Alma 17: 6 Having refused the kingdom which their father was desirous to confer upon them, and also this was the minds of the people...This has always been something I have found to be an interesting conundrum: what is our obligation to be/do large things when we are capable of being/doing large things? In this specific example, any one of these four sons could have been an amazing king. And while it's true that they brought many people to the knowledge of the truth, I don't see anything in the stories that would imply that those people couldn't have been brought to the truth by three of Mosiah's four sons, while the other stayed and became King. Alma only lasted as chief judge for all of nine years before the "freedom" they had granted the people blew up in his face and he had to quit to focus on preaching the word. What if they had had a strong king, who could have imposed a state religion on the people and a High Priest who could dedicate all of his time to preaching the word of God, and three sons of Mosiah who could have made an amazing 14 year missionary journey to the Lamanites? Wouldn't that have been a better use of at least one of the sons' time? They could conceivably had that king all the way through the book of Alma, and then had a great chance that his son, raised as he would have been, in the company of people like his father, Alma, the great missionary uncles he would have had, Moroni, and Heleman, would have been likely to be a solid, upright man, who could have taken them nearly to Christ's time.
So was the decision to decline the throne in favor of personal desires, however noble, the right decision?
Alma 17:11 Show forth good examples unto them in me, and I will make an instrument of thee in my hands unto the salvation of many souls. I have a note in my scriptures that Anatoliy Frolov didn't want to learn about the gospel but when we helped him by translating his paper, he saw our example and wanted to know more. Anatoliy was the first person who got baptized in consequence of my teaching while I was on my mission. He was an amazing man, and was wonderful to teach. I was with Elder Staples in Novo-Darnitsya at the time.
Alma 26:27 and when our hearts were depressed, and we wer about to turn back, behold, the Lord comforted us, and said: go amongst thy brethren, the Lamanites, and bear with patience thine afflictions and I will give unto you success. In Voskresenskiy, when I was teaching a family that I thought was perfect, and they told me that they liked everything we were saying, but they also liked their own church, and their friends were there, and they didn't see why they ought to change, I left their house so low that I was questioning why I had even come on my mission, and why we bothered to teach people the gospel at all, if the Lord, in his mercy, could just baptize them after they died anyway. We were walking to a bus stop, and I was praying, crying out inside, for God to help me understand, and I felt an amazing bolt of lightning and felt, "the Gospel is true because we have living prophets" and I was filled with such a joy that I could not contain it. I started running around, shouting for joy, throwing my bag into the air, and when my companion looked at me like I was a crazy person, I told him, "the gospel is true because we have living prophets." He said something like, "Duh." but also became enthusiastic and threw my bag a time or two. It's not new doctrine, and it's not intensely personal, but it was revelatory, and it was a message sent by God to me at a time when I needed to feel an outpouring of the spirit and it buoyed me up.
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