After condemning the unrepentant Gentiles, the Savior repeats their options. If they repent and believe in him, the church will be established among them. While the Nephite organization may have differed from Jesus’s Old World church, they would have grasped the essential point: It was an organization of believers in a population of unbelievers. Our modern perspective provides the more detailed information that this is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, restored by Joseph Smith.
These Gentiles who belong to the church are adopted into the covenant of Abraham and become heirs to the land’s promise. Thus, Gentile believers help fulfill the promise that the house of Israel will inherit this promised land.
In modern patriarchal blessings, Latter-day Saints learn of their spiritual lineage, indicating adoption into these blessings. Joseph Fielding McConkie states:
It is the office and calling of a patriarch in giving a patriarchal blessing to identify, by the Spirit of revelation, the blood lineage of those whom he blesses. President Joseph Fielding Smith taught: “A patriarch giving a blessing has the right of inspiration to declare the literal descent of the person receiving the blessing; he does not have authority to assign that individual to any tribe. Through the waters of baptism and the priesthood, Church members become heirs of Abraham with all the rights belonging to the children of Abraham through their faithfulness”
The promises given to Abraham are not figurative. He was expressly told they were to extend to his “literal seed, or the seed of the body” (Abr. 2:11). If those of the Bible-believing world properly understood the promises given to Abraham, they would know that the blessings of the priesthood are essential to salvation and that the right to hold the priesthood was given to Abraham and his posterity. It is his seed that is to bear the message of the gospel to all the ends of the earth. Missionaries are expected to have received their patriarchal blessing before they begin their missions. Thus they will have a revealed confirmation that they are of the lineage that has a rightful claim to the priesthood and the attendant responsibility to declare the message of salvation to the ends of the earth.