Line upon Line

In the winter of 164 BC the priests of Jerusalem had a problem made of stone. Judas Maccabeus had won back the sanctuary, and while his men kept the Syrian garrison pinned in its citadel, the priests set about cleansing the temple (1 Maccabees 4:41). But the heathen had defiled the altar of burnt offering. You couldn’t offer sacrifice on those stones. You couldn’t throw them away either, for they had once been holy. So the priests pulled the altar down and “laid up the stones in the mountain of the temple in a convenient place, until there should come a prophet to shew what should be done with them” (1 Maccabees 4:46).¹ Then they waited.

Twenty-two centuries later a girl in fleece pajamas sits cross-legged on a living room carpet with a cinnamon roll in one hand and a conference bingo card in the other. She is waiting too, mostly for someone to say “temple” so she can mark a square. Her father has the broadcast on. Her mother is hunting for a pen that works. Nobody in the room would call the morning extraordinary. The girl has no idea she’s living inside the answer.

Living on Echoes

The stones didn’t wait alone. Long before, in the days of the boy Samuel, “the word of the LORD was precious in those days; there was no open vision” (1 Samuel 3:1). Precious there means rare, the way water is precious in August. Amos saw worse coming. He foresaw a famine “of hearing the words of the LORD,” with men running “to and fro to seek the word of the LORD” and coming home empty (Amos 8:11–12). And a psalmist, standing where the enemy had “cast fire into thy sanctuary,” cried, “We see not our signs: there is no more any prophet” (Psalm 74:7, 9). They had scriptures. What they thirsted for was speech.

The rabbis later remembered that drought in a phrase that’s hard to shake. When the last prophets died, Haggai and Zechariah and Malachi, the holy spirit departed from Israel, and by holy spirit they meant the spirit of prophecy. What remained was the bat kol.² The words mean “the daughter of a voice”: not the speaker, but something born after the speaking. The rabbis still listened for it, the way a man in a dark house listens for footsteps. Their fathers had known a man with whom God spoke “face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend” (Exodus 33:11).

Yet at Sinai those same fathers had begged Moses, “Speak thou with us, and we will hear: but let not God speak with us, lest we die” (Exodus 20:19). They had asked for a prophet. The Talmud, in the same passage that mourns the departed spirit, remembers a day in Jericho when a bat kol told the sages that one man among them was fit for the Divine Presence to rest upon him, but his generation was not fit for it. The sages looked at Hillel.³ Heaven, it seemed, was waiting on the listeners. Now the children of Sinai strained after the ring a sound leaves in the air once the speaker has gone. For centuries Israel lived on echoes.

Long after, when the temple lay in ashes, the rabbis learned how to live faithfully inside the quiet. The Talmud tells of a day when a voice from heaven sided with Rabbi Eliezer in a dispute over an oven, and the sages overruled it. Rabbi Joshua rose and quoted Moses: “It is not in heaven” (Deuteronomy 30:12).⁴ The law had been given, and from then on the book and its scholars would decide. It’s a brave story. The Talmud tells it with a smile, then counts the cost.

The prophet Elijah, it says, reported that at that very hour God smiled and said, “My children have triumphed over Me.” Then the sages put Rabbi Eliezer under the ban, and he wept. It files the story under wounding with words. Heaven answered a humiliated man’s tears: a third of the harvest blighted, a wave that nearly drowned Rabban Gamliel, who had led the ban, and at last Gamliel’s own death. I don’t tell it to score a point. I think it shows what faithful people do when heaven stays quiet long enough. They build a house of learning around the silence, and after enough generations even silence can acquire furniture.

Winter in Solomon’s Porch

But a generation before that temple fell, the silence had already broken on the very mountain where the stones were laid up. “And it was at Jerusalem the feast of the dedication, and it was winter. And Jesus walked in the temple in Solomon’s porch” (John 10:22–23). The feast was Hanukkah, the yearly remembrance of that cleansing in 164 BC. The Mishnah, written down some two centuries later, remembers the old altar stones still laid up in a chamber on the north side of the court, where the Hasmoneans had put them.⁵ If it remembers rightly, the stones were within earshot. The feast that began with them was being kept, and the Lord of the temple walked among the worshippers and said, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27). After centuries of echoes, the Voice had come home.

The girl with the cinnamon roll won’t see Him walk through Solomon’s porch. Among the voices she’ll hear this morning are men He has called as “special witnesses of the name of Christ in all the world” (D&C 107:23). They speak His name because He first spoke theirs (John 10:3). The girl takes for granted an abundance for which generations of Israel had learned to ache.

A Book in the Witness-Box

And here the Latter-day Saint may reasonably glance at the several pounds of scripture on his nightstand. We have the scriptures. We have more of them than almost anybody, bound in leather with our names gilt on the covers. Nephi knew how the next sentence goes: “A Bible! A Bible! We have got a Bible, and there cannot be any more Bible” (2 Nephi 29:3).

The trouble is that we treat scripture like a recording, which is why “the scripture plainly says” feels so good in Sunday School. If it were true, the lesson would take five minutes. But scripture is a score, and a score wants a player. Closed on the nightstand, the Bible is black ink on paper gone a little yellow at the edges. It does not interpret itself, and every reader arrives at it from some street corner of his own. Take one plain word. Ask for bread at a bakery counter and you’ll get a loaf. Hear the word blessed at the sacrament table and a torn slice of store-bought white bread stands for a body broken outside Jerusalem. Knock on a neighbor’s door with hungry grandchildren behind you and ask again, and the word carries a weight no dictionary lists. Nobody escapes interpretation. The honest reader answers for it.

Joseph Smith had learned this by fourteen. The preachers of his day, he wrote, “understood the same passages of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible” (Joseph Smith–History 1:12). G. K. Chesterton came at the problem from another country and another creed, arguing for Rome, and he put it bluntly: “You cannot put a book in the witness-box and ask it what it really means.”⁶ A book can’t referee its own readers any more than a football can call a foul.

The Referee and the Father

That’s the argument most of us learned in seminary. Readers disagree, so somebody needs to settle the call. The argument is sound, but much too small. It makes the prophet chiefly a referee appointed because the players have become quarrelsome, and it quietly implies that if we ever learned to read properly, heaven could go back to being quiet. God sends living prophets for the same reason a father lingers at the supper table after the story’s been told. He wants to keep talking. Peter had already said where scripture came from: “holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:21). Scripture began as speech.

Listen to how He describes His own method. The commandments came “unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding” (D&C 1:24). There’s a whole theology of courtesy in that verse. The Lord of heaven stoops to the speech of a farm boy from Vermont and a former Utah Supreme Court justice from Provo. A list of propositions could be carved in granite and left to weather. God instead speaks to people in their own language, which is a strangely personal way for Omnipotence to behave. Revelation descends far enough to become conversation.

Nor does God work His prophets like a ventriloquist’s dummy. They ask. They study. They disagree, deliberate, pray, and eventually become of one heart, for every decision must be by “the unanimous voice of the same” (D&C 107:27). Elder David A. Bednar has said that revelation now and then comes like a light switched on in a dark room, but far more often it comes the way sunrise does, with a “slow and almost imperceptible increase in light on the horizon.”⁷ You look up from the page and find you can read without the lamp.

Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf has said plainly that leaders are human and that “imperfect people make mistakes.”⁸ The revelation had said so first. The same preface that speaks of servants in their weakness adds, “inasmuch as they erred it might be made known” (D&C 1:25). That candor does no harm to the promise later in the same section, that His word “shall all be fulfilled, whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same” (D&C 1:38).

The verse reads best as a co-signature. A father who co-signs does not promise his son will never default. He promises to pay. Scripture’s word for such a one is surety, and it gives the title to Christ (Hebrews 7:22). God does not disappear when His word passes through a mortal mouth. He stands behind it and lends His servants His name.

Yesterday’s Manna

And He seems to prefer it fresh. When Israel gathered manna in the wilderness, some tried to keep yesterday’s bread so they could spare themselves tomorrow’s stooping. “It bred worms, and stank” (Exodus 16:20). Yesterday’s manna was holy. It simply had no business pretending to be breakfast. Yet in the same chapter God commanded that one omer of it be kept “for your generations,” and Aaron “laid it up before the Testimony, to be kept” (Exodus 16:32–34). Laid up. The King James Bible uses the same words for the Maccabean stones. That jar is scripture: bread once gathered fresh, kept by command and holy for the morning it fell. Without it we might not know manna from frost. But the jar was never meant to be the camp’s only breakfast. The living voice is the morning gathering, with the dew still on the ground.

President Ezra Taft Benson had a phrase for this that still makes me grin. “The living prophet has the power of TNT,” he told BYU students in 1980. “By that I mean ‘Today’s News Today.’“ It’s a dad joke. It’s also doctrine, and he gave the reason in the next breath: “God’s revelations to Adam did not instruct Noah how to build the ark.”⁹ Every generation gets its own weather, and its instructions arrive the way news does: this morning, while the rolls are still warm.

Chesterton understood the delight of this fourteen years before he went to Rome. In 1908, still an Anglican and explaining why he accepted the Christian faith, he wrote that the Church “in its practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. It not only certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me to-morrow.” The man who lives in contact with “what he believes to be a living Church,” he added, “is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast.”¹⁰

A Latter-day Saint parts company with him over where such a teacher is to be found. But he had seen the paradox clearly. A dead teacher is wonderfully manageable. You can quote him, footnote him, win arguments with him, and put him back on the shelf when he becomes inconvenient. A living teacher suffers from the alarming habit of speaking again. Tomorrow he may say something you did not expect, and then the inconvenient object on the shelf is you. The girl with the bingo card lives in the dangerous house. So do we.

A Stone Under Moses

None of this makes us spectators. Moses once cried, “Would God that all the LORD’s people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit upon them!” (Numbers 11:29). The Restoration takes him at his word. The same Spirit that moves the prophet will tell the girl on the carpet whether he is one (Moroni 10:5). President Dallin H. Oaks has called these the priesthood line and the personal line, and he has warned that we need both.¹¹ The first gives the Church a voice. The second gives each of us ears.

On Saturday afternoon someone at the pulpit will read the names and invite all who sustain them to make it manifest. Hands will go up across the world. In living rooms they go up holding remotes and dish towels. We often hear sustain as though it meant agree. It is a much heavier verb. Behind it stands the Latin sustinere: to hold up from beneath.

When Israel fought Amalek, Moses stood on the hill with the rod of God held high, and Israel prevailed only while his hands stayed up. His arms grew heavy. So Aaron and Hur “took a stone, and put it under him, and he sat thereon,” and they held up his hands on either side until the sun went down (Exodus 17:12). Aaron and Hur steadied him from the sides. The stone held him from beneath.

What Should Be Done with Them

The Maccabees wrote their waiting into law. When they made Simon high priest, the decree said he would serve “until there should arise a faithful prophet” (1 Maccabees 14:41). The stones most likely perished with the temple. But before the temple fell, the fisherman whom Jesus had named Cephas, “a stone” (John 1:42), wrote to the Saints, “Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house” (1 Peter 2:5). The Maccabees had waited for a prophet to tell them what should be done with the stones. When the prophet finally came, his answer was to make a people out of them.

By the afternoon session the pan holds nothing but a smear of frosting. The girl runs a finger through it, licks it clean and raises her hand with everyone else, a little late, not quite sure what she’s holding up. Outside it’s an ordinary Saturday. The mail comes. A neighbor mows. And a people once starved for a single word sit in pajamas under an open heaven and hold up a prophet from beneath, plain and patient as stones.