Alma went from “God is love” to real understanding

Alma’s question “What does it mean when it talks about ‘how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that publisheth peace, that sayeth unto Zion – thy God reigneth’?” Sounds like it belongs to a historic variant of today’s “God is love” shallow understanding of Christianity. Under such a philosophy and with a similarly shallow understanding a young Alma may have believed that teaching people to just do what feels good (promoting whoredoms and winebibbing either implicitly or explicitly) was a correct way to publish peace. After Abinadi’s answer to his question he would have come away with a much deeper understanding of what it means to publish peace, like truly listening to “Love and Law” (Elder Oaks, October 2009) to discover how the truth behind God is love reinforces and requires the commandments instead of minimizing them. He would know that publishing peace meant teaching the people to keep the commandments and telling them “the God of Zion reigneth” meant teaching the truth about their God.