Alma 5: Can Ye Feel So Now

Emma's fall semester started today. She texted at 7:48 with a screenshot of her schedule and four words under it that said day one and still a freshman. I wrote back that nobody has ever felt on the first day of school the way the first day says they should. She sent a thumbs up, which closed the matter. Alma 5 was already open on my phone from the night before, and verse 6 was the one I kept going back to.

The first questions are about their fathers

What stops me in verse 6 is the address, "you that belong to this church," paired with a memory that isn't quite theirs. "Have you sufficiently retained in remembrance the captivity of your fathers?" He goes on to ask about mercy and long-suffering toward those fathers, and whether the room remembers that God delivered their souls from hell.

Everyone he's talking to already belongs, and the story he hands them belongs mostly to the generation before, though verse 5 slips in a "we" that counts himself among the delivered too.

His own father, the man who consecrated him a high priest, had started a church in the land of Mormon and baptized his brethren there. They got free of King Noah, then free of the Lamanites in the wilderness, "by the power of his word," and ended up where Alma is standing. Verse 7 takes us inside it. Their hearts were changed and they woke from a deep sleep, lit up while still "in the midst of darkness," with the bands of death and the chains of hell around them.

Then he asks whether they were destroyed and answers himself with "Nay, they were not." The chains were loosed, "their souls did expand, and they did sing redeeming love," and he says they are saved. The cause, when he finally gives it, takes one sentence and a short reason. His father believed what Abinadi spoke, and Abinadi was a holy prophet.

And according to his faith there was a mighty change wrought in his heart. Behold I say unto you that this is all true.

From there he widens it to their fathers. Alma's father preached to them, the same change was wrought in their hearts, they humbled themselves and trusted the true and living God, and "they were faithful until the end; therefore they were saved." That's the whole account of how the saving worked. A man believed a prophet, and the change came and lasted.

I wrote about the silk and the turned backs in Alma 4 on Friday. Alma gave up the judgment-seat so he could stir people up in remembrance of their duty, and this opening is that errand underway. What I hadn't weighed is how long he stays on a deliverance that most of the room didn't live through.

The answers stop there.

And now behold, I ask of you, my brethren of the church, have ye spiritually been born of God? Have ye received his image in your countenances? Have ye experienced this mighty change in your hearts?

He has just called the earlier group saved because of a change like this one. Of the people in front of him he says nothing yet, and the next fifteen verses are all questions.

Have ye spiritually been born of God

"Born of God" is aimed at "my brethren of the church," people who could probably recite the deliverance if he walked them through it. He picked members for this question, right after giving their parents' version of how saving works.

He asks whether they exercise faith in the redemption of him who created them, and whether they look forward with an eye of faith to this body raised in immortality and to judgment by the deeds done in it. You can keep a night you like describing for a long time without ever looking at the judgment.

Then he sets scenes at the bar of God side by side. In one the Lord says come unto me, ye blessed, because your works were righteous. In another a man tries to tell the Lord his works were righteous when they weren't. In a third a man stands with a perfect remembrance of his wickedness, and Alma asks whether he can look up to God "with a pure heart and clean hands," with the image of God engraven on his countenance.

People quote the received image and slide past the other verb. Received, in verse 14, is something that comes to you. Engraven, five verses later, means cut in, the kind of mark that would still be there on a Wednesday when you had nothing you wanted to report. I don't take that for a look somebody gets in good light.

Salvation, as he states it, waits on garments washed white through the blood of the one who "should come." Stand there with garments "stained with blood and all manner of filthiness," and the stains testify of murder and every kind of wickedness. No seat beside Abraham or Isaac or Jacob, and none beside the prophets whose garments are already spotless, unless you suppose the Creator a liar from the beginning.

The next question makes the rest of the chapter stricter.

And now behold, I say unto you, my brethren, if ye have experienced a change of heart, and if ye have felt to sing the song of redeeming love, I would ask, can ye feel so now?

Their fathers sang redeeming love when the chains came off, and he'd already called them saved. Here he grants that you might have felt both the change and the song, and he still wants the present tense. The sentence could have stopped at "if ye have felt," and he won't let it.

My roommate Evan had been away from church since the spring, the year after my mission. One Sunday in February I asked if he wanted to ride out to my parents' ward with me, and he said yes, which he hadn't said before. The white shirt still had a package crease across the collar. He sat near the back and let the bread tray go past him, and the deacon carrying it, twelve or thirteen, paused the way a row pauses when the rhythm breaks and then moved on. In the parking lot afterward he told me he could sit through the hour but wasn't going to stand up and say the rest of it had happened to him.

I said fine, and asked whether he'd finished the lab for Thursday. He had, and we talked about that until we got home. He lives in Denver now and we write most weeks.

Alma doesn't give anyone that exit.

The very next verse asks whether you've walked and kept yourselves blameless before God, and whether, called to die at this time, you could say within yourselves that you'd been sufficiently humble, garments cleansed "through the blood of Christ, who will come to redeem his people from their sins."

Verse 21 says "should come" and verse 27 says "will come." In Zarahemla the blood is still ahead of them and the cleansing isn't a hill their fathers watched. It's the same eye of faith he asked for earlier, aimed at a redemption that isn't on the calendar yet.

After pride he names envy, then anyone who mocks his brother or heaps persecutions on him. Each of them is unprepared, and the hour is close and nobody knows when it arrives.

He went and got a witness of his own

The change he opened with is his father's and the preacher is the son. The sermon never tells how the son himself was stopped. Mosiah 27 has the angel and the dumbness and the young man carried in to his father, plus the line "I am born of the Spirit." None of that is retold here. What he offers instead is slower.

Behold, I say unto you they are made known unto me by the Holy Spirit of God. Behold, I have fasted and prayed many days that I might know these things of myself. And now I do know of myself that they are true; for the Lord God hath made them manifest unto me by his Holy Spirit; and this is the spirit of revelation which is in me.

"Of myself" shows up twice, from the son of the man whose change is the pattern on the table. The father's faith is the history. For the testimony Alma gives the fast, the prayers and the Spirit. He knows of himself that Jesus Christ shall come, full of grace and mercy and truth, to take away the sins of every man who steadfastly believes on his name, and the adverb asks for more than one good afternoon.

The same stretch sends the preaching to the aged and the middle aged and the rising generation, with one cry for all three, that they must repent and be born again. I'm 47, so the middle of that list is mine, and he doesn't hand us a lighter version.

A command, and an invitation

Memory drops out of the questions near the end and the word persist takes its place. Will they lay the sayings aside and trample the Holy One. Will they keep the costly apparel and the hearts set on vain things, the ranking of one above another, the persecution of the humble, the backs turned on the poor and the needy. Friday already walked through the apparel and the poor, so I'll only mark the verb. He isn't charging them with trying on a fine coat once. He's charging them with meaning to continue.

Set in among the woes, the arms of mercy are extended. Repent, and he will receive you. Come and partake of the fruit of the tree of life, and come bring forth works of righteousness, or be hewn down and cast into the fire.

In the shepherd lines he calls in his own name, which is the name of Christ, and if you won't hearken to that voice, "to the name by which ye are called," you aren't his sheep. The church already wears the name. Alma separates wearing it from answering to it, and he says the one who won't answer has the devil for a shepherd.

Verse 41 follows with a plain test, that a man who brings forth good works is hearkening to the good shepherd and one who brings forth evil works has become a child of the devil because that's the voice he follows. I don't see a way to read that as a question only for the inside of a person.

Followers are told to come out from the wicked and be separate, so the wicked aren't numbered with the righteous. He calls after the room once more, and if they hearken he brings them into the fold and tells them to keep the wolves out.

His last verse changes the verb when the audience changes.

I speak by way of command unto you that belong to the church; and unto those who do not belong to the church I speak by way of invitation, saying: Come and be baptized unto repentance, that ye also may be partakers of the fruit of the tree of life.

Members get a command and everyone else gets an invitation to baptism and the fruit. The hard questions stayed on the church, and outsiders aren't asked to pass the present-tense test before they can hear him, though members aren't allowed to trade the command for the softer word either.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is born of God one moment, or a life?

I'd resist anyone who makes it only one of those. Verse 14 asks if you've been born of God, and verse 26 asks if you can feel the song now. If the first had finished the matter, the second would be wasted breath.

Does "can ye feel so now" mean I'm supposed to feel something every day?

I don't read it that way and I don't think Alma does either. Verse 26 asks about feeling, and the very next verse switches to walking blameless and being able to say within yourselves that you're ready. The test he cares about is whether the change is still true of you, which can hold on a Tuesday when you feel nothing in particular.

Isn't this the chapter where an angel stops Alma?

No, that's Mosiah 27. People mix the two up because the same Alma stands in both, but here the mighty change in verse 12 belongs to his father after he believed Abinadi. The son is only the one preaching.

Who are "the fathers" in verse 6?

His own father's people, the ones baptized at the waters of Mormon who then escaped Noah and the Lamanites. Verse 5 says "we were brought into this land," so Alma was among them, and some of his hearers may have been too. I'd guess a good share of the room had only heard it told, since he talks about "your fathers" in verse 13 as people who came before them.

— D.