Alma 14

(March 26, 2014)
I have never believed that the Lord needed any help in judging any of us.  After all, He knows the end from the beginning and can see into our hearts in ways that we cannot see ourselves.  He didn’t need to send us down here to be tested – He could have told us our eternal reward at the point where we were born and His judgments would have been both perfect and just.

With thoughts like that in mind, I think that Alma is wrong on why he thinks that the women and children were martyred.  I think that the purpose of mortality is for us to be tested, but it is for us to recognize that the judgments of God are correct and just.  They were allowed to martyr the women and children so, in that day when the Lord judged them, they would be forced to concede that their days had been days of wickedness on the Earth and the Lord’s judgments were just.

And what about the women and children?  Well, to my mind the second part of the purpose of our mortal life is to develop us towards those attributes of Godhood that we each need to develop. And what they suffered must have been in furtherance of that end in a manner that I don’t understand.