Today’s guest post is by Todd Smithson.
We often imagine revelation as a telegram from heaven—new coordinates, new rules, new certainties delivered to the deserving. But the word itself whispers another story. Revelare: to lift the veil. To uncover what has been there all along.
Revelation is not new information but new sight. It does not add; it removes. It peels away the blindness we mistake for light, the assumptions we’ve polished into idols. When the veil falls, the world looks at once ancient and new, and we realize that God had not been silent—we had been deaf.
To receive revelation, then, is to repent—not in the shameful sense of groveling, but in the liberating sense of turning, of yielding to what is true. Repentance is the humility that lets the veil drop; revelation is what we see when it does.
The implications of seeing repentance as a form of revelation are profound. It means that redemption’s light does not descend from above but rises from within, illuminating even the places we have tried to hide. Our shadows are not disqualified; they become the canvas upon which light reveals itself. In this way, darkness is not banished but transformed—the very soil from which new sight grows. When we allow revelation to touch our shame, even our failures become translucent with grace.
In a post-Enlightenment world dominated by intellectual thought, revelation often finds itself trapped in the mind alone—reduced to information, argument, or belief. But revelation was never meant to live only in ideas. As John wrote, the Word became flesh. The larger truth is not heavenly data descending from on high, but divinity taking form in the ordinary, the human, the here and now. The Christ is being revealed in each of us as an embodied reality—truth made visible in love, compassion, and the willingness to see anew.
Even Moroni’s final plea—to ask God, with real intent, and that by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things—has often been misunderstood. It has become, for many, a mechanism of confirmation rather than revelation. The difference is subtle but essential: one manipulates the subjective as proof of the objective, while the other opens the heart to encounter. Moroni’s invitation was never meant to explain divinity but to meetit—to enter into relationship, not validation. Revelation is not a test we pass but a Presence we yield to.
This is the pattern repeated throughout scripture—in stories like Enos and Alma the Younger, each reimagining God, transforming their idea of a deity who demands blood into the realization of a God who trusts love. Revelation begins as a disruption in the mind, a turning of thought, but it does not end there. That same grace moves inward until it blossoms in the heart and body. This is what it means to be alive in Christ: to awaken from the old imagination of fear into the living reality of love.
We often think sin makes us unacceptable to God, while God sees sin as the way to make himself acceptable to us. As the saying goes, absence makes the heart grow fonder—so does separation from God provide the fertile ground for our deepest longing. It is through trial and error that trust expands, through failure that love becomes more than theory. Perfection, if it were possible, would cast a diabolical shadow: the suspicion that God’s goodness might be self-serving, that his truth might be for his own honor rather than our healing. But imperfection keeps us honest; it keeps us reaching. The gap itself becomes grace.
When we as Latter-day Saints speak of Christ—particularly of the “doctrine of Christ”—we often use the word as though it were simply Jesus’s last name. Yet in Nephi’s language, Christdescribes something larger: the universal pattern of transformation revealed through Jesus but not confined to him. It is the movement from blindness to sight, from death to life, from self to love. Jesus embodied the Christ, showing us what it looks like when divinity and humanity meet without remainder. To take upon ourselves the name of Christ, then, is not merely to claim belief in him but to participate in that same pattern of unveiling—to let revelation become flesh in us.
Those who demand revelation as proof of their righteousness will miss it, because revelation undoes righteousness as we imagine it. It finds us not in the throne room of certainty but in the quiet ruin of our own knowing. There, in that naked place, the light does not arrive—it is uncovered.
I have ended many days looking back and realizing that, though I was awake, my hours resembled something closer to the walking dead. Perhaps the truest revelation is found where we least think to look. While we wait for the seas to part and mark the path ahead, we miss the gentle Spirit whispering the truth of where we have already walked.
The enemy of revelation, then, is pride—the need to be right. Nothing dams the possibility of seeing faster than the conviction that one already sees.
Revelation does not crown our certainty; it dismantles it. It invites us to see again—each moment, each face, each failure—as if for the first time. And perhaps this is all repentance ever was: not the fear of being wrong, but the courage to see.
- Rethinking Revelation: If revelation is less about receiving new information and more about removing the veil—seeing what has always been true—how might that reframe the way we understand historical “revelations” such as the 1978 priesthood revelation? Was it God changing His will, or humanity finally seeing more clearly what had been true all along?
- Repentance as Sight: If repentance is the humility to see differently rather than the shame of being wrong, how might this shift the way we experience personal and communal change? What practices help us cultivate this kind of seeing?
- The Risk of Certainty: In a culture that prizes doctrinal clarity and prophetic authority, how can we hold space for revelation that unsettles rather than confirms what we already believe? What might humility look like in our approach to ongoing revelation?
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
My question is exactly what revelation from god is supposed to be or look like. I think a lot of it depends on how you define god. The way I see god, it is a natural force and is synonymous with nature itself. Revelation can then only be obtained by experimentation and discovery. There can perhaps be a lot of different right answers, especially in regard to morality, with some of these right answers even being mutually exclusive, and right only in certain contexts. But there are definitely wrong answers. I think scientific discovery and moral reasoning has been a form of revelation. What’s right and true has been rooted in evidence and good argumentation. But not everything can be shown by empirical proof. A lot of knowledge has to be derived and cannot be immediately observed. There are some propositions we have to have confidence in. Sometimes we have to claim we’re right and show the evidence, show the reasoning. Sometimes we might even have to ask the audience to simply trust the experts, because the evidence is too hard for a lay mind to understand and its presentation would require the listener considerable time simply to read and digest. At the same time, of course there has to be room for open-mindedness. But we shouldn’t be so open-minded that our brains fall out and that we get led away by the logically fallacious, unreasoned, unevidenced, and just plain mendacious among us.
“Revelation does not crown our certainty; it dismantles it. It invites us to see again—each moment, each face, each failure—as if for the first time. And perhaps this is all repentance ever was: not the fear of being wrong, but the courage to see.”
This resonates with me. I was raised with a John Birch father and mother who either supported him or ignored him. Either way, she didn’t challenge him. Because of that, I went on my mission as a very conservative person. Most of my fellow missionaries were much more open and not so conservative, even though they were missionaries and believed wholeheartedly in the church.
When I got home, I continued in the same vein until I was married and four years later divorced. This caused me to think a lot about who I was and what I believed. I started to question everything. It’s interesting to me that the “revelation” I received for myself was an opening of my eyes, allowing me to see that my conservative beliefs were not on solid ground. The interesting thing for me was seeing the scriptures in a new light and how they applied to current events in the world today.
Even now, 50 years later, I’ve found that revelation is seeing things in newer, clearer ways. I’ve also found much more peace within.
Brad – I very much agree that it depends on how one defines God, which I very much like your formulation. Scripture reads nicely when I interpret God as the “nature of reality”. I also very much like the idea of revelation as “discovery”, which aligns nicely with Moroni’s misunderstood statement in chapter 7. He says, “Ye receive no witness until AFTER the “trial” of your faith”. The epistemology of “faith” follows a similar path to science; the evidence is made manifest (revealed) as a function of being put to the test (tried). This is also congruent with how the concept of the “Holy ghost” is positioned within the transformational process referred to as “the doctrine of Christ”, Faith, repentance, baptism, holy ghost. If we follow the logic here, the confirmation of faith follows the pattern of first; acting (testing), second; repentance (revising), third; baptism (complete immersion), fourth; holy ghost (confirming evidence). I’m not trying to be obtuse here; I’m suggesting that Moroni distinctly informs us that how we often seek confirmation is backwards. We are simply told to read and pray, first seeking confirmation before we do any testing. We effectively skip steps in the process of revelation, critical of which includes acting and revising BEFORE confirmation.
Of course, we want the path perfectly cleared before we dare take a step into uncertainty, but that is NOT how Moroni states the process of divine revelation. Our epistemology has inverted the process, instead of using the book to encounter God (the greatest good, or however one defines God), we use God to confirm the book.
Michelangelo was once asked how he produced such masterpieces. He replied that with a new block of marble, he would walk around it until he could see the image trapped inside, down to every tiny vein. Then, he said, his job was simply to set it free. “Inside every block of stone,” he remarked, “is an angel, and my task is to liberate it.” Revelation, I believe works the same way. It does not create what was absent but removes what conceals. The end result is not newly made but newly seen—the unveiling of the beauty that was always there.
If revelation is unveiling rather than dictation, then “the 1978 revelation” (lifting the priesthood ban) becomes less an instance of God altering course, and more a moment of human vision catching up to divine reality. God didn’t change; we did. The veil wasn’t rent in heaven—it was removed from human eyes. This reframing rescues revelation from the problem of divine inconsistency. It suggests that “continuing revelation” isn’t God’s fickleness but our progressive healing from blindness. In this view, revelation is evolutionary, not revolutionary—it’s not the sky cracking open, but scales falling off our eyes.
toddsmithson,
I find Moroni’s counsel in verse 3 of Moroni 10 to be quite interesting in light of your OP:
3 Behold, I would exhort you that when ye shall read these things, if it be wisdom in God that ye should read them, that ye would remember how merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men, from the creation of Adam even down until the time that ye shall receive these things, and ponder it in your hearts.
Moroni prepares us (the reader) by helping us to understand that there are some things we need to bring to the table before we can expect a confirmation from God. And those things have to do with preparing our hearts and minds in a way that drives out negative biases and preconceptions. And the way we do that is by opening ourselves up to the “prerequisites” that Moroni outlines–which are:
1) Being open to the possibility that it is right and good for us to encounter the BoM.
2) Believing in the goodness of God and his willingness to condescend to each one of his children.
3) Taking time to seriously consider the message of the BoM.
It is then that we’ll be in the best possible position to receive the desired confirmation–because in our sincere efforts to follow Moroni’s counsel (in verse 3) we will have exercised the requisite measure of faith and repentance that’s needed for the spirit to speak to us without working upon us with any degree of coercion.
That said, I agree with much of what you say in your OP. The one thing I’d add to what you’ve written (very eloquently, by the way) is that the gospel has elements of both restoration *and* progression. And what I mean by that is–while much of our experience with revelation is indeed an unveiling of sacred reality we also experience an element of “newness” in the way that revelation transforms us into new creatures and leads us into completely new vistas.
toddsmithson, thank you for a poetic piece that read as heartfelt. It uplifted my spirits and set my sights on the divine again.