It is human nature, especially in our modern day, to complicate things, to look beyond the mark, whereas often the answers to life’s most vexing problems are simple and straightforward. And we frequently fail to see things as they really are because of our tendency toward abstraction. This is not a modern phenomenon.
We remember that Nephi referred to a similar incident in ancient Israel’s history, the occasion when a murmuring band of Hebrews were bitten by fiery, flying serpents (see Numbers 21:69). In order to be healed, the afflicted persons had but to look to a brazen serpent Moses had set up on a pole (symbolic, of course, of the Savior- see John 3:14) . “The labor which they had to perform was to look; and because of the simpleness of the way, or the easiness of it, there were many who perished” (1 Nephi 17:41).