Quick Hit Scripture Thoughts

February 07th, 2024 by G.

There’s the chapters in 1 Nephi that are pretty clearly talking about Columbus and early European colonials. Who had their faults. Modern education is sometimes selective in presenting facts about the people it wishes to blacken, but doesn’t always invent stuff. A lot of the dubious things they were up are dubious. The Book of Mormon, though, presents them as blessed and to some degree on the Lord’s errand, even though later in the same chapter it says they err a lot because of their incomplete scripture. With Columbus, one thing to keep in mind is that greatness is an aspect of righteousness. A great man (visionary, energetic, and so on) who does wicked stuff is only partially righteous. So is a commandment-keeper who is mediocre. For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. For the settlers, another thing to keep in mind is that they are described as “humbling” themselves. Righteousness isn’t really a matter of intellectual assent to a set of propositions, nor in this life is it a freeze frame of what kind of person you are holistically right now. “Humility” isn’t abasement. Humility is a recognition that something is lacking about you and a desire to fix that lack. In other words, humility is directional. Reading the BoM through the lens of Lehi’s Dream, humility is grasping the rod to move to the tree.

the end of the world — should we interpret that as the end of the World? Not the end of everything, but the end of this worldly system.

There has to be some connection between Laman and Lemuel standing by the ‘chasm’ and the river of filthy water in Lehi’s dream, and his earlier comparison of them to a valley and a river respectively when they first left Jerusalem.

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