"Nephi's vision 2: and this time it gets ugly"
This is a continuation of Nephi's vision of the tree of life, which basically turns into a vision of the history of the world. Although at this point none of it had happened yet so it was actually a vision of the future rather than a mere history. Which is pretty cool. Quite often I wish I could see the future.
1. Nephi beholds the promised land and sees the he and his brethren have lots and lots of descendants. Keeping with familial tradition, they fight amongst each other.
2. Nephi sees all he destruction that precedes the Coming of the Savior to the Nephites. I always wonder if watching something like that would be more like watching a disaster movie, where people just run out of the way and look scared but you don't see any real violence, or more like Peter Jackson's King Kong where you actually witness the individual people suffering? If it's the second I'm glad I didn't have to see that. I think it's an all-around good thing that I'm not a prophet, actually.
3. Next, Nephi sees Christ's ministry among the Nephites, which I'm positive is exactly like it's shown in the movie The Testaments.
Here's an interesting tidbit: Nephi mentions that Christ calls twelve men to be Apostles among his seed in order to judge them in the afterlife, whereas the Jerusalem Twelve (as they shall henceforth be called) will judge the Jews. First question: the Jerusalem Twelve, is that plus or minus Judas? I'm going to assume he won't qualify, so who will they pick to take his place? Matthias, maybe? Joseph Smith? Who knows?
Seriously, the Joseph Smith thing was 100% speculation. Please don't quote me on that.
Second question: so different ethnic groups have different judges? Or is it different time periods? How does this massive organization of post-mortal judging teams work? I'm afraid this is another one of those questions I will most likely not know until I die unless I somehow end up married to the prophet. Possibly not even then. Not that I'm complaining. I recognize that it's not MASSIVELY important.
4. Next, and this must have been hard to watch too, but for different reasons, Nephi watches four generations pass away in righteousness, which must have been heartening. Yet I'm sure Nephi probably figure it out pretty quickly that it wasn't going to last. He sees his descendants gathered against his brothers' descendants in battle, and he basically watches them wipe each other. Even if he only saw the PG version, that must have been painful to watch. The more I think about it, the happier I am that I can't see the future, because you know the future will always contain good things and bad things. I'd rather be surprised by both.
6. Lastly, we have a quick review of the rest of the symbolism of the vision.
River = Hell
Great and Spacious Building = Pride of Man
7. The angel then reiterates that The Lamanites totally kick the Nephites' trash (as if he needed him to rub it in any more) and that the Lamanites forget all the traditions of their fathers and dabble in all sorts of wickedness. Which seems a pretty harsh dismissal of the Native Americans, but maybe he was only talking about the really bloodthirsty ones.
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Verse 8: Why show him all this? I suppose that it fits under the rubric of “Plan of Salvation” and “Gospel History of the World,” but does it really matter all that much who is going to judge the world? I can say that it makes a lot of sense to me that people will be judged from within their own culture. I don't know for sure whether that's what this is about, but it's tough to know exactly how to apply universal Gospel truths in the context of a different culture, so people who have been raised in that culture would make better judges of character than others.
This verse marks a transition in the angel's role. The angel has been telling Nephi to behold all the way up through the first verse of this chapter and has kept his commentary to a minimum. Now we start to see more verbal explanation. This is especially noticeable in French because when the angel is merely commanding him to behold it is translated “Regarde!” but when he tells him what he is looking at it is translated “Voici.” In this chapter we stop seeing “Regarde!” after the first verse and start seeing “Voici” in the this verse.
It seems to me that Nephi is either seeing two visions simultaneously or perhaps just seeing one and having the other mapped on to it verbally by the angel. What Nephi tells us he sees is mostly historical events. But at every turn the angel tells him what the events are represented by in Lehi's dream. In one case the two seem to overlap visually: Nephi sees a mist of darkness covering the earth after Christ's death. But even there it isn't clear that the two mists of darkness are the same. The angel is training Nephi's eyes to see historical events using the metaphors in 1 Nephi 8. That's so much more effective than staying within the metaphor. A lot of the time when interpreting parables we only talk about what the parts of a parable mean. The father is God; the prodigal son is a sinner; the other son is a self-righteous jerk. And that's ok as far as it goes, but it's far more effective to tell a true story from history or your own life and map the parable onto the true story. You bring metaphors to life for people by retraining their eyes to see a story by the light of a certain metaphor.
It's really mind-blowing to me that these people saw visions of their people falling into complete apostacy. Hearing that a friend has left the Church often breaks my heart. Knowing that my entire posterity will do so would be highly demoralizing. Why build a house that you know is destined to become a den of sin? Why build a city that is sure to perish like Gomorrah? It's like being stranded in the wilderness with no hope of being rescued. The ten days of supplies don't mean anything if you're destined to starve to death. Unless there is hope of being rescued, why postpone the inevitable? Of course, there's a personal aspect to the plan of salvation such that even if future generations degenerate, the present generation can be saved, but still, if I were Nephi, I would be scraping the bottom of the motivation barrel after a while.
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