1 Nephi 12-18

Quote of the Week:

Something extraordinary is happening.  Do you sense it?  Truly, as obedience and morality decline in the world, the Lord is sending more exceptional spirits to earth.  As a body they excel the average capacity of their forebears.  Their potential for personal growth and positive contribution is enormous.

-- Richard G. Scott, Ensign 11/03

Further Reading:

David A. Bednar, Ensign May 2006
"The Book of Mormon as a Personal Guide," Ensign September 2010, p. 4
"Ten Scripture Study Tools," Ensign September 2010, p. 31
Howard W. Hunter, "No Less Serviceable," Ensign, April 1992
Stephen Robinson, "Warring with the Saints of God," Ensign, January 1988

Handouts:

1 Nephi 12:17--Temptations of the Devil

Rulon G. Craven, “Temptation,” Ensign, May 1996, 76
Temptation is like a magnetic force which holds a metal object in its power. It loses its magnetic force and power when you turn away from it. So we must turn away from temptation; then it will lose its power.
Temptation can be a compassionate way of warning us of possible dangers. It acts like a caution sign. It warns us of possible danger ahead. Temptation can alert the mind to turn away from an improper thought or act.
As eternal beings living this earthly experience, we will not be free from temptation. Temptation implies an inner struggle to do that which is right.
We should expect temptation, for without temptations there would be little education and little character improvement.

1 Nephi 13:12--Christopher Columbus

Columbus, the Don Quioxote of the Seas, Jacob Wasserman, translated by Eric Sutton, p. 18, 46, 62
"Our Lord with provident hand unlocked my mind, sent me upon the seas, and gave me fire for the deed.  Those who heard of my enterprise called it foolish, mocked me and laughed.  But who can doubt but that the Holy Ghost inspired me?
To King Ferdinand:  "I came to your majesty as the emissary of the Holy Ghost."
"His achievement did not seem to him something unimportant and fortuitous.  It was in his eyes so tremendous, so inexpressibly great, that it could only be achieved by the direct assistance of God."

1 Nephi 16:9-10, 16, 26-29; 18:12, 21--Liahona

Spencer W. Kimball, Ensign 11/76
"If we will remember that everyone of us has the thing that will direct him aright, our ship will not get on the wrong course . . . if we listen to the dictates of our own Liahona, which we call the conscience."

Thomas S. Monson, Ensign, 11/86
The same Lord who provided a Liahona Lehi provides for you and for me today a rare and valuable gift to give direction to our lives, to mark the hazards to our safety, and to chart the way, even safe passage—not to a promised land, but to our heavenly home. The gift to which I refer is known as your patriarchal blessing. Every worthy member of the Church is entitled to receive such a precious and priceless personal treasure.

Robert e. Wells, Doctrines of the Book of Mormon, p. 13
As I read the Book of Mormon, something strange seems to happen to me.  Passages of scripture that I have read many times in one light seem to change--and suddenly there is a new meaning to that old and familiar scripture.  I like to think that the Book of Mormon is truly like the Liahona of old.  not only does it point us the way of the Lord and to the Lord according to the faith, diligence, and heed we give it, but if we are interested enough to read it again and again, from cover to cover, there are times when a "new writing"--plain to be read--seems to appear.

Sam, Nephi's Brother

Howard W. Hunter, “‘No Less Serviceable’,” Ensign, Apr 1992, 64Many who read the story of the great prophet Nephi almost completely miss another valiant son of Lehi whose name was Sam. Nephi is one of the most famous figures in the entire Book of Mormon. But Sam? Sam’s name is mentioned there only ten times. When Lehi counseled and blessed his posterity, he said to Sam:

Sam’s role was basically one of supporting and assisting his more acclaimed younger brother, and he ultimately received the same blessings promised to Nephi and his posterity. Nothing promised to Nephi was withheld from the faithful Sam, yet we know very little of the details of Sam’s service and contribution. He was an almost unknown person in life, but he is obviously a triumphant leader and victor in the annals of eternity.

1 Nephi 15-18--Adversity

Henry B. Eyring, “Adversity,” Ensign, May 2009, 23–27
With all the differences in our lives, we have at least one challenge in common. We all must deal with adversity. . . . My purpose today is to assure you that our Heavenly Father and the Savior live and that They love all humanity. The very opportunity for us to face adversity and affliction is part of the evidence of Their infinite love. God gave us the gift of living in mortality so that we could be prepared to receive the greatest of all the gifts of God, which is eternal life. Then our spirits will be changed. We will become able to want what God wants, to think as He thinks, and thus be prepared for the trust of an endless posterity to teach and to lead through tests to be raised up to qualify to live forever in eternal life.

It is clear that for us to have that gift and to be given that trust, we must be transformed through making righteous choices where that is hard to do. We are prepared for so great a trust by passing through trying and testing experiences in mortality. That education can come only as we are subject to trials while serving God and others for Him.

Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “Your Happily Ever After,” Ensign, May 2010, 124–27
In stories, as in life, adversity teaches us things we cannot learn otherwise. Adversity helps to develop a depth of character that comes in no other way. Our loving Heavenly Father has set us in a world filled with challenges and trials so that we, through opposition, can learn wisdom, become stronger, and experience joy.
It is your reaction to adversity, not the adversity itself, that determines how your life’s story will develop.
Enduring adversity is not the only thing you must do to experience a happy life. Let me repeat: how you react to adversity and temptation is a critical factor in whether or not you arrive at your own “happily ever after.”

James B. Martino, “All Things Work Together for Good,” Ensign, May 2010, 101–3
To some, our trials may not seem great, but to each of us who are passing through these experiences, the trials are real and require us to humble ourselves before God and learn from Him.

James E. Faust, "The Blessings of Adversity," Ensign May 1998
Adversity is the refiner’s fire that bends iron but tempers steel.

1 Nephi 17:45--Past Feeling and Sensitivity to the Spirit

Joseph B. Wirthlin, Ensign, 5/03
I fear that some members of the Lord's Church 'live far beneath our privileges' with regard to the gift of the Holy Ghost. Some are distracted by the things of the world that block out the influence of the Holy Ghost, preventing them from recognizing spiritual promptings.  This is a noisy and busy world that we live in.  Remember that being busy is not necessarily being spiritual.  If we are not careful, the things of this world can crowd out the things of the Spirit.
Some are spiritually deadened and past feeling because of their choices to commit sin.  Others simply hover in spiritual complacency with no desire to rise above themselves and commune with the Infinite.  If they would open their hearts to the refining influence of this unspeakable gift of the Holy Ghost, a glorious new spiritual dimension would come to light.  Their eyes would gaze upon a vista scarcely imaginable.  They could know for themselves things of the Spirit that are choice, precious, and capable of enlarging the soul, expanding the mind, and filling the heart with inexpressible joy.

1 Nephi 13--Great and Abominable Church

Stephen E. Robinson, “Warring against the Saints of God,” Ensign, Jan 1988, 34
In either the apocalyptic sense or the historical sense, individual orientation to the Church of the Lamb or to the great and abominable church is not by membership but by loyalty. Just as there Latter-day Saints who belong to the great and abominable church because of their loyalty to Satan and his life-style, so there are members of other churches who belong to the Lamb because of their loyalty to him and his life-style. Membership is based more on who has your heart than on who has your records.

Some Latter-day Saints have erred in believing that some specific denomination, to the exclusion of all others, has since the beginning of time been the great and abominable church. This is dangerous, for many will then want to know which it is, and an antagonistic relationship with that denomination will inevitably follow.
More often, some have suggested that the Roman Catholic church might be the great and abominable church of Nephi 13. This is also untenable, primarily because Roman Catholicism as we know it did not yet exist when the crimes described by Nephi were being committed. In fact, the term Roman Catholic only makes sense after a.d.  1054 when it is used to distinguish the Western, Latin-speaking Orthodox church that followed the bishop of Rome from the Eastern, Greek-speaking Orthodox church that followed the bishop of Constantinople.

In the period between Peter and the Roman emperor Constantine, there were many Christian churches besides the Orthodox church: Ebionites, Syrian and Egyptian churches, Donatists, Gnostics, Marcionites, and so on. Even if we use the term Catholic for the church Constantine made the state religion in a.d. 313, the New Testament as we know it was already widely circulating. That is, the plain and precious parts had already been removed. The notion of shifty-eyed medieval monks rewriting the scriptures is unfair and bigoted. We owe those monks a debt of gratitude that anything was saved at all.

By the time of Constantine, the Apostles had been dead for centuries. Furthermore, the early Orthodox church can hardly be accused of immorality. It had, in fact, gone to the extremes of asceticism. In some areas of the world Orthodoxy replaced an earlier, already corrupt form of Christianity. And during much of the period, members of the Orthodox Church were not in a position to persecute anyone, as they were being thrown to the lions themselves. The Catholic church of the fourth century was the result of the Apostasy—its end product—not the cause. To find the real culprits, we need to look at a much earlier period in church history than the fourth century after Christ. Satan had his ministers in the world long before then, and we must remember that Babylon was already there to oppose Zion in the days of Cain, Nimrod, Pharaoh, and Herod.

Actually, no single known historical church, denomination, or set of believers meets all the requirements for the great and abominable church: it must have formed among the Gentiles; it must have edited and controlled the distribution of the scriptures; it must have slain the Saints of God, including the Apostles and prophets; it must be in league with civil governments and use their police power to enforce its religious views; it must have dominion over all the earth; it must pursue great wealth and sexual immorality; and it must last until close to the end of the world. No single denomination or system of beliefs fits the entire description. Rather, the role of Babylon has been played by many different agencies, ideologies, and churches in many different times. It should be clear that the great and abominable church that Nephi described in chapter 13 is not the same historical entity that crucified the Savior or that martyred Joseph and Hyrum.

It would be an error to blame some modern denomination for the activities of an ancient great and abominable church. The other error is to go too far the other way, dehistoricizing the abominable church altogether. The term then becomes merely a vague symbol for all the disassociated evil in the world. We cannot, in the face of the scriptural evidence, accept this view. For if we do, we shall not be able to recognize the categories and know who is playing the role of Babylon in our own times or in times to come. Thus, we must, on the one hand, avoid the temptation to identify the role of the great and abominable church so completely with one particular entity that we do not recognize the part when it is played by some other entity. At the same time, we must remember that the role will be played by some entity or coalition, and we must be able to tell by their characteristic fruits which is Zion and which is Babylon.

Can we, then, identify the historical agency that acted as the great and abominable church in earliest Christianity? Such an agent would have had its origins in the second half of the first century and would have done much of its work by the middle of the second century.

This period might be called the blind spot in Christian history, for it is here that the fewest primary historical sources have been preserved. We have good sources for New Testament Christianity; then the lights go out, so to speak, and we hear the muffled sounds of a great struggle. When the lights come on again a hundred or so years later, we find that someone has rearranged all the furniture and Christianity has become something very different from what it was in the beginning. That different entity can accurately be described as hellenized Christianity.

The hellenization of Christianity is a phenomenon that scholars of Christian history have long recognized. Hellenization refers to the imposition of Greek culture and philosophy upon the cultures of the East. The result was a synthesis of East and West, a melting pot of popular culture that was virtually worldwide. In the realm of religion, however, synthesis means compromise, and when we speak in terms of the gospel, compromise with popular beliefs means apostasy from the truth.

When Jewish Christianity and Greek culture met head-on in the gentile mission field in the middle of the first century, a great battle of beliefs and life-styles arose. The Greeks’ world-view eventually won, and Jewish Christianity was revised to make it more attractive and appealing to a Greek audience.

Primary prejudices of the Greek world were the absolute nature of God (i.e., he cannot be bound or limited by anything) and the impossibility of anything material or physical being eternal. In order to satisfy the Gentiles steeped in Greek philosophy, Christianity had to throw out the doctrines of an anthropomorphic God and the resurrection of the dead, or reinterpret them drastically. Denying or altering the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead is precisely what some Greek Christians at Corinth had done, and Paul responded against them forcefully in 1 Corinthians 15.

The historical abominable church of the devil is that apostate church that replaced true Christianity in the first and second centuries, teaching the philosophies of men mingled with scriptures. It dethroned God in the church and replaced him with man by denying the principle of revelation and turning instead to human intellect. As the product of human agency, its creeds were an abomination to the Lord, for they were idolatry: men worshipping the creations, not of their own hands, but of their own minds.

Babylon in the first and second centuries may even have been a collection of different movements. Some Jewish Christians couldn’t let go of the law of Moses and eventually gave up Christ instead. The Orthodox Christians adopted Greek philosophy. The Gnostics wallowed in the mysteries and in unspeakable practices on the one hand or in neurotic asceticism on the other. Second-century compilers like Tatian and Marcion rewrote the scriptures, the latter boldly chopping out anything he didn’t like. And all of them together forced the virtuous woman, the true church of Jesus Christ, into the wilderness.

Isaiah

Boyd K. Packer, Ensign, May 1986
Most [readers] readily understand the narrative of the Book of Mormon.
Then, just as you settle in to move comfortably along, you will meet a barrier. The style of the language changes to Old Testament prophecy style. For, interspersed in the narrative, are chapters reciting the prophecies of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah. They loom as a barrier, like a roadblock or a checkpoint beyond which the casual reader, one with idle curiosity, generally will not go.

You, too, may be tempted to stop there, but do not do it! Do not stop reading! Move forward through those difficult-to-understand chapters of Old Testament prophecy, even if you understand very little of it. Move on, if all you do is skim and merely glean an impression here and there. Move on, if all you do is look at the words.