D&C 99: John Murdock's Call Came With a Delay Built In

Verse 6 of D&C 99 says John Murdock's children are to be "sent up kindly unto the bishop of Zion." Most people stop on the bishop or the distance or the plain fact that a father is being told to wait. I stop on the adverb. The Lord could have ended the sentence at "provided for" and nobody would have felt anything missing. He added how it was to be done.

Kindly. As in, not just delivered.

Why couldn't John Murdock leave until the children were placed?

The revelation came on August 29, 1832, at Hiram, Ohio, and it's a mission call. Verse 1 sends John east, house to house, village to village and city to city. Verses 2 through 5 say what happens to the people who take him in and the ones who don't. Then verse 6 turns around and tells him not to go yet.

And now, verily I say unto you, that it is not expedient that you should go until your children are provided for, and sent up kindly unto the bishop of Zion.
D&C 99:6

John's wife Julia died on April 30, 1831, after giving birth to twins. Joseph and Emma Smith took the twins in, having just lost twins of their own. The baby Joseph Murdock died on March 29, 1832. That was five days after a mob pulled Joseph Smith out of the same house in Hiram and tarred him, and the baby had been exposed to the cold and had the measles. So by the time this revelation came, John had buried a wife and a son, had one daughter living in the Smiths' house and had three older children being passed from family to family in Ohio while he preached.

The bishop in verse 6 is Edward Partridge. He was in Missouri, since Zion in 1832 meant Jackson County. That fall John paid a man named Caleb Baldwin to take his three older children there, which was a long way for children to go with a hired driver.

The chapter doesn't say how they felt about it. I'll come back to that.

Does verse 6 mean family comes before the mission?

I think it does, though I'd put it more carefully than that, because the call in verse 1 and the delay in verse 6 are in the same revelation, spoken to the same man on the same day. Nobody is told to choose. He's told the order.

The phrase is "not expedient," too, and that's mild. Expedient in these sections tends to mean fitting or useful, so "not expedient that you should go" reads to me like a statement about timing and less like a wall. That's my reading and I wouldn't build much on it.

The Lord says something close to this in D&C 75, given earlier that same year, about men sent out to preach. Verse 24 says it's the duty of the church to support the families of those called. Verse 28 says "every man who is obliged to provide for his own family, let him provide, and he shall in nowise lose his crown." Paul put it harder in 1 Timothy 5:8, where a man who doesn't provide for his own house "hath denied the faith." Murdock's call fits between those two. He isn't excused from the work, and he isn't excused from the children.

Here's the part I can say from experience, and it's much smaller than a mission. In October of 2021 Melissa flew to Phoenix for four days to help her sister Katie after surgery. Caleb was six, Lily was three, Emma was seventeen and at school most of the day, and I was working from the kitchen table. Melissa left a list on the refrigerator, two pages in her round handwriting. When Lily gets up. Which cup. The folder that has to go back in Caleb's backpack by Wednesday or he loses his spot at the reading table. Lily will say she doesn't like the crusts and she does.

I read that list on the first night and understood something I'd been missing for years about verse 6. The list was the "provided for." Melissa wasn't leaving her kids with whoever happened to be home. She was handing them over with instructions. On Wednesday morning I made Lily's hair into something I'd call a ponytail, and she looked at it in the hall mirror and said, "It's very high, Dad." The folder made it back to school. That's about the size of my four days.

John Murdock's list was longer than that, and it ended hundreds of miles away.

What do verses 1 to 5 add if the children are the news in verse 6?

The first five verses are about receiving, and they're what gives verse 6 its weight. "Who receiveth you receiveth me," verse 2 says, which is Matthew 10:40 nearly word for word, and verse 3 says that anyone who receives him "as a little child, receiveth my kingdom." Whoever turns him away is rejected of the Father and his house, and John is to "cleanse your feet in the secret places by the way for a testimony against them."

I'm leaving the secret feet mostly alone, because D&C 60:15 says it more fully, a year earlier. There the missionaries are told to shake off the dust "not in their presence, lest thou provoke them, but in secret." The point in both places is that you do the thing without making a scene. A missionary who's been shut out of a house has every excuse for a speech, and the instruction is to wash up somewhere along the road and leave it with God.

Verse 1 is also a list of doors: house to house, village to village, city to city. John is being sent to knock on a great many of them, and the first door the revelation deals with is his own. He has a house with nobody to keep it and children with nowhere to be.

The chapter's weight is lopsided. Five verses carry the mission and what follows from how people answer it, and one verse carries the children. That one sits at the hinge, after the large claims and before the open future. Whoever reads it as a footnote has the proportions wrong, because the mission can't start until it's done. John Murdock seems to have read it that way, since he arranged the children before he went anywhere.

The bishop on the receiving end had his own kind of work. I wrote about that side of it in D&C 96 and the job of clearing liens, where Newel K. Whitney, the bishop in Kirtland, is told to take charge of a piece of ground and divide it into lots. It's ordinary, practical work. Partridge in Missouri was occupied with the same sort of thing, so the Murdock children were going to a man whose days went mostly to land and inheritances, and who had a good deal on his hands already.

What are verses 7 and 8 offering him?

Verse 7 offers him a choice, and verse 8 is the alternative. "After a few years, if thou desirest of me, thou mayest go up also unto the goodly land, to possess thine inheritance." Otherwise, "thou shalt continue proclaiming my gospel until thou be taken."

Neither has a date. "A few years" is as exact as it gets, and "until thou be taken" means until he dies. That's an open call, and it opens both ways, since it lets him go to Zion and be near his children or stay in the field. If John wanted his family back together in Missouri, the revelation told him he could ask for that.

He lived until 1871, nearly forty years after this, so the "if thou desirest" covered a lot of road.

I can't tell from the chapter what the trip was like for the children. Verse 6 says "kindly," and I believe the Lord meant it, but the verse is addressed to the father and the children aren't asked. A six-year-old doesn't hear "provided for" as comfort. He hears that today his father isn't here.

Otherwise thou shalt continue proclaiming my gospel until thou be taken. Amen.
D&C 99:8

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was John Murdock in D&C 99?

He was a convert from northern Ohio who was baptized in 1830 and became a missionary soon after. His wife Julia had died after the birth of twins in 1831, and he had been preaching while his children lived with different families. The revelation in section 99 was given at Hiram on August 29, 1832, and calls him to the eastern countries.

Who is the bishop of Zion in verse 6?

Edward Partridge, the first bishop of the Church, who was serving in Jackson County, Missouri. John Murdock's older children went there in the fall of 1832 with a man he paid to take them. The chapter itself says only "the bishop of Zion," so the name comes from Church history and not from the text.

Is "receive you as a little child" about children?

No, I don't think so, and the phrase in verse 3 is about how a person takes in the message, which is with the openness a child has before he's learned to defend himself. It echoes what the Savior says in Matthew 18, but the chapter isn't talking about literal children until verse 6.

Do I have to put my family ahead of a church calling?

Verse 6 and D&C 75:28 say a man provides for his own family, and the calling waits or bends around that. It doesn't say the calling is unimportant. Talk it over with your spouse, then tell your bishop what you can give and what you can't, and see what he says back.

When you get a call to serve and you feel the old reflex to say yes before you've checked the calendar, read verse 6 first. Say out loud what has to be arranged at home, who has the kids Tuesday night and who knows about the folder, and let that be part of your answer.

— D.