Mosiah 26: Alma Didn't Know, So He Asked

I keep getting stuck on a phrase in verse 1, "being little children at the time he spake unto his people," so I'm going to start there and take a Saturday night in 1994 with me.

I was fifteen. My mother had just finished her last piano lesson of the day, a girl who had been stuck on the same Clementi sonatina for three weeks, and she was wiping the keys with a dishtowel in the front room of the rambler in Bountiful. I told her I didn't want to go to church in the morning. She said "Alright" and kept wiping. I went anyway, mostly because staying home alone with a question I couldn't phrase seemed worse than sitting through a meeting I couldn't follow. Nobody asked me what I believed. If they had, I'd have said I didn't know what the question was.

Why didn't the rising generation believe?

Mosiah 26:1 doesn't say these young people heard King Benjamin and turned him down. It says they "could not understand the words of king Benjamin." Verse 3 adds that "because of their unbelief they could not understand the word of God," which runs the cause in a circle, and I doubt that's an accident. Not understanding and not believing feed each other, and from inside you can't always tell which came first.

By verse 4 they "would not be baptized" and "would not call upon the Lord their God," and they stayed that way. Still, verse 1 is about children who were too small to take it in when it was given. The discourse happened once in front of a crowd, and the little ones were in the crowd, and then they grew up.

Verse 5 doesn't look like much, and it's the one I'd underline. The unbelievers "were not half so numerous as the people of God," and then, "because of the dissensions among the brethren they became more numerous." So the believers were arguing among themselves and the argument made the other side bigger. Verse 6 says the unbelievers used "flattering words" on church members, and I don't doubt that happened, but the verse before it hands the first cause to the brethren. A line about us, sitting in a chapter about them.

The chapter just before this one, which I covered in Mosiah 25, has children too, the children of Amulon, whose fathers had done real harm to Alma's people and who joined anyway. Mosiah 26 opens on the other kind. Same generation and same city, and nothing in the text I can find that explains why one set of children landed on one side and one on the other.

What did Alma do when he didn't know what to do?

This is the part I'd teach if I had five minutes. Verse 9 says there "were many witnesses," that "the people stood and testified of their iniquity in abundance," and then, in the same verse, "Alma did not know concerning them." Plenty of evidence, and he still didn't know. Evidence wasn't what he was missing, and I think anybody who has ever had to rule on something, a family dispute or a ward matter or a disagreement between two people who both seemed sincere, will recognize the gap between having heard everything and knowing what to do.

He tries the sensible thing first, and verse 10 gives the reason: it says "there had not any such thing happened before in the church," so he takes the accused to the king, and Mosiah answers with "I judge them not; therefore I deliver them into thy hands to be judged."

Back to Alma, with no instructions.

Verse 8 had already said Mosiah "had given Alma the authority over the church." This is the man who turned down a crown in Helam, which I wrote about in Mosiah 23, and now authority has found him anyway, and he doesn't want to get it wrong.

Verse 13 gives his reason for going to God, and I'd put it on a card above a desk: "he feared that he should do wrong in the sight of God." He doesn't say he feared looking foolish or setting a bad precedent. Then verse 14, "after he had poured out his whole soul to God." Pouring out a whole soul takes a while.

That's a long way from a man who wanted a ruling.

And because thou hast inquired of me concerning the transgressor, thou art blessed.

Mosiah 26:19

Before any instruction on discipline comes a run of blessing, verses 15 through 19, which cover Alma and his people and end by giving the asking itself as the reason. The covenant and the instructions come after, from verse 20 on. I can't tell whether that's the order Alma heard them in or the order he wrote them down in (verse 33 says he "wrote them down"). Either way we get the blessing before the rules.

There's a line in verse 22 I'd missed on earlier reads: "whosoever is baptized shall be baptized unto repentance." Go back to verse 4, where the young unbelievers "would not be baptized," and the two verses face each other across the chapter. Baptism in this chapter is where repenting begins, and a person keeps at it after that, so the ones who refused it had refused a place to start.

What does the Lord ask for before He forgives?

Verse 29 is plain about the condition, which is that whoever transgresses gets judged "according to the sins which he has committed," and that "if he confess his sins before thee and me, and repenteth in the sincerity of his heart, him shall ye forgive, and I will forgive him also." Verse 30 follows with "as often as my people repent will I forgive them their trespasses against me."

No count attached.

Verse 31 is the one that gets skipped, and it's addressed to the members, not the transgressors: "he that forgiveth not his neighbor's trespasses when he says that he repents, the same hath brought himself under condemnation." Read it slowly. It says when he says that he repents. It doesn't say when you've checked, or when enough time has gone by. The person on the receiving end is told to act on the word, and that can be harder than the confessing.

I also like verse 39, near the end. It says Alma and the others "did admonish their brethren" and then "they were also admonished, every one by the word of God."

The people running the discipline were under it too, and the chapter says so in one clause, right after calling them diligent and persecuted, as though the author knew a reader would start to think of them as a separate class and wanted that settled before the page ended.

Frequently Asked Questions

Was the rising generation just a bad batch of kids?

I don't read it that way, because the text says they were little children when Benjamin spoke and couldn't understand it, and it puts the growth of their numbers partly on dissension among the believers. Verse 3 does say hearts were hardened, so I won't pretend none of them dug in. But the chapter doesn't open with an accusation, and I wouldn't either.

Is this the same thing as modern Church discipline?

The pattern is recognizable, confession and sincere repentance and forgiveness, but I'd leave the specifics to the handbook and to a bishop, who knows far more than I am. What I can say is that the chapter itself treats the whole thing as new and uncomfortable for the person in charge of it.

Does verse 30 mean God forgives no matter what?

It says "as often as my people repent," and the repenting is in the sentence. I wouldn't stretch it past that. I also wouldn't shrink it, because "as often as" is a generous phrase and the verse doesn't hedge it.

Why does Alma write the Lord's answer down?

He did it, according to verse 33, "that he might have them, and that he might judge the people of that church according to the commandments of God." I think it's because he'd just learned the difference between knowing and having a record. He had been sure of nothing in verse 9, and he didn't want to be in that spot again.

What I don't like about this chapter

Three places. Verse 27, where the Lord says He will "confess unto them that I never knew them." Verse 36, where the names are "blotted out," said flatly, with no word on what became of anyone afterward. And verse 4, which says the unbelievers "remained so ever after," as if somebody had closed the file.

I've read the explanations for each one and they're reasonable.

I still don't like them.

— D.