Hello, welcome back. It's a great day to spend some time in the Book of Mormon.

Of course that's true every day, but I'm looking forward to the things that we get to talk about today in the book of Mosiah.

Today, basically for the first time, we get to sink our teeth into the large plates of Nefai.

If you remember, Nefai was commanded to make two sets of records. One, the small plates were for the more spiritual part, the ministry and the prophecies and revelations.

The larger plates were the ones that were for the reigns of the kings and the wars and contentions of his people.

The small plates comprised everything from first Nephi through Omni and then everything else is large plates with words of Mormon as kind of

connective tissue so he lets you know what he's been doing. In fact what has he

been doing he's been editing and so we now shift from authors,

Nephi, Jacob, Enus, Jaram, and so forth,

into editors, namely Mormon,

who's taken all these records from people like King Benjamin, Mosiah, Alma the Younger, later Nephies, and so on,

and abridging them, including what he lamented, was less than 1%, the 100th part, to try to help us understand the things of God through the history of his people.

Now that's a significant shift.

We're going from spiritual teachings, sprinkled in with a little bit of history so that we understand the storyline as it's going through

to now primarily history with some spiritual lessons that Mormon is really hoping that we will be able to pull out.

Mormon's goal really was no different than Nephys.

Remember Nephy back in 1st Nephy 6?

The fullness of my intent is to persuade all people to come into the God of Israel

and be saved.

Mormon had the same goal in mind.

He just had different material to work with.

That's probably why he was so thrilled when he stumbled across the small plates and decided to include them at the end.

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