Jacob resumed his “conference talk,” pursuing the subject of a righteous branch of father Lehi’s posterity. Some of their descendants would perish in unbelief, but many would be recovered and come to a “true knowledge of their Redeemer.”
Their Redeemer, as an angel revealed to Jacob, would be called Christ (Christos is the Greek form of the Hebrew Mashiakh, English Messiah—both language titles meaning “the Anointed One”).
It was necessary for Christ, the Messiah, to come into mortality as a Jew because he came to die (“for thus it behooveth our God”). It was requisite for his divine purpose, or it was essential or imperative for him to come and die for all the children of God, and the only nation or people on earth who would crucify their own God was the Jews. However, this needs to be qualified. Not all Jews would reject and kill their God. Peter, Andrew, Matthew, James, John, Mary Magdalene, Martha, Mary, Lazarus, and many others were all Jews, and they listened intently to the Savior and loved and obeyed him. When we read in the scriptures about “the Jews” trying to entrap, condemn, and murder Jesus, we should read “some Jewish leaders,” for as verse 5 reveals, it was “because of priestcrafts and iniquities [that] they at Jerusalem will stiffen their necks against him, that he be crucified.”