BOM Mosiah 27

Today’s reading, Mosiah 27, covers one of the most dramatic stories in the Book of Mormon.

Alma the Younger, son of the chief priest, and his companions, the sons of King Mosiah, were among the unbelieving and cynical critics of the Church.  In fact, they were arguably the most visible, vocal, and hostile of such critics.  It’s probably not coincidental that they were also privileged aristocrats, members of the elite of their society, with advantages of status and education that placed them above most around them and, thus, made them especially dangerous.

But God intervened.

Alma’s spectacular conversion was a pivotal event in his own life, and marked him forever.

We see its effects in the great sermon recorded in Alma 5, where he summons his audience to deep and genuine conversion.  He himself was a convert, plucked from the fire, and he remained conscious of that fact for the rest of his time on earth.

We see it echoed in the way, after having almost certainly recounted his personal conversion story repeatedly over decades, he had worked it into the elegantly and artistically chiastic form of its retelling in Alma 36.

And — I wonder how many have noticed this — we see its impact in his wish that everybody could have the experience that he had had, the spectacular experience that saved his soul and transformed his life:

O that I were an angel, and could have the wish of mine heart, that I might go forth and speak with the trump of God, with a voice to shake the earth, and cry repentance unto every people!  Yea, I would declare unto every soul, as with the voice of thunder, repentance and the plan of redemption, that they should repent and come unto our God, that there might not be more sorrow upon all the face of the earth.  But behold, I am a man, and do sin in my wish; for I ought to be content with the things which the Lord hath allotted unto me.  (Alma 29:1-3)

Notice the plain parallels, in Alma’s expression of missionary zeal perhaps as much as a quarter of a century later (and, in my English edition, a hundred pages further into the Book of Mormon), to his own transformative encounter with the angel.