A seer is “a person authorized of God to see with spiritual eyes things which God has hidden from the world (Moses 6:35–38). He is a revelator and a prophet (Mosiah 8:13–16). In the Book of Mormon, Ammon taught that only a seer could use special interpreters, or a Urim and Thummim (Mosiah 8:13; 28:16). A seer knows the past, present, and future. Anciently, a prophet was often called a seer (1 Sam. 9:9; 2 Sam. 24:11).
“Joseph Smith is the great seer of the latter days (D&C 21:1; 135:3)” (Guide to the Scriptures, “Seer”). The Prophet Joseph Smith is the “choice seer” described in 2 Nephi 3:6 as a descendant of Joseph, son of Israel.
President Brigham Young (1801–77) bore witness of the “choice seer” Joseph Smith, who was known not only in the days of Joseph in Egypt, but even before the creation of the earth: “It was decreed in the counsels of eternity, long before the foundations of the earth were laid, that he, Joseph Smith, should be the man, in the last dispensation of this world, to bring forth the word of God to the people, and receive the fulness of the keys and power of the Priesthood of the Son of God. The Lord had his eyes upon him, and upon his father, and upon his father’s father, and upon their progenitors clear back to Abraham, and from Abraham to the flood, from the flood to Enoch, and from Enoch to Adam. He has watched that family and that blood as it has circulated from its fountain to the birth of that man. He [the Prophet Joseph Smith] was fore-ordained in eternity to preside over this last dispensation” (Discourses of Brigham Young, 108).
Elder Neal A. Maxwell suggested several examples of truths that the Seer Joseph Smith could see with spiritual eyes that had previously been hidden from the world:
(See Conference Report, Oct. 2003, 105–7; or Ensign, Nov. 2003, 100–101.)