The Lord's Own Preface

By late 1831 there were perhaps six dozen revelations in manuscript, circulating in copies of varying accuracy. A conference at Hiram, Ohio, voted to publish them as the Book of Commandments. Some of the elders present were uneasy — the language was plain, occasionally awkward, and unmistakably the language of a young farmer from upstate New York.

According to the account preserved in the history, the Lord's response was to invite the doubters to write a revelation of their own. William E. McLellin tried and failed. What follows in section 1 is the preface the Lord gave to His own book, and it addresses the very objection that had been raised.

This is one of the most consequential verses in the Latter-day Saint canon, and it is easy to read past. It concedes three things at once: the revelations are of God; they came through weak men; and they are phrased in those men's own language so that they could be understood.

The addressee widens in the first sentence: my church, then people from afar, then the islands of the sea. Whatever else this book is, it does not present itself as an internal document. And verse 2 is uncomfortable by design — "there is none to escape" — because a voice of warning that nobody has to hear is not a warning.

Verse 20 states an aim that is easy to miss in a hierarchical church: that every person might speak in the name of God. The Restoration's practice — an unpaid lay ministry, ordinances performed by teenagers, revelation available to every member for their own stewardship — follows directly from that sentence.

Compare 1 Corinthians 1:27 and Ether 12:27. The pattern of God choosing the weak and making weakness itself the instrument runs through the whole canon, and section 1 applies it to the Restoration's own leadership without flattery.

Verse 38's final clause is the section's most quoted line: "whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same." It is also the one most in need of the qualification supplied fourteen verses earlier — that servants speak in their weakness, after the manner of their language. Both verses are in the same revelation, and a mature reading holds them together.