Jacob 1 - That We Might Persuade Them to Come Unto Christ I'm taking an online economics class right now, which prompted me to think of the definition of economics in the context of the scriptures. Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources. In the case of Nephi and his successor Jacob, the plates upon which they engraved their record was a scarce resource. They were costly to make and difficult to engrave, and instilling a tradition of passing them through generations was surely cumbersome. Recognizing the great importance of spiritual things and the challenge of maintaining records, Nephi instructed Jacob to prioritize religious instruction saying, " if there were preaching which was sacred, or revelation which was great, or prophesying, that I should engraven the heads of them upon these plates, and touch upon them as much as it were possible, for Christ’s sake, and for the sake of our people" (Jacob 1:4). This priority was not only reflecte...
Sometimes I feel the scriptures are the social media versions of prophets' lives, carefully curated to capture the highlights of their experiences and teachings. We don't see the times when prophets were bored, or yelled at their kids. Not every day was as meaningful as the few they recorded, neither were their lives as inevitable as they seem to us reading about them thousands of years later. For this reason I treasure the hints and allusions that render them human, and give insight into the rest of their lives. In this beautiful and humanizing passage, we glimpse the intensity of Nephi's struggle with anger, sorrow, temptation, and sin. The fact that the same man who saw visions, performed miracles, and lived a life of astonishing faith also had cause to weep for his failings gives me hope and helps me be more kind to myself. In his BYU Forum address " The Glorious Cause of America ", David McCullough captured this idea beautifully: "History wa...