The Revelation and Response

This article really helps to put in context the great revelation on the dead to President Joseph F. Smith.  It tells both of the circumstances in the life of Joseph F. Smith in 1918—who died shortly after the revelation—and the story of Susa Young Gates, a great advocate in her day of temple work and family history research.  She was a leader in the Church and spent many years seeking to encourage members of the Church to participate in family history and temple work, but apparently (not unlike today) it was difficult to get them involved.  The article states, “Susa often felt that she was waging an uphill battle.  She believed that too many Latter-day Saints exhibited ‘a very general indifference’ toward genealogy and temple work.  ‘Not even an angel from heaven could induce some of these club women and these successful business men to set aside a portion of their time for temple work,’ Susa wrote to a friend.”  She was a very close friend to President Smith and was privileged to read the revelation before it was published to the Church.  She was overjoyed with the revelation, particularly because of how it could help inspire members to participate more in the work of the temple.  She wrote to a friend about it, “Think of the impetus this revelation will give to temple work throughout the Church!” 

                This story highlights that the revelation was not given just for our enjoyment or so that we could have interesting information about the life hereafter.  The revelation came, at least in part, in order to inspire and motivate members of the Church to participate in the great work of the salvation for the dead.  It helps to answer the “why” of temple work so that we can better understand what it is that we do when we “take names” to the temple.  We learn that those in the world of spirits have the gospel preached to them by “chosen messengers” who teach “faith in God, repentance from sin, vicarious baptism for the remission of sins, the gift of the Holy Ghost by the laying on of hands,” meaning that the dead learn the same gospel as us except that they know that baptism is a “vicarious” ordinance that they must wait for from the other side of the veil (D&C 138:31, 33).  President Smith saw that those faithful prophets who had died continued their work by preaching the gospel to the spirits of the dead.  It’s as if he was saying, “These prophets who tirelessly did the Lord’s work while on the earth have continued to labor without ceasing on the other side for the salvation of the dead; shouldn’t you be doing a little more for the work of redeeming the dead?” 

The revelation is an invitation to us all to participate in “the great work to be done in the temples of the Lord in the dispensation of the fulness of times, for the redemption of the dead, and the sealing of the children to their parents” (D&C 138:48).  It is a doctrinally rich revelation that helps us to understand in a powerful way the plan of salvation, but surely its purpose is also “utterly wasted” if it doesn’t inspire us to actually do more to bring to pass the salvation of our dead.  We should not need “an angel from heaven” to get us involved in the work—we have a revelation from God which can, in the words of Sister Gates, motivate us to “rise to the measure of fulness in response to this heavenly manifestation!”