The Revelation of John Explained

Fifteen questions and fifteen answers about another book — the one place in the collection where the text works with a named chapter and verse in front of it, and one of the few where it quotes a whole sentence of it back.

What this page maps. Modern revelation, reported as the text gives it. D&C 77 is fifteen verses, each one a question marked “Q.” and an answer marked “A.” — a format the frozen verse text itself carries. The section names no questioner and no answerer inside its verse text; the answers speak in the first person plural (“We are to understand…”) and at one point in the second person (“if you will receive it” — D&C 77:9). This page therefore attributes nothing to a named speaker and imports nothing from the excluded section headnotes.

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.

A caution this page has to make before it starts. The section cites the Revelation by chapter and verse five times. In four of those five, the verse it names and the verse whose words it uses are not the same verse. That is not a defect this page corrects; it is a textual fact that governs every record below and it is the reason none of the records here is entered asserted_by: "source". The instances are tabled in the section Where the naming and the words part company.

Account

What the section names, and how

The section names its subject in eight of its fifteen verses, and the forms it uses are worth listing because they differ. Three verses name a chapter and a verse: “spoken of by John, 4th chapter, and 6th verse of the Revelation” (D&C 77:1); “spoken of in the 7th chapter and 1st verse of Revelation” (D&C 77:8); “Revelation 7th chapter and 2nd verse” (D&C 77:9). Three name a chapter only: “the 8th chapter of Revelation” (D&C 77:12); “the 9th chapter of Revelation” (D&C 77:13); “the 10th chapter of Revelation” (D&C 77:14). Two name the chapter in words rather than figures: “in the eleventh chapter of Revelation” (D&C 77:15); and one names only the person, “spoken of by John” (D&C 77:5).

Two more verses point back inside the section itself rather than out to the Revelation — “spoken of in the same verse” (D&C 77:2) and “the things spoken of in this chapter” (D&C 77:10) — and the second of those two is a genuine ambiguity the page leaves open: whether “this chapter” means the section or the chapter of the Revelation under discussion is not settled by the verse.

The one place the section quotes

[Textual] — verbatim quotation. () - D&C 77:9: “wherefore, he crieth unto the four angels having the everlasting gospel, saying: Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads.” - Revelation 7:3: “Saying, Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads.”

Twenty-two consecutive words match, word for word and mark for mark, including the closing full stop — “Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads.” (D&C 77:9, Revelation 7:3). The run stands at exactly two distinct frozen verses in the corpus, these two. It is the only place in the section where a sentence of the Revelation is reproduced rather than described. Two divergences of setting are worth recording: in the vision the cry belongs to an angel ascending from the east and is addressed to four angels to whom it was given to hurt the earth and the sea (Revelation 7:2); in the section the four angels are the ones “having the everlasting gospel” (D&C 77:9), a description with no counterpart in the vision’s verse — and the section then identifies the crier, which the vision does not: “this is Elias which was to come to gather together the tribes of Israel and restore all things” (D&C 77:9).

Where the naming and the words part company

The verse the section names and the verse whose words it uses line up in one instance out of five. This table is the page’s central textual observation and every record below is drawn to respect it.

The one exact chapter-and-verse citation whose words the section then quotes at length points one verse short of the quotation. Whether that is a citation of the passage’s opening rather than its sentence, this page does not decide — it reports the offset and lets it stand.

The images the section glosses

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () - D&C 77:1: “Q. What is the sea of glass spoken of by John, 4th chapter, and 6th verse of the Revelation? A. It is the earth, in its sanctified, immortal, and eternal state.” - Revelation 4:6: “And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal”

“sea of glass” stands at four distinct frozen verses in the corpus: Revelation 4:6, Revelation 15:2, D&C 77:1, and D&C 130:7. The vision describes the object’s appearance and its position before the throne; the section supplies an identification the vision nowhere makes — that the object is the earth. That identification is the section’s own, and this page reports it as such rather than reading it back into the vision.

[Textual] — paraphrase. () - D&C 77:2: “Q. What are we to understand by the four beasts, spoken of in the same verse? A. They are figurative expressions, used by the Revelator, John, in describing heaven, the paradise of God, the happiness of man” - Revelation 4:6: “and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind.”

“four beasts” stands at thirteen distinct frozen verses in the corpus, eleven in the Revelation and two in this section (D&C 77:2, 77:3). The section’s answer contains a claim the vision does not make and then withdraws part of it in the next verse: the beasts are called “figurative expressions” (D&C 77:2) and are then said to be “limited to four individual beasts” (D&C 77:3). Both statements stand in the section’s own text and this page reports both without harmonising them.

[Textual] — paraphrase. () - D&C 77:4: “Q. What are we to understand by the eyes and wings, which the beasts had? A. Their eyes are a representation of light and knowledge, that is, they are full of knowledge; and their wings are a representation of power, to move, to act, etc.” - Revelation 4:8: “And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within”

The vision counts the wings and locates the eyes; the section counts nothing and assigns each feature a meaning. The words the two share are the nouns and one adjectival phrase, and the section reuses “full of” for a different object — the vision has them full of eyes, the section full of knowledge.

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () - D&C 77:5: “Q. What are we to understand by the four and twenty elders, spoken of by John? A. We are to understand that these elders whom John saw, were elders who had been faithful in the work of the ministry and were dead” - Revelation 4:4: “and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold.”

“four and twenty elders” stands at seven distinct frozen verses in the corpus: six in the Revelation (4:4, 4:10, 5:8, 5:14, 11:16, 19:4) and this one. The vision describes what they wear and where they sit; the section supplies three facts the vision does not — that they had been faithful in the ministry, that they were dead, and that they “belonged to the seven churches” (D&C 77:5).

[Textual] — paraphrase. () - D&C 77:6: “Q. What are we to understand by the book which John saw, which was sealed on the back with seven seals? A. We are to understand that it contains the revealed will, mysteries, and the works of God” - Revelation 5:1: “And I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the throne a book written within and on the backside, sealed with seven seals.”

The exact run “sealed with seven seals” stands at exactly one distinct frozen verse in the corpus, Revelation 5:1 — the section’s own wording interrupts it with “on the back”, so it is not a second carrier of the string. That is why this record is entered as a paraphrase and not as a shared phrase. The section then supplies a duration the vision does not state: “the seven thousand years of its continuance, or its temporal existence” (D&C 77:6), and assigns one thousand years to each seal (D&C 77:7).

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () - D&C 77:8: “A. We are to understand that they are four angels sent forth from God, to whom is given power over the four parts of the earth, to save life and to destroy” - Revelation 7:1: “I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth”

Divergence, and it is a real one: the vision’s angels stand on the four corners of the earth, the section’s have power over the four parts of it. The vision gives them a holding action; the section gives them a two-sided commission, “to save life and to destroy” (D&C 77:8), and a further one the vision does not carry at all — “these are they who have the everlasting gospel to commit to every nation, kindred, tongue, and people” (D&C 77:8).

[Textual] — paraphrase. () - D&C 77:11: “Q. What are we to understand by sealing the one hundred and forty-four thousand, out of all the tribes of Israel—twelve thousand out of every tribe?” - Revelation 7:4: “and there were sealed an hundred and forty and four thousand of all the tribes of the children of Israel.”

The two texts write the number differently and this page states the difference rather than treating it as one string: the vision has “an hundred and forty and four thousand” (Revelation 7:4) and the section “one hundred and forty-four thousand”. The per-tribe figure the section puts in its question is not in the vision’s verse either; the vision gives it twelve times over in the twelve verses that follow (Revelation 7:5–8). What the section adds is an identification of who the sealed are — “high priests, ordained unto the holy order of God, to administer the everlasting gospel” (D&C 77:11) — which the vision does not supply.

[Textual] — paraphrase. () - D&C 77:14: “Q. What are we to understand by the little book which was eaten by John, as mentioned in the 10th chapter of Revelation? A. We are to understand that it was a mission, and an ordinance, for him to gather the tribes of Israel” - Revelation 10:10: “And I took the little book out of the angel’s hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey”

“the little book” stands at four distinct frozen verses in the corpus: Revelation 10:8, 10:9, 10:10, and D&C 77:14. The vision reports the taste and the effect; the section reports neither, and instead assigns the act a meaning — a mission and an ordinance — and names the eater as the same figure it named two questions earlier, “this is Elias, who, as it is written, must come and restore all things” (D&C 77:14). Note that the section applies that name twice, at 77:9 and 77:14, to what its own wording presents as two different figures — the angel ascending from the east, and John. This page reports the double application and does not resolve it.

What the section names but does not quote

Three of the fifteen answers name a chapter of the Revelation and then say something about timing without carrying any of its words: the sounding of the trumpets is placed “in the beginning of the seventh thousand years” (D&C 77:12); the ninth chapter’s contents are placed “after the opening of the seventh seal, before the coming of Christ” (D&C 77:13); and the two witnesses of the eleventh chapter are identified as “two prophets that are to be raised up to the Jewish nation in the last days” (D&C 77:15). At the 2026-08-10 editorial review, the trumpets and the two witnesses gained citation records minted asserted_by: "source" ( against Revelation 8:2; against Revelation 11:3) — the chapter is named and the element inside it forces the verse; the ninth-chapter question carries no record by the same rulings, a chapter cited with no element inside it earning no verse endpoint, so that citation lives in this prose alone. “two witnesses” stands at six distinct frozen verses in the corpus — Deuteronomy 17:6, Deuteronomy 19:15, Revelation 11:3, D&C 42:80, D&C 42:81, D&C 77:15 — and most of those carriers are about the law of witnesses rather than about this vision, which is exactly why a two-word run is not enough to register on.

Significance

The interest of this section is not that it agrees or disagrees with the Revelation but that it is a text working on a text, and says so in its own citation apparatus. Nowhere else in the Doctrine and Covenants does the wording point at chapter and verse this often; the collection’s more usual habit, catalogued across the other pages in this cluster, is to carry another book’s sentence without naming it at all.

The section’s method, described rather than judged, is to take a described object and assign it a referent — the sea of glass is the earth (D&C 77:1), the eyes are light and knowledge (D&C 77:4), the little book is a mission and an ordinance (D&C 77:14) — and to fit the whole to a seven-thousand-year scheme the vision itself does not state (D&C 77:6–7, 77:12). Whether those identifications are the vision’s meaning is a question about two texts that this wiki cannot settle from either of them, and does not try to. What it can do, and has done above, is show exactly which words are shared, which are the section’s own, and where the citation and the quotation do not line up.

Key references

• D&C 77:1–5 — the sea of glass, the four beasts, their eyes and wings, the elders
• D&C 77:6–7 — the sealed book and the seven-thousand-year scheme
• D&C 77:8–11 — the four angels, the quoted cry, the sealing of the hundred and forty-four thousand
• D&C 77:12–15 — the trumpets, the ninth chapter, the little book, the two witnesses
• Revelation 4, Revelation 5, Revelation 7, Revelation 10, Revelation 11 — the chapters the section works from

Related

John the Beloved · The Day of the Lord · The Signs of the Coming · The Order of Revelation · Coming Forth of Scripture · Index · Connections

Sources

Doctrine and Covenants section 77 (verse text only; headnotes excluded). Cross-references quoted from Revelation 4, Revelation 5, Revelation 7, and Revelation 10. Revelation 8, Revelation 11, Revelation 15, Deuteronomy 17, Deuteronomy 19, and D&C 42 / 130 are cited inside disclosures and censuses rather than registered as connections of this page.

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. Eleven connection records are registered here, all [textual], all asserted_by: "source" — minted at the 2026-08-10 editorial review, with the citation-offset table above reporting how each naming sits against its quotation. Distribution figures are counts of distinct frozen verses in the corpus, derived by search at the time of writing.