Scott Woodward:
In 1831 the Lord promised the New York Saints that if they would gather together with church members in Ohio, they would there “be endowed with power from on high.” Trusting this promise, most of them moved to Ohio in full expectation of receiving this endowment or gift of power from on high. But what exactly was this endowment? What power was given from on high? Was it one thing or several things? And how was this gift, or gifts, of power received in the Kirtland Temple so crucial in the unfolding story of the development of Latter-day Saint temple worship in general, and to our personal temple experience today? In today’s episode of Church History Matters, we dig into the surprising yet satisfying answers to these important questions. I’m Scott Woodward, and my co-host is Casey Griffiths, and today Casey and I dive into our second episode in this series about the development of Latter-day Saint temple worship. Now let’s get into it.

Casey Griffiths:
Hello, Scott.

Scott Woodward:
Hi, Casey.

Casey Griffiths:
We’re back.

Scott Woodward:
We are back, talking temple.

Casey Griffiths:
Talking temples.

Scott Woodward:
Talking the origins of temple worship, temple liturgy—we are a temple-building people, and that’s been the case from the very beginning, as we’re finding out. And so this is fun.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. And I’ve got to tell you, I don’t know how long this series is going to be, how many episodes, because I keep thinking, “We’ve got to do a whole episode on this, we’ve got to do a whole episode on this,” but it’s good stuff. Like, I’m loving it, I’m learning a ton, and I hope you guys are enjoying it, too. So should we just dive in? Let’s dive in.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. So this is episode two of who knows how many in this series. We’ll just see.

Casey Griffiths:
We’ll just keep going and probably still feel like we haven’t covered everything, but let me recap what we talked about last time. So last time we were just kind of setting the table.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
When we try to trace the beginnings of temple worship among Latter-day Saints, it goes back to the Book of Mormon, it goes back to this promise that there’s going to be a New Jerusalem on the American continent. And what made Jerusalem special? The temple was there.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
So the saints were really, really fired up by this idea that there was not only going to be the old Jerusalem that would be restored and built up again, which the Book of Mormon prophesies, but also a new Jerusalem that would be built on this continent, and this seems to be the thing that kind of really gets them going to the point to where early controversies in the church, like the Hiram Page revelations, centered around the location of the New Jerusalem.

Scott Woodward:
That’s early, right? That’s D&C 28?

Casey Griffiths:
D&C 28, right?

Scott Woodward:
Super early.

Casey Griffiths:
Hiram Page’s revelations, which turned out to be false, Joseph Smith says in part were concerning the New Jerusalem and the upbuilding of Zion.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
And the first missionaries are sent out in consequence of that. First official mission in the church is led by Oliver Cowdery. It’s a mission to the Lamanites to travel to the borders of the American republic, where the Lord told them that was where Zion would be located. “On the borders by the Lamanites” is the phrase from Doctrine and Covenants 28.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. And that’s our very first explicit mention of temple, right, is in Oliver Cowdery’s covenant contract? As he embarked on his mission, he said that he was going to go out to Missouri and raise up a pillar as a witness of where the New Jerusalem temple would stand.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And that’s, like, the 17th of October, 1830. So early.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. The church is less than six months old, and they’re already talking about temples.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
And that the center of the New Jerusalem is going to be a temple, but they also know from the Book of Mormon that it’s not going to be a temple like the one that existed in the time of Christ or any earlier time, because there’s no animal sacrifice any longer. The Book of Mormon ends that.

Scott Woodward:
So what kind of temple is it going to be?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, that’s the question, right? What’s the temple going to be for? They don’t know. They just know they’re supposed to build one.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
Oliver travels on, he converts a number of people in Kirtland, Ohio. That causes people in Kirtland, Ohio, specifically Sidney Rigdon and Edward Partridge, to travel and meet with Joseph Smith, and when they meet with Joseph Smith, the very first thing that happens is they’re given a commandment to gather, this time to the Ohio, to the place where Sidney Rigdon and Edward Partridge live.

Scott Woodward:
And that was only shortly after Sidney had become Joseph’s scribe, right?

Casey Griffiths:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Sidney and Edward travel to meet Joseph Smith in New York, they hit it off, almost immediately Sidney starts acting as his scribe on the Bible translation, and then they get section 37, which is just a commandment to gather. Doesn’t give any context, any explanation, just gather to the Ohio. But a couple days later they receive section 38, which does give two specific reasons to gather. One reason is to receive the law, which is section 42—several laws, but most importantly the law of consecration, and then the second reason is more mysterious. The Lord just says, after you gather to the Ohio, you will be endowed with power from on high. And that’s where the word endowed or endowment starts to come into play when it comes to the development of temple worship.

Scott Woodward:
And that word just means a gift, right?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Some sort of a gift. And that was already in the dictionary at the time. It’s not, like, a special church word, it’s just the Lord is promising them a “gift of power” of some kind, right?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, that’s right. They don’t know what it means, they don’t attach all the assumptions to it that Latter-day Saints do today, where it’s always associated with temple worship, but from the beginning the word endowment starts to pop up in the Doctrine and Covenants. And so maybe the next step is they’re trying to figure out what the endowment is. In fact, they gather to Kirtland, and they have a big conference there.

Scott Woodward:
Yes.

Casey Griffiths:
And a bunch of unusual things happen, and some people think this is the endowment, correct? Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. In fact, Joseph’s working on the JST in the latter part of February 1831, just shortly after he had arrived in Kirtland, and he receives what’s now JST Genesis 14, which speaks of the man Melchizedek, who was ordained a high priest, it says, “after the order of the covenant which God made with Enoch, it being after the order of the Son of God.” And so it’s about that same time, then, late February of 1831, the Lord commands “all the elders of my church” to gather together to a meeting in Kirtland, Ohio. That meeting was held on June 1st through the 3rd of 1831, and it was at that meeting that the—what Joseph calls the high priesthood was restored, or the high priesthood after the order of the Son of God, that same phrase spoken of back in JST Genesis 14, was conferred, Joseph says, for the first time in our dispensation. And from the accounts of those who were at that meeting, they speak about the authority of the Melchizedek priesthood being manifested, and Joseph says, for instance, “I conferred the high priesthood for the first time upon several elders.” So there’s actually another priesthood order that’s coming to play here. So this is kind of hard for our modern brains to kind of wrap our head around because of the way we currently use the word priesthood and Melchizedek and elder in our lexicon, but back in 1831, elder was an office of the church, and it wasn’t associated necessarily with a priesthood yet. This is still super early. And now, in 1831, we have a restoration of the holy order of the Son of God, or the high priesthood, and elders were then ordained at that conference into the high priesthood, or some of them were at least, and from then on they would be known as high priests.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
So this is, like, actually not minor. This is major. And it actually will have a lot to do with temple, we come to find out later that September, when D&C 84 is revealed. D&C 84 is the very first priesthood revelation, and it happens to be, Casey, the very first temple revelation.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
In fact, it just seems like you can’t understand the one without the other as the Lord unfolds this here. So back at that conference in June it wasn’t just casual laying on of hands and conferring the high priesthood, definitely some of that, but there was also divine manifestations. Some people saw God. Others were actually possessed by dark spirits, and Joseph casts out evil spirits out of them, and, like, there were some pretty dramatic things that happened at that meeting as almost, like, a manifestation of the power inherent in the higher order of the Son of God.

Casey Griffiths:
I would have loved to have been at this meeting, because they actually cast Satan out of the meeting, and he knocks people over on his way out, and Joseph Smith says that this is the beginning of the Second Thessalonians prophecy that the man of sin will be revealed. Like, this was not a boring conference—

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
—by any stretch of the imagination.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. It was very dramatic. Lyman Wight says he saw God. Joseph Smith himself said that he saw the heavens opened and he saw the Father and the Son. We don’t often talk about the Morley farm as a place where the Father and the Son were seen. We always talk about Palmyra, and that’s appropriate, but the Father and the Son were seen there on the Morley farm as well, and in the records of some of those who actually attended this meeting, for instance, John Corrill, they’re pretty explicit that they thought that this was the endowment of power the Lord had promised when they were in New York and invited to come out to Kirtland. In fact, let me just read a little bit from John Corrill. He said this: “The same visionary and marvelous spirit spoken of before got hold of some elders.” This is talking about the Satan attack. He said, “It threw one from his seat to the floor. It bound another, so that for some time he could not use his limbs nor speak, and some other curious effects were experienced, but by a mighty exertion in the name of the Lord, it was exposed and shown to be from an evil source. The Melchizedek priesthood was then, for the first time, introduced,” or this higher priesthood, Joseph will call it, of the holy order of the Son of God, “and it was conferred on several of the elders.” And then John Corrill says this: “In this chiefly consisted the endowment, it being a new order and bestowed authority.” So it sounds like in John Corrill’s mind, at least, this was the fulfillment of the promised endowment of power. There was a new order, he says, the holy order of the Son of God conferred, and that was the endowment of power.

Casey Griffiths:
They’re kind of going off that definition of endowment that they would have used, which is just a gift.

Scott Woodward:
Gift of power.

Casey Griffiths:
They’re not thinking of it as a ceremony or any kind of covenantal relationship, just something awesome happened, and we were given this new power—

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
—and that’s the endowment.

Scott Woodward:
And that’s the endowment. So I guess the $50 question here, Casey, is, was he wrong? Was that the endowment or not the endowment? What do you think?

Casey Griffiths:
I don’t know. I mean, the truth is, we’ve got to adjust our way of thinking from the way we think of the endowment to the way they would have thought of the endowment, right?

Scott Woodward:
100 percent.

Casey Griffiths:
And who’s to say they’re wrong? It was a huge gift given to them, and in that context, he’s right.

Scott Woodward:
Totally, right? Yeah. So the Kirtland endowment, we’re going to find out, turns out to be Kirtland endowments. It’s layer upon layer of different degrees of power and manifestations, et cetera, which we’d like to try to kind of codify today into certain categories, if we can.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Anything else we want to say about the Morley farm or anything there?

Casey Griffiths:
Just that it illustrates that clearly they didn’t know what the endowment was.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
And they’re looking for its fulfillment because the law, the Lord promised the law and that they’d be endowed with power from on high. The law comes, I think, within five days after Joseph Smith’s arrival in Kirtland, so boom, that’s done, and they’re expecting the endowment, but as it sometimes is, there’s a longer and more winding road to get to where we need to be. For instance, it’s at that same conference that Joseph Smith is commanded to take several pairs of missionaries and hold the next conference on the frontier in Missouri.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
So in between the conferences—one takes place in June—they set out almost immediately, just a couple days after, and make it to Missouri by late July, and when they get there the Lord gives them section 57, which also uses the word temple. The Lord identifies the precise location of the city of Zion by saying the lot where the temple will be built will be not far from where the courthouse stands.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
This is in verses one and two of Doctrine and Covenants 57. So they know that they’re going to build the city. Now the Lord’s made it specific to, it’s going to be in this place on the frontier. And now he’s narrowed it down to, and at the heart of the city is going to be a temple. The formal commandment to build that temple comes in section 84 of the Doctrine and Covenants, but alongside of that, just a few weeks later, they receive another big revelation, this is section 88, where they’re commanded to build a temple in Kirtland as well.

Scott Woodward:
Man.

Casey Griffiths:
And the commandment to build the temple in Kirtland calls it—this is the verse: section 88, verse 119. “Organize yourselves; prepare every needful thing; and establish a house, even a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith, a house of learning, a house of glory, a house of order, a house of God.”

Scott Woodward:
So that’s the Kirtland temple.

Casey Griffiths:
That’s the Kirtland temple. That’s the commandment to build it. They’re going to try to build the temple in Zion—in fact, complex of twenty-four temples. We talked a little bit about that last time—but the actual first temple they succeed in building is the temple in Kirtland, and it still stands today. That beautiful structure is still there.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. That’s incredible. Hey, I’ve got to interrupt here for just a second to say that this episode was recorded only one week before the major announcement on March 5, 2024 that the LDS Church had purchased the Kirtland Temple from the Community of Christ. We are both super grateful for how well the Community of Christ cared for this structure for so many years, and at the same time super excited that the LDS Church has now become the stewards over this sacred structure. I mean, this is the kind of thing you get giddy about when you’re church history nerds like we are. For the rest of this episode we’ll discuss why this structure and what happened inside it is such a big deal. So anyway, back to the episode. So let’s just keep in mind all these pieces, try to hold them all together, right? There’s this conference on the 1st through the 3rd of June, 1831 where the high priesthood was restored. The Lord doesn’t explain really what that is until section 84. At the same time he’s explaining the first command to build the temple in Missouri. Fast forward only a few sections, section 88, and now another temple in Kirtland.

Casey Griffiths:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
So all these pieces are connected. So what happens between section 88 and section 110, Casey, that’s the story we want to tell today, right?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Is what happens between section 88, when the command is given to build the Kirtland Temple, and section 110, when the Savior comes and receives the dedication. It’s quite the story, and as we tell this story, we start to be able to wrap our head around what the Lord meant by Kirtland endowment. And so that’s what we want to talk about today.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. This temple, if you adjust for inflation and count in things like labor and, you know, the resources ratio in the community, is probably the most costly temple ever built by the church.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
They are dirt poor, and they don’t have a ton of resources, but man do they go to, and the evidence of their love and craftsmanship is still right there. For instance, I want to pull out this quote. One of the proposals, according to Lucy Mack Smith, that they made was that the temple should be a log cabin, that they were going to build the temple out of logs.

Scott Woodward:
See, that’s funny to us today, but, like, they didn’t know. They’ve never built a temple!

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. This is—

Scott Woodward:
Why not?

Casey Griffiths:
—the first time they’ve done it, and they don’t have anything, so why not make a log cabin? Lucy Mack Smith recorded that Joseph stood up and said, “Shall we, brethren, build a house for our God of logs? No, brethren. I have a better plan than that. I have a plan of the house of the Lord given by Himself.” Then he gave them the plan in full, which they were highly delighted. And particularly Hyrum. So it’s a huge thing, and they have even grander ideals. Twenty-four temples in Zion, section 94 and section 95 lay out three structures that I guess could all technically be called temples, though one was designated a house for the presidency, kind of a church administration building, a house for the printing of the scriptures, and also the house of God. Now, they focus their efforts correctly on building the house of God. They do build the smaller printing establishment, and Joseph Smith’s house, which is just a couple yards away from the temple, kind of functions as the house of the presidency. But the temple is built, and it’s still there, and there is an endowment that takes place here, right? That’s going to be our big question for the day is what is the Kirtland endowment?

Scott Woodward:
What was the Kirtland endowment, and does it look anything like what church members think of when they think of the endowment today?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, so run us through. You’ve done a great job identifying the endowment as maybe three or four things.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
What are those things?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, if you kind of step back and look at the whole story, here are the four key pieces of the Kirtland endowment: Number one, ordinances, meaning rituals. And we’ll dive into that in just a second, what that means. Number two, divine teachings. Number three, spiritual outpourings/divine manifestations. And then number four, the restoration of priesthood keys. And if you think about each of those as a divine gift of power to the saints during this time, they all check the box, and Joseph Smith will call these pieces of the endowment. Let’s walk through each one of them, and let’s talk about what that looked like. We’re talking about basically the beginning of 1836 is when the action really starts to happen with all four of these, and so it’s from January 1836 really to April of 1836.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. And most of that time is before the temple’s dedicated.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
They’re so anxious to receive these ordinances that they don’t wait for the temple to be finished. They start using rooms as soon as they’re completed, which they’ll do in Nauvoo.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
As well. They’ll use the baptismal font in Nauvoo before the temple’s done. And Kirtland has no baptismal font, no ordinance rooms, no sealing rooms. It very much looks like a congregational space with these huge, beautiful pulpits and intricate woodwork, but nothing that we would consider to be, like, a modern temple that’s built by the church today. Because they don’t have the ordinances yet, right?

Scott Woodward:
That’s right. So the ordinances that they do in the Kirtland Temple are essentially four things.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And they do kind of sound familiar to us when we talk about the initiatory. What they would do is called the washing. Usually they would wash with pure water, sometimes with alcohol. That would be the washing of the whole body. Then you have anointing with oil. Then you’ve got sealing the anointing. That’s placing your hands on the head and giving a blessing at that point. And then number four, fourth aspect of ordinances, would be washing the feet. So let’s talk about each of those. In fact, Casey, do we need to talk about “The Spirit of God,” that song that Phelps wrote? There is a hidden verse.

Casey Griffiths:
Oh, yeah. I think most people are aware that “The Spirit of God Like a Fire is Burning” was composed particularly for the dedication of the Kirtland Temple.

Scott Woodward:
Yes.

Casey Griffiths:
And Emma Smith’s hymn book that she was commanded to do in section 25 is published in time for the Kirtland Temple, and the very last hymn in it is “The Spirit of God,” and we’ll post a picture of this, but there’s a missing verse that we don’t currently sing right now.

Scott Woodward:
It was originally the fourth verse, yeah. Do you want to read it for us?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. So it goes—

Scott Woodward:
Actually, what if you sing it for us? Do you want to sing it for us?

Casey Griffiths:
I don’t know. I don’t—well, okay. I’ll give it a shot. So, ♫ “We’ll wash and be washed and with oil be anointed, withal not omitting the washing of feet. For he that receiveth his penny appointed— ♫

Scott Woodward:
He’s going.

Casey Griffiths:
♫ —must surely be clean at the harvest of wheat.” ♫ And then the chorus is the same, but that verse, which I don’t—I don’t know why we took this out. We should have kept it.

Scott Woodward:
That’s a good verse.

Casey Griffiths:
—captures a little bit about what they thought about the endowment happening in the Kirtland Temple. You’re washed.

Scott Woodward:
Washed.

Casey Griffiths:
You’re anointed. You’re blessed . . .

Scott Woodward:
“Withal not omitting the washing of feet.”

Casey Griffiths:
“Withal not omitting the washing of feet.” Yeah. Which is described in section 88 of the Doctrine and Covenants as well, so none of this stuff is incredibly secretive. It’s in the Doctrine and Covenants, but . . .

Scott Woodward:
Yes.

Casey Griffiths:
It is considered very sacred.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, a lot of people speculate about what’s up with the washing of feet, and there’s always some whispered answers that elders will pass along on their missions and things, that “I heard this and I heard that,” but like you’re saying, it’s actually explained in D&C 88.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And the Lord explains what it’s about. He says it’s about being clean from the sins of this generation. There’s also more to it than that. Do you want to explain some more of what Brigham Young said?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. So they washed, and they anointed. Some sources indicate that they were washed with clear water. One source says they were washed and perfumed with whiskey. So, like, whiskey and water mixed together—

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
—but they were anointed and perfumed with consecrated oil, and all of this took place in the spirit of fasting. They’d partake of the sacrament. Brigham Young, when he described the washing of feet, said, “We were instructed to wash each other’s feet as evidence that we had borne testimony of the truth of the gospel to the world.”

Scott Woodward:
There you go.

Casey Griffiths:
And so it’s tied into their commission to do missionary work, too, that they’re going out to teach, they’re washing their feet as a way of saying, “We’ve done our duty. We’ve presented the world with the message of the gospel.”

Scott Woodward:
And so in that way, “We’re clean from the sins of this generation because we have given them the opportunity to repent.” Like, “Their sins are not upon our head,” essentially, right? It’s, “We have done our part, inviting the nations of the earth to receive Christ. We are no longer accountable for their sin. It’s on them now.”

Casey Griffiths:
And that’s a very New Testament idea, right? Jesus washed his disciples’ feet. But they’re also drawing from the Old Testament, too, like Oliver Cowdery, who’s essentially assistant president of the church at this time, this is his description of these endowment ceremonies: he says, they wash their bodies “with pure water before the Lord, preparatory to the anointing with the holy oil. After we were washed, our bodies were perfumed with a sweet-smelling odorous wash. At evening the presidents of the church, with the two bishops and their counselors, and Elder Warren Parrish met in the president’s room, the high councils of Kirtland and Zion in their rooms, and those named in the first room were anointed with the same kind of oil,” and here’s the important part, “in the manner that were Moses and Aaron and those who stood before the Lord in ancient days, and those in the other rooms with anointing oil prepared for them. This glorious scene too great to be described in the book, therefore, I only say that the heavens were open to many. Great and marvelous things were shown.” So they’re tying this back to washing the feet, which is a very New Testament idea, but the washing of the bodies and anointing with oil they’re tying directly back to temple practices described in the Old Testament in the books of Exodus and Leviticus, Moses and Aaron.

Scott Woodward:
And let’s make clear that those are two different ordinances, right? One is washing—

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
—the body, and one is washing the feet.

Casey Griffiths:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
The washing of the body seems very connected to Moses and Aaron, washing the feet very connected to the New Testament.

Casey Griffiths:
That’s correct, yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Excellent. Something that we can notice in that quote that you just read from Oliver Cowdery is that spiritual outpourings and divine manifestations were often tightly connected to the ordinance of washing and anointing.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
In fact, it would often happen like that: they would do the washing and anointing, and then sometime thereafter spiritual manifestations would occur. Sometimes those came in the form of divine teachings as well, like through visions, people are learning things, and oftentimes seeing things, and we want to talk all about that today, but I want to start with maybe an example of a divine teaching that occurs during anointings in the form of divine manifestations. This catches three out of the four definitions of the endowment that we are proposing today. And to do that, we’d want to go to Doctrine and Covenants 137.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, and Doctrine and Covenants 137 is kind of an oddball section because it’s a new addition to the Doctrine and Covenants. I mean, I don’t think it was canonized until ’79 and then placed in the Doctrine and Covenants until ’81, so it’s the second to last section of the Doctrine and Covenants, but it’s old. It’s older than most sections of the Doctrine and Covenants. In fact, chronologically this would go before probably section 109.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
Because it’s an event that happens at the Kirtland Temple while they’re performing this anointing ordinance.

Scott Woodward:
That’s right. It’d be between section 108 and 109.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, I believe that’s correct. So tell us a little bit about what happened here.

Scott Woodward:
I’m just going to pull up the words of Joseph Smith. I’ll let him tell us about this. Yeah, he wrote a very detailed account of what happened.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, absolutely.

Scott Woodward:
This occurs January 21, 1836. So Joseph says this: “At early candlelight I met with the presidency at the west schoolroom in the temple.” That’s, if you’re looking at the temple, you see the steeple at the very top, the opposite side of the roof on the other end, that’s the west room where this occurred. He said, “to attend to the ordinance of anointing our heads with holy oil. Also, the councils of Kirtland and Zion met in the two adjoining rooms and waited in prayer while we attended to the ordinance. I took the oil in my left hand, Father Smith being seated before me, and the remainder of the presidency encircled him round about.” So you’ve got Joseph Smith, Sr. sitting in the chair, First Presidency surrounding him. “We then stretched our right hands toward heaven and blessed the oil and consecrated it in the name of Jesus Christ. We then laid our hands upon our aged Father Smith and invoked the blessings of heaven. I then anointed his head with the consecrated oil and sealed many blessings upon him. The presidency then, in turn, laid their hands upon his head, beginning at the oldest, until they had all laid their hands upon him and pronounced such blessings upon his head as the Lord put into their hearts, all blessing him to be our patriarch, to anoint our heads, and attend to all duties that pertain to that office. Pretty cool. They all take a turn blessing Father Smith, right? And then, after they’ve blessed him to be able to bless them, “The presidency,” Joseph continues, “then took the seat in their turn, according to their age, beginning at the oldest, and received their anointings and blessings under the hands of Father Smith, and in my turn, my father anointed my head and sealed upon me the blessings of Moses, to lead Israel in the latter days, even as Moses led him in days of old. Also the blessings of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. All the presidency laid their hands upon me, and pronounced upon my head many prophecies and blessings, many of which I shall not notice at this time.” So he actually never notices them ever again. We never learn what they said upon his head specifically, but this is the part where it gets really interesting. It was in the midst of that, with their hands on his head, pronouncing prophecies and blessings upon Joseph Smith, that the following happens: Joseph says in his account, “Let’s come to visions and revelations,” and then he gets into what is now canonized as section 137, but as we have it in 137, that little prelude is not part of the canonized piece. And so just remember when you read section 137 that hands were laid on Joseph’s head—he’d just been washed, he’d just been anointed, and there are blessings that are happening upon his head when this occurs. He says, “The heavens were opened upon us.” Bam! Vision. “And I beheld the celestial kingdom of God, and the glory thereof, whether in the body or out I cannot tell. I saw the transcendent beauty of the gate through which the heirs of that kingdom will enter, which was like unto circling flames of fire; also the blazing throne of God, whereon was seated the Father and the Son.” That’s another time in Kirtland, by the way, he saw the Father and the Son. He said, “I saw the beautiful streets of that kingdom, which had the appearance of being paved with gold. I saw fathers Adam and Abraham and my father and . . . mother; my brother Alvin, that has long since slept; and marveled as that he had obtained an inheritance in that kingdom, seeing that he had departed his life before the Lord had set his hand to gather Israel the second time, and had not been baptized for the remission of sins.” This is really interesting. So he’s having a vision, he sees the celestial kingdom, and in the celestial kingdom he sees both his mom, his dad, and his brother Alvin, which is curious, because his mom and dad are still alive, his dad’s actually in the room with his hands on his head.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And yet he sees what must be then a vision of the future, and in that celestial kingdom he sees his brother Alvin, and once he sees Alvin, he formulates in his mind a doctrinal question: How could Alvin be there, having not been baptized before he died? And that’s where the voice of the Lord now comes to Joseph and teaches him some doctrine, actually. So here’s a divine teaching that’s super powerful: the Lord says, “All who have died without a knowledge of this gospel, who would have received it if they had been permitted to tarry, shall be heirs of the celestial kingdom of God; also all that shall die henceforth without a knowledge of it, who would have received it with all their hearts, shall be heirs of that kingdom; for I, the Lord, will judge all men according to their works, according to the desire of their hearts.” And then the Lord throws in, I guess, what we could call a freebie. This wasn’t even a question Joseph was asking, but it certainly answered a question in Joseph’s heart. The Lord says, “And I also beheld that all children who die before they arrive at the years of accountability are saved in the celestial kingdom of heaven.” Now, Joseph and Emma have lost children up to this point, and many people, of course, in that day and age, lost children to disease or in childbirth—

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
—and that’s a question on many people’s minds. Does the Bible not say you must be baptized to enter the kingdom of heaven? Then what about children? Then what about those who didn’t receive the gospel before they died, etc., etc.? So, what the Lord vouchsafes here to Joseph Smith in the midst of this vision is actually answering some really perennial questions of the ages, at least 1800-year-old questions. Since Jesus started emphasizing baptism as the entrance requirement to the kingdom of God, these questions have plagued hundreds of thousands of Christians.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And here in the Kirtland Temple, January 21, 1836, in the midst of washing and anointing and a heavenly manifestation, the Lord answered that question once and for all. That’s pretty powerful.

Casey Griffiths:
And it’s not something we typically think of as the endowment, but is that a gift? I mean—

Scott Woodward:
Oh, my word, yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
Answers to huge questions. And also not just questions for the fate of mankind, but questions Joseph Smith has been wrestling with. You get the feeling that he feels this intense sense of guilt that his brother died and never had the opportunity to be baptized under the authority of the priesthood, so, yeah, section 137, that’s part of the endowment, I would say, as well.

Scott Woodward:
A divine teaching that comes during anointings in the form of a divine manifestation.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
So we kind of launch into this few-weeks period of divine manifestation. So it starts January 21st, and then it goes until February 6th, and then there’s, like, a gap, and then in March they hold what’s called the solemn assembly, and this was a big deal. This was brought up by the Lord in section 88, that you were to “call your solemn assembly” and Joseph does a big ramp up to this, and for him this is as big as the dedication of the Kirtland Temple. So maybe we could just skim some of the highlights from the January 21st to February 6th outpourings, and then maybe talk about what happens in March, the solemn assembly, dedication day, and then dedication day evening, and then we’ll go to April 3rd, when the Savior appears. What do you say?

Casey Griffiths:
This is a lot. I want to emphasize here, we are skimming. There’s whole books, Karl Anderson’s book, Joseph Smith’s Kirtland, The Savior in Kirtland, both emphasize this. Milt Bachman wrote a book called The Heavens Resound that talks about a lot of this stuff. We’re just giving you kind of the cliff notes, essentially, but a lot happens during this Pentecostal season.

Scott Woodward:
There’s another great book called The Opening of the Heavens that Jack Welch helped to edit—

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
—basically bringing together all the firsthand material, secondhand material from that time period about divine manifestations, essentially, in that first generation, and so there’s much that’s said about these days that we’re about to highlight. So where should we start?

Casey Griffiths:
Let’s do a couple highlights between February and March, and then let’s just get to the dedication, should we?

Scott Woodward:
Well, let me wrap up January. So in January 21st, that’s what we just highlighted with Joseph in section 137, and then the next day, January 22nd, they have another meeting, and in that meeting some saw visions, angels ministered to some, the temple is filled with the glory of God, some saw visions of the Savior, even. The gift of tongues was experienced, and some said that angels mingled their voices with ours. And by the way, they stay up until, like, 5 in the morning, Joseph says, sometimes, just all night long praising God, witnessing visions, having these kinds of manifestations.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Okay, off to February. So all we have in February is one meeting on February 6th. This is another washing and anointing experience, where high priests and elders are invited in, and Seventies and the Twelve are in a different room, and bishops are in a third room. These often are kind of these quorums, priesthood quorums, broken up in the Kirtland Temple, meeting together, and they’re supposed to be, after washing and anointing, kind of being quiet, contemplative, and prayerful, and then on the signal of the First Presidency, they were to all break out into “Hosanna” with one accord, “Hosanna to God and the Lamb” with an “Amen, Amen, and Amen,” and once they did that, that’s when the Spirit broke loose. Should I just read one little passage here?

Casey Griffiths:
Fire away.

Scott Woodward:
So the instructions were, after we say “Hosanna to God and the Lamb, Amen, Amen, and Amen,” then everyone be silent, and if any obtain a prophecy or a vision, then go ahead and rise and speak, that all may be edified and rejoice together. That was the setup of that meeting. And after a little bit of trouble getting the quorums to behave themselves, especially the elders, you know how they are—he says it was the elders in the West room that had a hard time just being quiet, and so—

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
—Don Carlos has to go over there and kind of chastise them. Anyway, once everyone gets settled, then the Spirit of the Lord comes, and Joseph says, “The Quorum of the Seventy enjoyed a great flow of the Holy Spirit.” That’s a cool phrase. The Holy Spirit starts flowing. And he says, “Many arose and spoke, testifying they were filled with the Holy Ghost, which was like fire in their bones, so they could not hold their peace but were constrained to cry, ‘Hosanna to God and the Lamb and glory in the highest.’ President William Smith, one of the twelve, his brother, saw a vision of the twelve, and seven in council together in old England prophesied that a great work would be done by them in the old countries,” which—

Casey Griffiths:
Which happens.

Scott Woodward:
—totally happens. Yeah, and then Zebedee Coltrin, one of the seven, saw a vision of the Lord’s host. I think that means the army of heaven. And others were filled with the Spirit and spake with tongues and prophesied. And Joseph says “This was a time of rejoicing long to be remembered. Praise the Lord.” And then he ends his account there. Oliver Cowdery also, speaking of that meeting, said, “Many saw visions, many prophesied, and many spoke in tongues. We closed a little before 12 o’clock.” Midnight. Erastus Snow has an account of what happened, but they all say similar things: speaking in tongues, revelations, seeing visions, and so on. And so there you go, three different firsthand accounts of what happened on February 6th. Pretty remarkable. And then there’s kind of a dry spell from February 6th to March 27th—

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
—which is dedication day. Do you want to highlight anything from dedication day, Casey?

Casey Griffiths:
A couple things. This is the very first temple dedication in the church, and a lot of the stuff that we do at a temple dedication, and there’s a lot of temple dedications going on right now, find their origins in this. So this is where “The Spirit of God” was first sung by the church. This is where the Hosanna shout was first performed. The first dedicatory prayer, which is now section 109 of the Doctrine and Covenants. And I want to emphasize, too, that this is a spiritual outpouring that’s pretty hard to match. We’re not talking one or two people have a spiritual manifestation: We’re talking pretty much everybody, and they crammed everybody they could into the temple, talking about a thousand people, give or take, that’s the estimate on all meaning almost every seat was filled. Here’s just a couple samples of people that were there: William Draper said, “It was such a time of the outpouring of the Spirit of the Lord that my pen is inadequate to write it in full, or my tongue to express it, but I will here say that the Spirit was poured out and came like a mighty rushing wind and filled the house, that many that were present spoke in tongues and had visions and saw angels and prophesied. We had a general time of rejoicing such as had not been known in their generations.” Several other people talked about cloven tongues of fire, external manifestations. Joseph Smith kind of summed it up by saying it was a Pentecost and an endowment. There’s that word again. “Indeed, long to be remembered, for the sound shall go forth from this place into all the world,” and so let me pick out a couple just favorites, if that’s okay. This is one that I just really love: This comes from Benjamin Brown, but he says, “The order of the house of the Lord was that there were no small children admitted,” because these meetings took a long time. Like, they were hours and hours and hours. Sidney Rigdon spoke for two and a half hours, and then Joseph Smith gave the dedicatory prayer. He said this: “There were no small children admitted, but one woman, however, not knowing the order, brought her child, about two months old. She stood out of the door for a long time, manifested an anxious desire to enter at length. One of the elders said, ‘Brethren, we do not exercise faith. My faith is this child will not cry a word in the house today.’ On this, the woman entered, and child entered, and the child did not cry a word from eight till four in the afternoon, but when the saints all shouted, ‘Hosanna,’ the child was nursing, but let go, and shouted also when the saints paused, and it paused when they shouted. It shouted three times when they shouted, Amen. It shouted also for three times when then it resumed its nursery without any alarm.” So the baby—

Scott Woodward:
Whoa.

Casey Griffiths:
—is nursing, pauses to shout—

Scott Woodward:
Shout “Hosanna” three times.

Casey Griffiths:
—which you’ve got to imagine first of all, having a baby not make any sounds from 8 a. m. to 4 p. m. Is a miracle in and of itself, but the baby also shouts along with them when they’re shouting Hosanna.

Scott Woodward:
And then resumes nursing.

Casey Griffiths:
No big deal. Back to lunch. There were external symbols that happened. For instance, this is from Priscindia Huntington. She said, “A little girl came to my door exclaiming, ‘The meeting is on top of the meeting house.’ I went to the door, and there I saw in the temple angels clothed in white, covering the roof from end to end. They seemed to be walking to and fro. They appeared and disappeared. The third time they appeared and disappeared before I realized they were not mortal men. Each time, in a moment, they vanished and their reappearance was the same. This was in broad daylight in the afternoon. A number of the children in Kirtland saw the same.” And these unusual spiritual manifestations we’re reading about are marked by a lot of people. Like, the story about the baby is told by two different people. One of them, the elder that told them they could let the baby into the temple was Joseph Smith, Sr. So, again, this isn’t, like, stuff that takes place in the shadows. Everybody is having some kind of massive spiritual manifestation. They’re speaking in tongues. They’re seeing angels.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. There’s, like, Frederick G. Williams said that while President Rigdon was making his first prayer, he says he saw an angel enter through the window and come take a seat between Father Smith and himself, and he remained there during the prayer, which tells me that Frederick G. Williams was opening his eyes during the prayer, Casey. David Whitmer sees angels in the house. I mean, you read this, and it just seems like they’re talking about it like it’s normal, but both Joseph and Oliver Cowdery mentioned that Brigham Young stood up and then gave a sermon in tongues, in an unknown tongue.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And then he sits down, and then David Patton stands up and interprets what Brigham Young just said and then gives his own little sermon in tongues. And then George A. Smith arose, and he starts to prophesy, and as he starts to prophesy, a noise was heard like the sound of a rushing mighty wind that fills the temple, and all the congregations simultaneously arose. Like, that’s a thousand people standing up suddenly, “being moved upon by an invisible power,” the account says. And many began at that point to speak in tongues and to prophesy. Others saw glorious visions. Then Joseph says, “I beheld the temple was filled with angels, which fact I declared to the congregation.” and not just inside the temple, like you mentioned, but then Joseph says, “and the people of the neighborhood came running together, hearing an unusual sound within the temple and seeing a bright light like a pillar of fire resting upon the temple.” It’s kind of cool because they just sang about “The Spirit of God like a fire is burning.” That’s kind of cool.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
“And they were astonished at what was taking place. This continued until the meeting closed at 11 p. m.” That’s a long day. It’s an exhausting, beautiful, spiritual day.

Casey Griffiths:
And apparently there’s so many people that weren’t able to get in that they hold a second dedicatory service where they kind of go through the whole thing all over again.

Scott Woodward:
And similar things happened again.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. Karl Ricks Anderson has a chart in his book of spiritual manifestations in Kirtland where he outlines, here’s the date, here’s how many people were present, here’s what they saw. And like I said, this isn’t just one or two people: this is pretty much the whole community in Kirtland, and a significant number of members of the church that traveled from Missouri to witness the dedication of the temple as well. But as amazing as the dedication is, I would say the peak, the climax of the Pentecostal season, and also the Kirtland endowment, happens on Sunday, April 3, 1836. This is probably the most important thing that happens in the temple and what opens the door for the rest of the story of development of temple worship.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
April 3, 1836. This is Section 110 in the Doctrine and Covenants. This account has been canonized. But drawing from Joseph Smith’s journal—his journal’s being kept by someone else, so he’s referred to in third person here—“he attended a meeting in the Lord’s house, assisted the other presidents of the church in seeing the congregation, then became an attentive listener to the preaching from the stand. T. B. Marsh, David W. Patten, spoke in the a. m. to an attentive audience of about 1,000 persons. In the p. m. he assisted the other presidents in distributing the elements of the Lord’s Supper to the church, receiving them from the hands, twelve, whose privilege it was to officiate in the sacred desk this day. After having performed this service to the Brethren, he retired to the pulpit, the veils being dropped, and bowed himself with Oliver Cowdery in solemn but silent prayer to the Most High. After rising from the prayer, the following vision was opened to both of them.” Now, before we do that, a couple clarifications: The veil in the Kirtland Temple were not the same as the veils in modern temples.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
These were partitions. They weren’t considered to be part of any of the ordinances that took place. Kirtland Temple has this really innovative system of pulleys where you could raise and lower canvas partitions that would allow you to separate each of the rooms into smaller and smaller areas. So when they say the veil was dropped, it’s not in the sense that we use it today. They were just creating a smaller room around the Melchizedek Priesthood pulpits in the Kirtland Temple on the bottom floor, which was referred to by them as the House of Worship. So this space, I mean, I’ve spent a little time here, and I’ve got to say the Kirtland Temple is unique because you can go to Israel and go to the Valley of the Doves or the Temple steps and say, “Hey, here’s a place where Jesus probably walked,” but the Kirtland Temple is the only place I know of where you can point and within a couple of feet say, “This is a place where Jesus appeared.” It’s the Melchizedek priesthood pulpits in the Kirtland Temple.

Scott Woodward:
That’s incredible. So we’re going to picture, then, Joseph and Oliver in prayer by those pulpits, canvas tarps having been dropped to partition that area off, secluding them from the eyes of the rest of the people in the congregation.

Casey Griffiths:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
And Joseph’s account says that after rising from prayer, the following vision was opened to both of us, and that’s where we get section 110. Section 110, in my view, is the peak of the Kirtland Endowment. Everything we’ve talked about so far has been building up to section 110.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
We’ve had people that have seen glimpses of the Savior. People have seen Him in vision. We’ve had moments like that, but nothing quite like what happens in section 110. This, by the way, is Easter Sunday. It’s also Passover Sunday, and it’s one of those rare moments where Easter and Passover are on the same day, and both of those are going to kind of play into some of the drama of what unfolds here on this day. Joseph says that “The veil was taken from our minds, and the eyes of our understanding were opened.” So far, that’s not unique. That’s happened—since January that’s been happening in the Kirtland Temple. “We saw the Lord standing upon the breastwork of the pulpit, before us; and under his feet was a paved work of pure gold, in color like amber.” Okay, this is getting a little more specific. He did say back in January that he saw the streets of the Celestial Kingdom that looked like they had the appearance of gold, so a little bit of foreshadowing there, perhaps. And then he really just describes Jesus really carefully here, which has some echoes of the way that John the Revelator described him in the book of Revelation: describes his eyes “as a flame of fire,” his hair “white like the pure snow; his countenance shone above the brightness of the sun; and his voice [like] the sound of . . . rushing of great waters.” It’s like you can’t describe the divine without similes, metaphors, right? There’s this, “his voice was like,” “his eyes were like,” “his countenance was like,” “his hair was like.”

Casey Griffiths:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
And then Jesus begins to speak in verses 4 through 10. The Savior accepts the dedication of the Kirtland Temple. He first forgives Joseph and Oliver of their sins. He then says, “Let the hearts of your brethren rejoice” in verse 6, “and let the hearts of all my people rejoice, who have, with their might, built this house to my name. For behold, I have accepted this house,” he says, “and my name [will] be here; and I will manifest myself to my people in mercy in this house,” and I’ll appear here, he says, as he has been doing since January, and I will “speak unto them [in] my own voice, if my people will keep my commandments, and do not pollute this holy house.” a little foreshadowing there of what’s going to happen, unfortunately, in the latter part of that year and into the next year. He then says this: “Yea, the hearts of thousands and tens of thousands shall greatly rejoice in consequence of the blessings which shall be poured out, and the endowment with which my servants have been endowed in this house.” Okay, so here’s Jesus now talking about the Kirtland endowment. The hearts of thousands and tens of thousands will rejoice because of the endowment that is received in this house. And that would certainly include everything we’ve been talking about since January.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
But he’s now teeing up the crescendo of that endowment, if we could say it like that, because verse 10, after he talks about how the fame of this house will spread to foreign lands, and this is the, he says, “the beginning of the blessing which shall be poured out upon the heads of my people,” he then concludes, and that vision ends. And then almost immediately Joseph says, “The heavens were again opened upon us,” and another vision occurs, and Moses is now standing before them. Why is Moses there? What’s this got to do with the endowment? Well, everything in this world, that’s what it has to do with the endowment. We’re going to get Moses, we’re going to get Elias, we’re going to get Elijah in rapid succession here, kind of three visions following the vision of Jesus. We have four visions, kind of in rapid succession here. And this, I believe, is what the Lord is talking about in verse 9 when He says, “the hearts of thousands and tens of thousands [are going to] rejoice [because] of the blessings which [will] be poured out, and the endowment with which my servants have been endowed in this house.” like, this is the crowning piece of that endowment.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
So Moses, Elias, Elijah. What should we say about the gift of power that now comes through Moses, Elias, and Elijah?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, and this is tricky because they’re all Old Testament figures, right?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
Two out of the three, according to the Book of Mormon, were taken up without tasting death, that’s Moses and Elijah. Elias is the most mysterious of the three because Elias technically, when it shows up in the Bible, is the Greek version of the name Elijah, but he’s clearly spoken of here as a different person. So why don’t we just walk through them one at a time and try and see if we can identify the common thread between the three.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. And let’s look at what gift of power they bestow and why would the hearts of thousands and tens of thousands rejoice because of what these three angelic messengers bring back, restore, confer? So, okay, let’s pick it up in verse 11, then. Let’s start with Moses.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. “After this vision closed the heavens were again opened unto us. Moses appeared before us and committed unto us the keys of the gathering of Israel from the four parts of the Earth and the leading of the ten tribes from the land of the North. Now, let’s point out an obvious parallel here, which is the Mount of Transfiguration described in the Bible. Peter, James, and John are taken to a high mountain. We don’t know exactly which mountain, but Moses and Elijah appear. If you break this down a little bit, Moses is the big gatherer of Israel. He brings them together. When it says leading the ten tribes from the land of the north, we could get into all kinds of wild theories, but the most easy way to resolve this is that the ten tribes were captured by the Assyrian Empire, which was to the North, and then they were deported to the North. So this is probably a symbolic representation of the idea that they were going to return to their covenant, that they were going to come to know their identity. It’s probably more symbolic than literal, though I’m open to the idea of it being literal.

Scott Woodward:
The North seems to represent Assyria, which signifies their scattered condition.

Casey Griffiths:
Being pulled from their cultural context, from their religion, from their national identity, kind of thing.

Scott Woodward:
And the prophet Jeremiah, after that had happened to the Northern Tribes of Israel, he prophesied—Jeremiah 16:15, he said that God would “lead the children of Israel from the land of the north and from all the lands whither he had driven them, prophesying of this future gathering of Israel. And so that phrase is Old Testament language that Moses is using here, that these keys are the keys of gathering Israel from the four parts of the earth and the leading of the ten tribes from the land of the north. By the way, that’s just parallelism. That’s not two different things. The ten tribes in the Old Testament are Israel: that’s the North, and the South was called Judah. You have Judah, you’ve got Israel, right? The ten tribes are Israel, and the four parts of the earth are Israel in their scattered condition, or AKA the land of the north. And so that’s really parallelism: two ways of saying the same thing.

Casey Griffiths:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
And so I guess the most confusing part about this whole thing is, what are those keys, Casey, and what do they mean? The keys of the gathering of Israel. Most people’s mind kind of wants to go to missionary work, right? It’s like, oh, that sounds like he’s restoring missionary work, because that’s what missionaries do: they gather Israel. The problem with that is that that ignores the previous seven years of missionary work that’s been going on since 1829, right?

Casey Griffiths:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
If we’re going to say that missionary work was not authorized until Moses came back in the Kirtland temple in 1836, then we’ve got problems in our church history. We’ve got a bunch of rogue missionaries for seven years, right? And that’s—of course, that’s not true. The keys of missionary work, I think we could safely say, were restored by John the Baptist.

Casey Griffiths:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
Right? He’s the one that restored the keys of preaching the gospel of repentance and baptism. When you think about what missionaries do, there you go. So that’s May 1829. And so that would be, you know, justification for all the missionary work that’s been happening since then, or between these two points, the Lamanite mission, missions of elders in 1832-33, mission of the Quorum of the Twelve in 1835, dozens of others, right? Between 1830 and 1836, we’ve got lots of missionary work that’s been going on, and so it doesn’t seem like Moses’s keys are talking about that.

Casey Griffiths:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
What about directing the gospel going out to the nations of the earth, directing missionaries. Is that what it’s about? And with a moment’s reflection, we have to say . . .

Casey Griffiths:
No, they were already doing that.

Scott Woodward:
They were already doing that, yeah. The Quorum of the Twelve were in charge of directing the opening up of the nations of the earth for the proclamation of the gospel. This is in section 107. When Joseph sets them apart, he says they are to hold the keys to unlock the door of the kingdom of heaven unto all nations and preach the gospel unto every creature. What’s that coming from? That’s actually coming from Peter, James, and John, also back in 1829, who conferred the holy apostleship and the keys of the kingdom upon Joseph and Oliver. So those are the keys that can now direct preaching of the gospel into all the earth.

Casey Griffiths:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
Okay, so you’ve got John the Baptist, who’s restored the keys of preaching the gospel. You’ve got Peter, James, and John, who’ve restored the keys of the kingdom and the holy apostleship, which directs the opening up of the nations of the earth to gospel preaching. So again I ask, what is Moses restoring, if not missionary work, right? What does this mean, the keys of the gathering of Israel?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. So if Moses isn’t restoring the keys of missionary work, but the keys of gathering Israel, the question we’ve got to ask is, what was Israel gathered for in the first place?

Scott Woodward:
Ah, shoot.

Casey Griffiths:
And this is where, when people read the story of Moses in the book of Exodus, they focus on all the plagues and the destructions and the battles and everything that are in about the first, you know, twenty chapters or so.

Scott Woodward:
The stuff that makes a good movie.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, yeah. The stuff that makes for good cinema.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
They don’t focus on the stuff in the second half of the book of Exodus, which is Moses was really the first temple builder.

Scott Woodward:
Ever. He is the first temple builder in scriptural history.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
That’s such a big deal.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. It’s the first time in scripture that the building of a temple is recorded in detail. And, I mean, we’re talking detail, like, down to, you know, the materials that the furniture should be made out of and the rituals that they should do. Moses has them build the tabernacle in the wilderness, which is essentially a mobile temple that eventually becomes the pattern for the temple that’s going to be built in Jerusalem later by Solomon, and then that is torn down, built up, refurbished, and is there when Jesus arrives on the scene hundreds of years later. So Moses is bringing back something that’s linked to temple work, right? And I think you can make a pretty good argument about this from the Doctrine and Covenants, too.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
For instance, section 124, which is about the Nauvoo Temple, verse 38, reads, “I commanded Moses that he should build a tabernacle, that they should bear it with them in the wilderness, and to build a house in the land of promise, that those ordinances might be revealed which had been hid from before the world was.” So Moses’s big mission was to gather Israel, but for what purpose? To build a temple.

Scott Woodward:
And why build a temple? So that those ordinances might be revealed.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Hmm.

Casey Griffiths:
So our first person is linked to temples. Moses.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. Moses is also the very first person to gather Israel from Egypt. So let’s think about the pattern here: Moses gathers his people out of Egypt in order to build a temple, right? The Lord takes him right to Sinai, and it’s at Sinai that he reveals the temple pattern almost immediately.

Casey Griffiths:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
So he gathers his people in order to build a temple so that, section 124 said, he could reveal the ordinances to them, meaning the laws and rituals of God.

Casey Griffiths:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
Let’s summarize it like this, then, Casey: The keys of the gathering of Israel are this. Those keys empower those who hold them to direct people who’ve already been baptized, let’s call them modern Israel, to then gather out of all the nations of the earth in order to build temples so that the Lord can reveal certain ordinances to bless both them and those who come after them.

Casey Griffiths:
Definitely a temple connection, right? And that’s a good way to look at it, that the purpose of gathering Israel is to get a temple built, to reveal ordinances, to start us down the road of making these eternal covenants with God.

Scott Woodward:
Joseph Smith, in Nauvoo he says it just like what you just said. Here’s his words: He said, “What was the object of gathering the people of God? The main object was to build unto the Lord a house whereby he could reveal unto his people the ordinances of his house and the glories of his kingdom and to teach the people the way of salvation. So when’s the very first time Israel was ever gathered? With Moses. And what happened right away? Temple was revealed, the very first in scriptural history. And that was revealed so that the ordinances could be revealed, and in our day it follows a similar pattern, because once they get into Nauvoo, you kind of have to track this carefully, but you’ll notice in section 124 when the Nauvoo temple is commanded to be built, the Lord says through Joseph Smith that His saints were to be called to come from afar in order to build a house to my name, he says, so that “I may reveal mine ordinances therein unto my people.” Like, there it is again. Boom. Gather to build a house so I can reveal my ordinances. And I think that’s the moment where Joseph Smith is exercising the keys he’d received from Moses in the Kirtland Temple. That’s my case.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. You make a good case. And I’m not going to disagree with you. The next one is the most mysterious. Elias is all he’s identified as. Section 110, verse 12: “After this, Elias appeared, committing the dispensation of the gospel of Abraham, saying that in us and our seed, all generations after us should be blessed. Now, we’ve already mentioned this, but Elias is the Greek version of the name Elijah, and, of course, Joseph Smith is aware of this similarity. He’s translated the whole Bible at this point. He’s studying Greek and Hebrew. So the word Elias actually shows up in the Doctrine and Covenants as early as section 27. The short answer of who is this Elias is, we don’t know. The long answer is this: In section 27 Elias, who’s later identified as the angel Gabriel, is said to hold the keys of bringing to pass the restoration of all things. So it could be Gabriel. In section 77, in verses 9 and 14, John the Revelator is identified as Elias, and he’s commanded to gather the tribes of Israel. So this is tying back to Moses, right? So it’s clear that just from those couple of references, Elias is a title that’s used for different people, and we don’t know who this person is, but because they committed the keys of the dispensation of the gospel of Abraham, one theory is that this could be Abraham, that Abraham appeared using the title Elias. It could be Melchizedek. It could be some other prophet from the time period.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. President Packer said it could be a guy named Elias that we don’t know about in scripture. Like, yeah, there’s so many possibilities.

Casey Griffiths:
That’s actually what the Bible Dictionary says, is Elias could be these people, or it could be a prophet Elias that we don’t know about. The short answer is we don’t know. But what is important here isn’t the identity of the messenger, it’s what he restores, which is the keys of the gospel of Abraham. What’s the phrase here?

Scott Woodward:
“The dispensation of the gospel of Abraham.”

Casey Griffiths:
“The dispensation of the gospel of Abraham.”

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
“Saying that in us and [in] our seed all generations after us should be blessed.” So do we have any clues as to what the gospel of Abraham would refer to? The good news of Abraham?

Scott Woodward:
Well, that’s a good question. Here are some clues: the word dispensation, sometimes we speak about that in the church to mean, like, period of time where the gospel’s on the earth or something like that.

Casey Griffiths:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
But it’s also just a generic word that’s used more broadly than just in the church. Like, in Joseph’s 1828 dictionary dispensation just means a system of principles and rituals. So this could be, like, the rituals or the ordinances related to the gospel of Abraham. Something like that. So Elias appears and commits the system of principles and rituals of the gospel of Abraham. Elder McConkie took a swing at this. He said that what was happening here is the Lord was restoring through Elias the marriage discipline of Abraham. He said, here’s a direct quote, “The Lord be praised, the marriage discipline of Abraham was restored. And it’s the system that enables a family unit to continue in eternity.” He also said, really straightforward, “Elias restored celestial marriage.” So Elder McConkie came down pretty clear on that, and I think I like that. You see, I think that feels right.

Casey Griffiths:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
That the dispensation of the gospel of Abraham would be that ordinance, or that system of principles, which enables a husband and a wife to receive the blessings of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And we know in our modern temples that that occurs at the marriage altar, right?

Casey Griffiths:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
That’s when those three names are invoked. That’s when a husband and wife are given potential to have their seed and all their seed after them become a blessing to the nations, have become part of that blessing group, the covenant group through whom God’s purposes will be fulfilled for this earth, and so as you come into the dispensation of the gospel of Abraham, picture a husband and a wife kneeling across the altar and the person officiating being authorized by the keys restored by Elias in the Kirtland Temple to be able to bestow those blessings upon that couple. And then that couple can now go forth, having their children born in the covenant, and become part of that group that is prophesied to bring about God’s purposes in blessing the nations of the earth. And so, to me, I feel like what Elder McConkie is saying totally can be justified, and I think that’s right. I think that’s absolutely right.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, I think he’s right on in that this covenant, the Abrahamic covenant, it’s really spelled out between him and Sarah: they receive new names, they’re told that they’ll have an innumerable posterity—that all fits.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
And there’s still one more messenger in the story. So the last couple verses: “After this vision had closed, another great and glorious vision burst upon us; for Elijah the prophet, who was taken to heaven without tasting death, stood before us, and said:” and now he’s going to quote the most mysterious passage of scripture in any book of scripture. I mean, Jews, Christians, Latter-day Saints have puzzled over this ’til their puzzlers were sore. It’s the last passage in the Old Testament. It’s Malachi 4, verses 4 and 5, which by the way, it appears in every one of our standard works, too. It’s in the Bible. It’s in the Book of Mormon. Jesus quotes it to the Nephites. Moroni quotes it to Joseph, so it’s in the Pearl of Great Price, and a modified version is section two in the Doctrine and Covenants.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
It reads, “Behold, the time has fully come, which was spoken of by the mouth of Malachi, testifying that he, Elijah, should be sent before the great and dreadful day of the Lord come, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the children to the fathers, lest the whole earth be smitten with a curse. Therefore, the keys of this dispensation are committed into your hands, and by this ye may know that the great and dreadful day of the Lord is near, even at the doors.” So Elijah appears, which, again, the significance of this happening on Easter and Passover can’t be overlooked. I served my mission in Florida, where there were a lot of wonderful people of the Jewish faith, and I even went tracting during Passover and doors were open. They have a little place setting set just in case Elijah comes. They were always disappointed when we knocked on their door and it wasn’t Elijah, it was two guys in white shirts and ties, but boy, this prophecy finds fulfillment not in Elijah coming to a family home but in coming to the house of the Lord, the first dedicated temple of our time. There’s a lot to unpack here about what Elijah brought back.

Scott Woodward:
And Joseph will do that over the next few years, especially in Nauvoo. He is going to be reflecting on these keys he received. I don’t think that he fully understood it all at once, but slowly unpacks it. In different sermons that he gives, we see Joseph taking a crack at this Malachi passage and at multiple angles to try to explicate it, lay it bare, make it clear and understandable. Let me give you two examples: In 1844 April he said, “The spirit, power, and calling of Elijah is that you have power to hold the keys to receive, obtain, and perform all the ordinances belonging to the kingdom of God, even unto the turning of the hearts of the fathers unto the children, and the hearts of the children unto the fathers, even those who are dead.” And then he said, “The spirit of Elijah is that degree of power which holds the sealing power of the kingdom to seal the hearts of the fathers to the children, and of the children to their fathers, not only on earth, but in heaven, both the living and the dead to each other. So as Joseph explains this, he seems to understand these keys of Elijah as a sealing power of the kingdom that can seal children to parents and parents to children back through the generations, and it starts to form something like a heavenly network where the human family starts to be linked together into, like, one united, eternal family, Casey. It’s, like, a sealed network of interwoven eternal relationships that starts to form the very structure of heaven, and that seems to be how Joseph understands it by the time of his death: that the sealing power is about linking the entire family of God together.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. We’re going to talk a little bit about this next time, but it’s clear that in the Kirtland Temple, Joseph Smith was kind of given all the puzzle pieces, right? He sees his brother in the Celestial Kingdom. He doesn’t know how his brother got there, and the Lord doesn’t explain how his brother got there other than to say, everybody that would have received the gospel will be heirs of the Celestial Kingdom. Still doesn’t answer the question of how baptism fits into the whole picture.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Griffiths:
Or ordinances or covenants. And it does take Joseph time in Nauvoo to kind of take all these puzzle pieces and sort of put them together. This is sort of raw material being placed in the hands of the prophet, and then he has to go and build the theology that we take for granted today.

Scott Woodward:
And that, Casey, is embedded in our little logo for Church History Matters, right?

Casey Griffiths:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
It’s all these little pieces coming together to form the Nauvoo Temple. It’s the crescendo of the theology, the keys, the revelations, all sort of coming together to start to form the magnum opus of the Restoration, like, where all the pieces come together will be in the Nauvoo Temple. And Kirtland is significant in that regard. Each of those keys and privileges that were restored by these three holy angels to Joseph and Oliver now build upon each other and work together to bring about God’s grand purposes for mankind. So we’re going to get to talk about that more as we get into Nauvoo, but anything else you want to say about those keys before we land the plane here, Casey?

Casey Griffiths:
Let’s sum up really quickly: so how did these three messengers pertain to modern temples? You’d say Moses enabled the directing of those previously baptized to gather from among the nations to build temples so that ordinances can be revealed. Elias gives us the blessing of extending to couples through marriage the Abrahamic blessings regarding how they and their posterity will be a blessing for endless generations. So eternal marriage, Elias. And Elijah gives us the keys to enable relationships to be made eternal so that the human family can be sealed together into one eternally united family under God.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
So all of this stuff is operative in every temple that the church builds today, but the Kirtland Temple, which ironically has no sealing rooms, no baptismal font, no ordinance rooms, is just a house where the Lord can reveal these keys and then allow Joseph Smith to kind of put together the larger structure of temple worship.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, and that’s backed up by Elder Joseph Fielding Smith. He’ll say about the Kirtland Temple that it was built, “Primarily for the restoration of keys of authority.” He says, “In the receiving of these keys, the fullness of gospel ordinances will be revealed. And so, in his mind, that really is the crescendo of the Kirtland Temple. That’s why it was built. We get this kind of preparatory temple so that we can get the full-fledged temple that is going to be built in Nauvoo, the kind that the keys that were received in the Kirtland Temple can now operate within. And so it’s kind of, again, line upon line. This step, the Kirtland Temple step, is essential for the Nauvoo Temple step to be able to happen, because we’ve got to get these keys. Got to get the keys.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. And I always have people come up and say, hey, if we ever acquired the Kirtland Temple from Community of Christ, would we turn it into a working temple? And the answer’s no. No, we wouldn’t. I mean, we’re not going to tear up the pulpits where Jesus appeared.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. Hey, I’ve got to interrupt here one more time to say Casey didn’t know how right he was in his little prediction here, because one week after we recorded this episode, the church announced that it did in fact purchase the Kirtland Temple, and in a Frequently Asked Questions document they released on their Newsroom, they specifically responded to the question, “Will the Kirtland Temple be converted into a functioning Latter-day Saint temple?” And in their response, they said, “No. The Kirtland Temple will be maintained and presented as a historic building that is open to the public.” So, bam. Casey was totally right. Anyway, back to the episode.

Casey Griffiths:
And that really wasn’t the purpose for the temple. If we acquired the temple, we’d probably do the same thing with it that Community of Christ does right now, which is treat it as a sacred space where the Savior himself appeared, but he just gave them the pieces that they needed to construct the full system of temple worship that’s going to come later in Nauvoo and also in Utah, because we don’t really get the whole picture together until the St. George Temple, to be honest with you.

Scott Woodward:
That’s a great point. So the Kirtland endowment, Casey, was a bunch of things that culminated ultimately in section 110. It was ordinances, washing, anointing, sealing.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
It was washing of the feet. It was also the divine teachings that come in the form of revelation, oftentimes amidst spiritual outpourings and divine manifestations. It’s all of that. Let’s call all of that a partial fulfillment of the promised endowment of power, because Joseph Smith calls those things part of the endowment. Right?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
But then when we get to April 3, 1836, then we have Jesus saying that the hearts of thousands and tens of thousands are going to rejoice because of the blessing which shall be poured out and the endowment with which my servants have been endowed in this house. And that could have some reference to those spiritual outpourings as well, but the timing is significant. As soon as he finishes that, now Moses, Elias, and Elijah show up and confer that final piece, the capstone, the crowning bit of the Kirtland endowment.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And I think we can safely see, Casey, how in verse 10, when the Lord said that “this is the beginning of the blessing[s] which shall be poured out upon the heads of my people”—would I have liked to have been in those meetings watching people speak in tongues and watching the whole congregation stand up and seeing angels? Like, I think that’d be super cool, but more significant than that are the keys that are going to enable the sealing together of the entire human family, right? We’re talking living and dead. We’re talking everyone who’s ever lived. We’re talking that if this doesn’t happen, to put it in Moroni’s words in D&C 2, the whole earth would be utterly wasted, you know?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
That’s how big a deal the coming of Moses, Elias, and Elijah is. And so we are still reaping the blessings of the Kirtland endowment today in every ordinance that happens in the temple. Everything prior to that was prelude, and that is the ultimate gift that keeps on giving. Thank you for listening to this episode of Church History Matters. Next week, Casey and I follow the brief stop the Prophet Joseph and the Saints make in northern Missouri in 1838, and the two temples that almost were, that is the Far West and Adam-ondi-Ahman temples. Both had grounds officially dedicated for their construction, but neither was ever built, and we’ll talk about why. Then we’ll make our way with the saints to Nauvoo, Illinois, where the temple story enters into the next phase of development. So stay tuned, and we’ll see you next time. If you’re enjoying Church History Matters, we’d appreciate it if you could take a moment to subscribe, rate, review, and comment on the podcast. That makes us easier to find. Also, we’d love to hear your suggestions for future series on this podcast. So if there’s a church history topic you think would be worth exploring for multiple episodes, send us your idea to podcasts@scripturecentral.org. We promise to consider all suggestions. Today’s episode was produced by Scott Woodward and edited by Nick Galieti and Scott Woodward, with show notes and transcript by Gabe Davis. Church History Matters is a podcast of Scripture Central, a nonprofit which exists to help build enduring faith in Jesus Christ by making Latter-day Saint scripture and church history accessible, comprehensible, and defensible to people everywhere. For more resources to enhance your gospel study, go to scripturecentral.org, where everything is available for free because of the generous donations of people like you. And while we try very hard to be historically and doctrinally accurate in what we say on this podcast, please remember that all views expressed in this and every episode are our views alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Scripture Central or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Thank you so much for being a part of this with us.