The claim that the prophet Joseph Smith is God’s servant in the Book of Isaiah has confused many in a day when fake news is supplanting the truth. Touted by some who hop on the servant bandwagon without feeling a need to search diligently, these persons simply appropriate Avraham Gileadi’s decades of discoveries for their personal ends and add their own twist that invalidates the whole. Truly, the Lord is coming “to sift the Gentiles in the sieve of falsehood and with a bridle of error on their jaws to try the people” (Isaiah 30:28).
If Joseph Smith is also God’s end-time servant named David—who releases God’s people from physical captivity, restores Israel’s twelve tribes, leads their new exodus to Zion, builds the temple in old Jerusalem, and reestablishes the political kingdom of God on the earth—there exists not a single scripture to indicate this. The claim that the Moses figure of Doctrine & Covenants 103:15–20 is the prophet Joseph Smith, not God’s servant, overlooks the fact that the next passage mentioning him starts an entirely different revelation.
From “private interpretations” to extrapolations to “cunningly devised fables” originating with persons “of your own selves” who pass themselves off as “some great one”—professing inside knowledge and divine revelation but in reality typifying wolves in sheep’s clothing, “not sparing the flock” but “speaking perverse things to draw away disciples after them”—such occurrences follow a classic pattern of false prophets whom Jesus predicted would precede his second coming (Matthew 7:15; Acts 8:9–10; 20:29–30; 2 Peter 1:16, 20).
It doesn’t follow that God’s “hiding” his servant from the world and keeping him “secret” until his hour has come (Isaiah 49:2; 1 Nephi 21:2)—the same as with Jesus until his hour had come (John 2:4)—applies to all except certain enlightened ones who can’t wait to tell everyone who the servant is, making God a liar. The servant’s “birth” by the Woman Zion—his calling when God’s people go into labor—does not occur until the Dragon rules and the Woman Zion flees into the wilderness to escape oppression (Revelation 12:3–6).
As God has given us “a pattern in all things, that ye may not be deceived; for Satan is abroad in the land, and he goeth forth deceiving the nations” (Doctrine & Covenants 52:14), there exists no scriptural pattern for the prophet Joseph Smith’s returning to assume a further mission on the earth that involves being physically disfigured so as to require a miracle of healing (Isaiah 52:14; 57:18–19; 3 Nephi 21:10). Even more fraudulent is Joseph Smith’s taking on another mortal life, an entirely dissimilar calling, and a new identity.
The prophet Joseph Smith attained the highest spiritual level one can achieve in this world, making the idea of his returning to perform a different mortal role spurious and redundant. Scriptural patterns show that God raises up persons of their “own generation” to accomplish his purposes (Acts 13:36). Hence Joseph Smith’s statement that “the throne and kingdom of David is to be taken from him and given to another by the name of David in the last days, raised up out of his lineage” (TPJS, 330; cf. Jeremiah 33:7–26; Ezekiel 34:11–31).
Thank you. I have heard this quite a bit and actually believed it. However I need to research and study for myself in order to know the truth.