These verses conclude this particular aside. Nephi has written of the coming of Jehovah as the Messiah in six hundred years, and noted just a little of the way he would be received. The scattering of Israel, both of those who rejected their Messiah as well as those physically separated on the isles of the sea, would be reunited.
Now Nephi is clearly mentally writing in real time. This is not a recounting of the past, but part of his current thinking about his people, the Nephites. Nephi writes that these new children of Israel might “remember the Lord the Redeemer.” He wants his people to understand the mortal mission of Jehovah as the Messiah.
He conflates his family’s exile with the poor treatment that the Messiah will receive. Had the Lord not saved them, they would have perished—and the Messiah will come to the literal and spiritual descendants of that people, and he too will perish.
Nephi declares that the scriptures, those writings on the plates of brass, testify to these things, as well as does he himself.