One Step Enough - John S. Tanner

One Step Enough - John S. Tanner

In periods of prolonged distress, we yearn for the Lord to carry us to a mountaintop, as he did Moses, and there reveal in detail the course of our lives (cf. Moses 1). Instead, God requires us to wander like Abraham, as “strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Hebrews 11:13), living on promises. To live on this side of the veil is to “walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7); it is to “feel after” the Lord (see Acts 17:27; D&C 101:8) as he lights our way home, one step at a time.

We have just sung lines by John Henry Newman that express this theme. Newman wrote “Lead, Kindly Light” aboard ship on the way home to England from Italy. He was homesick and seasick; he had just had malaria. Though he didn’t know it yet, he was also about to take the first faltering steps of a spiritual pilgrimage that ultimately would lead him, and many who followed him, to another church. In these circumstances, Newman writes:

Lead, kindly Light, amid th’ encircling gloom;
Lead thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home;
Lead thou me on!
Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene—one step enough for me.
[Hymns, 1985, no. 97]

To walk by faith is to follow in the footsteps of Abraham, the spiritual father of the faithful (Galatians 3:7), who must sojourn as pilgrims and strangers on this earth. In Hebrews we read:
By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.
By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise.[Hebrews 11:8–9; emphasis added]
“Not knowing whither he went,” Abraham left not only his city but city life itself, in the cradle of civilization, to become a nomad. As Abraham so aptly puts it:
Therefore, eternity was our covering and our rock and our salvation, as we journeyed from Haran . . . to come to the land of Canaan. [Abraham 2:16]
Moreover, Abraham did not cease to be a nomad after he arrived in the promised land. Rather, even in Canaan he dwelt “in tabernacles” (i.e., tents), “as in a strange [i.e., foreign] country.” While his nephew Lot chose to live “in the cities” on the well-watered plain of Jordan (Genesis 13:10–12)—and reaped the consequence of that choice—Abraham dwelt not in cities. “For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Hebrews 11:10), and taught us by his example that “here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come” (Hebrews 13:14).
As Abram wandered through Canaan, he was promised the land over and over again (cf. Genesis 12:1–3, 7; 13:14–17; 15:18; 17:1–8). Yet when Sarah died, Abraham had to buy the cave of Machpelah in which to bury her. How poignant are Abraham’s words to the sons of Heth, from whom he purchased the cave:
I am a stranger and a sojourner with you: give me a possession of a buryingplace with you, that I may bury my dead out of my sight. [Genesis 23:4]
The land was Abraham’s by covenant, yet near the end of his life he did not even own a plot of ground sufficient to inter Sarah’s body. Later, Abraham was buried in this same cave, the only property he ever owned in Canaan (Genesis 25:9–10). No wonder Stephen the Martyr says that the Lord gave Abraham “none inheritance” in Canaan, “no, not so much as to set his foot on,” but promised only that he would give Abraham the land “for a possession, and to his seed after him, when as yet he had no child” (Acts 7:5).
Abraham spent all his days living on promises—not only with respect to the promised land but also with respect to a promised posterity. With what could seem like cruel irony, the Lord repeatedly pledged Abram posterity as numerous as the dust of the earth and the stars of heaven (Genesis 13:16; 15:4–5; 17:2–4; 18:17–19; 22:16–18). He also changed his name to Abraham, meaning father of a multitude. Yet all the while Abraham had no promised heir; all the while he and Sarah were growing older.
At last, of course, Isaac was born. Then the God of Abraham, who seems to have a keen sense of irony, required the sacrifice of the very child through whom the prophecies that Abraham’s seed would become “a great and mighty nation” were to be fulfilled (Genesis 18:18). How is it that Abraham “staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief” (Romans 4:20), but “believed in the Lord,” who “counted it to him for righteousness” (Genesis 15:6; cf. Galatians 3:6).
We distort the trials of Abraham (or of anyone else) if we read them from the comfortable retrospective of history. Rather, as Kierkegaard reminds us, we must remember the fear and trembling.⁸ We must flee with Abram from Haran, not knowing whither we go, with eternity as our rock; we must wander with Abram in Canaan, living on increasingly incredible promises about possessing the land and a great posterity; we must journey with Abraham to Mount Moriah, prepare the altar for Isaac, and lift the knife. We must, in short, become “contemporaneous”⁹ with Abraham in his trials. Only then will we begin to understand why Abraham is the father to the faithful, the model for all those who, like him, die
in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.
For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country. . . .
. . . a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city. [Hebrews 11:13–14, 16]
The scriptures are replete with examples of Abrahamic faith. Lehi’s example comes readily to mind. Like Abraham, Lehi fled from his home, “dwelt in a tent,” and was led by faith to a better country. Also like Abraham, Lehi seems to have left Jerusalem “not knowing whither he went.” Nephi’s account, at any rate, depicts Lehi first fleeing into the wilderness and only later learning that the Lord intended to lead him to a new world (cf. 1 Nephi 2). That Lehi’s family made several return trips to Jerusalem may be explained, in part, by their unfolding knowledge of the journey they were undertaking. Perhaps they had to learn that their exile was to be an exodus.
Likewise, missionaries in every age have always had to walk by faith—from the sons of Mosiah, who journeyed to the land of the Lamanites on the strength of prophetic promises (Mosiah 28:7; Alma 17:10–12), to modern-day missionaries like Wilford Woodruff, who followed the Spirit’s prompting to go south to Hertfordshire, where he baptized hundreds.¹⁰ All those who embrace the gospel become the progeny of Abraham (Abraham 2:10; Galatians 3:7) and like him have to walk by faith, one step at a time.
This includes prophets of our day. I will never forget a conversation with President Harold B. Lee that taught me this. President Lee (who, by the way, loved the hymn “Lead, Kindly Light”) had talked freely that day about a new program the Church had just announced. He then remarked that he had just reread the minutes of the meetings in which the program had been formulated and that he saw now, in retrospect, that the Lord had been guiding the deliberations all along. What a remarkable description of revelation! The Lord’s guidance was not fully evident, even to his prophet, until President Lee turned to survey the terrain he had traversed. The Lord led his servant, yes, but one step at a time.
This lesson impressed me, but it should not have surprised me. For even Jesus “received not of the fulness at the first, but received grace for grace. . . . And thus he was called the Son of God, because he received not of the fulness at the first” (D&C 93:12, 14). He was called the Son because he received not of the fulness at the first. Does this imply that Jesus’ human limitations define the essence of his sonship (or mortality), just as they do ours? Does this mean that he had to learn his mission incrementally and live through trials without knowing the beginning from the end? I note that the Lord often had to fast and pray to obtain the Father’s unfolding will. And Jesus’ astonishing plea that he “might not drink the bitter cup” (D&C 19:18) suggests that the Savior’s prescience of the Atonement did not preclude his very human apprehension about the ensuing ordeal. In this, as “in all things it behoved him to be made like unto his brethren” (Hebrews 2:17). “For verily he took not on him the nature of angels; but took on him the seed of Abraham” (Hebrews 2:16).