BOM 1 Nephi 3

There is so very much that could be commented on in this chapter, and I hope that some of you out there will take those things up.

In the meantime, it being late out here in the East, I think I’ll content myself with one aspect of the chapter — a limit that, anyway, conforms to the rule that I’ve set myself for this project.

Isn’t it wildly implausible that, having just being rebuked by an angel from the Lord, Laman and Lemuel begin again, almost immediately, to complain and to doubt?

I think, at one point in my life, that I would have thought it unbelievable.  But I don’t think so any longer.

The “natural man” is a powerful thing, difficult to suppress or control.  Our immediate desires, fears, habits, insecurities, deep-seated personality traits, and the like, will assert themselves over time, even after peak experiences of inspiration and enthusiasm.  Resolutions fade.  Doubts recur.  Momentum is lost.  Inertia rules.  Entropy dominates.  Equilibrium returns.

The Book of Mormon itself recognizes this at several places.  The decline of Nephite righteousness even after the spectacular post-resurrection appearance of Jesus offers a clear example of the phenomenon (see 4 Nephi), as had, already, the gradual relapse into indifference that followed the signs prophesied by Samuel the Lamanite (3 Nephi 2:1-3).

I myself, however, have known people, and known of even more people, who claim to have experienced powerful revelations and spiritual manifestations and yet, nevertheless, fell away, or fell into spiritual sloth.  I wouldn’t have believed it possible, but I’ve seen it and heard it with my own eyes and ears.

I think, in particular, of one person whom I knew quite well, years ago, who claimed at least three extraordinarily powerful experience of a type that few people ever enjoy at all — I was actually, by sheer chance, able to get independent and detailed corroboration of one of the incidents some years after he had related it to me — who has since lost his faith and resigned his membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  What did those remarkable experiences mean to him?  In a public statement not long before his complete departure from the Church, he stated it clearly:  “Nothing,” he said.  “They mean nothing.”

I think of another man whom I met on my mission.  He told me an astonishing story of very specific revelations to a Church leader that had led, over a period of several weeks or even, perhaps, several months, to saving at least three or four members of the Church from arrest, prison, and possible execution under a new dictatorship.  I know nothing of the story beyond what he told me, but he then informed me that, while he had once been a believer, he had since studied medicine and, because of his studies, become an atheist.  But how, I asked, did he account for the story that he himself had just related to me?  “Brain chemistry and coincidence,” he replied.

Humans can talk themselves into or out of just about anything, if they so desire.

In the particular case of Laman and Lemuel, as they’re depicted at the close of 1 Nephi 3, they clearly manifest a lack of faith in the Lord, where faith is understood to mean something like trust or confidence.  It’s not merely a matter of affirming the proposition that God exists.  It’s a matter of refusal or inability to rely upon him, to trust him to be able to do what he says he will do.

Posted from Richmond, Virginia