Great Blessings for Small Acts of Obedience - Book of Jarom

You can read the entire chapter at the following link: https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm/jarom/1?lang=eng.

We’re in a section of the Book of Mormon where the record-keepers are taking a very long view of events and developments. With Enos and Jarom, we don’t get the same vivid detail that Nephi and Jacob provide. That makes it a little more difficult to apply directly to our personal lives. But by pulling back and helping us understand how civilization under covenant to the Lord gets along over time, Enos and Jarom open a window for us into how the Lord’s love and mercy operate.

What stands out to me in the account of Jarom (Enos’ son) is that the Nephite people are clearly imperfect. Jarom tells us that much needed to be done—presumably in reminding the people of the gospel law and of their covenants—because of their general blindness, deafness, and stiffneckedness (verse 3).

And yet, despite these weaknesses, the Lord showers the Nephites with blessings. Why? According to Jarom, it seems to come down to two things in particular:

1)   Some portion of the Nephites continued to exercise abundant faith and receive the communion of the Holy Spirit. Notably, this includes their kings and leaders, who were mighty in faith and taught the people in the Lord’s ways (verses 4 and 7).

2)   Even though the people had trouble with openness to the word of the Lord, at a certain level, they remained obedient to fundamentals—what we know as the Law of Moses. This of course includes the Ten Commandments as well as many of the other practices governing worship and daily habits that are spelled out in the Books of Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and that many Jews continue to this day (verse 5).

We know that the Nephites’ prosperity in the land is based on their obedience (verse 9). It appears as though their willingness to keep the Law of Moses and their basic respect for the Lord (Jarom also specifies that the Nephites did not use profanity or engage in blasphemy) was sufficient to help them multiply on the land, become exceedingly rich and sweep away the invading hordes of their bloodthirsty Lamanite cousins (verses 6-8).

Underlying the Nephites’ prosperity is the continual effort put forth by the Lord’s prophets and those assisting them to remind the people of the Law of Moses and that it points the way to the Messiah. Devoid of that context, we may face challenges in understanding the “why” of the Law of Moses beyond its utility as a code of ethics to provide order on earth. With it, the law is tied to the great work of salvation personified in Jesus. It points us in the direction of His divine qualities, and ultimately, His willingness to sacrifice His entire will to that of His Father because of His love for us. Under Jarom, the prophets, priests and teachers persuaded their people to believe in the Messiah to come “as though he already was” (verse 11).

As the Apostle Paul wrote more than 400 years after Jarom’s time (by Jarom’s own timeline, he finishes his record and entrusts the plates to his son Omni in 361 B.C.), and after the Atonement and Resurrection of Christ had been accomplished (in Galatians 3:24):

Wherefore the law [of Moses] was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster. For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.

The Law of Moses recognizes that the rest of us need to learn obedience and sacrifice gradually, while showing that the ultimate goal of emulating the Savior remains the same. The great lesson of Jarom—that we can still find great blessings while we are in the process of feeling our way toward the higher law that Jesus kept—is extremely comforting and shows how much the Lord wants to bless us for even the smallest acts of obedience. It also reinforces the inseparability of the Law of Moses from who Jesus is and what He did and still does. Let us never forget that the Passover deliverance of the Israelites from mortal death—so powerfully represented by the Israelites’ reliance on the blood of the unblemished firstborn lamb—points directly to the Lamb of God’s ability to deliver us all from both the grave and our own sins by His own willing sacrifice.