This brought to pass the fulfillment of a prophecy uttered by Abinadi almost sixty or seventy years before, when he was brought before the wicked priests of still more wicked King Noah, and by them was burned at the stake: "But this much I tell you, what you do with me, after this, shall be a type and a shadow of things which are to come."(Mosiah 13:10)
"Because of his belief in God," the Prophet Abinadi was the first of the faithful in Christ to suffer death by fire. Mormon, in his abridgment of Alma's record comments that Abinadi meant this when he pronounced the terrible indictment against King Noah and his priests "that many should suffer death by fire, according as he had suffered." (V. 11)
In commenting on the martyrdom of Abinadi as recorded in Mosiah 17:12-19, COMMENTARY ON THE BOOK OF MORMON, Volume II, pp. 190-192, we repeat what we said there: "The Prophet Abinadi, pronounced guilty by the loathsome King Noah and sentenced by him to die, calmly looked about the king's chambers and expressed no regrets. He offered no excuses, nor did he plead for mercy or for clemency. What mattered most to him, he had proclaimed the message God sent him to deliver!"
In spite of the scorn King Noah's people had for Abinadi's words, and the contempt they showed by refusing to obey them, Abinadi was true to the promise he had made, "I finish my message." (Mosiah 13:9)
Led forth by Noah's wicked priests and by the clamoring throng that in carnival spirit had gathered to mock him, the prophet was hastened to his place of death and neither flinched nor feared his coming doom.
As the flames of the martyr's pyre began to scorch his weary frame, Abinadi cried unto them, saying many terrible things that would happen unto them: That because many Lamanites should "believe in the Salvation of the Lord their God," their seed would cause the believers to "suffer the pains of death by fire," even as "ye have done unto me." Also, he told them that because of iniquity among them, pestilence and disease would be sowed broadcast among them. In addition to all that, he said, "Yes, and ye shall be smitten on every hand, and shall be driven and scattered to and fro, even as a wild flock is driven by wild and ferocious beasts."(Ibid., 17:17)
Abinadi continued his fearsome prophecy, and we are now contemplating its full fulfillment, for Alma records in the words of Mormon that the Amulonites who were the seed of King Noah's wicked priests "were driven by the Lamanites, and they were hunted, and they were smitten."