Show notes
Transcript(~50 min 42 sec | Book of Mormon class, opening lesson on 1 Nephi 1) Nancy (teacher):This is different, in a while. And I sat there with that light coming in and started to cry, so it’s not a good start for me. It was just so beautiful, and I could hear you talking. And so I wanted to say—and plus I see my children—and oh, anyway, it’s a great honor to be here, and I also thank you for being here. We have two years on the Book of Mormon. My brother-in-law said, “What are you teaching?” And I said, “Book of Mormon.” Big pause. He said, “Well, that’s nothing to know anything about.” So we’ll try. And we have a couple of new teachers that are wonderful. Hello, Emily. Is it two? Yeah, I don’t know how to—if I knew how I would, or I could put it out. Then you can see my face. It’s not boring. It’s deep. It’s wild and deep, what we will be studying. Psalm 42 says, “Deep calleth unto deep. In the roar of thy waterfalls all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.” Deep calleth unto deep. And Joseph Smith from Liberty Jail said, “Thy mind, O man, must stretch as high as the utmost heavens and search and contemplate the darkest abyss, and must be introduced into the society of the most ancient and greatest of beings.” Deep call upon the deep. So we were—let me just pause and say that occasionally I stutter. Don’t be nervous. I was just listening to an actor, this very handsome man, and they were interviewing him on NPR and said, “Now I heard that you stutter.” And he said, “Yeah, not when I act, but when I get home and let it loose.” Love this guy. Anyway, I don’t really even think about it. Well, I hope you don’t. Okay. We were on a late trip in San Diego this July, and we had bought tickets—a couple of us, a few of us—to the Chris Stapleton concert. But at the last minute the adults couldn’t go, or didn’t want to go, and so my husband John took all the teenagers to it. And they were on the grass, and every few inches there were beer venues, you know. And the day before, everyone had been—all 28 of us went to the San Diego Temple Open House. So a couple of days after the concert and the Open House we were having a family gathering, and John, my husband, asked the 14-year-old Jackson what the difference was between the Open House and the Chris Stapleton concert. And he said, “Well, there was a lot more beer at the concert.” And you gotta think about what I just said. You gotta love 14-year-olds, right? I think he was joking, but with Jackson you can never tell. Anyway, so my friends, let’s see this year if we can go deep into this beautiful, beautiful book. Leave the beer behind—which is, you know, I mean the world behind—and find openings into another world. Thomas O’Dea, a Catholic sociologist, wrote many years ago that the Book of Mormon has not been universally considered by its critics as one of those books that must be read in order to have an opinion of it. So, 1 Nephi 5:5 and 10, and we’ll start with the word. When Lehi gets the plates after his sons have brought them from Jerusalem at such cost, what does Lehi do? You don’t have to read it, but I can tell you. He takes them in his hands, and he holds them, and begins to search them and to read them. He probably had never held them before. He was not a Levite, he was not a priest. Didn’t have access. Only Laban had access to the scripture and maybe a few elders. If anybody’s out there, you can—I mean, please come in. There’s a few up here, and we don’t care. Anyway, and Lehi holding them is so overwhelmed that he begins to prophesy and worship. And I think he began to weep. I’m sure he did, holding those which he had never held himself, been able to read himself. And he says they will never be dimmed by time. So what book is he holding? What are those brass plates? See, I’ll allow you one. The Old Testament, or parts of it—the Torah, the prophets, up to Jeremiah. So right here, these books that we have are the Torah and the prophets and the writings. And of course Hebrew, you go backwards, right? But you can see the Hebrew and the translation over here. So that’s what he’s holding, right? In his hands. This is an older one that I got from one of my children, I think. It’s beautiful. In Nehemiah 8:1–9, Ezra, priest and scribe, has come back from exile with a few of the Jews. This is fifth century. Nehemiah 8:1, the people have gathered at the Water Gate in Jerusalem, and Ezra brings the book of the law of Moses before the congregation, both of men and women and all that could hear with understanding, and he begins to read from the book and cause them to understand what he was reading. And when he opened it, all the people—I’m sorry, I cry every time I read this—all the people stood up, lifted their hands, and bowed their heads and began to weep. Why did they weep? Why did those people being carried along most? Because for the first time it was not reserved only for the priests. It was for them. It was for the people, God’s people, and they were included. Anyway, go to 1 Nephi 1, and the story begins. So after his opening paragraph, which in the original Book of Mormon were one paragraph, Nephi begins with his father’s experience, Lehi’s experience, which he took from Lehi’s own record, the Book of Lehi, which was in a portion of the large plates. Lehi’s out walking around Jerusalem, listening to the prophets. You’ve been there—it’s a very windy, narrow little place. I’m trying to imagine where the prophets were at places that, you know, intersect, or where are they that he’s listening to. And they’re all prophesying doom for Jerusalem, for Israel, and Lehi begins to pray. This is 1:6. And as he prayed, there came a pillar of fire and dwelt upon a rock, and there was probably someone in the fire—there usually is in scripture. So he goes home, verses 7 and 8, and lies on his bed, and is carried away in a vision, and he sees the heavens open. Now John the Revelator in Revelation 4:1 says, “I looked and behold a door was opened in heaven.” So it’s the same experience. And I think it slid open like a sliding glass door, because I’ve seen it once. Where do you think heaven is? You can just think. Brigham Young said heaven is all around us. It’s on the earth. It’s around the earth. That’s in Discourses of Brigham Young. Anyway, verse 8 of chapter 1, Nephi writes that Lehi thinks he sees God on his throne with angels all around, as also John saw. And then Lehi [sees] one descending out of the midst of heaven, and he beheld that his luster was above that of the sun at noonday. So here we have the first mention of Jesus Christ in verse 8 already. And after this, he’s everywhere in the book, as you know. Verse 10, there are twelve others with him who go out on the face of the earth. And verses 11 and 12, and then the one stands in front of Lehi and gave unto him a book and tells him that he should read the book. And as he reads, he was filled with the Spirit of the Lord. If we knew that every time we read God’s word we would be filled with the Spirit, would we read it more? So Lehi, verse 13, reads a prophecy that Jerusalem will be destroyed and the people in it killed and taken captive by Babylon. So here’s a question. Why is it that Lehi is to read the prophecy instead of being told the prophecy? Why is he handed a book to read? It’s almost as strange as in Revelation when John is told by an angel to eat the book, and it would be sweet as honey. The book would have been a scroll like this, right? So John does, and he eats the book, and also Ezekiel is told the exact same thing: eat the book. And Ezekiel eats it, and then… say it’s bitter in their stomach. They’d probably about throw up. Sorry. Anyway, it’s very interesting, I think. Okay? So this summer I read a book that I haven’t read since I was probably in high school. This is Jane Eyre. I mean, and then I looked, I started to read about it. It’s one of the great novels in the world that have ever been written. And it was so wonderful. I was walking around the corner of my house, and I had not really started this, and I thought, I wish I could just eat that book. It’s a very human thing. I thought it was. And then afterwards I remembered, it’s very human to read and to read. But isn’t that a great mystery that Lehi is told to read? To read means to riddle. So when you read, you unriddle, and thus you are starting to think about in scripture about the mind of God that’s beginning to come into you and you’re unriddling it. And so that is what’s happening here. We are seeing, we are unriddling God through Nephi’s mind, and he’s all through Nephi’s mind. So here’s a thought that just when Lehi and his family are about to leave Jerusalem, and the brass plates will become crucial, Lehi is given a book to read. We have this book to unriddle, begun by Nephi, carried through and abridged by Mormon, finished by Moroni—the three great narrators of the book. And there are main, minor ones, but those are the three great narrators: Mormon, Moroni, and Nephi. This is probably a good place to say that when we are reading a book, we should be aware that there is almost always two minds present, and occasionally three minds are present, when you have a prophet who quotes prophets who quotes other prophets. So you are reading through three minds working at the same time, and they’re all—there are sources that are being used, like letters and sermons and lists and poetry and geography and genealogy. It’s a complex book when you really read it as a book instead of just looking up topics, which is what I hope we can do this year. So let’s go back to what was happening in Lehi’s world. Verse 4, chapter 1 is when it really begins. “In the commencement of the first year of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah, there came many prophets prophesying unto the people that they must repent, or the great city of Jerusalem must be destroyed.” So Zedekiah is in his first year as king. The Babylonians have put him on the throne, almost like a puppet king. He was the brother of the previous king, Jehoiakim, whom they killed or captured, and they changed Zedekiah’s name from Mattaniah to Zedekiah. He is twenty-one years old. Later, when he rebels against the Babylonians, they kill his sons in front of him and then put out his eyes. One son, Mulek, escapes, as we know from Helaman, and twenty-one, but that comes later. And if you want to read about this, it’s all in 2 Kings chapters 24 and 25. It’s really an amazing read to read this background in the Book of Kings. So who are the many prophets who are prophesying unto the people that Nephi tells us about? Who are these prophets to be knowing? Well, I think Jeremiah was one of them, although he was in prison at the time. Class member: Jeremiah, he’s the big one. Nancy: Lehi mentions him in 1 Nephi 7. He said they have rejected the prophets, and Jeremiah had been cast into prison. Also at that time were the prophets Obadiah, and maybe Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah, although the times are kind of fluid, so we’re not sure. But they would have been contemporary with Lehi, and they’re all in the Old Testament. So in Jeremiah we read, “I have sent also unto you all my servants the prophets.” So does that include Lehi? Well, I think so, because he was there. So here’s a little bit about Jeremiah. God tells Jeremiah to write the words he has given him. He’s thrown into prison, and Zedekiah burns his scrolls, because he doesn’t like what’s on them, because they’re negative about himself. So when Jeremiah gets out of prison, he goes straight to Baruch, his scribe, and they write it all down again. Personally, I think we should read—this is me—but Jeremiah along with the Book of Mormon. This great prophet who taught us how to pray, how to worship, how to understand God. He’s a great prophet. One more thing that’s really important, I think, to understand is that something else was happening in the world when Lehi and his family leave in chapter 2, about 600 BC. So what is happening in the history of the world? Well, the founders of most of the world’s great religions all appear. It’s quite an amazing thing. Contemporary with Lehi: Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Zarathustra, Pythagoras—they all appear in these few years. So what is happening? Why would this happen? Perhaps God is moving, preparing the world for something big to happen. He’s moving. It’s a really interesting topic. 1 Nephi 1:19–20. This is about Lehi being out, the prophets of Ammon. “The Jews did mock him because of the things which he testified of them, for he truly testified of their wickedness and their abominations, and he testified that the things which he saw and heard, and also the things which he read in the book, manifested plainly of the coming of a Messiah, and also the redemption of the world. And when the Jews heard these things they were angry with him, even as with the prophets of old, whom they had cast out and stoned and slain; and they sought his life, that they might take it away.” So why did they want to kill Lehi? Why kill him? They mock him when he speaks of their wickedness—“the Jews did mock him because of the things which he testified of them”—but they tried to kill him when he speaks of the coming of a Messiah. Why does that specific prophecy enrage them? I was listening to a little podcast on Instagram from Moon’s Rare Books, and the man that owns Moon’s was speaking of this rare edition of the Book of Mormon that he had to sell, and the comments below, you know, as you can read them, were pretty interesting. They range from “burn it, just burn it,” “use it as toilet paper,” to others saying it changed their lives and it was the most important book in the world. Why burn it? Who cares if we have it? Why the anger? Because of the truth of God, as Nephi says, and also in 2 Nephi 28:20: “For behold, at that day shall the devil rage in the hearts of the children of men, and stir them up to anger against that which is good.” This is Enos 1:14 about the Lamanites: “And they swore in their wrath that, if it were possible, they would destroy our records and us, and also all the traditions of our fathers.” This is a big topic, I think: why people want to destroy what’s good, or as Nephi puts it, those who have dwindled in unbelief seek to destroy the things of God. And it will rear its ugly head over and over again, as it does even today. So let me ask you this: what is the purpose of the Book of Mormon? And this one you can— Class member: To bring people to Christ. To bring people to Christ. To testify of Christ. Nancy: To testify of Christ. Okay. Good answer. I mean, they’re all—I’m sure the answer’s in your head—good answers. But I want you to think what you think it is. I mean, I’ve written a few. Class member: I also think purpose is to bring people to the Book of Mormon. Nancy: To bring people to the Book of Mormon. And it opened their eyes, opened others’ eyes to come and look. That’s a good answer. We can read Nephi’s purpose. I’ll just read it to you. 1 Nephi 6:4: “to persuade men to come unto the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, and be saved.” And then he writes in 2 Nephi 4 to write the things of my soul and many of the scriptures that were on the brass plates. Thought over the years is to bring us home to the Father through the Son, which is why we even need the magnificent Son. But is it only to return? Is it only to teach us of Christ? Because once we get home, then what? Class member: You may speak. It’s part of the gathering and being descendants and promise, the promises of our fathers of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to make covenants and bring us home. Okay, yes. It should be a warning and a warning to us today of what we may be facing. Class member: Yeah, and to teach the doctrine, and so to invite us to act, so we are not only learning the Christ, but we’re becoming like him. Nancy: Okay, on that one I’m going to stop and tell you what I think. Because when we…
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