Words of Mormon 1

(August 21, 2013)
Sometimes it is important to recognize that if the Lord has taken steps to prepare for something, He could have just as easily taken steps to avoid something.  That He did not should tell us something.  For example, the Lord prepared in the event that the Book of Lehi would be lost by instructing Mormon to write the second set of plates.  But could He not have just as easily instructed Mormon to start the Book of Mormon with the line, “Don’t give this to anyone.  This means you, Martin.”  Of course, He could have done so (or something similar and yet reasonable).

But He did not, which I interpret that to mean that He had a purpose in the loss of the Book of Lehi.  Of course, that leads to the obvious question of what that purpose must have been.  It is easy to look at that question and come up with the answer that it was to teach Joseph Smith a lesson on tempting the Lord (and it would also be, at least partially, correct).  And that in itself is instructive – Mormon presumably spent hundreds of hours abridging the records in order to provide them to Joseph Smith who would then lose them all for the purpose of educating Joseph in how he should relate to the Lord.

Aside from the lessons we gain from that, there is the additional lessons that we should learn for our own personal lives.  Sometimes we have setbacks – even catastrophic ones – and we wonder why the Lord didn’t stop them.  It is true that He could have stopped them, but do we have the trust in Him to rely on His judgement that these catastrophes shouldn’t have been stopped so that we can learn from those experiences?