Alma reminded the forgetful Ammonihahites of the promise God gave unto Lehi and his children when first they settled in their new Land of Promise:
Inasmuch as ye shall keep My commandments ye shall prosper in the land; but inasmuch as ye will not keep My commandments ye shall be cut off from My presence. (II Nephi 1:20)
The reminder to the people of Ammonihah of the Lord’s promise to their fathers should have been sufficient to awake in them the desire to serve Him, but in their unbelieving hearts it infuriated them to a point of madness. They listened while Alma compared their fallen state to that of their brethren, the Lamanites; then, once more, their hatred of him became more bitter and malignant. They sought his life; but again, a Power more mighty than theirs shielded him from all harm.
Because the Lamanites gave no heed to thoughts of the Lord, thereby putting aside His holy name, their worship of Him was unknown. They, themselves, had cut the ties that bind the spiritually living and the dead. Without the light of His influence to guide them they had gone astray. They had become a dark and a loathsome people, delighting in bloodshed, and in all manner of wickedness. The Ammonihahites could see right before their eyes the degraded and desolate men and women who once were a “white and delightsome people,” but, who, because of idleness and iniquity, were sunken to a place where God’s Spirit cannot dwell. The Lamanites, they well knew, lived without God, and from the very first when they chose the paths of idleness and of treachery towards their brethren who were seeking diligently to serve the Lord, “They had been,” Alma said, “cut off from His presence.” The story told in the Book of Mormon of the righteousness and wickedness of the ancient inhabitants of America has undeniable proof written on every page thereof that God‘s promise of Lehi’s descendants was verified in the many events that occurred in their then over 500 year history.
Alma waxed vehement in denouncing the evil practices of the people of Ammonihah, and in so doing pointed out to them that in the Day of Judgment, notwithstanding the wickedness of the Lamanites, the punishment meted out to them by the righteous Judge who should there and then preside would be less harsh upon the Lamanites than upon them; yea, upon them that have had revealed to them the Light of Christ, and yet have rejected its rays. “It will be more tolerable for them in the Day of Judgment,” Alma said, “than for you.” Moreover, he told the Ammonihahites that it will profit them little to wait until that day to repent; but now, even now, the Lord commands them to turn from their wicked ways which they deliberately seek, and trust in Him who is mighty to save. Alma told them, though not in these words, that they were putting the blessings of God to shame by partaking in sin of the gifts of His bounteous hands. They accepted reward for work they should, but did not do. They quickly received of His gifts, but gave no thanks to the Giver. In neglecting these things Alma said that they had just cause to repent as commanded, and he further warned that unless they did so immediately and honestly they would be swept from off the face of the earth, and their beautiful city of which they were increasingly proud also would be destroyed.
Throughout their entire history the righteous kings and rulers of the Nephites saw the Lamanites as brothers. They neither took delight in their fallen condition, nor sought they their destruction. The Nephites, rather than shed the blood of their brethren, strived at every opportunity to raise them to higher levels of goodness and of industry. They prayed unceasingly for the Salvation of the Lamanites in God’s Kingdom; however, and notwithstanding that both were of the House of Israel, the Lamanites refused to worship its God, and sank deeper and deeper into a morass of loathsomeness and iniquity. They became a wicked and indolent race, often resorting to warfare just to satisfy the desire for the blood of their neighbors. The events of their history were not understood by the Lamanites, and the incidents surrounding their birth as a nation were by them willfully perverted so as to make them feel they were a nation of outcasts. Their annals by repeated telling were distorted and confused; their chronicles became diluted in oral transmission with stories of being wronged by Nephi and his followers.
As early as when dissension breached the ranks of Lehi’s children, or when Nephi and his followers separated from his brothers, Laman and Lemuel, to escape their unjust hatred, the children of Laman and Lemuel had been taught to despise, to deny, and deride, the true records that were kept by the Nephite historians. The Lamanites were taught by their leaders that they were driven out of the Land of Jerusalem, the land of their father’s inheritance, because of the iniquity of their forebears. They contended that they were wronged in the Wilderness of Judea, and also while crossing the sea. They said they were imposed upon by Nephi while still at the place of landing after they arrived in their new home, and that he usurped the leadership of Lehi‘s colony upon Lehi’s death, when, according to Hebrew custom, that calling rightly belonged to the elder brothers. Another of their vile traditions was that when Nephi led his sympathizers into the wilderness surrounding their habitation in the new Land of Promise, he took with him the Brass Plates which they had obtained from Laban, and also other sacred things. “Nephi robbed them,” was their oft-repeated complaint, and that calumny was handed down from one generation to the next.
Thus, faulty memory bequeathed to the Lamanite children the wicked and abominable traditions of their fathers, which when repeated time and time again made it easy for wicked and ambitious rulers to lead them astray. We may imagine that with each telling, these unwritten memorials assumed greater and more evil proportions, and in this way, every passing generation of Lamanites inherited more and more which was but the invention of diseased and depraved hearts. Thus, again, their imperfect traditions delivered a treacherous blow to the Lamanites for they therein became the victims of their own degraded beliefs, and it was not long until the dark-skinned Lamanites were guided by corrupt leaders who cared little or nothing about sowing falsehood among them, or in urging further enmity between these two branches of the same family. (See COMMENTARY ON THE BOOK OF MORMON, Volume II, pp. 114 ff.)
Now, the Lamanites knew nothing concerning the Lord, therefore they depended upon their own strength. Yet they were a strong people, as to the strength of men.
They were a wild, and ferocious, and a bloodthirsty people, believing in the tradition of their fathers, which is this—Believing that they were driven out of the Land of Jerusalem because of the iniquities of their fathers, and that they were wronged in the wilderness by their brethren, and they were also wronged while crossing the sea;
And again, that they were wronged while in the land of their first inheritance, after they had crossed the sea, and all this because that Nephi was more faithful in keeping the commandments of the Lord—therefore he was favored of the Lord, for the Lord heard his prayers and answered them, and he took the lead of their journey in the wilderness.
And his brethren were wroth with him because they understood not the dealings of the Lord; they were also wroth with him upon the waters because they hardened their hearts against the Lord.
And again, they were wroth with him when they had arrived in the Promised Land, because they said that he had taken the ruling of the people out of their hands; and they sought to kill him.
And again, they were wroth with him because he departed into the wilderness as the Lord had commanded him, and took the records which were engraven on the Plates of Brass, for they said that he robbed them.
And thus they have taught their children that they should hate them, and that they should murder them, and that they should rob and plunder them, and do all they could to destroy them; therefore they have an eternal hatred towards the children of Nephi. (Mosiah 10:17)