Previously I had written about the way Alma presented himself to the people of Zarahemla and the people of Gideon. The people of Gideon in Alma 5 were not in as good of a spiritual condition as those of Zarahemla, so Alma focused on stirring them up to repentance with strong emotional pleas.
The Gideonites are a people who many of them knew about the Church previously, but had since departed from it and lost the blessings that came along, so they probably were familiar with church history up to that point. Alma exhorts them to remember the many ways the Lord has delivered both them and their ancestors, temporally and spiritually. He asks them to ponder upon what they might think at the day of judgment and if they think they could possibly be saved with all their sins. In v. 18:
"Or otherwise, can ye imagine yourselves brought before the tribunal of God with your souls filled with guilt and remorse, having a remembrance of all your guilt, yea, a perfect remembrance of all your wickedness, yea, a remembrance that ye have set at defiance the commandments of God?”
By being direct in speaking of the ultimate consequences of wickedness, Alma paints a vivid picture of what the people can expect if they continue in wickedness and also attempts to dispel any illusions they may have had about escaping the consequences of sin.
The people may already know that Alma can speak of the guilt and remorse caused by sin from personal experience, as mentioned in Mosiah 27:29 after he had repented of trying to destroy the church and in Alma 36:21 when he was speaking to his son Helaman. Furthermore, it makes sense for Alma to ask this question because we can tell that he has already answered these questions to himself and pondered how he would feel being judged if all his sins were still on his head in Mosiah 27:31:
"Yea, every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess before him. Yea, even at the last day, when all men shall stand to be judged of him, then shall they confess that he is God; then shall they confess, who live without God in the world, that the judgment of an everlasting punishment is just upon them; and they shall quake, and tremble, and shrink beneath the glance of his all-searching eye."
Due to the nature of Alma's conversion, it seems that he is particularly skilled at describing what we would feel being judged of God. Much of the beginning of Alma's preaching to the Gideonites is in the form of questions, which encourages them to imagine for themselves what consequences are in store, and their imagination could be more emotionally overpowering than what Alma could convey directly. V. 22 is a prime example of this:
"And now I ask of you, my brethren, how will any of you feel, if ye shall stand before the bar of God, having your garments stained with blood and all manner of filthiness? Behold, what will these things testify against you?"
In addition to reminding them of the misery caused by sin, in v. 22 Alma invokes the emotions of spiritual rejoicing that they have likely felt before.
"If ye have experienced a change of heart, and if ye have felt to sing the song of redeeming love, I would ask, can ye feel so now?"
Alma might be drawing on his own experiences here. Since he was the son of the man in charge of the Church previously, he may have felt this way about the gospel at some point before he set about trying to "destroy the church of God" and lost that feeling. But instead of relating his own emotions, Alma thought it would be more effective if he urged the people to remember how they had felt.
As a side note, one of my favorite passages in Alma is Alma 12:14:
"For our words will condemn us, yea, all our works will condemn us; we shall not be found spotless; and our thoughts will also condemn us; and in this awful state we shall not dare to look up to our God; and we would fain be glad if we could command the rocks and the mountains to fall upon us to hide us from his presence. "
This was not in Alma's address to the Gideonites, but it is another example of Alma speaking about how we might feel at the day of judgment.
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