Mary Lightner Hears from Joseph's Own Lips of the Angel Who Came with a Drawn Sword (1834–1842)

Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner — the first Latter-day Saint woman to whom the Prophet Joseph Smith personally unfolded the principle of plural marriage — preserved in her 1905 address a firsthand testimony of the angelic ministrations by which the Lord enforced the introduction of that principle. As she recounted the Prophet's own words to her: an angel came to Joseph three times 'between the years of 1834 and 1842,' commanding him to obey the principle, and the last time the angel 'came with a drawn sword in his hand and told Joseph if he did not go into that principle, he would slay him.' Joseph told her he had reasoned with the angel soberly, pleading that the Book of Mormon called such a thing an abomination unless the Lord commanded otherwise — but that 'God Almighty showed me the difference between an angel of light and Satan's angels,' and that he finally yielded because God cannot lie. He added the crowning assurance she never forgot: 'I know that I shall be saved in the Kingdom of God. I have the oath of God upon it and God cannot lie; all that he gives me I shall take with me for I have that authority and that power conferred upon me.' Lightner's record is among the most direct surviving testimonies of the drawn-sword angel. She heard it from the Prophet's own lips in Nauvoo, before she ever consented to be sealed, and she asked him the very question a skeptic would ask: 'Don't you think it was an angel of the devil that told you these things?' His answer — that God had shown him the difference between an angel of light and Satan's angels — satisfied her, and she testified, 'I am a living witness to it.'

In a private correspondence to Emmeline B. Wells, Lightner specified that while the vision regarding her occurred in 1831, it was not until the early part of February 1842 that Joseph Smith was 'compelled to reveal it to me personally' due to the angel's threat. Additionally, in her signed statement from February 8, 1902, Lightner recorded that Joseph Smith stated the angel appeared to him three times, and that he was specifically commanded in 1834 to take her as a wife, but because she was a thousand miles away, he initially hesitated.