Alma - 5 - A PPI with the Savior

Alma Chapter Five is one of my favorites in the Book of Mormon. A friend once observed it is a type and shadow of the interview you’ll have with the Savior after this life. I’m inclined to agree. That said, there are books worth of material discussed in this chapter. (Have you noticed I say that a lot?) The Book of Mormon is doctrinally dense. It’s like the oriental game “Go” I watched old men playing in Korea: the rules are simple, but mastery takes a lifetime. It can be read in a day almost, but mastering it will take years, even decades.

That said, this time through a couple passages stood out to me. The first is verse seven where Alma tells how the Lord saved the people of Noah. As I pondered that, I realized we all are, to different degrees, in spiritual darkness. His saving them is a testament to us that no matter where we are, the Lord can reach us too.

I also was touched by verses 45-47 where Alma teaches that he knew the truth of all that he’d taught because he’d learned for himself they were true. By fasting and prayer, he’d come to know the truthfulness of what he taught. Here is a person who’d seen the Savior and Heavenly Father in an unforgettable vision which changed his life. Despite this, or more accurately, besides this, he’d devoted a lifetime to studying the scriptures, prayer and fasting. And through these actions, the Holy Spirit had taught him the truth of these things.

He paid the same price to know which we must pay today. The powerful lesson is that as Alma did it, so can we…

Ether - The End

The moral of the end of Ether can be summed up in one sentence: If a people turn away from God and they don’t repent, they will destroy themselves.

Satan took them from one degree of darkness to another until there was no light of the Lord in them and anger, revenge and hatred ruled them. In that state, people choose death over life. It took four years to gather in all the people to the armies of Shiz and Coriantumr and eight days to kill themselves in one horrifying string of battles.

But enough of that, I start on Moroni in my next post.

Ether 9-11 - The Age of Kings

These thee chapters in Ether cover hundreds, if not more than a thousand, years of time telling the genealogy of a succession of Jaredite kings. Some were righteous, most were not. The common thread running through it all is the Lord always strives to teach and bring us, His children, back to Him. Most of the time, we’re to busy to bother.

He often has to resort to pain and suffering to get our attention. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t.

When a society ignores the Lord, just as certain as gravity pulls us down, it descends into darkness, materialism, anger and war. The headlines of newspapers and the internet show we are well on that path to war. Secret combinations rage. People are focused on ephemeral interests of no lasting value, totally absorbed in the goal, “I’m gonna’ get what’s mine, no matter what it costs anyone else…”

Such are our days. Yet in all that darkness, there were still prophets and enough who listened that the Gospel of Jesus Christ endured. So it is with us, though we live in times of darkness, we can still have a personal relationship with the Savior. It won’t spare us the difficulties of this day, but it gives us hope to endure it well.