Where do Rules Come From?

When I arrived at the Missionary Training Center on June 16, 1999, I had no idea what I was getting into. After an incredibly emotional goodbye to my family, I was ushered onto the campus with my red dot sticker on my suit lapel. I don’t know if they still have the red dot stickers, but back then, they were a signal that I was brand new. I think this practice was well-intentioned, meant to offer a helping hand from those who had been around longer, so that others like me could be ushered where they needed to be as we acclimated to our new world.

From my perspective, this caused a lot of unwanted attention, and I will never forget looking around at all the other missionaries with no sticker and thinking that they knew everything in the whole world, and I knew nothing (even though most of them may have only been there one week longer than I had been). It was a bit disorienting, but after a few days, I didn’t feel so intimidated by all the other missionaries; instead, I found a new antagonist I hadn’t expected… rules. So many rules! It felt like a million rules, but that was not all, a schedule. Not just any schedule, I still feel like every ten minutes of my life was planned out, and with that and a hundred rules, I felt like a caged animal ready to fight everyone for my freedom.

Up to that point in my life, I largely followed the rules. I was a good kid, and even though I was mischievous and did things my own way, I wanted to do the right thing. So when I began to feel rebellious toward my newfound rules and schedule, I felt very miserable. It forced me into a lifelong journey to understand the value of rules and the value of independent decision-making that sometimes conflicts with rules.

Over the two years on my mission, I learned much about this conflict between two important parts of life, and I came to see why the rules were so important as guides in our decision-making, but I also had some of the most important and spiritual experiences of my mission when not complying exactly with the rules and schedule I was expected to follow.

So, as we think about Israel, newly freed from centuries of bondage, and now needing to learn how to be a covenant people, Moses has his hands full, and their story has a lot to teach us about this dilemma that we can take into our lives and in our mentoring of our children.

Moses and the Making of the Rules

We all know the basic story. Moses doesn’t know what to do, and so he goes up Mount Sinai. God does not hand Moses a rulebook at first. He makes a covenant first. “I bare you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto myself,” He tells Israel in Exodus 19. “If ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people.” The identity comes first. You are mine, and I am yours.

Unfortunately, the people wanted to know what was expected of them, not just to whom they belonged. The Ten Commandments were God meeting them where they were, as a more specific set of commands – not as the complete set of rules for them to follow, but more of a set of principles that would define what God’s covenant people should look like.

The Ten Commandments, though, proved insufficient for governing the daily lives of tens of thousands of people in the wilderness. Almost immediately, Moses finds himself buried in conflict resolution. Two men have a dispute over a donkey. A woman’s inheritance falls outside the normal pattern. A man gathers sticks on the Sabbath, and no one is sure what to do about it. The commandments say “remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy,” but what exactly counts as work? What if someone’s ox falls into a pit? What if it’s your neighbor’s ox? What if it’s Tuesday?

Jethro, Moses’s father-in-law, watches his son-in-law sit from morning until evening, judging these questions and finally says the obvious thing: “The thing that thou doest is not good. Thou wilt surely wear away” (Exodus 18:17–18). He counsels Moses to appoint capable men as judges over tens, fifties, hundreds, and thousands. Moses should handle the hard cases; everything else should be delegated.

Jethro’s counsel is a gift to Moses. It is also the beginning of delegated, exponential rulemaking. There is no longer a single set of rulings, but many from different judges. The judges compare notes. Precedents accumulate. A case decided in one tribe becomes a template for cases in another. Over centuries, what began as the Ten Commandments and a small body of rules grew into the 613 mitzvot the rabbis would eventually count, then into the oral tradition around them, and finally into the massive interpretive literature that would become the Mishnah and the Talmud. The Old Testament scholar Jacob Milgrom spent a career showing how the holiness code in Leviticus expanded outward to cover every corner of ordinary life — food, clothing, sex, farming, grief, worship — because real people living real lives kept encountering real situations that the original text had not anticipated.

Any of us who have lived in a large community understands the dynamic. The United States currently has something like 23,000 pages of federal law, tens of thousands more in regulations, fifty separate state legal codes, and countless local ordinances on top of that. No one set out to create a system this complex. Each rule was someone’s honest answer to a real problem. Multiply thousands of real problems by a few hundred years of faithful attention, and you end up with a legal tradition no single person can hold in their head. Israel’s experience was not different in kind from ours. It was just earlier.

By Christ’s time, the accumulated rules had produced a religious culture that genuinely sought to help ordinary people be faithful. The Pharisees were not villains at the start. N.T. Wright has written persuasively that they were, for the most part, devout Jews attempting to keep covenant identity alive under the boot of Roman occupation, in a moment when the temple was compromised, and the future of the covenant people felt uncertain. The rules proliferated because the stakes felt enormous. If every rule were a fence around the covenant, then more fences meant more protection.

When Jesus arrived, those people most invested in the rules were the ones who could not recognize the covenant maker standing before them. Jesus spent most of his ministry dismantling this in the gentlest and sharpest way possible:

“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.” — Matthew 23:23–24 (KJV)

Notice what Jesus does not say. He does not say the tithing of herbs was wrong. He says it ought to have been done. The problem was not the rule. The problem was that the rule had become the whole thing, and the weightier matters — judgment, mercy, faith — had been quietly set aside because they were harder to measure and easier to neglect. The Pharisees were not being condemned for keeping the rules. They were warned for losing sight of the reason the rules existed in the first place.

The Same Pattern in the Restoration

We believe that we are Israel as well, and so it should come as no surprise that this same pattern has happened in our two hundred years of Latter-day Saint history.

Joseph Smith did not receive a rule handbook in his early revelations. He received a restored covenant relationship with God. The opening act of the Restoration was a Father and a Son appearing to a boy who wanted to know which church was true, and the core answer was that God would speak to him directly. Covenant first. Everything else was meant to support that relationship.

Revelation after revelation would come, most of them in response to specific situations. How should the Whitmer family proceed? What should Martin Harris do about the lost pages? How should the Saints organize themselves in Kirtland? Should they move to Missouri? The Doctrine and Covenants, taken as a whole, is a record of a prophet and a people trying to figure out how to live a covenant in real time. It is the most Jethro-shaped book in our scripture. Problems arose, answers came, rulings accumulated, patterns emerged.

Over nearly two centuries, those patterns have grown into what we have now. A General Handbook that runs to hundreds of sections. Temple recommend questions that have been refined and re-refined across generations. For the Strength of Youth. The Missionary Handbook. Stake presidents and bishops have their own layered guidance on how to implement the guidance. Culture on top of doctrine on top of tradition on top of revelation, braided together in ways even thoughtful members have trouble separating out. Some of what we treat as “the gospel” is actually doctrine. Some of it is administrative policy. Some of it is a cultural habit that attached itself to the doctrine a generation ago and has never been officially anything. All of it feels like the same set of rules when you grow up inside the church.

It is a natural feature of any covenant community that has lasted long enough to produce children and grandchildren. But it is worth understanding, because if we are not careful, the pattern that produced the blind Pharisees can produce blindness in us as well. The checklist quietly becomes the focus. We start measuring faithfulness by compliance, and we forget why the rules existed – to nurture our covenant relationship with God and his children.

Rules are Downstream of Covenants

Measuring our standing with God by our level of compliance with the checklist on its face shouldn’t be a bad thing; we are, after all, being obedient and keeping our covenants. However, when the checklist becomes the focus, then a few unintended consequences follow. The first is success, and, as my last post discussed, this quickly becomes prosperity, pride, and comparisons to those who seem not to be following the checklist as closely. The second is that our failure to comply, especially when compared to how we feel others are complying, breeds shame and a sense of hopelessness that we can never fit the checklist mold. The covenant relationship with Jesus Christ is replaced by transactions and measurements.

This mindset stems from how we interpret certain scriptures. Nephi promises that inasmuch as we keep the commandments, we will prosper, and King Benjamin highlights that when we are obedient, the Lord “immediately blesses us.” This sounds transactional, and in many cases the Lord absolutely does bless us with specific blessings and general prosperity when we follow the checklist, but a transactional mindset shifts us into a very formulaic relationship with God.

If I check box A and box B, then it should equal C.

A+B=C

When the formula appears to work — when you keep the rules, and your life goes well, your marriage is happy, your kids turn out, your career prospers — it becomes very easy to conclude that you have earned it. The blessings feel like the payout on a contract you kept. And the corollary, though people rarely say it out loud, is that you feel that people whose lives are not going well must have failed to keep their end of the deal. This is the old pride cycle dressed up in modern clothes, and it is especially dangerous because it feels like gratitude. You thank God for your blessings while quietly believing you deserved them.

When the formula does not work — when you keep the rules as best you can, and your child still leaves the faith, your marriage still collapses, your health still fails, your prayers still feel unanswered — the checklist-shaped gospel gives you nowhere to go. If the covenant is a transaction and you have been doing your part, then the conclusion must be that you need to do even more, or worse, that God does not love you, or he never existed in the first place.

I have watched this happen. I have watched faithful people walk away from their covenants, not because they stopped believing in God but because the version of God they had been handed could not survive contact with their actual life. The only thing that really fits into every kind of life is a covenant relationship between each of us and the Lord.

A Covenant Relationship and Individual Agency

Most of the rules in the gospel are there because thousands of years of human experience have shown that life goes worse without them. The Word of Wisdom may seem arbitrary, but following it provides better health and protection. The law of chastity is not a relic; it protects real, healthy relationships. Tithing, Sabbath observance, honesty, the primary answers — almost every one of them encodes wisdom that could be painful to rediscover on our own. I want my kids to keep the commandments.

But I also tell them that keeping the commandments is not the point. It is the guardrail, not the destination. The destination is a covenant life — a life in which we learn, fail, repent, try again, and build relationships of love along the way. And the covenant life occasionally requires us to exercise real agency in places where it may conflict with the rulebook or where the rulebook does not fully reach.

This is where personal revelation becomes indispensable. Hugh B. Brown, speaking at Brigham Young University in 1969, gave what even today would seem a bit radical:

“We are not so much concerned with whether your thoughts are orthodox or heterodox as we are that you shall have thoughts. … Preserve, then, the freedom of your mind in education and in religion, and be unafraid to express your thoughts and to insist upon your right to examine every proposition.” — Hugh B. Brown, “An Eternal Quest: Freedom of the Mind,” BYU, May 13, 1969

This is an Apostle telling a room full of young Latter-day Saints that the health of their covenant life depends on their willingness to think, to question, and to exercise their own agency in communion with God. He is not undermining the rules. He is reminding his audience that the rules were always meant to serve a person capable of real spiritual intelligence — a person who knows God well enough to recognize Him when He speaks in the quiet of their own conscience.

What I have learned, slowly and imperfectly, is that God does not want us to outsource our spiritual life to a checklist. He asks us to become the kind of person who can be trusted with agency — someone who knows the rules are there to protect us and who also knows that exercising our agency in pursuit of our covenant relationship with God may lead us down paths that may not feel right to others. In those circumstances, I know that God will chase us down if we are wrong, and if we are right, then it will lead to something that only benefits his plan to gather all of His children home.

None of this works without genuinely needing the Lord, which is part of our covenant with him. If rules can become idols, agency can become an excuse. It is possible to dress up our self-will as personal revelation and call the resulting actions covenant living. I have seen that too. The person who insists that the Spirit has confirmed every convenient thing they already wanted to do is not living their covenants. They are rationalizing their pride, just like those who cannot see past the checklist.

The reconciling practice — the thing that keeps us honest across years and decades — is asking God for help, when things are good and when things are bad. Fortunately, the church has built-in practices precisely to help us with this. The sacrament and the temple are not just ceremonies we perform; they are moments when we can ask, honestly, whether there are things we should be doing differently. Whether the rules we have been dismissing are actually carrying wisdom we have been too proud to see. Whether the agency we have been exercising has been pointed toward God’s will or toward our own comfort. If we do this, then I believe God will trust us and guide us even when we are wrong.

Jesus set the example for us when he said to God, “Thy will be done.” It is difficult, but that is what the covenant life requires of us. Not blind compliance. Not self-willed agency. A genuine, ongoing, humble conversation with God about what He wants of us — in which we are honest enough to ask hard questions and willing enough to accept the answers when they come.

Learn and Grow + Build Eternal Relationships

When Jesus was asked to name the great commandment, He did not reach for the checklist. He did not answer with tithing or the Sabbath or any of the hundreds of rules that shaped the daily life of His questioners. He gave two:

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” — Matthew 22:37–40 (KJV)

I have come to believe that what Jesus meant by loving God and loving our neighbor is something like this: learn and grow + build eternal relationships of joy and love. That is the covenant, translated into a life. Loving God means letting Him teach us, which requires us to keep making mistakes and keep being reconciled. Loving our neighbor means the slow, imperfect work of building the relationships that will outlast this mortality — with our spouses, our children, our extended families, our wards, and even the people who hurt us or whom we hurt.

The rules help with this. Genuinely. A life without rules is a life that burns through relationships and squanders opportunities to grow. I want my children to keep the commandments, to hold temple recommends, to honor the Sabbath, to pay their tithing, and to guard their minds and bodies. The rules are guideposts that thousands of years of human experience have erected along the road, and ignoring them almost always costs more than keeping them.

But the rules are not the road. The road is the covenant. And the covenant is this: we will keep trying, we will learn from what goes badly, we will give thanks for what goes well, and we will trust that Christ’s grace is sufficient to reconcile every mistake we honestly bring to Him. Success teaches us gratitude. Failure teaches us humility. Both, held together inside a covenant relationship with God, teach us how to love.

That is what I want my children to understand about rules and where they come from. The rules are not small. But the covenant is larger. And underneath the rules, the handbooks, the checklists, and the centuries of accumulated guidance, there is a Savior who is not grading our compliance. He is looking for a relationship. He is asking us to come home a little more often than we have been.

I believe that He is there. I believe that the rules, properly understood, help us find Him. And I believe that when we finally stand before Him, the question will not be how many items we checked off. It will be whether we learned to love. And whether, along the way, we built something that will last.

Additional Resources

Books

Letters to a Young Mormon by Adam Miller — a brief, luminous meditation on what the gospel is and is not.
The New Testament and the People of God by N.T. Wright — a sympathetic reading of first-century Judaism and the faithful instincts behind the Pharisaic tradition.
Leviticus as Literature by Jacob Milgrom — the definitive scholarly work on how Israel’s holiness code grew to cover ordinary life.
An Other Testament by Joseph Spencer — a careful LDS reading of covenant in the Book of Mormon.

Talks

Hugh B. Brown, “An Eternal Quest: Freedom of the Mind,” BYU, May 13, 1969.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “The Merciful Obtain Mercy,” April 2012 General Conference.

Podcasts

Faith Matters Podcast: Encouraging faithful inquiry amid complexity.
Comeback Podcast: Sharing Stories of those who left the church and came back.
Unshaken with Jared Halverson: In-depth historical and doctrinal studies for those wrestling with tough questions.
Leading Saints: Insights into modern leadership and discipleship, often addressing nuanced challenges.