Students may wonder why Alma said “I would cite your minds forward” and then spoke of events that had already passed (see Alma 13:1). It is helpful to remember that Alma 13 is a continuation of a discourse that is also in Alma 11 and 12. The end of Alma 12contains Alma’s words about the Fall of Adam and Eve (see Alma 12:22–23, 30–32). At the beginning of Alma 13, Alma continues his account, asking the people to “cite [their] minds forward” to a time after the Fall when the Lord ordained priests to teach His commandments.
“These Nephites, who were faithful and true in keeping the law of Moses, had the Melchizedek Priesthood, which means they had also the fulness of the gospel. … Some of our best information about the Melchizedek Priesthood is found in Alma 13” (Bruce R. McConkie, The Promised Messiah [1978], 421).
“Alma, in about 82 b.c., discoursed at length on the Melchizedek Priesthood and on those who held it from the beginning. ‘Those priests,’ he said, meaning high priests of the Melchizedek Priesthood, ‘were ordained after the order of his Son, in a manner that thereby the people might know in what manner to look forward to his Son for redemption.’ That is to say, they were types and shadows of our Lord’s coming; they were living, walking, breathing Messianic prophecies, even as we should be living witnesses that he has come” (Bruce R. McConkie, The Promised Messiah[1978], 451).
“God gave his children their free agency even in the [premortal] spirit world, by which the individual spirits had the privilege, just as men have here, of choosing the good and rejecting the evil, or partaking of the evil to suffer the consequences of their sins. Because of this, some even there were more faithful than others in keeping the commandments of the Lord. …
“… The spirits of men had their free agency. … The spirits of men were not equal. They may have had an equal start, and we know they were all innocent in the beginning; but the right of free agency which was given to them enabled some to outstrip others, and thus, through the eons of immortal existence, to become more intelligent, more faithful, for they were free to act for themselves, to think for themselves, to receive the truth or rebel against it” (Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation, comp. Bruce R. McConkie [1954], 1:58–59).
“Every man who has a calling to minister to the inhabitants of the world was ordained to that very purpose in the Grand Council of heaven before this world was. I suppose that I was ordained to this very office in that Grand Council” (Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith [2007], 511).
“In the world before we came here, faithful women were given certain assignments while faithful men were foreordained to certain priesthood tasks. While we do not now remember the particulars, this does not alter the glorious reality of what we once agreed to” (Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Spencer W. Kimball [2006], 215–16).