“THEY WERE CALLED THE PEOPLE OF GOD”
After a terrifying vision, Alma the Younger undergoes a profound transformation, echoing the changes that were occurring in his family, his church, and in his society.
I’m Mark Holt, and this is Gospel Talktrine.
Thank you for being with us for this episode of Gospel Talktrine. As always, should you have a question about a lesson in “Come Follow Me,” about the Book of Mormon, or about any question that can be answered from the scriptures, send me email at gt@gospletalktrine.com.
This week’s lesson, Mosiah chapter 25 through 28. “They Were Called the People of God.” And the chapters for this week are sort of centred around how the people of Nephi, the people of Zeniff, and the people of Mulek or of Zarahemla, they all finally find themselves reunited, and they settle in together, and they decide who they are going to be as a people.
So beginning in chapter 25 – that’s exactly the story of chapter 25 – we finally have… the people of Alma have arrived, and they’ve long been expected. So if you remember, Zeniff took a group of people away, to go back to their original lands that the Nephites had inherited, and that the Lamanites had taken not long before.
For two or three generations they’d live there, and then they came back in two separate groups. And Alma’s group had been separated, and nobody knew what had become of them. So, now here we are, where Alma has arrived, and Alma and Mosiah quickly become great friends.
And everyone gets to hear the story of everyone else. So all Nephites who are in the city of Zarahemla who never left, they get to hear the story of the people of Zeniff and the people of Limhi; the people of Limhi get to hear the story of the people of Alma; and everyone knows what happened to everyone else, and they’re all shocked and amazed and gladdened by the stories of faith and of miraculous intervention that they hear, but also saddened by the stories of death and of suffering and of wickedness that they hear.
So that’s the story of chapter 25. And it’s exactly as you might expect. Except that something interesting happens. So if you were to pick out of the people that we’ve seen out of the last several chapters, not knowing the ending, if you were say, “Who is going to be a religious leader among these people?” you might say that Mosiah is going to be that religious leader. It’s obvious.
Just like Benjamin, he’s a righteous king, he’s a seer, and so he’s a prophet as well. And he’s powerful in his revelations from God, and also his righteousness is unassailable.
And yet you’d be wrong! Because what happens is Alma becomes the religious leader, of the church of the people of Nephi. And so, we’re going to talk a little bit about that, and what led up to that, and what results from it.
Now we already knew that Alma had been a leader among those few people – four hundred and fifty, roughly, people, – that he had taken out of the city of Limhi, the city of Nephi I guess, and he had taken them into the wilderness, and they’d established the city of Helam (or a village, I guess, with that many people). But they hadn’t been there for that many years, maybe less than ten years they’d been living there. And so they weren’t that much larger as a people.
And so Alma, this leader of a minor group, becomes the default choice for a religious leader.
The first thing that happens, is that Limhi – the son of the king that he’d left, the wicked King Noah – Limhi comes to Alma, and says, “All of our people are without any means to make a covenant, the way that your people have made, and the way that everyone who is here in Zarahemla has already made. They were all here to hear that speech by King Benjamin, so they all made a covenant; you guys went off in the wilderness, you made a covenant; and we were left alone in the city of Nephi with nobody with authority to help us to make a covenant.”
Now they had been told of the teachings of Benjamin, but they hadn’t yet been able to formalise them. And we talked a little bit about who might have been baptised, who might not have. There’s not 100% certainty there, but whether they were all baptised – and I believe probably they all were – but whether they formalised, but whether everyone formalised their covenant with baptism or not, it seems like those who were among the Nephites had made a covenant to obey God, and keep his commandments, and to be called his people.
And Limhi and his people also have the desire to be baptised.
And so at this time, he chooses to come to Alma. And Alma, perhaps because they shared a history together, but in any case, Alma baptises all the people of Limhi as well. And there were probably thousands of them.
From there he’s got some momentum going, and he keeps right on going with the people of Zarahemla, and all the Nephites who remained behind; he establishes a church among all of them.
So I want to talk a little bit about this process, this choice to establish a church.
As I’ve mentioned a few weeks ago, the Israelites didn’t have churches or synagogues or weekly worship – the way that we know them to now, the way that Jews do now – for centuries of their history. Part of the law of Moses wasn’t “You shall assemble every sabbath day to worship. You shall build synagogues everywhere you shall go,” right? This was an innovation that happened either during the Babylonian exile, or after the Babylonian exile, when the Jews returned to Israel.
We know around that time, they began to build synagogues. And the belief is that they did this in response to being separated, physically, from the Temple, and being unable to worship there, to gather there three times a year, as they had been commanded. But whatever the case may be, and whatever gave rise to the power of the synagogue, it wasn’t a central feature of their religion, or it hadn’t been up until that point. And it wasn’t included in the law of Moses.
And even after that point, the local religious leader would be called a “rabbi,” and rabbis were self-governing. In other words, every rabbi was sovereign. Now this wasn’t 100% true in ancient Israel; it seems to be a lot more true today. Judaism is very much not a centralised religion.
And now here, what we’re reading in the Book of Mormon, we find that this is a religion closer to what you and I might expect from a religion. Being members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we very much do have a hierarchical structure, with order established throughout the levels of Church leadership. And that means there is one prophet to make the decisions that govern the entire Church. Which, as I’m sure that many of you would agree, if not all you, that’s the way that it should be, or that’s the way that makes most sense.
However, this principal wasn’t immediately clear to the Jews of the Old Testament time. The people that it was clear to in the Bible, are the Jews of the New Testament time. So after Jesus ascended to heaven, there seems to have been a similar structure to today’s church, a hierarchical structure, where there is one prophet who is governing the church, who is making the decisions, who is interpreting revelation from God, and receiving continued guidance, along with twelve assistants called apostles.
So what I take from this is that there seems to be something intrinsic in the nature of making this new covenant. Ok, again, the new covenant that I’m talking about is the covenant referred to by Jeremiah in Jeremiah 31, verses 31 through 34 . When he says, “There will come a day when the law will be written in the hearts of my people, and I will make a new covenant with them, and this time they will obey it, and I will forgive their sins.”
Jeremiah was forecasting a day when God’s labour would be much more effective, when the hearts of the people would be turned to him. And they would receive him on their innermost parts, and not just in their outward ordinances. There seems to be something intrinsic in a people adopting this new covenant, and in establishing a church. We have now two examples: we have an example in the New Testament; Jesus Christ established a church when people began to worship him in this new way. You’ll recall, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “You have heard it said by them of olden time: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ But I say: ‘Thou shalt not react in anger to another human being.’ You’ve heard it said ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ But I say: ‘Thou shalt not look at a woman to lust after her.’”
So Jesus taught that you have to “write the law in your hearts.” And as he was establishing this covenant, creating a people who would be ready to make this covenant, he was also building a church. What he called “The Kingdom.”
Now the word “Kingdom” is going to figure into our lesson today. It’s a central idea of what is going on in the book of Mosiah. And in these chapters, and in the book of Mosiah as a whole. Alma also realises this. He looks round, and possibly Mosiah as well; they look around and they see, everyone has committed themselves to living this higher law, this law in a totally new way, where it’s written on their hearts rather than only in a book that exists outside of them. And they need to be nurtured. This faithfulness, it needs to be fostered, and gently and diligently cared for, so that it can grow.
And the best way for us to do that, is to associate with each other in a way that builds our faith together. Though this comes almost a century before the coming of Christ, before the birth of Christ, the lesson is the same: when people are willing to follow Christ, commit themselves to him, and make this inner commitment, then organising them into a church and having the church worship in a certain way, where they gather together often, support each other and bear one other’s burdens, it seems to be the most efficient, the most appropriate way.
Now what has been the case up until this point? As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, the Nephites, or I should say, the Lehites, the descendants of Lehi were organised by Lehi at the end of his life, they were organised into tribes. And we don’t think of them that way, because it wasn’t made explicit the way it was in the Old Testament. But if you read it carefully, number one, you’ll see Lehi gives specific blessings to different groups of his posterity. And, secondly, you’ll see that several times through the Book of Mormon, and even in the Doctrine and Covenants, the groups of Nephites are mentioned as being part of seven groups or seven descendancies. And they’re always mentioned in the same order.
So it’s my personal belief that these are the tribes of Lehi. And there are seven of them, sort of divided into two groups. The Nephites, the Jacobites, the Josephites, and the Zoramites. They all get grouped together among the Nephites. And then, the Lamanites, the Lemuelites and the Ishmaelites. They get grouped together among the Lamanites.
So if you’re willing to follow me this far, and take that leap, then what you see happening in the book of Mosiah is that there is now a contrast being shown us between the lineage by birth, and the lineage by decision, by choice, or by covenant, that God would have us be part of.
To illustrate this a little bit further, I’d like to point you to the first chapter of John. And what John says in chapter 1 verse 12 is, Jesus gave power – to all those who believed in him – he gave them power to be born of God. And then he even clarifies further. He says, “They weren’t born in the way that most people are born of the flesh, or by the will of their father, by the normal way in which people are conceived and then born and brought into the world. He gave them power to be born of the Spirit.” In other words, it was their choice to be part of the family of God and to be reborn as his seed.
And John felt in necessary to clarify this, because the way the Israelites saw themselves as being very much divided by the accident of birth into tribes. And the New Testament therefore is a contrast between church versus tribe. And now we are seeing here in the Book of Mormon as well. In fact, I think it is the central idea of the entire book of Mosiah.
So we’re going to back up a little bit, and talk about the entire book of Mosiah, since we are near the end. And as a bonus chapter, I going to sort of cover Mosiah 29, so we can finish out the book. We’ll cover it again briefly next week as well, to not short change you and the lesson.
But we’re finishing the book of Mosiah, and I want to talk about it as a whole. And in order to do that, I have to remind all of us that the beginning of the book of Mosiah is missing; we don’t have it today. Joseph Smith originally translated up until the first couple of chapters of the book of Mosiah. Another thing to remember is those chapters were larger than the chapters we have now. So we may be missing anywhere from five to eight or nine chapters from the beginning of the book of Mosiah. And by that number, I mean the chapters in the way that we divide them now.
My point is, the book of Mosiah would likely – we can kind of guess this, because of the Words of Mormon. He talks about what was going on, when the small plates of Nephi ended. And the first part of Mosiah was likely a story about Mosiah the First, and his problems that he had in the city of Nephi – or the land of Nephi, the land of the Nephites first inheritance – and why he felt it necessary to take all of his people, everyone who would believe, and leave with them. And travel with tens of thousands of people through the wilderness for at least twenty days – that’s how long it took Alma’s people to get there. But probably more like several weeks. And take a journey through the wilderness, and keep going until they found the city of Zarahemla.
So it was a long journey, and they had to leave everything they had ever known. They had to leave their temple behind, and they had to establish their life completely anew.
Now if we make a couple of what I think are reasonable assumptions about this event, then it helps us in understanding the intent of the book of Mosiah.
First of all, the assumption we can make is that there was a king in the land of Nephi, and his name was probably Nephi, because that’s the indication that we get from the book of Jacob. Which is, that the kings begin to be named after Nephi; First Nephi, Second Nephi, Third Nephi, et cetera.
And secondly, we can assume that that king was probably wicked. And that wickedness was the reason. Because Mosiah the First was so righteous. We know that he was a seer, we know that his son Benjamin was a seer, we know that his grandson Mosiah – the one we normally think about when we use that name – we know that his grandson was a seer.
So this Mosiah was a very righteous man, and therefore probably left a wicked society.
So right away, the book of Mosiah starts of with a conflict between the wickedness of a king and the righteousness of his people. Or their desire for righteousness.
Now it continues. The people of Zeniff, they want to go back. Right way, they want to go back, and they can’t stand the fact that they’ve lost their lands of Nephi. They want to go back and possess it. And Zeniff seems to be a fairly righteous man, at least not terribly unrighteous. And yet, very quickly he’s replaced by a king who is wicked. And this king is almost pulled right from scripture, in the book of Kings. All the wicked kings that exist in the book of Kings, the centuries of wickedness, that the Israelites had to endure because of the wickedness of their kings.
Now there were a few righteous kings, but they were very much the exception, rather than the rule. And King Noah, among the people of Zeniff, he was right in that tradition. And because of his wickedness, he caused that the laws were changed, he caused that the people enforcing the laws were changed, the people over the religious worship were changed, all to support wickedness rather than righteousness.
So that lands us in chapter 25. The people are finally together, they have a chance to breathe, they’ve all recovered from two episodes of terrible tyranny and wickedness of a monarch, and the horrible price that people pay when they have to separate themselves from such a monarch.
At the same time, they’re undergoing this individual transformation in their hearts. The law is changing from something that existed outside them, a way in which society is organised, to a way in which their individual preferences and spiritual awakening were organised. It’s changing their very natures. And because this law, this covenant, has changed who they are, society begins to restructure itself around this change that they’ve made, the personal change.
Now obviously this change doesn’t happen all at once. And some people are quicker to change their hearts than others. And so in chapter 26 we begin to see the conflict of the old way versus the new way. A church versus tribe mentality. There are people who grew up under some remnant of the tradition that used to govern, and even though their parents were present when King Benjamin made his address, what it says at the beginning of chapter 26, is there were a lot of people who grew up who just didn’t understand the way that parents were doing things.
So they had received in some measure, they had received the traditions that had come down, of a tribal organisation of society. And a monarchy as well.
But in another sense, this business of making a new covenant, it hadn’t yet had a chance to take firm root all the way down. And therefore, the kids just didn’t get onboard with what their parents had decided to do, the change that their parents had decide to make. And this was partially because there was no church to help each family pass on what they knew, pass on the necessity for this sort of covenant.
Can you imagine raising your children, and trying to teach them how important it was to believe in Christ, and follow him, and make covenants. All of you have received support in this effort from the Church. And that’s precisely because the Church is a gathering place of knowledge of what works to help people obey God.
And that’s not to say that nobody could possibly do what is right without a church organisation to govern them. But it is to say that all of us, probably, are more likely to remain faithful to our covenants when not only are we suffering with those that suffer, but then when it’s our turn to go through hard times, we have other people who are willing to let us lean on them.
And the people of Mosiah are going through this transformation. And it’s difficult. It’s a huge shift in the way that everyone thinks. What’s called a “paradigm shift” in modern language.
And so in chapter 27, these persecutions are heightening even more.
Now in chapter 26, Alma discovers something interesting. Which is that there are people who – though they are part of the “Church” (quote unquote) – they just don’t seem to want be. They aren’t willing repent of their sins, they don’t have the law written in their hearts, in any way. And he’s never encountered this before.
Now, for us in modern times, we look at this and we say, “Yeah, easy. They don’t want to be part of the Church. They should just be allowed to leave.” And I think it’s interesting, because Joseph Smith would have probably thought the same thing. And he writes this chapter as if it’s a hard realisation to come to. That those who want out of the Church should be excommunicated, or their names blotted out, et cetera.
That would not have been a new idea for Joseph Smith, that is not a new idea for us. And nevertheless, it does seem to be a new idea for Alma. And that is – in my opinion – a counter argument. Many people say that Joseph Smith’s religion that he depicts in the Book of Mormon was very advanced, and the arguments that they use to fight against their detractors – the prophets in the Book of Mormon, the arguments they use – are arguments that Christians at the time of Joseph Smith were using to fight against non-believers.
In other words, one argument used against the authenticity or the veracity of the Book of Mormon is that its religion is too sophisticated. It’s more sophisticated than it needs to be. And I think, here’s one counter example, where it shows that Alma was very unsophisticated. He is very new at starting a church, and he has no idea of even the concept of excommunication. But that is what the Lord reveals to him.
And basically, the underlying principle is: no-one can be forced into heaven. “My entire plan for all of you, down here on earth,” God says to Alma, “is that you will choose, and you don’t get to know right away the final results of your choice. You just get to choose who to trust. Whom do you trust? Do you trust the prophets, and do you trust the spirit within you? Or do you trust the desires and urges that lead you to sin?”
“And eventually will come the day when either you are called up, and shown how much approval you have earned, or then at the sounding of the second trump you will be shown that you never knew me, and I really was in charge the whole time. I, God, was in charge the whole time. And now, you’ve earned the reward that you are about to receive, and it is totally just, and you will have to depart from me. So you get no part of my glory.”
So God lets Alma know there are very real consequences of disobedience. And that the preaching of the Word is the supreme act of love. Helping everyone avoid all of the worst consequences that are possible, is the supreme act of love. Because it involves a large amount of sacrifice, humiliation, discomfort, et cetera.
So Alma makes that choice clear, and he makes the nature of that choice clear.
Now it’s interesting, that in the very next chapter we have – I shouldn’t say interesting; it shows the mastery of Mormon as a story-teller – in the very next chapter, we have a text-book example of this conflict.
So, first of all, there has always been religious freedom among the Nephites. People have had the freedom to believe. And now they have the freedom not to believe. They can remain part of the same people, and yet not believe in the God of their fathers; the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Nephi and Lehi, the God of Mosiah and Benjamin.
I can choose not to believe in that God, and I don’t have any consequences of a civil nature. I can choose not to believe, and it’s perfectly legal and fine. That seems to be – without some of the things that we might be missing from the missing manuscript – without knowing that for sure, that seems to be a relatively recent innovation among the Nephites.
And now we discover the freedom not to believe, now leads to an increased need to defend the freedom to believe . We see that in today’s society as well. We see that people embrace, when they embrace the freedom not to believe, then they immediately begin persecuting the people who do believe, in saying, you’re taking away my freedom not to believe – Well, let me put it this way: every other freedom must be secondary to the freedom not to believe. Including the freedom to believe. [24:21]
That is a paradigm that is shifting our modern society. Our whole society is reorganising itself around it. For example: it is my opinion – and obviously I’m a biased observer – but it is my opinion that the good ideas that gave rise to our system of government over the course of centuries – the ideas that inspired philosophers who then, in turn, inspired politicians and statesmen to create the United States of America, to create western society, to create freedom in general, to create a society governed by laws – it is my belief that those philosophers were influenced in those ideas by scripture, by belief in God.
In other words, it is God, it is the Judeo-Christian tradition – as it is commonly called – that is responsible for the liberties that most of us today enjoy. And therefore, I don’t think… I think it is extremely appropriate that a display of the Ten Commandments, for example, should be allowed in a courthouse. Because those Ten Commandments are the foundation for the ideas that gave rise to a society based on laws.
And nevertheless, that is a controversial statement. The fact that it is controversial is so interesting. It says so much about our times. Because so many people believe that I don’t want… not only do I not want to believe in the Ten Commandments, but I should not have to look at them in a court of law, because law should not in any way be associated in any way with religion.
My freedom not to believe trumps everyone else’s freedom to believe, and to connect belief to law, belief to freedom.
So now we live in a society where the freedom not to believe trumps everything. And what we are seeing here in the Book of Mormon is that this is the sort of society they were entering in as well. They had to deal with that idea. In their case they had it a little easier – because they had a king who was a believer in God. And so he was able to simply decree, “Look, just because you’re not a believer, doesn’t mean that you get to persecute those who are. Just because you’re free not to believe, doesn’t mean you get to take away the rights of those who do.”
And he seems to have – I shouldn’t say, put an end to it – but he seems to have mitigated those negative consequences for believers, and put a stop to that trend, at least, in relatively short order.
And so, what happens in chapter 27 is, they become… this process of persecution goes underground. And one of the chief agents of this persecution happens to be Alma, the prophet’s son. He’s also named Alma, but as it says in chapter 27, the fact that he shares his father’s name is where the similarity ends. He becomes “a wicked and an idolatrous man.” [ Mosiah 27:8 ]
And his companions are the sons of that very Mosiah who is both a prophet and a seer; he’s also a king; he’s a supremely righteous man; the descendant of two other righteous men that we have accounts of in the Book of Mormon. So that close relationship between fathers and sons, and that bitter opposition that they had to each other’s viewpoints, would have heightened their pain in a way that is masterfully conveyed to us by Mormon.
So Mormon is telling this story for the express purpose of getting us to feel the pain of separation, that is caused not by differences in belief, but by intolerances of differences in belief.
So the ultimate intolerance is, in this chapter, is on the part of Alma. He’s totally intolerant of people believing in the way his father believes. His father still loves Alma, and as we find out, his father is praying, Alma the Elder is praying for his son Alma the Younger. Non-stop.
But the goal of Alma and his companions is not to be free of the constraints of religious beliefs, it is to put an end to other people’s belief. And that seems to be the key difference. Now, a detractor would say, that Alma the Elder was trying to end the non-belief of other people, right? By sharing his beliefs in God and Jesus Christ, he is just as intolerant of their non-belief as his son is of their belief.
This is the fundamental difference the followers of Satan have with the followers of God. We just see that situation differently. And God’s ultimate goal – “and by their fruits shall ye know them,” as Jesus said – God’s ultimate goal is to preserve and extend our liberty.
That is the message of the whole book of Mosiah, which by the end of the lesson, that’s the point that I will make. God’s ultimate goal is to extend or create our liberty, and Satan’s is to curtail or end our liberty.
So that’s what Alma, the sons of Mosiah, and several of their companions are doing. And they are engaged in that very act, when all of a sudden, they have this horrendous vision. An angel appears to them, but it’s not a pleasing vision, it’s not like where an angel appears to Mary and says, “Mary, peace be unto you,” right? In fact, the first words out of Gabriel’s mouth to Mary are “Fear not.”
So, any time an angel appears in the scriptures, you can look at the reactions of the people and realise, angels aren’t always comforting messengers. They’re quite often fearsome visitations. And in this particular case, it’s probably one of the most fearsome. Because, not only are they personally shocked and amazed, but the very earth under their feet is rumbling, to the point where they can’t understand the words the first time.
One of the things that I always imagined was that Alma was knocked to the ground, and spent the entirety of the angel’s visit lying on the ground, but now, if we read it carefully, we realise the angel makes him stand up, then he falls to the ground at the end, again. [Alma 27:12-13, 27:18]
The words of the angel are that “God will not allow you to succeed in your purpose. You’re trying to destroy this fragile organisation of believers, that is his will that it be established. And God will not allow it. So, all of your efforts now are done. They’re over. It is my commandment – I the angel – have commanded that it will end, today! Now you, yourself, Alma, you can choose to be cast off. But you cannot destroy the Church of God. You cannot destroy the work of God.”
Now I’m going to call a time-out on the lesson for a moment, and put a question into your mind. And that question is: “How many of you have known someone – maybe you’re a parent of a wayward child, or maybe you’re a family member of a wayward brother or sister, a good friend – who decided that they didn’t believe in God any more, and not only that, but they became violently opposed to that belief, and bitter towards anyone who continues to profess it?”
And the question that comes up, for anyone reading these chapters, and realising what happened with Alma, is, “Why can’t that happen to my loved one?” Or, “Why couldn’t that have happened to me when I was wandering astray?”
And it’s a valid question, and it’s also the best kind of question, because there is no clear answer. But I want to bring up a couple of things to make it a little easier to think about.
First of all: this story is not about the conversion of Alma the Younger, ok? In my opinion, right? As a story, if I were the one telling the story, the important detail would not be the transformation that comes over Alma the Younger’s heart. Because, obviously, God was the author of that.
Now, how many times does an angel appear, and change someone’s heart? Not all the time. You remember earlier in the Book of Mormon, an angel appeared to Laman and Lemuel and said, “You have to stop. Can’t you see that your brother is going to rule over you? You have to stop beating him with a rod, you have to stop mistreating him, because he is more righteous than you are.”
They had a choice. They could have done what Alma the Younger did, and humbled themselves. And they could have been so amazed that there was a possibility that they were on the wrong side of God’s will, that they fell to the earth in a stupor, and it took sincere repentance for them to recover.
But they didn’t do that. They were too hardened in their hearts.
So Alma, in spite of the fact that he was involved in so much wickedness, there seems to have been some part of his heart that was accessible to God’s plea. And also was pricked by the thought that he would be lost forever.
But just as in the story of Saul of Tarsus – who later became known as Paul – it wasn’t a story of what a great guy he is – because God forced him to be a good guy, God forced him to believe – it’s really a story about how powerful God is to accomplish his will.
We have other stories in the Book of Mormon. In fact, we just recently read one. Alma the Younger’s very father, Alma the Elder, now he is converted simply because he hears the word of God, and the spirit works upon him in such a way that after one conversation, after one public lesson, everyone else hates the messenger, and Alma the Elder is so affected by the message that he decides to risk persecution and death; he gives up his position in society and he becomes a vagabond and an exile, simply because of the word.
Now this is in stark contrast to his son, who has to be literally toppled to earth, in order to change his ways.
So I personally don’t see the conversion of Alma the Younger as an inspiring story of humility, as much as it is an inspiring story of how powerful God is to accomplish his work. That’s the message that I take from this chapter.
And those of us who are thinking, “Oh, I have a loved one who I wish would repent, and if I just pray… I feel bad because the fact that an angel hasn’t appeared to my loved one means that I don’t have the faith of Alma the Elder,” because when the angel appears, he says, “It’s your father’s prayers, and the prayers of many that have brought me here, and now I say this unto you,” right?
And when Alma’s companions take him to his father’s house, and he’s fallen senseless to the earth, and he’s unconscious, then his father rejoices, because he knows that it’s the will of God, and now he’s suffering from the pains of his sins and he’s undergoing repentance, his father knows these things.
And you think, “Well, if I had Alma the Elder’s faith then this would have happened to my loved one, and therefore on some level it’s my fault.” All of this is the wrong lesson to take from this event. And that’s just simply true. I’m not saying that you can’t take different lessons from this chapter, but it is a fact that if you have a loved one, and an angel has not yet appeared to them, it isn’t your fault! That is my point. It isn’t your fault. It’s not a fact that you didn’t pray with enough faith to bring an angel to them.
It’s simply a fact that God has purposes for his Church, and his work on the earth. He is not willing to let one person destroy it.
And so in the case of Paul, he’s riding to Damascus to destroy the church there. And God intervenes and says, “I do not allow people, individuals like you, who are under the thrall of Satan, to destroy my work. I just don’t let it happen. And so, cut it out. You may choose to continue to destroy your own soul, but you may no longer choose to destroy my work.”
And that lesson should be very encouraging to all of us, because God’s work is – as he said in Jeremiah 31 – God’s work is to write this law on our hearts. And he’s going to one day have a covenant that we all keep. The new covenant won’t be like the old covenant, “which covenant the Israelites break” (or broke, as we would say today). It will be a new covenant that we will keep. And that will happen because God will forgive our sins.
So this should be a very encouraging message for all of us. I don’t think any of us are conscious of how terrible this experience was for Alma. The fact that he was, in objective time, able to make a quick transformation, it belies the very depths of despair to which he had to sink in order to make that happen.
And this conversion, because of its compulsory nature, it wasn’t quite as big a statement about his personal righteousness, as it would have been had he been willing to listen to the word alone. This is a point that Alma the Younger makes later on in his ministry. He says to the Zoramites, a group that he will teach in a few chapters, he says, “You have been humbled, because you have been compelled to be humble. And that’s good. But it’s much more blessed if you humble yourself because of the word alone.”
So he recognises the difference in his own conversion, and in his father’s conversion. And he knows that one of them is more powerful. And God wants to give all of us the chance to gain the blessings of being humbled by the word alone, before he compels us to be humble. As he says to Alma the Elder, in chapter 26, he says, “There will come a time when everyone will be compelled to be humble. But I want to give as many people the opportunity, for as long as I can, that they can choose to humble themselves, because the blessings are so much greater.”
So that’s my attempt at a answer to that question. It is a profoundly troubling question for people who are suffering this tribulation, this trial in their life, of a loved one who has fallen away from the truth, who has rejected the worship of God, or rejected the commandments of God. That’s very difficult.
And the other account we don’t have in the scriptures here, is exactly how long it lasted. So, we don’t necessarily get a feel for the great patience that Alma the Elder must have had to show through this ordeal. And therefore, take heart by that, because you never know when relief will come from God. It often comes after a long, long trial of our faith.
Now from the depths of their despair, these former persecutors, they become mighty missionaries. Every one of them. And it’s not – and incidentally, if you read carefully this account – it’s not just Alma and the sons of Mosiah. There are several people there besides them. But among them are four of the sons of Mosiah, and among them is Alma, and among them are other companions. And some of these companions remain with Alma, and some of them – now we find out in chapter 28 – some of them are the companions of the sons of Mosiah. And they’re preaching now, and they become great leaders in the church of Zarahemla, but their teaching has to extend beyond that.
They’ve preached to everyone they can, and now they realise that our wickedness was such that we need to make amends in a way that transcends the boundaries of our own people. And the way that they interpreted the Spirit talking to them was, “We have to go on a mission to the Lamanites, to those who hates us. Hate us with such an intensity that they’re willing to enslave and kill our people. And we’re going to take the truth that we know, the knowledge that we have, this great conversion that has come over us, and we’re going to take it to them.”
At the end of chapter 27, it’s such an interesting verse, because Mormon says, “How blessed were they; how beautiful were their feet on the mountains, they were publishing peace, they were saying to the Nephites: ‘Thy God reigneth.’” [Mosiah 27:37]
This is a clear quote by him of Isaiah chapter 52:7. And it’s also a quote – this is Mormon quoting himself, as he tells the story, just a few chapters before, of Abinadi. So Abinadi is the one who brought Isaiah chapter 52 to our attention. And in Mosiah chapter 15, he talks about anyone who is publishing peace is a fulfilment of this prophesy.
Now at the time, the point I made was, that in Hebrew, the way that they perceived the messenger, their cultural tradition, and also their scriptural tradition was that the messenger was either a good messenger, or some other kind of messenger.
If you brought good news - and it was usually about the victory of your forces in battle, the survival of your people as a nation - if you brought good news you were a good messenger. And if you brought bad news then you were some other type of messenger.
I had a listener send an interesting email this week about – this is from Paul in Australia, he is incidentally the one who does our transcriptions which are excellent. And if you haven’t seen a lot of the work we’ve done on our website, visit that at gospletalktrine.com . But he made the point that in the Lord of the Rings, J.R.R Tolkien, the author, was a great student of language, and I mentioned how the word gospel went from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to Old English. And in Old English it became godspell, meaning “good messenger.”
And in the Lord of the Rings, Gandalf goes into one of the places where he goes, you may remember this from the movie – and the king is under a spell, and this minister is whispering wicked words into his mind, and so the king is almost covered in cobwebs. And he says, “What are you doing here, Gandalf Stormcrow?” He calls him a stormcrow. In other words, he’s always bringing bad news.
Well, in the book, he uses the word lathspell , which means an evil messenger. So this is a great master of language showing us that the messenger is tied up with the message. It’s just an interesting side note from the Lord of the Rings. So lathspell versus godspell , right? They see him as an evil messenger, and call him a stormcrow, and they say, “Ill news is an ill guest.”
And this is Mormon saying, these messengers, they became so righteous that they became the message. How blessed were they, because their feet were beautiful upon the mountains. They let the word of God penetrate their heart to such a degree that they became the message themselves. They were the gospel. So that just reinforces my point, that it wasn’t just me making that stuff up, about the messenger becoming the message, this is really from Mormon. It’s a lesson that is taught in the Book of Mormon.
Now after his sons leave on a mission, Mosiah translates by the power of God, using a Urim and Thummim – and I wish we had more time to talk about the Urim and Thummim, it’s described here as two stones in a bow. I’ve done a little research on the Urim and Thummim, and we don’t know right now whether Mosiah’s Urim and Thummim were passed down from Lehi and Nephi, or whether they were discovered when his grandfather joined the people of Zarahemla, and there was a large stone tablet brought to Mosiah the First, and he interpreted that. We don’t know whether he received the Jaredites’ Urim and Thummim.
So the reason I say that is Joseph Smith made the statement that his Urim and Thummim that was included with the golden plates, that was the Urim and Thummim originally held by the brother of Jared. So it is possible that these interpreters came to Mosiah along with that first stone that he interpreted, and were passed on from there. It’s also possible that there is more than one set of interpreters that exist in the Book of Mormon.
In any case, they were described by contemporaries of Joseph Smith of having the appearance of spectacles. So these stones might have been clear stones, or at least translucent, and were attached to a piece of metal by which they could be held over they eyes simultaneously. And there may have even been a straight rod on one side of the spectacles, which then could attach it to a breastplate, so it wouldn’t need to be held with the hands.
So that’s the end of my side note, except to say, it’s not the power of the Urim and Thummim that does the translation, it’s the power of God. It’s the will of God that these interpreters would be in the hands of someone worthy to use them. And if ever they should fall into other hands, then the gift in them would immediately dry up.
But as in the story of the people of Alma, the people of Limhi, the story of the Jaredites is now told to the Nephites, and they rejoice because of the righteousness in it, and they rejoice because of the knowledge they’ve gained, but they also lament and they weep because of the story of the destruction and wickedness. And obviously we know that the Jaredites were totally destroyed at the end of their history. And so there was great cause for mourning as they heard this story, but they rejoiced in having the knowledge of the workings of God.
So that’s chapter 28. And then, Mosiah realises that he’s going to die. His sons have all left on a mission. They’re righteous, but he chooses, for whatever reason, he chooses not to confer these relics on one of his sons. He confers them upon Alma the Younger. So this leads me to believe that some time has passed since his vision and his conversion and his transformation. Alma the Younger is now the leader of the Church. He’s become the equivalent of the prophet.
What do these relics include? They include the brass plates; they include the plates of Nephi. They also include the sword of Laban, and the interpreters. And who knows what else. There are probably several other precious things in there, that God wants to have in safe keeping.
So if you are familiar with the story of Joseph Smith’s difficulties in protecting the plates once he had them, then you can have some feeling for what a great responsibility this was, to care for these artifacts, these relics, that God wanted cared for.
And not only that, but to continue the work of keeping the records throughout his life. So this was quite a responsibility put on the shoulders of Alma, at the end of chapter 28. [Mosiah 28:20]
Now, the reason I want to talk about chapter 29 is – and I’m not going to completely cover it - but chapter 29 sort of rounds out the point for today’s lesson. And it is in this chapter that Mosiah says, “Who do you want to be king?” And everyone votes and says “We would like your son Aaron.”
And Mosiah says, “Two problems with that. First problem is, he’s left on a mission. Secondly, before he left, he expressed the desire never to take upon him the kingdom. Also, all of my other sons, they said the same thing. They don’t want the kingdom.”
Now my guess is that Aaron and the other sons of Mosiah, they recognised that the seeds of pride and wickedness were still within them, and if they were to pay attention to those seeds and foster them, that they could grow again. And they were not willing to ever allow pride and the separation between people, like putting people on different levels, they didn’t want that to ever take root in their hearts again.
And therefore, they didn’t consider themselves worthy to be kings. And they were probably right; they should not have been kings. They were much better missionaries. And some people are just not suited for it. And Mosiah seems to have been sensitive to this. And he says, “look, if we should now put somebody else in the kingship, knowing that you all voted for Aaron at one time, if we should now install someone else as king, then he could come back, less scrupulous voices could prevail on him to try to establish himself as a king, and that could lead to war and bloodshed.”
“So here’s what I propose. We get rid of the position of king all together. And you, each of you, the citizens of Zarahemla, the Nephites collectively, you’ll take upon yourselves the responsibility of governing yourselves.”
Now as precedent for this, I want to go back to the book of 1 Samuel. The Israelites actually lived in a similar situation for a number of generations. And Samuel was the last judge of Israel. He wasn’t a king, but he was a ruler of sorts. And in 1 Samuel chapter 8 , this is when the Israelites come to him and say, “We want a king like other nations around us. We want to have somebody who will rule with prestige. And therefore, we want somebody who will be mighty in battle, and will also show the other nations what we are capable of, and show a display of wealth.
And Samuel’s response at that time was to say… Well first of all he took it to God. And in 1 Samuel 8:7 , God says, “You should let them have whatever they choose, because they haven’t rejected you, they have rejected Me. Up until this point I have been their king, and now they’re saying they want an earthly king. So, first thing you do, Samuel, is tell them: here are the consequences if you choose a king. But, secondly, let them have their way.”
And so Samuel went before the Israelites and he say “Look, yeah, if you have a king, he going to be able to show a display of wealth to other nations, but guess where that wealth is coming from? It’s going to come from all of you. And guess where his power is going to come from? He’s going to take your sons and your daughters, and your sons are going to be soldiers and die in war, and your daughters are going to be rewards for himself and his loyal servants. And you won’t have as much freedom as you used to, if you continue along this route.”
And the Israelites said, “Well, we want it anyway.”
My point is that the establishment of a monarchy in ancient Israel was a rejection of God, according to scripture.
So, in that context – and the people of Nephi were undoubtedly aware of that history – in that context, now what we see here in the final chapter of Mosiah is a return to the rule of the people by God. In other words, if the Israelite adoption of a king was a rejection of God, now the Nephites are undoing that rejection. They are now accepting God as a ruler over them.
If you want more context on this, you can go back further into the book of Judges, and Gideon – I mentioned Gideon last week, because we have a character in the Book of Mormon who is named after him. Gideon was a powerful man of war, at the time of the Israelites during the reign of the judges. And he almost became the king; he was in fact like a ruler almost like a king, he was so powerful and so popular. And then his sons battled it out among them, as we’ve seen so many times. This is the very lesson the Book of Mormon is teaching us now.
And after a particularly bloody conflict, one of them gets up on a wall, almost like Samuel the Lamanite, and says, “I’m going to tell you all a fable.” And he tells this story, of what we call the allegory of the brambles. It’s found in Judges 9, verses 8 through 15. [ Judges 9:8-15 ]
And the story is, that the trees wanted a ruler. So the trees, they go from one noble tree to the next. They go to the olive tree, and then they go to the vine, then different trees are tried. But all of the trees are unwilling to be a king. So the trees want a king, but none of the trees – none of the noble trees – want to rule. And finally the trees go to the vine, and the vine doesn’t want to rule. “Look, I’m making grapes.” “Look, I’m making olives. I’ve got important work to do.”
So finally the trees go to the bramble. And the bramble says, “Ok, if you want me to be a king, then I’m going to rule with an iron fist. And if you should change your mind, then fire will come out of the bramble, and burn you all down.”
And it was this very concept of a bramble ruling over the trees that defined the history of Israel from the time of Solomon’s son, Jeroboam, all the way to the Babylonian exile. It was: the worst among you will be the king, because power seems to attract the least scrupulous of people.
And so by adopting self-rule, by choosing what we would call today a democracy, the Nephites are not only rejecting the idea that God will not be their king, but they’re also turning their back on the series of choices that has a bramble put in charge of the trees. They’re turning their back on the pattern that attracts the least scrupulous and the most wicked people into positions of power.
And the esteem that they have for Mosiah, being willing to be the agent for all this is beyond measure. They recognise, that in Mosiah, they have somebody who loves only the people, and not himself.
And incidentally, there is no way to know what kind of a ruler someone will be, until they have power in their hands, and Mosiah has passed this test with flying colours. And not only redeemed himself, but redeemed all his people, made his entire country better, and affected the entire trajectory of their history.
Now that we’ve talked about the end of the book of Mosiah, let’s look over the whole book.
We have the brokenness of kings, demonstrated with examples. We of course have examples of righteous kings as well, but we see what a rare light they are in such an overwhelming sea of darkness. We have this long history of wicked kings, and punctuated only briefly by righteous kings. And we see how much suffering a wicked king causes, and how much he breaks society, how broken society is because of the wickedness of someone who rules over them.
Then we see a broken man, someone who is wicked an idolatrous, in spite of the fact that his father is the prophet. And this man, because of the miraculous intervention of God, changes his ways, and goes from being one of the most vile of sinners, as he is described here, to the prophet of God, to the leader of their church. And then we see that society begins to reorganise itself. Instead of along tribal lines, it begins to reorganise itself along lines of belief. People, instead of being born in a tribe – born to Nephi, or born to Jacob, or born to Zoram – they’re born to God.
And then, they change their government. From the top down, their government changes into one where people rule from the bottom up. And instead of having the responsibility – of choosing to make a covenant, to obey God, to follow his commandments – being centred at the top, that responsibility has now been distributed to everyone, and they’ve all taken responsibility over their own lives.
So I’ve made this point twice now, once in about 50 minutes, and once in about 5 minutes. So now I’ll say it in just a couple of sentences. So here is the book of Mosiah in a nutshell. It shows that society, when we depend on our own strength, is broken. And the individual, when he depends on his own strength, is broken. But when God takes that person, and changes him or her into a godly person, when that person is reborn of God, then society itself is restructured from the ground up.
So, society, religion, tradition, and people, are all in different layers of the same spectrum, which is: how willing are we to allow God into our lives, and to have his miraculous help? And when he writes his word on our hearts, when we are willing to make a covenant with him, when we are willing to reorganise ourselves to suffer with each other, to mourn with those who mourn, then we take upon ourselves more and more responsibility until finally, we are able to take upon ourselves all of the responsibility. And we don’t need a king. And in that case, God is our king.
So in one way, you might see the book of Mosiah as the answer to 1 Samuel 8, which is, “They have not rejected you, Samuel. They have rejected me, God. Because they have chosen to have an earthly king, they have chosen to give up all responsibility for their own salvation, their own obedience. They have taken the law, which I wanted to be written in their hearts, and they have put it entirely outside themselves.”
And here are the Nephites, reversing that entire process, and they’re saying, “We want all of the responsibility back on us. We have made a covenant with God, that we will obey him, keep his commandments until the end of our lives. We all of us have either been baptised or made some similar covenant, and now we are going to change the fact that we belong, not to a tribe, but to a church.
And then we’re going to change our government accordingly. We’re willing to take upon us the responsibility that we know the law, that we will study and research and choose just people to be our rulers. And knowing all that, now we can look around us today, and see that we are the heirs of this sort of philosophy. We are the heirs of this amount of courage, which is: it takes a lot of work to be a self-governing people. It is so much easier to allow a king to rule over you.
However, you don’t have the responsibility of – I shouldn’t say ‘however’. In that case you don’t have the responsibility of choices that lead you back to God. However, you don’t get to stop him when he enacts wicked laws, when he takes your entire society along a broken path.
And so the book of Mosiah has a unified message, which is that: liberty is the most precious gift of God. It is one that he gives us on a personal level, he gives it on a family level, he gives it to us on a belief level, and he also gives it to us on a societal level.
And as we choose to keep covenants with God, to allow this covenant into our hearts, then first the individual and then everything else, it is transformed. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.