Jacob 3

Now for the rest of you, this: Keep your minds firm, God-ward. Pray hard, faithfully. He’ll console you when you’re shaken up. He’ll defend you against malcontents and crooks out to get your hide. God’s words are pleasing. So think of firmness of mind as a kind of appetite, then devour those words.

If your hearts aren’t pure, though—indeed, if they’re outright filthy, as I know some of yours are—God will ravage your lands with a filth that only he can dredge up. And the Lamanites, whom you love to blame for all ills, will gobble you up. They’ll seize your property by force. And the righteous among you might get blessedly exiled to yet another promised land.

The Lamanites, with that black skin you think is God’s curse, are now officially better than you. Because they, at least, are still living by the sexual rules he gave. Their observance of even that puts them in better stead with God than you. So the tables are already turning.

Look, their husbands and wives love each other, they all love their kids, and any prejudice they have against you they got from their parents. So why are you any better than them? At some point, even your skin will be darker than theirs—at least metaphorically—when you stand before God to be judged. So stop all the race-baiting, the dark-skin biases. Stop even the comments about their hygiene. Different strokes, as they say. Or, if you hate it so bad, give them some of your expensive perfume.

In the meantime, start thinking about how you’re shaping your children’s thoughts about themselves and responses to others. You’re pretty pathetic examples and you can’t even envision what the effects of that will be. You talk about Lamanites’ “filthiness,” but you can’t smell your own. That defect could cripple your children’s souls for eternity.

You need to shake yourselves off like muddy dogs before you’re fit to sit in your own houses. You need to wake up from this fantasy life you inhabit before you can act mindfully on earth. You’re in chains, but you can remove them, one at a time. If you don’t, you may as well shake hands with the devil now. You’ll be spending a lot of time with him.

I said a lot more to everyone at the temple, especially about sex sins, detailing their gritty effects. Meanwhile, the usual disclaimer: I wouldn’t try to cover one-hundredth of the day-to-day goings on of our tribes. Look for those and war history, political debates, and such, on the other, larger plates I’ve cross-referenced.

These current plates, by the way, we now call “the plates of Jacob,” though Nephi made them.