Pop Quiz!
How times does the phrase “obey the commandments” appear in the New Testament?
If you read the email subject line, you probably already guessed the answer, which is zero.
Okay, how about “obey my commandments”?
Still zero.
Are you surprised? Doesn’t it seem like at some point Jesus said, “If ye love me, obey my commandments?”
He didn’t. What he said was...
“If ye love me, keep my commandments.” (see John 14:15, emphasis added)
Note: I think there is a difference between obeying commandments and keeping commandments. After a year of pondering and studying what it means to “keep the commandments,” I wrote a blog article about my thoughts. I’ll include it at the end of this newsletter.
If Jesus never asked us to obey the commandments, was Jesus obedient? I would say most definitely. When I brought this concept up in class recently, one of my students made this comment.
“When my father was raising us, he would tell us, ‘We don’t obey commandments, we obey the Commander.’”
I agree wholeheartedly. Jesus wasn’t obedient to commandments, he was obedient to his Father, the One who commanded him in all things.
At this point you might be thinking, “Well, that’s just semantics. If the Father commands Jesus to do something, and he obeys his Father, then he’s obeying the commandment that came from the Father.”
To which I say, it’s not semantics. Words matter. I think it’s important that we don’t say we obey commandments. And here’s why…
In the Noah Webster 1828 dictionary, you’ll find this definition under the word obedient.
Submissive to authority; yielding compliance with commands, orders or injunctions; performing what is required, or abstaining from what is forbid.
Did you catch that? Being obedient means you are willing to submit to authority. Commandments don’t have authority over us, it’s the Commander who has authority.
In my religion we have a quote from our current prophet that is repeated often from pulpits. It goes like this:
“Obedience brings blessings, exact obedience brings miracles.”
This quote is often interpreted as meaning that if we obey the commandments perfectly, miracles can occur. I’ve heard many stories about LDS members who report stress and anxiety in striving to be perfectly obedient. I don’t think President Nelson was trying to stress us out when he said this, and I don’t think Jesus wants us stressed out about this either.
While I don’t want to pretend like I know what Pres. Nelson meant by this quote, I have thought quite a bit about what “exact obedience” means. The word “exact” means “precise, not approximated in any way, to be completely accurate.” I think of it as the very center of a dartboard. The dart is exact in hitting it’s mark when it’s right in the bull’s eye.
How can we hit the bull’s eye when it comes to being obedient? I don’t think we do it by obeying all of God’s commandments perfectly. I think we hit the bull’s eye when we know exactly who we are obeying. Many people, including those in authority, may come forward and say “Obey me. I speak for God. Do what I say.” And sometimes that might be accurate.
However, sometimes we might find ourselves in a situation where obeying God and obeying church leaders conflict with each other. This happened to Jesus often during his ministry. Here’s an example:
The law at the time was that you couldn’t heal on the Sabbath because that was considered work. Jesus said he was sent to do his Father’s will and healed on the Sabbath. By doing what was asked of him by the Father, he upset the leaders of the synagogue. According to them, Jesus broke the Sabbath.
Does anything like this happen today? All the time. Here’s an example:
A woman serving an LDS mission was told she couldn’t call home. She was told she needed to obey her mission president and do what ever he asked. She discovered the mission president was engaged in inappropriate activities. She decided to break the rule of calling home and notified her local ecclesiastical leader. Within hours, the mission president was replaced.
Hopefully most of us don’t have stories as extreme as this one, but I think it illustrates that we need to know exactly who we are obedient to. Commandments don’t have authority over us, the One Who Commands has authority over us. While we may not be perfect in obeying or even keeping the commandments, we can have a perfect understanding of whom we should follow. In that regard, we can hit the bull’s eye.
Wishing you a great Sabbath,
Heather Ruth Pack
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Want to Read More?
Want to discover what I learned studying the difference between obeying and keeping the commandments? Find out in my article titled, "Keep the Commandments: It's Not as Hard as You Might Think"
The article is currently featured on the Times of Faith blog. To read the article, click the button below.
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