God Plans Ahead

Before 592 B.C., the Lord commanded Nephi to make a record of the ministry of his people, separate from his record of the history of his people. One thousand years later, Mormon abridged the record of the history, and then found the record of the ministry, which he decided, perhaps as a result of a prompting, to add at the end of his abridgement. One thousand four hundred years later, the abridgement of the record of the history was translated and subsequently lost, but the record of the ministry remained intact, was translated, and now accounts for the first several books of The Book of Mormon.

God knew the 116 pages would be lost.

God knew that Martin Harris would want to show his family some of what he had translated. God knew that Joseph Smith, at Martin Harris's insistence, would ask again and again for permission to let Martin Harris borrow the 116 pages. God knew that the pages would get lost or stolen and that conspiring men would use them for evil intent. God knew that the first part of the Plates of Mormon wasn't going to make it into The Book of Mormon.

So He made a buffer. He made sure Nephi and his descendants kept an historical record and that Mormon included at least part of that record, so that when Martin Harris lost the 116 pages, all he would end up losing (besides blessings) was a summary of a history book. The ministry of Nephi, his teachings, his testimony, and the rest of the record Mormon would later include and abridge, would remain intact and ultimately get published as The Book of Mormon, partly because God made sure there would be something there that Martin Harris and Joseph Smith could translate and then lose without losing anything too terribly important.

Because God knew, more than two thousand years before it happened, that Smith and Harris would lose the first part of whatever they translated, and He planned ahead to account for that.

I think that now I might understand what God meant when He said that His plans cannot be frustrated (D&C 3:1). No matter what's going to happen next, God knew it was going to happen, and He already accounted for it in His master plan. Now, this raises a few interesting questions, which I should probably explore later, but first, I just want to appreciate the fact that God plans ahead, even multiple millennia in advance.