The Justice of Non-Voluntary Obligations

Last night, I wrote a long blog post which I intended to post today, after I proofread it. Reading it over this morning, I found that I was really complaining about nothing. I frequently struggle between the concepts of obedience and freedom. I feel that one person telling another person what to do limits the second person's freedom. Sure, the second person can still do whatever they want, but if they don't obey, there will be consequences, and if the consequences of disobedience are dire enough, is choosing not to obey really still even an option? If someone offers you either a blue jelly bean or a red jelly bean, but tells you that if you take the blue jelly bean, they'll break your arm, what kind of a choice is that?

I'm ranting again.

Anyhow, I was upset at how unfair it all felt, that we were supposedly given freedom, but then we were given rules and consequences for breaking the rules, and I wondered how many of those rules I had agreed to and how many of those rules had been imposed on me by others.

But you know what? It doesn't matter.

Earlier this morning, I was reminded that all that is unfair in life will be made right through the Atonement. We will be rewarded for all the suffering we have to go through and for all the stupid rules we have to obey, whether we agreed to them or not.

Besides, we kind of did agree to them. In the Pre-Mortal council, I'm sure that we were told, and that we accepted, every commandment that we would be expected to obey. I'm sure we were also warned that life would be, or at least feel, unfair, but we all voluntarily went through with God's plan anyway.

This life was never meant to be a time of infinite freedom, where we can do whatever we want without any consequences. This is a time of testing, where we are given a little bit of power in order to prove whether we can be trusted to use it wisely. This isn't playtime; it's go time, and we all agreed to that.

I'm still not keen on the idea of people making rules for other people against their will, but in the end, dictators will get their just desserts, and everyone who has suffered under a dictator will be justly compensated. There are a lot of things that are unfair in life, and suffering consequences for breaking rules we never agreed to keep is one of those things. But there may be fewer of those "non-voluntary obligations" than I had imagined, and God will set everything right in the end.

Life is not always fair, particularly regarding all the rules we have to keep, but I'm comforted by knowing that there's more fairness in life than I realize and that everything is ultimately in God's hands. He will be perfectly fair with us on Judgement Day, and we will all get pretty much exactly the consequence that we deserve, even if we have to deal with unjust rules or undeserved consequences to get there.