Come, Follow Me Lesson: Isaiah 13–39 — A Marvellous Work and a Wonder

2026 · Week 39 · Sep 21–27 · Isaiah 13–39

A Marvellous Work and a Wonder — and why the code is the whole key

Before class started, a few showed up early. So we ran the codes.

“What was the first code we learned?”

“Egypt.”

“What could it mean?”

“America.”

That took four seconds, and it is the entire method. Two weeks ago none of them had heard of a code in Isaiah. Now it comes back faster than I can ask for it.

I had a full lesson prepared for twenty-seven chapters, with notes on all of it. I never opened them. I spent longer on the codes than I meant to, and it turned out the codes were the lesson. Everything after that ran on what the students could decode themselves.

So that is how this is written. Not a summary of twenty-seven chapters. The key, and then what the key opens.

And it goes further than the class did, on purpose. We ran out of clock with the best part still coming, and I told them the rest would be here. Here is the rest.

Read it in one sitting or come back to it. It will keep.

View the complete corrected slide deck (PDF, 24 slides).

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Watch the patterns

Ecclesiastes gives us a rule in a book traditionally associated with Solomon:

And the Savior said the same thing about Isaiah specifically, in the same breath where He commanded us to search him:

Have been. And shall be. Then, now, and again.

So Isaiah’s ancient nations are not a history lesson. He wrote about what happened, what happens, and what is coming — often in the same sentence. A code is not a cipher and it is not numerology. It is a recurring prophetic language — names, nations, roles, covenant conditions — that every prophet after him inherited and used.

Here is the codebook we have built so far. Every one of these came out of the text, not out of me.

Four of those do the heavy lifting in this week’s chapters. The rest are the map for the weeks ahead — you will meet Assyria, the arm, and the four names of Isaiah 11 again, and soon.

And here is the question that keeps a codebook from turning into a game:

Salvation is Him. Righteousness is His arm. Immanuel is His presence. The code is not a decoder ring for predicting headlines. It is a set of doors, and every one of them opens toward Christ and through Christ to the Father.

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The Restoration is not the whole marvelous work

The official Come, Follow Me lesson takes its title from Isaiah 29:14 — a marvellous work and a wonder. Almost everyone reads that as the Restoration: the First Vision, the Book of Mormon, the Church coming out of the ground.

That is the foundation. It is not the building.

Foundation. Commenced. Second time. That is the vocabulary of a beginning, and the scriptures use it every time.

I asked the class what President Nelson said their job is. They knew it cold: gather Israel. The battalion of youth. That is not a slogan bolted onto the Restoration — that is the marvelous work itself, and the Restoration is what made it possible.

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Where Isaiah hides inside the Book of Mormon

The Book of Mormon quotes nineteen chapters of Isaiah in full — seventeen of them inside Nephi’s own record. Last week we covered most of the big run, Isaiah 2 through 12. This week only two of it are left — 13 and 14 — and then one more that comes out of nowhere.

Here is the shortcut worth writing in your margin. Add ten. Isaiah 2 is 2 Nephi 12. Isaiah 3 is 2 Nephi 13. Isaiah 14 is 2 Nephi 24. That holds for the whole run Nephi copied.

Then Isaiah 29 breaks the pattern. It is not in the block. Nephi reaches forward, pulls it out of order, and expands it across 2 Nephi 27.

Read what is in it:

That happened. Martin Harris carried the characters to Professor Charles Anthon in New York. Anthon asked for the book. Harris told him part of it was sealed. Anthon said he could not read a sealed book.

One student said it out loud: I did not know about that. It’s right there.

The temple in Isaiah 2. The Book of Mormon and the sealed book in Isaiah 29. Nephi put both passages in front of us and gave us a way to search them.

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When Egypt becomes America

Isaiah 19 is not in the manual’s reading this week. It is one of sixteen chapters between Isaiah 13 and 39 that the manual skips. Read it with the first code in hand.

I asked what that was. They had it instantly: civil war. One of them thought of Captain America — fair enough, it is the only civil war a fourteen-year-old has a movie for.

Then I asked if they knew Joseph Smith prophesied the American Civil War roughly thirty years before it happened.

December 25, 1832. The revelation named South Carolina during the nullification crisis. The Civil War began in 1861, nearly three decades later.

Isaiah 19 gives us an older image of internal conflict. Reading that image alongside D&C 87 is an interpretive comparison, not a claim that the two passages describe the same event.

Then I told them to stand up and come close, because this one was too important to see from a chair.

Two images. Same composition. Same people, same arrangement, same conflict, same buildings on the same ground. The first is ancient Egypt. The second is modern America — and the Washington Monument rises straight up out of the obelisk, same place, same frame.

I clicked between them.

“Oh, my goodness.”

“This is big.”

Then, from somewhere in the middle of the room: “Do it again.”

So I did it again.

Hold it precisely. Isaiah 19 is about Egypt — that is the text. Reading Egypt as a type of a latter-day superpower is interpretation, the likening Nephi told us to do, and it is not the same as claiming the word Egypt means America. The pattern is the claim. The pattern is enough.

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Do not eat somebody else’s meal

Isaiah 28. I put the picture up and the class reacted before anyone read a word: “They look drunk.”

That is in your scriptures. Isaiah handed us something genuinely disgusting on purpose, because you will never forget it.

A table covered in what somebody else already ate and threw back up. Do not sit down there.

And a student got there before I did: don’t live on secondhand understanding.

Then the best line of the morning, from a fourteen-year-old:

That is not contempt for teachers or parents or prophets. A good teacher walks you to the table. Nobody can digest it for you. You cannot live on someone else’s testimony, someone else’s study, someone else’s knowledge — and the ten virgins already told us you cannot borrow someone else’s oil.

And last week I left you standing at a verse in this same chapter. Here it is.

David named that place Baal-perazim after the Lord broke through the Philistines for him (2 Samuel 5:20). Centuries later Isaiah reaches back to that place name and turns the image around.

Read who is on the receiving end in Isaiah 28. Not the Philistines. The covenant people. The rulers who had made a covenant with death. Same God. Same breaking through. Other direction.

That is why He calls it His strange work. It is strange because it is aimed at His own.

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The sealed book, is it hiding in plain sight?

Everybody knows part of the plates was sealed and we do not have it yet. But look at what Isaiah says:

A sealed book… sealed plates. Related by pattern, distinct in the text — do we not collapse them into one thing? The same thing. Are they?

Then I asked: what other part of the Book of Mormon is sealed, sitting right there in your hands, because nobody understands it?

“Isaiah?”

Wow. Could it be? I don’t know, just an idea…

And then a student asked the question:

Placing those two side by side is a discovery. But the covenant that governs it is not a clever idea anybody invented. It is written down, with conditions attached.

The Savior gave the Nephites the lesser things first, and He said why:

And the sealed record itself carries the same terms:

Believe the lesser things and the greater things are manifested. Refuse them and the greater things are withheld. Not maybe. Not eventually. That is the deal, in His own words, twice. Alma basically added a third witness when he told Zeezrom the same thing… See Alma 12:9-11.

So the question is not whether the sealed plates are coming. The question is what we have done with a part that is also sealed, and already in our hands.

And the part already in our hands, that almost nobody can read, sitting inside a book we all own, and share with the world by the tens of millions, and quote and carry to church — could it be Isaiah?

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Written for the end time

I asked the class what Latter-day Saints means. They know the name. They had never taken it apart.

The Church came out of the ground in 1827 — almost two hundred years, which feels like forever to a student and is about ten percent of the time since Christ. A tithe of the time. Two days in His time.

Latter days and end times may not the same thing. The latter days are the long stretch we have been living in since 1830. The end time is the sharp part right at the end of it.

Isaiah wrote for the sharp part.

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Why would God hide any of it?

This is where the clock ran out on us.

I got about three sentences into this in class and time was up, and they groaned, and I promised I would put the rest where they could get it. So if you were in that room Sunday morning — this is the part you did not get.

And it may be the best part.

When the Savior visited the Nephites, He asked for their records and read them. Then He stopped:

Samuel the Lamanite had stood on a wall and prophesied the signs, and they had not written it down. Christ told them to fix it. He cares what His people preserve.

Now hold that next to this. Four times, prophets were told not to write.

Nephi’s own words:

He was not writing in code. He was writing plainly — and he was stopped. Why? Too plain?

And one of the four comes with a reason. Mormon was told the lesser things come first, and the greater things are withheld —

Read that again. The difficulty is not an accident. It is the design.

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So what did Nephi do?

Do not take my word for any of this. Just read what he does next, in order.

Nephi reaches the latter-day part of his vision. He sees the whole thing. He is writing it plainly. And then the door closes:

Five chapters later he tells us what he is about to do, and why:

Then he gives us Isaiah 48 and 49, whole, in 1 Nephi 20 and 21. Then in 1 Nephi 22 he turns around and explains what they mean for the last days.

Nephi stops writing part of his vision and later turns to Isaiah.

Now sit with that for a second before you read the next line.

What did Nephi put in our hands at the exact place his own plain account could go no further?

He could not write the rest of the vision. He did hand us Isaiah and tell us to liken it.

It may be the test. And the Savior told us exactly what to do with it: search these things diligently. Not read. Search. What does that even mean?

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Nephi left a map

We ran out of time before I could show the class this part, so here it is — and this is the reason to come back next week.

Before Nephi quotes a single full chapter of Isaiah, he plants four seeds. Four places where he paraphrases Isaiah without naming him. Look them up yourself. Under the Law of First Mention, the first appearance of an idea sets its meaning for everything after.

And Nephi names Isaiah by name exactly twice before quoting him — no more, no fewer:

Then look at the third seed, because it is this week’s title. 1 Nephi 14:7 is the first time the marvelous work appears in the Book of Mormon, and Nephi does not just repeat Isaiah — he says what the work does:

Everlasting. One hand or the other. The marvelous work is not only a restoration. It sorts people.

And Nephi never drops Isaiah on us cold. He sets up before and explains after — bookends. 1 Nephi 19 prepares, 20–21 gives you Isaiah 48–49, 22 explains it. Then 2 Nephi 11 prepares, 12–24 gives you Isaiah 2–14, and 25 explains how he expects you to read all of it.

Skip the bookends and you have thrown away the reading guide the prophet wrote for you.

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Where this lands

President Ezra Taft Benson stood up in general conference in October 1986 and said the reason we must make the Book of Mormon the center of our study is that it was written for our day — “The Nephites never had the book; neither did the Lamanites of ancient times.” It was meant for us.

Thirty-eight years later, in October 2024, Elder Bednar stood up in general conference and quoted that same line — and said it continues to shape how he reads the Book of Mormon.

Sit with what that means. Mormon abridged a thousand years of records. He chose what to keep. And he chose it for a people he would never meet, in a day he would never see, holding a book his own nation never had.

It is not a history lesson. It is a future lesson. It was aimed at you before you were born.

The Restoration laid the foundation. The Father is fulfilling His covenants. Christ is the sure foundation, and the gathering of Israel is the work He is carrying out for His Father — which is where every one of these codes has been pointing the whole time.

Search. Not read.

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Next week

General conference, so no class. But this one is too important to skip, so the lesson is going up anyway and you can do it at home.

Isaiah 40 through 49 — “Comfort Ye My People.” And I will tell you now that two of those chapters, Isaiah 48 and 49, are the ones Nephi put in 1 Nephi 20 and 21 — the first full Isaiah he ever handed us, with bookends on both sides.

Isaiah 49:2 says the Lord’s servant is hidden. Twice, in one verse. I’m betting He is really good at hiding things… and people.

And D&C 113 named three of Isaiah 11’s four figures and left one alone.

I think those two facts are the same fact. We will see.

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Ken Krogue is the founder of The Covenant Project and has been deeply studying Isaiah for more than ten years.