If one was to sit down and make a list of the most important events that happened to the House of Israel from the time they left Egypt to the time the Jews were carried away captive to Babylon, one of the top ten would have to be a house-cleaning initiated by king Josiah.

The Kingdom of Judah endured 57 years of the most extreme wickedness.  Fifty-five of those years were under the reign of Josiah's grandfather, Manasseh; and two under Josiah's father, who followed exactly in Manasseh's footsteps.  Manasseh put down worship of the Lord, had the prophet Isaiah "sawn asunder," elevated idol worship, defiled the temple, and "filled Jerusalem with innocent blood."

Josiah became king at the age of 8.  At the age of 16 "he began to seek after … God."  At the age of 20 "he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem from the high places, and the groves, and the carved images, and the molten images."  He broke down the altars of Baalim.  When he was 26 he ordered that the temple be cleaned and repaired.  It was because of this housecleaning that Hilkiah the priest made a discovery.  He "found a book of the law of the Lord."  (2 Chronicles 34).

He'd found the scriptures!  A copy had probably been hidden away by a righteous priest when king Manasseh had embarked on his rampage of wickedness.  For 75 years no one had seen, read, or possessed the scriptures.  The book was carried to Josiah and read in his presence.  Josiah was horrified to find how far astray the Jews had gone.  He rent his clothes, and said, "Great is the wrath of the Lord that is poured out upon us, because our fathers have not kept the word of the Lord, to do after all that is written in this book."  (2 Chr. 34:21).

Josiah repaired the temple.  "And 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 23:3).  Josiah then held a Passover, the likes of which had never been seen in Israel.

A side note of interest here is that among the crowd that stood to listen to the reading of the book, and who participated in that massive Passover, was, most probably, a young man about 6 years younger than the king, by the name of Lehi.

The important point, though, is that the finding and the reading of the scriptures turned an entire nation around.

The same thing happened in our family when we began using the scriptures like the Lord intended.  Elder Gene R. Cook visited our stake when our children were little.  He encouraged families to hold a daily family devotional, and told what that practice had done for his own family.  His family was that of a General Authority, so of course he'd see great results!  We doubted that would be the case in our family.  I recall having lessons on honesty and integrity and trying to do our best no matter what circumstances we found ourselves in.  We read the story of Joseph who was sold into Egypt, who worked hard to be the best son, and then the best slave, the best prisoner, and who ended up being second in command to Pharaoh, king of Egypt.  We augmented our lessons with stories from general conference, the scriptures, the Readers' Digest, and any other place we could find usable material.  We thought our children would complain about having to get up half an hour early on school mornings; but instead, they begged us not to stop.

An interesting thing that we noticed was that our children were willing to listen to the scriptures when they weren't willing to listen to the advice we'd give them as parents.

Those daily family devotionals instilled in our children a love for the scriptures. That was 30 years ago.  All but one of our 10 children are now grown and married.  Added all together, those 10 children have read the Book of Mormon something over 160 times!  Our 14-year-old is on his 6th reading.  Our eldest set a goal to read the Book of Mormon once for every year of his 38-year-old life.  He's right on target.  What's even neater is that when we now visit the homes of our children, they all have a scripture-reading program with their own children.  They're doing better than we did.

President Benson promised, and gave name to, dozens of amazing blessings that would come to us if we would "immerse ourselves in the scriptures."  President Kimball said that, "I find that when I get casual in my relationships with divinity and when it seems that no divine ear is listening and no divine voice is speaking, that I am far, far away.  If I immerse myself in the scriptures, the distance narrows and the spirituality returns."  (The Ensign, November 1976, pg. 58).

What we do when we read the scriptures, or have family devotionals, is to give the Holy Ghost a chance to whisper to us.  It was the Holy Ghost that our children were feeling when they begged us not to stop holding family devotionals.  That's why they're reading to their own children—so that they'll become acquainted with the Holy Ghost, too.

That's the value of scriptures.  They provide the Holy Ghost an opportunity to speak to us.  The scriptures enlighten our minds, and give us insights into situations and people.  They help us keep our thoughts on righteous things instead of the sordid things around us.  They give us an eternal perspective, instead of a focus upon the here and now.  They soften our hearts.  They sharpen our parenting skills, make us brighter students, better friends, and more compassionate.  They keep us in remembrance.

We fault the Children of Israel for being so blind, stubborn, and unbelieving.  But they didn't have the scriptures.  All they had was a prophet leading over a million people.  How often did they get to see him or listen to him?  They didn't have any Bible or Book of Mormon that they could sit down with and read to their children.  No wonder they had such trouble staying faithful!  How much better are we if we don't read the instruction manuals that the Lord has provided for us?

Never in the history of the world has there been a people more blessed with scriptures than we are.  The Children of Israel didn't have them.  The Jews before Christ had just a few.  The Nephites didn't have the Book of Mormon.  No one but priests had access to scriptures during the Middle Ages.  Printing wasn't invented until fairly recent times.

Where much is given, much is expected.  How foolish we are if we neglect this opportunity.

I bear you my testimony that if you'll immerse yourself in the scriptures, you'll find, like Lehi did, that they're more valuable than all the wealth in the world.  Lehi was willing to leave "his house, and the land of his inheritance, and his gold, and his silver, and his precious things" (1 Ne. 2:4), but he absolutely had to have the scriptures.  The Lord sent him away with a set of scriptures that was better and more complete than the limited copy that Hilkiah found in the temple and gave to Josiah.  That one, little book turned a whole nation around for a while.  All the books that you have in your possession have the power to point your whole posterity toward eternal life—permanently.

JOSIAH AND LEHI—CONTEMPORARIES

 

Year	Events in Judah	Probable Events in Lehi's Life
721 B.C.	Hezekiah begins his righteous reign
	Isaiah is Hezekiah's chief advisor
	Great religious reformations
698	Manasseh begins reign at age 12
	Isaiah "sawn asunder" by Manasseh
	Wholly turns Judah to idolatry
	Judah's most wicked king
649	Josiah born to Manasseh's son, Amon
643	Manasseh dies, Amon begins reign	Lehi is born
641	Amon dies, Josiah begins reign at age 8	Lehi is 2-years-old
626-628	Jeremiah begins his 40 years of prophecy	Lehi is 15 to17-years-old
623	Book of the Law of the Lord is found	Lehi marries Sariah
	Josiah and Jews covenant with the Lord	Lehi covenanted, too
	A massive Passover is held	Lehi was there
615		Nephi is born
610	Josiah dies	Nephi is 5-years-old
	Judah becomes a vassal of Egypt
	Jehoiakim begins wicked reign
602	Judah becomes a vassal of Babylon
600		Lehi leaves Jerusalem
597	Zedekiah begins 11-year reign
589		Lehi arrives in Promised Land
586	Jerusalem destroyed—Babylonian captivity

 

Making this chronological chart puts things into context for me, and gives me a new perspective of Lehi's life.

Isaiah died only about 50 years before Lehi was born.  Isaiah's writings were fresh scripture when Lehi read them on the Brass Plates.  Isaiah was good king Hezekiah's chief advisor.  Manasseh, according to tradition, had Isaiah "sawn asunder."  (Bible Dictionary).

Lehi was born about the same year that Manasseh died.  Manasseh was Judah's most wicked king.  He wholly turned Judah to idolatry.  He had his own son sacrificed to an idol.  He "filled Jerusalem" with innocent blood.  (2 Kings 21:16).  His acts, more than any other, caused the Lord to determine to destroy Jerusalem.

For the first two years of Lehi's life, Manasseh's son, Amon, reigned.  He was just as wicked as his father.  Lehi's first years then, were spent in the very wickedest, most idolatrous period of Judah's history.  Temple worship and the true religion were almost non-existent.

When Lehi was about 2 years old, Josiah came to the throne at the age of 8.  Under the guidance of Hilkiah, the priest, he began a thorough religious reformation.  The book of 2 Chronicles says that he began religious reforms before Hilkiah the priest even found the Book of the Law in the temple.  He destroyed the groves, the idols, killed the idols' priests, got rid of the Sodomites, did away with enchantments and sorcerers, restored the temple, and held a Passover feast the like of which had never been seen in Israel.

Lehi was there.  All of this took place at about the time Lehi and Sariah would have gotten married.

Up to the time that Hilkiah found the Book of the Law, scriptures were apparently non-existent in Judah.  The book was read to Josiah, he rent his clothes, and made a covenant with the Lord, while standing by a pillar of the temple, to wholly follow the Lord.  He caused all Judah to make the covenant with him.  Lehi was there.  Jeremiah had just begun his 40 years of prophesying in Judah, and would continue doing so until the Babylonian captivity.

Lehi would have had no scriptures to hold in his hand and read.  At the time of his marriage there was only the one known copy of the Book of the Law.  It was kept in the temple by the priests.  Surely some scribes would have been set to work to make copies, but that took time.

The only other set of scriptures was the Brass Plates.  They were probably brought to Jerusalem from the Northern Kingdom in the 15th year of the good king, Asa, when "he gathered all Judah and Benjamin, and the strangers with them out of Ephraim and Manasseh, and out of Simeon: for they fell to him out of Israel in abundance, when they saw that the Lord his God was with him."  (2 Chronicles 15:9).  The Brass Plates, however, weren't known about, were in the possession of Laban's father, and were only accessed by Laban's family and some unknown scribe (or Jeremiah himself) who recorded thereon some of Jeremiah's prophecies.

Nephi was about five years old when king Josiah died.  Josiah's death ended all pretense of Judah's righteousness.  Josiah was killed in an invasion by Egypt.  Judah became a vassal state to Egypt for about eight years.  It would presumably have been in this period that Lehi learned Egyptian, how to write in Reformed Egyptian, and also amassed his fortune.  He was apparently an official or a merchant with close ties to Egypt.

Two or three years before Lehi left Jerusalem, Judah was yanked out of Egypt's control by Babylon.  These were turbulent times.  It was probably at the time of the switch from Egyptian control to Babylonian control that Lehi received his call to begin prophesying.  His fortunes probably changed then.  He probably lost his Egyptian connections.

In this time of turmoil, Judah again turned to wickedness, following the evil example of their leader, Josiah's son.  Lehi left Jerusalem, Zedekiah became king, served 11 years under Babylonian authority, and then Jerusalem was destroyed when he rebelled from under Babylon's rule.

The Lord, however, made sure that the best copy of the scriptures was saved by sending it to America with Lehi.  Had the Brass Plates stayed in Jerusalem, they would have been destroyed.