No question is more basic to scriptural interpretation than the determination of whether a particular passage, story, or even an entire book of scripture is to be understood as figurative or literal.
Having read to his brothers what we know as Isaiah chapters 48 and 49, Nephi was asked if what he had read was to be understood in a figurative or a literal sense. Short of the actual destruction of scriptural records, Satan has no more effective way of opposing scriptural truths than confusing the figurative and the literal. Like potter’s clay, some simply mold the scriptures into the likeness of the theories of men.
Conversely, by making scriptural metaphors literal, the most marvelous truths are distorted beyond recognition. The bread and wine of the sacrament are an obvious illustration. By eating the sacramental bread, do we literally eat the body of Christ?
And in drinking the wine or water in a sacramental ritual are we figuratively drinking Christ’s blood, or doing so literally, as some suppose? Such is the issue, ever present in scriptural interpretation: Is the passage, the story, or the book to be interpreted figuratively or literally?