5 And
an account of my making these plates shall be given hereafter; and then,
behold, I proceed according to that which I have spoken; and this I do that the
more sacred things may be kept for the knowledge of my people.
6 Nevertheless,
I do not write anything upon plates save it be that I think it be sacred. And
now, if I do err, even did they err of old; not that I would excuse myself
because of other men, but because of the weakness which is in me, according to
the flesh, I would excuse myself.
7 For
the things which some men esteem to be of great worth, both to the body and
soul, others set at naught and trample under their feet. Yea, even the very God
of Israel do men trample under their feet; I say, trample under their feet but
I would speak in other words—they set him at naught, and hearken not to the
voice of his counsels. (1 Nephi 19:5-7)
I am struck by these verses for a few
reasons. First, because I am a writer myself, I know what it is like to write
about the scriptures and then feel like others may not appreciate those things
how I do. Even in the church I think we struggle against an inner lassitude about it. I wonder if it is common to not quite appreciate something in the
scriptures unless you are in quite the right frame of mind or dealing with a
challenge that a particular text touches on. Then there is an “Aha!” moment,
and ever after it means something special.
Second, the way Nephi shifts from
thinking about how his own writing might be rejected or set at naught to
thinking about how the Messiah would suffer and be set at naught. He shifts
pretty quickly between those two topics and spends so much time writing about
that that I wonder if that was what he meant to spend time on in the first
place or whether his thoughts were pulled there so strongly that he had to go
at length. (Because he does go on for
six more verses about the Messiah.)
At any rate, when I read this section
and what follows, part of me starts thinking, “How did we get on this topic of
prophecies of Christ from the topic of record-keeping?” But it shows how Nephi
uses his own experiences and worries as jumping-off points to think about
Christ, and that is a mentally sanctifying skill, I think. As we go through
life, if in our trials we can think about how Christ experienced or suffered
something similar, we can gain a greater sense that we can ask for Christ’s
atonement to be applied in our behalf.
Third, I notice Nephi says he will give
an account of making those plates, but I’m not sure he ever gets around to
including that, just like we don’t get an extended account of how he builds the
ship to get to the promised land. But the fact that he wanted to include an account of making the plates says that it must
have been spiritually faith-promoting to him, with challenges to overcome, revelation gained, the way prepared by the Lord, and so on. He certainly couldn’t go out and buy them at the
corner drugstore. He had to find ore (or buy it), melt it out, beat it into
plates, pierce them, make rings to connect them, and engrave them.
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