Alma’s courage in face of physical harm (v. 7) is admirable, but the words he spoke were even more courageous. Calling them a “wicked and perverse generation” (v. 8) would ordinarily have incensed them further, and it did, but not before Alma had spoken the truths he had been commissioned to declare. Their delaying to harm him was probably because “the guilty taketh the truth to be hard, for it cutteth them to the very center,” as Nephi had said unto Laman and Lemuel (1 Nephi 16:2).
Attributing the success of Lehi and the successive generations to the power, mercy, and long-suffering of God (Alma 9:9–11) toward the Nephite people had apparently caused them to stop and think. It did set the stage for the call to repentance (vv. 12–13) and the reminder of forgotten commandments given by Alma (v 8). His call to repentance warned of eternal and temporal consequences if they did not respond favorably. Eternally, they would not inherit the kingdom of God, but more immediately they would be destroyed from off the face of the earth (v. 12). Again he uses Father Lehi to support both the reason to repent and the warning of destruction (v. 13). Although these alternatives had been first revealed to Nephi, son of Lehi (see 1 Nephi 2:20–21), Lehi had also been promised this conditional prosperity for the land by the time his people had arrived in the Americas (see 2 Nephi 1:9–12, 20).