Reference: This verse is problematic when compared to other Old Testament texts from Zenos’s time. The sentiment of addressing God is similar, but this verse redirects the mercies of God through an intermediary, the Son. As modern Christians, we understand God as the Father and Jesus Christ as his Son. However, the prophets from Zenos’s time interpreted their God to be Yahweh, son of the Most High God.
Although Yahweh is the name of the premortal Jesus Christ (and therefore Jesus is appropriately God), “the Son” is a reference to Jesus’s mortal mission as the Atoning Messiah. This change in perspective from the purely heavenly genealogy to one that transcends the division between the two worlds creates the shift that appropriately tells us that “the Son’s” atoning mediation on earth reconciles us to our God in the heavens. (See 1 Nephi, Part 1: Context, Chapter 2, “The Historical Background of 1 Nephi.)
S. Kent Brown astutely notes that Alma “brought together the passages from the writings of these two men [Zenos and Zenock] which proved a point about the Son of God. [They] called the Messiah Son whereas Alma called him Son of God (Alma 33:14, 17ff). Had Alma known of a passage in which either Zenock or Zenos mentioned the Son of God, he surely would have used it to make his point to the Zoramites.”
This verse ends the quotation from Zenos.