1 Nephi 6

Working with metals

Nephi is such a great and a noble soul.  His great desire was for room to write the things of God.  As important as genealogy is, it was enough for him to note that his father's family descended from Joseph.  He couldn't write everything from his father's record, but someday that record will also come to light.  Nephi was making an abridgment of his father's record on plates that he made with his own hands. (1 Ne. 1:17)  Thus the beginning of the Book of Mormon is a son's abridgment of a father's record.  The end of the Book of Mormon also contains abridgments, by a father Mormon, and by his son Moroni.  As I see it, these book-end, father-son relationships are microcosmic symbols of the unity between Jesus Christ and His Father, with that macrocosmic relationship most salient in the heart of the Book of Mormon.

When Nephi painstakingly inscribed these words, I'm not sure that we fully grasp what it meant for him to "write the things of God."  Nephi was not interested in pleasing the world.  He was not concerned about anything other than pleasing God and persuading men to come unto Christ:

"For the fulness of mine intent is that I may persuade men to come unto the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, and be saved.

Wherefore, the things which are pleasing unto the world I do not write, but the things which are pleasing unto God and unto those who are not of the world." (1 Ne. 6:4-5)

It makes sense that if our aim is to please God, and if we are not of the world, then we will also be pleased by the things of God.  It is also interesting to note that at this point in the record, Nephi wrote of persuading men "to come unto the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob," because this was Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament.  Nephi was inscribing these words almost 600 years before the Lord's first coming to the old world and the new world (as well as to other sheep).  He was also writing retrospectively after many years of toil and hardship.  In any case, the whole purpose of his writing, the "fulness of [his] intent," was to lead souls unto salvation.

First Nephi chapter 6 is a great mission statement, or a thesis statement for the Book of Mormon.

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