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The following remarks were shared as part of the United Kingdom Conference held in Edinburgh, Scotland on November 18, 2023.
Denver Snuffer: Did anyone bring a set of Scriptures with them? A set of the three-volume, new printed Scriptures? You did? Do you mind if…
Unknown: [indecipherable comment]
DS: No, if I let people pass them around. Is that okay?
Unknown: You have permission.
DS: This is one volume. Do you have the other two?
Unknown: No, I just choose between three.
DS: So you packed and you flew from the States, did you? Umm, this is hard-bound.
Unknown: Buffalo.
DS: Did they give you the option of getting them hard-bound?
Unknown: Yeah.
DS: They did?
Unknown: Got in early.
DS: Yeah, why would anyone do that? They’re flexible when you soft bind them, but they’re still in leather.
I wanted anyone who has not seen what these look like to have a chance to look at them. I’m gonna mention them… Let’s just pass them around. That way, it’ll wind up—if it goes this way and then this way—it’ll wind up back with its owner. I want to mention the Scriptures at the end. What time are we supposed to end here?
Unknown: Five o’clock.
DS: Five o’clock. So I’ll be right on the money.
When the Scriptures were being put together, one of the last things that needed to be done was to take the book of John and do something with it that made it a little more reliable, a little more accurate. And that assignment ultimately devolved upon me. But the material was not put in the New Testament; it was instead added as a section in the Teachings and Commandments volume, as section 171 and under the name of Testimony of St. John. I’m gonna be quoting from an incident that happened in that text.
As I was working on it, I got to the—very early on—I got to the wedding feast in Canaan [Cana]. And there were so many options using the many definitional choices that you could have with the Greek for the words that were being used, that I gave up, and I quit the assignment, prayerfully, and let the Lord know that, you know, it would never be done in time for adding it to the Scriptures because the choices were too plentiful. And that night, I got help on the wedding feast at Canaan [Cana].
John purposefully selected that and put it into his account very early on, in order to tell about an incident that would illustrate the entirety of the gospel of Jesus Christ and Christ Himself. And so the purpose of this event (which actually took place) would put a parable into the mouth of the master of the feast that illustrates what it is we find when we come unto Christ. So I’m gonna read from that testimony:
When the host of the wedding tasted the ceremonial water…
Now, it’s called “water” at this point because these pots were six water pots made of stone that were used for ceremonial purification in religious observances. And so far as anyone knew, they were simply six pots filled with water, the water being used in cleansing ceremonies.
When the host of the wedding tasted the ceremonial water, it had been converted into wine. But he did not know the source that converted the water, unlike the servants who recognized the Source.
In the account, this is an attempt in our language to replicate some of the subtlety that John had at his command, writing in his language. The word source,
- in the first use, he did not know the source that converted the water… is small s;
- unlike the servants who recognized the Source, capital S.
We can use capitals and small letters in our language in order to convey or communicate a point. Throughout the record, Christ is not recognized as who He is, except on rare occasion, and therefore, all the pronouns referring to Him are small letter. But when someone figures out and they’re recognizing Him in His true role, then in our language, we can depict the recognition with capitalization. So “source” gets used twice in this sentence: once small/uncapitalized and once capitalized, because the servants were the ones who knew who the Source was.
The host of the feast called for the bridegroom, and praised him using a proverb, saying, Careful men introduce their plans using the best wine, and later, when …followers are drunk, then their worst — but you have brought [to] us better wine than at the start.
This was a sign confirming his role as the Messiah…
You see, the Messiah is not like men who bring people aboard with some delightful tale, but when they get them within their grasp, then they abuse and misuse it. The Savior, when you come to Him, find out it only gets better. And this is a parable about how the Savior would conduct Himself—and does conduct Himself—with people who come to and accept Him as who He is.
…It was a demonstration of authority over both the elements and ordinances of salvation. Those who recognized this as a sign of his authority were awed as they considered it was him present among them. (TSJ 1:16-17)
But clearly, it was only a small group. And in fact, it was the group that was the most servile; it was the servants who recognized who the Master was. Others were oblivious.
Christ would be confronted by Nicodemus in the account that we have in the Testimony of St. John, and Christ explained to Nicodemus:
I tell you, if you want to ascend to the Heavenly Council, you must first acknowledge and give heed to the messengers sent by them. (TSJ 2:3)
See, Nicodemus had greeted Him by acknowledging Him, that He was a master and that He’d been sent by the Heavenly Council—and he wanted to know something about how to get back into that condition. And Christ is saying, “Well, if you want to ascend to the Heavenly Council, you must first acknowledge and give heed to the messengers sent by them.” So Nicodemus needed to change his priority. Instead of being attentive to the Sanhedrin, an authority that had not been sent; they’d simply inherited office by tradition that had been preserved under the arrangement that Moses had originally established, but they were hollow at this point. They may have authority that people recognized societally/institutionally within the group, but they didn’t have authority from the Heavenly Council. And therefore, what Jesus was saying was rather revolutionary. It was rather turning things upside down. It’s like that quote I read the other night: “All great truths begin as blasphemies,” as George Bernard Shaw.
Well, at this point, what Christ is saying is really in the form of blasphemy because he’s undermining those that are in a position of authority. Christ goes on to explain to Nicodemus:
Everything about my assignment, which I am now performing, was foretold by the prophets sent earlier to teach Israel, for they all testified of me. They told you I would come, and I am now here doing what was prophesied, but you refuse to see it happening…
That’s always a dilemma, you know. It’s happening right in plain sight. Easily ignored.
Enough is underway that rejecting it means you prefer darkness to light. Humble yourself and admit the prophets foretold the very things now underway; repent and be baptized and the Spirit of Truth will open your eyes. If you want greater light, you will obey this instruction. If you refuse, then you never meant it when you greeted me as an enlightened heavenly guide. (Ibid. ¶ 4, emphasis added)
That’s always the test, you see. “I believe in Heaven. I believe in prophets. I believe in Scripture. I believe in the Lord. And I believe all that He said throughout!” And yet, were the Lord here, you’d find reason to criticize! You’d find Him too congenial, too irreverent, or too somber. I mean, He says, at one point: “Look, I sent you people that played for you to dance, and you wouldn’t dance. And I sent you others to cause you to mourn, and you wouldn’t mourn. You’re never happy. You can’t be pleased. The only way to please you is to say, well, you are all of it.” But the truth is, none of us are all of it. We’re all not quite what the Lord was and is.
Jesus responded to the doubts of the Jewish religious leaders:
My doctrine does not come from me, but from God who sent me. Anyone who walks in God’s path will understand his doctrine, because that path increases light and knowledge. I testify of that path. Follow it and you will know whether I am sent by God or I am not sent by God. Teachers who preach from their own understanding only gratify their pride… (TSJ 6:5)
Okay, so we need to pause at that point because this is a really interesting moment in our Scriptures that we’ve been given. He’s saying, If a man is out teaching you and what he is teaching you, it hails from his understanding, then what he’s doing is being done to gratify his pride. So hold that idea of gratifying your pride, and I want to jump to a letter that was written by Joseph Smith in the Liberty Jail after he’d been confined for nearly six months and at a point when he did not know if he would ever get out of there. He wrote (after saying “many people are called but few are chosen”):
Why are they not chosen? Because their hearts are set so much upon the things of this world, and aspire to the honors of men, that they do not learn this one lesson — that the rights of the Priesthood are inseparably connected with the Powers of Heaven and that the Powers of Heaven cannot be controlled nor handled, only upon the principles of righteousness. That they may be conferred upon us, [it’s] true, but when we undertake to cover our sins or to gratify our pride, …the Heavens withdraw themselves, the Spirit of the Lord is grieved, and when it is withdrawn, Amen to the priesthood or the authority of that man. (T&C 139:5)
So if we undertake to gratify our pride, God ends any commission of authority given to that person. And Christ in the Testimony of St. John is quoted as teaching that “when you teach based upon your own ego, that’s only being done by a teacher who seeks to gratify his pride.” That ought to put us on notice about how careful we ought to be when we teach.
…but a teacher of truth teaches only what God tells him, and that teacher provides a light worth heeding. (TSJ 6:5)
So if you can find a teacher who is telling you that what they are teaching hails from a higher source, then you may have found something worth heeding.
Well, so far, as we have made a few milestones moving along in our present day, we began with the proposition that we were under condemnation, and we had been under condemnation since about the second year of the Restoration through the Prophet Joseph Smith, where the Lord says, “You’re under condemnation, even all of you, because you’ve taken lightly the former commandments and the Book of Mormon, not only to say but to do, and this condemnation rests upon all” (see T&C 82:20). So all of us got condemned in the revelation in 1832 (as I recall), and that never got reversed. Now, I was an active Latter-day Saint when I heard people from the podium (including a president of the Church, Ezra Taft Benson) teach that that condemnation remains upon us.
So, we accepted the proposition that we were under condemnation, and so, trying to figure out a way out of the condemnation, one of the things that multiple people were inspired to do was to go back and to take a look at the Scriptures that had been treated lightly. Two different groups of people, independent of one another (actually, at the first, there were three, but two of the three combined into one, so there were two by the time it came to me), two groups of people worked on trying to get the Scriptures right. And I heard rumors that this was underway, but I wasn’t involved.
And then one of the groups came to my attention and gave to me their work-up of the Scriptures. Within a few days after that, the second group contacted me and said, “We’ve worked up the Scriptures, and we’d like to turn them over to you.” And I said to both of them (after finding out that they had worked independent) that “You really need to get together.” So two completed projects! They all met at my office in the conference room to look at what one another had done, and they found out that they had encountered many of the same problems, but they’d reached different solutions. And my suggestion was, “I don’t want two different solutions. You guys get it right.”
So the project that had been worked on for some time—years—now was starting over again. And as it turns out, there was, at the same time, more material rolling out into the public view that had been withheld. And so the project started all over again. And it was worked on diligently. I think that effort, with more people using better resources, took about another 18 months to culminate in a finished project, which at a conference held in St. George, Utah was printed up and distributed in multiple copies, large print, for everyone to take a look at so that everyone could give their input if there’s something that someone else knew that we didn’t know about. And sure enough, as it turns out, there was a fellow who had spent years looking at the Joseph Smith Translation who told us that the Old and New Testament versions we had worked up were incredibly flawed, that the version that we’d been working with had been adopted by the RLDS Church (when they were the Reorganized Church) and that that version included many changes that a committee made that Joseph never did, and it omitted dozens—perhaps hundreds—of changes that Joseph had made that they didn’t feel significant enough to include in the text.
So now the Bible and the New Testament have to be reworked, and the project starts all over again, and we find out that some of the material that we thought was included in the revelations of Joseph Smith were, in fact, alterations that had occurred after Joseph had released them. And so the Doctrine and Covenants began all over again.
The Scriptures that are now available have recovered, as close as possible, the version of the Book of Mormon as Joseph Smith intended it. The version that the LDS Church printed was taken from a copy that got typeset in England. When the original Book of Mormon was typeset, on average, the printer’s copy made one-and-a-half errors per page when it was copied from the translation copy. So Oliver Cowdrey, making the printer’s copy, introduced errors. The printer’s copy then was taken to E.B. Grandin’s workshop, and John Gilbert typeset the Book of Mormon in the first edition—but John Gilbert was working with a text that had no punctuation. So when Gilbert is supplying the punctuation, he supplies the punctuation in the way that he understood the text ought to be punctuated. Among other things, the punctuation of John Gilbert (which remains as part of the LDS version of the Book of Mormon)—because of commas, semi-colons, periods (and the absence thereof)—has Trinitarian descriptions of God.
If you erase the punctuation and you let me re-punctuate it, I will make the words of the Book of Mormon consistent with Joseph Smith’s Lectures on Faith. It’s easily done. But there have been Ph.D. dissertations written on the Trinitarian view of Joseph Smith early in his career as a Prophet when he was writing the Book of Mormon, in contrast to his later theological teachings that differed—so Joseph Smith changed his theology. Well, let me change the punctuation, and I’ll make it consistent. It’s not that hard to do. And it has, in fact, much of the punctuation to the text of the Book of Mormon has been eliminated. Wherever possible, we have made it as simple as possible to give the greatest flexibility in understanding it.
So we have recovered, as close as possible, the version of the Book of Mormon as Joseph Smith intended it, we have eliminated things that never belonged in the Doctrine and Covenants, and we have added many of the missing revelations of Joseph Smith that he intended be received as revelations. And there was one talk that Joseph Smith gave in Nauvoo that he wrote up; he intended that as a sermon. It is in… The entirety of that talk is in the—we call it Teachings and Commandments to distinguish it from Doctrine and Covenants—but it’s in that volume that’s being passed about.
When they worked up the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants, Joseph Smith had sent Oliver Cowdery to independence, where a printing press was bought and they were going to publish the revelations. So in Independence, Missouri, Oliver Cowdery put together the revelations, and he called it the Book of Commandments. The Book of Commandments never made it into print because the press was destroyed. And when Oliver was attempting to translate the Book of Mormon, he was told about his failure and encouraged by saying, “You get to write other things later for people, not by way of commandment, but you’ll be able to write other revelations later.” When he was putting together the revelations for the Book of Commandments in 1833 in Independence, Oliver took editorial license because he could write on behalf of the Lord—and things in the Book of Commandments blew up; more got put in. When the press was destroyed and copies were smuggled out by the women back to Kirtland (where they had a press and where they were working on a new edition of the Scriptures), the Book of Commandments version of the revelations got incorporated as the “covenants.” And the “doctrine” was something that Joseph Smith worked on from the School of the Prophets: Lectures on Faith.
Joseph Smith paid attention for months to the content of Lectures on Faith, making sure that he got those right. But a committee took care of the revelations. So Joseph vouched for Lectures on Faith, but he left it to the committee to finish up the revelations. And so the doctrine, which is the Lectures on Faith, was Joseph assuring us that he would stand by every word that appeared in that, and the covenants were left to a committee. We have cleaned up the revelations, we have restored the Lectures on Faith, and we have published that as Teachings and Commandments.
We have published the most correct and complete version of the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible. The Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible (if you have Doctrine and Covenants) is mentioned in the Doctrine and Covenants and promised 15 times—that was a necessity for the saints to avoid falling under condemnation; they needed the Joseph Smith Translation. We’ve recovered it. It was promised 15 times. We’ve cleaned it up from what the RLDS did to mangle it. We finished up some of the things that Joseph added that have never been included, and that is The Old Covenants and half of The New Covenants.
We have obtained and implemented a new covenant from the Lord that was given in 2017.
We are currently advancing a translation of the Book of Mormon into Old Testament Hebrew that was mentioned earlier. We are also advancing work on a modern English version of the Book of Mormon because, as it turns out, the vocabulary that got employed at the time of the publication of the Book of Mormon in 1830 has language that we share with those people, but we have an altogether different understanding of the meaning of the words that got employed. And so a modern English version that works through the Book of Mormon—in order to give what today, in our vocabulary, ought to be understood by the word choices—is also currently advancing. And we’re hoping to get (I don’t know, Steph always says, “Never promise a date”) sometime before 2030 to get those in print. We have—modest though our ability and our capacity may be—we have, nevertheless, taken seriously and remembered the covenant people of the Jews and Native Americans, and we have begun a labor on both of those fronts. It’s still modest; we assume it will ultimately pay some dividends.
We’ve begun gathering funds to build a house of God—a Temple—to be built in the tops of the mountains.
We’ve published the New Testament and Book of Mormon in a single bound volume, as Joseph Smith intended to do and promised would be done. He wanted the Book of Mormon and the New Testament to occupy a single volume. So The Old Covenants volume is the Old Testament. The New Covenants volume is the Book of Mormon and the New Testament. And the Teachings and Commandments are Lectures on Faith and modern revelations.
We’ve created a searchable, free, online Scriptures site: scriptures.info. Can you imagine that that website was available for the taking? If you go to scriptures.info, all of the Scriptures are available. They’re available free, they’re online, and they’re searchable. You can do word searches. If you want to know how many times the word “iniquity” appears in the Book of Mormon (because Amberli has aroused your curiosity), you can go to scriptures.info, feed in “iniquity,” limit the search to the Book of Mormon, and see how many times there are. It’s searchable. Now, there have been some updates recently to our phones—the plague of modern man—a new program. And so I think that unless you have an older phone, the search engine on handhelds is currently being updated for the new generation of whatever they’re doing to charge you more money for your phone, and will be available soon. But if you search it from a PC, it’s perfectly established.
We have also established voluntary fellowships in which tithes are collected and then distributed to members of the fellowship to those needing assistance within the fellowship. Tithing doesn’t go anywhere except among the people who pay in the tithing. It gets used among those who have a need among the fellowship for food, clothing, housing, transportation, medical care, dental care, and education. If anyone within a fellowship has a need, that need gets addressed. Now, there have been fellowships with rather affluent members with practically no needs, and as a consequence of that, they aggregated a lot of money. And so they decided to reach outside their fellowship. This was them deciding this, voluntarily among themselves. No one’s telling anyone what to do with tithe money. It’s all voluntary, and it’s all a matter of consensus. But there was someone who had a profound disability who needed a van that would help transport disabled people and could be operated by someone that was disabled in a wheelchair. The fellowship had enough money; they bought that van for the purpose of helping someone that they knew locally. It’s up to the fellowship to decide such things. But that’s underway.
Volunteers have organized general and local conferences, including this one. I don’t know who paid for this, but someone did. We believe that the religion requires sacrifice of ourselves. The people who have come over here to participate in this are not being compensated; it is a financial burden to come and to participate. If your religion does not require that you make a sacrifice—and for the most part, people assume that it’s enough to be a home teacher or a home minister or serve as a Sunday school teacher. Tell them it’s gonna involve your pocketbook, and all of a sudden, “Well, that’s not sacrifice. That’s wrong! I’m doing… I’m giving up my time and my talent and everything other than money that the Lord has blessed me with or with which He may bless me to the building up of the Kingdom of God and the establishment of some theoretical future Zion that will never get here until after we develop 133,000 acres of real estate in Florida. But it’s coming!”
A website has been created to archive the record of the Restoration, including our conferences, our Scriptures, and everything going on currently. And that’s referred to as restorationarchives.com. Any talk that’s ever been given—I assume including the ones that are given here—will ultimately both be available as an audio recording and as a transcription because we have an obsessive-compulsive transcriber; I’ll spare naming her. But she does wonderful work, and she’ll get around to transcribing these things. (I hope part of that’s automated.)
And we have a website for events that get announced called remnantevents.com.
And those things are what have been and are currently available or are being prepared for as a consequence of what we’re up to. Small—I’ve never thought numbers mattered. I’m absolutely persuaded numbers don’t matter, now. Based upon the letter that Paul wrote to the Corinthians, the Lord’s ultimate success in Judea involved 500 who assembled together at the time of His ascension into Heaven. Those I assume to be the correct number of the real believers who had been invited to come along for that occasion. Literally, that means the greatest group of believers that the Lord ever spoke to was the group that He talked to in Bountiful, when people had come up 11 months after the destruction, at a festival time, and they’re standing about showing one another “the marvelous changes that took place since the last time we were at Temple Square. Look, the horn is gone!” Except now the spires are gone; the interior is gone. Sitting over here, you may not know the “marvelous changes” that have gone on.
All of the original handicraft of the workmen… I don’t know if this is lath and plaster. But it could be because of where we are and how old buildings are here. But all of the interior work of the Salt Lake Temple was made of lath and plaster, painstakingly done by pioneer workmen. It’s gone. They gutted the entire interior. Standing on Temple Square and looking through the windows, you can see the sky from the ground up. It’s… The entire thing’s been gutted. It will be a movie theater version of the temple endowment instead of the live version that was there before. The orientation of the rooms required that you circumambulate a circle, going from room to room and up the stairs; you were required to change directions (a symbol of repentance) when you climb and then change and continue climbing, and then ultimately complete your rotation once you get to the celestial room through the veil, entering from the terrestrial room. And then at the highest level, there were sealing rooms that were made off of the celestial room; an annex was made on the north wall off of the celestial room with a corridor that had sealing rooms on it. That entire north-wall annex is gone. I noticed that one of the problems the temple was having was that when they cut through, in order to add that, the blocks at the corner of the cut had begun to separate, so you could see the crack that was made. They got rid of all that to sturdy up the structure again. But because of that (if the Deseret News can be trusted), they have now moved the sealing rooms—instead of being at the highest level and off of the celestial room—they’ve moved it downstairs into the basement, in the new way of doing it. So you’ll get in… And by the way, in order to gut it, they had to remove the solemn assembly room at the top. I don’t know what they’re going to do to replace or if they’re going to do it. It’s so rare that they use the three pulpits at one end and the three pulpits at the other end. And they have a theater over in the Conference Center, so that’s where the General Authorities can come hold their solemn assemblies. So I don’t know what they’re going to do with that. But one of the premonitions that I had had some time ago was that the Salt Lake Temple would be destroyed. But I thought, rather like the trumpet being shaken out of the hand, that it would be the doing of the Lord, the trembling of the Earth. But as it turns out, it’s been altogether destroyed voluntarily by the proprietors. They’ve gutted it, and now it’s not gonna contain… I assume that they’ll try and put moldings back in. But they’ll be wood and painted; they’ll be, you know, pre-manufactured stuff (at least I hope it’s wood and not plastic).
Okay, so it’s five o’clock. And I understand this was the moment at which we were supposed to end, but I’m happy to—if anyone’s got a quick question—I’m happy to answer anything on any subject, including why there are so many New York Yankee hats over here! Don’t you guys know the Yankees are the evil empire? Get a Red Sox hat, for goodness sake.
Yeah, what?
Question: I was just interested in asking whether you could expound upon a comment that you made in Leeds that kind of made me struggle a little bit to think that, umm, when you said that we may have decades.
DS: It took 500 years for the Roman Empire to fall apart, you know. [Indecipherable audience comment.] It took 500 years for the Roman Empire to finally fall apart. The world is held together—tattered though it may be—the world is held together by American hegemony. If you take the American, really, Navy out of the picture (I guess the Air Force’s ability to transport part of that, as well), but right now, you know:
- Turkey and Greece would be at it.
- Right now the Armenians still have a battle to settle.
- Right now Iran and Iraq continue to have animosities.
- You don’t have as peaceful a coexistence between Pakistan and India because of the disputed border in that region.
- And what would China do with Tibet if some of the others came to Tibet’s aid? Where’s that going to go?
- Korea has historic grudges.
- Japan has historic grudges with China.
Everywhere you look, there are potential conflicts that are kept at bay because there’s a respected world order. So how long does it take? Well, once you remove the capacity to enforce that, you still have a period during which that animosity turns to violence. It’s not abrupt; it’s gradual and generally requires provocation. And the prophecy is that the turbulence, the calamity, the stuff that is to come is going to make a full end of all nations (T&C 85:3). Well, that’s quite a sweeping statement. To make a full end of all nations is not something to be achieved in a blink of an eye.
If you start today and you remove the American presence and their military hegemony from the scene, it’s still gonna take a while to work things up. I mean, go up to the castle and look at all the swords. How long did it take to fabricate those? You don’t get ready for that, you know, overnight, and you’re going to have to undertake the preparations for war. These people aren’t gonna go out throwing rocks at one another. It takes a while. But the wicked are going to destroy the wicked. That’s the prophecy. The wicked are gonna destroy the wicked, but it’s tedious work. I mean, there are a lot of wicked, but there are a lot of wicked to kill. And everyone’s got something to do when it comes to that kind of an undertaking.
So, yeah, don’t think of it in terms of an abrupt moment. There will come an abrupt moment, but that’s at the end, “by and by,” when the Lord in His glory does the wrap-up with, you know, things burning as stubble under the feet of the righteous. That will come. But that’s not where it starts. That’s where—after the wicked have had a season of hard labor destroying one another—it all turns about, and the Lord takes care of what’s left.
Well, thank you. We’ve got someone (a monitor) now at the door telling us to get out of here. So, [singing] “Get that thing back where it came from…”