The following is the text to a series of videos I produced to expand upon the meaning of First Nephi 1:1. The series backstory and other information is also linked.
1. Troubles and the Book
A powerful example of a good person who triumphs through tragedy.
View the Video (5:08)
You’re in pain. Anxious. Lost. Afraid. You have had enough of him, or her, or it, or them.
You cry yourself to sleep or you cry out, “Why? Why is this happening? I hurt so bad. Please, free me from this!”
We all know pain. Each of us has had our own hidden hurts. In fact, they seem to be the one thing we all have in common.
But we must not despair, for there is something on the other side of pain: hope. In fact, strengthening hope—and faith, patience and love—is what pain is all about.
My goal is to examine pain with you, to present its purposes, and to suggest strategies for enduring and overcoming it. We will do this through the eyes of someone whose many pains nearly crippled him, and which nearly killed him several times. Someone who triumphed through challenges beyond what most of us will ever face, who recorded his experiences so we could learn, like him, to harvest joy from them.
His name is Nephi.
So who is Nephi?
An author, for one thing. He wrote the first two books in the Book of Mormon.
He lived in Jerusalem about 2,600 year ago, a time dense with fear and tragedy as nations invaded, kings were murdered, and families struggled with cycles of poverty, fear, prosperity, and destruction. Nephi’s own life was deeply spiritual but often filled with crippling physical and emotional pain and fear.
He struggled against his brothers, got married, raised children, founded a nation, and made epic journeys that measured up to anything out of the classic myths. But unlike those myths, his story is true.
His life was a journey to do good, to be patient in pain, and to find and follow God regardless of the cost. And find Him he did.
God revealed to Nephi that his challenges had a purpose. They were lovingly calibrated to give him experiences that would develop his own vision well enough so that, when God showed him our day, Nephi could understand us. He could feel our pain and record his experiences in such a way that they would help us get through our own challenges. He may not have understood automobiles, planes, the Internet or cell phones, but he knew despair, regret, loneliness, unfairness, pain, rejection, and death. He knew hopes, dreams, repentance, redemption, and faith.
Like the Bible, his books are filled with great stories. They are at times profound, inspiring, simple and complex, sometimes head-scratching, sometimes tragic, surprising, and even laugh-out-loud funny. But more than being merely entertaining, they are full of great stories filled with life-changing learning.
They can inspire you to take your own journey through these pages. Each time I have gone through them I have gained a broader understanding of the book’s messages and of myself and gained a more spiritually intimate relationship with God. And I have gained helps to get me through life.
These principles can be found in the first 68 words of the book. I urge you to study them with me. This verse, though tiny, is as broad as the universe. Its study will provide you life-changing insights and will help you discover the who, the why, and the how in your life. And it will help you deal with pain.
So. Let’s dive into it a bit deeper. Next time, we’ll take a look at who this Nephi was and why he was so concerned about us.
2. The Child Prophet
Introducing Nephi, his world, challenges, pains and successes and why this young prophet was so concerned about us.
View the Video (6:12)
“I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents, therefore I was taught somewhat in all the learning of my father; and having seen many afflictions in the course of my days, nevertheless, having been highly favored of the Lord in all my days; yea, having had a great knowledge of the goodness and the mysteries of God, therefore I make a record of my proceedings in my days.”
This is the opening verse of the Book of Mormon. It is a tightly-coiled introduction to a scriptural universe and a tantalizing pointer toward everything you need to know about God and yourself.
Let’s unspool it a bit and see what it has for us, starting by introducing its remarkable author.
Nephi had a hard life. His family was quite wealthy, but his country was slashed again and again by political and religious conflicts and overrun by brutal wars.
He was the fourth of six brothers born to Lehi and Sariah, along with an unstated number of sisters, living in Jerusalem about 600 years before Christ’s birth. He was a descendant of Manasseh, son of Joseph, son of the prophet Abraham. His father Lehi apparently made his living as a merchant or trader. As such, Lehi likely traveled extensively, by caravan and perhaps by boat. He very likely took his growing children – his business heirs – on some of these trips. He also knew some of the city’s elite, including the Jewish army’s commanding general. He spoke Egyptian as well as his native Hebrew. Also, as Jerusalem was a regional finance, culture, religion and military hub, he was probably at least familiar with the other major trade languages of the time, including Greek and Persian.
At the opening of the book, Nephi describes himself as being “a man”, but also being “exceedingly young”. Some have calculated his age to be 13, the traditional age when boys were considered men, or 14. Nephi also describes himself as being “large in stature”, which at least refers to physical size.
Laman, his eldest brother, was heir to the family fortune and was respected as such by the entire family. Lemuel was next, followed by Sam, Nephi, and later Jacob and Joseph.
As I said, Nephi lived in warlike times. One hundred years before his birth, the ten northern tribes of Israel had been destroyed by Assyria, leaving the tribes of Judah and Benjamin clinging to life around Jerusalem. As a result, many kings ruled his country during his lifetime: Josiah, Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim – an Egyptian puppet enthroned when Judah was conquered by Egypt – Jehoiachin, and Zedekiah, another puppet placed there when the Babylonians drove out the Egyptians. Nabopolassar, and later Nebuchadnezzar, reigned in Babylon. Pharaoh Necho was king of Egypt.
The biblical prophets Nahum, Huldah, Jeremiah, Zephaniah, Obadiah, Daniel (carried captive to Babylon), Habakkuk, Ezekiel, and many others spent years warning the people about their potential destruction.
Nephi and his family fled Jerusalem around 600 years before Christ, a good thing because three years after they left, Babylon staged successive attacks against his country and within two decades had levelled it to the ground.
Nephi and his family were far away by then, on their own journey, a small family alone in a sequence of wildernesses. To survive, they had to learn many basic skills. Under God’s tutelage, Nephi became a prophet, husband, father, inventor, metalworker, shipwright, pioneer, architect, warrior, general, scholar, linguist, poet, historian, king and founder of a numerous people.
He was a strict disciplinarian with a no-nonsense approach to human relations and an ironclad sense of justice, which enabled him to take up the sword, when he had to, many times. Still, given what he saw and created, it is easy to imagine him having an artistic, generous, spiritually sensitive soul that ached with compassion for others.
Sounds like the perfect voice for our time.
About 30 years after leaving Jerusalem, he began recording his stories into what we now know as First Nephi and Second Nephi, the opening two books in the Book of Mormon. They chronicle his life in Jerusalem, his family’s departure, his voyage across the ocean, and his experiences at nation building and establishing a tradition of faith among his descendants. They also reveal some small glimpse into the crushing challenges he faced, all of which strengthened his hope and faith and revealed how the heavens opened to him as a result.
Next time we will look at those visions and see why he wrote them for you.
3. Molehills and Universes
The motivations behind Nephi’s concern for us and how the messages from his lifetime of immense challenges can help you get through your own doubt and pain today.
View the Video (5:34)
Previously, I introduced Nephi and his writings and sketched out his world and why it matters to you. Now we’ll talk about why he did what he did – his motivation.
Nephi used the phrase “my days” three times in the book’s first paragraph. As a lead-in to books this master orator labored over for years, his word choice was no accident.
The first usage, “having seen many afflictions in the course of my days”, summarized his core impression of his life, that it had been filled with suffering. His younger brother eloquently echoed this thought: “The time passed away with us, and also our lives passed away like as it were unto us a dream, we being a lonesome and a solemn people, wanderers, cast out from Jerusalem, born in tribulation, in a wilderness, and hated of our brethren, which caused wars and contentions; wherefore, we did mourn out our days.”
Seeming almost embarrassed at his focus on the negatives, though, Nephi quickly followed this up with the second usage, contrasting that pain with his lifelong, glorious blessings: “Nevertheless, having been highly favored of the Lord in all my days…”
Lastly, he used the phrase again to hint at his earnest desire to tell his story in his own words, a desire he later emphasized several times: “I make a record of my proceedings in my days.” He yearned to describe his life and the lessons he learned in it, to save us from calamities like his own, and to help us build our own hope for a better life.
Nephi knew God, factually. Like other prophets, he saw and talked with The Lord face to face. That association led him to know who God was, and to know that our relationship with Him was that of father to child, a relationship we all share. He saw that each of us had spent time together with him and our Heavenly Father before our earthly birth.
Nephi knew that all human beings – male and female – are created in the image of God. Each of us is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents. As such, we each have a divine nature and destiny.
Before our birth on Earth, each spirit son and daughter worshipped God as their Eternal Father and accepted His plan by which they could obtain a physical body and gain earthly experience to progress toward perfection as heirs of eternal life.
Although the active memory of that life has been withheld from us, some connections there still tug at us. We sometimes feel that our life here is a bondage, a limitation. We look to the stars and sense that we are meant for greater things. And we are.
You, I, and everyone who has been or ever will be on this earth are part of a plan. Like each of us, Nephi’s earthly experiences with God allowed him to raise his head above the molehill of his existence and see that he was part of a broader universe. That gave him hope so that, even through a lifetime of immense difficulty and pain, he knew that helps were pre-placed and made available to us, and that a better world waited. He knew that his life and its challenges had meaning and purpose, and that God loved him and had a place for him, just like God does for each of us. God provided means by which each of us can triumph over our challenges so that we can experience joy in this life and a fullness of joy in the life to come.
God’s plan of happiness enables family relationships to continue beyond the grave and makes it possible for individuals to return to the presence of God and for families to be united eternally. Nephi knew with empowering clarity the value of this message and yearned for the welfare of his people, spending his whole life doing all he could to help them understand, accept, and take advantage of those words.
With the wrenching challenges we each experience in life, such a perspective can be comforting, empowering, revealing, and even lifesaving.
What we have described here is a small taste of the power in this book. Next we’ll take a look at how such a work came to be.
4. Plates Like Gold
The remarkable power of one man’s story and the powerful influence your own works can have.
View the Video (5:12)
Nephi’s learning and faith led him to do remarkable things, as we touched on last time, the knowledge of which influences us today. Let’s take a look at his work, the 2,600-year-old, life-changing history he wrote for our day.
About 30 years after the events in the beginning of the Book of Mormon, the Lord inspired Nephi to create a record of God’s impact in his life. To obey God’s command, to help his children learn from his successes and failures, and to serve as a warning to future generations, he wrote down his story, engraving the words on metal plates that had the appearance of gold. A wise request, seeing that God intended to preserve them for centuries.
As Nephi aged and his kingdom became more settled, he commanded officials to continue keeping records. His descendants obeyed that command for a thousand years. As that civilization neared its end, a leader named Mormon reviewed all their history and massaged it into one manageable volume. With help from his son Moroni, he engraved the result onto other plates, making a durable and invaluable summary.
Moroni eventually buried those plates. This same Moroni, in fulfillment of biblical prophecies, appeared to a young boy named Joseph Smith 1,400 years later and showed him where the plates were buried. With God’s help, Joseph acquired, translated and published that record, creating what we now know as the Book of Mormon. It is now available in print and electronic form in many languages. The book laid the foundation for the restoration of God’s ancient church in modern times, a church not affiliated with or having doctrinal or direct historical ties to any other faith or creed.
Today, tens of thousands of missionaries and many millions of followers across the globe spread the book’s message of love, healing, salvation, peace, power, and good will, making those golden plates worth far more than gold to people everywhere.
I sometimes wonder if our own journals could have the same impact. Nephi emphasized that the purpose of his writing was “for the learning and the profit of my children”. His brother Jacob added that the people labored diligently to keep their records, “hoping that our beloved brethren and our children will receive them with thankful hearts, and look upon them that they may learn with joy and not with sorrow, neither with contempt, concerning their first parents. For, for this intent have we written these things, that they may know that we knew of Christ, and we had a hope of his glory”
Thumbing through your ancestors’ photo albums helps you connect with them. Your record could have the same effect. Your children could turn the pages of your own history and view your stories, perhaps learning from them where they came from, how they can improve, what they should avoid, or how get through their own lives.
A modern prophet, Spencer W. Kimball, said, ““People often use the excuse that their lives are uneventful and nobody would be interested in what they have done. But I promise you that if you will keep your journals and records, they will indeed be a source of great inspiration to your families, to your children, your grandchildren, and others, on through the generations… “Begin today and write in it your goings and comings, your deepest thoughts, your achievements and your failures, your associations and your triumphs, your impressions and your testimonies.”
Centuries ago, Nephi followed that counsel and created his own record. From him, we learn sacred and essential things.
Next time we’ll take a look at where the Book of Mormon’s power comes from, starting with its remarkable first two words.