Alma’s revelatory experience seems to have been visual, since he apparently had a vision that gave him a pure understanding. Now, he struggles to put his understanding into words, trying three times in slightly different ways to communicate that understanding. He hesitates at one point: “whether it be at his resurrection or after, I do not say.”
This difficulty is not Alma’s lack of understanding but rather an effect of the ineffable experience he has had. He understood something of Yahweh that happened in Yahweh’s realm on Yahweh’s time, a place and time that is different from our own. The two simply don’t match. When Alma attempts to correlate what he understands on the level of Yahweh’s time in reference to mortal time, he cannot give a precise definition. However, he does understand clearly the sequence: Those who have been dead the longest will be among the first to receive their resurrected bodies.