Preserve the Records

One of the themes of the short book of Enos is his desire for the Lamanites to receive the gospel. After his own spiritual experience receiving a remission of his sins and after praying for his own people, Enos turned to his enemies: “I prayed unto him with many long strugglings for my brethren, the Lamanites” (v11). He wrote of how hard they were working to bring the Lamanites back to the faith: “For at the present our strugglings were vain in restoring them to the true faith…. And I bear record that the people of Nephi did seek diligently to restore the Lamanites unto the true faith in God. But our labors were vain; their hatred was fixed, and they were led by their evil nature that they became wild, and ferocious, and a blood-thirsty people, full of idolatry and filthiness” (v14, 20). It appears that in these efforts the Lamanites had not only rejected the Nephite missionaries but also threatened to destroy the sacred records that the Nephites had: “And they swore in their wrath that, if it were possible, they would destroy our records and us, and also all the traditions of our fathers” (v14). And so Enos pled with the Lord both to preserve their scriptures from falling into the hands of the Lamanites and that their records would be useful in bringing those Lamanites back into the fold: “And I had faith, and I did cry unto God that he would preserve the records; and he covenanted with me that he would bring them forth unto the Lamanites in his own due time” (v16). Enos, like his fathers before him, sought the Lord’s hand to protect their records and to bring them forth unto their brethren.   

                Enos further described his hope for the records and the Lamanites this way: “And now behold, this was the desire which I desired of him—that if it should so be, that my people, the Nephites, should fall into transgression, and by any means be destroyed, and the Lamanites should not be destroyed, that the Lord God would preserve a record of my people, the Nephites; even if it so be by the power of his holy arm, that it might be brought forth at some future day unto the Lamanites, that, perhaps, they might be brought unto salvation” (v13). I have always read this verse thinking about what would happen some 800 or so years later when the Nephites would be destroyed and then what would happen in the last days when “Lamanites shall blossom as the rose” as they received the gospel (Doctrine and Covenants 49:24). I think we can see those events as a fulfillment of Enos’s prayer and desire. But I realized today that there is another fulfillment of his desire/prophecy closer to his own time. The Nephites were essentially destroyed in the days of Mosiah who fled the land of Nephi and traveled to Zarahemla with a relatively small group of Nephites. As far as we know, the Nephites who remained were destroyed by the Lamanites, but before that happened the Lord made sure that the desire of Enos was fulfilled: the records were preserved. Amaleki recorded that “the Lord had sent the people of Mosiah with the plates of brass which contained the record of the Jews” (Omni 1:14). Despite the threats of the Lamanites, the records were not destroyed, and the Lord preserved them for Mosiah and his people as they fled the destruction of the rest of the Nephites. And what happened soon after that? Those records became instrumental in converting a vast number of Lamanites, just like Enos had prayed for. Mosiah’s great-grandchildren took with them the words of the records back to the land of Nephi and they were the means by which so many of the Lamanites that Enos had prayed for were converted. When Ammon taught King Lamoni, he “rehearsed and laid before him the records and the holy scriptures of the people, which had been spoken by the prophets, even down to the time that their father, Lehi, left Jerusalem…. he expounded unto them all the records and scriptures from the time that Lehi left Jerusalem down to the present time” (Alma 18:36, 38). Later when Aaron taught Lamoni’s father, “he began from the creation of Adam, reading the scriptures unto the king—how God created man after his own image, and that God gave him commandments, and that because of transgression, man had fallen. And Aaron did expound unto him the scriptures from the creation of Adam, laying the fall of man before him, and their carnal state and also the plan of redemption, which was prepared from the foundation of the world, through Christ, for all whosoever would believe on his name” (Alma 22:12-13). Later Alma explained this to his son Helaman, “Yea, I say unto you, were it not for these things that these records do contain, which are on these plates, Ammon and his brethren could not have convinced so many thousands of the Lamanites of the incorrect tradition of their fathers; yea, these records and their words brought them unto repentance; that is, they brought them to the knowledge of the Lord their God, and to rejoice in Jesus Christ their Redeemer” (Alma 37:9). With great power, the sacred words of holy writ had not only been preserved among the Nephites but also used to the convincing of the Lamanites of the truth. The fervent prayers of Enos from hundreds of years before were answered.