Book of Mormon Month - Day 11: Columbus Prophesied in the Book of Mormon

On Day 11, we look back on the Day 10 celebration of Columbus Day in the United States of America.

Did you know that the voyage and work of Christopher Columbus was shown to the prophet Nephi in the Book of Mormon approximately 2,000 years before Columbus made his voyage?

10 And it came to pass that I looked and beheld many waters; and they divided the Gentiles from the seed of my brethren.
11 And it came to pass that the angel said unto me: Behold the wrath of God is upon the seed of thy brethren.
12 And I looked and beheld a man among the Gentiles, who was separated from the seed of my brethren by the many waters; and I beheld the Spirit of God, that it came down and wrought upon the man; and he went forth upon the many waters, even unto the seed of my brethren, who were in the promised land.

Today, Columbus is revered by some, yet reviled by others. Is criticism of the man warranted? I guess that depends on one's point of view, cultural history, and/or ethnic background. You can read more about how we might see a wider perspective of the interpretation of those events and their significance in our day.

Related articles

• Think You Know The Real Christopher Columbus? (npr.org)
• Columbus Day - Facts - Not some blogger's opinion. (realthinktank.com)
• Christopher Columbus: Five things you thought you knew about the explorer (csmonitor.com)
• Columbus Day 2011 (andrewconard.com)
• Columbus Day... reconsidered... (cenantua.wordpress.com)
• Christopher Columbus Day Thoughts! (iamdomo.com)
• To Celebrate Or Not To Celebrate Columbus Day, That Is The Question (laist.com)
• Columbus Day (davidscommonplacebook.wordpress.com)
• Columbus Day: 5 Things You Didn't Know (abcnews.go.com)

Nephi Sees Conditions Leading to Latter-day Events (1 Nephi 13, Part III)

In Part II of this chapter, we covered the arrival of the Gentiles and their wars and contentions with their mother nations. We also covered the book they brought with them which, it is abundantly apparent, is the Bible as we know it today.

In Part III, we finish 1 Nephi Chapter 13 by discussing Gentile influences on the descendants of Nephi's brothers, Laman and Lemuel.

Christopher Columbus wrote in journals regarding his experience in mounting his voyage to the New World:

It was the Lord who put into my mind (I could feel his hand upon me) the fact that it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies. All who heard of my project rejected it with laughter, ridiculing me. There is no question that the inspiration was from the Holy Spirit because He comforted me.... For the execution of the journey to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps. It is simply the fulfillment of what Isaiah had prophesied.

The passages of Isaiah he refers to are as follows:

Isaiah 18:1-2

1 ^aWoe to the land shadowing with wings, which is ^bbeyond the rivers of ^cEthiopia:

2 That sendeth ambassadors by the sea, even in vessels of ^abulrushes upon the waters, saying, Go, ye swift messengers, to a nation scattered and peeled, to a people terrible from their beginning hitherto; a nation meted out and trodden down, whose land the rivers have ^bspoiled!

Isaiah 49:1, 5-6

1 ^aListen, O isles, unto me; and ^bhearken, ye people, from far; The Lord hath ^ccalled me from the womb; from the bowels of my mother hath he made mention of my name.

5 ¶ And now, saith the Lord that ^aformed me from the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob again to him, Though Israel be not gathered, yet shall I be glorious in the eyes of the Lord, and my God shall be my strength.

6 And he said, It is a light thing that thou shouldest be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel: I will also give thee for a ^alight to the ^bGentiles, that thou mayest be my ^csalvation unto the end of the earth.

Samuel Eliot Morison of Harvard, who studied the extremely spiritual character of Columbus, wrote:

Men may doubt this, but there can be no doubt that the faith of Columbus was genuine and sincere, and that his frequent communion with forces unseen was a vital element in his achievements. It gave him confidence in his destiny, assurance that his performance would be equal to the promise.... This conviction that god destined him to be an instrument for spreading the faith was far more potent than the desire to win glory, wealth, and worldly honors, to which he was certainly far from indifferent.

In the secularized world of today, with its so-called "separation of church and state", and perpetual hand-wringing over America's erstwhile participation in the slave trade, the topic of Columbus can certainly make for uncomfortable dinner conversation among mixed company. For, as the argument goes, if Columbus hadn't set foot on his ship and come here, nothing bad would have happened.

Utter nonsense. To believe such a thing is to ignore patterns of human development and behavior in all nations and by all nations, especially their tendency to invade and enslave their neighbors. It is to imagine that only Columbus would ever have stumbled upon the Americas.

If not Columbus, then someone else--perhaps with unabashedly ignoble motivations--would have taken his place.

It certainly can't be denied that the impact of European contact with American natives was enormous. However, contrary to popular, uninformed opinion today, Europeans unknowingly carried with them certain strains of microbes and viruses that had not existed in the Americas, accidentally causing the deaths of great numbers of those already living here. They didn't arrive with a knowledge of what would happen in the future any more than you or I know whether we will be safe going to and from work in the morning or if we will, by some innocent choice or errant left turn, cause accident or injury to others.

Columbus was a humble, yet noble, learned, and religious man. So were several (but not all) of those who traveled with him on his first voyages. Those who were the more righteous and well-intentioned part did the best they knew how with what knowledge of the Gospel they possessed in the scriptures they had inherited from their fathers. They were therefore zealous in their desire to convert the natives they found on Hispañola and other islands of what is now known as the Bahamas.

Among many, a great example of these good intentions is found in a quote from a copy of Columbus' original Journal of the First Voyage as written by Bartolomé de Las Casas and quoted in America's God and Country: Encyclopedia of Quotations:

...And I say that Your Highness ought not to consent that any foreigner does business or sets foot here, except Christian Catholics, since this was the end and the beginning of the enterprise, that it should be for the enhancement and glory of the Christian religion nor should anyone who is not a good Christian come to these parts.

Tragically, when word got out about the great resources and riches of the New World, others who were not so much inclined towards religious benevolence as to monetary gain, took it upon themselves to exploit and plunder whatever they could find. The Native Americans, being in the way of their greed, took the brunt of this exploitation in that they were turned from friends into slaves and made to do the work of those who wanted what the new land had to offer.

Again, in today's political climate, we often hear a revisionist interpretation of these events: as if somehow Columbus was the purposeful instigator of the mistreatment of God's children on the American continents. However, those who malign Columbus do not have the perspective that the Book of Mormon offers to us--and to Native American descendants who remain. God foresaw all of these events and has designed a higher purpose in their tragedy and suffering that transcends our own limited perspective and interpretation of events. When people make wrong choices and suffer consequences, God provides for even greater blessings than those that were lost, if they will but repent and obey Him. Sometimes those blessings come much later, but the do come.

30 Nevertheless, thou beholdest that the Gentiles who have gone forth out of captivity, and have been lifted up by the power of God above all other nations, upon the face of the land which is choice above all other lands, which is the land that the Lord God hath covenanted with thy father that his seed should have for the ^aland of their inheritance; wherefore, thou seest that the Lord God will not suffer that the Gentiles will utterly destroy the ^bmixture of thy ^cseed, which are among thy brethren.

31 Neither will he suffer that the Gentiles shall ^adestroy the seed of thy brethren.

32 Neither will the Lord God suffer that the Gentiles shall forever remain in that awful state of blindness, which thou beholdest they are in, because of the plain and most precious parts of the gospel of the Lamb which have been kept back by that ^aabominable church, whose formation thou hast seen.

33 Wherefore saith the Lamb of God: I will be ^amerciful unto the Gentiles, unto the visiting of the remnant of the house of Israel in great judgment.

First, God makes a promise to Nephi that his family's descendants will not be completely eliminated. He promises to be merciful to the Gentiles and, through them, to restore what was once lost from the written Gospel they carried with them. How would he do this? Through the seed of Nephi and his brethren.

35 For, behold, saith the Lamb: I will manifest myself unto thy seed, that they shall write many things which I shall minister unto them [the Book of Mormon], which shall be plain and precious; and after thy seed shall be destroyed, and dwindle in unbelief, and also the seed of thy brethren, behold, ^athese things shall be hid up, to come forth unto the Gentiles, by the gift and power of the Lamb.

36 And in them shall be written my ^agospel, saith the Lamb, and my ^brock and my salvation.

37 And ^ablessed are they who shall seek to bring forth my ^bZion at that day, for they shall have the ^cgift and the ^dpower of the Holy Ghost; and if they ^eendure unto the end they shall be ^flifted up at the last day, and shall be saved in the everlasting ^gkingdom of the Lamb; and whoso shall ^hpublish peace, yea, tidings of great joy, how beautiful upon the mountains shall they be.

The fulfillment of this prophecy is the restoration of the Gospel, through Joseph Smith, who descended from these first European-American Gentiles, and the Book of Mormon, which was written by Nephi's, Laman's, and Lemuel's descendants.

Verses 38 through 42 can be summed up thusly: God saw that people would make wrong choices and intervened to help them. When precious parts were taken out of the Bible, either intentionally or unintentionally, He made sure that the Book of Mormon would be made available to support the Bible's teachings and provide clarification as to what was lost. In the end, the Jews, who were the first to receive the Gospel, and the Gentiles, who received it second, would be brought together and unified towards fulfilling all of the prophecies in both books.

Research hints that Columbus was of Jewish descent. It is certainly possible that God meant for Columbus' journey to be one of many symbols of the literal fulfillment of the unification of Gentiles and Jews in the latter days in this vision given to Nephi.

Nephi Sees Conditions Leading to Latter-day Events (1 Nephi 13, Part I)

As the vision continues, Nephi is shown many of the things which, to him, were new and amazing. To those of us living in the U.S., they are now part of our national lore and cultural history. These things at which Nephi marvels as future and strange events are things we now take for granted and even struggle to teach effectively in our schools. This begs the question: Which is of more benefit in our day...to learn exclusively from our history, or to look to prophets to guide us so as to avoid pitfalls of the future?

The answer as provided by the Book of Mormon is that we should do both.

First, Nephi sees the many nations and kingdoms of the earth. In those nations were living those that the angel refers to as "the Gentiles". To Nephi, who was part of the house of Israel, this would have meant that they were all people outside the covenant and lineage he had come from.

Next, Nephi is shown that the Gentiles create a great church, one that is opposed to God's purposes and aligned with Satan's purposes instead. Nephi sees that this church puts in bondage, persecutes, tortures, and kills people who believe in God.

The temptation here is to immediately wonder which "church" is meant by what is shown in the vision, but we must be careful not to engage in presentism (distorting historical analysis by applying our own present-day biases) to interpret scripture. The purpose of this vision was not to single out any one denomination or even any one religion. No such entity is specifically named. All this scripture points to is "a great church".

The angel clarifies what is meant. This church is a metaphor for any organization of the world that seeks to use its power to gain power over God's people, to corrupt them in any way, or to destroy them physically and/or spiritually. He also states that it is the "church of the devil", meaning that the devil is the founder of it, and that its motivation is pride and to get the glory of the world. The fact that it is lumped into one great church is meant as a convenience in addressing its influence in the world rather than an attempt to single out any one group of individuals having a particular religious belief.

Now we get to the really interesting part, for we learn that Nephi sees "many waters" that divide his and his brothers' seed from the Gentiles (obviously these are the Atlantic and Pacific oceans). Then, he sees a man who is influenced by the Holy Ghost to set out on the waters "even unto the seed of my brethren, who were in the promised land."

Stop for a minute and think about who Nephi is seeing. Who in our own history books "first" arrives on our continent and "discovers" the people living there? Why, it's Christopher Columbus, of course.

In the next verse, we learn that other Gentiles followed suit and arrived in the Americas in "many multitudes" and began to smite the seed of Nephi's brothers who remained, scattering them--which we, in hindsight, see as having been done in three ways: geographically, culturally, and spiritually.

14 And it came to pass that I beheld many ^amultitudes of the Gentiles upon the ^bland of promise; and I beheld the wrath of God, that it was upon the seed of my brethren; and they were ^cscattered before the Gentiles and were smitten.

15 And I beheld the Spirit of the Lord, that it was upon the Gentiles, and they did prosper and ^aobtain the ^bland for their inheritance; and I beheld that they were white, and exceedingly fair and ^cbeautiful, like unto my people before they were ^dslain.

16 And it came to pass that I, Nephi, beheld that the Gentiles who had gone forth out of captivity did humble themselves before the Lord; and the power of the Lord was ^awith them.

Again, beware presentism. It is the norm today to vilify Columbus and those Europeans who followed them by viewing their motives and doings through the lenses of multi-culturalism and political correctness. No one should or can deny truthfully that what happened to Native Americans was a travesty and caused pain and suffering and near extermination of entire tribes and full extermination of others.

But, now we are reading history through the eyes, minds, and hearts of people whose descendants they were and who have a prophetic and divinely inspired explanation (not an excuse) as to why such horrible things would have happened to their seed. Remember that an earlier portion of Nephi's vision is replete with a fratricidal war of equal proportions perpetrated by the Lamanites against the Nephite people and eventually among the Lamanite people themselves.

Nephi explains to us in this and later writings that the Lamanites were reaping the consequences of actions previously sown. The lesson that Nephi, and later Moroni, teach us is that the Book of Mormon is meant to show the Gentiles that they are little different from the Lamanites, Nephites, and Jaredites. The Gentiles will be under equal condemnation and consequence from God if they do not repent of their sins (including the intentional killing and scattering of the Lamanite nations) and turn to Him while living in the promised land.

In the next post, 1 Nephi 13, Part II, we will analyze Nephi's vision of the Revolutionary and other Gentile wars and events in the Americas. We'll also look at Nephi's vision and interpretation of the development and influence of the modern-day Bible (no, it didn't just fall out of the sky one day as a single, chronological volume and land on Emperor Constantine's throne or Martin Luther's pulpit).

In 1 Nephi 13, Part III, we'll look at the additional books of scripture that God authorized to be written and how both the Bible and other books of scripture support each other in testifying of Christ in all the world...not just in Jerusalem.