In my last post, I talked about one way to interpret the writings of Nephi in the Book of Mormon is to assume that the characters of Laman and Lemuel represent you and me. Remember, they were always obedient to the Law of Moses – Nephi never once calls them out on that. They were also just like the majority of the Jews at Jerusalem – those who were about to be destroyed because of their wickedness (see 1 Nephi 2:13).

Although this approach makes us feel uncomfortable – after all, none of us likes to believe that we are included amongst the wicked – it causes some deep introspection and self-examination. We start to look more closely at how Nephi describes his older brothers. If he never criticises them for their approach to the Law of Moses, when does he call them to repentance?

I’m not going to delve into 1st Nephi in this post to examine those instances, but instead look at the last words their father, Lehi, gives to them. These are really instructive, and I believe are included in order to show to us that we should consider ourselves as Laman and Lemuel; that is one primary purpose of Nephi’s.

In order to do that, I’m going to skip forward to chapter 8 of 2 Nephi first. This is part of Jacob’s sermon to the young Nephite nation, and in this chapter Jacob is quoting Isaiah 51 and 52:1-2. Here, I want to highlight just 3 passages.

First:

‘Awake, awake! Put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake as in the ancient days. Art thou not he that hath cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon?’ (2 Nephi 8:9)

Here, the Lord refers to the past. Rahab here represents Egypt, and the Lord is referring to Israel’s miraculous deliverance from their Egyptian masters. The next verse emphasises this, referencing the parting of the Red Sea, ‘Art thou not he who hath dried the sea, the waters of the great deep; that hath made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?’

The ‘arm of the Lord’ refers to God’s own power, often as used through a prophetic instrument. In much of Isaiah, the prophet refers to a latter-day ‘arm of the Lord’, sometimes referred to as the Davidic servant. But in this passage, my interpretation is that Moses was the arm of the Lord.

Second:

‘Awake, awake, stand up, O Jerusalem, which hast drunk at the hand of the Lord the cup of his fury—thou hast drunken the dregs of the cup of trembling wrung out— And none to guide her among all the sons she hath brought forth; neither that taketh her by the hand, of all the sons she hath brought up.’ (2 Nephi 8:17-18)

In this passage, the Lord is referring to the present. His covenant people are wicked, and they are in process of receiving covenant curses for disobedience. There is destruction and captivity that is about to be their lot. Unfortunately, unlike the past, when Moses was the ‘arm of the Lord’, there is no-one in a similar role here from among ‘all the sons she hath brought up’.

In Isaiah’s writings, this applied not only to the people of His time, but as the Saviour taught that Isaiah’s words ‘have been and shall be’ (3 Nephi 23:3), applies also to us in our day. Just as the Israelites of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms were the Lord’s covenant people in Isaiah’s day, so too this refers to the Lord’s covenant people in the latter-days. If you believe you are in covenant with God today, that means you.

Third:

‘Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion; put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city; for henceforth there shall no more come into thee the uncircumcised and the unclean. Shake thyself from the dust; arise, sit down, O Jerusalem; loose thyself from the bands of thy neck, O captive daughter of Zion.’ (2 Nephi 8:24-25)

This final passage refers to the future, a day when all those in Zion/Jerusalem are pure and holy. Only those who are circumcised in heart – who have the covenant with the Lord deeply held within their heart; those who know Him and love Him – will be able to enter.

And Isaiah tells us exactly what we need to do in order to be those kinds of people: we need to shake ourselves from the dust, and loose the chains around our necks in order to be freed from the captivity of the devil.

Remember, however, that a corrupt or apostate people never consider themselves corrupt or apostate. They don’t believe they are in chains. And the leaders from the established hierarchy won’t tell them – they have it good and don’t want change. That’s why most people ignored Isaiah, Jeremiah and other prophets or got angry enough to try to kill them for being false prophets. That’s also why the scriptures teach that most of the Lord’s covenant people in the latter-days will also ignore the message or get angry at it – because we don’t believe we’re captive. We don’t see any chains around our necks. We believe all is well in Zion.

A summary of these three passages and the chapter as a whole might be: 

Remember the power and deliverance of the Lord in days past. Trust in the promises of the Lord that there is a truly glorious future for Zion. But if you want to be included in that glorious future, you need to repent in the present, because as things are, you’re not going to make it.

It’s important to understand this context of 2 Nephi 8/Isaiah 51-52 because listen to what Lehi says to his two oldest sons:

‘O that ye would awake; awake from a deep sleep, yea, even from the sleep of hell, and shake off the awful chains by which ye are bound, which are the chains which bind the children of men, that they are carried away captive down to the eternal gulf of misery and woe. Awake! and arise from the dust … Awake, my sons; put on the armor of righteousness. Shake off the chains with which ye are bound, and come forth out of obscurity, and arise from the dust.’ (2 Nephi 1:13-14, 23)

I’ve highlighted in bold the words that correlate directly to the previously-quoted Isaiah verses so that you can see how deliberate this is by Lehi. Nephi often talks about applying the scriptures, and specifically Isaiah, to ourselves, and here his father Lehi is applying it to his sons Laman and Lemuel. By including the whole chapter of Isaiah a little later in his record – a record he knows he is writing to us – Nephi is telling us to apply the same message to ourselves. The same message given to Laman and Lemuel is one we should take personally.

As we step back from this and look at the pattern, we see 1 Nephi begins with Lehi being called as a prophet and then calling the Jews in Jerusalem to repentance. When they fail to repent and instead decide to kill him, Lehi takes his family at the direction of the Lord and flees into the wilderness.

2 Nephi begins with Lehi calling Laman and Lemuel (like unto the Jews at Jerusalem) to repentance. They fail to do so, and when they decide to kill Nephi a few chapters later, the Lord tells Nephi to take those who believe and to flee into the wilderness.

These parallels aren’t accidental. Nephi has written them deliberately into his record so that we can take this message to heart.

The Lord’s covenant people of the latter days believe they are righteous. They have long to-do lists just like the Jews anciently and they fastidiously keep them. But the hamster wheel of ‘righteous’ works sadly has the effect of making many people believe they’re righteous, when in fact they’re anything but. They keep every item on their to-do list, but neglect the widow and the poor, the refugee and homeless, the fatherless and outcast. Indeed, they often use these groups as scapegoats for societal problems, and thus grind their faces (see Isaiah 3:15; 2 Nephi 13:15). Thus, they are ripe for destruction. This is us.

This is what Nephi is teaching us. If we repent (as taught in the scriptures as opposed to how it is taught by corrupt spiritual leaders), we will be able to hear when the Lord calls us to leave the majority, to head to our last-days promised land and avoid the destruction awaiting the self-righteous.

The issue we face is that we mustn’t point at others and say, ‘You need to repent’, but instead point at ourselves as ask, ‘Is it I?’ The answer is, ‘Yes’, and the rest of Nephi’s writings in both 1 and 2 Nephi include how we go about that.

Yes, the Book of Mormon is truly a remarkable book of scripture. It is written for us and to us. I hope that each of us can take it much more seriously than we have done.

© Copyright 2025, Jeffrey Collyer