“The Blessings of 1836 and the Difficulties of 1837,” Liahona, Jan. 2025.
The Blessings of 1836 and the Difficulties of 1837
Remembering our spiritual high points reminds us that we will eventually be delivered from our low points.
Interior of the Kirtland Temple
Photograph by George Edward Anderson, 1907
In March 2024, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints accepted the sacred stewardship of the Kirtland Temple ownership from Community of Christ. That temple is a special place, largely unchanged since its dedication in 1836. On Easter Sunday, April 3, 1836, Jesus Christ accepted it as His house (see Doctrine and Covenants 110). In that temple, we can feel His presence and envision in our minds where He stood.
The Kirtland Temple has several lessons for our lives today, some of which we can learn by thinking about the events of 1836 and 1837.
The Spiritual Highlights of 1836
In January 1836, as the temple neared completion, the Saints began to experience the spiritual blessings of a temple in their midst. They had been promised that in the Kirtland Temple they would be endowed with power (see Doctrine and Covenants 38:32, 38). This promise echoed what the Savior told His Apostles in Jerusalem in the New Testament. After His Resurrection, He told them that they should not leave to preach until they had been endowed with “power from on high” (Luke 24:49). Then, on the day of Pentecost, His Apostles received this power when the Spirit descended upon them like “a rushing mighty wind. … And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues” (Acts 2:2, 4).
In January 1836, Joseph Smith met with other Church leaders to pray, bless each other, and conduct Church business. After they blessed the Prophet Joseph, he saw a vision of the celestial kingdom. He saw Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, Adam and Abraham, his own parents (still living), and his older brother Alvin, who had died without baptism. Joseph learned that “all who have died without a knowledge of this gospel, who would have received it if they had been permitted to tarry, shall be heirs of the celestial kingdom of God” (Doctrine and Covenants 137:7).
Two months later, on March 27, 1836, the Saints crowded into the Kirtland Temple for its dedication. They listened to Joseph’s dedicatory prayer, in which he asked Heavenly Father to accept the Kirtland Temple as a place where the Savior “might … manifest himself to his people” (Doctrine and Covenants 109:5). Squeezed into that sacred space, the Saints sang “The Spirit of God.” They shouted in unison, “Hosanna! Hosanna! Hosanna to God and the Lamb!”
They experienced spiritual blessings at the dedication and during the coming week. They fasted, prayed, took the sacrament, washed each other’s feet, and experienced visions. They felt empowered to go forth and preach the gospel. They had been endowed with power from on high.
But the spiritual manifestations weren’t at an end. On April 3, 1836, the Savior appeared to two of His servants. “The veil was taken from our minds, and the eyes of our understanding were opened,” Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery said. “We saw the Lord standing upon the breastwork of the pulpit, before us … , saying: I am the first and the last; I am he who liveth, I am he who was slain; I am your advocate with the Father” (Doctrine and Covenants 110:1–4).
Following the Savior’s visit, Moses, Elias, and Elijah each appeared to Joseph and Oliver and committed to them keys that would enable them to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ and gather Israel, bless the earth with the Abrahamic covenant, and seal families (see verses 11–16).
The Challenges of 1837
But the Kirtland story doesn’t end with these marvelous manifestations. A year after the temple’s dedication, the community was fraying. An international economic crisis led to massive unemployment in the United States. Banks failed across the country, including a small bank established by Church leaders in Kirtland to spur development of the community. Joseph Smith and other Church leaders desperately tried to save the economy of the community. But the tide of the global economic crisis was too much. People began to lose jobs and homes. Many began to murmur against God and the Church. Why had the Lord allowed His people to fail economically? Some began to whisper and then proclaim that Joseph was a fallen prophet.
At one meeting in the summer of 1837 in the Kirtland Temple, Joseph Smith Sr., the Church patriarch, spoke in his son’s absence. As he spoke, a dissenter tried to pull him from the pulpit. When William Smith defended his father, a fellow Apostle threatened to kill William with a sword. Other men with knives and pistols surrounded William. The temple, which had been a place of sacredness and spirituality a year earlier, was now a place of violence, dissension, and chaos.
When Joseph Smith returned to Kirtland, most Church members sustained him as the prophet, but three Apostles were removed from the Quorum of the Twelve. Economic problems had turned into spiritual problems. Within a few more months, the Lord told Joseph to leave Kirtland for the safety of his family and for the sake of his own life.
Eyewitness accounts testify to the difficulties of that time. Vilate Kimball, the wife of Apostle Heber C. Kimball, sent a letter to her husband, who was then serving as one of the first missionaries in England. “I have no doubt but it will pain your heart,” she wrote to Heber, telling him about the dissenters. “They profess to believe the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants but in works deny them.”
Vilate knew that Joseph was not perfect. He had made mistakes in the Kirtland economic crisis. And she continued to love many among the dissenters. But she saw a deeper lesson in the events of 1837: “The Lord says, he that cannot endure chastisement but denies me cannot be sanctified.”
In the same letter, Marinda Hyde added a note to her husband, Orson, also an Apostle serving in England. Marinda’s older brother was one of the Apostles who had left the Church. “Such times in Kirtland you never witnessed as we now have, for it seems that all confidence in each other is gone,” she wrote.
The Lessons of 1836–37
Why remember the tragedy of 1837 and not just the triumph of 1836? Because, of course, the two can never be separated. It is such in our own lives. God grants all of us periods of spiritual blessings, times when He speaks to our souls and leads us by the hand along the covenant path. He grants us periods of stability, times in which we have enough and to spare, times in which our families are healthy and happy, times in which our friends are close at hand and commune with us. We all live through times that are like 1836.
But God never promised that we would only experience 1836. For each of us, 1837 comes. It comes with economic instability, when we worry about where money will come from. It comes with personal instability, when our families suffer from sudden illnesses, chronic diseases, depression, or anxiety. It comes with social instability, when our friends drift away or betray us.
If we don’t remember our own 1836 experiences—our own times in which we have felt the Lord’s hands in our lives—1837 might bring spiritual instability. It can tempt us to say, “This isn’t worth it.” It can tempt us to say, “God doesn’t love me.” It can tempt us to say, “Joseph Smith wasn’t a prophet” or “President Nelson isn’t a prophet of God.” It can tempt us to say, “The covenant path is not for me.”
But if we do the spiritual work of remembering and dwelling spiritually in 1836 even as we experience the trials of 1837, we can still be grounded in our faith in Jesus Christ, we can still know that God loves us, and we can still know that the Restoration of the gospel and Church of Jesus Christ is real and that the Lord leads His Church through His chosen servants.