You can read the entire chapter here: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/alma/22?lang=eng.
As Ammon and King Lamoni return to Lamoni’s realm to teach the people there, Aaron is leaving Middoni. We learn that God is guiding him and his companions to Lamoni’s father (verse 1).
Sometimes it requires a team effort to bring about a change in our hearts. One person might do something that leads us to question a well-established practice or habit of ours that had been so firmly set in stone for years. They succeed in cracking the elaborate shell of illusion we’ve constructed to convince ourselves we’ve reached a point where the painful process of change is no longer necessary. Once it’s cracked, we can sometimes become overwhelmed—going from never questioning anything about ourselves to questioning everything all at once.
In that situation, it’s nice to have a trusted friend who can lead us in the right direction, assuring us that we don’t necessarily need to completely overhaul everything about our lives, but instead narrow our focus on what’s most important to change.
After Ammon cracks the shell of Lamoni’s father, softening that hard man of action into a much more introspective person, Aaron shows up at just the right time to guide Lamoni’s father by the hand for the rest of his journey toward truth and reconciliation.
Lamoni’s father (aka “the king”) tells Aaron that two things about Ammon have “somewhat troubled his mind,” or gotten him to think about things in a new way. First, what motivated Ammon to act so generously toward Lamoni? Second, what was the animating force behind the great words that Ammon spoke in defending truth and righteousness, and explaining his just cause (verse 3)? Remember, Lamoni’s father has years, maybe decades of experience ruling over people, so he knows a thing or two about the importance of finding a way to stir the hearts of others. Clearly, he recognizes a force in Ammon’s approach that he hadn’t yet encountered even in all his past experience.
The king is also troubled by, or curious about, his new teachers’ reference to “the Spirit of the Lord” and repentance (verse 6).
Aaron does not explain by providing a dictionary definition of the terms, but instead he backs up and simply asks if the king believes there is a God. The king has heard the Amalekites (those hardened people who descend from the priests of the wicked King Noah—introduced in ) talk about a God, and shows his willingness to trust Aaron by saying, “I’ll believe it if you tell me it’s real.” Aaron answers, “Yes, assuredly God is real” (verses 7-8).
Then Aaron uses the starting points the king already has. The king knows about a Great Spirit from the Lamanites’ traditions about coming out of Jerusalem. So Aaron takes the knowledge the king has, and adds to it by explaining that the Great Spirit and God are the same thing. Then Aaron tells the king about God’s “plan of redemption” for man—creation, commandments, Adam’s transgression, and Jesus as our Redeemer from death and sin through his sufferings and death (verses 9-14).
The king, this once very proud and haughty ruler who brooked no disrespect from his adult son (a king himself) or anyone else, is brought to complete and utter humility by Aaron’s teachings. He laps them all up hungrily, and is desperate to be “born of God,” to have “this wicked spirit rooted out of my breast” and receive God’s spirit and eternal life. In fact he’s so desperate, he says he’ll give up his whole kingdom for these spiritual treasures that he has only just now discovered. At the heart of this great show of feeling and desire from the king is the ultimate question—one that is always there for us too. “OK, now that I know something more about myself, the world, God, and our intertwined relationships, what do I DO?” (verse 15)
Aaron reassures him that God doesn’t need him to make such drastic and total changes to his life (at least not now). He just needs to repent of his sins and bow down to the Lord in faith to receive a hope and assurance of his forgiveness and connection with God (verse 16).
It is drastic enough for this king to bow himself down to someone else, this invisible God that Ammon and Aaron have spoken of. It must have presented quite a spectacle to the servants and others at court watching the king do this. They might have wondered if he’d gone mad or somehow been duped or used by Aaron here. What a moving thing to contemplate! No one, no, not even the highest ruler of the land, is exempt from the consequences of sin and mortality. We all are subject to Him who rules above everything (verse 17).
When they are uttered with sincere feeling and real intent, there are no more important words for us to say to the Lord than what the king says in his prayer, “I will give away all my sins to know thee, and that I may be raised from the dead, and be saved at the last day.” A measure of the king’s sincerity is that he, like his son King Lamoni and those surrounding him not too long before (in Alma 18-19), is struck dumb by the power of the transformation that begins to work on his mind and heart (verse 18).
The reaction of the king’s servants and the queen here is very different than with Lamoni. Instead of carrying the king into the queen and waiting patiently for the situation to resolve itself, the servants fetch the queen and she is ready to act immediately against Aaron and his companions. When the servants express reluctance to obey the queen’s command to kill the visitors, based on the power they perceive Aaron has, she insists they gather the people to come and kill Aaron and his companions. Perhaps the queen has been conditioned over time to act quickly in order to avoid being left vulnerable or having others perceive her as vulnerable if too much time is taken to act (verses 19-21).
The situation is also different because Aaron hasn’t built up a relationship with the servants or any of the people surrounding the king, unlike Ammon with his efforts to ingratiate himself at King Lamoni’s court through a period of service with Lamoni’s flocks. Aaron has every reason to believe that the people will not be pacified. Just as the servant Abish roused the royal family in Alma 19 with the prospect of an angry multitude on hand, Aaron takes the king by the hand to raise him from his trance. The queen and everyone else, no longer feeling as though Aaron intends direct harm to the kingdom, now feel a less expressible, more foreboding type of anxiety, as they don’t know what to make of the power Aaron has (verses 22-23).
The king steps in at this
point. He so convincingly ministers to his household that we learn they are all
converted to the Lord. Additionally, he pacifies the discontented multitude and
sends Aaron and his companions out to preach to them (verses 23-26).
