The Kingdom Rolls Forth

Six verses, and every one of them borrowed: a herald’s cry, a king’s dream-stone, a wedding supper, and a prayer that turns another prayer’s closing words into a petition about the earth.

What this page maps. Modern revelation, reported as the text gives it. D&C 65 is six verses long. It names no recipient, and its speaker is identified only obliquely — the section opens by reporting “a voice as of one sent down from on high” (D&C 65:1) and closes in the second person addressed to God, “that thou, O God, mayest be glorified in heaven so on earth” (D&C 65:6). This page reports that shift of address as a feature of the text and does not resolve who is speaking at either end. The occasion, date and place of the revelation are outside this wiki’s source text.

Standing disclosure — KJV-overlap material. This page reports verbal correspondence with the King James text as textual fact, including where the correspondence follows the KJV’s English translation. What that correspondence implies about the origin of the Doctrine and Covenants text — in any direction — is an external question outside this wiki’s scope.

Account

A section that changes who it is talking to

The six verses move through three postures, and the page’s first job is to mark them, because a reader can slide past the change. Verses 1 to 3 report a voice and quote its cry. Verses 4 and 5 are imperatives addressed to hearers — “Pray unto the Lord, call upon his holy name” (D&C 65:4); “Call upon the Lord, that his kingdom may go forth upon the earth” (D&C 65:5). Verse 6 is not an instruction to pray but a prayer, in the second person to God, with a doxology attached. That the section ends by performing what verses 4 and 5 command is a structural fact of the text; what it implies about how the section was meant to be used is not this wiki’s to assert.

The cry

[Textual] — verbatim quotation. () - D&C 65:1: “yea, whose voice is unto men—Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” - Matthew 3:3: “The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”

Eleven consecutive words match without variation — “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” (D&C 65:1, Matthew 3:3) — the revelation joining the first of them to the preceding clause with a dash, printing “unto men—Prepare” (D&C 65:1), where the Gospel sets it off with a comma. The pairing is with the Gospel and not with the prophecy the Gospel attributes the words to, and the reason is a distribution fact worth stating exactly. “Prepare ye the way of the Lord” stands at ten distinct frozen verses in the corpus, including Isaiah 40:3. But the second half of the cry does not stand there: Isaiah 40:3 reads “make straight in the desert a highway for our God”, and “make his paths straight” stands at exactly seven distinct frozen verses, none of them in Isaiah — Matthew 3:3, Mark 1:3, Luke 3:4, 1 Nephi 10:8, D&C 33:10, D&C 65:1, and D&C 133:17. The section carries the Gospels’ form of the cry, not the prophecy’s, and this record is drawn to match. Divergence: the Gospel locates the voice in the wilderness; the section locates it “as of one sent down from on high” (D&C 65:1) and describes its reach rather than its place.

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () - D&C 65:3: “Yea, a voice crying—Prepare ye the way of the Lord, prepare ye the supper of the Lamb, make ready for the Bridegroom.” - Revelation 19:9: “Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb.”

“supper of the Lamb” stands at exactly two distinct frozen verses in the corpus, these two. Divergences: the vision calls it the marriage supper and the section does not; the vision blesses those called to it, and the section commands its hearers to prepare it. The bridegroom belongs to the section’s verse and not to the vision’s.

The stone

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () - D&C 65:2: “as the stone which is cut out of the mountain without hands shall roll forth, until it has filled the whole earth.” - Daniel 2:45: “Forasmuch as thou sawest that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it brake in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold”

“cut out of the mountain without hands” stands at exactly two distinct frozen verses in the corpus, these two. The divergence is the verb the stone is given. In the interpretation of the dream the stone smites and breaks in pieces (Daniel 2:34; Daniel 2:45); in the section the stone rolls forth. Nothing in the section’s verse breaks anything.

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () - D&C 65:2: “shall roll forth, until it has filled the whole earth.” - Daniel 2:35: “and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.”

“filled the whole earth” stands at exactly two distinct frozen verses in the corpus, these two. In the dream the stone becomes a mountain and the mountain fills the earth; in the section it is the gospel that rolls forth to the ends of the earth, “as the stone” (D&C 65:2), which makes the stone the section’s simile rather than its subject. That grammatical difference is the whole of what the section adds to the figure, and it is a textual fact rather than a reading.

The section’s own subject in that verse is a set of keys: “The keys of the kingdom of God are committed unto man on the earth” (D&C 65:2). “keys of the kingdom” stands at eight distinct frozen verses in the corpus — Matthew 16:19 and seven in the Doctrine and Covenants (D&C 65:2, 81:2, 90:2, 113:6, 128:10, 128:14, 128:20). The census is given here as a term-fact; the keys themselves are treated on The Committing of Keys, and no connection is registered to them on this page.

The prayer

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () - D&C 65:6: “that thine enemies may be subdued; for thine is the honor, power and glory, forever and ever. Amen.” - Matthew 6:13: “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.”

Divergences, and they are substantive rather than incidental: the prayer’s triad is kingdom, power and glory; the section’s is honor, power and glory. The kingdom has been moved — it is the subject of the section’s petition rather than a term of its doxology: “may the kingdom of God go forth, that the kingdom of heaven may come” (D&C 65:6). The exact string “thine is the honor, power and glory” stands at one frozen verse in the corpus, D&C 65:6, and “the kingdom of heaven may come” likewise at one, the same verse. The prayer’s petition also stands in the corpus in a second rendering (3 Nephi 13:13), which reads “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.” — disclosed, not ranked; the pairing is with Matthew because of the “for ever”/“forever” split alone, which is thin, and the record’s evidence rests on the triad and not on that.

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () - D&C 65:6: “Wherefore, may the kingdom of God go forth, that the kingdom of heaven may come, that thou, O God, mayest be glorified in heaven so on earth” - Matthew 6:10: “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.”

Two petitions of the prayer are folded into one sentence and both are altered. “Thy kingdom come” becomes two kingdoms in sequence, one going forth and one coming (D&C 65:6); and the earth-and-heaven clause is inverted, the prayer asking that God’s will be done on earth as in heaven and the section asking that God be glorified in heaven so on earth. The second rendering in the corpus reads “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” (3 Nephi 13:10) — disclosed, not ranked.

Significance

This is the shortest section in the cluster and, verse for verse, the densest in borrowed language: a Gospel cry, a Danielic stone, a supper from the Revelation, and two petitions of one prayer, inside six verses. What the section does with them is consistent and is worth naming as a pattern rather than as four separate observations. In every case the borrowed figure is set in motion. The stone that smites becomes a stone that rolls; the supper one is called to becomes a supper one prepares; the kingdom asked to come becomes a kingdom asked to go forth so that another may come. The section takes static images and gives them verbs of travel.

That is a description of what the text does, not a claim about intent. Whether the pattern is deliberate is the kind of question the wiki leaves with the reader; that every one of the six verses carries language standing elsewhere in the corpus is a countable fact, and the counts are given above.

Key references

D&C 65:1–3 — the voice and its cry; the keys; the stone
D&C 65:4–5 — the imperatives to pray
D&C 65:6 — the prayer and its doxology
Daniel 2:34–35, Daniel 2:45 — the dream, its stone, and the interpretation
Matthew 3:3, Matthew 6:10, Matthew 6:13, Revelation 19:9 — the passages the section’s language tracks

The Day of the Lord · The Missionary Charge · The Committing of Keys · The Signs of the Coming · Zion · Index · Connections

Sources

Doctrine and Covenants section 65 (verse text only; headnotes excluded). Cross-references quoted from Daniel 2, Matthew 3, Matthew 6, Revelation 19, and 3 Nephi 13. Isaiah 40:3 is quoted inside a disclosure to show why the record pairs with the Gospel rather than the prophecy, and no connection is registered to it. The keys census cites Matthew 16:19 and six further Doctrine and Covenants verses by reference only.

Every quote is verbatim from the frozen source text, cited to its exact reference and checked character-for-character; no quote crosses a verse boundary. Six connection records are registered here, all [textual] and all asserted_by: wiki — the section names no source for any of its borrowed language. Distribution figures are counts of distinct frozen verses in the corpus, derived by search at the time of writing.