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1 Nephi 15:6-11 

6 And it came to pass that after I had received strength I spake unto my brethren, desiring to know of them the cause of their disputations.
7 And they said: Behold, we cannot understand the words which our father hath spoken concerning the natural branches of the olive-tree, and also concerning the Gentiles.
8 And I said unto them: Have ye inquired of the Lord?
9 And they said unto me: We have not; for the Lord maketh no such thing known unto us.
10 Behold, I said unto them: How is it that ye do not keep the commandments of the Lord? How is it that ye will perish, because of the hardness of your hearts?
11 Do ye not remember the things which the Lord hath said?—If ye will not harden your hearts, and ask me in faith, believing that ye shall receive, with diligence in keeping my commandments, surely these things shall be made known unto you.

Nephi’s was not a fancied sorrow. It sapped Nephi’s strength and it took a while for him to recover. Although his brothers may have taken them differently, Nephi’s words seem not to be so much a chastisement as they are an expression of his pain. Nephi’s words were also an urgent plea, which he offered even though he had seen in vision that they would not listen. His promise is extended to us by the words of Alma, “he that will not harden his heart, to him is given the greater portion of the word, until it is given unto him to know the mysteries of God until he know them in full” (Alma 12:10). That same promise was made through the Prophet Joseph: “He that keepeth his commandments receiveth truth and light, until he is glorified in truth and knoweth all things” (D&C 93:28).

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1 Nephi 15:1-6 

1 And it came to pass that after I, Nephi, had been carried away in the spirit, and seen all these things, I returned to the tent of my father.
2 And it came to pass that I beheld my brethren, and they were disputing one with another concerning the things which my father had spoken unto them.
3 For he truly spake many great things unto them, which were hard to be understood, save a man should inquire of the Lord; and they being hard in their hearts, therefore they did not look unto the Lord as they ought.
4 And now I, Nephi, was grieved because of the hardness of their hearts, and also, because of the things which I had seen, and knew they must unavoidably come to pass because of the great wickedness of the children of men.
5 And it came to pass that I was overcome because of my afflictions, for I considered that mine afflictions were great above all, because of the destruction of my people, for I had beheld their fall.

There is an apparent incongruence about Nephi’s words that is not only real but actually typical. He has just come down from a high mountain where he has talked with God and seen things that were too marvelous for his words. Yet his response is to feel deep sorrow and to be “overcome because of my afflictions.” Actually, this kind of conflict is what one would expect of a prophet who has experienced love and truth. Truth—knowing reality in sacred time—floods his intellect, but love—knowing God and his children in sacred time—is his dominant emotion. Hence the dissonance that brings the tears.

When one knows truth and knows the exalting power it has upon the human soul, then one’s primary desire is to share truth so that it may exalt others as well. The joy of doing so is an eternal fulfillment, but the sorrow of watching them turn their back on both the truth and the joy it brings is a devastating sorrow. So, while still basking in the light of the revelation he had just received, Nephi could remember, “I was overcome because of my afflictions, for I considered that mine afflictions were great above all, because of the destruction of my people, for I had beheld their fall.” Similarly, the Three Nephites were warned that they would experience the same dichotomy, and with the same cause (3 Nephi 28:9).

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1 Nephi 15:1  

1. And it came to pass that after I, Nephi, had been carried away in the spirit, and seen all these things, I returned to the tent of my father.

It may be true that there is almost nothing more difficult for earth-bound people to comprehend than the power of God to communicate by traveling through time and space, but there are many examples of people who have done it. The following are examples of people who were, like Nephi, “carried away,” either to a high mountain or to the throne of God. That throne is in the Holy of Holies of the temple in Kolob. In short, they go a very great distance, but rarely even mention the trip.{1}

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FOOTNOTE

{1} Examples are Isaiah 6:1;Ezekiel 1:3-4 and 26, 40:2-3; 2 Corinthians 12:2-6; Revelation 1:9-13, 21:9-10;1 Nephi 1:6-8, 11:1; Moses 1:1-2.

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1 Nephi 14:27  

27. And I, Nephi, heard and bear record, that the name of the apostle of the Lamb was John, according to the word of the angel.

When the Prophet Joseph asked the Lord about some symbolic meanings in the Book of Revelation, he received information about John himself:

14 Q. What are we to understand by the little book that was eaten by John, as mentioned in the 10th chapter of Revelation?
A. We are to understand that it was a mission, and an ordinance, for him to gather the tribes of Israel; behold, this is Elias, who, as it is written, must come and restore all things.

9 Q. What are we to understand by the angel ascending from the east, Revelation 7th chapter and 2nd verse?
A. We are to understand that the angel ascending from the east is he to whom is given the seal of the living God over the twelve tribes of Israel; wherefore, he crieth unto the four angels having the everlasting gospel, saying: Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads. And, if you will receive it, this is Elias that was to come to gather together the tribes of Israel and restore all things (D&C 77:14, 9).

It appears that John is the Elias in both of these verses, and that the book John received (like the book Lehi read) was the account of his own mission, and that his receiving that book was an ordinance that assured his ability to fulfil of that mission. If that is correct, then the Book of Revelation is a brief description of the contents of the book John read—information given to him about what his own mission had been, was then, and would be until after the end when there “should be time no longer” (Revelation 10:6).

John, who was the last living apostle of the meridian of time, was therefore the senior apostle and the last living President of the Church. Since he could not pass on his administrative responsibilities to a successor for almost 2000 years, until Joseph Smith’s time, it appears that John’s mission was to look after things in the interim. Having John be responsible was probably necessary because, even though the whole world was in apostasy, the Lord would not leave the world without the directing hand of mortal (even if translated) men who held the sealing powers of the priesthood. Apparently John was responsible for the things on the European front, that would include bringing Europe through the apostasy and preparing its people for the restoration, while the Three Nephites may have been responsible for doing essentially the same thing in America.

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1 Nephi 13:36-37 

36 And in them shall be written my gospel, saith the Lamb, and my rock and my salvation.
37 And blessed are they who shall seek to bring forth my Zion at that day, for they shall have the gift and the power of the Holy Ghost; and if they endure unto the end they shall be lifted up at the last day, and shall be saved in the everlasting kingdom of the Lamb; and whoso shall publish peace, yea, tidings of great joy, how beautiful upon the mountains shall they be.

These verses contain the promise that the fulness of the gospel will be written on the gold plates and that they will be a keystone in the restoration performed by the Prophet Joseph. The verses are profoundly beautiful and deeply encoded, following the full sequence of the ancient Israelite temple drama. It lasted eight days.

Days 1, 2, and 3 were devoted to the beginning acts of the drama: the Council in Heaven, creation, Adam and Eve in the Garden, receiving priesthood and kinship authority, and finally the symbolic destruction of Jerusalem and death of the king.

During days 4, 5, and 6, while the king remained in the world of the dead, the drama focused on the life and Atonement of the Savior; then on his mission among the dead, and finally on his resurrection.

Day 7, Jehovah (represented by the Ark of the Covenant) and the rescued king, emerged from the Underworld, and joined by the people in a grand procession around the city, then into Solomon’s Temple to celebrate the coronation of the king.

Day 8, the festival concluded with a day of sacrificing, feasting, rejoicing, and celebration, representing the fulfillment of Jehovah’s covenants and his millennial reign.{1}

The central part of that chronology is the three days that celebrated the Savior’s Atonement. That drama is the subject of our book, Who Shall Ascend into the Hill of the Lord?
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FOOTNOTE

{1} The sequence suggested here is my own. Others see it differently. A. M. Hocart suggests the sequence was the same as the seven days of creation in Genesis. Kingship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 202.

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1 Nephi 13:17  

17. And I beheld that their mother Gentiles were gathered together upon the waters, and upon the land also, to battle against them.

Nephi’s description of the Revolutionary War is not at all the sort of thing the Prophet Joseph or any of his contemporary Americans would have written. Joseph, who was a young man when John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died, would have understood the American Revolution as a local land war.

For Americans the Revolution was mostly a land war, and would have been described by them as such. America’s navy consisted almost entirely of John Paul Jones doing some privateering off the coast of Europe and a few blockade runners on this side of the ocean trying to get into and out of American ports. The French admiral de Grass was instrumental in scaring the English navy away from Yorktown so Washington could defeat Cornwallis, but there was no actual naval engagement there.

However, that is only a part of the story. The American Revolution was the first real “world war.” What began as a skirmish in Massachusetts escalated all out of proportion. And if it had not have done so, America would never have become free. France joined America to get even with England and with the hope of absorbing the American colonies after the English lost them. Spain came into the war because France pulled her and, reluctant as she was, she had little choice. Holland (the “money bags” of the world at that time) came in because England was belligerent. Russia came in just as reluctantly, and for about the same reason.

These nations, including England, had long since divided the rest of the non-European world among themselves. Their colonies were literally scattered all over the globe, and when the mother countries went to war, so did their colonies. The result was that England found herself fighting almost all of the greatest colonial powers in Europe and fighting them all over the world. England had the world’s greatest navy, but it was not greater than the combined navies of America’s allies. For England it was a sea rather than a land war, and a devastatingly costly one at that.

Had it not been a “world war” with England’s military and economic resources spread all over the world fighting to retain her colonies, she could have concentrated all her might against the American colonies, and the United States never could have won independence. Nevertheless, even today (as in Joseph Smith’s day), Americans think of our Revelation as being only our war, fought on American soil to gain American independence.

Nephi described the American Revolutionary War that secured the environment into which the gospel could be restored as a battle that took place on the seas rather then a struggle that took place in only the thirteen colonies. In that, Nephi’s description is a much more accurate description than Joseph Smith or his American contemporaries could have been expected to write. This is one more of those little evidences that Joseph was not the original author of the Book of Mormon.

To secure their liberties, the Americans fought the American Revolution (just as Nephi had foreseen) established the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and began to spread over most of North America.

As America grew in size, its westerners worked out the final bugs in the system so that there came to be greater political, economic, and religious freedom there than ever before in recorded history. It had taken almost 2,000 years to create a perfect environment in which Joseph Smith could restore the fulness of the gospel, and then Brigham Young could lead the Saints to the safety of the Rocky Mountains.

Some historians have seen that pattern and have argued that Joseph Smith was simply a product of the times in which he lived, but from the point of view of Latter-day Saints, the environment had been carefully shaped so the Prophet Joseph could come and do his work. Looking at the past 2000 years from that prospective, even though there have been some very ugly times, in the big picture we see one of the great miracles of human history.

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1 Nephi 13:12 

12. And I looked and beheld a man among the Gentiles, who was separated from the seed of my brethren by the many waters; and I beheld the Spirit of God, that it came down and wrought upon the man; and he went forth upon the many waters, even unto the seed of my brethren, who were in the promised land.

Our tendency, sometimes, when we think of foreordination, is to limit the scope of our own understanding to having it be about only the great prophets. But here is a striking example of Nephi’s knowing about Columbus’s mission 2,000 years before it happened. Nephi also described other events that required specific individuals to bring about their accomplishment. For example, President Ezra Taft Benson observed:

The restoration of the gospel and the establishment of the Lord’s church could not come to pass until the founding fathers were raised up and completed their foreordained missions. Those great souls who were responsible for the freedoms we enjoy acknowledged the guiding hand of providence.{1}

President Benson’s words echo George Washington’s:

The hand of Providence has been so conspicuous in all this, that he must be worse than an infidel that lacks faith, and more wicked, that has not gratitude enough to acknowledge his obligations.”{2}

Just because those men were foreordained to their tasks does not mean that the tasks were easily accomplished. It only means that the Lord removed the obstacles that would have prevented them altogether. Elder Alvin R. Dyer observed:

The very articles of the Constitution would seem testimony enough that the ministerial bickerings of that day did not hamper, to any appreciable degree, the work for which they were foreordained of God and which they accomplished to the lasting benefit of mankind.{3}

When Wilford Woodruff did the temple work for the Founding Fathers and others in the St. George Temple, he ordained all the men for whom vicarious work was done to be elders, except a few whom he ordained High Priests. President Woodruff’s journal reads:

August 19, 1877
I spent the Evening in preparing a list of the Noted Men of the 17 Century and 18th including the signers of the declaration of Independence and the Presidents of the United States for Baptism on Tuesday the 21 Aug 1877.

August 21, 1877
I Wilford Woodruff went to the Temple of the Lord this morning and was Baptized for 100 persons who were dead including the signers of the Declaration of Independence all except John Hancock and [William Floyd]. I was baptized for the following names: [lists names] ….

Baptized for the following Eminent Men: [lists names] ….
When Br McAllister had Baptized me for the 100 Names I Baptized him for 21, including Gen Washington & his forefathers and all the Presidents of the United States that were not in my list Except Buchanan Van Buren & Grant. It was a vary interesting day. I felt thankful that we had the privilege and power to administer for the worthy dead especially for the signers of the declaration of Independence. that inasmuch as they had laid the foundation of our Government that we Could do as much for them as they had done for us.
Sister Lucy Bigelow Young went forth into the font and was Baptized for Martha Washington and her family and seventy (70) of the Eminent women of the world. I Called upon all the Brethren & Sisters who were present to assist in getting Endowments for those that we had been Baptized for that day.

August 22, 1877
…. [Wilford Woodruff] ordained 2 High Priests for George Washington and John Wesley ….

August 23, 1877
…. W Woodruff Ordained 2 High Priest One for Christopher Columbus.

March 19, 1894
I had a Dream in the night. I met with Benjamin Franklin. I thought he was on the Earth. I spent several hours with him and talked over our Endowments. He wanted some more work done for him than had been done that I promised him He should have (2d). I thought then He died and while waiting for burial I awoke. I thought very strange of my Dream. I made up m mind to get 2d Anointing for Benjamin Franklin & George Washington.{4}

One can get a better sense of how completely God is in charge of the world’s affairs when we realize that not only is he aware of what is going to happen, but he is also concerned with who is going to do it. Brigham Young explained,

If God has foreordained certain men to certain ends, it is because he knew all things from eternity, as in the case of Pharaoh, who he knew would do wickedly; consequently, selected him to be put upon the throne. “You are determined to be wicked and to carry out the schemes of the Devil; therefore I will use you to promote my kingdom on the earth and to exalt me among men, for I know that you will do all you can against my children, against my work, and against my grace to save the children of men.” God raised him to the throne of Egypt, because he foresaw that in this position he could use him to the greatest advantage to His cause,—not because he was foreordained to that position.{5}

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FOOTNOTES

{1} Ezra Taft Benson, The Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1988), 604.

{2} John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., Writings of George Washington, 39 vols.(Washington, U.S. G.P.O. 1931-44), 12:343.

{3} Alvin R. Dyer, Who Am I? (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1966), 20.

{4} “Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, 1833-1898,” Typescript in 9 vols. edited by Scott G. Kenney.

{5} Brigham Young, in Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (London: Latter-day Saints’ Book Depot, 1854-1886), 8: 160.

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1 Nephi 13:1-5 
1 And it came to pass that the angel spake unto me, saying: Look! And I looked and beheld many nations and kingdoms.
2 And the angel said unto me: What beholdest thou? And I said: I behold many nations and kingdoms.
3 And he said unto me: These are the nations and kingdoms of the Gentiles.
4 And it came to pass that I saw among the nations of the Gentiles the formation of a great church.
5 And the angel said unto me: Behold the formation of a church which is most abominable above all other churches, which slayeth the saints of God, yea, and tortureth them and bindeth them down, and yoketh them with a yoke of iron, and bringeth them down into captivity.

What Nephi was being shown was the “formation” of a great and abominable church. That formation began in the old world even before the apostles were killed. Both Paul and Peter warned the saints—not that it was coming—but that it is upon them already.

The apostate movement did not originate as a single organization, but it was a widespread decay of both doctrine and priesthood authority. Nephi understood it as a single church because it had a single founder—the devil—and because, in all of its parts, it engaged in the same coercive and destructive tactics.

Christianity quickly spread all over the world. Historians credit that spread to the vigor of Christian missionaries, but we can gather from the Savior’s statement to the Nephites that he personally visited the remnants of the house of Israel wherever they were. That would account for the sudden growth of Christianity. For example, I learned while I was on my mission that there is a little chapel near Norwich, in Norfolk, England that sits on the hill where tradition says the Savior came and taught the sermon on the Mount—which, judging from his appearance in America, is precisely what we would expect he would have done. There is another tradition that both Peter and Paul were in England, as well as in Gaul and Italy. The acts of Thomas tells how that apostle went to India and was very successful there. Marco Polo reported that not long before he arrived in China, there had been a titanic battle between the Christian and non-Christian armies, and that the Christians had been wiped out. One of the greatest problems these widespread congregations had was their inability to communicate with each other. The technology did not exist that would enable men with priesthood authority to keep reins on the church organization or its eroding doctrine. There was no way for the apostles to keep in touch with each other or with their converted friends—except by letters that were slow in arriving (that is, if the letters arrived at all).

From the writings of the apostles in the New Testament, it is clear that people, rather than letting go of their old traditions, were importing them into the church. The upshot was that each of the scattered congregations was left to its own resources and its own interpretations of doctrines.

One can find other symptoms of apostasy developing even before the conclusion of the New Testament. The letters written by Peter and Paul show that neither of them had any hope that the church they had helped establish would survive. Rather, their letters focused on the hope that their friends would hold on to their own individual testimonies— that they would be able to endure to the end.{1}

There was a systematic, murderous persecution of the saints by the Roman government. In time, all of the Twelve except John were martyred and the church was left without apostles or prophets. The result of that was that many of the people who actually did have the authority to lead the church by revelation, and actually did have the true doctrines, were killed, and other people (some well meaning, others self serving) tried to take their place and established their own authority. The result was that within the first few generations in most parts of the world, Christianity was different from the Church that had been instituted by the Savior and his apostles. The apostasy was already completed within 150 or 200 years so the question was how is the Lord going to fix things. The way he accomplished that was one of the most wonderful stories in history.

So “the formation of a great church” that Nephi describes was a general apostasy, where people without proper authority sought to restructure the church and accommodate its teachings to their own purposes.
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FOOTNOTES

{1} Examples of warnings of that early apostasy are Acts 20:28-31; Galatians 1:6-8; 1 Timothy 4:1-3; 2 Timothy 1:13-15, 3:10-15, 4:1-8; 3 John 1:9-11.

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1 Nephi chapters 13-14 

After introducing us to the apostasy that destroyed the Savior’s Church Nephi does a quick jump, passing over a thousand years of European history to a new era of enlightenment. Much had happened in Europe during the time that Nephi skipped over. The original Christianity had been completely absorbed by pagan traditions. However, during that absorption the first steps toward preparation for the restoration of the gospel had already taken place. Europe had been “Christianized.” The pagan gods seemed to have disappeared. but the basic theology of the pagan religions still remained essentially intact,

An example of how that was done is the missionary effort of the French king Charlemagne. His missionary methods were simple and effective. When his armies conquered a village, he gathered its leading men together and forced them to hear a sermon preached by his own priest. The sermon carried a simple message: baptism was necessary for one to go to heaven, so without baptism one would go to hell. After the sermon, Charlemagne gave his captives a choice. They could either be baptized and go to heaven at their leisure, or they could refuse to be baptized and go to hell immediately. They tended to choose baptism. Charlemagne was not interested in theology, so he let them keep their old beliefs but insisted they worship “Jesus” rather than Odin. Thereupon Odin became “Jesus,” and the local gods were given the names of Christian saints. The belief systems remained the same. Jesus now looked and acted much like Odin, but Odin did not exist anymore. Since false gods only exist in the minds of their worshipers, when the worshipers no longer worship them those gods no longer exist. That is important because, no matter what their beliefs were, the Europeans were now worshiping a god whose name was “Jesus.” Consequently, centuries later when Gutenberg invented the printing press and Rasmus published the New Testament in Greek, much of the preliminary work toward a real European conversion to Christianity had already been done.

Armed with these new printed scriptures, the Reformers began to address the questions, “Who was the real Jesus, and what did he really teach?” It was not necessary to start afresh by introducing Christianity to Europe, because the Europeans already worshiped “Jesus.” All that was necessary was to redefine both Jesus and his teachings. That was accomplished on two fronts: first by the great Protestant reformers, and then by the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Both groups read and accepted the New Testament and tried to make their religions square with the teachings they found there.

Then even more marvelous things began to happen. People who read the New Testament discovered a theology in which God was loving and kind and where individual people had souls that mattered. But that was not all. With the invention of the printing press, scholars began to publish works of ancient Greek histories and philosophers. Thus, the very best ideas of the ancient world were thrust upon Europeans as new and revolutionary ideas. Into the mix of the Judeo-Christian doctrines that people had individual worth, were the Greek ideas of rationality and responsibility and the Roman idea of the supremacy of the law. Calvinism added the doctrine of the Protestant Work Ethic. Ittaught that one should work hard, be frugal, honest, and generous, because those qualities are evidences that one is in God’s good graces, and such a person will go to heaven. That doctrine was the rationale behind the individual initiative that created the free market system and participatory government. All of those ideas came together in England, where they were merged with an acceptance of freedom of religion and with the very best of British legal traditions: British Common Law and the fundamental principles of local and national, democratically elected representative government. All of those ideas blossomed together into a beautiful new kind of Christianity. That Christianity had taken almost 2000 years to develop, and when it was at its purest beauty, it was transplanted to North America where it could mature to create the political, economic, and religious environment in which the fullness of the gospel could be restored by the Prophet Joseph Smith.

No doubt, Nephi saw all of that, but he focused on those events during that 2000-year history that were most relevant to himself and to his people. He described Columbus as being brought to America by the Holy Ghost, and then the European invasion and destruction of the cultures of the American Indians.

Thus the events that Nephi described to us may be seen in two lights—each illuminating a different facet of the same history. One is the story of corruption, decadence and apostasy in the old world. But the other is the testimony of how the Lord carefully works through human history to achieve his purposes, without violating the agency of any individual. Even though Nephi mourned because of the destruction of his own people, his mourning was subordinated to his rejoicing in the restoration of the gospel, the triumphal return of the Savior, and the establishment of His millennial reign.

There are two ways to consider the Great Apostasy. The first is to see it as a dreadful thing that extended through the period of the Roman Empire, through the Dark Ages, through the Reformation and the Renaissance, and continues on through to our time. That view is defensible but inadequate.

The second way of looking at the apostasy is to see it as a short-term event lasting less than 200 years as the Church established by the Savior was perverted from within and persecuted from without, then seeing most of the next 1600 years as events in the process of creating an environment in which the gospel could be restored. That is a much more positive and accurate description of what happened.

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1 Nephi 12:16-18 

16. And the angel spake unto me, saying: Behold the fountain of filthy water that thy father saw; yea, even the river of that he spake; and the depths thereof are the depths of hell.
17. And the mists of darkness are the temptations of the devil, that blindeth the eyes, and hardeneth the hearts of the children of men, and leadeth them away into broad roads, that they perish and are lost.
18. And the large and spacious building, that thy father saw, is vain imaginations and the pride of the children of men. And a great and a terrible gulf divideth them; yea, even the word of the justice of the Eternal God, and the Messiah who is the Lamb of God, of whom the Holy Ghost beareth record, from the beginning of the world until this time, and from this time henceforth and forever.

A common thread runs through the symbolism of each of the bad things the angel explained to Nephi. That thread is a persistence in insisting that things are real when they are not real. Jeremiah accused the children of Israel of the same sort of thing: “How shall I pardon thee for this? Thy children have forsaken me, and sworn by them that are no gods” (Jeremiah 5:7). That same sense, that the pagan gods are not gods but just bits of wood or metal, is also found in Isaiah: “All nations before him are as nothing; and they are counted to him less than nothing, and vanity” (Isaiah 40:17).

Both Jeremiah and Isaiah are accusing the Israelites of the same thing: Not that they are swearing by or worshiping a god that is false, but that they are swearing by and worshiping a god that has no reality at all.

This is like the angel’s explanation to Nephi: “The mists of darkness are the temptations of the devil, that blindeth the eyes, and hardeneth the hearts” (1 Nephi 12:17). Blindness of this sort is never perceived as real blindness. It mocks the light and “loves darkness rather than light.” Here again the problem is one’s refusing to see the reality of the light and insisting that a bad thing is actually good, turning from reality to a fiction and using the fiction to obscure the reality. Evil is real, but the rationale that is used to justify it is an illusion.

Hardness of heart is the same thing. The refusal to know binds us in “the chains of hell” (Alma 12:11). Having a hard heart is refusing to hear, as being in the mists of darkness is refusing to see. It is turning from the reality of the things of God to a fiction that are the “philosophies of men,” making the fiction the path of one’s life and refusing to recognize the light that is real.

“The large and spacious building…is vain imaginations and the pride of the children of men.” Everything is this world, even our own bodies testify to us that they are tentative. “Vain” simply means things that have no consequence, artificial things (money, a fancy car, a big house, power, the ability to exercise authority over other people) that are transient in their nature, temporary in their worth. They seem as real as our experience in this world but are not real in terms of our being able to sustain their existence, or they ours, beyond the this life.

Not everything in this world lacks permanence. One’s house is temporary, and will decay into the elements from which it came, but inviting someone home to dinner may have eternal ramifications. The car is temporary, but giving someone a ride when he needs to get somewhere is real. Power and authority are very temporary, but blessing someone’s life is very real. Real things are things that will last through eternity.

“Vain imaginations” is a kind of redundancy. It suggests things that have no reality but that are imagined to be of worth. Pride is about things that have no reality but that are imagined to be of worth, except “pride” is one’s attitude about the imaginary things with which we decorate ourselves (like the emperor’s clothes) as opposed to the “vain imaginations” that we worship.

If this appraisal is correct, then the message of the angel to Nephi is that our successfully going to the tree of life may be as simple as having a correct perception of reality, and going anywhere else is only pretending that a non-reality has worth, and then seeking after that pretended worth. Then of course, when we get it, pride is making sure everyone else recognizes that we have it.

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