The Dealings of the Lord

As Zeniff summarized the difficulties his people had with the Lamanites, he wrote about Laman and Lemuel and the original problems that they had with Nephi.  One of these was this: “They were wroth with him because they understood not the dealings of the Lord” (Mosiah 10:14).  In other words, they didn’t understand how God deals with His children.  This is evident, for example, in the fact that Laman and Lemuel did not understand prayer and their own responsibility in prayer.  When they asked Nephi to explain the words of their father about the olive tree, Nephi asked them, “Have ye inquired of the Lord?”  They responded, “We have not; for the Lord maketh no such thing known unto us” (1 Nephi 15:8-9).  They seemed to have assumed that all responsibility in communicating with God was His, not understanding that He requires us to seek and ask.  They also refused to understand that God would require difficult things of His children.  When Lehi gave them the Lord’s command they could not accept it.  Lehi lamented to Nephi, “Behold thy brothers murmur, saying it is a hard thing which I have required of them; but behold I have not required it of them, but it is a commandment of the Lord” (1 Nephi 3:5).  When he taught them about the need to hearken to God’s words and to be righteous lest they should be cast off, Laman and Lemuel responded, “Thou hast declared unto us hard things, more than we are able to bear” (1 Nephi 16:1).  They chose not to understand their own responsibility to keep the commandments of the Lord. 

            It’s pretty easy to assess Laman and Lemuel’s failure to understand “the dealings of the Lord” with them, but the important question is whether we really understand the dealings of the Lord with us in our own life.  When we have difficulties that are hard to understand, it is easy to “murmur in many things” like Laman and Lemuel because we can’t readily see why the Lord would let undesirable events happen or require us to do certain things (1 Nephi 2:11).  When Oliver Cowdery was unable to translate the plates with Joseph Smith, this was difficult to him to understand—why had the Lord had allowed him to translate the plates only for him to find out that he wasn’t able to do it?  After the experience the Lord counseled him this way: “Do not murmur, my son, for it is wisdom in me that I have dealt with you after this manner.  Behold, you have not understood; you have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought save it was to ask me” (D&C 9:6).  One of the misguided ideas of Laman and Lemuel seemed to be that they expected the Lord to simply make things easy for them, taking little spiritual responsibility.  In the matter of the translation Oliver had a little bit of the same problem—he anticipated that his part in the matter was much less demanding than it really was.  Nephi, on the other hand, understood that we must seek the Lord and His help with all our hearts.  When he heard his father’s words, he did “cry unto the Lord” and the Lord blessed him because he “sought [Him] diligently, with lowliness of heart” (1 Nephi 2:19).  That’s why his response was different than Laman and Lemuel’s.  He taught us that we must “diligently seek him” and that our efforts to come to the Lord must not be half-hearted; we must “hold fast unto” the word of God and “keep his commandments always in all things” (1 Nephi 10:17, 15:24-25).  Surely there is much that we all don’t understand about the dealings with the Lord with us—for as Isaiah taught, his “ways are higher than [our] ways”—and there will always be those things that we don’t understand as we “see through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12).  The key perhaps is to understand at least that in His dealings with us that we must continue to “diligently seek him” and know that if we do, eventually “the mysteries of God shall be unfolded unto [us], by the power of the Holy Ghost, as well in these times as in times of old” (1 Nephi 10:19).