The Book of the Law

To my son,

                This week in the Come, Follow Me program we learned about one of my favorite stories in the Old Testament. Josiah was a righteous king of Jerusalem who lived at the same time as Lehi. His father and grandfather had been very wicked, but he tried to serve the Lord. When he was about 26 years old, someone found in the temple “the book of the law” which was likely the book of Deuteronomy from the Old Testament. This is what happened when the book was given to Josiah and read to him: “And it came to pass, when the king had heard the words of the book of the law, that he rent his clothes.” He lamented, “Great is the wrath of the Lord that is kindled against us, because our fathers have not hearkened unto the words of this book, to do according unto all that which is written concerning us” (2 Kings 22:10-13). He realized as he read this lost book of scripture that they had not been keeping the commandments of the Lord, and he was distraught because of it. So he gathered the people together in Jerusalem and “read in their ears all the words of the book of the covenant which was found in the house of the Lord.” He wanted to make sure that the people knew the words of the scriptures and that they would commit to live by them. After reading them the words, “The king stood by a pillar, and made a covenant before the Lord, to walk after the Lord, and to keep his commandments and his testimonies and his statutes with all their heart and all their soul, to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this book. And all the people stood to the covenant” (2 Kings 23:2-3). So all of the people stood together and covenanted with the Lord that they would keep His commandments with all their hearts. It must have been an incredible experience for them to repent and commit to follow the Lord from that day forth!

                I hope that for you and me, we can always treasure the word of God. There is a story I once heard from a member of our ward over a decade ago that is a remarkable account of the power of the scriptures. As he told it, there was an American soldier who was drafted to go to Vietnam to fight in a war, and before he left he had a reoccurring dream where he was walking down a jungle path and then got shot. He had this dream many times as he was preparing to leave, and he went to his bishop for counsel. The bishop told him to have faith and gave him a pocket size set of scriptures to take with him. He eventually made it to Vietnam, and one day he was leading a patrol down a road and he realized it was the exact place of his dream. Sure enough, a shot was fired and he was hit. But his life was spared because the bullet hit the scriptures and, as this brother told the story, it stopped at this verse from the war chapters in Alma: “Now ye see that this is the true faith of God; yea, ye see that God will support, and keep, and preserve us, so long as we are faithful unto him, and unto our faith, and our religion; and never will the Lord suffer that we shall be destroyed except we should fall into transgression and deny our faith” (Alma 44:4). So his life was literally preserved by the word of God. I don’t know for sure that this story is true, but I do know that this verse is true and that God will support us if we are faithful to Him and to His word. It will always be a powerful protection to us if we search the word of God every day. May we treasure up the words of the scriptures and conform our lives to them like Josiah of old. I know that if we do, He will sustain us and guide our lives for the best. 

Love,

Dad