Enos

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Enos

The Mormon family saga continues. From Lehi to his son Nephi to his little brother Jacob, and now Jacob's son Enos has a turn engraving the metal plates.

One time Enos was hunting in the woods and he remembered the gospel according to his father, and he got on his knees and cried all day and into the night for the salvation of his soul. Then the voice of God told Enos that his sins were forgiven.

Enos believed the voice, but he was curious about how the forgiveness was actually accomplished. In every place and age, men have a hard time believing that the creator of the universe can just let things go. They have to believe he needs some complicated scheme to come together before God can forgive sins.

God told Enos he was forgiven because he had faith in Christ, even though he never heard or saw Christ, and indeed it would be far in the future before he came in the flesh.

Enos then prayed for the salvation of the Nephites, but God said they would be blessed or cursed according to how they obeyed the commandments. Apparently faith in Christ didn't figure in their salvation at all, that's only for the select few.

Enos, fearing that the Nephites would refuse to obey the commandments of God, then prayed for the Lamanites who oppressed them, that at least they would avoid destruction. And he prayed that God would preserve a record of the Nephites so that someday the Lamanites too might be brought to salvation, even though anything the Nephites said and did now in Enos' time would have nothing to do with salvation on that future day, but only faith in Christ, whose death and resurrection would be in the past instead of the future.

Nevertheless, God made a covenant with Enos that he would bring the records of the Nephites to the Lamanites in due time.

So Enos turned into a prophet and went among his people the Nephites lest they be destroyed as God had warned Enos. Now Enos does not say if he was successful at converting the Nephites back to the true faith, but he does say that the Nephites were unsuccessful at converting the Lamanites back to the true faith. The Lamanites probably didn't think the Nephites were practicing what they were preaching.

Enos characterized the Lamanites this way:

Their hatred was fixed

They were led by their evil nature that they became wild, and ferocious, and a bloodthirsty people.

They were full of idolatry and filthiness;

They fed upon beasts of prey

They dwelling in tents and wandered about in the wilderness

They wore a short skin girdle about their loins and their heads were shaven

Their skill was in the bow, and in the cimeter, and the ax.

Many of them did eat nothing save it was raw meat

They were continually seeking to destroy the Nephites.

In short, the Lamanites were American Indians, perpetually at war with the White Man who tilled the land, grew fruit in orchards, and tended flocks of cattle and goats and horses.

(By the way, horses went extinct in North America thousands of years before the Nephites and Lamanites arrived there, and were not introduced until around 1500 by the Spanish, who brought them by sailing ship).

In 421 BCE Enos wrote that he was close to death. His grandfather Lehi, his uncle Nephi and his father Jacob all wrote the exact same thing: they too knew when they were about to die. No one entrusted with the metal plates ever just died and left the record dangling.

And so ends the book of Enos, which was a good one because it was so short.