"And now as ye have been delivered by the power of God out of these bonds; yea, even out of the hands of king Noah and his people, and also from the bonds of iniquity, even so I desire that ye should stand fast in this liberty wherewith ye have been made free, and that ye trust no man to be a king over you.
And also trust no one to be your teacher nor your minister, except he be a man of God, walking in his ways and keeping his commandments.
Thus did Alma teach his people, that every man should love his neighbor as himself, that there should be no contention among them."
Mosiah 23:13-15
It is interesting to me here that Alma taught his people to not trust a king, teacher, or minister unless they were dedicated to God and keeping his commandments, but at the same time, and even maybe because of this ("thus")... that we should love and avoid contention. I don't think that this is contradictory, but on the surface it can seem so, since we are used to thinking about trust as a part of love.
I think though that God's pure and perfect kind of love transcends trust. He loves us, even though he absolutely cannot trust us to not sin. But he loves us anyway, and teaches us how to be better... to overcome ourselves and to learn to be worthy of trust. And I think maybe that is what Alma is advocating here as well. We can't always trust our leaders and teachers, or many of the other people around us, honestly. Trust is necessarily limited with fallible humans, but we *can* love them, and do all we can to help them to be better. The same with ourselves, actually. We can't always trust ourselves either, but we can love ourselves, and dedicate ourselves to working hard to be better and to listen to God, and to be more obedient... to eventually be worthy of trust and be able to return to God.
It reminds me of an episode of Doctor Who actually, where the doctor says "Do you think that I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?" ... and isn't that what God is saying to us every single day? He knows that we've betrayed him, and there are lots of analogies in the scriptures about it, comparing us to unfaithful spouses or mothers forgetting their children, to help us to understand the depth of our betrayal. And yet, knowing all of this, he still died for us, and lives still, for us, to lead us to eternal life and happiness. Today, let's be careful of who we trust, but let's never hold back our love, and let's love God most of all, who we can always trust, and turn to him, and work to be worthy of that love and that grace that he offers us, and the life that he gave so that we could learn to love and live again as he does.
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