BOM 1 Nephi 14

Today’s reading is 1 Nephi 14.

I’m going to continue focusing on a topic that I raised yesterday, regarding 1 Nephi 13.  That topic is the “great and abominable church.”

I said yesterday that I don’t believe that the idea can be sustained that that phrase refers to the Roman Catholic Church.  I’ll go further, today, and say that it clearly cannot be referring to a specific denomination.

In 1 Nephi 14:10, Nephi reports

And he [the angel] said unto me: Behold there are save two churches only; the one is the church of the Lamb of God, and the other is the church of the devil; wherefore, whoso belongeth not to the church of the Lamb of God belongeth to that great church, which is the mother of abominations; and she is the whore of all the earth.

If everybody who doesn’t belong to “the church of the Lamb of God” is a member of “the church of the devil,” that church cannot simply be one denomination among many (however large).

Furthermore, with that in mind and in that light, I’m open to the possibility that “the church of the Lamb of God,” as Nephi uses the phrase here, also doesn’t refer simply to a denomination, and not even to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

It’s possible that there are nominal members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who really belong to “the church of the devil,” and that there are members of other denominations — and perhaps even adherents of other faiths altogether — who, ultimately, belong or will belong to “the church of the Lamb of God.”

However we interpret “the church of the Lamb of God,” though, 1 Nephi 14:12 is quite interesting:

And it came to pass that I beheld the church of the Lamb of God, and its numbers were few, because of the wickedness and abominations of the whore who sat upon many waters; nevertheless, I beheld that the church of the Lamb, who were the saints of God, were also upon all the face of the earth; and their dominions upon the face of the earth were small, because of the wickedness of the great whore whom I saw.

Some members expect membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to expand geometrically, so that our numbers become enormous:

Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces.

Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshingfloors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth. . . .

And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever.  (Daniel 2:34-35, 44)

And that, of course, hasn’t quite happened yet.  Others, critics of the Church, mock and deride its relatively small numbers, claiming that our failure, thus far, to convert hundreds and hundreds of millions demonstrates the insignificance and silliness of the Restored Gospel.

Give us time!

One can easily point out the fact, of course, that Christianity itself, around AD 200, was still very far from the worldwide movement that it’s since become and very far from the major world-historical force that it’s long been.

But it’s crucial to note that, in the vision of the latter days recorded in 1 Nephi 14:12, while “the saints of God were . . . upon all the face of the earth,”  “their dominions upon the face of the earth were small” and the “numbers” of “the church of the Lamb of God” were “few.”

There is no scriptural reason to expect that, this side of the Millennium (and even, perhaps, throughout the Millennium), “the church of the Lamb of God” is going to win any sort of global popularity contest.

We’ll spread worldwide — we currently have over 11,000 members in Mongolia, of all places; temples are going up in such cities as Bangkok, Lisbon, Paris, Port-au-Prince, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, and Durban, South Africa; and a new mission has just been established in Hanoi — but there is, alas, no reason to believe that we’ll ever be Earth’s predominant church, numerically speaking.