The Zoramites’ self-righteous prayer was spoken only on their holy stand. It was a set, memorized prayer that included the false doctrine that God is a spirit and a denial of the veracity and divinity of Christ. Are there parallels today, where worship is done only in a church, with memorized prayers, teaching that God is a spirit? Are there those who teach that Christ was a great moral teacher but not the Son of God?
Why does Satan want people to believe that God is a spirit-nothing too mysterious to comprehend? Because life eternal is to know God and Jesus Christ (John 17:3), and we can’t know and become like a spirit-nothing. All false religions teach that God is an incomprehensible mystery.
And the Zoramites’ brazen presumptuousness in regarding themselves as the exclusive holy children, the elect who would be saved while others were destined for hell! They prayed, “O God, I thank thee that we are better than our brethren” (Alma 38:14). That sanctimonious approach to “worship” is more pharisaic than the Pharisee in Jesus’ later parable who stood and prayed “with himself” and thanked God that he was not as other men (Luke 18:11), with a “holier than thou” attitude (Isaiah 65:5).
The Zoramite concept of election anticipates the later false Christian idea of predestination, which Augustine and Luther worried about, and the idea of double predestination that John Calvin taught. Such doctrine not only negates agency but also, worse still, tries to destroy faith in Christ, as the Zoramites’ attitude demonstrates. Having been automatically elected by God to be his holy children, the Zoramites did not need Christ, and all others around them could not have Christ because they were destined to hell anyway.