Stand Up Like King Josiah!

Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com

المحتوى المقدم من Nehemia Gordon. يتم تحميل جميع محتويات البودكاست بما في ذلك الحلقات والرسومات وأوصاف البودكاست وتقديمها مباشرة بواسطة Nehemia Gordon أو شريك منصة البودكاست الخاص بهم. إذا كنت تعتقد أن شخصًا ما يستخدم عملك المحمي بحقوق الطبع والنشر دون إذنك، فيمكنك اتباع العملية الموضحة هنا https://ar.player.fm/legal.

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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!

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Stand Up Like King Josiah!

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 the truth. Because I could go right now and change something in Wikipedia. It’ll be changed back in 30 seconds. The way you change the information that most people have access to, the free information, is you’ve got to do the work. And the work is painstaking and slow. It’s giving that silver over to the people in the house. That’s what Josiah did. He said, “I trust the process. I don’t know what I’m going to find.” He never imagined that this beloved tree of Asherah which had been there for decades would turn out to be an idol he would have to take out into the Kidron Valley and grind into dust. Believe me, Josiah did not think that and that’s why he tore his clothes. He tore his clothes… this is profound. He tore his clothes, this act of mourning… this is Josiah, because he realized, “We’ve worshiped idols and the things that we loved. The Asherah tree that my father loved, and my grandfather loved, and I was taught to love, that’s hateful in the eyes of Yehovah. And I have to walk to the truth. There’s this light, and I have to walk into the light. I can’t just do what my fathers did, because what they did was wrong. I now have the truth, and I have to act on it.”

Look, I’m going to share something that very few people know. So, I don’t know if they can see this here, but that’s a hole where a doctor, two weeks ago, exactly two weeks ago today, put a probe into to look at my heart. And he found out there was a 95% blockage in my heart, and they put in what’s called a stent. That was a situation where I could have dropped dead at any second. I didn’t even know it. I’m what’s called asymptomatic, but they had done this test, a routine test, and they said, “Something’s not right.” They used the word abnormal. I actually thought the woman on the phone said it was normal. “Oh, that’s wonderful.” She said, “No, you didn’t hear me, I said ab normal.” “Okay, what does that mean?” She said, “We’ve got to look and make sure there isn’t a blockage in your arteries.” And there was; 95%.

So, that really makes a man think. I could have been dead at any second. I still could be dead at any second, so what do I want to accomplish before I die? And what I want to accomplish is to make the world aware of the truth about Yehovah’s word. The truth about Yehovah’s name. The truth that’s been preserved by the people of Israel in the manuscripts. I don’t have a time machine where I can travel in time and listen in to Yehovah speaking to Moses in the tent. But I have things that were written down, and they were transmitted over the generations. And they survive in these manuscripts, and we have access to those manuscripts today. It’s the closest I may ever get to hearing… in this lifetime, I’m quite sure it is the closest I’ll ever get to hearing Yehovah’s voice spoken to Moses. I may have an inner voice where I hear Him and I perceive Him on certain occasions, but Yehovah speaking to the Prophets of ancient Israel, this is the closest I’ll ever get. And I want to uncover that and share that with people.

We’re living in this unprecedented time where, like I said, I have access today, right here on my computer that I’m speaking to you on, to more information than the greatest scholars had. Scholars I’ve met, the greatest scholars that I’ve had access to, for sure before 1990, hands down.

This morning, I was reading with Nelson, my research assistant. We were looking at this book written by the greatest scholar of the time in the 1980’s when he wrote his book, analyzing all the manuscripts. And we know more than he knew because we have access to that information. That information needs to get to the people. And the way we need to get it to them… it’s multiple fronts. One way to get to the people is through putting out videos and putting out podcasts, and that takes resources.

I get people writing in to us, and they’ll say, “This should all be free. You shouldn’t charge for it.” Okay, well I’m going to call up our editor in the Dominican Republic and tell her that we can no longer give her the resources she needs to feed her baby because the people are all telling us it should be free. Is that what we should do?

Lynell: Let me just say, about a year ago we had this exact situation come up where we had one of the people that work for us… and look, we can’t pay our people that much. They work for us because they love God, and they want this to be spread. She said to me, “Look, I don’t have enough money to pay for the hospital to have my baby. I want you to pray with me about it.” She wasn’t asking me for money, she knew we didn’t have money. I picked up the phone and I called as many people as I could and I said, “Can you please…” One of them was a corporate attorney that I knew, and people literally gave $50 or $100 at a time to take care of that. Guys, a workman is worthy of his hire. We need people for IT, we have to have producers, we want to do a woman’s podcast. Really, that’s our heart, that’s my heart, and Nehemia has said that that’s something that he really feels like we should do.

Nehemia: Well, that’s something I don’t really have the resources within my physical body to do, to communicate with women. God designed us differently; I still believe that. It says, “Male and female He created them,” and there are things I can communicate, particularly to autistic men, but hopefully to all men and women, but there are things that I can’t communicate that God has given to you in your heart to communicate. And you can communicate things that I’ve discovered in ways that I can’t to various people.

And look, that is part of the ministry, absolutely. Like I said, I need to speak to the scholars. I also need to speak to the non-scholars. And you need to speak to people who you have an aptitude to speak to. All of that is important. You can also speak to people in the business world, which I know nothing about. You were the CEO… I don’t know if people know this, but my wife, Lynell here, is a woman who comes from the business world, and she built a company… multiple companies, and she can speak to people that I have no practical understanding of how to communicate with them.

It’s funny, I was just at this conference in San Diego, and we went into this restaurant where all the scholars were coming together. And I was waiting for people to arrive, and I overheard the man say to the lady at the front, whatever that’s called…

Lynell: Hostess.

Nehemia: The hostess. And he says, “I’m looking for the nerds.” And she turns around, literally, and walks directly over to me and my other colleague! That’s literally what happened! And I said to her, “You know this may affect the tip.” She says, “I don’t care. I don’t get tips.” I said, “How did you know we were the nerds?” She said, “I’ve been doing this for a long time.”

Lynell: You know, the thing that I’m most excited about, guys, Nehemia has an opportunity that has come up that is something we have been praying for since we were dating. This is something that’s an opportunity to present on the name of Yehovah in a unique way. And I can’t even say anything about it until everything is finished, but I’ve seen God open up for Nehemia opportunity after opportunity that has never been afforded to anyone else before. I know he’s blessed by Yehovah, and God has done such great things. We just have to have finances to support it. We can’t do it ourselves.

I said to Nehemia this past week, “It would be really nice to get paid for the work that I’m doing with what I’m doing.” But we don’t have resources to do that. When Nehemia hired me to help him, and he has, because I work for Makor, he took part of what he was being paid and he said, “Let me give you some of what I’m being paid.”

Nehemia: We didn’t, and we still don’t have any money to pay her. So literally I said, “Alright, it all goes in the same bank account. Take some of my salary and put it over onto you, because right now we don’t have the money…” Look, we do need to hire a number of specific roles just to stay afloat. People might think this doesn’t require resources, but just to do what we’re currently doing requires resources. And we need to expand what we’re doing into new areas. And look, I can’t share some of these things.

Lynell: Yet!

Nehemia: Yet, right. Eventually, after they’re done, we can share them. And one of the reasons for that is that there are certain things… look, there’s Israelis who have recently encountered this. There were Israeli heroes who were involved in the war in Gaza who went to visit places like Amsterdam and post it on their TikTok. “Hey, I’m in Amsterdam,” and they were physically attacked. What they learned is something I learned quite a number of years ago. You can’t share with the public certain things you’re doing until after they’ve already been done because it actually can physically endanger you. And certainly poses a risk to the project. Let’s just say that. I can’t say more.

Lynell: A complete risk to the project. Because there are people who don’t want this out, guys. There are people who do not want…

Nehemia: And if you think this is theoretical, it’s not. There are things that you can’t share with the public until they’ve already been done, and that’s just the reality of the world we live in. There are actually physical dangers involved, and it can endanger the project as well.

Lynell: And I told Nehemia, I said to him last year, “If God doesn’t provide for us by,” and I think I said August or September, I said, “I’ll just go and get a different job, and we’ll just find a way to make things work.” And we will find a way to make things work, because God will open doors. He will. But we’re asking that you guys would help us here. That you would pray and ask God in your heart if He would have you give something to help us in the ministry. That’s all we can ask for.

Nehemia: In 2014, I was in China, and I was teaching English in a high school. And it’s interesting… at that time I had never been paid a dime by the ministry. In fact, the ministry wasn’t always able to reimburse me for the expenses that I put out to do things like the Aviv Search. And I had to make a decision; do I continue to teach English in high school? Or do I do what I’ve been called…

I don’t know if you know this, Lynell, but I ran away from ministry. I was Jonah. I got on a boat, or in this case a plane, and I said, “I’m running away from ministry. I don’t have the emotional bandwidth for this.” And I couldn’t get away from it. I was called back to it. And I had to make that decision; do I go back and do this? Well, okay, then I need to be able to be paid to do it, or I literally won’t be able to continue to do it. That was in 2014 that I made that decision. And I think it was a good decision, because in 2016 Yehovah opened these doors that I still haven’t been able to share all the things that have been discovered, and I won’t be able to until the proper time. Some of those opportunities are actually coming up this year, and so, Yehovah willing…

Lynell: Yeah, I’m excited!

Nehemia: …some of those discoveries will be shared soon. But I made that decision; I ran away to Tarsus to avoid Nineveh, and I was called back to do it, and I had to do it. And I don’t know how much time I have left. There’s a piece of metal right now in my right coronary artery, and I don’t know how much time I have left. There’s another blockage that they didn’t do anything about because that was the medical decision, so I want to make the most of what’s left. And the legacy I would like to leave to this world is that there will be the basis for people to continue after me. That really is my desire in this world with whatever time I have left.

Lynell: And if anything keeps him up…

Nehemia: And guys, you can be part of that. You can be Josiah… Like I said, he turned the silver over to the Temple and he said, “Okay you guys, figure this out.” He had no idea what they were going to do. He certainly didn’t think he would find out that this beautiful pole of Asherah would turn out to be an idol he would have to grind to dust in the Kidron Valley. But that’s how it turned out and he followed that truth of Yehovah. Please be Josiah and join us in this.

Lynell: And just because I know people are going to write and tell me… guys, Nehemia has been on a very strict diet now for a couple of years. He’s lost an enormous amount of weight.

Nehemia: As of this morning, I’ve lost about… I’m bad at math, but I want to say it’s 66 pounds. And I’ve got about another 60 or so to go, so I’m working on it.

Lynell: He’s worked very hard at it. He’s not taking his health for granted. The thing that keeps Nehemia up at night, and I know because I’m his wife, is, “If God takes me, who’s going to take over after me?” And I remember when he was having surgery done, before he goes back in there and I tell him I love him and I pray for him, what’s on his heart is, “God, if You don’t save me, who is going to share these truths?” Because, like Nehemia said, there is a method here. There is a way to get the information out. Anyone can say anything, and you can stick it up online.

Nehemia: And they do.

Lynell: And they do, that’s true! But getting the truth out is totally different. You may not know this, Nehemia, but when I was a little girl, I told God… my father was a minister. And I said, “I never, ever, want to go into ministry. And God, it’s not because I don’t love You.” I did music ministry until I was in my mid-twenties, and that’s what I thought my ministry life would be. I never had an idea that God would call me to speak to women. No clue, not at all. But I said, “God, they’re so mean to ministers, they’re mean to you. They don’t want to pay you, and I don’t want to be poor the rest of my life,” because I grew up gathering walnuts on the side of the road to pay for milk.

Nehemia: And you mean literally.

Lynell: Literally. I know what it’s like to be poor. And it’s not an unhappy thing to be poor, but I’d like to be able to pay my bills. But today it’s different. I know that I’m going to have milk on my table and I’m going to have butter in my fridge. But that’s not the desire of my heart. The desire of my heart is to grow a ministry that will make a difference in the lives, now this is me, of women. Women who have no hope, women who are in situations where it’s been hopeless, because I have been there, and God has pulled me out. I want to share that with people, and in order to do that, I feel like I need to do a podcast. And I want to have women on who have been in situations and have seen God’s hand pull them out and they know that it’s the hand of Yehovah that has done that, just like with me. I feel very strongly called to do that.

I have a friend; her name is Lori. Her husband is a friend of Nehemia’s. Lori and Jeff are friends of ours, and she’s been such a strong advocate of, “Just do what you believe God has called you to do.” I really appreciate that, and I want God to send us lots of friends who will say, “Lynell. Nehemia. Do what God has called you to do.”

Look, I don’t have the truths that Nehemia does, I’m just here to tell you. When we sit down, and he starts talking and he starts reading the Bible in Hebrew, and he starts telling me what these Scriptures are saying, I’m like, “But that’s not what it reads.” And he’s like, “Yeah, but that’s what it says.” That is unique; who else does that that you know of? Who has that skill set? I think we need to really think in our hearts what it is that God has called us to do, and if you can’t be the one… Someone once told me that… he was a missionary; “If you cannot be the one who goes out to tell the truth, then support those that God has called to do that.”

Nehemia: And in this case, if you can’t be Hilkiah, you can be Josiah. Each of them had a role. And look, Yehovah will send who He will send. When I die, if I don’t get out what I’m supposed to get out, then Yehovah will send who He will send, and it will get out. But right now, I feel, like in the story of Esther, “Maybe for such a time as this I have been called. And if I don’t do it, salvation will arise from another place.” But I have to do what I need to do, and what I’ve been called to do, and what you, the listener, has been called to do, if that’s in your heart, is to be Josiah. So, we need a bunch of Josiahs to stand up and put the resources into this so I can go and dig in the Temple and find that scroll.

Lynell: I have nothing else to say.

Nehemia: What about Gweny Penguin? She wants to be involved.

Lynell: Gweny might want to be involved? I think Penny and Penguin Shark are happy to just be in the background.

Nehemia: Cedric is happy to be here too. Cedric wants to be the only one. Let’s pray!

Lynell: Hang on just a minute, sweetheart, let me just put this back over here. They want to listen. Oh guys, I have the funniest story, the cutest story. In our family, when we sit down to eat, and we thank God for our food, our penguins pray with us! Do you want to show them how Gweny prays? She puts her head down and she prays.

Nehemia: Yehovah, Avinu sh’ba’shamayim, our Father in Heaven. I’m so grateful for every day and every hour that You give me. Father, I’m going to do the best I can to do with… the resource You’ve given me right now, which is life, the most precious resource of all that no one can pay for. Father, I am so grateful for that. And Father, I ask you that You bless those who pour their resources, like Josiah, into uncovering Your truth. Father, lead us in this path to find Your scroll in the Temple, and then to share that with the people. Father, my job is to find that truth and share it with Josiah and share it with everyone who is willing to listen. Father, give me the time, the time to live to do that, and bless all those who pour those resources into the ministry to discover truth and share that truth with people, to empower people with information about the ancient Hebrew sources of faith.

Lynell: Yehovah, I pray You would keep Nehemia, Father, that he would live to be 120. Father, I pray that You would give me wisdom in how to support him, how to support this ministry that You’ve given to him. And Father, I pray that You would open the doors for me to be able to do ministry with women with what I believe You’ve called me in my heart to do. God, I know that You don’t need the resources. You don’t need silver and You don’t need gold. God, that You just require of us our hearts and our wholehearted love toward You. Father, I pray that You would open the hearts of those who You call to support this ministry, and that they would give from their hearts. And Father, I pray that You would bless them, that You would bless them for all that they do, for every prayer, Father, for every kind deed, and Father, for every kind thing that they do toward our ministry. And God, I thank You for the people that You’ve already given to our ministry. God, I thank You for them. They are so precious and kind, and they love You. So, we thank you for all that we have, and God I pray that You would have Your will in our lives and that we would serve You and that You would watch over and keep the ministry as we do what we believe You’ve called us to do. Amen.

Nehemia: Amen.

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