You can read the entire chapter at the following link: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/alma/9?lang=eng.
As we finished the previous chapter (Alma 8), Alma and Amulek are going out together to preach to the people of Ammonihah. This chapter begins with Alma making an effort to speak to the people, and the people flatly rejecting him. Just days before, the same people cast Alma out of the city, and now he’s back. They are surely wondering why he’s trying again with them and probably want to be even clearer he is not welcome.
They dismiss the idea that one person can presume authority to share momentous prophecies about them and their future (verses 1-2). They may feel as though an outsider like Alma can’t properly know them well enough to speak to their situation. How would we feel if someone who didn’t know us personally suddenly appeared in our neighborhood and started telling us about the things we were doing wrong?
But their resistance goes beyond their unfamiliarity with Alma. They seem to be daring him, and God, to share ominous warnings so that they can mock those warnings into meaninglessness. To drive the point home, they basically say, “If you warn us that the most disastrous thing imaginable will happen—the destruction of our city in a single day—we still won’t believe you” (verse 4). These residents of Ammonihah may be used to facing down other people, but they don’t understand you can’t trifle with the Lord or intimidate Him away.
Neither can you bully the Lord’s servants. The people get ready to take hold of Alma, either to throw him out again or take him to prison. But Alma, blessed with the Lord’s strength, stands boldly to testify to them of their wickedness (verse 7). Somehow he is able to avoid being silenced—the only thing we read is that the people did not lay hold of him.
Alma’s main concern for the people is that they have forgotten God and His commandments (verse 8). So Alma stirs them up to remembrance. He reminds them that God guided Lehi and his family to the promised land they now inhabit. He recounts the many times God delivered Lehi’s family members from those who would destroy them, including the members of their own family (a clear reference to Lehi’s son Nephi eluding the dark designs of his other sons Laman and Lemuel) (verses 9-10). Alma then sums up by saying it is only through the Lord’s power and mercy that any of them can hope for salvation (verse 11).
This point—which hints at salvation through Jesus Christ—leads directly to the next one, which is that the people need desperately to repent. If they don’t, Alma shares with the people what the angel shared with him (in Alma 8:16)—that utter destruction will come upon them (verse 12). It’s a vivid reminder to us that when we fail to repent of sin, it wreaks havoc in our lives. Maybe it’s not as outwardly destructive as what the people of Ammonihah are being warned of, but it goes to work on us like a virus. And the only cure comes from the Lord.
Again, Alma mentions Lehi, the founder of their civilization. He reminds them that the Lord told Lehi that their people would be cut off from the Lord if they did not keep the Lord’s commandments (verse 13). And Alma shares the example of the Lamanites, who rebelled early and often, and as a result, lost the guidance of the Lord (verse 14).
He goes on to warn the people of Ammonihah that they, as descendants of Nephi, are expected to live to a higher standard than the Lamanites of their generation because the Lamanites have not been raised to believe. In contrast, the people of Ammonihah have had “so much light and knowledge given unto them of the Lord their God,” and have been so richly blessed and miraculously delivered from their enemies time and again. By failing to live in line with the truth they have been taught, the Lord will hold them accountable, while the Lamanites will be entitled to greater mercy because of their relative ignorance (verses 15-17).
But there’s more—a lot more. In addition to there being hope for many of the Lamanites to be corrected and find happiness in God’s way, Nephi says that the Lamanites will be the instrument God uses to destroy the people of Ammonihah if they refuse to humble themselves and change (verse 18). He then tells them that this is why the Lord is so focused on warning them. He wants them to know of their perilous state and that the way out of it is to repent and follow the gospel of Christ, which leads to covenants made through baptism and the salvation this brings (verses 19-30).
Alma has now done everything in his power to make the people aware of their predicament, and the way they can choose to escape it and find salvation. The people are livid at him because they see him as an outsider who presumes to judge them—so their pride is injured and they want to punish him (verse 31). They are probably also feeling some sense of uneasiness at the guilt that attends their rebellious natures.
We have a curious passage here that is similar to some about Jesus during his mortal life. The people seek to take hold of Alma and throw him in jail, but the Lord doesn’t allow this to happen (verses 32-33). How God protects Alma from the mob is unclear, just as in some of the cases where people tried to harm or imprison Jesus and the gospel narrators tell us that the Lord did not suffer them to do it. Instead, Amulek steps forth, and we get ready to hear what this newly minted companion of Alma has to say (verse 34).
Check out a video clip covering this chapter here.
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