Book of Mormon Themes
Apostasy
[Themes of the Book of Mormon: Entropy; Rechabite wanderers;
Land of Promise; Gospel Plan; Materialism; Ethnic Mix of People;
Promised Land; Wilderness]
23,24 Because of our imperfections we break down. Anything which isn’t perfect isn’t going to last, if it has the slightest flaw. That’s why we must come here and get baptized to wash away our sins and achieve perfection. If you have flaws they show up very quickly, as you know. We talked about the constant decline because things run downhill. That’s entropy. So destruction is a great theme, and the Book of Mormon hits it all the time.
24 This is the Rechabite motif—driven by fate. All the great men are wanderers, strangers like Abraham. He was a stranger and wanderer in the earth looking for a city of God which was built without hands. Abraham was called a refugee. Every year, especially the seventh year, every Jew would come to the temple and make a basket like a cornucopia of all the good things from his land, the blessings that his land had given him. Then he would say a prayer and say, “Our father Abraham was an outcast and a Syrian, a tramp and a wanderer that had no home.” That’s what the word Hebrew means—IVRI means a person who has no attachment, a displaced person. The Israelites were always displaced persons. Abraham wandered; he had to rent his grave from a Phoenician in Hebron. He didn’t have anything of his own. He was a stranger depending on other people’s bounty wherever he went, and of course depending on God wherever he went. Our father Abraham was a stranger, a wanderer, a tramp, and so are we all. It comes out all the time that we are all refugees.
25 Another theme is that this is the land of promise. The Lord said, if you want to be saved you have to get out. Lehi has a dream—he must get out. Nephi has a dream—he must get out. Mosiah has a dream—he must get out. You must get out of here. It isn’t safe where you are; you have to keep moving. This business of surviving has to be more than survival.
25 Then this idea about the record, how the books hold it together. That’s another theme we mentioned. A book is a mnemonic device. There’s a great deal said about memory and the importance of memory. The purpose of writing, as the Book of Mormon tells us, is to keep in the people’s memory the things that the Lord wants them to know. That’s why it is given to them. He says, if we had to write these things from memory our record would not be reliable. So no matter how good your memory is you have to write things down. The record holds everything together. Your identity is your memory. If you lose your memory you lose your identity. I did for a while back in 1964. I had a minor stroke or something and forgot absolutely everything, lost identity and everything else. The remarkable thing is the way it came back, improved as a matter of fact.
26 Then the gospel plan. As I said, the Book of Mormon has better, more clear expositions. The half-a-dozen sermons you find in the Book of Mormon are great. Some of them are the only ones, like Alma’s talk to his son Corianton. He is the only person who tells us what happens after this. Is there something? Yes, he says, I know. I went there, and it was hell what I had to go through because I hadn’t been doing right. There is more, and it tells us the whole plan. It’s laid out throughout the Book of Mormon. All these passages right at the beginning of Jacob tell how it is going to be. After their greatest victory Nephi can prophesy. This gospel plan is temporal and it is eternal. It goes for the eternities. And they live after the manner of happiness in the gospel plan. What a marvelous thing to say—that there is a manner of happiness and what it is like. Nobody else has it. You can have everything here.
26 This is a theme we haven’t mentioned, that of materialism. It piles up. Remember the Buddha. He was the son of a local prince but a very rich one. He had everything he wanted. His father particularly spoiled him because he didn’t want him to become mystic and join the priests or anything like that He gave him everything the heart of man could desire—the food, the play, the games, the sex, and all the rest of it. It made him sick, and he just brooded about it. He was not satisfied with it. He went out into the woods and finally found nothing. What was he looking for? The only conclusion he could reach was the five conditions in which you are nothing. Don’t want anything and you won’t be disappointed. Don’t expect anything. There is no hereafter. There is no nothing. Once you get that idea, then nothing will worry you. Of course it won’t. You might as well put a bullet through your head. Then nothing will worry you either. But that was it. The religions of the East promise us that. Don’t expect anything and you won’t be disappointed.
26 The very same problem was faced by Enos in that marvelous book. Enos was a marvelous example, so was Nephi. (What a neurotic Nephi was, worried himself sick.) All day long Enos brooded. He’d had everything in his life. He was worried about himself because he hadn’t been doing right. He said, this can’t be what I’m here for. Then he finally remembered what his father had said about these things. He prayed all night. He said, this can’t go on—I can’t live like this. He went alone to hunt beasts in the forest. He was the spoiled prince who had everything, but it wouldn’t do at all. He finally had the vision; the Lord came to him.
27 If you have everything, that’s not going to be it. This brings in the subject of materialism anid the fatal gong that strikes in the Book of Mormon when it says, ‘They set their hearts on riches.” Oh, look out when it says that! And does this apply to us?
27 Then there’s the ethnic mix. Here’s another one you could write about. The Book of Mormon is a crazy quilt of ethnic mixture, and we have always been so simplistic about it. When I was a little kid everything you found was either Nephite or Lamanite. Well, that’s not so at all according to the Book of Mormon. It talks of vacant lands and people who had been there, of vast areas deforested by the former inhabitants of the land. They weren’t Jaredites either. This was down in the south lands.. Don’t make this ethnic mix business so simple.
27,28 Lehi is of what tribe? He is out of Manasseh. Well, who is Ephraim and Manasseh’s mother? We are descended from Ephraim. Ephraim and Manasseh were the sons of Joseph and Asenath. Joseph married Asenath, and she was the daughter of the high priest of Heliopolis. She had to be pure blood Egyptian. So the ancestor of Ephraim is Egyptus. Don’t worry about that. But that gives a terrific mixture because the Egyptians were already a mixture of at least seven different lines. Asenath had at least seven. Remember they [Lehi’s family] were half Manasseh. They were on the other side of the Jordan. They were desert Arabs. They all had Arab names, as you find in the Book of Mormon. [His family] marries up with Ishmael. A Jew isn’t going to be called Ishmael because Ishmael was the enemy of Jacob. Ishmael was the father and hero of the Arabs. He [the Ishmael in the Book of Mormon] had his daughters marry the sons of Lehi. You can be sure they were Ishmaelites because Lehi himself was a desert man. He was a merchant who traveled in the desert. [Ishmael] would be his cousin and an Ishmaelite.
28 Then they took Zoram. He was the servant of Laban, as you know. It calls him a slave. But a Jew can’t be a slave of another Jew. Zoram, as his name shows, was obviously of some other tribe. He could have been from one of the old Canaanite tribes, a Phoenician, or anything else. Right from the beginning you get this terrific mixture in the family of Lehi. Then throughout the Book of Mormon you find all sorts of mixing going on— strange things. .
28 Then there’s the theme of the promised land. In the Dead Sea Scrolls every blessing goes with a cursing because that’s the penalty. In a contract you have to have a penalty clause. If you don’t keep the contract, you said, “Well, that’s fine. If I keep the contract I get rich. If I don’t keep it, nothing lost.” When you invest in a thing like that you have to be kept to something. The promised land is never mentioned without the curse that’s on it. There is a promise on the land. The curse is sometimes mentioned first. There’s a curse on this land if you do not live up to it—when you are ripe in iniquity. When the fruit is ripe there is no reason for letting it go on rotting. Then is the time you have to pick it. Or when the cup of iniquity is full then you can add no more to it. You can’t dilute it; you can’t take the poison out of it. When that time comes, then the inhabitants shall be swept from the land. Extinct is the word that’s used. This doesn’t happen in other nations. This is a special curse on the promised land. The Greeks, Arabs, and Egyptians are still there. The Hindus and Chinese were ancient nations when Lehi left Jerusalem. They are still there, still speak their language, and still have their culture. But what about the cultures that were in America? Nobody can even guess about them. Nobody has the wildest guess about what was going on in the time of Christ 2,000 years [ago] in this country. You can’t even begin to guess that because we have no written records, nothing like that. They haven’t found the big stuff yet. I’m sure they will find it. It’s different in this country. They have disappeared. The magnificent ruins are there and some of the people, like the Mayan, are still there and still speak [the language]. But they have lost all connection with the past; it’s all gone. They are nations from the dust. Notice how often the Book of Mormon uses that phrase “from the dust.” Whispering from the dust, these voices of nations that have passed. It’s very sad when it starts out. This is a voice that comes to you. There’s nothing sadder than the ending or the beginning. When you get this record you shall know.
28-29 Incidentally, that’s another theme, the wilderness theme and the importance of living in the wilderness. You’ll notice that at least half of the Book of Mormon takes place in the wilderness. It’s always the good people that are in the wilderness. You have to go back to nature to make yourself clear. They do that. Lehi and Nephi would always go out by themselves to pray. And where was the revelation given to Joseph Smith? In the grove. He went to the grove. He starts out his story (that was discovered in 1969, the oldest version of the First Vision) with how he got onto it. He lived in the most beautiful area. Upstate New York is gorgeous, but then it was a marvelous wilderness. He said he looked about him and saw what a beautiful world it is, the sun and the moon and all nature in its glory, and man walking forth upon the face of the earth with all his potential and glory. This was when he was just a kid fourteen years old.
29,30 And when he looked upon the wickedness and the dissensions and the violence and the deceptions and the meanness and the cruelty of man, he said there was something definitely wrong. That’s what first sent him to the Bible and out to the grove to ask what was going on. There the Lord told him, “Behold the world lieth in sin at this time and none doeth good, no not one, ... and mine anger is kindling against the inhabitants of the earth to visit them according to this ungodliness.” [Reference note: Dean C. Jessee, “The Early Accounts of Joseph Smith’s First Vision,” BYU Studies (Spring 1969): 275] His [the Lords] anger is kindling, getting hotter and hotter. It’s building up. When Alma, Enoch, Jared, Lehi, Nephi, Ammon or whoever it is runs away, it is always to the wilderness. You get out and away from people if you can.
30 Alma 45:21 Then we have the theme of the routine apostasy. Must it always happen? We say the individual is without excuse, but they [societies] always apostatize. We are going to get a very good speech on this in Alma Chapter 46. If this chapter was the only one we had, it would be quite enough to prove the Book of Mormon and to convince a person. Naturally you must read what goes on before. At the end of [Alma] Chapter 45 everybody got very rich. For behold, because of their wars with the Lamanites and the many little dissensions and disturbances. . .” There were lots of troubles everywhere because things had gotten uncorrelated, like the Church in Europe after World War II.
31 `Alma 45:23 There were many dissensions and disturbances, so they had to make a single regulation throughout the Church. The central authority had to take over, which you have to do, of course. That’s why you have the central offices, etc. So Helaman, the son of Alma, and his brethren went forth to establish the Church again. They went to straighten things out. But the people didn’t want to pay any attention to Helaman. Things were going too well after the war. They gave a sigh of relief and wanted to take it easy. In Alma 45:23 it says, “And they would not give heed to the words of Helaman and his brethren.” Why not, after the war? Remember, this was written by a 23-year-old in the 1820s in upstate New York. People knew nothing about this course of history, but this is the course that history has taken in our day. This is what you might expect to happen after a great war, but who would have all this figured out? This is what happened, and it sounds very familiar, doesn’t it? “But they grew proud, being lifted up in their hearts, because of their exceedingly great riches”—great prosperity.
31 Alma 45:24 This is what happens here. “But they grew proud, being lifted up in their hearts, because of their exceedingly great riches; therefore they grew rich in their own eyes, and would not give heed to their words, to walk uprightly before God.”
31,32 Alma 46:1,2 Who is Helaman to speak to us? We’ll go our own way. So big trouble begins with chapter 46. We are starting out now very appropriately on a timely theme.[The Apostasy] This chapter is so compact and rich with detail, all related. It alone would prove the Book of Mormon. So what did they do? Well, they felt their wealth was threatened, and they formed an opposition party. And what’s more, this is the Central American pattern. They cracked down on the peasantry with hit squads, and they really meant business here. Notice it says they “gathered together against their brethren. . . . they were exceedingly wroth, insomuch that they were determined to slay them.” This was not just politics here. They wouldn’t put up with this sort of thing, that in their exceeding great riches they might feel threatened. And they found a strong and ruthless leader. It was Amalickiah, and he was clever. He was a good man [for this job]. He was a leader; he was sharp—this mixture of cunning and wisdom. He’s clever and a good military man. You see the flaw that runs through his character, a dangerous character. He was a dictator. Notice that he “was desirous to be a king.” These are the king-men here. He’s a typical military dictator, a type that has proliferated today. He makes a reflection on the next page which is very much to the point here.
32 Alma 36:4,5 Who was backing him? ‘Those people who were wroth were also desirous that he should be their king.” They lined up back of Amalickiah, and he was very good at organizing them. He organized together various conflicting groups. He brought them together in a common cause here. “And they were the greater part of them [ambitious lower officials] the lower judges of the land, and they were seeking for power.” An upwardly mobile, ambitious class seeking for power, and this was the man to give it to them. “And they had been led by the flatteries of Amalickiah.” He promised them that they would come to power. Notice, “he would make them rulers over the people.” This is the classic pattern, not only in Central America, but in modern Europe.
32 Alma 36:5: “And they had been led by the flatteries of Amalickiah, that if they would support him and establish him to be their king that he would make them rulers over the people.” Well, that’s what you do. You make people ambassadors, department heads, and cabinet members if they support you, to put you on the throne. This is the pattern we follow in this country. “Thus they were led away by Amalickiah to dissensions, notwithstanding the preaching of Helaman.” It didn’t do any good.
34 There’s the great ode of Catullus on that: ‘The sun sets and the sun rises again. But once our little brief light goes out, nothing remains for us but one long night of nothing.” How negative. That’s the philosophy of the Romans. The Romans were a materialistic civilization. They lived for that. That’s all they had to look forward to. What a world we are in. Nothing gives you comfort like the Book of Mormon. You won’t find this cynicism in the Book of Mormon, but you will find this. We are to blame for the whole thing. It’s because of the foolishness of men. They don’t have to act that way. How quick to do iniquity, how quick to forget, and the great wickedness of one very wicked man. We are prone to wickedness. We are very vulnerable to all sorts of foolishness.
34 ` This sad Book of Mormon story is all going to be repeated over and over again. This happened then, and it’s happening now. Must we go through with this? “