My husband and I were reading Mosiah 27 about the conversion
story of Alma the Younger, and it seemed to me that it was impossible that he
had not been taught the gospel by his father Alma while growing up. It’s easy to wonder where Alma the
Younger started to go wrong.
Mosiah 26 describes a great purge of the church, when many
members who were unrepentantly sinning were cut off. It is perfectly possible
that Alma the Younger and the four sons of Mosiah were cut off from the church
for their wickedness at that time.
Later, Alma the Younger himself later tells of how he and Mosiah’s four
sons went forth with anger and mighty threatenings to destroy the church (Alma
26:18). That sounds very much like
the anger of someone who felt they had been excommunicated unjustly, someone
who rebelled against the authority of the priesthood.
Alma the Younger may have convinced himself that what
happened to him and his friends was unjust and that the church needed reform.
So, part of what the angel’s visit would have settled for
Alma the Younger and Mosiah’s four sons was that his father was right and was
on God’s side, that God did have power and that Alma the Younger was
wrong. And if he was wrong, then
his efforts to fix the church were wrong and amounted to persecution and destruction rather than reform.
The cool thing about Alma the Younger’s conversion story is
that it shows us that even an angry ex-member of the Church is not a lost
cause. It shows us Alma the Elder’s example of praying for those who separate
themselves from us and for those who have been cut off for transgression. They may yet be brought to the
knowledge of the truth.
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