What keeps us from admitting God’s authority? Is it our pride? Our faithlessness? Or is it some other flaw? God is involved in all our lives. However, we have difficulty admitting it. Some of us have difficulty even seeing it. We reassure ourselves with the false notion God is not involved with our lives, and give ourselves a license to ignore Him and go our own ways. We take credit for things which came to us through the inspiration of Heaven. We are selfish and selfcentered.
Nephi would like this to stop. He would like us to realize and to admit God is very involved with the lives we lead. He is not a distant, unaffected and uninvolved God. Nephi’s brothers were unable to accept God’s involvement with their prophet-father or prophet-brother. They could accept a false religious tradition as was practiced by their contemporaries at Jerusalem. But a living, speaking and revealing God was beyond their tolerance. The issue is the same for us. It has always been so. We, too, are “darkened in our minds” because we depend too much upon othersrather than let the light of heaven shine directly into our own lives.
Christ lamented: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, And say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets. Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers. Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell? Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city.” (Matt.23: 29–34.) We are like that, too. The voice of inspiration and revelation is never welcome. It always intrudes and makes us uncomfortable. Particularly in religious things, people want to be left alone. They prefer comfortable, false teachings to challenging and demanding new teachings that are true.
That is as true of us as it is of Christianity at large, as we also bind the tongues of the prophets and keep the Holy Spirit from speaking the great truths to us which we might otherwise receive if we were willing. Indeed, among us the silence of the heavens which reigns in our lives is particularly unacceptable.