Noah ruled as if authority required inequality. How else to explain the trappings of power with which he surrounded himself after his father’s death? He fired all the priests and hired new ones with unquestioned loyalty to him. He built magnificent structures, “ornamented with gold and silver and with precious things” (Mosiah 11:9). He reserved seats for his priests which towered above the people below, creating a palpable distance. And then there was his tower, near the temple but so much taller, which served to protect his people but also to assert his supremacy.
Everything about this system was intended to prioritize loyalty over justice. King Mosiah would later explain that a leader like Noah “has his friends in iniquity” and “teareth up the laws of those who have reigned in righteousness before him” (Mosiah 29:23). How does a leader like that retain authority? By emphasizing the differences between himself and the people he leads, flaunting his own power, and convincing the people around him that hierarchy is indicative of value.
Enter Abinadi. He had no authority, no station. He was an ordinary man who claimed direct authority from God. His simple message to Noah’s people: If you don’t repent, terrible things will happen. Noah’s response indicated the importance of status in his mind: “Who is Abinadi, that I and my people should be judged of him?” (Mosiah 11:27). He threatened to kill Abinadi, and Abinadi withdrew.
Two years later, Abinadi returned with the same message. This time, he found himself in the seat of power—Noah’s throne room—surrounded by the king, his priests, and armed guards. Even in that environment, designed to intimidate people into submission, Abinadi spoke boldly. He responded with disdain when the priests asked him to explain a passage of scripture to them, presumably to demonstrate their superior knowledge: “Are you priests, and pretend to teach this people, and to understand the spirit of prophesying, and yet desire to know of me what these things mean?” (Mosiah 12:25). Their elevated seats contrasted sharply with their lack of spiritual knowledge. It was all a facade. When Noah tried to send him away, he refused to leave, demonstrating the difference between real and artificial power (Mosiah 13:1-5).
Abinadi’s theology narrowed the distance between the human and the divine. “God himself shall come down among the children of men, and shall redeem his people,” he prophesied after reciting Isaiah 53 (Mosiah 15:1). He warned everyone in the room of eternal judgment and urged them to repent and accept the redemption offered by Christ (Mosiah 16).
Noah made little effort to hide the true reason for Abinadi’s execution. “We have found an accusation against thee, and thou art worthy of death,” he said, implying that the charge was designed to produce the desired sentence. His crime: “Thou hast said that God himself should come down among the children of men.” Presumably this is some form of blasphemy, although Noah didn’t specify that. Instead, he offered Abinadi an offramp which further indicated the corruption of the proceeding. Abinadi could avoid death, not by recanting his testimony but by disavowing “all the words which thou hast spoken evil concerning me and my people” (Mosiah 17:7-8).
Blasphemy was the excuse; disrupting the established order was the crime. But when Noah’s son, Limhi, later explained Abinadi’s death, he found a doctrinal basis in Imago Dei:
Because he said unto them that Christ was the God, the Father of all things, and said that he should take upon him the image of man, and it should be the image after which man was created in the beginning; or in other words, he said that man was created after the image of God, and that God should come down among the children of men, and take upon him flesh and blood, and go forth upon the face of the earth—
And now, because he said this, they did put him to death.
Mosiah 7:27-28
Imago Dei has political implications. As Abinadi demonstrated, this doctrine elevates and equalizes people, undermining systems of authority that are maintained by cultivating inequality.
Today I will treat everyone around me as equals, remembering that we are all created in the image of God.
Wow.
Do you know if he placed his name on these structures?
…
He built magnificent structures, “ornamented with gold and silver and with precious things”
Ha! You may have noticed that I didn’t make any direct reference to modern politics in this post. I will only add that Abinadi’s testimony is still true today: We are all created in God’s image, in spite of worldly efforts to make some people seem more important than others.