SCRIPTURE: “Behold the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes. It is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.” –1 Nephi 4:13. [source]
HYMN: “Do what is right; let the consequence follow.” –from the chorus of the LDS Hymn Do What is Right. [source]
COMMENTARY: If you read 1 Nephi chapter 4 carefully, you can tell Nephi regretted his decision to kill Laban, because even when he wrote about it years and years later, he spent a lot of time trying to justify his decision. And since he was the only one there, we can’t know for sure that God commanded it. As the verse says, the Lord slayeth the wicked; not the Lord commandeth the righteous to slay the wicked. We know from other scriptures that the Lord will always provide a way, so maybe Nephi just needed more faith. He could have brought a rock to the Lord as the Brother of Jared did, and asked the Lord to turn it into a seer stone so he could use it like Joseph Smith did and read the plates of brass off the stone from the bottom of his hat. Oh, but I guess Nephi didn’t have a hat, so that wouldn’t have worked. Oh well, I tried; nothing left but to kill the bastard. But what do I know? I’m just another apostate.
