Promises of God

• Joseph Smith, compiled by Joseph Fielding Smith, "Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith", p. 70

Joseph recounts an incident in which Martin Harris had boasted that, due to some promise of God, he could handle serpents without receiving harm. While fooling with a black snake with his bare feet, he was bitten, and Joseph reproved him saying "it was presumptuous for any one to provoke a serpent to bite him, but if a man of God was accidentally bitten by a poisonous serpent, he might have faith, or his brethren might have faith for him, so that the Lord would hear his prayer and he might be healed; but when a man designedly provokes a serpent to bite him, the principle is the same as when a man drinks deadly poison knowing it to be such. In that case no man has any claim on the promises of God to be healed."