The Call of Josiah
In this video, Nehemia discusses the "Call of Josiah" and how you too can be part of uncovering the truth of Yehovah!

Lynell: This is your favorite thing to do!

Nehemia: No, I don’t like it, but we have to do it. We’re coming towards the end of the year, and at the end of the year we get an overview of the ministry’s finances and realize we don’t have the resources to pay for some of the things we’ve already done, and we definitely don’t have the resources to move forward and carry out things in the coming year. We need your help. That’s the bottom line. We have amazing opportunities to share truth, and that takes resources. It’s not just to share the truth. Lynell, you saw this amazing quote that we both thought was really relevant. Can you share the quote?

Lynell: I think the quote was, “News is free, journalism is not.”

Nehemia: I thought that was really profound, because information is free. Anybody can go to Wikipedia and find out more… honestly, they can find out more than some scholars a hundred years ago at Harvard University had access to, for free. So, information is free, but the time and expertise required to determine which information is true and which is not, that takes resources. Just think about the time, but it takes resources to dig through piles of information, much of which is not…

Ronald Reagan famously said… when he was talking about politics, he said, “The problem with my friends, the Democratic Party, is they know so many things that just aren’t so.” And this is the problem; we are flooded with information, and to find out which of it is true and which is not takes expertise and resources. And then there’s information we don’t even have.

I was praying about what we should say here to the people when we’re telling you guys, we need your help. We need your financial resources and help. And there’s this one verse that gnaws at me. It says, in Deuteronomy, “It’s not in Heaven.” We don’t need someone to go across the sea or up into Heaven to get the Torah for us.

But then we have the story of Josiah, and Josiah is one of my favorite stories in the Tanakh. He’s this young boy king. We were looking at this because we’re doing a teaching soon, on… I’ll just tell people, it’s on the Christmas tree. So, we’re looking at all the verses that talk about Asherah. There’s this Asherah tree or pole in the Tanakh, and it’s called a tree in some places. It’s a tree that was planted or set up next to the altar, originally of Baal, but then of Yehovah. In 2 Kings 23:6 it says, “And he brought out the Asherah from the House of Yehovah,” and that’s the name in the Bible for temple. It doesn’t use the word temple, that’s a later term. It calls it the Beit Yehovah. “They brought out the Asherah from the House of Yehovah,” in the time of Josiah.

What blows my mind about this story is that Josiah is this king who, at a very young age, has this burning love for Yehovah and worshiping Him. So, he gathers silver, resources, money… the word in Hebrew is kesef, which is literally silver, but it also means money. So, he gathers money and he gives it over to the service of the Temple to repair the Temple. But he doesn’t know that having an Asherah in the House of Yehovah is forbidden. He has no inkling. He’s probably thinking, “There’s this tree in the House of Yehovah. We have to beautify it with silver and gold and clean up the debris around it so people can come worship Yehovah with this Asherah tree.” He doesn’t know! He’s an 18-year-old boy, and for decades people have been serving and worshiping in a false worship. And then what happens is, because he puts the resources out there and trusts in Yehovah, they’re repairing the Temple, and they find the Torah. They find this scroll, and he’s brought this scroll. And a man named Hilkiah says, “We found this scroll.” It wasn’t him… meaning, it was Hilkiah, the High Priest, who brings it to the representative of Josiah, and then they read it to him. And he says, “Oh…” Actually, the first thing he does is he tears his clothes because he realizes, “I had the desire to worship Yehovah but there was information that we were missing. I didn’t know idolatry was forbidden. I didn’t know it was forbidden to have an Asherah in the House of Yehovah.” And so, he tears his clothes, which in ancient Israel is an act of mourning.

And I have the burning desire of Josiah to serve Yehovah, and I know there’s people out there who have the burning desire of Josiah to serve Yehovah. And they don’t know what to do, they’re not Hilkiah. Hilkiah himself didn’t know what to do until they found this scroll in the Temple! Well, today we have access to these scrolls. Today we have access to manuscripts that a hundred years ago… not a hundred years ago, twenty years ago, the top professors in the world dreamed of having access to manuscripts that I’ve held in my hands. Yehovah has given us this opportunity to share truth, and it takes resources. It absolutely does.

We’re about to fly to Israel, and then to Germany, to speak at academic conferences that I was invited to speak at. And this is an opportunity to change the world, to uncover truth. I hear people say, “Nehemia, you taught us this thing. How come that’s not in the encyclopedia?” And actually, what they’re saying is, “I shared this with my friend. And he beat me over the head with the Encyclopedia Britannica, which doesn’t say what you said.”

And so, my question is, how do we change the Encyclopedia Britannica? How do we change Wikipedia? The way to do that is… information is free. There’s a lot of things on Wikipedia that just ain’t so. How do you change that? You don’t log in and write something on Wikipedia. You do serious research, and that changes. It’s a cascading effect that, over time, will eventually bring out