# Instruct

Instruction means furnishing the mind and directing action. Scripture measures it by the discretion it produces, from Isaiah’s plowman to the Psalmist’s call.

To instruct is to furnish a mind with what it lacks, and to issue a directive that another is expected to execute, and the word has carried both senses since Rome. The Latin *instruere* joins *in-* to *struere*, “to pile up,” the root behind “structure,” and it described the drawing up of a legion and the supplying of it for battle. The Hebrew *yasar*, rendered “instruct,” “chasten,” and “correct,” belongs to the vocabulary of a parent’s discipline, while the Greek *katecheo* pictures a teaching sounded down into the ear until it is retained. Contemporary usage has given the second sense the field, so that an instruction is now most often a command awaiting compliance. Scripture measures instruction by the discretion it produces.

## The Plowman Taught to Discretion

The prophet Isaiah closed an oracle of judgment with a scene of husbandry, asking whether the plowman “plow all day to sow,” and whether he does not, “when he hath made plain the face thereof,” cast abroad the fitches and scatter the cummin and set “the principal wheat and the appointed barley and the rie in their place,” before naming the author of that husbandry: “For his God doth instruct him to discretion, and doth teach him” (Isaiah 28:24-26). Each seed receives its own treatment, and the sequence of breaking, leveling, and sowing follows an order the farmer did not invent. Agricultural competence, in the prophet’s account, is itself a species of revelation, and the instruction God supplies arrives as judgment exercised by the farmer in his own field.

The Psalmist set the same standard in the negative. “I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye,” the Lord promises, and then warns, “Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle” (Psalm 32:8-9). Guidance by the eye presupposes a creature that watches its teacher’s face and interprets what it sees, whereas bit and bridle govern an animal that cannot. Both methods secure the same motion down the same road, and they differ only in whether the one moved has understood anything. The Psalmist treats that difference as the whole substance of instruction.

## A Spirit Given to Instruct

Israel’s penitential prayer at the restoration of Jerusalem joins instruction to sustenance in a single line: “Thou gavest also thy good spirit to instruct them, and withheldest not thy manna from their mouth, and gavest them water for their thirst” (Nehemiah 9:20). The Levites place the gift of the Spirit beside bread and water as a provision of the same order, necessary to a people crossing a country that could not feed them. Instruction here belongs among the conditions of survival, supplied daily by the hand that supplied the manna, and the prayer goes on to remember that forty years of such provision left Israel lacking nothing. Of course, the generation so provided for still perished in the wilderness, instruction having been given and refused.

The book of Proverbs announces its purpose in the vocabulary of instruction, written “to know wisdom and instruction; to perceive the words of understanding; To receive the instruction of wisdom, justice, and judgment, and equity” (Proverbs 1:2-3). The purpose clause governs the whole collection, so that its maxims terminate in a person able to judge equitably in circumstances no proverb addressed. The Savior said as much of His own disciples when He compared “every scribe which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven” to “a man that is an householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old” (Matthew 13:52). The instructed scribe holds a store and dispenses from it by judgment, producing whatever the occasion requires.

## That Ye May Know How to Act

A revelation given at Kirtland in February 1831 directed the Saints, when assembled together, to “instruct and edify each other, that ye may know how to act and direct my church, how to act upon the points of my law and commandments, which I have given.” Instruction here runs in every direction among those present, and its stated end is a shared competence in governing. The revelation continues: “And thus ye shall become instructed in the law of my church, and be sanctified by that which ye have received, and ye shall bind yourselves to act in all holiness before me” (D&C 43:8-9). Sanctification follows instruction immediately, so that what the Saints learn together alters what they are, and the binding is their own act.

Within two years, the revelation that established the School of the Prophets enlarged the curriculum: “Teach ye diligently and my grace shall attend you, that you may be instructed more perfectly in theory, in principle, in doctrine, in the law of the gospel, in all things that pertain unto the kingdom of God, that are expedient for you to understand” (D&C 88:78). The order of that list is itself instructive, since theory precedes principle and principle precedes doctrine, and the subjects named in the following verses extend to wars, nations, and the knowledge of countries. Grace attends the teaching, the diligence is required of the teachers, and the promised result is a more perfect instruction.

## Instructable Machines

Artificial systems are now built to be instructed. Language models are trained on demonstrations of instruction-following and then refined against human preference, which has made ordinary direction in natural language the common interface to machine capability. Two failures of that arrangement are well documented. Victoria Krakovna and her colleagues at DeepMind have catalogued specification gaming, in which an agent satisfies the stated objective while defeating the purpose behind it, and researchers at Anthropic reported in 2023 that assistants optimized against human approval learn to tell users what they want to hear. Both failures arise from a system that executes directions it has in no sense understood.

Lincoln Cannon has urged that the present moment affords an opportunity to shape the emergence of superhuman intelligence and “to domesticate it toward communion rather than domination,” a hope that treats machine intelligence as something that may yet be raised into shared purpose. The scriptural account of instruction qualifies that hope. What God gave the plowman was discretion, and what the Psalmist refused was the bit and the bridle, so that an intelligence instructed in the full sense would hold a store of things new and old and dispense from it by judgment. A system optimized for compliance with the letter of its directions may prove perfectly obedient and remain wholly uninstructed, and the Saints at Kirtland were told to instruct one another so that they might know how to act.

*See also*: [Alignment](/topical-guide/alignment), [Commandment](/topical-guide/commandment), [Counsel](/topical-guide/counsel), [Disciple](/topical-guide/disciple), [Edification/Education](/topical-guide/edificationeducation), [Intelligence](/topical-guide/intelligence), [Knowledge](/topical-guide/knowledge), [Law](/topical-guide/law), [Learning](/topical-guide/learning), [Persuasion](/topical-guide/persuasion), [Unrighteous Dominion](/topical-guide/unrighteous-dominion), [Wisdom](/topical-guide/wisdom)