Jacob reprises the salvation theme of the prior day’s sermon. He had not made these points explicitly in the second-day sermon, but they are an essential part of the call to God. He closes, fittingly, with a testimony of the Messiah’s coming mission.
Epigraph—Text and Context: What conclusions can we draw about Jacob’s sermon? He was probably delivering it at a festival for which the people had assembled. Perhaps this hypothesized festival had a clear but now lost emphasis that would have lent itself to covenant-making. However, Jacob’s text contains the most significant clue: Nephi’s assignment of the Isaiah text as the theme for the sermon. Yet Isaiah’s main point—that salvation will come to Israel from the Gentiles—makes best sense only by hypothesizing a social context in which the Nephites and newly accepted Gentile members have formed a community. The covenant renewal is therefore initiating the Gentiles into the community as well as reminding the Old World Nephites of their responsibility to accept them.
Another element of that context is probably skirmishes with the Lamanites. Armed conflict with both “Jews” and “Gentiles” is a social reality for the Nephites (v. 16). Perhaps Jacob’s discourse on resurrection and everlasting life spoke with peculiar and painful power to his listeners. Perhaps the already exacted cost in human life, plus the potential for more, also helps explain the relevance of a comforting sermon on the effect of their covenants across the barrier of death.
Text: The chapter ends here in the 1830