Is Paying Tithing 'Fire Insurance'?

There is a verse in the Doctrine and Covenants that most Latter-day Saints have heard dozens of times, usually in the context of a joke during sunday school. It comes from a revelation given to Joseph Smith in September 1831:

Behold, now it is called today until the coming of the Son of Man, and verily it is a day of sacrifice, and a day for the tithing of my people; for he that is tithed shall not be burned at his coming.¹

Read quickly, it seems straightforward: pay your tithing, and you won’t be burned at the Second Coming. Fire insurance with a ten percent premium.

But read it again, slowly, and notice something about the wording.

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“He that is tithed.”

Not he that tithes or he that pays his tithing. The verb is passive. Something is being done to the person, not by them. Someone else is doing the tithing. The person is the object, not the subject.

That’s a strange way to describe someone writing a check to the Church.

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This revelation was given in September 1831. D&C 119²³ that defines tithing wasn’t given until July 1838. Seven years later.

In fact, in September 1831, the saints weren’t practicing tithing at all. They were living under the Law of Consecration, given earlier that same year.⁴.

So when Joseph received this revelation in 1831, there was no tithing law for the saints to comply with, and there wouldn’t be for seven years. Whatever “a day for the tithing of my people” meant to them, it couldn’t have meant pay your ten percent. That law didn’t exist yet.

What if ’tithing’ here is similar word-play employed by the Lord in D&C 19? And it happens to be exactly the framework Isaiah uses in chapter six.

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Isaiah 6 is the chapter where Isaiah sees the Lord in vision, receives his commission, and is told that his message will mostly fall on deaf ears. The chapter ends on what sounds like a hopeless note: the land will be desolated, the cities emptied, the people scattered. But then at the very end:

But yet in it shall be a tenth, and it shall return, and shall be eaten: as a teil tree, and as an oak, whose substance is in them, when they cast their leaves: so the holy seed shall be the substance thereof.⁵

A tenth survives the first desolation. Then that tenth is refined again (“eaten”) until what remains is the holy seed, the substance of the stump. A tenth of a tenth. Isaiah is using the language of the Levitical tithe⁶ as a picture of divine selection: God is doing the tithing, sifting through the whole to find and preserve the remnant.

The tithed person isn’t the one who paid. The tithed person is the one who was kept.

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But what do I know? I don’t know, Jack.