Nephi and the Commandments of the Lord

The Lord said to Nephi in one of my favorite scriptural passages, “And I will also be your light in the wilderness; and I will prepare the way before you, if it so be that ye shall keep my commandments; wherefore, inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments ye shall be led towards the promised land; and ye shall know that it is by me that ye are led.” Nephi testified that because they had kept the commandments of God, He did “nourish them, and strengthen them, and provide means” for them to make the arduous journey across the wilderness to the place they called Bountiful. He summarized his own efforts this way, “Wherefore, I, Nephi, did strive to keep the commandments of the Lord, and I did exhort my brethren to faithfulness and diligence” (1 Nephi 17:15). Even in the desert with all of the suffering they endured, Nephi still was faithful trying to keep the commandments of the Lord.  

So which commandments exactly did Nephi keep? Of course the most obvious was the command given to Lehi to make the journey in the first place: “Wherefore, the Lord commanded my father that he should depart into the wilderness” (1 Nephi 17:44). We know of course that he was obedient to the commands to both get the plates and get the family of Ishmael to follow them into the wilderness. He was certainly obedient to the command to build a ship, declaring, “God had commanded me that I should build a ship…. If God had commanded me to do all things I could do them” (1 Nephi 17:49-50). He and his father undoubtedly were obedient to the Liahona which directed them and gave them instructions from time to time. I believe that he and his father were also faithful to the law of Moses in the wilderness. Though he didn’t mention that specifically, when he obtained the plates he wrote, “Yea, and I also thought that they could not keep the commandments of the Lord according to the law of Moses, save they should have the law” (1 Nephi 4:15). Clearly he knew that their family needed to keep the law of Moses and they would have sought to do so on their journey. This meant keeping the Sabbath day holy as they traveled and offering “sacrifice and burnt offering unto the Lord” as Lehi did in 1 Nephi 5:9. That would have indeed been a great sacrifice as they gave up animals they could have otherwise eaten and offered them instead to the Lord. They would have also kept the dietary restrictions of the law of Moses which perhaps was the hardest of all. For example, the camel was ceremonially unclean under the law of Moses—this meant if one of their camels died (presuming that they used such to travel), they would not have been able to eat it. Surely there were occasions when they came across animals they could have eaten but didn’t because they were not clean under the law of Moses. For example the cape hare is found in the Arabian peninsula, but, if I understand correctly, would have been unclean for them to eat. Surely it took great trust on the part of Nephi and Lehi to not try to eat these kinds of animals when food was so scarce for their families. But Nephi testified that the Lord “did provide means for [them]” while in the wilderness as they did “keep the commandments of God,” no matter how difficult those commandments were (1 Nephi 17:3).

As I pondered Nephi’s testimony in this chapter, and his witness that the Lord will lead us to our promise land as we keep His commandments, I was led to ask: “What commandments am I not keeping that are preventing me from receiving the blessings of the Lord?” Nephi’s example shows that it takes great diligence to keep God’s commandments—and sometimes sacrifice—and his story invites us all to ponder that question and strive more earnestly to do those things that we know God has asked us to do.