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The Children if Israel disappointed the Lord many times in many ways. Ezekiel spoke of their failures in chapter 20 then in verse 25 he said, because of their failures, “Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live.” Ezekiel was referring to the fact that the Lord made allowances for their behavior because of His diminished expectations for them.

In Matthew chapter five, starting at verse 31, the Lord explains what some of those aforementioned statutes and judgments are. Because of the hardness of their hearts the Children of Israel were given loopholes in the Law which gave them a little leeway from the strictness of the Law. In verses 31-32 the Lord explains that whereas the Law of Moses allowed a man to divorce his wife by merely giving her a writing of divorcement, the consequences of divorce were too serious to be done that lightly. In verse 33-37 He explained His stricter rules for swearing oaths. In verse 38 the Lord rejects the law of “an eye for an eye”. Continue all the way through the end of the chapter for more information.

Previously, the “law of diminished expectations”, as I call it, reached a critical stage in the days of Noah when the Lord could no longer make allowances for the bad behavior of the wicked so He sent the floods. The Lord promised Noah that He would not destroy the wicked with a flood a second time. When humankind again became very wicked and so self aware of their wickedness that they feared a second flood they decided to build a tower to reach heaven so they could escape retribution. But, this time the Lord confounded their language and scattered them. During the time of Abraham cultural/economic conditions made it seem appropriate for the wealthy to support extra wives and concubines. The Lord did not tell them as He did the Nephites that polygamy was an abomination and a whoredom. The law of diminished expectations was in force for the people of Abraham’s day.

I view the explanation for polygamy in the early days of Utah as relating to the law of diminished expectations. For the benefit of those who were concerned about the Book of Mormon passages condemning polygamy it was suggested that they could avoid the evils associated with having plural wives by limiting the practice to the sanctified. If they really believed that limiting polygamy to the sanctified would prevent the practice from being a whoredom and an abomination then what else could they allow the sanctified to get away with? For one thing, they got away with racism even though our scriptures promote the idea that the Lord sees all of us as being equal. In 1978 when the practice of withholding the priesthood from blacks of African descent was finally ended, racists in the church had benefitted from the “law of diminished expectations” for nearly 150 years.

The Nephite prophet Jacob explained another principle at work. He said, referring to the Children of Israel in Jacob 4:14, that because they looked beyond the mark, despised the words of plainness and sought for things which they could not understand that the Lord therefore delivered things to them which they could not understand, and He “hath done it, that they may stumble.” The Doctrine and Covenants contains a record of the failures of the early Latter-Day Saints. Scourged from city to city they managed to settle in the Utah Territory and came away with a commission to do work for the dead and obtained an endowment which reaffirmed Abraham’s blessings on their heads.