The Great Vision

Towards the end of Nephi’s great vision where he saw the last days, the angel said this to him, “The things which thou shalt see hereafter thou shalt not write; for the Lord God hath ordained the apostle of the Lamb of God that he should write them.  And also others who have been, to them hath he shown all things, and they have written them; and they are sealed up to come forth in their purity” (1 Nephi 14:25-26).  The “apostle” of course was John who recorded what we now have today in the Book of Revelation.  Apparently Nephi saw the same thing as John, but for some reason the Lord wanted John to be the recorder of the vision and Nephi was forbidden to write the rest of his vision.  What interests me is the fact that there were “others who have been” who had been “shown all things” and therefore must have seen the same things that Nephi and John saw.  So who else besides these two received the same vision?  

                The scriptures point to several others who likely had this same panoramic vision of the end of the world.  First of all, a few verses after the above passage Nephi wrote, “And I bear record that I saw the things which my father saw” (1 Nephi 14:29).  We know that Lehi wrote “many things which he saw in visions and in dreams,” and being the patriarch and prophet it only makes sense that he would have seen the great vision like Nephi.  The Brother of Jared of course was another who most likely saw the same or a similar vision as Nephi and John.  We read that “there never were greater things made manifest than those which were made manifest unto the brother of Jared” (Ether 4:4).  So even though we don’t have a specific reference that he saw this same vision as Nephi, given that kind of superlative language.  What’s more, the language of 1 Nephi 14:26 about the “others” who saw what Nephi saw and “sealed” them up certainly points us to the Brother of Jared whose words Moroni did “seal up” to come forth to us as some future point (Ether 4:5).  It seems likely that Moses was also another one of these who saw the same apocalyptic vision as Nephi and John.  We have this language in the account of the his own vision: “Moses cast his eyes and beheld the earth, yea, even all of it; and there was not a particle of it which he did not behold, discerning it by the Spirit of God.  And he beheld also the inhabitants thereof, and there was not a soul which he beheld not; and he discerned them by the Spirit of God; and their numbers were great, even numberless as the sand upon the sea shore” (Moses 1:27-28).  It seems most likely to me that this was not just the inhabitants of his own day that he beheld but of all ages, including our own.  As the Israelite prophet par excellence and given the fact that he was witness to these kinds of incredible visions, it only makes sense that he too saw the great vision of John and Nephi.  One other who likely saw the vision was Adam.  Three years before he died he was gathered together with his posterity and we have the description that he “was bowed down with age, being full of the Holy Ghost, predicted whatsoever should befall his posterity unto the latest generation” (D&C 107:56).  If he knew about even the “latest generation” then he must have seen our day and most likely privy as well to the great apocalyptic vision. 

                Surely there are many others that we don’t have an account of.  As for the rest of us, we probably won’t get to see the vision in this life.  But we do have this invitation from the vision as recorded by John: “Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand” (Revelation 1:3).  We are greatly blessed to have the account which was written by John largely for us—but it will only benefit us if we actually read it!  And we can look forward to the day when it is all revealed to us as well.