2 Nephi 25:16
1830 Edition
Influences
Changes
Simple English
After they are scattered, the Lord God will punish them through other nations. This will happen for many generations. It will go on from one generation to another. Finally they will be led to believe in Christ. He is the Son of God. They will believe in the atonement. The atonement is for all people everywhere. When they believe in Christ, they will worship the Father in his name. They will worship with pure hearts and clean hands. They will stop looking for another Messiah. When that day comes, they should believe these things.
Paraphrase
After they’ve been scattered, and the Lord has let other nations punish them for many generations—down through the ages—they’ll finally be persuaded to believe in Christ, the Son of God, and in his atonement, which covers all humanity. When they believe in Christ, worship the Father in his name with pure hearts and clean hands, and stop waiting for another Messiah—then the time will come when they must accept these truths.
Notes
Written in approximately 550 B.C., 2 Nephi 25:16-26 provides an excellent example of a "theological anachronism."
LDS scholar, Grant Hardy observes: "In 1831, Alexander Campbell, one of the book's first critics (and certainly the first one to read it carefully), famously observed that it seemed to weigh in on all the popular religious questions of the day, including 'infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government, religious experience, the call to the ministry , the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the question of freemasonry, republican government, and the right of the man.' This is a fair list, and references to these topics-or their analogous counterparts-can be found throughout the Book of Mormon." -Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon, p. 184
M.T. Lamb writes, "The whole Old Testament, as we have it, proceeds upon the assumption that these new Testament truths were not fully understood by the Old Testament writers. The entire system of bloody sacrifices, as found in the law of Moses, would have been the silliest nonsense to him had he understood in full the great plan of redemption to which this system looked forward in type... It would hardly seem possible for language to state more clearly or positively that the mystery of Christ's incarnation and the modus operandi or method of human salvation HAD NOT been revealed to the world until the Apostle's day. That while the Old Testament authors had presented the truth, it had been so presented in type, shadow, symbol and figure that it was not an could not be understood by them, not even by the angels of God..." -M.T. Lamb, The Golden Bible; or The Book of Mormon, Is It From God? (New York: Ward and Drummand, 1887), pp. 148.