1 Ne 2:24 they
shall be a scourge unto thy seed, to stir them up in the ways of remembrance.
Hugh Nibley
“One
thing the reader of the Book of Mormon is never allowed to forget is that the
Nephites lived in a polarized world, in which they were perpetually engaged
either in hot or cold wars with the Lamanites. Their basic problem was one of
survival; security was an obsession with them…the Nephites had by all human
standards ample cause for alarm. Yet from the beginning they received full
assurance that God had purposely arranged things that way, and that they had
absolutely nothing to fear as long as they behaved themselves. God intended
that the Nephites should have hostile Lamanites breathing down their necks: ‘I will curse them even with a sore curse, and they shall
have no power over thy seed except they shall rebel against me also. And
if it so be that they rebel against me, they shall be as a scourge unto thy seed,
to stir them up in the ways of remembrance’ ("1
Ne. 2:23"1 Ne. 2:241 Nephi 2:23-24).
“So
it was a blessing to the Nephites after all to have the Lamanites on their
doorstep to ‘stir them up to remembrance’—‘Happy is
the man whom God correcteth’ ("Job 5:17Job 5:17). No matter how wicked and ferocious
and depraved the Lamanites might be (and they were that!), no matter by how
much they outnumbered the Nephites, darkly closing in on all sides, no matter
how insidiously they spied and intrigued and infiltrated and hatched their
diabolical plots and breathed their bloody threats and pushed their formidable
preparations for all-out war, they were not the Nephite problem. They
were merely kept there to remind the Nephites of their real problem, which was
to walk uprightly before the Lord.” (Since Cumorah, 2nd ed., pp. 338-9.)