In section 99 John Murdock is called to serve as a missionary but is instructed first to provide for his children and arrange for them to travel to Zion. The situation with John’s children was complex at the time this revelation was given. The family caring for his oldest son, Orrice, had left the Church, and they insisted that John should pay them for keeping Orrice. The family looking after his next son, John, had moved to Missouri, and the family caring for his daughter Phebe told John they would “keep her no longer” and also demanded payment. John’s other daughter, Julia, was healthy and well in the care of Joseph and Emma Smith, but his last son, Joseph, was gone. “My little son Joseph was dead,” John painfully recorded. “When the Prophet was hauled out of bed by the mob in Hiram, the child having the measles lay in bed with him . . . at that time they stripped the cloth off the child. He took cold and died.” Writing of the mob responsible for his son’s death, John simply wrote, “they are in the Lord’s hands.”¹

John spent two months in Kirtland making arrangements for his children before fulfilling his call to serve in the eastern states. His children traveled to Zion with Caleb Baldwin. There they were placed in the care of Edward Partridge, the bishop of the Church in Missouri. It was two years before John was reunited with them. When John arrived in Missouri as part of Zion’s Camp, he was told that his daughter Phebe, then just six years old, was deathly ill with cholera. “I had seen all my children in good health,” he later wrote, “but the destroyer commenced his work.”² John continued, “I immediately went and took care of her until July 6th [1834] when the Spirit left the body just at the break of day, being 6 years 3 months and 27 days old.”³ John’s two older sons lived to adulthood and served with distinction in the Church.

Doctrine and Covenants 99 also contains a promise from the Savior to John: “whoso receiveth you receiveth me” (D&C 99:2). John had become a very real witness of Jesus Christ only a few months earlier. During the meetings of the School of the Prophets in the spring of 1833, John recorded a vision in his journal:

In one of these meetings the prophet told us if we could humble ourselves before God, and exercise strong faith, we should see the face of the Lord. And about midday the visions of my mind were opened, and the eyes of my understanding were enlightened and I saw the form of a man [the Savior] most lovely. The visage of his face was sound and fair as the sun. His hair a bright silver gray, curled in the most majestic form. His eyes a keen, penetrating blue, and the skin of his neck a most beautiful white. And he was covered from the neck to the feet with a loose garment, pure white, whiter than any garment I have ever before seen. His countenance was most penetrating, and yet most lovely. And while I was endeavoring to comprehend the whole personage from head to feet, it slipped from me and the vision was closed up. But it left on my mind the impression of love for months that I never felt before to that degree.⁴

John Murdock remained a witness of Jesus Christ throughout the remainder of his life. After serving as one of the first missionaries to Australia, he eventually settled in Utah. He died as a patriarch of the Church and is buried in Beaver, Utah.

1. Lisa Olsen Tait, “I Quit Other Business: Early Missionaries,” in Revelations in Context, 2016, 88.

2. Tait, 88.

3. John Murdock Journal, p. 25, BYU Special Collections.

4. John Murdock Journal, p. 13.