He preached to a people who would not listen, watched his entire civilization destroy itself to the last man, wrote it all down from a hole in a rock, and signed off in perfect peace. Ether is the book's witness that a man can lose the whole world and keep his soul — and that faith is precisely the thing that holds when there is nothing left to hope for in this life.
The Prophet Nobody Heard
Ether came at the end. He was of the royal Jaredite line — son of Coriantor, descended through the long, bloody dynasty of kings the brother of Jared had warned would lead to captivity — and he was raised up to prophesy in the final, rotten days of his nation, when the whole people had grown fully ripe in iniquity (cf. Ether 13:2). The record is almost unbearably blunt about how his ministry went:
And it came to pass that Ether did prophesy great and marvelous things unto the people, which they did not believe, because they saw them not. (Ether 12:5)
Which they did not believe, because they saw them not. He told them glorious things — he foretold the coming of Christ, the establishment of a New Jerusalem, the destiny of the promised land (Ether 13:2–12) — and they dismissed all of it for the oldest reason in the world: it wasn't in front of their eyes. He was a prophet preaching to people whose ears were already closed, in a society already past the point of return, and he knew it. He preached anyway. From morning, even until the going down of the sun, exhorting the people to believe in God unto repentance (Ether 12:3). A whole career of crying out to people who had decided not to hear.
The Faith of Things Not Seen
It is in the middle of Ether's story that Moroni, abridging the record, stops everything to deliver one of the great meditations on faith in all of scripture — and he hangs it on Ether precisely because Ether is the proof of it. And now I, Moroni, would speak somewhat concerning these things; I would show unto the world that faith is things which are hoped for and not seen (Ether 12:6). The whole chapter unfolds from Ether's situation: a man holding fast to invisible promises while the visible world collapses around him.
Wherefore, dispute not because ye see not, for ye receive no witness until after the trial of your faith. (Ether 12:6)
This is the exact rebuke to the crowd that rejected Ether — they did not believe, because they saw them not — and the exact description of Ether himself, who believed without seeing, and so became the standing example of the doctrine. Moroni piles up the heroes of faith the way Hebrews 11 does: it was by faith the brother of Jared saw the Lord, by faith the law was given, by faith miracles were wrought (Ether 12:11–22). And the climax of the whole passage is the Lord's promise about the very weakness Ether and Moroni both felt — preaching beautifully and being ignored:
And if men come unto me I will show unto them their weakness. I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them. (Ether 12:27)
My grace is sufficient. Ether is the man for whom that promise had to be enough, because he was given nothing else. No revival. No converts the record names. No vindication he would live to enjoy. Only the promise that the unseen things were real and that grace would carry him — and for Ether, it did.
The Hole in the Rock
The most haunting image of his life is also the simplest. When the people finally cast him out and the civilization began its slide into total war, Ether did not flee the country or fall silent. He found a hiding place and kept working:
For so great was the destruction of the people of Coriantumr that Ether was constrained to hide himself in the cavity of a rock, and from thence beheld the destruction which came upon the people. And by night he went forth viewing the things which were to come upon the people. (Ether 13:13–14)
Picture it. A solitary old prophet, crouched in a cleft in the rock by day, creeping out at night to watch armies tear each other apart, going back into the dark to write it down. He is the historian of the apocalypse — the last literate, faithful man in a dying world, recording the extinction of his own people because someone has to, because the record must survive even if the nation does not. He had no audience left. The people who might have read his warnings were killing each other in the fields below. And still he wrote, by night, in a hole in the rock, the chronicle that would one day be carried in another people's record and read on the far side of an ocean and a thousand years.
There is something almost unbearably lonely and almost unbearably faithful in it. Ether's whole reward, in this life, was to be right about a catastrophe he could not stop and to write the obituary of everyone he had ever known. And he did it without bitterness, because his faith was fixed on the things not seen — on the Christ he had foretold, on the New Jerusalem, on the kingdom of God where the things of this collapsing world would finally be set right.
The Last Words
The book of Ether — and with it the entire Jaredite record, a civilization's worth of history — closes on Ether's own quiet signature, and it is one of the most serene endings in scripture. He has watched the last battle. He has seen Coriantumr survive alone, exactly as he prophesied. There is no one left. And Ether writes:
And it came to pass that Ether did finish his record … and he hid them in a manner that the people of Limhi did find them. Now the last words which are written by Ether are these: Whether the Lord will that I be translated, or that I suffer the will of the Lord in the flesh, it mattereth not, if it so be that I am saved in the kingdom of God. Amen. (Ether 15:33–34)
It mattereth not, if it so be that I am saved in the kingdom of God. Read those last words against everything that has just happened. His nation is gone — every person, every city, the whole world he was born into, erased. He is, as far as the record shows, the last Jaredite alive, an old man alone with a finished book. And his final line contains no grief, no complaint, no fear — only a calm indifference to his own fate so long as the one thing that matters is secure. Translated or dying in the flesh — it mattereth not. He has lost literally everything a man can lose except his soul, and he has discovered that the soul was the only thing that was ever really his to keep.
That serenity is the whole point of Ether. He is the proof of what faith is actually for. Not for getting what we want in this life — Ether got none of it. Faith is the thing that holds a man steady when this life has nothing left to offer him, that fixes his peace on a kingdom the collapse of this world cannot touch. The man in the hole in the rock, writing by night while his people died, ended his record more at peace than the kings who had everything. It mattereth not. He had the only thing that does.
He preached glory to people who would not hear it because they could not see it, and then watched every one of them destroy each other to the last man. He hid in a cleft of rock and wrote the death of his own world by night, with no audience left alive to read it. And when it was finished — his nation gone, himself alone, an old man with a closed book — he laid down his pen in perfect peace: translated or dying in the flesh, it mattered not, so long as he was saved in the kingdom of God. He is the book's witness that faith is for exactly this — not the things we can see and want and lose, but the unseen kingdom that holds when everything seen has burned. He lost the whole world and kept his soul, and found it was the only thing he had ever truly owned.