There is, I think, one scripture that not only helps us understand prophetic mistakes but also gives us a sort of iron rod to hold on to when the going gets rough and we question our ability to receive personal revelation from Heavenly Father. This is not an obscure scripture. You’ve probably read and referenced it hundreds of times in your life.
We find this scripture in Doctrine & Covenants section 8, revelation targeted specifically to Oliver Cowdery and later canonized with the understanding that its lesson was applicable to all. Oliver Cowdery’s quest, after months of assisting the precocious prophet, was a sure knowledge. You’ll remember Oliver’s story: hearing rumors of new scripture, he visited the Smith residence near Palmyra, NY. Following a strong spiritual prompting after speaking most of the night with Hyrum, Joseph’s brother, Oliver struck out to join himself to the work of translation.
I think many of us can relate to this rash heeding of spiritual impulse. It has carried me to many major decisions in my life. A powerful spiritual experience as a 19-year-old led me to switch my plans 180 degrees and hurriedly submit my mission papers. My good bishop even marked my application as a “rush” so I could more quickly receive my call; back in those days, calls took months, and I can only imagine the chuckles that the presumptuous “rush” elicited at church headquarters. It wasn’t until a few months later that, safely immersed in the streets of Torino, Italy, the spiritual buzz evaporated. I looked around at a mostly silent senior companion, a sadistic zone leader, the puzzled looks on the street as I sought to communicate, and the growing blisters on my feet (which, incidentally, changed the shape of my feet…) and wondered what I had done. The following weeks of prayers kneeling on cold European floors basically amounted to me begging the Lord for a similar spark, for the same certain enthusiasm that had precipitated my decision to serve. I wanted to rush headlong into rash spirituality again.
I wonder if Oliver Cowdery had been wrestling with similar requests. Translating the Book of Mormon certainly wasn’t glamorous work, harassed by the neighbors and probably a couple nights going to bed hungry when the stores ran low. After rushing headlong to attach himself to this new prophet, I wonder if Oliver also prayed for the blessing of ardent faith rekindled. In a word, both Oliver and I sought spiritual knowledge, the kind of deeply felt certainty that had sent us off on our prospective missions.
The Lord recognizes that in verse 1: “Oliver Cowdery, verily, verily, I say unto you, that assuredly as the Lord liveth, who is your God and your Redeemer, even so surely shall you receive a knowledge [emphasis mine] of whatsoever things you shall ask in faith, with an honest heart, believing that you shall receive a knowledge concerning the engravings of old records, which are ancient…”
It would appear here that Oliver is searching for a sure knowledge of his daily work’s divinity. He has felt that the plates that will become the Book of Mormon have been divinely guided into this small homestead in the early American republic. But he wants to know. He wants to know so that he can continue the frenetic, exhilarating pace of his work. Oliver, like so many of us, needs motivation to continue working. He won’t continue the struggle unless he knows it’s worth it.
But notice that the Lord does not just hand Oliver knowledge. He hands him a principle. And it is this principle that will be our iron rod for both explaining revelatory mistakes and ensuring revelatory success.
Verse 2: “Yea, behold, I will tell you in your mind and in your heart, by the Holy Ghost, which shall come upon you and which shall dwell in your heart.”
This is it. The Lord is teaching both Oliver and us a significant truth about revelation. So let’s figure out what exactly the Lord is teaching here. So often, we make the mistake of assuming this scripture describes only the metaphysical receptors through which the Lord will beam his pure knowledge into our souls. There is much more to be learned here, but the idea of mind and heart is still a good starting place.
Contemporary readers will be inclined to equate the terms “mind and heart” with “thinking and feeling” or “brain and gut,” and that’s not a bad place to start either. But these terms have very diverse meanings, especially in the early 19th century, and expanding our knowledge of these terms’ connotations will give us a clearer picture of what, exactly, the Lord is promising us.
Let’s start with mind. Mind certainly does refer to thoughts and thought processes, the kind of mental work we would refer to if we were telling a young student to “use your mind.” In addition, however, there is a powerful strand of meaning related to memory when the term “mind” is used in Joseph and Oliver’s time (and to a certain extent, in ours too). If I say, “That brings something to mind,” I’m referring to the marvelously complex abilities of human memory to accept a new idea or stimulus and connect it to an older thought.
So what does that mean? It means that, in the first part of this verse, the Lord is telling us that the Spirit will make use of our logical (and illogical) processes of thinking, but that it will also interact with our memories. If we add in the heart, and the connotation that word had (and still has) to represent our feelings, inclinations, will, and desires, we see that the still, small voice will not come to us like a flyer precariously pinned to our windshield at the supermarket. Instead, the still, small voice, amplified through our thoughts and our memory and our feelings and our will and our desires runs a incisive and expansive full-blown media campaign. If we are prepared, we will know what message comes from the Lord.
Which leads us to a complication of sorts, a complication we saw in the case of Nephi. What if the mind and the heart have been imperfectly prepared? Nephi’s memories of scripture were imperfect remembrances of imperfect scriptural texts. His memories of God’s sweet promise to him combined with this imperfect scripture allowed him to logically justify troubling violence. And as we mentioned earlier, if Nephi can suffer from this, where does that place us?
The next part of the verse uses significant language that sets the stage for this discussion. The Holy Ghost will interact with these various faculties in two distinct ways: it “shall come upon you” and it “shall dwell in your heart.” Let’s look at each interaction separately before we put them together.
Shall Come Upon You
There are several important concepts enunciated in this phrase. First, the Spirit will “come,” meaning that there will be an outside influence upon the mind and the heart. Second, it will come “upon you,” meaning that it will rest upon the foundation that is “you.” The individual assumptions, beliefs, thought processes, and prejudices form the foundation on which the Spirit can build. This is, in effect, how personal revelation becomes personal. Divine truth is filtered through the lens of individuality and personal circumstance. The Lord uses the Holy Spirit to meet us where we are in our spiritual development.
As we learn and develop intellectually, we have the potential to build a foundational infrastructure that either forms a constantly improving conduit to this revelation or confronts that revelation with an increasingly complex labyrinth of preconceptions. More importantly, our early spiritual experiences can either be incorporated into this foundation of “you,” correcting errors of human judgment and prejudice, or those experiences can be forgotten or short-changed, never becoming a part of the infrastructure of mind and heart.
Shall Dwell in Your Heart
I like to think that the second interaction, the promise that the Spirit will dwell in our hearts, as being related to the first chronologically. That is, if we allow the Spirit to penetrate the labyrinth of our preconceptions and desires, then the Spirit is able to penetrate to the deepest parts of our heart, to communicate with us in a perfect and ineffable way.
This is the pattern shown in the first verses of 3 Nephi 11, when the survivors of the apocalyptic destruction that corresponded to the Savior’s death are gathered around the temple in Bountiful discussing the recent destruction and the prophecies of the Savior’s return. It was precisely while they were discussing, opening their personal labyrinths to greater light and knowledge, recognizing the limitations of their knowledge and refusing to commit to easy answers or folkloric explanations, it was “while they were thus conversing one with another, they heard a voice as if it came out of heaven; and they cast their eyes round about, for they understood not the voice which they heard; and it was not a harsh voice, neither was it a loud voice; nevertheless, and notwithstanding it being a small voice it did pierce them that did hear to the center, insomuch that there was no part of their frame that it did not cause to quake; yea, it did pierce them to the very soul, and did cause their hearts to burn.” (3 Nephi 11:3)
A small part of divine communication, one advance party of a larger spiritual salvo makes it through the imperfect labyrinth of human understanding. It makes it all the way through to these people’s hearts. And it pierces them. It causes their hearts to burn.
At this point, the people gathered in Bountiful have a choice, the same choice that we all face. Do I allow this feeling, this piercing, this pain of spiritual growth and discomfort of burgeoning understanding, do I allow this to dwell in my heart?
The apostle Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, teaches us what the potential is if we do allow that illuminating and peaceful discomfort to take up residence in our heart and, reaching outward, in our mind.
“I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith [emphasis mine]; that ye being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.” (Ephesians 3:14-19)
If we make the choice to allow this piercing spiritual knowledge to remain in us, to change our nature, to change our prejudice and misconception, our thought process and very desires, then we have the potential to begin to see a greater breadth, length, depth, and height of divine knowledge, culminating in a perfect knowledge of the love of Christ or, in other words, life eternal (see John 17:3).
This is precisely what the people gathered around the temple in Bountiful do. Each time they give this “voice” a space within their hearts to change what they think and what they know, they turn around and listen again. Each time they do so, they are rewarded with greater knowledge. More of the divine light breaks through. More of that light is incorporated in a restructuring of knowledge and belief, ultimately leading to the appearance of Jesus Christ.
Thus, I think about these two actions as a positive feedback loop. In the event that inspiration, coming upon us, pierces our hearts, we can choose to let it dwell there. If we do, the inspiration within our heart enlarges our understanding and corrects our behavior and belief, which in turn allows greater conductivity of the Spirit through our conceptual labyrinth, resulting in still greater inspiration piercing our hearts. And so on.
Putting it all Together
This is the inspiring promise we receive in Doctrine and Covenants section 8. This is also the challenge we face. For, while the people of Bountiful model the idea of this revolutionary process in a matter of minutes, the actual process of using revelation to perfect our understanding takes lifetimes. At pivotal moments, the Spirit will be still come upon us and have to pierce a personal foundation of imperfect understanding. The difference between us and prophets is not a problem of kind, but of degree. Like us, prophets must deal with their own imperfect understanding of the world and how it works.
The good news that the Lord gives us is that he will tell us using multiple metaphysical channels. Our memory, our thought, our feelings, our desires will all coalesce into a unified message if the Holy Ghost is behind the prompting.
The bad news is that we are horrendously awful at waiting for that coalescence. Far too often, due to the exigencies of daily life and personal pride, we shortcut revelation. We fail to see the blind spots in our reasoning and our worldview. We receive revelation and then squander it by subordinating its inspiration to our agendas and prejudices, our imperfect hopes and our human reasoning. It is in this moment that we dilute not only the Lord’s revelation to us, but also the good that revelation could have led us to do. More or less, this is the source of all prophetic and personal confusion and mistakes.
Nephi felt that killing Laban was wrong. He shrunk from what his reasoning told him was the correct action. This was Nephi’s warning. His heart and his mind were not sending a unified message. When Nephi chose to subvert his revulsion against violence to the logical justification of Laban’s murder, he made a mistake, he misinterpreted in part, what the Lord was prompting him to do. He still achieved the objective of his divine quest, but his journey there created pain and sin at the same time it brought joy and knowledge to his family and posterity.
Next, we will apply this framework to the modern prophets who wrestled with the priesthood ban in the mid-twentieth century.
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