Mosiah 27: The Angel Came for His Father's Prayers

Verse 34 of Mosiah 27 is a list of four names. Ammon, Aaron, Omner and Himni, and then the verse goes right on to say that these were the names of the sons of Mosiah, as if the reader might have lost track in the last six seconds. It reads like a stutter, and my guess is somebody wanted the names spelled right and said out loud.

I think about verse 35 more than I think about the angel, and I have a reason. When I was sixteen I backed my dad's Buick out of the driveway on a Saturday in June and took out two sections of the neighbor's cedar fence with the back corner. Then I drove to a friend's house instead of knocking on a door. By Monday my dad knew, and he never raised his voice about it. He handed me a post-hole digger and I spent three Saturdays at it. The repair is the part I remember. The dent in the Buick I couldn't tell you about.

Why does the angel say he came?

The chapter opens in the middle of a complaint, with unbelievers persecuting the church and the members taking it to Alma, who takes it to King Mosiah, who sends a proclamation through the land (verses 1 and 2). It works, or it looks like it does. By verse 6 there is "much peace again in the land" and by verse 7 the people are a large and wealthy people.

The uncomfortable one for anybody who likes tidy stories about the righteous is verse 8. "Now the sons of Mosiah were numbered among the unbelievers; and also one of the sons of Alma was numbered among them." The king's own sons, and the church leader's son named after his father. According to verse 10 they went about secretly seeking "to destroy the church, and to lead astray the people of the Lord, contrary to the commandments of God, or even the king." The proclamation was written in one house and being worked against in the next. The text says Alma was wicked and idolatrous and that he flattered people into following him, and it stops there.

The angel comes in verse 11, in a cloud, with a voice that shakes the ground where they're standing. Verse 12 has a detail I always forget, which is that they were so astonished they "understood not the words which he spake unto them." He has to cry again. In verse 13 he calls Alma by name, and the first thing he talks about is the church. Alma comes second: "This is my church, and I will establish it; and nothing shall overthrow it, save it is the transgression of my people."

Then the reason, in verse 14:

Behold, the Lord hath heard the prayers of his people, and also the prayers of his servant, Alma, who is thy father; for he has prayed with much faith concerning thee that thou mightest be brought to the knowledge of the truth; therefore, for this purpose have I come to convince thee of the power and authority of God, that the prayers of his servants might be answered according to their faith.

Mosiah 27:14

Two sets of prayers get named there, and I'd hold the people's and the father's together. The members complained to their leaders in verse 1, and a complaint is a kind of prayer when it has nowhere else to go. The father's was for one son in particular. The angel doesn't say the visit is a prize for how well anyone prayed. He says he's come so the prayers can be answered.

The one I'd slow down on is verse 16, because it doesn't promise what a parent might want it to. The angel tells Alma to "go thy way, and seek to destroy the church no more, that their prayers may be answered, and this even if thou wilt of thyself be cast off." My reading is that the question stays open. The prayers get answered in the sense that the destroying stops, and whatever Alma does with the rest of his life is still his to do. Nothing in the verse promises how he'll turn out.

What happened in the two days Alma couldn't speak?

This is the stretch of the chapter that gets the least attention, and I think it holds the most.

In verse 19 Alma is so astonished that he "became dumb, that he could not open his mouth" and is too weak to move his hands. The rest of the verse says what happened next: "therefore he was taken by those that were with him, and carried helpless, even until he was laid before his father."

Who were those that were with him when he went down? Verse 10 says Alma went about with the sons of Mosiah, verse 11 says the angel appeared "unto them," and verse 34 says four of that company were the sons of Mosiah. If I'm reading it right, the first thing the sons of Mosiah did after the angel left was pick up the man they'd been plotting with and carry him to his father's house. They didn't run and they didn't stand around arguing about what they'd seen. And then in verse 20 they "rehearsed unto his father all that had happened unto them." Unto them, plural. They told the whole thing on themselves.

The father's response takes one clause: "His father rejoiced, for he knew that it was the power of God." He's been praying for this son for who knows how long (the text never says), and the son has just been carried in unable to speak, and he recognizes the answer anyway. I'm not sure I'd have recognized it.

Then he starts gathering people, and in verse 21 it's a multitude, "that they might witness what the Lord had done for his son, and also for those that were with him." In verse 22 the priests assemble and "began to fast, and to pray to the Lord their God that he would open the mouth of Alma, that he might speak, and also that his limbs might receive their strength."

The praying in these verses isn't Alma's. Whatever he's doing in his own mind for those two days, the praying is done by people standing around him, and verse 23 gives the length of it, "the space of two days and two nights." Only after that do his limbs get their strength and he stands and begins to speak.

I don't know what the forty-eight hours were like from the inside. The text doesn't say whether he could hear them or think, and I've read commentary guessing at it that has no footing in the verses. What I can say is that nobody in the room knew it would end in a sermon. For two days it looked like a man struck down who might stay that way, and the priests, who verse 5 says were supposed to be laboring with their own hands like everyone else, put the work down and fasted. That's a lot to ask of anyone for a man who was, until a few hours before, working against them.

By Mosiah 25 the church had grown past one teacher. Verse 23 of that chapter says "there were seven churches in the land of Zarahemla." Verse 21 only says a multitude, but with seven churches around, I'd guess the crowd wasn't a handful of loyalists, and some of them had likely been on the wrong end of his flattery. The text just says the priests fasted.

What does born again mean in Alma's own words?

When Alma stands, his first words are in verse 24: "I have repented of my sins, and have been redeemed of the Lord; behold I am born of the Spirit." In verse 25 he's quoting the Lord, "Marvel not that all mankind, yea, men and women, all nations, kindreds, tongues and people, must be born again." The verse doesn't say when the Lord told him that. It could have been during the two days or at the end of them, and I can't tell from the grammar.

What stays with me is verse 27, because he gives a reason and it isn't a flattering one: "this I know, because I was like to be cast off." And verse 28 adds something the angel scene doesn't show at all: "after wading through much tribulation, repenting nigh unto death, the Lord in mercy hath seen fit to snatch me out of an everlasting burning."

Wading is a slow word, and so is repenting nigh unto death. Verse 17 has the angel finish and leave in one sentence, but the man describing it in verse 28 is talking about something longer than a visit. The chapter doesn't show that part. It tells us it happened and leaves the work offstage.

In verse 16 the angel tells Alma to "remember the captivity of thy fathers in the land of Helam, and in the land of Nephi; and remember how great things he has done for them; for they were in bondage, and he has delivered them." That's the story his own father lived, the one in Mosiah 24, where the burdens got lighter before they got taken away. Then in verse 30, coming out the other side, Alma says "I rejected my Redeemer, and denied that which had been spoken of by our fathers." What he'd denied is what the angel pointed him back to. Nobody handed him a new fact. He was told to remember one he already had.

His summary of it is the line I'd put on a wall:

My soul hath been redeemed from the gall of bitterness and bonds of iniquity. I was in the darkest abyss; but now I behold the marvelous light of God. My soul was racked with eternal torment; but I am snatched, and my soul is pained no more.

Mosiah 27:29

What did the sons of Mosiah do once the angel was gone?

Verse 35 again:

And they traveled throughout all the land of Zarahemla, and among all the people who were under the reign of king Mosiah, zealously striving to repair all the injuries which they had done to the church, confessing all their sins, and publishing all the things which they had seen, and explaining the prophecies and the scriptures to all who desired to hear them.

Mosiah 27:35

The order matters, since repair comes first and then confessing and telling what they saw, and teaching comes last and only "to all who desired to hear them." They didn't walk back into town and start preaching at people who'd been on the receiving end of their plotting. The chapter doesn't tell us how they repaired anything. It says they were zealous about it.

They preached, according to verse 32, "in much tribulation, being greatly persecuted by those who were unbelievers, being smitten by many of them." The king's proclamation had been written to prevent exactly that, and it hadn't. The law stopped some of it, and the rest needed people willing to be hit.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where do I read what the sons of Mosiah did next?

Alma 17 through 26 follows Ammon, Aaron and the others to the Lamanites. Mosiah 28 comes first, if you want to see how the mission got started, and I'd read it before jumping ahead.

Did Alma's father's prayers make him change?

I don't think so, and verse 16 is why, because the angel tells Alma to stop destroying the church so that the prayers may be answered, and adds "even if thou wilt of thyself be cast off," which leaves Alma's own choice open. The visit gave Alma something he couldn't argue himself out of, and what he did afterward was his own work, the wading and repenting of verse 28.

Was Alma struck dumb as a punishment?

The chapter doesn't say that. Verse 19 gives the cause as astonishment, "the astonishment of Alma was so great that he became dumb," and it never calls it a sentence or a lesson. Whether it was mercy or consequence, the verses don't take sides.

Does everybody need an angel to be born again?

Verse 25 says all mankind must be born again, and nothing in it says everyone needs the angel. Alma's own account includes a long stretch of tribulation, and verse 28 puts the weight there. Most of us will never get the thunder, and by his own telling it wasn't the thunder that did the work.

— D.