Summary:
Lynn Hilton Wilson discusses Section 1 of the Doctrine and Covenants with Stephen Harper, highlighting its significance for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Stephen Harper shares insights from his updated work on the Doctrine and Covenants, providing historical context and access to resources like the Joseph Smith Papers.
The conversation explores the early organization of the church in 1830, the move to Kirtland, and the challenges faced by Joseph Smith, including the need to publish revelations.
The discussion touches on the transition from “commandments” to “revelations” and the significance of these terms in early church history.
Harper reflects on the challenges of publishing the revelations, comparing it to a mission call or personal commandment for early church members.
The transcript highlights the struggle of early church leaders to decide whether to publish revelations, considering the controversies and potential repercussions.
The role of women, including Emma Smith and Phoebe Rigdon, is acknowledged, emphasizing their sacrifices and support in the church’s early history.
The significance of Section 1 as the Lord’s preface to the Book of Commandments is discussed, introducing themes of listening to Jesus Christ’s voice and the importance of agency.
The conversation addresses the challenges of language, inerrancy, and the restoration of the canon, emphasizing the role of personal revelation.
Both speakers testify to the truth and faithfulness of the revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants, affirming their belief in Joseph Smith’s role as a revelator and the ongoing importance of these revelations for the church.
Hello, I’m Lynn Hilton Wilson. I am so excited to be able to talk today about Section 1 of the Doctrine of Covenants. This is Scripture for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, and I’m overjoyed to have one of those who knows more about it than most of us all put together. And this is Stephen Harper from BYU’s Religion Department, as well as BYU Studies and the Joseph Smith papers and many, many others. And Steve, it is such an honor to have you here.
Thanks, Lynn. It’s great to be with you.
Before I began teaching at BYU with you, I was introduced to you through your wonderful book, Making Sense of the Doctrine and Covenants. And that has been a great resource in my life. But I just want to thank you from Scripture Central team for writing up these wonderful stories and details about the Doctrine and Covenants that we have now online for free for everyone to use in the library of Scripture Central. So thank you. Do you want to tell us a little bit about them?
Well, it’s a lot of the same work that I did for making sense of Doctrine Covenants, but it was updated, right? We’ve done more work, more research. And so they’re also a little leaner and more efficient, less boring, hopefully.
Great. And if you’re watching this, I’ll give you a click on to how to access Steve’s research so that you can get it every single week throughout the Come, Follow Me year. Today, we get to start talking about Section 1. I want to go back and give you a little bit of background. If you’re watching this on a slide, I also We have a timeline. We know the church is organized in 1830 on April sixth in Fayette, New York, and the persecution in upstate New York grows enormously over that first year. We don’t even have 200 members in New York. We have more members living in Kirtland when the Lord gives the revelation to Joseph to move to Kirtland.
Somewhere early in February, 1831.
1831. And Joseph’s inundated with all these… The church is double the size now, and everyone He wants to spend time with him, and he’s not getting to the work. But I have to tell you, he’s not getting to the work of translation of the New Testament like he wants because he has two twins living in the house. It has very little to do. I can’t I’m thinking, if I had twins, would I get anything done? Of course, these are small homes, and they’re sharing homes with other people. So the graciousness of the John Johnson’s, what is it? 35 miles or so south.
Yeah, Elsa and John Johnson invite Emma and Joseph and the twins to come live with them in Hyrum, Ohio, about 35 miles south of Kirtland.
And it’s not just Joseph and Emma. He brings the Scribe’s family, and Sydney brings six kids with him. I just thought, oh, these Johnson’s are just so magnimonious. But they’ve got a separate home for Sydney’s family and Nancy, Sydney and Nancy over there. So that’s a blessing. And it becomes the church headquarters. And the challenging thing for me this is that they have all these meetings where people are coming, and Joseph still is having a hard time to get to the translation. But he receives a revelation that we need to have a conference to actually publish the revelations. And I’m fascinated with the fact that they call them Commandments instead of revelations, because sometimes in our mind, commandment is a little more forceful.
It’s a little more Thou shalt do this or not do that. Yes.
When I read the revelations, it’s, You need to repent, but I love you. Anyway, I’m fascinated with that change that Joseph’s vocabulary goes from the Book of Commandments to these are the revelations, and we’re going to compile them. But I thought before we start Section 1, we need to just talk a little bit about those first couple of months at this farm when they’re trying to meet together and decide, what are we going to do with all these revelations? Because the Lord’s already told them they’re going to go to the rest of the world. That’s already been a revelation by now.
Yeah, the great commission is clear that the savior’s original commission of his Apostles, go and take the gospel to the whole world and so forth. It’s clear that the Latterday Saints have inherited that. It’s now their job to carry that forward. And Joseph and the other leaders of the church realized they’ve got to Can we get some plans made? Are we going to publish the revelations as part of this? How do we go? I think the commandment, the idea that many of these early sections of the doctrine and covenant, we know them today, are in the earliest manuscripts we have them, they’re headed with the great big word commandment.
Yes, they are. I’ve seen the Joseph Smith papers. You can look them up.
I think that’s something like what we might think of today as a mission call, a commandment to go to Palo Alto or Winnipeg to to serve. You might think of Section 4 as a commandment to Joseph Smith senior. What’s he supposed to do? He’s supposed to work on having charity and brotherly kindness and making sure he’s temperate and so forth. I think that’s how the early saints are understanding the document as a commandment. A lot of them are addressed as individuals or groups and tell them what they ought to do or not do.
But Section One comes out of this twelve days of a whole bunch of people, at least 18, and it says there are others, church members that don’t have their signatures there. But because of the wonderful work of the Joe Smith Papers Project, we can look at these documents. This is something that only the church historian had the opportunity to see in my father’s era. Now for me to be able to be looking at these in my own bedroom is just such a joy. But you can see the minutes of the conference. We can hear the discussions And then we get the private journals and the remembering afterward, and we get McClellan’s comments on how they spend hours describing and deciding if they were going to print and publish this stuff. This was not an easy decision.
Might seem to us like it should be, right? The Lord Jesus Christ speaks and you’ve got his written revelations. Of course, you would publish those as fast as you can. And there are all kinds of reasons to do it, great reasons. And then there are reasons to be cautious about doing it. It may be not.
Why was McClellan cautious? Well, first of all, he’s a new convert. He’s just learning. I mean, the poor guy is getting his big toe in the water. He hasn’t immersed yet.
One week before they convened this conference. He’s at the Johnson’s Home with Joseph Smith, as you know. He has asked God five intimate and secret questions that no one but William McClellan and the Lord know. He’s asked Joseph Smith to seek a revelation on his behalf. He says later, I wanted it as a testimony of Joseph’s inspiration. He says, The Lord answered every question he put in his ears to his full and entire satisfaction. He said, this is 18 years later, he said, I consider it to me.
Absolutely miraculous.
To this day, it’s evidence I can’t refute. So McClon is such a fascinating person. On the one hand, he really wants one of these Commandments for himself. And as I count it, the revelation the Lord gives him, there are 22 Commandments, 22 things to do or not do. So on the one hand, these people want nothing more than to hear from the Lord. Who doesn’t want that? And on the other hand, I guess you should say, creates burdens and responsibility. I’m not sure I want to hear from the Lord. Who knows what he might tell me? He might, like we did to William McClellan in the very first commandment in the Revelation is, Repent. You’re clean, but not completely clean. Repent of the things that you’ve still got to work on. I’ll show them to you. It’s a wonderful blessing to have Commandments from the Lord, and it’s a burden. And depending on what we’re going to do with those Commandments, they become just a heavy weight on our shoulders if we’re not going to behave according to them. The greatest way to be unhappy is to have beliefs that are firm and behavior that does not match those beliefs.
The closer those things align, the better off we are. The further apart they are, the more miserable we are. And McLean went through phases of being wonderfully happy because he’s aligning, and then being quite miserable because he chose not to obey that command to repent. So he’s characteristic. He’s like this group of of men, leaders of the church, who are there in the Johnson’s home, deciding what to do with this stack, not only of William McClellan’s revelation, but 60 or so others like it. Do we publish these for the whole world? Sure. Why wouldn’t you? Well, because last time we published the Book of Scripture, it created quite an uproar.
Well, I’m glad you mentioned that, because I think the opening of the canon should be addressed before we start talking about section one. This is absolutely revolting to the second great Awakening. Yes. If we are looking at American religious history, actually, going back to European religious history, as soon as the reform farmers broke away from Catholicism, so starting with Martin Luther and Zwingli and Calvin, as soon as they broke away, they say, Oh, but where does our authority come from? And they read the text and they say, It comes from the Bible. And so If they have their authority in the canon, that means the canon is inerrant. There can be no mistakes. It is completely correct. And I’m just fascinated with how many preachers are upset about Joseph opening the canon. I went back to the early New York Times, and here they are, hundreds and hundreds of miles apart. We have articles on this kid who’s trying to open the canon. And I’m thinking, you’ve got to be kidding. But they were fascinated with this idea because it was so repulsive. It was vulgar in their mind. And yet Joseph had no choice.
He was God’s servant.
This generation will have my word through you.
Yes, he had no choice. And the Lord wants to open the canon. And this is 1831. This is before he even says it’s a crippled, awful… You’ve got it memorized, don’t you?
Yeah. Oh, Lord, deliver me from the narrow prison of paper, pen, and ink, and a crooked, broken, scattered, and imperfect language. Language. That is a very beautiful piece of writing from a young man who didn’t feel like he was a very good writer, and then he crossed it all out. He’s not a great writer. We sometimes, I think, ever emphasize that Joseph is dumb. He’s not dumb. He’s just not highly literate. As he puts it, both times he writes autobiography, he says, I didn’t get a chance to go to school very much. His father I was a school teacher, so I presume he had a little bit of homeschooling? The way Joseph puts it is instructive, right? He says, I was merely instructed in the ground rules of reading, writing, and arithmetic. So that’s the extent of his father’s school teaching, too. He’s not going to get advanced literature from either one of his parents.
Which I think is really important because at that day and age, to be an authentic reformed minister, Presbyterian, Baptist, congregational, you’ve got to have a college degree in this field. Not Methodism, not some of the new ones, but to really be have yourself grounded. And he’s saying, that’s not me.
Yeah, he certainly does not fit that mold of a doctor of divinity, right, or a college-educated minister. He doesn’t do Latin. He doesn’t know any Greek. He learns a little later. He dabbles. He aspires to it. He would love to have that. But he never in his life attains to that learning. And the Lord in section one says, That’s part of the reason I picked you, you and others. I picked the weak things of the Earth. I spoke to them in their language, and I sent them to tell everyone else the good news. When Joseph is mocked about that in 1834 by a minister who is better educated, Nancy Tau says, Are you kidding me? This plow boy blushed such pretensions. He says, Oh, the gift has returned back as in former days to a literate fisherman. So that’s his response to feeling the inadequacy of not being highly literate.
And so all of this comes back to the idea, can we accept the revelations as they are panned out of Joseph’s mouth via Oliver or Sydney’s or Frederick D. Williams quill, turkey quill. Can we accept them as they’re written or should we make some changes? So they’ve got this huge conference and how does section one come about?
Well, as you say, they’re in the middle of a conversation about revelations and language is the way Joseph’s history puts it. On the one hand, we’ve got the voice of the savior speaking to the ends of the Earth. Section one says this is to everyone. Every ear, every heart needs to be penetrated with these words. And so, of course, you want to publish these things. On the other hand, the grammar is uneven, unorthodox. The spelling is creative, to use a positive term. Besides that, the very act of saying, these are revelations from Jesus It’s a bombshell. Like you say, if you do this in a Protestant country, this is going to create controversy at a high level.
That’s the hard question. Not only are you opening the canon, but are you claiming to be aneric? Because I think this is why the people had such a hard time receiving Joseph, not just Nancy, but so many people. If you can’t spell my name right, you’re not a prophet. I thought, oh, what a goosy. Doesn’t he know you can’t spell? I mean, no, that’s not their mentality. If their authority comes from the Bible, the entire Christian faith is geared on inerrancy. The Catholic believe the Pope was inerrant, the Protestant believe the Bible is inerrant, and Joseph says, oh, I’m not inerrant.
But the revelations are. Yeah, he’ll say later in his life, as you know, I never told you I was perfect, but there’s no error in the revelations I’ve given you. Now, critics would say, Oh, my gosh, I can show you thousands of edits. So could I. You could, too. We know this. That’s not the point. That’s not what Joseph means. What he means is God spoke to me. The Christ who gave me the revelations is not fallible. I am, Joseph says. And section One says so. The earliest revelations in the book, chronologically speaking, the earliest ones recorded, section three, that’s all about how fallible Joseph is. But you’ve got an infallible Christ picking and speaking to his chosen servant and nurturing him to become what he needs him to be.
I love that, Steve.
This is the restored way, right? This is the latter day way. As you said, when you’ve got an unrestored Christianity, you’ve got to find your rock, your anchor point. What is it that you can rely on? Well, if you’re Catholic, it’s the Pope. If you’re Protestant, it’s the Bible. And if you’re a Latterday Saint, it’s Jesus Christ who speaks directly to Joseph Smith. Those others would say it’s Christ for us, too. The Pope is the Christ.Of course.Figure.Yeah, right.And the Bible speaks of Christ.The Bible is the Christ. The Christ. Yeah. Right. I’m not trying to fault anybody for hanging onto those anchors. I would, too, if I didn’t have a version that’s better. The restored version says the living Christ is still speaking to his Apostles as in days of old. There are living prophets and Apostles. To me, that’s the best alternative is to have the living, resurrected savior speaking to us here and now. I’m grateful for the revelations that he gave.
Amen. But when we go back to the John Johnson farm and we’re there in the- November 1831. With the beautiful orange and the white-colored paint and the floorboards. I’ve got some pictures to show you. But I’m fascinated that it was difficult to get this group to agree until Section One was given. And that became a peace-making experience.
Yeah, talk about that. Well, the Lord did something really interesting, right? They’ve been talking, as you said, for days. Are we going to publish this book? They finally decide, Yeah, we’re going to publish it. They overcome their fears, what the Lord calls fears, and doctrine comes 1667. I’ve seen your fears. I know you’re fearful. I understand why you are. Here’s some reassurance. So they’ve You’ve got fears. Who wouldn’t doing what they’re about to do? And then the next project is to write a preface, right? So they pick their best, most talented, most literary minds, and those guys try to come up with a preface, and everybody realizes that’s not adequate to introduce-Oh, I think they even realized it.
I just think they were very humbled as they had to present, Okay, this is the best we could do. Exactly. But it’s Sydney, and Oliver and William McClellan?
Right. You got literary guys in the room, those three, and they give it a try. They can’t compose an introduction that satisfies them. This has got to be, what do you write as the preface to the Book of the Lord’s Commandments? And they try it, the Lord lets them try it, and then they all say, We can’t do it, or this isn’t adequate. Then the Lord says, Let me give you the preface to the Book of My Commandments. That’s verse 6. In section one, it’s It’s really something, right? It’s not the first revelation chronologically speaking. It was given after 60 plus of the sections in the doctrine covenants, but it was given to be the first one. It was given to introduce the book of the Lord’s revelations.
It’s an overview of what I want to do. I’m sure Joseph saw that there was far more than 60 coming, but the others didn’t know that yet. They wanted to restore. They wanted to make sure that we had preserved what we had and made their plans But that is just a beautiful account. As I recall, Joseph says he was sitting by a window, and Sydney picked up a quill as he was- Sydney writes it. Very familiar with what he knew. He’s done this before. Joseph was receiving revelation. He knew how to respond.
Yeah, it’s very common in this situation. I mean, it’s uncommon to have a 24-year-old revelator speaking the voice of Jesus Christ and a scribe writing down. That doesn’t happen every day. But for these fellows, it happens often enough. They’ve all seen this happen before, and most of them have been the recipient of a revelation that if you didn’t know Joseph was the revelator, if all you had was the text, it is Jesus speaking directly to Sydney Rigdon, or Jesus speaking directly to Oliver Calvary, or to William McClella.
He is a vicarious mouth of the Lord.
When this happens, they’ll They’ll have a question that they all understand. They’ll know what the point is, and they’ll ask the Lord to answer. And then Joseph will deliberately and slowly begin speaking the words that the Lord gives to him. And The Lord says in section one, verse 24, I will give you the revelations in your language. He acknowledges in that verse, it’s weak, to my weak servants. This is Joseph’s Crooked, broken, scattered, language. Yeah, the Lord says, How else am I going to talk to you? I could give you any language in the universe, but you can’t decode that. You can’t understand. The Lord condescends and says, I’ll speak to you in your language so that you may come to understanding, as if there’s going to be a process of understanding the Lord. Elder Bednar, as you know, taught us so beautifully that there are revelations that are like a light switch going on, and we can see everything at once. And then for the most part, he says, it’s like daylight just gradually dawning, maybe almost imperceptibly. This process of coming to understand is a lot more like that gradually dawning day.
Line upon line, precept upon precept.
It’s sprinkled wonderfully with these revelation events like the Lord giving, Revelation One. But it takes Revelation to understand those revelations, even for Joseph Smith, even for the revelator.
Okay, we got to say that again. It takes Revelation to understand Revelation. That’s beautiful. Our scripture said he has to be accompanied with prayer. It’s not enough to listen to Steve Harper’s great mind on this. You got to take it to the Lord. You got to open the chapter. You got to read the verse. You got to have a witness that this is of God.
Anybody who’s had that experience can understand that, right? They realize, Oh, I could read a revelation that was given on November 3, 1831, and I could have the experience of receiving my own revelations about that. Sure. The God of the universe condescends to speak to anxious teenagers, to 24-year-old, inexperienced prophets, to professors who have learned a lot of stuff and still don’t know how some of the basics of of repentance and faith. It’s just lovely that we worship a God who wants to and will and has spoken to us, all of us. There’s no one, there’s no person who’s disqualified from receiving the Lord’s revelations by him. Now, we sometimes cut ourselves off or distance ourselves from him, as you know, but he’s not the one who’s limiting our access to revelation.
Well, and I keep wanting to walk back into that room and feel the energy of the members of the church, the men and other women who were there watching this transpire, and their enthusiasm completely changes. Do you remember how many books they want to publish? I mean, this is just ludicrous.
They’re going to go for 10,000. This is two times the print run of the Book of Mormon. And the Book of Mormon was just the year before, and it didn’t sell.
What are they thinking? But they They have just experienced something, and they’ve got a vision of the Lord’s work. I’m just fascinated with, as you said, the Lord dissipated the fog and allowed them to see the vision of what this can become And it’s all just unfolding in my day and age for the Lord’s second coming. But he’s saying this is needed to prepare for the Lord’s second coming. I feel like the doctrine covenant is one of the major themes here throughout the whole year. Count them every single section. There’s some reference to the second coming. It’s either Zion or it’s my people. But these are buzzwords at the time, especially at the time when there was Zionist movement all over the growing nation. But I just love the fact that they hear section one coming out of Joseph’s mouth from the Lord, and they jump to it. Ten thousand copies were going to do it. They couldn’t even afford it. They had to make it this small. They had No, there wasn’t even paper when they get to Missouri to print it. I mean, that’s the thing that just breaks my heart. They buy the press somehow.
How do you get a press to Missouri? I mean, Missouri might as well be out in the middle of the ocean. It was out there, and there’s not even paper Port Joseph’s got to go clear back to West Virginia to pick up paper.
It’s a huge project. I like that you’re drawing our attention to this because this decision to do this is difficult. It’s going to bring terrible reputation to all of them. You don’t publish a Book of Scripture in a Protestant country without getting just butchered for it. And you’re already in big trouble for that, right? Your neighbors and the whole country is at odds with you.
Persecution was not just an egg at your door.
No, certainly not. So Joseph is going to be dragged out of his house and tard and feathered within the year. By protestants who want to make- And Sydney, too, right? Yeah, right. To want to teach him a lesson. You don’t do that here. We don’t tolerate that here. And that’s the beginning of a life that’s going to end in his murder, right? So It’s the physical violence. It’s the threat to your family. His son is a casualty of this persecution, and Emma will be traumatized by it, right?
Oh, yes.
Julia survives it. So There’s this physical threat of violence, which is not just an illusion. It happens enough to make you think it could happen any day or every day. There’s the sacrifice of time and so forth. Joseph will be part eventually of this group the Lord will call the literary firm. These are six men that the Lord says, that problem of getting that pressed in the paper, that’s your problem.
Yeah, I want you to consecrate create everything you have to this.
Yeah. I can’t remember the word in section 70. What is it? The benefits are yours and the… I can’t remember the word. I’m sorry. But the bottom line is the burdens. The burdens are yours, too. And bring it to pass, publish the revelations. And so it’s a very, very difficult project for lots of reasons. We’ve only touched on a few.
I’m so glad you brought this up because sacrifice was so much hard charter. It wasn’t just financial. It wasn’t just physical. It was emotional. It was spiritual. It was your family. You are putting your family at stake, let alone the nation around you. I just feel like there was enormous sacrifice to get the canonization of the doctrine and covenants. And it’s one thing to say, okay, there’s an ancient scripture that we want to bring about, and it came from Jerusalem and it’s related to the Bible. No, this is completely Completely different. These men, similar, I think, in some degree to the signing of the Revolutionary War papers in 1776 on July fourth, the signing of that name was more than a signature.
You’re aware, I’m sure, that Levi Hancock pencils his name onto the document. In this conference at Hiram, Ohio, November 1831, Joseph receives a revelation, and several revelations. One of the things he receives is his testimony to the Book of the Lord’s Commandments. It bears witness similar to the way the witness statements in the Book of Mormon do. It bears witness to the truth of what’s now the doctrine of covenants, what earlier was the Book of Commandments. Then they sign it. These men of this may sign it. As it crosses the country on its way to being printed in Missouri, others sign sign it. And one of them is Levi Hancock, and his is in pencil. And he puts in parentheses, never to be erased. Don’t you dare erase my name from this.I.
Don’t have a quilt.
From this. Isn’t that something? Never to be erased. John Hancock puts his great big signature on there. And then later, Levi Hancock says, I want to sign on to this with my life and fortune and sacred honor as well. So I think there is a nice parallel there.
I so honor those that were willing to the sacrifice because I don’t believe it was just the men who made their signature.
Let’s talk about… I think it’s the women. Yeah. Let’s talk about Emma and Phoebe Rigdon, right?
Let’s just talk about those two.
What sacrifices are they making to bring this to pass? First of all, their husbands are foregoing other employments. The Lord has already told Emma in one of these spectacular revelations, again, if we didn’t know Joseph was the revelator, it’s Jesus speaking straight to Emma in section 25. And She invites her to make sacrifices. She already knows from Section 24 that this is going to cost them material prosperity. This career as a revelator, I use career as a replacement for a money-making career, it’s going to cost them dearly, including in material comforts. She’s not ever going to have her own home until 10 years or so after this, and then she’s going to share it with a lot of people. Emma foregoes His material comforts to support. The Revelation, as you know, calls her to be a strength, a support to sustain Joseph as the revelator. He will talk about what a strength that is to him.
Emma was an independent, strong, brilliant, trained, educated woman. Very capable. This was very difficult to read in our world, and yet I think Emma was a liberated woman. I think Joseph needed Emma as a liberated, A strong woman. Because Emma had a testimony, she could then follow. She wasn’t doing it to submit to Joseph. She’s doing it to submit to God.
Oh, yeah. People don’t know Emma Smith very well if they think she’s not doing this of her own free will. If she’s been cowed into this or something. No. That’s not who she is. You make me think of the… Joseph Smith will do a little Q&A, as you know, in the church’s newspaper late in the 1830s, and he’s answering questions he’s been frequently asked in his travel. Couples, didn’t you steal your wife? They eloped. So the question is, didn’t you steal your wife? Didn’t you take her against her will and against her parents will and marry her? His answer is, ask her. She was of age. She’s a year and a half older than he is, right? She didn’t get married against her will. No.
In fact, she was older than most women were at that time.
Let’s think about Phoebe Rigdon, right? So Phoebe has been married to Sydney Rigdon now for some time, and they have, just a year or so before this, have joined the church, and they counted the cost when they did that. They had just moved into a home that their congregation had built for them. They have been blessed with this comfortable new home.
He’s the minister. It’s a paid position, almost. Not quite, but they’re living what they can do congregationally to support each other.
If they accept the restored gospel, they are homeless. All All of a sudden, they’ll be moving out. This is one reason why Johnson’s offer, you can have a place at our farm, is welcome to them. So Phoebe Rigdon is another one who sacrifices immensely because of her faith in the restoration.
And she is there, and Emma is there. It’s a twelve-day conference. They’re going home. They’re talking it over. The women are integrally involved in this. I feel like those two women had said, Absolutely not. It It would have changed the course of history, but they didn’t.
I would sure love to know those conversations, right? After the meetings of the day, maybe over dinner. I would just love to. I wish we had records of those things.
And I do think that as Joseph would have read Section 1 to Emma that night, because I think with the twins, it would have been very difficult for her to be present at that meeting. Now, maybe if she could get some help, because she always had hired help working with her, if she had help, maybe. But when she heard that, I think she, too, would have had a witness of the spirit if she were humble and meek, like all of us need to be in order to have a witness of the spirit.
She certainly is a right-hand to him, right? She’s a scribe to him often, and as the Lord talks to her about in section 25, she is a strength, a comfort, a source of counsel.
Nothing could have worked without Emma. That’s why Joseph had to bring the right woman, which we’ll talk about in a couple of weeks. But Emma It has to be there, and it is the right woman.
With this group of the right people around him, and all these people feel trepidation, right? Oh, big time. That’s going to get us in trouble. They also feel this excitement in this faith, right? We can’t not publish the Lord’s revelations just because it’s going to cause us a lot of inconvenience and trouble. We have to do it. And so they make the decision to do it. As you said, they decide to publish 10,000. This is so ambitious. They’re going to flood the world with these Commandments from the Lord, these revelations. And they make great plans and efforts to do it. It’s just really remarkable decision. And section one, of course, is really one of the main heartbeats of that 12 days. It comes in the middle and it gives us the Lord’s preface. It’s the Lord telling us, this is the way I want you to read the book. What theme should you be looking for? What is this the book’s supposed to do?
What theme should we be looking for?
The first word in the doctrine comes, the first revealed word is hearken.
Yes.
Hearken to what? To my voice. Listen to the voice of Jesus Christ.
And hearken in the ancient world is listen and obey. Do something about it. Yeah, do something about it.
Right. That’s the beginning of an 11 verse as we’ve got it. Inclusio, this is a passage, usually of scripture, where your author is intentionally making a sandwich. You say the first thing, you say the same thing at the beginning and the end of it.
Chiastically, if you’ll forgive me, but yes.
Yeah. And then you put the important things in the middle as well. And by setting it off that way, you signal to your reader, this is a unit. This is a digestible chunk. You should attend to this as a piece. So what is it? It says, Listen to the voice of Jesus Christ. Hearken to me. You that are on the aisles of the sea, you that are far away, you that are close by, everybody, listen. There will be no ear that won’t hear. There will be no heart that won’t be penetrating. Generated. Everybody will be able to hear the voice of the Lord, and these are the reasons why.
See that second coming language, isn’t it?
Indeed. So verse 2 of the doctrine of Covenants makes the point that the voice of the Lord is to everyone everywhere. There’s something theologically significant here.
It breaks down the tulip. It breaks down the idea that only the elect are saved and that this is only a limited atonement. Yes.
To fast forwarding, when we get to section 29, the Lord says, Listen, listen to the voice of Jesus Christ. And then he says, You are called to bring to pass the gathering of mine elect. Well, who are they? Are they the ones that have already been arbitrarily chosen by God. No, the elect are those who hear my voice and harden not their hearts.
That’s God’s definition. It fits as we take that definition back in terms of the biblical text as well. I feel like the doctrine covenants gives us the vocabulary and the definitions of terms then to take back and say, oh.
Yeah. Yeah, it puts us in conversation with the Bible in very interesting and wonderful ways, certainly with the Book of Mormen. I call this locating agency. A question in Presbyterian or Methodism or whatever else is, is there human agency? Is our will in bondage to God’s will, as Martin Luther would say? Is there any such thing as what Latterday Saints call agency? Well, The revelations say there is emphatically, and the Lord locates it in us in part by telling us, Listen to what I have to say. I’m going to make sure everyone hears it. We’re not really re agents, we can’t, that is, act on the Lord’s will in obedience or disobedance until we know it. So he takes upon himself the responsibility to declare to the ends of the earth.
I want you to communicate this.
And that’s what this first 11 verses is about. I’m speaking, listen to me. And he tells us that the way he’s going to do this communication of his will to the ends of the earth is he’s going to call on his servants. And he acknowledges that they’re weak. I’m going to call on Joseph Smith, and I’m going to call on others, and I grant that they’re weak, but they have my authority. They have this preface to the Book of My Commandment. Elements. It’s not just them on their own. They’ve got this book. That’s why they printed this book in its tiny little way so these elders could put it in their pocket and take it to the ends of the Earth, or at least to Kentucky or wherever else. And so their job is to go forward and begin to spread the message that the covenant is restored. Every ear will hear it. Every heart will be penetrated with it. That doesn’t mean they’ll be forced to obey it. It means that they’ll have the choice now to obey it, consciously, willfully or not. So the revelation, the preface does important work of showing that the Lord intends to take his word in these revelations and get it to everyone.
It’s our job to fulfill that obligation to get it to everyone.
In addition to the gathering of Israel, this answers the question about the inerrancy, though. The prophet is not inherent. The spirit is, God is, his son, Jesus Christ is, but it is our own personal responsibility to hear the word of the Lord and to feel it burn within us. They are the ones we have to go through. So if the words are different in King James English than we’d like them to be, then read them prayerfully, and hopefully the spirit can teach you, because that is what is inerrant. It is the spirit. Trust in the spirit. And I do believe that the spirit speaks to our prophets, both now and in the time of Joseph. I believe Joseph was called as a prophet of God. And I would just love to end today by hearing your testimony of Joseph Smith.
Well, Joseph Smith is the world’s greatest revelator. He’s the greatest revelator the world has ever seen. So is he perfect? Well, he certainly said he wasn’t, and so did Jesus in the revelations to Joseph, which he published to the world. So the question for me is not, is he flawless? The question is, did Jesus reveal to him? I know Jesus revealed himself to Joseph Smith. And I am so grateful that that’s the Christ that we have. That Christ who condescends to come to an anxious teenager and give him forgiveness of his sins, right? That’s the one I need desperately, too. Then the revelations continue until we have this magnificent book full of the Lord’s Latterday revelations. And there are several… I mean, there’s no end to what we could say about them, but there are some really important through lines. The temple, the restoration of the fullness of temple, covenants and ordinances, together with the power and authority to perform them is in the doctrine and covenants. The restoration of the Everlasting Covenant, the gathering of Latterday Israel in anticipation of the Lord’s second coming, and the establishment of Zion, that is throughout the doctrine and covenants.
It’s just chalk full of things that would solve the world’s problems, that will solve the world’s problems as we apply them. The first section ends the Lord saying, Search these Commandments. Read these revelations carefully and repeatedly. Search them. Search them. What a powerful verb. He could have picked anything. Nonchalantly, maybe pay some attention to these if you want to. He didn’t choose that one. Search. There’s a rationale. It’s really good to learn to listen to the Lord’s rationale in the revelations. In this case, he says, Search these Commandments for they are true and faithful, and the propheses and the promises that are in them shall all be fulfilled. That’s my testimony. These revelations in the doctrine and covenants are true, and they are faithful. They’re not just full of faith. They are faithful. God says what he means to do, and he does what he says he will do. He’s always faithful to his promises. And therefore, the propheses in these revelations, some spectacular ones, and the promises that are in them will all be fulfilled. Well, if that’s true, that means my family will be together forever if I am true and faithful to the covenants.
It means that Zion will come, there will be peace on Earth. It means there will be an end to the evil It means that the people who are shoving pornography down my kids’ throats are not going to always be able to do that. It means the answer to the great longings that all of us have for a resolution to the problem of suffering and so forth. So I’m grateful that we have a book that reassures us in the Lord’s own voice that there will be a fulfillment of all his promises.
Oh, thank you. And I add my testimony that we belong to the Church of Jesus Christ, and we are so grateful to have this year to study the history of the Church with you. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.
Guest Author
dyejo
