Come, Follow Me September 23-29: 3 Nephi 8-11
In 2024, the Maxwell Institute will offer a weekly series of short essays on the Book of Mormon, in support of the Church-wide Come, Follow Me study curriculum. Each week, the Maxwell Institute blog will feature a post by a member of the Institute faculty exploring an aspect of the week’s reading block. We hope these explorations will enrich your study and teaching of the Book of Mormon throughout the coming year.
Christ Comes to Bountiful, or Egypt Meets Sinai
By Rosalynde F. Welch
The events described in 3 Nephi 8 at the death of Christ are a catalog of disaster. Tremendous thunderstorms spark wildfire, three days of total darkness isolate survivors in cells of grief, and the face of the land is contorted by earthquake into a death mask. As Grant Hardy points out in his Annotated Book of Mormon, these events are implicitly compared to the ten plagues of Egypt by the phrase “great and terrible things,” which is used to describe each of these calamitous scriptural episodes (3 Nephi 8:19, Deuteronomy 10:21; see Hardy 579, n 19). The ten plagues--which, like the events in 3 Nephi 8, included geographical disfigurement, storms of hail and fire, and three days of darkness--represent divine power and judgment on Egypt, just as the New World calamities represent divine power and judgment on Lehi’s children.
The events described in 3 Nephi 8 at the death of Christ are also a herald of visitation. Zenos the prophet promised that the “Lord God surely shall visit all the house of Israel at that day… with the thunderings and the lightnings of his power, by tempest, by fire, and by smoke, and vapor of darkness, and by the opening of the earth, and by mountains which shall be carried up” (1 Nephi 19:11). These three hours of intense divine intervention in the world signal that Christ approaches. Here again Hardy notes that these “great and terrible” disturbances were also present when Jehovah visited Moses on Mt. Sinai (Exodus 19:16-18; see Hardy 579, n 17). Thunder, lightning, smoke, and earthquake, in the New World as in the Old, signal God’s power and prepare and purify his children to receive his presence.
When we read it alongside the book of Exodus, then, 3 Nephi 8 does a curious thing: it symbolically brings together the Egyptian plagues and the Israelite theophany in a single happening. For the human part, the Lehite survivors stand in two positions at once, representing both the cruel Egyptians and the liberated children of Israel. For the divine part, Christ comes to the Lehites as both the judge of Egypt and the compassionate lawgiver of Sinai. Human wickedness and human chosenness coincide in the people who sit in darkness; divine judgment and divine mercy coincide in the Christ who brings them light.
This surprising mashup of Egypt and Sinai will sound familiar to readers who have been paying attention. Samuel the prophet made the same rhetorical move in his iconic sermon atop the wall of Zarahemla thirty-eight years earlier. Samuel’s sermon in Helaman 13-15 consists of two sets of prophecies: a prophecy of judgment concerning the fates of the children of Lehi in the distant future and another prophecy of joy concerning the signs of Christ’s coming, some five years in the future. A dramatic image in the heavens symbolizes both prophecies: the warning prophecy opens with the image of a “sword of justice” that hangs over the people (Helaman 13:5), while the prophecy of joy is signaled by “great lights in heaven” (Helaman 14:3). Samuel combines his two prophecies of judgment and of joy into a single sermon on God’s saving work, just as Mormon shapes 3 Nephi 8 to invoke two biblical stories of divine judgment and divine love in a single fulfillment of prophecy.
I draw a few lessons from this fascinating fusion of plague and visitation, judgment and love. For one, the pathos of Mormon’s portrait of the terrified survivors shows the complexity of human nature. Book of Mormon prophets often warn of the “natural man” and his “carnal nature:” rebellious and temptable and, too often, the agent of terrible evils (Mosiah 3:19, 16:5). The Lehite survivors in 3 Nephi 8 are associated with Egypt and its plagues of judgment; Mormon wants to show us that they, like all of us, are capable of Egyptian cruelty and tyranny. It is bracing to recognize the darkness in ourselves. “O that we … had not killed and stoned the prophets, and cast them out,” mourn the survivors (3 Nephi 8:25).
Despite our propensity for sin, we are God’s children and are made to live in covenant relationship with him. The Lehite survivors in 3 Nephi 8 are associated with Moses ascending Mt. Sinai to stand in God’s presence and receive his law amid thunder and earthquake. Like Moses, they have been purified and prepared to receive and obey God’s law, his gracious gift that points to what is good. Covenant obedience makes us “free forever, knowing good from evil; to act for [ourselves] and not to be acted upon” (2 Nephi 2:26). Egypt and Moses, the natural man and the divine nature, wickedness and covenant faithfulness, coexist in all of us.
The greater lesson of Mormon’s narrative strategy in 3 Nephi 8 is, for me, the revelation of God’s integrated nature. In the text’s merger of Egypt and Sinai, I see a picture of a God who does not choose different sides--judgment or mercy--in different eras, for different groups, or in different circumstances. I see an integrated God whose justice and mercy are one and the same, expressed always, to every people, and in every circumstance, in acts of healing and restoration. God’s work in our world is a single, unified work with different aspects: not two prophecies and two symbols, but one great work of love from heaven.
This unified vision of divine action challenges us to reconsider any compartmentalized view of God's interactions with humanity. In this way, Mormon nudges us to see the great loss of human life described in these chapters as a merciful act, not a retributive one. Indeed, Christ says as much: the wicked have been taken from the earth “that the blood of the prophets and the saints should not come up any more unto me against them” (3 Nephi 9:7), ceasing their obscene accumulation of violence and sin. In dramatically breaking the Nephites’ generational transmission of wickedness, the Lord halts their self-destructive cycle of covenant unfaithfulness and reboots their society in light of his own law.
With the benefit of latter-day revelation on the growth and healing that continues into the spirit world, we can reimagine the Lord’s words to the surviving Nephites as if directed to those in the spirit world who died in the upheavals of 3 Nephi 8: “O all ye that [were not] spared because ye were more [wicked] than they, will you not now return unto me, and repent of your sins, and be converted that I may heal you?” (see 3 Nephi 9:13). Truly, ours is a God of love whose message is the same at all times, and in all things, and in all places: “Behold, mine arm of mercy is extended towards you, and whosoever will come, him will I receive; and blessed are those who come unto me” (3 Nephi 9:14).
IMAGES
Ben Crowder, Christ Visits the Nephites III Art Print. https://bencrowder.net/art/
Minerva Teichert, Christ Blesses the Nephites at the Bountiful Temple. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [Bookofmormonartcatalog.org/catalog/christ-blesses-the-nephites-at-the-bountiful-temple/].
Yoram Raanan, Har Sinai II. https://www.yoramraanan.com/
Walter Rane, The Angels Ministered Unto Them. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [Bookofmormonartcatalog.org/catalog/angels-ministered-unto-them/].