2 Nephi 29 tweet: God’s words hiss 4th. Gs say a Bible – got it! Fools, God speaks to more than 1 nation. Jews, N-ites, lost tribes, all nations shall write.
2 Nephi 30 tweet: Gs who repent r covenant ppl. L-ite remnant + Jews will know Christ. God will work among all nations. Great division – S will have no pwr.
In a previous post I may have suggested that I was through with Nephi’s use of Isaiah. That wasn’t entirely correct; however, this really is the last post on Isaiah in Nephi’s writings. (Of course, we’ll get to Isaiah again when Abinadi and the Jesus quote him). As I’ve read and then tried to write about Nephi’s Isaiah chapters, I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s going on. The number of posts has slowed down as I’ve tried to do some justice to not only what Isaiah was saying originally but then how Nephi likened it to his own people. The 2 Nephi chapters are so dense with history, poetry, doctrine and prophecy that trying to unpack them has taken me way longer than I anticipated. This has been especially true of trying to write this final post on 2 Nephi 29–30. The way Nephi uses Isaiah in these chapters – weaving Isaiah’s prophecies with his own visions – has proved too hard to outline in a single blog post (maybe somebody more succinct than me would have better luck). So instead, to mark the end of Nephi’s use of Isaiah, I’ll try to briefly summarise the overall theme of Isaiah’s work, and in turn Nephi’s likening of Isaiah’s prophecies – namely, the fulfilment of the Abrahamic covenant.
The Abrahamic covenant is one of those terms where I suspect the ratio of understanding to frequency of reference is probably pretty low – that is, I think it’s something that crops up fairly regularly in talks and lessons, but I’m not sure how well we really understand the nature and scope of the covenant. At a personal level, we may appreciate that through baptism we are adopted into the house of Israel and that in the temple we can receive the promises made to Abraham. But the true nature of the covenant – and why Isaiah and Nephi were so obsessed with its ultimate fulfilment – is far, far greater in scope than that. This covenant is, essentially, concerned with the salvation of the entire human family. With help from Joe Spencer,1 it might be summarised as follows.
After Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, one of the most immediate results in the aftermath was fratricidal violence. First Cain killed Abel but that was just the start. Cain started a whole tradition of secret murder and by the time of Noah “the earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence” (Gen 6:11; see Moses 8:28). Violence is the primary motivation for the flood: “The end of all flesh is come before me, for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth” (Gen 6:13; see Moses 8:30). Humanity was facing a kind of Jaredite-like situation of self-eradication, so the Lord flooded the earth to allow for the salvation of a small remnant: Noah and his family. (It would be a distraction to discuss the nature of this flood, i.e. global vs local; I’ll just say that IMO, insisting on a global flood paints us into a corner that I don’t think we need to occupy. Feel free to pick that up with me in the comments.)
After the devastation, God makes a postdiluvian promise to Noah that he won’t flood the earth again – essentially that he won’t meet violence with violence. But of course, as soon as Noah’s children have children, we end up with violence all over again. This violence was in a new form – instead of secret combinations, war was waged by nations and empires. The fraternal conflict that began with Cain and Abel was now being worked out at a global level. At this point God was faced with a dilemma. The earth was again filling up with violence, but he had made a promise not to flood the earth again. A new approach was needed.
And so God called Abraham and through him launched a new nation – a nation that wasn’t to work like any nation before it. The story begins with God telling Abraham, “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house” (Gen 12:1). Abraham stripped himself of his old familial ties and nationality and began anew. But this was a new kind of family and nation, a new style of kingdom building. While this new nation did mark borders and claim lands, Abraham’s children were called to establish peace among the nations – they were to bless “all the families of the earth” (v.3). They were to rework the very order of the world, replacing the national with the familial, war with peace. And so Abraham becomes not only a figure of faith and obedience, but also of hospitality and peacemaking.
At this point I’ll quote Joe Spencer who picks up the story of the Abrahamic covenant:
[Abraham’s] children inherit this task [of peacemaking]. Israel is born, a whole nation that’s supposed to be ready to assume the Abrahamic project. But the rest of the Bible is the story of their failure to understand this. They want to be a nation like other nations. They want kings and legal structures that mirror the other nations. They want imperial power and they hope to extend their borders. They see their covenantal relationship with God to mean that they’re different from other nations only in that God backs them up. And so they find themselves in constant trouble. And God sends them prophets to get them out of trouble, or at least call them back to their responsibilities. There’s an especially important prophet who comes along in the eighth century when the covenantal status of Israel is under the most serious threat that it’s experienced since Egypt. You can guess his name: Isaiah. He lays into Israel, trying to call them back to their covenantal task, to the work of redeeming all the Gentile nations by teaching them peace. At the outset of his remarkable book of prophecy, there’s an especially Abrahamic promise of what’s to come when Israel finally fulfils its task. The Gentile nations won’t be learning war anymore, because they’ll be beating their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Abandoning violence at last, they instead decide to join Israel in worshipping the Lord at his temple.2
This latter-day vision – of Jew and Gentile at peace and worshipping together in the house of the Lord – is the fulfilment of the Abrahamic covenant. This vision consumed Isaiah and in turn, Nephi. And I think it should consume us as well. At least I think it will have to if we hope to eventually approach Zion.
And with that we come to end the end of Nephi’s Isaiah and also the end of Joe Spencer’s book on Nephi’s Isaiah. Again, I’ve only scratched the surface with my posts. If you want to go further with how Nephi likens Isaiah, I’d strongly recommend Joe Spencer as a guide.
Next week’s reading: 2 Nephi 31
- Joseph Spencer. The Vision of All: Twenty-five Lectures on Isaiah in Nephi’s Record, p.79–81
- Ibid. p.81
The Small Plates of Manchester 
August 3, 2017 at 7:29 am
Loved this – sheds some light on Israel and the purpose of the covenants we take upon ourselves as we are adopted into the house of Israel.
Would be interested in discussing global Vs local view of the flood. Obviously there’s a huge presumption it was global but not really considered the local view.
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August 3, 2017 at 9:25 am
Hi Matt
I’ll try and provide my own response later when I have a bit more time. But in the meantime here are a couple of resources on the issue of global vs local flood.
The first is the FairMormon take on the issue: https://www.fairmormon.org/answers/Mormonism_and_science/Global_or_local_Flood
(As an aside, FairMormon recently received some form of tacit institutional endorsement. See here: https://www.lds.org/si/objective/doctrinal-mastery/gospel-sources?lang=eng)
The second is an article referenced in the FairMormon piece by a BYU professor: https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/134-27-45.pdf
I haven’t read the FairMormon piece and it’s a while since I read the Duane Jeffery article, so I can’t say to what extent I agree / disagree with them. Like I say, I’ll try and write my own response when I get a chance.
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August 15, 2017 at 12:35 pm
(Very) late to the party. I agree with you on the flood and painted corners, and I really like how your discussion of the covenant here begins with its concern for universal salvation and ends with its fulfilment in people at peace. Thinking about salvation as peace — total peace, peace in every conceivable way — opens up a number of avenues for fruitful discussion and exploration. It’s a really useful reframing.
A couple of initially interesting questions for me include, what does salvation as total peace suggests about salvation itself? Why is it that our experience here tends towards violence, in all its varieties, and what is it about the nature of this covenant (all covenants?) that overcomes and transforms that experience? And, how can we better access and disperse the overcoming and the transformation?
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August 15, 2017 at 7:50 pm
Great questions, Ben. By way of a partial answer to your last question, I’ll refer you to the following blog post by Michael Austin at BCC: https://bycommonconsent.com/2017/08/02/peace-like-a-riverpeace-like-a-desert/
The tl;dr version is that we ought to be careful not to think of peace as merely the absence of violence but as the active working towards justice and equality for all. This idea is summarised at the end of the post with a quote from Martin Luther King’s letter from Birmingham jail:
“First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
This idea might change our understanding of what it means to be a peacemaker. To make peace is not necessarily just to calm troubled waters or to reconcile differences between two warring factions (as important as that may be); to make peace may also be to fight for justice, particularly for those who cannot fight for themselves, the weak and the marginalised. So to better access and disperse the peaceful transformative nature of covenants may require we be less accepting of the status quo (less of the “all is well in Zion” attitude) and a greater willingness to work to overcome the inequalities that are all around us.
Now, why we tend towards violence is also an interesting question. But I’ll need a bit more time to respond to that.
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August 17, 2017 at 12:22 pm
Appreciate the link to Michael’s post and your response. I agree with the problematic nature of thinking about peace as the absence of violence (although obviously when there is true and total peace, violence will be absent). It would seem also that peace won through the overcoming and transformation of violence is much more powerful than a peace that is merely the absence of violence. I’m thinking here of the difference between the peace attributed to Enoch’s community and that described as existing in the first garden.
This year in our Sunday school we’ve done quite a bit of work on Zion based on the four requirements from Moses 7:18, with each representing a different kind of equality:
One heart—spiritual equality
One mind—intellectual equality
Dwell in righteousness—social equality
No poor—economic equality
I can’t remember where I first read these equivalences or I’d post the link, but I think they speak quite well to the discussion, particularly if we understand “violence” as anything that disrupts, undermines, prohibits, or inhibits one of these of equalities. I think that understanding really opens up the question of why we tend to violence, and also makes the question of why and how covenants overcome and transform the experience all the more interesting and useful.
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August 19, 2017 at 8:36 am
That’s a great way of framing Zion and thinking about peace. LDS have a unique take on what death is – physical death is separation of body and spirit; spiritual death is separation of spirit from God. So we might think about death as separation or division. This might be applied to relationships – the divisions between spouses, parents and children, different generations – might be considered a form of violence or death. Even internally, e.g. when our actions conflict with what we truly desire, we might think of this as a form of self-inflicted violence that disrupts our peace.
This is all 2nd law of thermodynamics stuff – things tend to fall apart and disintegrate. The atonement is the process that runs in the opposite direction. Bringing together, making one, overcoming death/violence, creating peace.
Without trying to get too meta, we might think of it this way: if we believe that some part of us is uncreated and co-eternal with God (a la D&C 93:29) I think at our core, we are fiercely individual. At some point in the pre-earth life, God adopted us and by covenant we became his children. By our own choice, we were brought into his orbit (or gravitational pull) but we still tended towards separation into the basic, individual, uncreated selves. At some point we had drawn as close to God (and each other) as we could in a spirit form so God created a physical world in which his nascent spiritual family would be housed. The laws and nature and boundaries of this physical experience provide greater forces towards separation (violence, death) than we previously knew, but also an infinite force towards wholeness or oneness, i.e. love, the ultimate manifestation being the atonement. I suppose covenants are about accessing this love and then enacting it. As we keep covenants we tend towards love, peace, oneness, Zion. Our covenants become a schoolmaster, training us to overcome the tendency towards separation, division, violence, death.
Ultimately, I think that’s what our work for the dead is about. Joseph’s vision of Zion wasn’t just about creating strong nuclear families, or a temporal community. It wasn’t even about healing the nations. Audacious beyond measure, in introducing work for the dead, he imagined sealing the entire human family (D&C 128:18).
And what is the end goal of sealing ancestors and trying to create Zion? Is it just about living with God as families? I spoke about this in a stake conference a couple of years ago. Drawing heavily on ideas by Steven Peck, I suggested the following:
“So what are we actually doing when we seal our ancestors to one another and to us? I think we are creating the order of heaven, which order would seem to be a series of unimaginably vast and interconnected networks. I think we find it difficult to appreciate how our individual lives overlap with others. I suppose we have some sense of how our lives impact our immediate family and perhaps beyond that an extended family. But I think we struggle to approach Zion because we fail to imagine what is really possible for a society of Saints bound to God and each other by priesthood covenants. Yet what we see over and over again with life on earth is that new possibilities emerge as individual entities join to form increasingly complex societies: cells come together to form organisms, bacteria join to become mutual beneficial structures; bees join to become colonies, as do meerkats and parakeets. These are larger emergent structures that have different behaviours than the components that make them up. What then does a society of gods become? What does a society of societies of gods become, is it just the sum of the parts or does something even more wondrous occur? As we consider these questions, perhaps we begin to realise how much potential is bound up in the two words ‘eternal progression’.”
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