Fornication, Murder, and Denying the Holy Ghost

Corianton went off fornicating on his mission and Alma calls him on it.  But even the rebuke portion of his sermon is pretty doctrinal.  Alma starts by situating fornication on the scale of serious sins.  First denying the Holy Ghost, he says.  Second, murder.  But next to those two, its fornication.  Rhetorically effective, but also interesting in itself for us and it sets up the later parts of Alma’s discourse to Corianton in ways that aren’t obvious to a casual reader.

Interesting in itself– notice how each part of that trifecta of serious sins corresponds to a part of the complete human, body and spirit.

Denying the Holy Ghost  —————>  Spirit

Murder  ————————————->  Sins against the end of the body

Fornication  ——————————->  Sins against the beginning of the body

If you wanted to stretch even further, you might analogize each of these three to a member of the Godhead.  Denying the Holy Ghost obviously corresponds to the Holy Ghost, Resurrection is an obvious role for the Son which corresponds with life creation/the (re)beginning of the body), but is God associated with death in some way?  It seems fanciful.  On the other hand, we are reading something fancy here.  Look at the elaborate beautiful chiasmus in Alma 36.  The idea that Alma’s discourses to his son are highly structured literary works is not something we should reject.  More to the point, the rest of Alma’s sermon talks repeatedly about Christ as the Resurrector and mentions several times that men are “appointed to die” and then in Chapter 42 says that it was “God” who appointed death.  That is very suggestive.