O That I Were An Angel

It was right after the story of the reunion of Alma and the sons of Mosiah that we have the record of Alma’s great desires to preach the gospel with the power of an angel.  “O that I were an angel,” he wrote, “and could have the wish of mine heart, that I might go forth and speak with the trump of God, with a voice to shake the earth, and cry repentance unto every people!” (Alma 29:1)  It had been about 16 years since Alma himself had been visited by an angel who had “caused the earth to shake” and “cried” unto Alma to repent and change his ways (Mosiah 27:11, 13).  It had been an incredibly turbulent period of time since then, and his very difficult experiences must have being weighing heavily upon him.  It had been only about five years since he had watched women and children be burned by the wicked people of Ammonihah because they had refused to repent (Alma 14:8).  I don’t know how he could have ever gotten that image out of his mind, and he must have desired with all his heart that those murderous Nephites could have been stopped by his words like he had been stopped by the angel.  He also had just witnessed in the year before “a tremendous battle, yea, even such an one as never had been known among all the people in the land from the time Lehi left Jerusalem” (Alma 28:2).  The cause of the battle was the dissenters from the Nephites who had once had the faith but had forsaken it.  “The Amalekites… were exceedingly angry” and “they began to stir up [the Lamanites] in anger against their brethren, the people of Anti-Nephi-Lehi” (Alma 27:2).  We read that “the armies of the Lamanites had followed their brethren into the wilderness” and this is when a terrible war took place (Alma 28:1).  At the root the cause of the war was the conversion of these Anti-Nephi-Lehies and the apostate Nephites’ hatred towards them.  Surely the terrible tragedy of the thousands of lives lost because of this battle was part of the reason for Alma’s exclamation, “I would declare unto every soul, as with the voice of thunder, repentance and the plan of redemption, that they should repent and come unto our God, that there might not be more sorrow upon all the face of the earth” (Alma 29:2).  He understood that the solution to the painful problems among their people was repentance and he longed to be able to more powerfully convey that to his brethren.

                Perhaps there is another angle from which we can understand his longing to be an “angel.”  The sons of Mosiah “were treated as though they were angels sent from God to save them from everlasting destruction” (Alma 27:4).  This was likely what king Anti-Nephi-Lehi meant when he said, “The great God has had mercy on us… therefore in his mercy he doth visit us by his angels, that the plan of salvation might be made known unto us” (Alma 24:14).  These converted Lamanites considered their missionaries to be angels for bringing them the plan of salvation, and surely as Alma interacted with them they used this same description about the sons of Mosiah to him.  Alma showed no sign of jealousy of them in his soliloquy; to the contrary he exclaimed, “Now, when I think of the success of these my brethren my soul is carried away, even to the separation of it from the body, as it were, so great is my joy” (Alma 29:16).  And yet perhaps there was a longing in him to have that same kind of missionary success—to “bring thousands of souls to repentance”—especially after what had happened among the people of Ammonihah (Alma 26:22).  Perhaps that wish was granted in some respect in his next mission as he and Amulek helped convert “many” of the Zoramites who ultimately came and lived with the people of Ammon (Alma 35:6).  At any rate, as was once suggested to me, when Alma “was taken up by the Spirit” and the Lord took him “unto himself,” one of the first things the Lord must have done was to hand Alma his trumpet and grant him the full desire of his heart (Alma 45:19).