A comment in gospel principles class recently gave me pause. A fellow member suggested that we ought to obey God blindly: without question, without examination, simply because He commands it.
I respect the spirit behind the sentiment, a desire for total submission to God’s will. But I believe the scriptures teach something richer and more demanding than blind compliance, they teach that genuine faith is not blind at all.
What Is Blind Obedience?
To obey blindly is to act without evidence, without understanding, and without willingness to examine one’s reasons for acting.
It is the posture of a person who, knowing nothing of the one giving the command, simply complies. You often hear this criticism leveled at religious belief generally, under the label of “blind faith”: the idea that believers invest themselves in action without any rational basis for doing so.
But is this what God actually demands of us? The Book of Mormon suggests otherwise, and it does so through a phrase that does not appear anywhere in the Bible.
The Eye of Faith
The phrase “eye of faith” appears in the Book of Enos, in Alma 5, and again in Ether 12. It is a striking image because an eye that is blind is no eye at all. To speak of faith as having an eye is to say that faith perceives: that it looks toward something, sees something, knows something.
For a person who knows something of God’s character, His attributes, His perfections, faith cannot be blind. It is vision of a particular kind: a vision directed by knowledge of who God is.
The Brother of Jared: A Study in Knowing God
My favorite illustration of this principle is the brother of Jared. When he approaches the Lord boldly and asks to see His face, the Lord responds with a striking question:
“Believest thou the words which I shall speak?”
Ether 3:11
On the surface, this seems almost impossible to answer honestly. How can anyone agree to believe words that haven’t been spoken yet?
What if the undisclosed content turned out to be something entirely unacceptable? Is the brother of Jared being asked to sign a contract he has never read? And if so, what becomes of his agency?
The brother of Jared’s answer resolves the apparent paradox. He does not say, “I will believe whatever you say.” He says:
“Yea, Lord, I know that thou speakest the truth, for thou art a God of truth, and canst not lie.”
Ether 3:12
The content of God’s future words was, in one sense, irrelevant. The brother of Jared was already in possession of something more foundational: knowledge of a specific characteristic of God.
He knew that God cannot lie. Whatever God would say, it would be true, because that is what God is. This is not blind obedience. It is faith with its eyes wide open.
Why Knowledge of God’s Character Matters
The Lectures on Faith, compiled under Joseph Smith’s direction, spell out precisely why this kind of knowledge is so essential. Lecture 4 states:
And again, the idea that he is a God of truth and cannot lie, is equally as necessary to the exercise of faith in him, as the idea of his unchangeableness. For without the idea that he was a God of truth and could not lie, the confidence necessary to be placed in his word in order to the exercise of faith in him, could not exist. But having the idea that he is not man that he can lie, it gives power to the minds of men to exercise faith in him.
Lecture 4:22
Notice the progression the Lectures describe. It begins with an “idea”: a piece of data, a proposition held in the mind. That idea, even in its early form, is enough to enable faith to exist. Faith begins not in the dark, but in the light of a concept. It is looking forward through the lens of an idea.
But the scriptures press beyond mere ideas toward something more: actual knowledge, born of experience. This is the difference between knowing about someone and truly knowing them.
When Ideas Become Knowledge: Enos and Nephi
Enos wrestled before God in prayer until the Lord declared his sins forgiven. His response to that declaration echoes the brother of Jared almost word for word: “And I, Enos, knew that God could not lie; wherefore, my guilt was swept away” (Enos 1:6).
He did not merely hope God was telling the truth, or reason that it was probably reliable. He knew. And that knowledge was not abstract; it was forged in the experience of being forgiven.
Nephi exhibits the same quality in its most bold expression. When his brothers doubted that the Lord’s commands could actually be obeyed, Nephi declared:
“If God had commanded me to do all things I could do them. If he should command me that I should say unto this water, be thou earth, it should be earth; and if I should say it, it would be done.”
1 Nephi 17:50
This is not bravado. It is the logical conclusion of possessing an actual knowledge of God’s characteristics.
Nephi could look forward to a reality he had not yet seen, because he knew who had promised it. Faith, for him, was not a leap into the dark. It was a step into a future he could already perceive through the eye of faith.
From Idea to Knowledge
If we find ourselves feeling like we are simply obeying blindly, complying without understanding, submitting without conviction, that is a signal worth heeding.
It may mean we have not yet made God’s character our own. The invitation is not to try harder to obey, but to seek a deeper knowledge of who God is.
That knowledge is available. It lives in the holy scriptures, and Lectures 3, 4, and 5 of the Lectures on Faith offer a particularly clear and systematic starting point. As we come to possess even the idea of God’s character, attributes, and perfections, we can begin to exercise faith in a way that is genuinely open-eyed, and over time, through experience, what began as an idea becomes a knowledge we can bear witness to.
Faith informed by a knowledge of God’s character is not blind; it sees clearly.
Once you see God as who he is, obedience is no longer a leap into the unknown, it is trust in someone you have come to know.
…for they shall know that it is a blessing unto them from the hand of God; and their scales of darkness shall begin to fall from their eyes…
2 Nephi 30:6
