As the Savior ends his quotation from Malachi, he continues with an explanation which Mormon does not record. Verse 1 is a general description of what happened next. Either Nephi or Mormon provided this information as a connector between the quotation from Malachi and the “great and small” explanations that followed.
Text: In the 1830 edition, this verse followed Jesus’s quotation of Malachi 4 and is intended to explain both the importance of that text and what followed. Orson Pratt moved verses 1–5 to the beginning of the next chapter in the 1879 edition, rather than keeping them as the conclusion to the chapter as they appeared in the 1830 edition because he wanted to parallel the KJV versification for Malachi.