God showed Nephi we would behave treacherously toward Him. Nephi knew we would struggle to accept the Lord while in mortality. With a veil between the Lord and us, we feel we are alone and at liberty to stray from His paths as a result of our misperceived privacy. Nephi will later write about false beliefs which lead many in our time to “seek deep to hide their counsels from the Lord; and their works shall be in the dark.” (2 Ne. 28: 9.) Of course, we have no works truly “in the dark” because God sees everything. We have difficulty acknowledging God’s Lordship over us because of our false sense of privacy. We have no private moments or even private thoughts.There should be little wonder in that, since we use God’s power as our energy source to live, move, and have our being. It is difficult for us to keep God in mind at all in the normal course of our day.
Prophetic proof of God’s existence and power is dismissed by us in favor of alternative explanations. Even when God’s hand appears to have worked something in our lives, given enough time to rationalize on the matter, we can generally dismiss God’s involvement and find another reason for everything.
We have three stages referred to in this verse: We hear not. In this respect we won’t listen. We refuse to hear the whisperings of the Spirit. The Spirit is more felt than heard. Feeling the Spirit is tied to keeping the commandments. When we rebel and refuse to follow His commandments, we coarsen our feelings. Satan knows this and that is why he keeps tempting us to disobey. Although we fail to acknowledge the relationship between our obedience to God and our ability to hear Him, Satan both knows this and relies upon it as his main ‘tool of the trade.’ D&C 93:39: “And that wicked one cometh and taketh away light and truth, through disobedience, from the children of men, and because of the tradition of their fathers.” So, we do not hear Him, because we cannot feel Him; we cannot feel Him because we have lost the light we once had; and lost that light by our disobedience.
As a result of this failing, we wind up losing the light we have. We know less and less, because that is how the whole process works. It follows law. What we once had, we lose. Alma reminds us of this in Alma 12: 11: “And they that will harden their hearts, to them is given the lesser portion of the word until they know nothing concerning his mysteries; and then they are taken captive by the devil, and led by his will down to destruction. Now this is what is meant by the chains of hell.” We lose the light we have gained through disobedience and then, we no longer know what is true. This is Nephi’s lament. It is relevant to our time, as well. Often we find the same person who once bore testimony of the truthfulness of the Gospel has become a critic of the Church, the Prophet, the First Presidency, the Twelve, the Stake President or the Bishop. They got there through disobedience, of course. And anyone can qualify for that outcome, too, if they choose to disobey the commandments.
All these things are related to our failing to keep our “ears” open to hear. Opening the ears is not merely a physical event. It is deeply spiritual. As the Nephites learned when the Father introduced Christ to them, we are sometimes three degrees removed from Him and must be willing to listen across this divide before we can hear Him. God, in His mercy, has given us commandments which will lead us back to Him, if only we would obey. But we do not. And when we do not obey, and therefore cannot receive the light and truth which obedience would have given to us, we then complain about God’s injustice to us. Truly, we deal treacherously with Him. And blame Him for our failings.