D&C Section Eight

Revelation is at the foundation of the church. No other church claims on-going revelation and yet it is by revelation that God has done his work among men since the time of Adam. In these early sections of the Doctrine and Covenants, the Lord is schooling Joseph and future church leaders in how the Spirit works. No one, especially the church's of the Joseph's day understood the principle of revelation since time-wise, they were at the end of the apostasy. So this principle would have been new to Joseph, and new in the sense that it was also a skill that he and the future church leaders would have to develop.

We tend to think of Joseph just naturally recognizing the Spirit; the Lord speaks, Joseph listens and that's all there is to it. But there is much more to it than that. Joseph has to learn to recognize the Spirit when it speaks to him just like the rest of us. To help his prophet and the establishment of his church proceed, the Lord gives Joseph the Urim and Thummim to receive many of the early revelations. Later, he will not need that help as he will become so skilled at receiving them that he is literally a Urim and Thummim.. Oliver didn't have the Urim and Thummim and the Lord temporarily provided him with a physical tool to help him. We're not sure what it was, but it was a rod of some sort. Verses 6 and 7 in the 1833 version of the revelation read: "Now this is not all they gift; for you have another gift, which is the gift of working with the rod; behold it has told you many things. Behold there is no other power, save the power of God, that can cause this rod of nature to work with your hands." That made sense to Oliver in his day, but for the general principle to be understood in a context that everyone could identify, Joseph and Oliver changed this in 1835 to read "Now this is not all thy gift; for you have another gift, which is the gift of Aaron; behold, it has told you many things. Behold there is no other power, save the power of God, that can cause this gift of Aaron to be with you."

In Section 8, the Lord explains what revelation is and how it comes. He says he communicates to us in our hearts and our minds. If we wait for some dazzling or dramatic experience, we will miss the revelation. President Kimball said that revelations "come down to prophets as deep, unassailable impressions settling down on the prophet's mind... Expecting the spectacular, one may not be fully alerted to the constant flow of revealed communication."