answer is, when I say “what changes will God make to his plan?” what I mean is: what blessings, that I can only receive through prayer, will I receive?
Now it may be that God would have treated the seed of Nephi and Lehi similarly, and it may be that God actually changed some of his plans because of the faith and the prayers of Nephi and Lehi. And, not least among them, Enos, who prayed all day and all night, because he loved the Lamanites. The thought that they would suffer, hurt him so much. And there are many prophets and missionaries in the Book of Mormon that felt the same way. In spite of the fact that they were enemies, they couldn’t abide the idea that the Lamanites would suffer in wickedness.
In fact, that’s really the story of the Book of Mormon. It’s people who are motivated by love toward their enemies, to such an extent that they would sacrifice their safety, to bring them the truth.
Now I have a particular terminology for this idea. I call it an “heirloom covenant.” It basically means we have created – I shouldn’t say “we” – Nephi and Lehi have created for their posterity a covenant that exists because they have so much faith. And I actually know people, and I know there are some people listening, who have done this with their own families. They have created “heirloom covenants.” They have changed the lives, the trajectory of the lives of their children because of their faithfulness.
In so doing, what they have done is they’ve set up a covenant with God, that “God I am raising my children a certain way, I am worshipping a certain way, I am allowing thee to change me in a certain way, so that you will continue to bless my children when I’m gone, and my grandchildren, and so forth.”
And that is an heirloom covenant. That’s my own terminology. I don’t know that it exists in Gospel Doctrine, but I believe in it.
At the end of the chapter, I also wrote this, this is another note I had in my Gospel Library app. So the context of this is, that after Nephi has explained that all of the scriptures of all these different nations will come together, and all of them – the act of them coming together – is proof of the existence of God, and of the mercy of God, his loving kindness. In fact to me, any Church that didn’t have the doctrine where God loves everyone equally, and could prove it by showing that God would send his word to one people and then another, and by showing that God is willing to redeem the dead – that’s another wonderful aspect of the restored Church of Jesus Christ – is that it shows in so many different ways; the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, the vicarious work for the dead; it shows that God loves all people equally.
More than any other denomination of which I’m aware, it is such a powerful evidence of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. And at the end of this chapter, after he talking about all these things, here’s what I wrote. This is attached to verses 13 and 14.
“God covenanted with Abraham, and to keep that covenant with a single person, the whole plan of salvation is changed. He covenanted with Enos and others to do a mighty work among their seed. What will he do because of my prayers? If I pray for him to bring forth more of his word, would it be a blessing or curse for him to answer me? Am I the kind of person who loves and obeys the light and truth I have already been given?”
So we each of us have an opportunity to create heirloom covenants of our own. Like Enos did, we can kneel down and pray, and ask God to bless our posterity forever. And God, once he covenants with us that he will do that, because of our faithfulness, he will change the trajectory of hundreds of generations because we asked him to do it.
That is God’s desire, to give us those kinds of blessings when we ask him.
And this line of reasoning is continued in chapter 30. In verses 1 and 2 we learn that God’s covenants are extended to those who are willing to keep them, not because of race or lineage.
You remember the very memorable line from the Bible, when Jesus, the scribes and pharisees are surrounding him, saying, “Look, Abraham is our Father. I don’t know who your father is, but we have Abraham to our father.” And Jesus said, “If Abraham were your father, then you would do the works of Abraham. You’re trying to kill me because I talk about God, I’m trying to reveal God to you. Abraham didn’t do that, and so you have the devil for your father, because the devil is the one who has inspired people throughout the ages to kill the prophets. And if what you’re worried about is posterity from Abraham, God is capable of raising up seed to Abraham from these stones.” And I imagine him picking up a stone, I don’t know whether he did.
The point was, God doesn’t need us to be faithful, in order to keep his promises to our ancestors. He’s capable of figuring out a way. Our ancestor’s covenant does not depend on us. We have our agency. God will not compel us, in spite of a covenant he made to our ancestors, I guess is a better way of saying that.
Incidentally, Jesus made the comparison between stones and seed of Abraham. And in Hebrew, the word for stone is eben, and the word for son is ben. So he was comparing the ben to the eben. He did that again, I believe it was in Matthew Chapter 21 or 22, when he gives the parable of the lord of the vineyard, [Matthew 21:33-44] and how he keeps sending his servants, and these tenants that he has in the vineyard, they keep killing everyone. Finally, he sends his son, and they kill him. And so, he asks the question, “What should the lord of the vineyard do to these wicked husbandmen?” Then he says, “the son of God is the stone that the builder will reject, but it will become the head cornerstone.”
And so he is playing on this idea of the ben and the eben, the stone and the son. And so when I think about the covenants of God towards one prophet or one man, one person – that wasn’t just one man incidentally, it was Abraham and Sarah that received the covenant of Abraham – when we think about the covenants of God to one family, and the way that they affect posterity, I always think of the stone versus the son. God doesn’t need us to be righteous in order to keep that covenant. He can do it with anyone. So that’s the stone versus the son, That’s a little digression, but that’s the spice of life. Sorry for getting off-topic.
So, what of those who accept the Book of Mormon? Nephi’s been spending a lot of time talking about those who reject it. And chapter 30 is where he talked about those who accept it, So you might remember this language, this is biblical language, that God would come, in verse 9, Nephi describes God as “smiting the earth with the rod of his mouth.” “With righteousness shall the Lord God judge the poor.”
So all throughout chapter 30 of 2 Nephi, this is really just an extended quote of Isaiah. First from chapter 11, and then from chapter 65. So chapter 11, you may remember, is where Isaiah says, this is the famous branch prophesy, it’s very, very messianic. He’s talking about this Davidic king who will arise, and this is where the Messiah gets the nickname “the Branch.” He’s referred to by that name in Zechariah and other places. And some people believe that name, and the town of Nazareth have a correlation.
So that’s the first chapter that Nephi is quoting, it’s chapter 11 where he’s speaking very much about the Messiah. That every Jew and every Christian would believe in. And then, he’s also quoting from chapter 65, it’s the second to last chapter in Isaiah, where Isaiah’s attention is almost totally caught up in the new creation that will come about, after all of the suffering that attends, that accompanies Jesus’s second coming.
So you’ll notice that with Isaiah, events are not chronological. To a modern reader, it almost seems like Isaiah is easily distracted, because he’ll be talking about the need for righteousness and repentance, and then he’ll be immediately swayed into talking about this wonderful blessing that God will bring about, the changes that will come upon the earth when all things are created anew.
But the truth is that’s just a very Hebrew way of teaching. Things did not have to be chronological for them. For us it could be confusing. Why did he go from that? It seems like what he’s saying is, the new creation follows this other event directly. It wasn’t Isaiah’s intention to talk about a specific chronology of the latter-days. And that’s why we can get sort of distracted, we can look beyond the mark, if we tried to construct an order of events for the second coming. Because, ancient Hebrew prophets simply did not have that as the way that they taught, to teach a chronological order of events. It wasn’t their motive; it wasn’t their goal.
In any case, chapter 65 is one of those chapters where Isaiah is caught up into this vision, and he’s talking about how wonderful it will be. The entire nature of the animal kingdom will change, the plant kingdom will change, man himself will change. This idea about beating swords into plowshares is heightened when a lamb lies down with a lion. So that’s the kind of world we’ll all live in.
And Nephi sees all of this. He’s freely adapting the words of Isaiah to fit the vision that he sees. One of his take-aways is in verse 17, (2 Nephi 30:17).
“17 There is nothing which is secret save it shall be revealed; there is no work of darkness save it shall be made manifest in the light; and there is nothing which is sealed upon the earth save it shall be loosed.”
So if you think about, he goes on to talk about, how anything that has ever been revealed to any prophet will be revealed to all. There will come a time when all of us, for example, see the sealed portion of the Book of Mormon.
Earlier, in chapter 27, Nephi talks about the translation process of the Book of Mormon, and how part of the book was sealed. You may remember this story. Incidentally, I want to recommend to you the book that the Church put out, about the history of Joseph Smith, the early history of the church, the translation of the Book of Mormon, the plates, the first vision, etcetera, called “Saints.” And this is freely available in your Gospel Library app, as well as available as a trade paperback.
And it’s a wonderful book. It portrays Joseph Smith as a human. You can kind of see his weaknesses, and as a teenager, being sort of impressionable. Other people pressuring him to follow their desires, rather than his own. And he had to learn the hard way. One of the ways that he learned that was by giving in to pressure from Martin Harris to deliver the manuscript pages. So, Joseph Smith just wanted to be nice to people, good to people, and he wanted to make them happy, in addition to wanting to follow the directions of God.
And he learned through hard experience, this is why he was so unflinching in following the will of God, as he had to learn that through hard experience. So, reading that book in conjunction with reading chapter 27, you’ll see a lot of the parallels. It’s fascinating. So, I highly recommend that book.
So my take-away from this lesson is, number one: we have such a powerful, powerful testimony in the Book of Mormon. Not only of the restoration. No! The most powerful testimony of the Book of Mormon is the testimony about God himself, about the nature of Jesus Christ and the nature of his salvation. And here in these chapters specifically, about the fact that God esteems all flesh as one.
And so just because there was a chosen nation called Israel, it doesn’t mean that they were better. In fact, Nephi says to his brothers, “Do you think that God” – this was at the time they were building the ship – “Do you think God would have prospered the Israelites, if the Canaanites had been righteous? No! God esteems all flesh alike.” This is a message that if… you can find it in the Bible, but you have to work a little bit harder to justify it, because there are seeming contradictions to that doctrine in the Bible. And here in the Book of Mormon it’s so abundantly clear that God loves everyone so much that he will never stop revealing his truth. He will never stop the day of miracle. He will never stop having a prophet on the earth He will never stop allowing his words to flow together and support each other and bring us closer to him, because he has to reach out to us. That’s his job. That’s his whole plan, that’s his purpose.
When God said in the Book of Moses, he said, “It is my work and my glory to bring to pass the immortality and the eternal life of man.” It’s not the kind of work for which God expects a pay cheque. And God never sleeps. He doesn’t punch in and punch out. He’s always at it, it is his sole purpose to bring us happiness and joy, and the peace that comes from following him. That is the reason for the commandments, that is reason for the scriptures, that is reason for a living prophet, that God is trying to bring about our immortality and the eternal life of man. That is his marvellous work and a wonder. We are his marvellous work, and his wonder! To give us the opportunity to accept the truth, and then bring us before him, so that we can receive our reward.
So may we ignore those distractions which would keep us, those… being angered against all things that are good, and being flattered or distracted away, or being pacified to the point where we don’t even believe that there’s a God or Satan at all.
May we resist all of those things, and may we remember that God loves us, and loves all people equally. That God’s truth is to be found in the earth today. What a comforting message that is! That is the message of the Book of Mormon. In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.