Counted as His

This morning in Alma 13, I stopped short at verse 15. Abraham paid tithes—one-tenth of all he possessed—to Melchizedek. That made me pause.
Wait… what about sacrifices? Further study helped me answer that question.

Abraham is clearly familiar with sacrificial offerings—Isaac alone makes that undeniable. But Abraham lived centuries before Moses, long before the highly ritualized system laid out in Leviticus —  after the Israelites are wandering in the wilderness with Moses. Abraham’s obedience was real and costly, but not institutional. What struck me is that tithing appears here as something deeply Christ-centered long before the Law of Moses ever existed. It wasn’t a checklist. It was covenantal.

Alma then shifts and speaks tenderly of those who are “wanderers in a strange land,” blessed because angels teach them and prepare them for Christ’s coming. He pleads with them to repent. Sadly, it doesn’t go well. Chapter 14 tells that story.

Then I moved to my Old Testament study and into Numbers. As I read the lists of tribes and their numbers—hundreds of thousands of men—I honestly can’t wrap my mind around the scale of it all. The sheer size of these groups is staggering.

And this may be a little irreverent, but as I listened to Numbers 2, my mind jumped to ward camps and Stake Girls’ Camp specifically and how we gave location assignments. Each clan carefully placed in a specific area, everything organized and accounted for—it sounded strangely familiar. I was fascinated by how deliberately God ordered His people, even in the wilderness – maybe especially in the wilderness. He didn’t want anyone to get lost. So like Him.

Some days my time in the scriptures feels more like a box to check than a place to meet the Savior—but today I saw Him clearly, caring about His people, all of His people, wanting each one known, ordered, and counted as His.