Alma 12

A great time for him to speak up. And he did.

Alma saw Amulek had outfoxed Zeezrom. So he started up a new sermon to the growing crowd. It was as if he and Amulek were a tag team with scripture as the wrestling mat.

Here is what Alma said: “So, Zeezrom—what does that name mean: liar? Because we’ve seen what most people already knew about you, mister attorney. You lie this way and that, vertically and horizontally—to God as well as men. But God is our attorney. And his version of ‘pretrial discovery’ is something you can’t imagine: he reads your mind and then tells us.

“You had an agenda, a scheme to wow people and shut us down in their eyes. I’d like to say ‘the devil made you do it.’ But that’s a cliché. And anyway, you let him do it. You actually liked that he was behaving through you. But he liked it even better. Because the more he can inhabit your soul, the more that soul will have to inhabit the hell he’s cooked up for evil men. And you’ve now signed a hefty lease on that property.”

Zeezrom was visibly shaken. Literally. He shivered as though standing in ice. He knew they’d seen straight into his heart. Then, in a weird twist, he quit his ad hominem line of argument and started asking about theology in the abstract.

“Explain the doctrine of resurrection and judgment,” he said.

Alma was coy. “Some of us get to know God’s mysteries, though with the proviso we only share them with worthy inquirers. We have to be very selective, despite God’s general reputation for generosity.

“Hearts can calcify. Their interior can encrust so that they hold less and less. God can pour only a small amount into them. If a man chooses this calcification, he’s chosen limited knowledge of God and his ways. The devil sees that and, as the man struggles with this non-functioning heart, the devil slowly, almost imperceptibly, wraps chains around the man, eventually kidnapping him and delivering him to hell’s doorstep.

“Amulek made the resurrection doctrine pretty clear, I’d say. Also the future judgment of all men. If one walks around with a chest full of stone where his heart should be, he shouldn’t expect any great illuminations. And he’s certainly not destined for God’s kingdom. Not without serious open-heart surgery.

“Interestingly, God has ears. And he listens, like a musician waiting for his cue. His favorite set-list is the words coming from his children’s mouths. If they get too dissonant, he gets upset. And if we’re the ones making the discord, we’ll wish the mountains tipped over onto us, just to protect us from the Great Musician’s anger.

“But that’s not an option. We get exposed, little us and big Him. We don’t get to say what’s fair, because he defines what ‘fair’ means. Also, fortunately, what ‘merciful’ means.

“We all die. But just as we say you can be born again, you can die again. If you die a sinner, you find that death has none of the comforts it has for former sinners. It’s the Satan Hotel for the rest of forever, with all its pathetic accoutrements: a flaming bathtub, closetful of chains, but no place sit.

“If you self-select into that hotel, Jesus may as well not have come. You’ve made a farce of the whole plan.”

At that, the whole courtroom, which had gotten quieter and quieter just to hear Alma, suddenly got noisy. One man, a bigwig named Antionah, asked Alma about the refurbishing of the body and the endless existence of the soul. Then, while he was at it, could Alma explain the part about the cherubim with a flaming sword, who guarded the tree of life in the Garden of Eden so that no one could live forever, and yet now Alma says everyone will live forever?

Alma said, genially, “I was about to get to that. Adam fell and made us all subpar. If he could have eaten from the life tree then he would have, in effect, made God a liar, because God had said he’d die by eating from the previous tree. So he did die, eventually, and we all will. But that’s the first death, not the second death. Fortunately, neither Adam nor we died the first time we sinned: the world would have been empty long ago and this discussion would not be happening.

“God gives us time between sinning and dying so we can regret and change. Endless life is an off-the-clock feast of fine cuisine or hellish crap. If you want the former, you’ve got to be more than hungry. You’ve got to dress up for it.

“Death and regeneration—‘resurrection’—were all part of the plan from the start. If Adam (and let’s not forget Eve) could have bypassed death, they’d have been miserable, since my contention—borne out from close observation of human experience—is that sin has no joy. Pleasure, maybe. Not joy.

“So, live free and die is the premise. But after you die, judgment falls on you like rain. And you better have a good raincoat. A hood too. Because nothing will stop that rain till God calls it off.

“God built death into the plan, as I said. He also built learning into it. Learning how to face death as we do life, with hope and expectation of growth. But that’s conditional. And he’s sent messengers always to update people on the conditions and to remind them of his greatness.

“He’s worked for years to drum into men and women’s heads, though mostly men’s, this plan of his, as frustrating and confusing and counterintuitive as it can seem in a basically rational world. If you change, turn around from evil intentions and deeds, you will discover, empirically, why you should prefer good intentions and deeds.

“The commandments of which we speak are like training wheels on bikes—I don’t know if you have those here—which help us to keep our balance when we’re just starting out on the ride. In time, we’ve internalized the sense of balance that keeps us steady.

“The first sin in the Garden of Eden had at least one virtue: to know good from its opposite is what allowed for free choice. If there are no options, what does freedom even mean?

“But along with that freedom came those commandments, intended to forestall that second death to which I’ve alluded. That hellish postmortal condition follows a death of the spirit here on earth, or at least the death of sensitivity to the goodness we can choose once we’ve learned self-correcting balance. I know this sounds overly pious. But I’m trying to make the case for God’s justice—that “fairness” we always seem to want, at least from a God that parades himself as the ultimate Good. At the heart of paradox and confoundment, one can always find simple, experiential ploys to change for the better.

“But to cut back the message to its essence, I’ll just say this: God, in his son’s name, says, ‘Stop the calcification of your emotions and I’ll back off of any preemptive threats. Jesus can take over from there. Change and live, with his reliable help. It may be all a fight now. But at the end you’ll know what real rest means. That’s a concept that, like ‘fair’ and ‘merciful’ and every other deep idea, I’ve reserved the right to define.

“Keep calcifying your emotions and you’ll never experience my form of ‘rest.’ Indeed I’ll give you an everlasting insomnia well beyond your power to imagine. The second death will be the ultimate state of ‘dead tired.’

“The choice is clear. God is relatively untickoffable. But if you get him started he doesn’t let up easily. The commandments may seem like work (well, actually they are work) but turn out to be, in a quasi-bizarre upturning of logic that God finds so cheerful, a form of rest.”