My grandson serving a mission in South Africa emails home every week in response to his mother’s questions.
Before starting that procedure, his emails were very short and limited in information, like three or four short paragraphs. When he is required to respond to questions, she is getting some serious dialogue from him. She recently asked him what he thought about a lesson in his missionary instructions on ‘blind obedience’ and his answer was, “ya, that lesson is a good one. and i always just look at the fact that my leaders can actually see better than me so blind obedience is not even accurate in most situations.” (Flexy) I included his response just the way that he wrote it. He was a texting teenager before he left on his mission and when texting you don’t take time to punctuate or use capitals. If you can ignore his grammar, you will recognize the wisdom in what this young missionary actually said. Obedience to our spiritual leaders is not blind obedience, because we have faith that their spiritual eyes are better than ours. Their spiritual wisdom far exceeds ours and to be obedient to their authority and words of direction is wise, not blind obedience.
I have often thought how seemingly disobedient the children of Israel were during the Old Testament times. They weren’t even enlightened to a point where they could have blind faith. After I became a little more spiritually mature myself, I came to realize that under their circumstances, they did very well. All during their period of slavery, lasting many decades, they were uneducated people who had absolutely no spiritual leadership or training. They did not have prophets or apostles when they were enslaved by the Egyptians. They did not have an Old Testament to read or books and magazines, hot off the press, written by their spiritual leaders, such as the Ensign, etc. They were frequently chastised for their lack of faith, but when I try to put myself in their situation, I have a feeling that I would have failed miserably in the faith area, too. After Moses returned from Media and began to organize them, they had leadership for the first time. At first, even Moses did not know for sure what he was doing. The Lord tutored him most of his years as the prophet, leader of Israel. The Book of Deuteronomy, in the Old Testament, is where the Lord tells the children of Israel ‘the way it is.’ The title of this book in Hebrew is ‘elleh haddebarim,” which translate into English as “these are the words” according to Dr. Thomas L. Constable.
‘These are the words,’ tells the children of Israel in that book and in no uncertain terms that if they are obedient they will receive great blessings, but if they are not, there are dire circumstances. The Preface to Chapter 28 paraphrases the whole chapter as follows: “If the children of Israel are obedient, they will be blessed temporally and spiritually—If they are disobedient, they will be cursed, smitten, and destroyed; diseases, plagues, and oppression will come upon them; they will serve false gods and become a byword among all nations; fierce nations will enslave them; and they will eat their own children and be scattered among all nations.” They obviously qualified for the latter for their history describes, in detail, almost exactly what happened to the majority of them over the centuries.
Their lives, as spelled out in the Old Testament, probably don’t read a lot different than histories of other populations of people would read if they were made available to us. It has always been amazing to me how so many populations have had cycles of obe- dience and cycles of turning from the Lord. We are all human or natural people who demonstrate strengths as well as weaknesses when it comes to our worldly behavior. We can show disrespect for the law, as well as God’s commandments. We have such rational brains that even while we are breaking a law, we can find an intellectual way to justify it. If I have to be some where in a hurry I will justify going five or even ten miles per hour over the speed limit (because???). One of the most frequent justifications that I use is, “The speed limit was set this low, in this area, in order for the city to collect more revenue. Obviously there is no other reason, we are practically in the country here.” To rationalize or justify our behavior is one of Lucifer’s primary tools to lead us away from God.
There are thirteen basic points of belief to which members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ascribe. Joseph Smith first wrote them in a letter to John Wentworth, editor of the Chicago Democrat, in answer to his request to know what members of the Church believed. They were later given the title of ‘The Articles of Faith.’ The last two are “#12. We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law. #13. We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men.” Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe these thirteen articles were inspired of God and have therefore adopted them as a brief description of our faith. The last two articles obligate us to obey the laws of the land, much like the ten commandments were guidelines to the Israelites. We, like the Israelites, have the option of being obedient, or we can choose to disobey. Lucifer encouraged them, as he does us, to use our agency to make decisions contrary to God’s guidelines by using our ability to rationalize.
We can choose! What a wonderful option that is, and it makes us free. But that kind of freedom can be a blessing as well as a curse. Either way it is a maturing characteristic, whether we choose to obey or disobey, we are going to learn from the consequences of our decisions. What we sooner or later learn is that the consequences of obedient behavior is sweet, while the consequences of disobedience is most often, immediately or eventually, a sour outcome.
May God bless us to recognize early that obedience to his laws and the laws of the land have positive and eternal rewards.