A Principle with Promise

Brigham Young later described the setting. The School of the Prophets met in a small upper room; the brethren chewed tobacco while they listened, spat on the floor, and smoked pipes. Emma Smith had to clean it. Joseph, Brigham said, took the matter to the Lord, and section 89 was the answer.

The account is secondhand and given decades later, but it fits the revelation's own opening, which addresses "the order and will of God in the temporal salvation of all saints," and its immediate practical effect on a specific room.

Verse 2 says plainly that this was not given as a commandment. Verse 3 says it is adapted to the weakest of the saints — that is, pitched deliberately low, as a floor rather than a ceiling. Both statements are in the canonised text and neither has been removed, which is itself instructive about how the Church handles its own history.

Verse 4's "conspiring men" was a striking phrase in 1833 and looks different after a century in which tobacco companies concealed what they knew. Church leaders have often applied it that way, and the application seems fair.

Two things in the table are usually overlooked. Verses 12–13 counsel that meat be used sparingly. And verses 10–17 are overwhelmingly about what to eat rather than what to avoid — herbs, fruit, grain, in season, with prudence and thanksgiving. Read as a whole, the revelation is a positive dietary counsel with four prohibitions in it, not four prohibitions with padding.

For most of the nineteenth century observance was uneven, and leaders' own practice varied. The Church encouraged it, taught it, and periodically pressed it, but did not make it a condition of standing. That changed gradually and then decisively: in 1921 President Heber J. Grant made observance of the Word of Wisdom a requirement for a temple recommend, and it has been so ever since.

This history is sometimes presented as an embarrassment. It need not be. D&C 89:2 said it was not given by commandment; the Church later made it one, which is precisely what a church with continuing revelation and living authority is able to do. The relevant principle is D&C 1:38 — the Lord's word by His own voice or by His servants — together with the recognition that requirements can be added as a people become ready for them.

Verse 18 attaches a condition wider than diet: "walking in obedience to the commandments." The promises are not a return on abstinence alone. And verse 19's promise is intellectual — wisdom and hidden treasures of knowledge — which is a striking thing to promise for a dietary code, and which reads naturally alongside D&C 88:118's instruction to seek learning.