In section 57 the Lord identified the site for his temple in Zion. That was the first reference to a specific Latter-day temple in the Doctrine and Covenants. There is not another one until section section 84, which tells the saints to build the temple and forges the gospel links between their missionary work, the gathering of scattered Israel, the fulfillment of ancient prophecies, and the building of New Jerusalem, crowned with its holy temple.
Joseph’s history designates section 84 as a “Revelation . . . On Priesthood.”[1] That is worth considering. It could be described as a revelation on temple ordinances, covenants, the gathering of Israel, missionary work, the law of consecration, and the imminent coming of the Savior to “reign with my people,” in Zion, as He says in closing (D&C 84:119). So why priesthood? What was Joseph seeing? What difference will it make to our understanding when we see it too?
The answer may be in a long digression between verses 7 and 31. It seems, at first, to tangent from the point of the revelation, which began with a prophecy about building the temple. It turns out, however, that the digression is becomes an explanation of priesthood the relationship between priesthood, ordinances, and the endowment of power we need to transcend the fall and regain God’s presence. In short, priesthood validates the ordinances to be performed in the prophesied temple.
Moses understood that, the revelation says, and tried to teach it plainly, but the Israelites of his day did not generally want the endowment of priesthood power. They could not, therefore, endure God’s presence. Angry, God gave them less priesthood than he had to offer but as much as they were willing to receive. Joseph later taught about this strange human tendency to “set up stakes and say thus far will we go and no farther.” By contrast, Moses and Joseph were like Peter and the others who, Joseph said, received “the fullness of priesthood or the law of God” when the Savior was transfigured before them.[2]
I remember a Sunday School class discussion in which the consensus was that God does not get angry. It was an example of wresting the scriptures, which testify in section 84 and elsewhere that the Lord’s “anger was kindled against them,” and justifiably so. They rejected him, his plan, his sacrifice, his redeeming love, his fullness. The misguided class was trying to articulate truth about God’s character. It was a little like the process by which the creeds of Christianity eventually determined that God had no passions or emotions like anger. Section 84 does a better job. The Lord is justifiably angry, it says. There is nothing wrong with justified anger. The problem is the choice to express it badly. God does not express his anger the way a fallen mortal might. Section 84 says that when God is angry at his children for rejecting his blessings, he responds by offering as much as they are presently willing to receive, preparatory to our receiving more (D&C 84:23-26).
Having concluded his digression, the Lord returns to his main theme, namely, how priesthood holders will serve in the temple to be built on the consecrated spot in Independence, Missouri. Saints who are full of priesthood power—figurative descendants of Moses and Aaron—will be filled with the Lord’s glory in the temple. One would think this revelation would provide the saints enough incentive to begin building a temple on the dedicated site in Independence, Missouri—Zion. They did not, however. There are several complicated reasons why, and later revelations will cover these.
The saints obeyed Section 84 in other specific ways. A council of high priests assigned Orson Hyde and Hyrum Smith to write a rebuke the church leaders in Missouri as verse 76 commanded.[3] As instructed in verses 112-114, bishop Whitney and Joseph Smith left Kirtland “to fulfill the Revelation,” making important contacts in New York City, visiting Albany, and prophesying in Boston.[4] The gospel continues to be preached to “all who have not received it” (D&C 84:75). Many people have made the covenant to receive, obtain, and magnify the priesthood as outlined in section 84. Many people have obeyed the law of consecration as instructed in verses 103-110.
Perhaps the most important result of Section 84 is that is raised Joseph’s consciousness of the fundamental importance of priesthood and, inseparably, the temple. He had listened attentively all night at age seventeen while Moroni explained the imperative need to obtain restored priesthood in order to seal the human family together before the Savior’s coming, but the doctrine of the priesthood distilled on Joseph like dew from heaven (D&C 121:45). Considerable dew condensed during the night nine years later, when section 84 explained the priesthood’s past and projected its future use in temples.[5]
[3] Joseph Smith, Letterbook, 1829-1835, pages, 20-25; Kirtland Minute Book, January 13, 1833, Church History Library, Salt Lake City. See Section 82.
[4] Newel K. Whitney, undated statement, Newel K. Whitney Collection, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. Samuel H. Smith, Journal, 26 November 1832, Church History Library, Salt Lake City. Joseph to Emma Smith, 13 July 1832, Community of Christ Archives, Independence, Missouri.
[5] Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005), 202-05.
The leaders of the church in Missouri grew troubled. Saints were gathering there by the hundreds. Relatively few of them were obeying the law of consecration when they did. “Have you all fulfilled the law of the church,” William Phelps wrote to them in the church’s newspaper, “which saith: Behold thou shalt consecrate all thy properties, that which thou hast, unto me, with a covenant and a deed which cannot be broken?” (see section 42).[1]
In Ohio, Joseph learned by “the still small voice” that leaders in Missouri were wondering what to do. He sought and received a revealed answer, section 85, which he sent to them.[2] It clarifies the duty of the Lord’s clerk to keep a history of righteousness and unrighteousness in Zion, including accurate records “of all those who consecrate properties, and receive inheritances legally from the bishop.” Those that do not receive their inheritance by living the law of consecration are to be excluded from the church record referred to as the “book of the law of God.”
Verse 7 prophesies that the Lord will send someone to arrange inheritances for those whose names are recorded in the book, but those who are not in the book will receive no inheritance in Zion. Verse 8 prophesies that those who steady the ark (go beyond their assigned role in building Zion) will be smitten.
Joseph purchased his first journal on the very day this revelation was given, “for the purpose,” he wrote, “to keep a minute account of all things that come under my observation.”[3]At about this same time, Joseph began writing his history, recording his letters, and minutes of church council meetings. He knew, as John the Revelator had prophesied, that the mankind would be judged by records of their works kept on earth (Revelation 20:12, D&C 128:6-8), and Joseph tried to document his own “manner of life” (D&C 85:2).
Later, in 1841, Joseph began another journal, the Book of the Law of the Lord, a title he derived from D&C 85. Joseph appointed Willard Richards as “Recorder for the Temple, and the Scribe for the private office of the President.” Willard became what Section 82 calls the “Lord’s clerk,” filling the duties described in the revelation. He recorded historical entries and donations in the Book of the Law of the Lord.[4] In 1842, while preparing to leave for the East, Richards gave the Book to William Clayton, whom Joseph appointed as Temple Recorder, with a commission to fulfill the duties named in Section 82.[5]
These recorders carefully kept track of consecration. They recorded the deeds and donations of those who freely offered their whole souls to the Lord’s work. Joseph recorded a tribute to his wife Emma, to bishop Newel Whitney, to his brother Hyrum and many others. ‘The names of the faithful are what I wish to record in this place.” He recorded “the virtues and the good qualifications and characteristics of the faithful few,” as he called them, but also noted that “there are a numerous host of faithful souls, whose names I could wish to record in the Book of the Law of the Lord.”[6]
I’m sometimes asked when the Lord will require us to live the law of consecration. The answer is never. It never has been coercive and never will be. Section 85 clarifies that church leaders should simply keep track of who consecrates but not encroach on individual agency to obey or disobey. The Lord will judgment as he deems best. The law is quietly kept by many people, and their names are recorded in appropriate places. The faithful whose names and deeds are documented will receive inheritances in Zion. Those “whose names are not found written in the book of the law . . . shall not find an inheritance among the saints of the Most High” (D&C 82:7, 11).
Section 86
With Christianity in apostasy and no living prophets, Protestant reformers retreated to the relative safety of the Bible, the known word of God. Some went so far as to declare, though the Bible never does, that it was all sufficient and alone sufficient for salvation. Joseph faced the same fears and frustrations resulting from apostasy, but he took a different approach to the Bible. He “reflected again and again” on its often repeated injunction to ask and receive, seek and find, knock and the door will open (Joseph Smith—History, 12).
Joseph continually worked at understanding the Bible better and better, and making it possible for us to do so too. He had been over the parables in Matthew 13 in the spring of 1831, but he revised his own revision a year and a half later. His journal for 6 December 1832 says he spent the day “translating and received a revelation explaining the Parable [of] the wheat and the tears.”[1]
Section 86 defines and evokes powerful symbols to explain a parable about how the gospel spread, how apostasy followed and “drove the church into the wilderness” (D&C 86:3), and how the Lord nevertheless protected and preserved his people and will cause the gospel to flourish again. The main analogy of the parable is a field in which the apostles have planted wheat but Satan has sewn tares. The question for Joseph Smith and Latter-day Saints is, how should the field be harvested? The version in Matthew 13 says to let the wheat and the tares “grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn” (Matthew 13:30). Importantly, Section 86 reverses the order of the harvest: “Let the wheat and the tares grow together until the harvest is fully ripe; then ye shall first gather out the wheat from among the tares, and after the gathering of the wheat, behold and lo, the tares are bound in bundles, and the field remaineth to be burned (D&C 86:7, cross reference D&C 64:24). In his new translation, Joseph revised Matthew 13 according to what he learned from the revelation (JST Matthew 13:29).
All that is preliminary to the Lord’s main point in Section 86. His intent in the revelation is to explain how, despite apostasy, the priesthood has returned to its lawful heirs, and they are commissioned to harvest the wheat planted by the original apostles. Notice how the Lord develops this point with the four consecutive Therefores that begin verses 7, 8, 10, and 11.
The difference between Joseph’s way of reading the Bible and the dominant way of his time and place is crucial. For many people, the Bible is “a sealed book,” as popular Methodist preacher of Joseph’s day described it, lamenting that he did not live “in the days of the prophets or apostles, that I could have sure guides.”[2] Joseph’s revelations open the Bible. Consider how profound it is that in section 86 the Lord explains his own parable to Latter-day Saints. Is there any reason why He would not? Could not?
Section 86 revises and expands the biblical record. The fact that it came as Joseph was revising his previous revision is, itself, revealing. Joseph never felt finished with the work of unlocking the scriptures. One of his great contributions to us is his example of reading for and receiving revelations.
Section 87
Section 87 came during a Constitutional crisis. Congress had passed tax laws that favored northern factories over southern planters. So a South Carolina convention “unilaterally nullified the tariff and forbade its collection. President Andrew Jackson, refusing to acknowledge this assertion of state power, called out troops. By Christmas 1832, a military confrontation appeared imminent.”[1]
Latter-day Saints and other Christians viewed these events (along with a plague in India and a nearly global outbreak of cholera) in eschatological terms, meaning they thought the end of the world would come soon.
At least that’s how it looked to Joseph Smith and others late in 1832. Wars and rumors of wars, desolating sicknesses and desolating scourges were in the news.[2] Joseph asked for and received a revelation about what was to come. It said that wars–plural–would begin shortly with South Carolina’s rebellion, then continue until wars had gone global and resulted in “a full end of all nations” (D&C 87:6). The revelation foresaw slave rebellions and the uprising of “remnants” vexing the Gentiles, which Joseph and the early Saints interpreted in Book of Mormon terms to mean descendants of Lehi irritating the unrepentant (Mormon 7:1-10, 3 Nephi 10, D&C 19:27).[3]
Section 87 is mainly descriptive, not prescriptive. The first seven verses describe what God knows will happen because people reject His laws and His love. It is not about what He wants to happen, or what would happen if people obeyed His laws and reflected His love. It describes unfathomable violence by which the inhabitants of the earth “feel the wrath, and indignation, and chastening hand of an Almighty God” whom they have rejected. Given the impending eschaton, the prescriptive point in the last verse is “stand ye in holy places, and be not moved” (D&C 87:8).
Is that a command to be passive? Does it mean we should be bystanders or immobilized by fear? I think it means something like, take a stand for holiness and don’t get pushed around. I interpret it as a command to take an immovable stand for the laws and love of God in a world descending into self-destruction. The otherwise depressing revelation ends with good news for those who take such a stand: The day of the Lord–the eschaton–comes quickly (D&C 87:8).
Joseph Smith may have looked foolish to some when the crisis blew over. Civil war didn’t come. It didn’t start with the rebellion of South Carolina, nor result in death and misery, or global warfare, or the end of nations. Well, at least not right away, as Joseph and others probably expected.
The eschaton never seems to happen as expected. That’s the story of Christian eschatology in a nutshell. Since the days of Paul at least, Christians have been expecting the end of the world any day. Every generation of Christians has waited for the end times, and there are always some Christians somewhere who are sure that it’s coming very, very soon.
Early Latter-day Saints were like that, though not quite as much as the followers of William Miller (1782-1849). He was a generation older than Joseph Smith. He was a Baptist, then a Deist, but the combination of having his life miraculously saved in the War of 1812 and the deaths of loved ones led him to conversion to Jesus Christ, and he renewed his Baptist faith. He longed for Jesus’ return to end wars and death. Like me, William Miller didn’t have the knowledge or skills or the revelation necessary to read and understand apocalyptic parts of the Bible in context. So he made some assumptions that led him to interpret Daniel 8:14 to mean that the Savior would return sometime between March 21, 1843 and a year later.
Some of William Miller’s followers got even more specific
They narrowed the day of the Savior’s Second Coming to April 3, 1843. They were not the only ones interested as that day approached. Latter-day Saints were also looking forward to the Savior’s Second Coming, studying the prophecies, trying to discern the signs of the times, as Christians had been doing for nearly two millennia.
So It was no wonder that on Sunday April 2, 1843 the subject came among the saints. Joseph told them, “I prophecy in the Name of the Lord God that the commenceme[n]t of bloodshed as preparat[o]ry to the coming of the son of man. will commenc[e] in South Carolina.— (it probably may arise through the slave trade.)— this the a voice declard to me. while I was praying earne[s]tly on the subje[c]t 25 December 1832. I earnestly desird to know concern[in]g the coming of the Son of Man & prayed. when— a voice said to me, Joseph, my, son, if thou livest until thou art 85 years old thou shalt see the facce of the son of man. therefore let this suffice & trouble me no more on this matter.[4]
The next day was April 3, 1843. It turned out not to be the eschaton. Joseph’s journal entry takes a poke at Miller and his followers: “tis too. pleas[a]nt. for false prophets.” A few days later on April 6, 1843, Joseph again told his experience a decade earlyer of praying to know when the Savior’s Second Coming would be, and this time he added how he had decided to interpret the Lord’s intentionally vague revelation: “. . . were I going to prophecy. I would procpesy [prophesy] the end will not come in 1844. or 5— or 6. or 40 years more [p. [72]] there are those of the rising generation who shall not taste death till christ come. <I was once praying earnestly upon this subject. and a voice said unto me.> My son, if thou livest till thou art 85 years of age, thou shalt see the face of the son of man. . . . <I was left to draw my own conclusions concerni[n]g this &,> I took the liberty to conclude that if I did live till that time Jesus <he> would make his appearance.— <but I do not say whether he will make his appeara[n]ce, or I shall go where he is.—> I prophecy in the name of the Lord God.— & let it be written. <that the> Son of Man will not come in the heavns till I am 85. years old 48 years hence or about 1890.—” (cross ref. D&C 130:14-17)
Look at the way Joseph read his own revelations in the context of his culture’s eschatology. He accurately prophesied the American Civil War, but he didn’t fully understand his prophecy. When he received the revelation in 1832, as South Carolina was threatening secession, he assumed, as almost all Christians have done, that the Savior’s Second Coming would be soon. Then in 1843 Joseph specifically noted the difference between what the Lord revealed and what he, Joseph, interpreted it to mean:
The Lord’s revelation: “Joseph, my, son, if thou livest until thou art 85 years old thou shalt see the face of the son of man. therefore let this suffice & trouble me no more on this matter.”
Joseph’s interpretation: “I was left to draw my own conclusions concerni[n]g this &,> I took the liberty to conclude that if I did live till that time Jesus <he> would make his appearance.— <but I do not say whether he will make his appeara[n]ce, or I shall go where he is.—> I prophecy in the name of the Lord God.— & let it be written. <that the> Son of Man will not come in the heavns till I am 85. years old 48 years hence or about 1890.—”
This is a terrific way to show that Joseph Smith was a true prophet of God and a frontier farmer in the antebellum (pre Civil War) United States. That means that he knew things from God that no one else could, and that he understood them as most everyone else in his time and place would.
Sometimes Joseph didn’t understand right away how to interpret the Lord’s revelations. He referred to his Christmas 1832 revelation occasionally but never published it during his lifetime. Latter-day Saints began to pay attention to it in the 1850s as the American Civil War loomed. Then, in 1861, when it began to be fulfilled to the letter, a Philadelphia newspaper reprinted the revelation and asked, “Have we not had a prophet among us?”[5]
Section 85 notes
[1]“To the Saints,” The Evening and the Morning Star, Nov. 1832, [6].
[3] Joseph Smith, Book for Record, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, published in Dean C. Jessee, editor, The Papers of Joseph Smith: Journal, 1832-1842 (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1992), 2.
[4] Book of the Law of the Lord, 26, Church History Library, Salt Lake City.
[5] William Clayton, “History of the Nauvoo Temple,” manuscript, Church History Library, Salt Lake City.
[6] Book of the Law of the Lord, 164, 179, Church History Library, Salt Lake City.
[2] Lorenzo Dow, The Dealings of God, Man, and the Devil as Exemplified in the Life, Experience, and Travels of Lorenzo Dow (New York: Cornish, Lamport & Company, 1850), 10.
[5] “A Mormon Prophecy,” Philadelphia Sunday Mercury, 5 May 1861, reprinted in Robert J. Woodford, The historical development of the Doctrine and Covenants, 3 volumes (PhD dissertation, Brigham Young University, 1974), 2:1110.
Samuel H. Smith, Journal entry describing Section 88, Church History Library, Salt Lake City.
Three months after receiving a revelation on priesthood that included a command to build a temple in Missouri, Joseph and a group of nine high priests gathered “assembled in the translating room in Kirtland, Ohio.” Joseph rose and taught them that “to receive revelation and the blessing of Heaven, it was necessary to have our minds on God and exercise faith and become of one heart and one mind.” He asked them each to pray in turn that the Lord would “reveal His will to us concerning the upbuilding of Zion and for the benefit of the saints and for the duty . . . of the elders.” Each man “bowed down before the Lord, after which each one arose and spoke in his turn his feelings and determination to keep the commandments of God.”[1]
The revelation began to flow, and by nine o’clock that night it had not ended. The brethren retired but returned the next morning and received the rest of the revelation. That is, they received the first 126 verses. The remainder came a week later on January 3.[2]
Like Section 84, Section 88 is thoroughly a temple revelation. Beginning with a promise of eternal life through Jesus Christ to the faithful, the revelation describes the purposeful creation of the earth and then tells how to obey divine law to advance by degrees of light or glory through a perfect resurrection and into the presence of God.
Historian Richard Bushman summarized Section 88 best. He said it “runs from the cosmological to the practical, from a description of angels blowing their trumpets to instructions for starting a school. . . . . The revelation offers sketches of the order of heaven, reprises the three degrees of glory, delivers a discourse on divine law, offers a summary of the metahistory of the end times, and then brings it all to bear on what the saints should do now.”[3]
As with several other Sections, 88 instructs the brethren to proclaim the gospel and connects this commandment to the imminent end of the world and impending judgment. Section 88’s eschatological section is, in fact, the most detailed in Jospeh’s revelations. “For not many days hence,” it begins, before describing the end of the world, the resurrections, and the judgments and triumphs announced by angels, all culminating in a final battle between good and evil, “the battle of the great God,” in which the archangel Michael leads the armies of heaven against “the devil and his armies,” resulting in the final conquest of death, hell, and the devil (D&C 88:114-116).
Section 88 is expansive. It maps the universe. Its concepts stretch the mind, inviting inquiry and awe. “Truth shineth,” it says, introducing a string of related if not synonymous concepts that include truth, light, power, life, spirit, and even law. Condescending from the revelation’s lofty heights, the Lord simplifies its vastness in a metaphor suited for the saints. “I will liken these kingdoms unto a man having a field, and he sent forth his servants into the field to dig” (D&C 88:51). “My friends,” the Lord says, “I leave these sayings with you to ponder in your hearts, with this commandment which I give unto you: that ye shall call upon me while I am near: Draw near unto me and I will draw near unto you” (D&C 88:62-63). The revelation both commands and invites solemnity and action.
Temple scholar Margaret Barker noted how the concepts in Section 88 pervade other scriptural temple texts. “Light and life, then, are linked and set in opposition to darkness and death. The presence of God is light; coming into the presence of God transforms whatever is dead and gives it life.”[4]
The therefore in verse 117 marks the beginning of the Lord’s final point in the initial, two-day revelation (D&C 88:117-126). This concluding segment reviews the revelation’s instructions in what one might call the “therefore what?” It is instructions for participating in a temple preparation class. The “therefore what” of the whole revelation is “therefore, sanctify yourselves that your minds become single to God, and the days will come that you shall see him” (D&C 88:68).
The Latter-day Saints built their first temple as a result of section 88 and came into the presence of the Lord. A few days after Section 88 was completed, Joseph sent a copy of it with a rebuke to church leaders in Missouri. The saints there had not acted on Section 84’s command to build a temple in Zion. “I send you the . . . Lord’s message of peace to us,” Joseph wrote, “for though our Brethren in Zion, indulge in feelings towards us, which are not according to the requirements of the new covenant yet we have the satisfaction of knowing that the Lord approves of us & has accepted us.” Joseph sent a copy of section 88 with his letter. Referring to it, he wrote, “You will see hat the Lord commanded us in Kirtland to build an house of God, & establish a school for the Prophets, this is the word of the Lord to us, & we must yea the Lord helping us we will obey, as on conditions of our obedience, he has promised <us> great things, yea <even> a visit from the heavens to honor us with his own presence.”
Joseph had learned from Section 84 that the only way into the presence of God was through the temple. Nothing should therefore be more important. Yet, like Moses, he worried that Latter-day Saints would harden their hearts and provoke the Lord’s wrath (D&C 84:24). “We greatly fear before the Lord lest we should fail of this great honor which our master proposes to confer on us, we are seeking for humility & great faith lest we be ashamed in his presence.”[5]
The saints in Kirtland began building the House of the Lord in the summer of 1833 and, after some interruptions and a rebuke that reminded them of Section 88’s instructions (see Section 95), they dedicated it in 1836. Joseph, meanwhile, instructed the saints to purify and prepare themselves for an outpouring of the Lord’s power—an endowment. In November 1835 he met with the newly-called apostles. He confessed his own shortcomings and then taught them Section 88, or, as he called it, “how to prepare yourselves for the [p. 31] great things that God is about to bring to pass.”
Joseph told them he had assumed the church was fully organized, but that the Lord had taught him more, including “the ordinance of washing of feet” mentioned in Section 88:139. “This we have not done as yet,” Joseph taught the apostles, “but it is necessary now as much as it was in the days of the Saviour, and we must have a place prepared, that we may attend to this ordinance, aside from the world.” He continued to emphasize the need for the temple. “We must have all things prepared and call our solem assembly as the Lord has commanded us [see D&C 88:70], that we may be able to accomplish his great work: and it must be done in Gods own way, the house of the Lord must be prepared, and the solem assembly called and organized in it according to the order of the house of God and in it we must attend to the ordinance of washing of feet.”
Joseph helped them understand the relationship between the power with which God intended to endow them and their calling to preach the gospel (D&C 88:80-82). Then he concluded his teaching by reaffirming what Section 88 twice calls the “great and last promise”: “I feel disposed to speak a few words more to you my brethren concerning the endowment, all who are prepared and are sufficiently pure to abide the presence of the Saviour will see him in the solem assembly” (D&C 88:69, 75).[6]
When the temple was finished and the solemn assembly convened, Joseph dedicated it with an inspired prayer that drew liberally on section 88 (see section 109). Joseph worked hard to get the saints to see the importance of section 88, to understand the temple and ultimate blessings. Like Moses, he wanted to usher his sometimes short-sighted people into the presence of the Lord. This revelation preoccupied Joseph’s attention. He wanted its promised blessings and he worked to explain them to the saints. Section 88 built a temple, established schools, motivated (and continues to motivate) learning by study and faith, and helped many saints sanctify their lives and lay hold on the great and last promise of entering the Lord’s presence.
Most everyone drank in the 1820s and 1830s, Joseph Smith included.[1] Distillers in his upstate New York neighborhood made corn whiskey and sent 65,277 gallons of it and 69 tons of beer to market on the Erie Canal the year after Joseph’s first vision of God and Christ.[2] Newspapers in the towns near Joseph’s home advertised cheap alcohol, printed recipes for making beer, and sold the ingredients. One scholar aptly described Joseph’s America as “the alcoholic republic.”[3]
Joseph’s father confessed in a patriarchal blessing to his son Hyrum in 1834 that he had been “out of the way through wine” sometimes in the past, but “Joseph Sr.’s drinking was not excessive for that time and place.”[4] Nearly all males drank and many women and children. Members of all social classes drank. They drank morning, mid-day, and evening, at funerals and parties, militia musters and church socials.
“The thing has arrived to such a height,” one widely-quoted temperance advocate noted, “that we are actually threatened with becoming a nation of drunkards.”[5] America’s desire for alcohol and the rise of temperance generated diverse opinions that led Joseph Smith to ask questions. Between 1831 and 1836, the cry for abstinence gained momentum. In 1833, in the middle of this controversy, the Lord clarified revealed where the Saints should stand relative to alcohol consumption.
Americans consumed enormous amounts of meat. Authorities often condoned this practice in winter but worried that too much consumption could result in over-stimulation. All authorities agreed that use of all stimulants, in which they included herbs, meats, coffee, and tea, could lead to over-stimulation and therefore disease. The most radical authorities, especially Sylvester Graham, thought that foods much more tasty than a Graham cracker (named for Sylvester) were very dangerous. He urged complete abstinence from coffee, tea, meat, spices, and condiments. Granting that coffee and tea were stimulants, other authorities thought Graham’s position too extreme and believed that healthy people could consume these drinks in moderation without causing disease.
By 1800, the influential doctor Benjamin Rush had persuaded many authorities that all disease could be traced to over-stimulation, and therefore all illness could be treated by so-called “heroic” methods of releasing the patient’s excess energy. Joseph Smith’s brother Alvin died in 1823 after a doctor’s dose of mercurous chloride blocked rather than purged his digestive system. Joseph Smith and most Latter-day Saints had little confidence in the fledgling medical profession and its heroic practices. In the days of primitive diagnostic techniques before diseases were well understood, an 1831 revelation to Joseph Smith taught Saints that “whosoever among you are sick, and have not faith to be healed, but believe, shall be nourished with all tenderness, with herbs and mild food, and that not by the hand of an enemy” (D&C 42:43). This counsel matched most closely the relatively innocuous naturopathic practices of Samuel Thomson, and many Latter-day Saints followed his advice until advances in medical science increased their confidence in professionals late in the nineteenth century.[6]
The world into which the Lord revealed the Word of Wisdom was quite different from our own. Advances in medical science have provided much more certainty about the dangers of consuming many of the substances that were thought by many in Joseph Smith’s world to have medicinal value. Moreover, his contemporaries were in the process of reconsidering their certainty about the value of alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, meats, fruits, and some herbs. There was no prevailing view to which everyone subscribed, even inside the Church. There were more questions than answers.
Outspoken temperance crusaders added tobacco to their list of noxious substances in the 1830s, and it became as warmly debated as alcohol. Was tobacco a powerful medicine capable of curing all kinds of afflictions or a noxious weed that was loathsome to the lungs? Was it filthy habit or a socially acceptable pastime? Uncertainty about these questions may have been the immediate catalyst for Joseph Smith’s reception of the Word of Wisdom.
Nearly two dozen men gathered for school in a second-story room of Newel and Ann Whitney’s Kirtland, Ohio, store on February 27, 1833. “The first thing they did,” according to Brigham Young, “was to light their pipes, and, while smoking, talk about the great things of the kingdom, and spit all over the room, and as soon as the pipe was out of their mouths a large chew of tobacco would then be taken. Often when the Prophet entered the room to give the school instructions he would find himself in a cloud of tobacco smoke. This, and the complaints of his wife at having to clean so filthy a floor, made the Prophet think upon the matter, and he inquired of the Lord.”[7]
With one of the elders for his scribe and perhaps one or two others present, Joseph Smith, in a nearby room, received the revelation known as the Word of Wisdom. Besides answering the immediate question of whether the brethren should smoke or chew tobacco, or “the filthy weed and their disgusting slobbering and spitting” as one colorful account put it, the revelation clarified several other issues that were being debated by Joseph’s contemporaries.[8]
One of the most unusual aspects of the word of wisdom is that although it came in answer to pressing questions in 1833, its primary purpose is to forewarn future saints of conspiracies to undermine their agency. Notice the doctrinal basis of the revelation. It assumes, as an earlier revelation to Joseph Smith said, that “the spirit and the body are the soul of man” (D&C 88:15). Whereas some Christians think of the body as evil and look forward to leaving it behind at death, Latter-day Saints regard the body as godly and look forward to a literal, glorious resurrection. They believe God and Christ are perfectly embodied and that through the process of birth, earth-life, death, and resurrection, men and women are being created in their image. To preserve the soul and its agency to act for itself, the Lord forbade drinking strong drinks and also wine, unless it was for the sacrament.[9]
The revelation instructs people how to act relative to distilled (“strong”) and fermented drinks, domesticated and wild animals, tobacco, hot drinks, grains, herbs, fruits, and vegetables. These are all things God has made and given mankind to use. The revelation tells us how to use them in ways that please God. “All these to be used with prudence and thanksgiving,” for example, speaking of herbs and fruits (D&C 89:11), or “they are to be used sparingly,” speaking of meat and poultry (D&C 89:12). A seldom noted aspect of stewardship in the Word of Wisdom is the repeated command to use what God has provided “with thanksgiving” (D&C 89:11–12). The repeated emphasis is on righteous use, not abuse. God created this earth and its life-sustaining abundance to be used by wise stewards who thankfully acknowledge him, not abused by the ungrateful or gluttonous.
The Word of Wisdom more than a simple health code. It is a covenant. Elder Boyd K. Packer testified that “while the Word of Wisdom requires strict obedience, in return it promises health, great treasures of knowledge, and that redemption bought for us by the Lamb of God, who was slain that we might be redeemed.”[10]
Some critics of the Word of Wisdom assert that because it addressed the circumstances of Joseph Smith’s world, it must not be real revelation. That is silly, since it assumes that a revelation that answers timely questions is somehow suspect. What good is an irrelevant revelation? Another simplistic assumption is that the Word of Wisdom mimicked the prevailing idea of Joseph’s time. There was no prevailing idea, no single opinion. Then as now there were many competing ideas, debate rather than consensus.
The Word of Wisdom sorts out and clarifies the strengths and weaknesses among the variety of opinions. Forbidding the ingestion of nearly all alcoholic beverages as well as coffee, tea, and tobacco, the revelation ran counter to the mainstream culture. It was consistent, however, with an emerging medical opinion regarding meats, herbs, fruits, and vegetables. The revelation did not give Joseph Smith, his followers, or family members what they wanted to hear. Many of the men in the church used tobacco. Emma Smith took coffee and tea. Joseph liked whiskey.[11] They all consumed more meat than was needful.[12] The revelation was not what they wanted to hear. It was the wisdom they needed to hear.
Section 90
There is nothing in the historical records to tell us what problem(s) section 90 resolved—nothing but the revelation itself.[1] In such cases it is extra important to read it carefully. It is full of financial instructions. It is safe to conclude that Joseph was concerned about the expensive commands the Lord had given to buy land in Missouri, establish a storehouse, print the revelations, and gather Israel to Zion.
The revelation was given, at least in part, to answer Joseph’s prayers for forgiveness, mentioned in verse 1, which also says that prayers of Joseph’s brethren that have reached the Lord’s ears. It seems that those brethren were Sidney Rigdon, who had been serving as Joseph’s counselor, and Frederick Williams, who just a few weeks earlier received a revelation through Joseph that he was “called to be a Councillor & scribe unto my Servent Joseph.”[2] The Lord refers “again” to these “brethren” by name in verse 6.
Section 90 blesses those who bear the keys of the kingdom, the authority to exercise the priesthood to govern the church of Jesus Christ. It grants them the oracles—the revelations to govern the church—and commands the saints not to take them lightly.
The revelation takes the next step in forming what section 81 called the “presidency of the high priesthood,” or what became known by 1835 as the First Presidency.[3]
The Lord forgives Sidney Rigdon and Frederick Williams and makes them equal with Joseph in holding the keys of the kingdom. Verse 9 nevertheless clarifies that Joseph presides over his counselors, who preside over the earth and are commanded by the Lord to spread the gospel and gather Israel in anticipation of His coming.
Beginning in verse 13, the Lord gives the Presidency their day to day duties: To finish revising the Old Testament, to preside over the church and the school of the prophets (see section 88), to receive revelations as needed, to study and learn all they can, and to preside over and set the church in order.
Verses 13 through the end include the kind of revelation needed to set the church in order. Here the Lord micromanages his affairs with specific instructions about a variety of people, property, and finances. Joseph and his counselors are reproved and instructed for their pride and directed to be better. The church is to provide a home for Frederick Williams, who had consecrated his farm to obey the same revelation that called him to be a counselor to Joseph. Joseph’s parents are to live on Frederick’s farm, Sidney to remain where he lived, and the bishop to find an agent both faithful and wealthy enough to help pay the church’s debts.
The Lord refers to the United Firm’s covenant (section 82) in verse 24, which is itself a covenant. In verse 25 he counsels Joseph’s father to conserve his financial resources by not assuming responsibility for more people than he can afford in his advancing years. Vienna Jacques, a converted Bostonian who had gathered with the saints and consecrated her considerable wealth, is promised an inheritance in Zion for her faithfulness.
No so with William McLellin, whom the Lord rebukes after he forsook two mission calls and circumvented the law of consecration to purchase two lots on Main Street in Independence, Missouri (see sections 66, 75, and 85).[4] The Lord also reproved church leaders in Zion who were badgering Joseph to come to Missouri to live.
Ten days after the revelation, a council of high priests convened. Joseph ordained Sidney Rigdon and Frederick Williams “by the laying on of hands to be equal with him in holding the Keys of the Kingdom and also to the Presidency of the high Priesthood.”[5]
The pressures of Zion building Zion weighed on Joseph. One can hear sub-textually that Joseph did not know how to resolve some pressing problems, but the Lord did. He coached Joseph how to cope, strategize, delegate, prepare, and press forward. The revelation reassured Joseph that the keys were his forever and he would receive revelations as needed. Section 90 treated Joseph’s anxiety, uncertainty, and stress. Zion, “shall not be removed out of her place. I, the Lord, have spoken it” (D&C 90:37). If the Lord was so cool and confident in Zion, Joseph could be too. He would need that reassurance. Things in Zion were about to get much worse.
Section 91
There was a hot debate among member of the British and Foreign Bible Society in the late 1820s. Some members advocated that the Society should include in its Bibles the Apocrypha—“the dozen or so books not found in the Hebrew canon but that were included in the Greek version of the Old Testament.”[1] Other members of the Society thought they were “adulterating the Scriptures, by circulating the lies and fables of the Apocrypha along with the words of eternal life.”[2] That debate had been ongoing among Christians for centuries. Joseph did not know whose argument was best.
Title pages of Joseph Smith’s Bible. Images courtesy of josephsmithpapers.org
Joseph’s version of the King James Bible included the Apocrypha. Section 90, revealed on March 8, 1833, told Joseph to finish his revision of the Old Testament before moving on to other pressing duties. The next day he asked the Lord whetherhe should read the Apocrypha and revise it along with the rest of the Old Testament. His history says, “having come to that portion of the ancient writings called the Apocrypha, I received the following” revelation.[3]
The Lord tells Joseph the he need not translate the Apocrypha, and he explains why. Much of it is true and already translated correctly. Much of it is not true, late additions, uninspired, and uninspiring. The revelation hinges on the therefore that begins verse 4. Because there is much truth and much else in the Apocrypha, let it be understood by the Spirit, which testifies of truth. That is the way to get the most from the Apocrypha.
Section 91 helps us understand the nature of scripture and of revelation. There have been many historical arguments and dogmatic positions taken relative to the Apocrypha. The revealed answer may be the least dogmatic. Rather than declaring the highly varied books of the Apocrypha absolutely true or false, the Lord focuses on truth and error within the texts. Nor does he seem worried about errors in or sufficiency of scripture, a term Latter-day Saints do not even use. He gives instead an infallible principle that can be applied to all texts and all subjects. The principle is that seeking truth in the light of the Holy Spirit will enable people to discern truth from error wherever they may be found.
Section 92
People live by the law of consecration and stewardship. When people say that early saints lived the United Order, they do not understand what it is—or was. United Order is actually a pseudonym for the United Firm, a group of several church leaders the Lord named specifically in section 82. “As a governing financial council, the firm was responsible for printing church publications, holding church properties in trust, assisting the poor, and operating general stores in Independence, Missouri, and Kirtland, Ohio, to generate funds for the church.”[1]
The Lord established the United Firm in 1832 (see section 82).[2] In 1833, the Lord called Frederick Williams to be a counselor and scribe to Joseph and to consecrate his substantial farm to the church. “Let thy farm be consecrated for bringing forth of the revelations and tho[u] shalt be blessed,” the Lord told Frederick.[3] Section 92 made Frederick a member of the United Firm.[4] The minutes describing what it means say that Frederick “should be received into the United Firm in full partnership agreeable to the specification of the bond” mentioned in Sections 78:11 and 82:11.[5] Section 92 instructs the members of the United Firm to receive Frederick and instructs him to be a “lively member.”
Joseph sent a copy of the revelation to the members of the firm in Missouri. They apparently raised some questions about Frederick’s role. He joined the firm, consecrated his farm, was ordained a counselor to Joseph Smith, continued to serve as a scribe, and was otherwise “lively” though soft spoken in building Zion. Joseph’s journal says, “Brother Frederick is one of those men in whom I place the greatest confidence and trust for I have found him ever full of love and Brotherly kindness. . . . He is perfectly honest and upright and seeks with all his heart to magnify his presidency in the church.”[6]
[10] Boyd K. Packer, “The Word of Wisdom: The Principle and the Promises,” Ensign, May 1996, 18.
[11] Joseph Smith address to the Mormons at Nauvoo on Last Sunday of April 1841, Reverend Julius A. Reed Collection, box 2, folder 15, Iowa State Historical Society, Iowa City, Iowa.
[12] Bush, “The Word of Wisdom in Early Nineteenth-Century Perspective,” 53, 63.
In his inimitable way, BYU philosophy professor Truman Madsen related an anecdote during a presentation he gave at the Yale Divinity School. He told of a conversation with some Catholic priests, very learned Jesuits who expressed their inability to conceive of God as an intimate father intent on raising mankind to fully share in his glory and status. Brother Madsen said he told them it was hard for Latter-day Saints to conceive of God as anything other than a concerned father whose work and glory is to exalt all of his willing children.
What does that have to do with section 93? It’s about the nature of God as Father, Christ as Son, and it parents as well as chastises Bishop Whitney and the members of the First Presidency, saying they need to be better parents.[1] The Lord explains why he gave the revelation in verse 19: “I give unto you these sayings that you may understand, and know what you worship, that you may come unto the Father in my name, and in due time receive of his fulness.”
The Lord’s use of the word fulness tells us that we have in Section 93 a revelation about exaltation. Fulness is used occasionally in the Book of Mormon and early revelations to describe the gospel, but in section 76, the first of the revelations to describe progress beyond simple salvation from sin and death, the word bursts onto the page nine times. In Section 93 we hear it fifteen times, and sometimes enriched as in “fulness of truth” (26) or “fulness of joy” (34). Section 93 is an introductory text on how to come into the Lord’s presence and become like him.
Section 93 adds intelligence to section 88’s impressive catalog of synonyms that include light, life, law, power, and glory—most memorably in section 93:36: “The glory of God is intelligence, or in other words, light and truth.” We worship “The Father,” the organizer of eternal elements and intelligent beings whom he designs to inherit his attributes and with them his “fulness of joy.” We worship a God who did not create us ex nihilo, or from nothing, but rather from eternally existing element and intelligence (33-35). We worship a God whose work is to frame worlds and inhabit them with his children to provide them a sphere in which they can act independently, truly free to do their father’s will or their own.
We worship God by choosing of our own free will to receive the intelligence, or light and truth he offers us, to keep his commandments and therefore receive more truth, more light, more intelligence, until we know all he knows and have become all he is. We worship our Heavenly Father by becoming like him. To emulate him is the highest worship we can offer him. In section 93, Christ holds himself up as the example. “He received not of the fulness at first, but received grace for grace.” He obeyed His Father and grew by degrees of glory “until he received a fulness” (12-13). In section 93, Christ declares that we have similar potential for growth and godliness (20).
There is an abrupt transition at verse 40 to pragmatic instructions, and the conclusion of the revelation “descend[s] from the heavens into the everyday concerns of Joseph and his friends. The Lord scolds them for not keeping order in their families.”[2] This part of the revelation is not disconnected from the lofty preceding verses. All of them tell how to raise children and why. God organizes life and provides His children a setting in which they can act freely. He endows them with light, truth, or knowledge to act upon independently, leaving them free to obey or disobey when “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” (39).
In section 93, Joseph received God’s theology of parenting and a pragmatic commandment to go and do likewise (40). Moreover, since the glory of God is intelligence, there is a commandment to worship by learning, by obtaining knowledge as a means to the end of exaltation. Exalting knowledge comes by obedience to God’s light and truth. “He that keepeth his commandments receiveth truth and light, until he is glorified in truth and knoweth all things” (28).
Professor Madsen cited section 93 as a profound solution to several theological problems:
How can there something come from nothing? Answer: The universe was not created from nothing. “The elements are eternal.”
How can Christ have been both absolutely human and absolutely divine at the same time? Answer: He was not both at the same time. Christ “received not of the fulness at the first, but continued…until he received a fulness.”
If man is totally the creation of God, how can he be anything or do anything that he was not divinely pre-caused to do? Answer: Man is not totally the creation of God. “Intelligence was not created or made, neither indeed can be. Behold, here is the agency of man.”
How can man be a divine creation and yet be “totally depraved”? Answer: Man is not totally depraved. “Every spirit of man was innocent in the beginning; and God having redeemed man from the fall, men became again, in their infant state, innocent before God.”
What is the relationship of being and beings, the one and the many? Answer: “Being” is only the collective name of beings, of whom God is one. Truth is knowledge of things (plural), and not, as Plato would have it, of Thinghood. “Truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come.”
How can spirit relate to gross matter? Answer: “The elements are the tabernacle of God.”
Why should man be embodied? Answer: “Spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy.”
If we begin susceptible to light and truth, how is it that people err and abuse the light? Answer: People are free; they can be persuaded only if they choose to be. They cannot be compelled.
The Socratic thesis that knowledge is virtue (that if you really know the good you will seek it and do it) is mistaken. It is through disobedience and because of the traditions of the fathers that light is taken away from mankind.[3]
That is impressive even for Joseph Smith, the twenty-seven-year-old farmer/revelator whose history casually contextualizes section 93 by saying, “on the 6th [of May 1833] I received the following.”[4]
Section 94 may make more sense after you have studied sections 95 and 96 and 97, because it was actually revealed right after section 97, though for many years it was misdated and thus misplaced. It makes the most sense when it is read as an extension of section 97.[1] It addresses similar concerns as section 97, and says that the Lord had already revealed the pattern for the House of the Lord in Kirtland, which he did in section 95.
In Section 97, the Lord required the saints in Missouri to build a temple. In Section 94 he commands the saints in Ohio to build a stake to Zion, beginning with another temple in Ohio, as commanded in section 88 and again in section 95. The Lord calls for the construction of an office for the First Presidency next to the temple in Kirtland, Ohio. He specifies its design and the conditions on which he will abide there. On the next lot south the Lord wants a printing office, perhaps to replace the church’s press destroyed by a mob just a few days earlier in Missouri (unbeknownst to Joseph). The members of the church’s building committee, Hyrum Smith, Reynolds Cahoon, and Jared Carter, are appointed lots or “inheritances” near the building sites. Verse 16 is not in the early manuscripts. Probably Joseph added it as clarification before the revelation was published in the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants.
In the letter to Missouri church leaders that included section 94, the First Presidency explained that the saints in Zion should build similar buildings for meetings and printing the scriptures.[2] But the saints in Zion were already being forced from their land and homes and saints in Kirtland struggled to muster enough resources to build the temple. They eventually scaled down the instructions in section 94, built one building instead of two, and used it as a printing office, a school, and office space for the First Presidency.
Section 95
Six months after the Lord told the Saints in Kirtland, Ohio to build a house of the Lord where they could learn his law, be endowed with his power, and come into his presence (see section 88), the saints had not begun to build the Lord’s house. Joseph wrote to tell the saints in Missouri. “The Lord commanded us in Kirtland to build an house of God,” he said “and we must—yea the Lord helping us we will obey, as on conditions of our obedience, he has promised us great things, yea even a visit from the heavens to honor us with his presence.”[1]
Joseph seemed to be the only one who sensed any urgency in the command. It was the dead of winter, 1833. In the spring the saints got around to having a meeting about building the Lord’s house, and appointed a Jared Carter, Reynolds Cahoon, and Hyrum Smith to a committee to raise money for construction and oversee it.[2] The meeting ended after that and nothing more happened for a month. Then the Lord gave section 95.[3]
It is a revelation of God’s love, his conditional love. “Thus saith the Lord unto you whom I love, and whom I love I also chasten that their sins may be forgiven, for with the chastisement I prepare a way for their deliverance in all things out of temptation, and I have loved you” (1). Given the premises that God loves the saints and chastens those he loves as a means to their forgiveness, the revelation’s next passage is a predictable rebuke for what the Lord calls the “very grevious sin” of not building the temple.
Then the Lord reemphasizes the importance of the temple. It is the school for prophets, the way to “pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,” the way out of darkness, the venue for receiving an endowment of heavenly power. The Lord wanted the elders to remain in Kirtland to receive this endowment, but they were contentious and he sent them into the field to be chastened–because he loved them.
Beginning in verse 11, the Lord promises the saints power to build the temple if they keep his commandments. “If you keep not my commandments,” he emphasizes, “the love of the Father shall not continue with you, therefore you shall walk in darkness” (12). The revelation does not say that the Love of God will not continue, only that it will not continue with those who choose to reject it, who “love darkness rather than light” (D&C 29:45). By juxtaposing his love with darkness, the Lord equates his love with light and the synonyms for it described in sections 88 and 93, including truth, glory, intelligence, power, and life. Why, the Lord seems to lament in Section 95, would saints choose to walk in darkness at noon when God’s loving light shines for all who choose to obey the conditions on which he offers it?
So what would be the wise course? “Let the house be built,” the Lord says, and gives the dimensions and a promise to reveal it to “three” (13). The building committee sent a letter to all the saints the same day the revelation came, urging them to “make very possible exertion to aid temporally as well as spiritually in this great work,” and “it is as important as our salvation is that we obey this . . . command.”[4]
The saints got the point. They went to work at enormous cost. The Lord revealed the building to the First Presidency (14).[5] Hyrum Smith broke ground on June 5, 1833 in a wheat field on the bluffs above the Chagrin River. Everyone helped. Saints consecrated funds, labor, expertise but “the project was far out of proportion to the Church’s pitiful resources.” They had to rely on the Lord’s promise of power to build it if they kept his commandments. Joseph borrowed money to finance the construction “but the economic realities gave Joseph no pause.” He understood the Savior’s “great and last promise” to be worth any cost, any sacrifice (D&C 88:68-69).
After receiving section 95, the saints no longer walked in darkness at noon. “Beginning in Kirtland,” wrote historian Richard Bushman, “temples became an obsession. For the rest of his life, no matter the cost of the temple to himself and his people, [Joseph] made plans, raised money, mobilized workers, and required sacrifice” (see section 97).[6]
Section 96
Reading section 96 is like walking in on an interesting conversation that is already underway. You try hard to catch on, to understand what’s being said, but you realize there’s so much you’ve missed that you just can’t make sense of what you’re hearing. It would be nice, in such cases, if there was a way to catch up on the earlier parts of the conversation. Those parts are sections 42, 72, 78, and 82. Those sections reveal the law of consecration, establish an organization (of church leaders) called the United Firm, to be trustees of church properties, manage storehouses, and relieve poverty.
Members of the Firm and others strategized in the spring of 1833 to acquire several farms in the Kirtland, Ohio area, especially a farm and brick tavern owned by an early settler named Peter French. The saints hoped to build a stake of Zion surrounding the House of the Lord, which they intended to build on French’s farm. They sent a committee to ask the farm owners the terms on which they would be willing to sell. The committee returned with news that the farms were available, and the council decided to buy, appointed agents to negotiate the sale, and called the elders out of their school to go raise funds among the saints.[1] The funds were raised and the farms purchased, leading to another council on June 4, which disagreed about who should manage the French farm, “but all agreed to inquire of the Lord.”[2]
The Lord answered that Newel Whitney, the bishop in Kirtland, was to “take charge of the place” as a good steward. The Lord, however, is the owner of “the place . . . upon which I design to build my holy house” (2). He begins the revelation by stating the rationale for buying the farm: “It is expedient in me that this stake that I have set for the strength of Zion should be made strong” (1). The Lord instructs the bishop and others how to act relative to the land, by dividing it among the saints and using the proceeds to fund the United Firm, called the “order” in verses 4 and 8 but “the Firm” in early manuscripts (see eections 70, 78, 82, 92). The Lord says John Johnson “should become a member of the order” and use his financial resources and skills to pay the church’s debts (D&C 96:8).[3]
Bishop Whitney became steward of the farm and acted on the revelation’s instructions to divide it and to finance the church’s publications with proceeds. John Johnson moved from Hiram to Kirtland, joined the United Firm, became steward of the tavern, and tried to obey the revelation by paying the firm’s debts.[4]
Section 97
Parley Pratt described Zion during the summer of 1833 as the opposition escalated. “Immigration had poured into the County of Jackson in great numbers; and the Church in that county now numbered upwards of one thousand souls.” He described how they industriously improved their situations by building homes and cultivating farms. He said that they observed the Sabbath according to Section 59, but made no mention of building the temple described in section 84. “I devoted almost my entire time in ministering among the churches,” Parley wrote, “holding meetings; visiting the sick; comforting the afflicted, and giving counsel. A school of Elders was also organized, over which I was called to preside. This class, to the number of about sixty, met for instruction once a week. The place of meeting was in the open air, under some tall trees, in a retired place in the wilderness, where we prayed, preached and prophesied, and exercised ourselves in the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Here great blessings were poured out and many great and marvelous things were manifested and taught. . . . To attend this school I had to travel on foot, and sometimes with bare feet at that, about six miles. This I did once a week, besides visiting and preaching in five or six branches a week.”
Parley and his brethren wrote to Joseph, seeking the Lord’s will concerning their school. While “thus engaged,” Parley wrote, “and in answer to our correspondence with the Prophet, Joseph Smith, at Kirtland, Ohio, the following revelation was sent to us by him, dated August, 1833.”[1]
Joseph Smith did not know when he received section 97 that the Saints in Zion had received an ultimatum from their antagonistic neighbors—stop obeying the revelations or we will force you to. In section 97, the Lord issues a counter ultimatum. “The ax is laid at the root of the tree,” he says, “and every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit shall be hewn down and cast into the fire. I, the Lord, have spoken it” (D&C 97:8).[2]
Section 97 highlights the Lord’s priorities for Zion. “I, the Lord, am well pleased that there should be a school in Zion, and also with my servant Parley P. Pratt, for he abideth in me” (D&C 97:3). Right away, however, the Lord notices that there is no temple in Zion yet. He requires one to “be built speedily, by the tithing of my people,” by obedience to the law of sacrifice set forth in section 97 (D&C 97:8-12). The temple—or, rather, the keeping of covenants required to build and worship in the temple—will be the salvation of Zion.
Section 97 is conspicuously full of if/then statements. It prophesies conditionally that if the saints obey the commandment to sacrifice to build a temple in Independence, then Zion will prosper and become great and immovable. She will escape her enemies if she observe to do all things whatsoever I have commanded her. If not, Zion will be visited with sore afflictions. The future of Zion is in the hands of the Latter-day Saints. If the saints want Zion as their first priority, they will sacrifice to build it and keep it holy. In verse 27, the Lord gives Zion a second chance. If Zion has since been, at least temporarily, “moved out of her place,” it is because too few Latter-day Saints share the Lord’s priorities set forth in Section 97 (D&C 97:19).
Parley Pratt testified that the Lord poured forth the promised blessings of section 97 when he did as the revelation commanded regarding the school for the elders. “The Lord gave me great wisdom,” Parley wrote, “and enabled me to teach and edify the Elders, and comfort and encourage them in their preparations for the great work which lay before us. I was also much edified and strengthened.”
Parley also noted that “this revelation was not complied with by the leaders and Church in Missouri, as a whole.” As Section 97 shows, the saints in Zion were not unified, not all committed to keeping their covenants. Thus, “notwithstanding many were humble and faithful,” Parley noted, “the threatened judgment was poured out to the uttermost.”[3]
[5]“Minute Book 1,” p. 12, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed July 9, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/minute-book-1/16. Truman Angell, Journal, typescript, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. Truman Angell to John Taylor, 11 March 1885, Church History Library.
[6] Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005), 217-18.
Section 96 notes
[1] Zebedee Coltrin, Journal, Church History Library, Salt Lake City.
[3] Scot Facer Procter and Maurine Jensen Proctor, Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt: Revised and Enhanced Edition (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 2000), 115-16.
Letter to Church Leaders in Jackson County, Missouri, 18 August 1833. Image courtesy of josephsmithpapers.org
In the summer of 1833, Oliver Cowdery wrote from Independence, Missouri to church leaders in Kirtland, Ohio, informing them that opposition from the saints’ Missouri neighbors was rising. By the time the letter arrived in Ohio, Bishop Partridge had been tarred and feathered in Missouri, the church’s press there had been destroyed, and the saints given an ultimatum to leave Jackson county or face escalating violence.
In Kirtland, Doctor Philastus Hurlbut had been excommunicated twice from the Church in a short period, and he thereafter “sought the destruction of the saints,” Joseph wrote, “and more particularly myself and family.”[1]Section 98 is the Lord’s prescription for peace and diplomacy amidst the strife and violence.[2]
Foreseeing the saints emotional reactions to hostility and violence, the Lord prescribes “be comforted,” “rejoice,” “give thanks,” and wait “patiently” for him, the Lord of Hosts, the defender of his people, to answer their prayers, for he has covenanted to do so. He promises that “all things wherewith you have been afflicted shall work together for your good, and to my name’s glory” (3).
The revelation then upholds the rule of constitutional law applied without bias. Freedom comes from God and “belongs to all mankind” (5, 8). The saints should therefore do all that lies in their power to preserve freedom for themselves and everyone else.
Section 98 reiterates the law of sacrifice described in Section 97. The saints are being tried and proven to see “whether you will abide in my covenant,” the Lord says, “even unto death” (14, cross reference Mosiah 18:8-10). Saints are commanded to “renounce war and proclaim peace” (16).
At verse 19 the Lord expresses his displeasure with materialistic saints in Kirtland, condemning pride, covetousness, and “all their detestable things,” he repeats the terms and conditions on which he will save or damn them.
Beginning in verse 23 the Lord reveals his law of forbearance and justified retaliation. It is the same law Nephi and Israelite patriarchs knew and obeyed. It applies to all people (32, 38). Simply put, the law requires saints to bear attacks “patiently and revile not . . . neither seek revenge” (23). After three offenses, patiently endured, the saints are to warn their attackers in the name of the Lord to stop. If they do not, the Lord says, “I have delivered thine enemy into thine hands” (29). At that point the saints can opt to spare the transgressor or deliver justice. “If he has sought thy life, and thy life is endangered by him, thine enemy is in thine hands and thou are justified” (31).
The Lord’s law includes the commandment that his people should “not go out to battle against any nation, kindred, tongue, or people, save I, the Lord, commanded them” (33). When an enemy declares war, the saints “should first lift a standard of peace” (34). If that gesture is rejected three times, the saints should testify to the Lord of their good faith efforts. “Then I, the Lord, would give unto them a commandment, and justify them in going out to battle against that nation,” and then the Lord would be on the saints’ side (36-37).
Beginning in verse 39, the Lord adds another dimension to the law. It is that enemies are to be forgiven as often as they repent, truly repent. The Lord’s vengeance is just and sure but it evaporates just as soon as there is real repentance (46-48).
Three days after section 98 was revealed, Oliver Cowdery arrived in Kirtland with the latest news from Missouri about the violent persecution and the saints’ pending expulsion from Jackson County. Joseph was passionate about Zion and responded to the crisis with a long letter in his own hand, written to the leaders in Missouri. Joseph’s letter begins with a broken-hearted prayer that the Lord would comfort the saints and curse their enemies before concluding, “O Lord glorify thyself thy will be done and not mine.”
Joseph’s first reaction was to curse the Saints’ enemies but he believed section 98’s promises and bowed to its moderating instructions in response to the crisis. For example, he urged the Saints to “wait patiently until the Lord come[s] and resto[res] unto us all things and build the waist places again for he will do it in his time.” He wrote to Zion, “th[ere] is no saifty only in the a[r]m of Jehovah none else can deliver and he will not deliver unless we do prove ourselves faithful to him in the severeest trouble for he that will have his robes washed in the blood of the Lamb must come up throught great tribulation even the greatest of all affliction but know this when men thus deal with you and speak all maner of evil of you falsly for the sake of Christ that he is your friend and I verily know that he will spedily deliver Zion for I have his immutible covenant that this shall be the case but god is pleased to keep it hid from mine eyes the means how exactly the thing will be done.” Joseph concluded his letter “by telling you that we wait the Comand of God to do whatever he plese and if <he> shall say go up to Zion and defend thy Brotheren by <the sword> we fly and we count not dear our live[s] dear to us.”[3]
Section 99
Section 99 fits chronologically between sections 83 and 84. Generically it is like sections 32-34 and 66. It is a mission call for John Murdock, but his is unique. No other missionaries were given the option to inherit Zion or serve as missionaries for the rest of their lives.[1]
John was among the early converts in Ohio, and from the time of his baptism in November 1830, he had hardly stopped preaching the gospel. His wife Julia had died after giving birth to twins, giving John five children under age seven to care for.
Then section 52 called John to preach and travel to Missouri in the summer of 1831. John shouldered and balanced his family and missionary calling as best he could. He made a selfless decision to accept an invitation an invitation from Emma and Joseph Smith, whose twins had just died, to adopt John and Julia’s. John left his other children in the care of relatives and fellow saints and endured a long, sickly, and extremely successful mission to Missouri and back. He found his children well with the exception of little Joseph, who had succumbed to measles in March 1832.
John nurtured his children, regained his health, and served in the church at headquarters until August 1832, when section 99 called him back to the mission field. The revelation shows the Lord’s familiarity with John’s family situation and tells him how to both provide for his motherless children and perform his mission. John, meanwhile, is given the unusual choice to inherit Zion in a few years or continue his missionary labors for the rest of his life.
John wrote that having received Section 99, “I immediately commenced to arrange my business and provide for my children and send them up to the Bishop in Zion,” Edward Partridge. Then John set out to preach the gospel. Some received him as section 99 predicted. Others, including his in-laws, rejected his message. When John “met with a Dr. Matthews, a very wicked man” who rejected his offering, John and his companion followed the revelation’s instruction: “We bore testimony according to the commandment and the Lord helped us in tending to the ordinance” of cleansing their feet “in the secret places by the way for a testimony against them” (99:4).[2]
Section 100
The adulterous apostate Doctor Philastus Hurlbut threatened to wash his hands in Joseph Smith’s blood.[1] Besides that, the saints in Missouri were in the midst of being forced from the promised land. On the bright side, missionary work around the Great Lakes was thriving. In the midst of the chaos, Joseph and Sidney accepted the invitations from prospective converts and referrals from friends and relatives, and went on a mission through Pennsylvania to upstate New York and Ontario, Canada.
Journal, 1832–1834. Image courtesy of josephsmithpapers.org
On October 12, 1833, Joseph did something he rarely did. He wrote his own journal entry, or at least part of it. “I feel very well in my mind,” it says in his handwriting, “the Lord is with us but have been much anxiety about my family.”[2] The Lord was with them, and gave Joseph section 100 that day. It addresses Joseph’s mission with Sidney Rigdon and the two concerns that occupied his anxious mind: Zion and the safety of his family and other Saints.[3] The revelation begins with the Lord’s omnipotent assurance that Joseph and Sidney’s families are well. “They are in mine hands, and I will do with them as seemeth me good” (1).
About the mission, the Lord gives Joseph and Sidney specific, omniscient counsel to ensure success that could guarantee their success, depending on how they decide to act on the counsel. If Joseph and Sidney speak the thoughts the Lord puts into their hearts, he says, they will not be confounded. If they solemnly, meekly declare the gospel in the Lord’s name, He promises that the Holy Ghost will testify of their words. He promises Joseph a powerful testimony and Sidney the ability to expound scripture. He makes Joseph a revelator for Sidney and Sidney a spokesman for Joseph.
Beginning in verse 13 the Lord offers “a word concerning Zion.” He promises protection and salvation to the brethren Joseph sent to Missouri with messages. “Zion shall be redeemed,” the Lord promises, after she is chastened and becomes pure and willing to serve the Lord.
Joseph Smith possessed a dogged tenacity. He did not want to give up on Zion, on New Jerusalem being built around a holy temple in Jackson County, Missouri. Oliver Cowdery had recently suggested that the Saints could start over somewhere else. Joseph resisted that thought. He told the Saints in Missouri that the Lord wanted them to hold on to their land, not sell it, not give up on Zion. He promised them that Zion would flourish in spite of Hell, though he did not pretend to know how or when.
Joseph described himself as praying fervently and often in the past weeks after Zion had been beaten. He could not understand why. He even said that he murmured about it. Section 100 comforted Joseph. It reinforced his faith in Zion, though it did not answer his questions about how or when the Lord would put the Saints back in the promised land. Joseph wrote that based on Section 100, “I know that Zion, in the own due time of the Lord will be redeemed, but how many will be the days of her purification, tribulation and affliction, the Lord has kept hid from my eyes; and when I enquire concerning this subject the voice of the Lord is, Be still, and know that I am God! all those who suffer for my name shall reign with me, and he that layeth down his life for my sake shall find it again.”[4]
Section 100 eased Joseph’s anxieties about his family’s safety in the hostile environment of Kirtland, Ohio. On returning from his month-long mission, he dictated the following journal entry: “Found my family all well according to the promise of the Lord for which blessings I feel to thank his holy name.”[5]
Section 101
On December 10, 1833, the morning mail brought Joseph Smith “the melancholy intelligence” that the Saints in Missouri were being exiled from the promised land.[1] He had already learned that leading citizens had mobbed the saints, destroyed their press, and forced on them an ultimatum to leave the county. Joseph hoped, however, that the rule of law would prevail, that the saints could get redress for the illegal acts against them, and that they would not have to leave the land they had legally purchased and occupied. The letter disappointed that hope.
The news depressed and bewildered Joseph. Why had the Lord let the saints be driven from the promised land. Would they return? If so, how? It was the Lord who had told Joseph to consecrate Independence, Missouri as Zion, a refuge and gathering place for the saints. “Therefore I ask thee,” Joseph prayed, “in the name of Jesus Christ, to return thy people unto their homes . . . [and] that all the enemies of thy people, who will not repent and return unto thee be destroyed from off the face of that Land.”[2] Section 101 came a week later to answer these questions and Joseph’s prayer, though not as he had hoped.
The Lord explains that he will let the saints be tried and chastened even as much as Abraham was if it will lead to their sanctification. They must choose to stop being contentious, jealous, covetous, and lustful or there will be no Zion even if he rescues them. Then he promises emphatically that he will rescue them. “Notwithstanding their sins, my bowels are filled with compassion towards them. I will not utterly cast them off; and in the day of wrath I will remember mercy” (9).
Just a week earlier, Joseph felt like murmuring because “those who are innocent are compelled to suffer for the iniquities of the guilty; and I cannot account for this.”[3] The Lord acknowledges the injustice in Section 101:41 and has his own “wisdom” in allowing it. From the Lord’s perspective, a potent does of “trouble” can be useful. For when the Saints were well and good they treated lightly the revelations to gather, to consecrate, to buy land and to build a temple. Now all of a sudden they “of necessity feel after me,” the Lord says (8).
Section 101 reaffirms that Zion will be established despite the Saints being driven. It prophesies the millennial day when the pure in heart will inherit Zion, enmity will cease, Satan will be rendered powerless, the Lord will reveal all things, and death, like sorrow, will depart. With that perspective, the faithful, persecuted saints can afford to “fear not even unto death; for in this world your joy is not full, but in my your joy is full” (36).
Beginning in verse 43, the Lord relates a parable to explain his will concerning how to get Zion back. It implies that the unfaithful Saints in Zion were bad stewards. Rather than building the temple as commanded, they second-guessed the Lord, used his money selfishly, and opened themselves to attacks that could have been prevented by obedience. “Ought ye not to have done even as I commanded you,” the nobleman of the parable asks the disobedient servants? (53).
The nobleman’s plans for reclaiming his vineyard from enemies includes gathering an army of his servants, “the strength of mine house” to go to battle (55-58). The nobleman promises to redeem his overrun vineyard and the servants ask when. “When I will” comes the answer, “go ye straightway, and do all things whatsoever I have commanded you” (60). The servants go and do as the nobleman commanded, “and after many days all things were fulfilled” (62).
Immediately following the parable the Lord resumes, as if he were the nobleman commanding his servants what to do, or, in the words of verse 43, “my will concerning the redemption of Zion.” He commands the Saints to obey Sections 57, 63, and 86—that is, to continue the work of gathering by preaching the gospel, gaining converts, and gathering together to pool resources so they can systematically (not hastily or haphazardly) purchase land and build Zion legally. The Lord calls for wise men to be sent to purchase the lands, to buy out the settlers of Jackson County, satisfy them for their land and resolve the controversies between them (73). There is no shortage of money among the saints in the eastern branches, the Lord says. They have enough to buy the land if they are willing to consecrate it for Zion (75).
In verse 76 the Lord calls for the Saints to continue to appeal to government for redress of their civil and property rights like the biblical parable of the unjust judge who finally relented to an insistent woman’s pleas for justice. Similarly, the saints are to petition for justice at the feet of every government official including the president. “And if the president heed them not, then will the Lord arise and come forth out of his hiding place; and in his fury vex the nation” (89). The Saints are to pray for their government officials to be responsive and therefore escape the Lord’s vengeance.
The revelation closes with a command that the saints not sell the storehouse nor any of the land they legally own. Though driven unjustly, they must not relent to their oppressors. They must not sell the promised land.
Section 101 explains why Zion was postponed. God could stop every mobbing and prevent every Saint from being lustful, covetous, and contentious. He chooses instead to put agency in his individual children. He gives them power to act and commandments to act upon. When they or some of them act disobediently to His commands, the blessings promised for obedience are not forthcoming. That’s how some of the Saints, and their enemies, postponed Zion. It is our fault, not God’s, that there is still no holy city in Jackson County, Missouri.
Section 101 promises an ultimate redemption of Zion, though its timing is dependent on the Saints’ decisions. In several places the Lord guarantees that Zion will come. In just as many he speaks ambiguously about when. When depends on what the Saints decide to do with the Lord’s commandments.
[2] John Murdock, “An Abridged Record of the Life of John Murdock, Taken from His Journal by Himself,” typescript, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.
[2] Joseph Smith, Kirtland, Ohio, to Edward Partridge, William W. Phelps, John Whitmer, Algernon Sidney Gilbert, John Corrill, Isaac Morley and all Saints, Independence, Missouri, 10 December1833, in Joseph Smith Letterbook 1, pp. 70-75, in hand of Frederick G. Williams, CHL.
Joseph Smith convened councils to arbitrate and adjudicate church decisions, especially disciplinary decisions. These councils were called as needed, according to the law of the church revealed in February 1831 (D&C 42). By 1834, experience and church growth revealed the need for standing councils to deal with complex issues. On 17 February 1834, Joseph told a group of priesthood leaders that he “would show the order of councils in ancient days as shown to him by vision.”
Joseph explained that “Jerusalem was the seat of the Church Council in ancient days.” He said that “the apostle, Peter, was the president of the Council and held the keys of the Kingdom of God on the earth [and] was appointed to this office by the voice of the Savior and acknowledged in it by the voice of the Church. He had two men appointed as Counsellors with him, and in case Peter was absent, his counsellors could also transact business alone.” Joseph explained that church councils operated on different principles of jurisprudence than secular courts. “It was not the order of heaven in ancient councils to plead for and against the guilty as in our judicial courts (so called) but that every councilor when he arose to speak, should speak precisely according to evidence and according to the teaching of the Spirit of the Lord.”
Clerks kept minutes of Joseph’s teachings on how the council should be organized. They record that “many questions have been asked during the time of the organization of the Council and doubtless some errors have been committed, it was, therefore, voted by all present that Bro. Joseph should make all necessary corrections by the Spirit of inspiration hereafter.” Joseph began that job the next day, February 18, and the following day an even larger gathering of priesthood holders and general members met to review and consent to the new “constitution of the high council of the Church of Christ.” The minutes Joseph refined were subsequently canonized in the Doctrine and Covenants and are currently found in Section 102.
At the February 19 meeting, Joseph then laid hands on his two counselors and blessed them with “wisdom to magnify their office, and power over all the power of the adversary.” He then laid hands on the twelve men called as high counselors and set them apart. He blessed them with “wisdom and power to counsel in righteousness upon all subjects that might be laid before them.” He also prayed that they might be delivered from those evils to which they were most exposed and that their lives might be prolonged on the earth. Then, in the name of Jesus Christ, Joseph gave his counselors and the high council a charge to “do their duty in righteousness and in the fear of God.” They signified their acceptance of Joseph’s charge by raising their right hands. Joseph pronounced the council organized “according to the ancient order, and also according to the mind of the Lord.”[1]
Section 102 restores the ancient order of church councils. The organization of the high council also went far toward establishing a stake of Zion in Kirtland, an ecclesiastical jurisdiction drawn on imagery from Isaiah 33:20 and 54:2 and applied to the church in a May 1833 revelation (D&C 94:1, 96:1). Moreover, these minutes provided for other standing high councils to be established as well as temporary councils to be organized beyond Zion and her stakes.
The church’s first high council went to work immediately. As specified in the minutes, the counselors drew numbers 1-12, with even numbers responsible to prevent insult and injustice against the accused person and the odd numbered counselors responsible to ensure the interests of the church. Ezra Thayer charged Curtis Hodges, an elder, with preaching too loudly and unclearly, and demanding that he was justified in doing so when corrected. Curtis said he was not guilty. Witnesses confirmed “that bro. Hodges was guilty of hollowing so loud that he, in a measure, lost his voice.” Oliver Cowdery, who had drawn number 1, summarized the church’s case against Curtis. Joseph Coe, who had drawn number 2, summarized the case for Brother Hodge “but could say but few words.” Ezra restated his accusations and Curtis restated his pleas.
In other words, the case, which was not considered complicated, was conducted exactly as Section 102 specifies, including the ruling of Joseph Smith, president of the council. He announced “that the charges in the declaration had been fairly sustained by good witnesses, also, that bro. H[odges]. ought to have confessed when rebuked by bro Thayer also that if he had the spirit of the Lord at the meetings when he hollowed, he must have abused it, and grieved it away. All the council agreed with the decision.” Brother Hodges then confessed, acknowledging that he could now see his error and would repent.[2]
Not all high council hearings are this straightforward but, remarkably, the specific instructions set forth in Section 102 continue to guide the standing high councils of the church in each stake of Zion.
Section 103
As 1834 dawned, the Saints in Missouri were “exiles in a land of liberty.”[1]They sent Parley Pratt and Lyman Wight to seek Joseph’s counsel in Kirtland, Ohio. The messengers probably carried a letter from William Phelps informing Joseph that Missouri governor Daniel Dunklin was willing to help the Saints get their Jackson County lands back, but he would not maintain a militia to defend them indefinitely.[2]
Would eastern saints come to the aid of Zion? Joseph counseled with his brethren, resolved that “he was going to Missouri, to assist in redeeming it,” and asked for volunteers to go with him. Sometime in this sequence of events, the Lord revealed section 103 to Joseph. It is not clear whether the revelation motivated Joseph’s actions or affirmed them after the fact.[3]
Zion depended on the Latter-day Saints. They had been driven by wicked people acting on their own free will. In section 103, the Lord promises to punish them “in mine own time” (2-3). But the saints were driven “because they did not hearken altogether unto the precepts and commandments which I gave unto them” (5). The Lord offers another chance at Zion by revealing the conditions on which the saints can prevail against their enemies. First he states these positively (what will happen if they do, 5-7), then restates them negatively (what will happen if they do not, 8-10). Section 103 reaffirms the section 58’s promise Zion will come “after much tribulation” (12). Even that promise, the Lord qualifies, is conditional. “If they pollute their inheritances,” he says of the saints again, “they shall be thrown down” (14, cross reference D&C 84:59).
Beginning in verse 15, the Lord maps out the way Zion will be reclaimed “by power.” Then the Lord evokes section 101, reminding the Saints of his promise to raise up a Moses to lead the modern Israelites. He calls on Joseph to gather an army of Israel. It could get violent, the Lord suggests, perhaps to as a test to see who is willing “to lay down his life for my sake” (27).
The Lord appoints calls eight recruiters, including Joseph, to gather five hundred more men to march to Zion, though he acknowledges that, because they are free agents, “men do not always do my will,” and that relatively few may respond to the call. He forbids the undertaking unless at least one hundred men are willing to consecrate their lives to Zion. The Lord leaves the outcome in the hands of the free agents. “All victory and glory is brought to pass unto you through your diligence, faithfulness, and prayers of faith” (36).
Heber Kimball described the action motivated by Section 103. “Brother Joseph . . . . sent Messengers to the East and to the North, to the West and to the South to gather up the Elders and, He gathered together as many of the brethren as he conveniently could, with what means they could spare to go up to Zion and render all the assistance that we could to our afflicted brethren. We gathered clothing and other necessaries to carry up to our brethren and sisters who had been plundered; and putting our horses to the wagons and taking our firelocks and ammunition, we started on our journey.”[4]
They were a faltering band, to be sure, but willing to give their lives for Zion. Section 103’s most significant result is the way it tested that resolve. A local newspaper reported on section 103, “in obedience to a revelation communicated to their great Prophet, Joseph Smith, three hundred young men are to ‘to well armed and equipped to defend the promised land in Missouri.”[5] The revelation seems purposefully ambiguous, leaving Joseph and his followers uncertain how Zion would be redeemed. “By power,” they knew, but what kind of power? Were they to take the promised land by the force of arms? Would the God of Israel lead them with “a stretched-out arm” (17). Would they lay down their lives? The revelation raised these questions but did not answer them, making it a suitable test of faith and sacrifice (D&C 101:4-5).
The Camp of Israel, as it came to be known, literally walked in faith, the considerable faith required to kiss one’s family goodbye and march with a small, poorly-equipped band to an unknown encounter for the cause of Zion. As a result of Section 103, the Lord let many, though not as many as he asked for, pledge their allegiance to him and his cause. Their lives were his. He let them march all the way there before explaining that the power to redeem Zion would come not from a confrontation in Missouri, but from an endowment in the House of the Lord back in Kirtland. (See Section 105).
Section 104
Revelation, 23 April 1834 [D&C 104]. Image courtesy of josephsmithpapers.org.The Savior told a story in Luke 16:19-31 about a rich man who “fared sumptuously” in life while a “beggar named Lazarus” waited in vain for some of his table scraps. When the two men died, angels carried Lazarus into Abraham’s bosom while the rich man went to hell. “And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments,” begging for Lazarus to relieve his suffering. Section 104 evokes that story and applies it to Latter-day Saints, but it is hard to recognize that now.[1]
Early manuscripts of the revelation refer to Dives, a proper name: “he shall with Dives lift up his eyes <in hell> being in torment.”[2] The intertextual relationship of this passage and the story in Luke is obvious, but who is Dives? Dives is Latin for rich, opulent, wealthy, and is the word in the Latin Vulgate Bible translated into English as rich in Luke 16:19, “there was a certain rich man.” In the middle ages, the word dives adopted as the name of the rich man, and that’s how it’s used in D&C 104:18.
The revelation came when the problems of the United Firm had become acute. The Firm was composed of Church leaders, including the two bishops, and was responsible to manage the Church’s two mercantile firms and its printing office. The printing office had been destroyed in Independence, Missouri and the mercantile there had also been shut down by the mob’s ultimatum. The United Firm still owed debts on these unprofitable losses, and its members were growing more indebted to Bishop Whitney’s remaining mercantile in Ohio, which in turn was owing its creditors. Section 103’s expensive command to lead a large group of men to Missouri to aid the saints there added to the pressure.
Joseph counseled with the other members of the United Firm. He sought and received the revelation in section 104 to address the complex financial reality. It is no overstatement to say that Joseph was pretty frustrated with saints who could and should have relieved the Church’s financial obstacles, but chose not to.[3]
The Lord was pretty frustrated too, including with some members of the United Firm whose covetousness was complicating the problem. Joseph and the members of the United Firm who were in Kirtland met on April 10, 1834 and reluctantly decided to dissolve the Firm and make its members individual stewards over its various properties. Section 104 affirmed those decisions.
All that helps explain why the revelation emphatically sets forth the law of consecration. The Lord declares the first principle of consecration—“the earth is the Lord’s” (Exodus 9:29) —repeatedly and clearly: “I, the Lord, stretched out the heavens, and built the earth, my very handiwork; and all things therein are mine” (14).
The Lord’s logic is potent: He made the earth. It is therefore His. He endowed mankind with agency to act on the ample, abundant earth as stewards. He decreed that the rich must share with the poor (16). “Therefore,” the next premise follows, “if any man take of the abundance which I have made, and impart not his portion, according to the law of my gospel, unto the poor and the needy, he shall, with the wicked, lift up his eyes in hell, being in torment” (18).
Section 104 begins with a curse upon the members of the United Firm who had broken the covenant of Section 82. “I the Lord am not to be mocked in these things,” He says, referring to making covenants with “feigned words” (4-6). Covenants are serious, and section 104 announces that those who break the covenant to consecrate cannot escape the Lord’s wrath and the buffetings of Satan, as prophesied in Section 82:21. So the Lord offers the members of the United Firm an opportunity to repent and consecrate in verse 10, after which he reviews the law of consecration in verses 11-18, before getting very specific in verses 19-46 about the stewardships for which He will hold each members of the Firm accountable.
Beginning in verse 47, the Lord dissolves the United Firm into two firms, one in Kirtland, Ohio and the other in Missouri. Again He emphasizes that this Firm, which was supposed to last and would have according to the terms of the covenant in Section 82:20-21, has been undermined by the broken covenants of free agents, “the covenants being broken through transgression, by covetousness and feigned words” (52).
Beginning in verse 54, the Lord reviews the principle of stewardship with emphasis on how it relates to the specific stewardships he gave to the Literary Firm in Section 70 (and the United Firm’s responsibility to support the Literary Firm as revealed in Sections 78 and 82). Verses 55-56 reaffirm the first premise of consecration—“the earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof” (Psalm 24:1)–with an inescapable logic that brings covenant-breaking Saints face to face with hypocrisy: If the Lord is not Creator and Owner of the earth, why worship Him? If He is, why pretend to be “owners” of anything or to resent or resist his prerogative to distribute his resources in what he calls “mine own way” (16)? In other words, to acknowledge the Lord at all is to accept one’s role as an accountable steward, not an unaccountable owner determined to “play-act just a little longer—risking righteousness and true happiness merely in order to be reassured about our independence.”[4]
The revelation ends by reminding the brethren that the Lord is the sovereign master who has given them agency to act and stewardships to be acted upon, and that he will continue to hold them accountable. He concludes with what must have been a reassuring guarantee that His house will not be broken up (86).
After the Lord revealed section 104, Joseph and his brethren in the United Firm at Kirtland acted on properties the Lord had assigned each of them as stewardships. They also forgave each other all debts they owed to the Firm. This relieved Joseph of paying more $1,151.31, and the six men combined forgave debts to each other totaling $3,635.35.[5] That did not satisfy the debts they owed other creditors, however.
Mindful of those obligations, Joseph and his brethren acted on this revelation. They did the specific things the Lord set forth as terms on which He promised to “soften the hearts of those to whom you are in debt, until I shall send forth means unto you for your deliverance” (104:80-82). Joseph’s journal records humility, diligent effort, and faithful prayers for this deliverance, and documents that it came as prophesied. On the day the revelation came, Joseph and other members of the Firm “united in asking the Lord” to bless Zebedee Coltrin and Jacob Myers in their efforts “to borrow for us.” Meanwhile, donations began to pour in from consecrating Saints. Joseph and Oliver Cowdery “united in prayer” for such blessings to continue, and covenanted as the Lord was enabling them to pay their debts, they would return one-tenth of what they received “to be bestowed upon the poor of his Church, or as he shall command, and that we will be faithful over that which he has entrusted to our care.”[6] They prayed and prayed, asking the Lord “to lift the mortgage on the farm upon which the temple was being built.”[7]
One evening they received an impression “that in a short time the Lord would arrange his providences in a merciful manner and send us assistance to deliver us from debt and bondage.”[8] Two months later as creditors were about to foreclose on the temple site, a converted hotel owner from New York, John Tanner, arrived in Kirtland with $2000 “with which amount the farm was redeemed.”[9] Good for His word, the Lord had delivered the “means” as promised (104:80). In the meantime, Joseph and his brethren learned to trust in the Lord, pray in faith, to be humble and diligent. The Saints in general also rose to the occasion and, though belatedly, consecrated to the building of Kirtland and its crowning temple. As a result of their offerings, the Lord poured out blessings in that temple that no amount of money could buy (see sections 109-110).
Section 105
As the Camp of Israel journeyed to Missouri in the summer of 1834, Governor Daniel Dunklin backed away from his promise to provide a militia force to assist the saints’ return to their Jackson County land.[1] Meanwhile, Joseph knew very well that the camp was “altogether too small for the accomplishment of such a great enterprise.” He repeatedly urged the eastern Saints to provide men and means to reclaim Zion, but they offered too little, too late.[2]
The camp was preceded by exaggerated rumors of its size and intentions. When it arrived, local citizens were already alarmed. Several hundred of them gathered, threatening attack. Joseph assured the sheriff and militia officers that the camp had come to defend, not to attack. “We are anxious for a settlement of the difficulties existing between us,” Joseph assured them, “upon honorable and constitutional principles.”[3]
Wondering when and how, not if, Zion would be reclaimed, Joseph sought revelation to know what the Lord wanted the camp to do next. While encamped near Fishing River, he received the landmark revelation in section 105.[4]
“I do not require at their hands to fight the battles of Zion,” the revelation said of the camp. It assured them that their prayers were heard, their offering accepted, and that they had been “brought thus far for a trial of their faith” (D&C 105:19). Because too few saints had chosen to live the law of consecration and respond to the Lord’s will and Joseph’s repeated invitations to send men and means to redeem Zion, the Lord postponed Zion (1-10). He said it had to wait until the elders could be endowed with the necessary power. The power, it turned out, would come through a priesthood endowment in the House of the Lord being constructed back in Kirtland (D&C 105:11, 33).
The revelation is a document of détente. It calls for proclamation of peace now and foreshadows a future role for the army of Israel in redeeming Zion. It postpones Zion in Jackson County for an ambiguous “little season” (9). It commands saints in the meantime to receive the anticipated endowment of power to help them gain experience, learn their duty and doctrine better, and to increase in number and in holiness. In the little season the saints are to continue to purchase all the land in western Missouri but to avoid gathering in quantities perceived as threatening by neighbors.
Section 105 gives Joseph and his army orders to retreat. They were instructed to seek redress lawfully, but the war was far from over. These tactics would buy time “until the army of Israel becomes very great” while more and more land in Jackson and adjoining counties could be legally purchased. Once it was, the revelation said, “I will hold the armies of Israel guiltless in taking possession of their own lands, which they have previously purchased with their moneys, and of throwing down the towers of mine enemies that may be upon them.” Meanwhile, Latter-day Saints are to “sue for peace, not only to the people that have smitten you, but also to all people; and lift un an ensign of peace, and make a proclamation of peace unto the ends of the earth” (D&C 105).
Section 105 led Joseph to disband the camp and direct its members to return to their families or, if they had none, to remain in Missouri to assist the exiled Saints. The revelation reoriented Joseph Smith and the Church. Zion remained the ultimate goal, but the revelation declared that Zion would not be redeemed until the saints were endowed with power. Now, having submitted to the trial of their faith, the brethren could understand section 103’s promise that Zion would be redeemed by power. They were to return to the House of the Lord in Kirtland, there be endowed with power on conditions of humility and faithfulness (12), and then spread out over the globe to gather Israel. Then, when the army became very great both numerically and by obedience to the law of consecration, they would regain Zion.
Joseph organized the saints in Missouri and appointed many of them to return to Ohio to participate in the solemn assembly. Back in Kirtland, Joseph and the saints finished the temple and received an endowment of priesthood power (see section 110). These were means to the end of Zion, and Joseph turned his attention back to regaining the promised land. He anticipated that the “little season” (D&C 105:9) leading up to Zion would end within a few months, and it could have if the saints had done the specific things listed in verse 10.
We remain in the little season, perhaps in part because we have not acted on section 105’s specific instructions to learn obedience to the law of consecration and gain experience obeying it. Some commentators have suggested that D&C 105:34 rescinds, postpones, or suspends the law of consecration, but that is not what it says. It says that the specific commands for the bishop to give the saints inheritances of the land in Zion, and to establish a storehouse and print the scriptures there, will necessarily need to wait until after the saints reclaim the land on which to keep those commandments (see section 57).
Section 105 charts the way to Zion by obedience to the law of consecration. It declares that “Zion cannot be built up unless it is by the principles of the law of the celestial kingdom; otherwise I cannot receive her unto myself” (105:5). So Zion will be postponed as long as Latter-day Saints postpone fidelity to the law. Verse 34 cannot be to blame for that. President Gordon B. Hinckley taught that “the law of sacrifice and the law of consecration have not been done away with and are still in effect.”[5] Just as when Section 105 was given, however, “there are many who will say: Where is their God? Behold, he will deliver them in a time of trouble, otherwise we will not go up to Zion, and will keep our moneys” (8-9).
[4] Neal A. Maxwell, All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1979), 2.
[5] Frederick G. Williams Papers, CHL. Amt. of Balances due as of April 23, 1834, Newel K. Whitney Collection, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. Max Parkin painstakingly documented each of these in “Joseph Smith and the United Firm,” BYU Studies 46:3 (2007): 5-66.
[9] John Tanner, “Sketch of an Elder’s Life,” Scraps of Biography (Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor’s Office, 12.
Section 105 notes
[1] Peter Crawley and Richard L. Anderson, “The Political and Social Realities of Zion’s Camp,” BYU Studies 14:4 (1974): 406-20. History of George Albert Smith, Church History Library. Parley P. Pratt, Jr., editor, Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1950), 115.
[3] Letter From Cornelius Gilliam, Clay County, Missouri, 21 June 1834, and a statement of reconciliation, Church History Library, Salt Lake City.
[4] Autobiography of Joseph Holbrook, typescript, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. Autobiography of Harrison Burgess in Kenneth Glyn Hales, ed. and comp., Windows: A Mormon Family (Tucson, Arizona: Skyline Printing, 1985).
[5] Gordon B. Hinckley, Teachings of Gordon B. Hinckley (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1997), 639.
Warren Cowdery, Oliver’s older brother, ledged and fed Joseph and his companions when the were recruiting for the Camp of Israel in the spring of 1834. Warren was sympathetic to the saints’ suffering in Missouri, and that summer he joined the Church. There were a few dozen other converts in the area, all converted by missionaries who passed through. Warren wrote to Oliver that they could really use a permanent preacher.[1] He wrote again a few weeks later saying he “had thoughts of requesting you to enquire what is the will of the Lord concerning me.”[2] Joseph asked, and the Lord answered with section 106.
The revelation says the Lord wants Warren to devote all of his time to the high and holy calling of presiding over the Saints in and around Freedom, New York and preaching the gospel in the area. In verse 3 the Lord promises Warren a living if he obeys the revelation and in verses 4-5 explains that he should serve in order to prepare himself and his neighbors for the Lord’s coming. Beginning in verse 6, the Lord reveals the joy he experienced when Warren joined the Church, and blesses him for it. The language of this verse suggests that what pleased the Lord was Warren’s willing submission to his divine authority, his kingly scepter. The Lord exposes Warren’s vanity and promises to preserve him at the Second Coming on the condition that Warren will choose to be humble. The last verse, too, is a conditional promise, a covenant between the Lord and Warren in which the Lord promises him his own kingly crown in heavenly mansions “if he continue to be a faithful witness and a light unto the church” (8).
Warren presided over his fellow Saints in New York until he and his family moved to Kirtland early in 1836. There he served the Church as a scribe and recorder but by 1838 he became one of many in that era who did not “continue” to be “a faithful witness and a light unto the church” (D&C 106:8).[3]
Section 107
Instruction on Priesthood, between circa 1 March and circa 4 May 1835 [D&C 107]. Image courtesy of josephsmithpapers.orgThe members of the first quorum of twelve apostles in the last dispensation were called and ordained between February and April 1835. The met frequently to receive instructions from Joseph. In their March 12 council meeting, Joseph proposed that the apostles spend the coming summer traveling “through the Eastern States, to the Atlantic Ocean, and hold conferences in the vicinity of the several branches of the Church for the purpose of regulating all things necessary for their welfare.”[1]
The apostles were all young men, the oldest being in their mid-thirties. They began to realize “that we have not realized the importance of our calling to that degree that we ought, we have been light minded and vain and in many things done wrong.” They repented, and as their mission approached, they united in prayer and asked God to “grant unto us through his Seer, a revelation of his mind and will concerning our duty the coming season even a great revelation that will enlarge our hearts, comfort us in adversity and brighten our hopes amidst the powers of Darkness.” Section 107 answered that prayer.[2]
According to Heber Kimball, one of the apostles, the revelation “was given to Brother Joseph as he was instructing us, and we praised the Lord.”[3] In its current form, section 107 includes not only what Joseph received on that occasion, but the text of a revelation he dictated in November 1831 and other information on the duties of bishops and on the newly called Seventy. The amalgamated revelation was composed in time to be included in the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants, and it highlights the priesthood precepts that Joseph had received to that point.[4]
Section 107 begins with a clear description of the two divisions of priesthood and the names given to them—Aaronic and Melchizedek. In 1841 Joseph taught that “All Priesthod is Melchizedek; but there are different portions or degrees of it.”[5] Verses 18-19 declare the exalting power of the Melchizedek priesthood, and verse 20 the preparatory power of the Aaronic.
Several offices are described within these divisions of priesthood, and several quorums and councils composed of priesthood holders. Most notably the revelation describes a first presidency as a quorum of three presiding high priests who preside over all priesthood holders (21-22). Twelve apostles, “or special witnesses of the name of Christ in all the world,” form a quorum whose authority is equal to the first presidency. Seventy missionaries to the Gentiles form a quorum whose authority is equal to the quorum of apostles. These quorums are to arrive at their decisions by consensus and finally unanimity, in order to be binding. And the decision making process is to be characterized by the Christ-like attributes listed in verse 30 because they are the condition on which the Lord will endow the presiding quorums with His “knowledge” (31). Verse 32 provides an appellate process in case decisions are made “in unrighteousness.”
Beginning in verse 33, Section 107 describes the order and relationship of the quorums of twelve apostles, Seventy, and stake high councils. The apostles preside under the First Presidency and travel the globe to build and regulate the church because they hold the keys to open doors through which the gospel is proclaimed (35, cross reference D&C 112:16-19). The Seventy also travel the world to build and regulate the Church, but under the direction of the apostles, who call on the Seventy for assistance. Verses 35-36 explain that the presidencies of the Church in Zion (Missouri) and the stake in Kirtland, Ohio, as well as future stakes with the twelve high priests in each location that served as councilors to these presidencies, functioned with the same authority in their local jurisdictions as the General Authorities did worldwide.
Patriarchs, or what verse 39 calls “evangelical ministers,” are to be identified by revelation to the apostles, who have the duty of ordaining them in any area where there are a large number of Saints, which, today, generally means a stake. Before Section 107 describes the next duty of the apostles in verse 58, verses 40-57 explain the rich history and provenance of the patriarchal priesthood, as recorded in the Book of Enoch, as it was handed down from Adam to his posterity. They tell how Adam gathered his righteous posterity prior to his death for a patriarchal blessing. Adam, “though bowed down with age, being full of the Holy Ghost, predicted whatsoever should befall his posterity unto the latest generation” (56).
Verse 58 transitions between the two major segments of Section 107 and gives the apostles responsibility for implementing the November 1831 revelation (generally verses 59-100) by ordaining priesthood holders and setting the Church in order under their direction. Much of the subsequent verses restate, or, more accurately, were restated by, the first part of Section 107 as well as Section 68, including the nature of being a bishop, a provision for a “common council of the church” headed by the a presiding bishop in case the president of the Church is tried for transgression (76-84).
Verses 85-88 describe the duties of presiding in Aaronic priesthood quorums, and beginning in verse 89 the Lord sets forth the duties of presiding in Melchizedek priesthood quorums both generally and locally. Having declared the duties of priesthood holders, quorums, and presidents clearly, the Lord finishes Section 107 with a statement of accountability, a terse restatement of the oath and covenant of the priesthood that emphasizes learning and acting diligently in one’s appointed office or else being judged unworthy of that office in the holy priesthood (99-100).
Section 107 came at a time when American culture was beginning to erode fatherhood. Noting how Section 107’s exalting priesthood principles seemed to have a powerful redeeming influence on Joseph’s own father, historian Richard Bushman went so far as to say that “in restoring priesthood, Joseph restored fatherhood.”[6] Section 107 continues to do that work.
It has evoked a response from countless men to quit being “slothful” and instead learn their duty and act accordingly. It inspires many men to “stand” (107:99-100). It’s a divine version of Lehi’s admonition, “arise from the dust, my sons, and be men” (2 Nephi 1:21).
Section 108
Joseph Smith was studying his Hebrew lesson on 26 December 1835 when Lyman Sherman, who was serving in the new quorum of the seventy, came to his home. “I have been wrought upon to make known to you my feelings and desires,” Lyman told Joseph, “and was promised that I should have a revelation which should make known my duty.” Joseph received Section 108 for Lyman that day.[1]
When Lyman said he was “wrought upon,” he meant that he was unsettled, even disturbed. “Let your soul be at rest” the Lord counsels him, and “wait patiently until the solemn assembly . . . of my servants.” Lyman waited patiently for the meetings in the House of the Lord. There he and others received sacred ordinances and blessings in 1836 (D&C 108:2,4).
Joseph Smith taught that revelations were universally available to mankind directly, but also that there was order to revelation. Both principles are evident in section 108. The Lord revealed to Lyman personally that he should seek revelation through Joseph, presumably because Lyman’s role as a general authority and his invitation to the upcoming solemn assembly were matters to be revealed through Joseph Smith. In verse 1, the Lord forgave Lyman because he submissively acknowledged and followed the revealed order. He was a loyal, devoted saint. In January 1839, the First Presidency called Lyman as an apostle, but he died before being ordained.[2]
Section 106 notes
[1]Warren Cowdery, Freedom, NY, to Oliver Cowdery, Kirtland, OH, 1 Sept. 1834, in The Evening and the Morning Star, Sept. 1834, 189.
[2]Warren Cowdery, Freedom, NY, to Oliver Cowdery, [Kirtland, OH], 28 Oct. 1834, in LDS Messenger and Advocate, Nov. 1834, 1:22.
[4] See Doctrine and Covenants 107:1-58; 1835 and 1844 editions, 3:1-30. Before its 1835 publication, this revelation was redacted by Joseph, who added information about the priesthood offices of priest, bishop, elder, and seventy. Much of the new revelation draws on Section 68:15-22. The redactions to Section 107 include much or all of what is now verses 61, 69-71, 73, 76-77, 88, 90, and 93-98.
[5] Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook, eds. and comps., Words of Joseph Smith (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center Brigham Young University, 1980), 59-60.
[6] Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005), 263.
Prayer of Dedication, 27 March 1836. Joseph’s cousin George A. Smith reported that “When the dedication prayer was read by Joseph, it was read from a printed copy.”[1]What does one pray for when dedicating the first House of the Lord in the last dispensation, having never done anything like it before? Joseph thought about that question on March 26, 1836, the day before he dedicated the Kirtland temple. He met with his counselors and secretaries “to make arrangements for the solemn assembly.”[2] Oliver Cowdery’s sketch book adds the detail that he assisted Joseph “in writing a prayer for the dedication of the house.”[3]
The next morning the House of the Lord filled to capacity with nearly a thousand Saints. An overflow meeting convened next door. The solemn assembly began at 9 AM with scripture readings, choir singing, prayer, a sermon, and the sustaining of Joseph Smith as Prophet and Seer. In the afternoon session the sustaining continued, with each quorum and the general body of the Church sustaining, in turn, the leaders of the Church.[4] Another hymn followed, “after which,” Joseph’s journal says, “I offered to God the following dedication prayer.”[5]
Joseph read section 109 from a printed copy. It is an inspired, temple prayer. It begins with thanks to God, then makes requests of him in the name of Jesus Christ. It is based heavily on Section 88’s temple instructions as well as other temple-related scriptural texts. It “sums up the Church’s concerns in 1836, bringing before the Lord each major project.”[6]
Joseph began by asking God to accept the temple on the terms he had given in Section 88, which the Saints had tried to fulfill in order to obtain the promised blessing of entering the Lord’s presence (D&C 88:68, 109:4-12). Joseph prayed that all the temple worshippers would be endowed with God’s power and “that they may grow up in thee, and receive a fulness of the Holy Ghost, and be organized according to thy laws, and be prepared to obtain every needful thing” (15). Joseph prayed, in other words, a temple prayer that the Saints would become like their Heavenly Father by degrees of glory as they obeyed His laws and prepared to enter His presence. He prayed for what Section 88 had taught him to pray for.
Joseph prayed that the Saints, “armed” or endowed with priesthood power from the temple, could go to “the ends of the earth” with the “exceedingly great and glorious tidings” of the gospel to fulfill prophecies declaring that they would (22-23). He asked Heavenly Father to protect the Saints from their enemies (24-33). He asked Jehovah to have mercy upon the Saints, and to seal the anointing ordinances that many of the priesthood brethren had received in the weeks leading up to the solemn assembly. He asked for the gifts of the Spirit to be poured out as on the biblical day of Pentecost (Acts 2:2-3). He asked the Lord to protect and empower the missionaries and postpone judgment until they had gathered the righteous. He prayed that God’s will be done “and not ours” (44).
Joseph prayed that the Saints would be delivered from the prophesied calamities. He asked Heavenly Father to remember the Saints oppressed and driven from Jackson County, Missouri and prayed for their deliverance. He asked how long their afflictions would continue until avenged (49). He asked for mercy “upon the wicked mob, who have driven thy people, that they may cease to spoil, that they may repent of their sins if repentance is to be found” (50). He prayed for Zion.
Joseph prayed for mercy on all nations and political leaders, so that the principles of individual agency captured in the United States Constitution would be established forever. He prayed for “all the poor, the needy, and afflicted ones of the earth” (55). He prayed for an end to prejudices so that the missionaries “may gather out the righteous to build a holy city to thy name, as thou hast commanded them” (58). He asked for more stakes to facilitate the gathering and growth of Zion. He asked for mercy for the Native Americans and for the Jews, indeed he prayed for “all the scattered remnants of Israel, who have been driven to the ends of the earth, [to] come to a knowledge of the truth, believe in the Messiah, and be redeemed from oppression” (67).
Joseph prayed for himself, reminding the Lord of his sincere effort to keep his covenants. He asked for mercy upon his family, praying that Emma and the children “may be exalted in thy presence” (69). This is the first usage of exalted in the Doctrine and Covenants to refer to the fulness of salvation through temple blessings.[7] Joseph prayed for his in-laws to be converted. He prayed for the other presidents of the Church and their families. He prayed for all the Saints and their families and their sick and afflicted. He prayed, again, for “all the poor and meek of the earth,” and for the glorious Kingdom of God to fill the earth as prophesied (68-74).
Joseph prayed that the Saints would rise in the first resurrection with pure garments, “robes of righteousness,” and “crowns of glory upon our heads” to reap “eternal joy” (76). Thrice repeating his petition, Joseph asks the Lord to “hear us” and accept the prayers and petitions and offerings of the Saints in building the house to His name. He prays for grace to enable the Saints to join the choirs surrounding God’s throne in the heavenly temple “singing Hosanna to God and the Lamb” (79). “And let these, thine anointed, be clothed with salvation, and thy saints shout aloud for joy. Amen, and Amen” (80).
Section 109 dedicated the first House of the Lord in the last dispensation and set the pattern for all subsequent solemn assemblies met for the same holy purpose. It teaches the Saints how to pray, including what to pray for and to ask according to the will of God. It teaches the doctrine and evokes the imagery of the temple, perhaps most poignantly in the idea that temple worshippers can “grow up” by degrees of glory until they become like their Heavenly Father (cross reference Section 93). That is the meaning of being exalted in God’s presence. Joseph’s temple revelations call this fulness, including fulness of joy. Section 109 continues the expansive work of the temple revelations in Sections 76, 84, 88, 93 and points us forward to the culminating revelation on exaltation, Section 132:1-20. Section 109 invites mortals who occupy a polluted telestial planet where they cannot think of more than one thing at a time, and generally only in finite terms, to be endowed with power that will enable them to journey to the real world where God lives “enthroned with glory, honor, power, majesty, might, dominion, truth, justice, judgment, mercy, and an infinity of fulness, from everlasting to everlasting” (77).[8]
Section 110
Joseph Smith Journal, April 3, 1836, handwriting of scribe Warren Parrish. Though Section 110 was not widely publicized when it was received and not published until 1852, it was written in Joseph’s journal soon after the visions occurred.[1]April 3, 1836 was the second greatest Easter Sunday in history. Joseph attended an afternoon sacrament meeting in the temple at Kirtland. When it ended, he and Oliver Cowdery retreated behind the heavy curtains used to divide the room. They bowed in what Joseph’s journal describes as “solemn, but silent prayer to the Most High.” Then they beheld a series of visions.[2]
First they saw and heard the Lord standing before them. Four times, in a voice like rushing water, he declared, “I am,” evoking Old Testament revelations in which he repeatedly identified himself saying, “I am the Lord your God” (see Exodus 20 and Leviticus 19). It seems like he meant to evoke the related words of the Hebrew verb for to be and the name transliterated into English as Jehovah. In other words, the Lord Jesus Christ was declaring that he is the God who told Moses to tell the Israelites that “I AM hath sent me unto you” (Exodus 3:14). Jesus Christ was affirming that he is the God of Israel, the promised Messiah.
In a powerful but understated juxtaposition of present and past verb tenses, Christ declares himself the crucified Christ who conquered death. “I am he who liveth. I am he who was slain; I am your advocate with the Father” (4). Who else can say that: They killed me, but here I am, in Kirtland, Ohio, forgiving your sins, accepting my temple and promising to visit my people here and pour out an endowment of power from here?
Section 110 fulfills the Lord’s conditional promise to the saints that if they would move to Ohio and build him a holy house, he would endow them with power in it (see Sections 38, 88, 95). It fulfills Section 88’s great and last promise that the sanctified would come into the presence of the Lord. Indeed, Joseph promised the saints that “on conditions of our obedience,” the Savior had promised “a visit from the heavens to honor us with his own presence.”[3]
After the vision of the Savior ended, Moses appeared to Joseph and Oliver and gave them the priesthood keys needed to gather Israel. Next Elias appeared and dispensed keys for the gospel of Abraham, “saying that in us and our seed all generations after us should be blessed” (12). Then Elijah appeared and said that it was time to fulfill a multi-layered prophecy.
Through Malachi, the Lord prophesied, “I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord” (Malachi 4:5). Moroni paraphrased and personalized that prophecy for Joseph Smith in 1823 (see section 2). Elijah fulfilled it nearly thirteen years later, as recorded in section 110. Jews had long awaited Elijah’s prophesied return and welcomed him during the Passover Seder. On the very day Elijah appeared in the temple, some Jews were celebrating the sacred meal with the hope that Elijah would return.
Moses showing up was pretty impressive too. “His appearance in company with Elijah offers another striking parallel between Mormon teachings and Jewish tradition, according to which Moses and Elijah would arrive together at the ‘end of time.'”[4]
Section 110 reenacts the endowment received in the Biblical account of the Mount of Transfiguration (Matthew 17:1-9). Joseph received priesthood keys from the heavenly messengers. He had received all the priesthood when he was ordained by Peter, James, and John years earlier (see D&C 27:12) But he did not have all the keys they had and he needed until after section 110. In other words, Joseph had power but not permission to send missionaries globally or to perform temple ordinances until Moses, Elias, and Elijah brought him the keys–the permission to exercise the priesthood in those ways.
Section 10 welds dispensations together. Given on Easter and during the Passover season, the revelation links Israel’s Old Testament deliverance with Christ’s New Testament resurrection and affirms that Joseph Smith and the temple-building Latter-day Saints are the heirs of God’s promises to the Israelite patriarchs. Christ is the Passover lamb who “was slain” and then resurrected and now appears to Joseph in Kirtland, Ohio to approve of the Latter-day work and to commission Joseph to fulfill the work of Moses (the gathering of Israel), Elias (the gospel of Abraham), and Elijah (the sealing of families).
Joseph went to work putting the keys to use against great opposition. Not long after receiving the keys to gather Israel from Moses, Joseph whispered in Heber Kimball’s ear a mission call to Great Britain. Joseph had previously sent missionaries on short, local or regional missions. Heber’s and his companions began the ongoing process of gathering Israel from the ends of the earth. Though oppressed by what seems like a concerted opposition that included financial collapse, widespread apostasy, an executive order driving the saints from Missouri, and then unjust imprisonment in Liberty, Missouri, Joseph began to teach and administer the ordinances of the temple. In sum, the endowment of priesthood keys he received on the second greatest Easter in history authorized him to begin performing temple ordinances.
Section 110 communicated temple knowledge and power. It came in the temple, behind a veil, was recorded but not preached, and acted on but not publicly explained.[5] After the revelation, Joseph used the keys to gather, endow, and seal in anticipation of the Savior’s second coming. Section 110 marks the restoration of temple-related power and knowledge that Moses possessed and “plainly taught,” but which had been forfeited by the children of Israel (D&C 84:19-25).
[3] Oliver Cowdery, Sketch Book, March 26, 1836, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.
[4] Steven C. Harper, “‘A Pentecost and Endowment Indeed’: Six Eyewitness Accounts of the Kirtland Temple Experience,” in John W. Welch, editor, Opening the Heavens: Accounts of Divine Manifestations, 1820-1844 (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 2005), 327-71.
