As they began to question him, Amulek perceived their intentions. The Spirit of the Lord was with him, and immediately he parried their thrusts. He turned their questions into barbed retorts in which he showed their iniquities. Boldly, and with a cause that was just, Amulek again called the wicked to repentance. He testified that Christ, himself, had said by the voice of His angels, “I will come down among My people, with equity and justice in My hands.” Therefore, Amulek said, as also had angels, “Repent ye, repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”
That the Ammonihahites, to excuse their ways of darkness, could not plead ignorance of God’s Laws, Amulek warned them that if they persisted in evil-doing, casting out from them the righteous, entering the secret pay of Satan thereby defiantly repelling God’s Holy Spirit, and therein boasting of unrighteousness, “they would be ripe for destruction.” Of all these things the people of Ammonihah were guilty. They chose iniquity; the righteous traditions of their fathers were by them obscured. In the case of Alma and Amulek, they sought to make it a crime, punishable by death, to preach God’s Holy Word.
By the trumped-up charges of which the lawyers accused the missionaries, the lawyers, themselves, the Sacred Record says, “Are laying the foundation of the devil; for ye are laying traps and snares to catch the holy ones of God.” In short, the lawyers together with the judges who perverted their callings were thus building upon an unfirm foundation the superstructure of which would sooner or later crumble under the weight of sin, “and bring down the wrath of God upon your heads, even the destruction of this people.”
Amulek, now more so than before, withstood the wrath of their disappointed pride—and we know of no more bitter and malignant passion that occupies the human heart than disappointed pride—as he told the Ammonihahites that if it were not for the prayers of the righteous among the Nephites, “ye would even now be visited with utter destruction,” not destruction by a flood of water “as were the people in the days of Noah, but it would be by famine, and by pestilence, and by the sword.” Amulek spoke with prophetic knowledge; there can be nothing so sure as that. Again he repeated it is through the prayers of the righteous that this thing has not already come to pass, and you are spared from destruction. But, he added to his Heaven-inspired warning, that unless repentance was their immediate goal the fierce anger of the Lord would “come out against you,” and as he previously told them, that you shall be smitten.