John Bytheway:               00:01                   Welcome to part two with Sister Heather Farrell, 2 Chronicles. There is yet one man by whom we may inquire of the Lord, but I hate him. Sorry. Wow. Okay. Mark that one in red, right? For he never prophesied good unto me, but always evil. The same as Micaiah the son of Imla. And Jehoshaphat said, let not the king say so.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        00:36                   We can go ask him, but I don’t like the guy. He never says anything good to me, right?

John Bytheway:               00:41                   Don’t sugarcoat it. What do you really think?

Hank Smith:                      00:44                   Yeah. Ahab doesn’t have a lot of friends in the prophets, does he?

Sis. Heather Farrell:        00:49                   In verse 14, they go to Micaiah. They want to know if they should go to battle. They’re wanting to know if they’re going to be prosperous in battle. Micaiah in verse 14 says, “And he said, Go you up and prosper and they shall be delivered into your hands.” But then the king, and I’m thinking this is Ahab, it doesn’t say which king, but I’m guessing it’s Ahab. He pauses him after this. He says, How many times shall I adjure thee that thou say nothing but the truth of me in the name of the Lord? He’s saying, Okay, you told me that, but tell me the rest. What’s the bad part that’s coming? I know there’s going to be a bad part. And there is a bad part. So in verse 16, then he says, well, I did see all Israel scattered upon the mountains, as sheep that have no shepherd.

                                           01:27                   And the Lord said, these have no master. Let them return therefore every man to his house in peace. And the king of Israel, that’s Ahab, said unto Jehoshaphat, “Did I not tell thee that he would prophesy good unto me about evil?” See? What did I tell you? Sometimes we can have the attitude about leaders or prophets. Ah, they’re going to call us out again on that one. I remember one time when I was a young woman, I came back. It was during President Hinckley’s time and I was at my aunt’s house. My older cousins were a lot older than me and they came back from priesthood session. I remember she asked them, well, what did they tell you? Oh, President Hinckley just told us about pornography again. Don’t do it. And this was like again and again and again. I feel like we can sometimes have that same attitude.

John Bytheway:               02:08                   I think I want to read the living Bible again. Didn’t I tell you the king of Israel exclamed to Jehoshaphat? He does it every time. He never prophesied anything but evil against me. He does it every time.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        02:22                   Yeah, especially because Ahab’s not the best dude at the moment, right? He’s not getting anything that he wants to hear at this point. He’s only getting those stuff like, hey, you got to shape up.

Hank Smith:                      02:31                   Oh, that is funny. Didn’t I tell you?

John Bytheway:               02:34                   Hello.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        02:36                   Then let’s skip ahead to chapter 19. They go and they have their battle.

John Bytheway:               02:40                   Is it just me or does war seem like a national pastime?

Sis. Heather Farrell:        02:46                   I think the battle is going, but it looks like he gets wounded and he gets taken back home to his king in Jerusalem. The prophet comes out to him and tells him chapter 19, verse 2. And Jehu, the son of Hanani the seer, went out to meet him and said to King Jehoshaphat, Shouldest thou help the ungodly, and love them that hate the Lord? therefore is wrath upon thee from before the Lord. He’s saying, these are all the ways you fall short. Shouldn’t you have done this? That’s kind of like me in my car the other day. I should be doing this. I should be doing that. But this is the part that when I read this, it almost brought me to tears because it was speaking to my heart. He says, nevertheless, there are good things found in thee. I love that. And that spoke to my heart. You know you’re falling short and you know you’re not living up to your potential, but nevertheless, there are good things found in thee. And then the last part, and thou has prepared thine heart to seek God. We know there’s things we’re falling short of, but the Lord is seeing his heart. He knows where his heart is and that’s really what matters to Lord and that’s what he’s counting there.

John Bytheway:               03:47                   You know what that reminds me of? Is it Zeniff? But I saw some good among the Lamanites. I wanted to go and live there.

Hank Smith:                      03:57                   Yeah. Is this saying you shouldn’t have aligned yourself with Ahab? Why would you do that? But you’re a good guy. But don’t align yourself with people like that.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        04:07                   Your heart is in the right place, but maybe in practice sometimes you fall short. But I love that that line is like underlined and starred that nevertheless, there’s good things found in me.

John Bytheway:               04:17                   I just underlined mine. Yep. Thanks to you.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        04:20                   So let’s go to chapter 20. We get another war. Another attack. Yes, John, I think the ancient world, there was a lot more fighting, which is one reason why we have all these stories about them calling on the Lord so often, right? They’re living in crisis situations a lot of time.

John Bytheway:               04:35                   And if they’re not in a war, they’re in a famine. Or the war brings a famine because they trample all of the agriculture, all the real estate growing the agriculture. And so a hard time to live.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        04:48                   Yeah. I’m glad we’re not switching places, right? Jehoshaphat and the kingdom of Judah know that there is this big force coming from Syria to fight them. And they know that they are outnumbered. There’s no possible way. They tried aligning themselves with Israel. Didn’t work. They just know there’s no way that they can combat this attack. They’ve done everything they can. There’s nothing else except for the Lord to fight for them. We have in chapter 20 verse five through nine, we have this beautiful prayer that Jehoshaphat prays in front of the congregation of Judah. He begs the Lord to come to his temple to see them and to fight for them. The last verse of this prayer is verse 12.

Hank Smith:                      05:33                   Chapter 20, verse 12. “O our God, wilt thou not judge them? we have no might against this great company that cometh against us. Neither know we what to do, but our eyes are upon thee.”

Sis. Heather Farrell:        05:48                   The next verse is that they stand forth with their children and their wives. They go out with everybody. The prophet comes to them and in verse 15, he tells them, “Thus saith the Lord unto you, be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of this great multitude. For the battle is not yours, but God’s.” Verse 17, “You need not to fight in this battle. Set yourself, stand ye still and see the salvation of the Lord God with you. Believe in the Lord your God. So shall you be established. Believe his prophets so you shall prosper.” So he’s telling them to stand still, don’t fight, and the Lord will fight for you. And they do this. They stand there. Instead of fighting, they sing. In verse 22, it says they begin to sing. Praise to God. The children of Ammon and the Moabites come against them and the battle is miraculously won without them even having to do anything. The Lord fights this battle for them.

Hank Smith:                      06:45                   The bad guys turn on each other. Here they come over the hill like, oh no. And then there they are. They’re all dead. Can you imagine? You’re like, we’re going to put our choir in front?

Sis. Heather Farrell:        07:00                   This is our battle force here. And your children, right? They’re standing forth with their children. Like what faith to stand there and to have faith that the Lord will protect you. I had a really beautiful experience when we lived in Jerusalem. We went to Jerusalem with six kids. We couldn’t afford to have a car because it was expensive and we couldn’t get one. We had bikes. My husband blessed our bikes that they would be protected. I had an electric bike and I would ride my bike up to the university, which is kind of up towards the Mount of Olives every day. If you’ve been in Jerusalem, you’ll know that the streets in Jerusalem are not designed for bikes or pedestrians or cars. They’re these skinny, tiny, narrow little streets and they’re often filled with huge buses, huge tour buses. I was riding my bike down one night and I almost got sideswiped by this bus.

                                           07:50                   I had a prayer in my heart like this. I was like, Heavenly Father, there’s not a lot I can do. This is my only way back and forth. Protect me. Let me get home to my kids. As I’m saying that prayer, I had this feeling and I know it sounds silly, but the only way I can think about it is that I had, I felt like I had these two wings pop out behind my back. And I felt presences there. I heard these boys say, “We’re here.” And I was like, “What?” I felt like I had these angels that were flanking me on both sides. I asked them, I was like, “Really? You got me?” And they’re like, “Yeah. We’re here to keep you safe.” And I was like, “Okay.” And I even asked, like, I’m having this conversation on my bike. I’m like, “Do I know who you are?” They said, “No, you don’t know who we are. But we’re here to protect you.” After that, I started, whenever I got on my bike, I would say, “Okay, here we go, Angel Squad. Are you there?” And I would feel these little wings pop out on my back and I would think, okay, they got me. I’m here. And it wasn’t until I… This had been going on for a couple months. I have this journal where every day I write in it, but it’s like a five-year journal. So you write a little bit and then you can see what you wrote the year before and the year before that. I got to the entry from the year before and I was reading it. And in this entry, our branch had gone to the temple in Rome because that was the closest temple we could go to.

                                           09:02                   And we had done baptisms. And when I was doing baptisms for a woman, just a temple name, she was Italian. As I came out of the water, I had this, this voice in my head say, “We will protect your family.” And at the time I was like, “Oh, okay. Great. That’s nice.” But when I came back to that after this, it hit me. I thought, they’re protecting my family. I have Italian angels watching me. Like they’re flanking me as I ride my bike down this hill. We will protect your family coming from an Italian. I was like, wow. And –

Hank Smith:                      09:33                   This is great.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        09:35                   And I have so many experiences. I mean, it’s too many to tell just the way that our family was protected, how I stood forth with my little children and how they were protected and how the Lord sent angels. And I know that there is something that happens in the temple that unlocks power, that unlocks people to help us. Yet there’s something that happens where the Lord isn’t able to give us more strength than we could before. And I haven’t felt the presence of those angels since I got home. I feel like they were sent to me to make sure I got home to my children. I just know that the Lord will fight for us. He will keep us safe. He will protect us and he will be there. He’ll show up for us with Italian angels if we need them.

Hank Smith:                      10:13                   I love it. That’s beautiful.

John Bytheway:               10:16                   Well, it’s like Elder Holland said, “Do not underestimate your family on the other side of the veil.” I just love that. In the last, what would you say, decade or two? It is so much easier now to get on your phone, get a family name that fast, not just a name, a family name and take them to the temple that are interested in you the way you are interested in them. Hearts turning to fathers and fathers to children and mothers to children and children to mothers. That’s pretty cool.

Hank Smith:                      10:48                   Heather, talk about likening the scriptures. Be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of all these buses for the bicycle is not yours but God’s.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        11:00                   Yes. Oh, I love that. And can we insert so many different things in there? Like, this is not your fight. God is here. He’ll do this for you. Like these really hard things. He’ll be there. I had another friend that she also rode her bike in Jerusalem. She said, “Sometimes all you can do is sing primary songs and pray.” She’s like, “And God’s got to do the rest.” And I was like, sometimes that’s all you can do is getting through those hard things is you turn over to the Lord and you stand forth and you be still and you say, okay. Show me what you can do.

Hank Smith:                      11:29                   Having been there many times, I don’t feel safe on a bus sometimes. Let alone on a bike.

John Bytheway:               11:36                   I love the humility of the prayer. I think that is part of it. We have no might against this great company that cometh against us. Neither know we what to do. We’re stumped, we’re outnumbered, but our eyes are upon thee. That’s a great prayer. I got that one marked too. Did you mark that one, Hank?

Hank Smith:                      11:55                   I did. And I wonder how many of us as parents say that sometimes. I don’t know what to do. And the Lord responds with, the battle is not yours. These children are not yours. They’re mine.

John Bytheway:               12:10                   Be not afraid nor dismayed.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        12:12                   Stand ye still and see the salvation of God. Watch what he can do.

Hank Smith:                      12:16                   Believe in his prophets.

John Bytheway:               12:18                   They’re going to come up to the cliff of Ziz. That was their mistake. Verse 16, the cliff of Ziz.

Hank Smith:                      12:29                   2 Chronicles 20, what a great story that’s so applicable.

John Bytheway:               12:34                   Believe in God and believe in His prophets. I know I marked that one too, I thought, that’s good.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        12:38                   There’s power in believing. We often forget that when the list of spiritual gifts is given, believing is a spiritual gift. Just like we think we could easily see like, oh, if I can talk in tongues or heal people or work miracles, we see those as spiritual gifts. But to believe is a spiritual gift that brings power with it. Believing it’s an actual power that we can bring to the table.

John Bytheway:               12:59                   Doubt not, but be believing.

Hank Smith:                      13:01                   Also, this is a guy who didn’t always make the best choices. He had aligned himself with Ahab and the Lord’s like, oh, what are you doing? But there’s good things in you.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        13:11                   And he got a miracle. Even not being perfect and not having done everything that he could have lived up to his potential. He still was deserving of a miracle. And I think that’s true for all of us.

Hank Smith:                      13:21                   Oh, I think you’re right. We’re not perfect people and we think, oh, I’m not worthy of this miracle. The story of Jehoshaphat can give you hope there.

John Bytheway:               13:29                   I just think that prayer tells you where his heart is. That kind of a heart gets answers, I think.

Hank Smith:                      13:36                   John, you frequently remind parents, “The battle is not yours, but God’s. This is my work and my glory.”

John Bytheway:               13:46                   Not, “This is your work and your glory and you’re failing.” The Lord doesn’t say that. He says, this is my job. I got this. I’m able to do my work.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        13:55                   And the generations change too. Even if we have a wicked child, sometimes we have a righteous grandchild here in the Davidic line. We see that. Like, it’s not that it’s all from here on to eternity, this whole line is now doomed. Because sometimes we can think that way. Oh, what’s happening? But the Lord is always working, always working in people’s lives, in our family’s lives. And we have to hold onto that promise of the power that can go forward into our generations.

Hank Smith:                      14:21                   And I’m amazed they put the choir out front. We’re going to battle. Tenors.

John Bytheway:               14:26                   Okay. Sopranos, tenors. Yeah.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        14:29                   Maybe they were really terrible. They’re like, run.

Hank Smith:                      14:36                   That’s funny. They’re like, what is that noise? Can you imagine coming over that hill with your choir out front and all you have is riches and spoils to take from these armies that had turned on each other? Wow, what a story.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        14:52                   Can we move up to Athaliah? The next story is one that actually is not included in the Come, Follow Me chapters. They kind of pick and choose, because we cannot do everything in Old Testament or it would take us like three years. In 2 Chronicles, there’s a story that gets skipped over because it’s a story of two women and it’s my very favorite story of women in the Old Testament. I speak a lot about women in the scriptures and people are always asking me, “Who’s your favorite woman in the Old Testament?” And my favorite woman is found here in 2 Chronicles. Her story’s also told in 2 Kings 11. And it’s told a little bit more clearly in 11, so I might skip back and forth with some of the things or take details from 2 Kings 11 and put them in here. The woman’s name is Athaliah.

                                           15:36                   Her son is the king of Judah. His name is Ahaziah. It says here in 2 Chronicles 22:3 says, “He also walked in the ways of the house of Ahab, for his mother was his counselor to do wickedly.” Here, we’re seeing that power of the gebirah of the mother in the king’s household, that she’s influencing him. Athaliah actually is a daughter of Ahab and Jezebel. So she was a political alliance. Back when Jehoshaphat is aligning himself with Ahab, she gets married into the family as a political alliance. She is a northern Israelite marrying into the kingdom of Judah. And there’s one scholar that says that she brought the poison of Israel into Judah. She brings with her some of those traditions into the house. And so she is influencing her son and teaching him. And we see here that she’s his counselor to do wickedly.

                                           16:27                   We’ve talked a lot about that power that the woman had in the household religion and that family. And even at the same time, the temple is still doing its thing. It’s what we’re concerned here is what’s happening in the king’s household with how he’s living his religion and he’s not doing so great. So he dies. Instead of the throne moving onto his son, Athaliah takes control. Again, this shows us the amount of power that this gebirah had in the Judean household, that she could step into being king. She could take it without a whole lot of battle or fight. In doing this, she kills all of the other claims to the throne. So that means she killed her grandsons and her nephews. This is her family she is killing. In chapter 22, verse 10, it says, “But when Athaliah, the mother of Ahaziah, saw that her son was dead, she arose and destroyed all the seed royal out of the house of Judah.”

                                           17:24                   She is wiping out that Davidic line, the line through which the Messiah is supposed to come. Athaliah is trying to completely wipe that out so that she doesn’t have anybody to contest her role as queen here. Enter Jehosheba. And she is my favorite woman. Once you hear a story, I think you’ll know why. Chapter 22, verse 11 says, “But Jehoshabeath,” and here she’s called Jehoshabeath, but in Kings she called Jehosheba. I’ll probably call her Jehoshabeath. “The daughter of the king took Joash, the son of Ahaziah, and stole him from among the king’s son that were slaying and put him and his nurse in a bed chamber. So Jehoshabeath, the daughter of the king Jehoram, the wife of Jehoiada the priest, for she was a sister of Ahaziah, hid him from Athaliah so that she slew him not. And he was with them, hid in the house of God for six years and Athaliah reigned over the land.

                                           18:18                   What an incredible story of this woman of Jehosheba. She’s a sister to Ahaziah, so she’s a princess. We don’t know if she’s Athaliah’s daughter because it says she’s a sister to Ahaziah. So she could be Athaliah’s daughter, which means that her grandmother is Jezebel. We have Jezebel and Athaliah. And then somehow we get Jehosheba who’s married to the priest of the temple. She’s aligning herself. She’s pointing her eyes and her heart towards the correct worship. She’s anchored in that temple, in that official religion, as well as in her home religion. She sees what’s happening to these children. And in my mind, I have it like this little movie that plays out, which I’m sure I’ve just made up because we don’t get all those details. I mean, can you imagine what this would looks like if she’s killed these children, bodies, blood, all that stuff, and she finds this baby who is not quite dead, who has been tried to be killed.

                                           19:15                   Athaliah has attempted to kill this baby, but he is not quite dead. And she finds one of the sons of the babies and she takes this baby with her and hides him for six years in the temple. And this baby whose name is Joash, they are able to present him to the people and overthrow Athaliah as the queen and reinstate the Davidic line. I feel like she could be one of the most important women in the whole Bible because without her and her willingness to go and to find this baby and to save it and to teach him and to raise him in the temple, the Davidic line would be completely erased. It would’ve ended. Jesus would not have been able to be born through the line of David if it had not been for Jehosheba and her personal righteousness, but doing what’s right and not being like her mother or her grandmother, like breaking that chain in that cycle of unrighteous women. She’s my favorite.

Hank Smith:                      20:16                   This is an incredible story. This could be the granddaughter of Jezebel. And when you think evil women, Jezebel is a murderer and her daughter, Ophelia, is a murderer. And then comes this Jehosheba. This is a beautiful story. I think you said earlier, Heather, that your family history doesn’t have to define you.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        20:38                   It doesn’t matter where we’ve come from or even how we were raised or what our past is like. We each have that choice to turn our eyes to the Lord. It’s beautiful to see that maybe if Matthew had more room, he would have put Jehosheba there in Jesus Christ’s lineage. We could have stuck him in there someplace. But she’s one of those ancestors. She’s one of the matriarchs in Jesus Christ’s lineage of that Davidic king.

Hank Smith:                      21:02                   Yeah. And as you read on, it looks like Athaliah doesn’t know that all of a sudden they’re praising this new king and she comes running out. This is quite a drama.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        21:12                   The next chapter, she runs out and the people are all praising the king and she runs out and she runs for the altar in the temple and she grabs onto the horns of the altar because that was the way you could claim sanctuary if you wanted to claim sanctuary. Jehoiada, the priest, he comes and says, pull her off there. Get her out of there. We can’t kill her in the temple. Get her out of the temple and then kill her. So they pull her out and they kill her.

Hank Smith:                      21:34                   Wow, what a story. And all the people of the land rejoiced and the city was quiet after they had slain Athaliah with the sword.

John Bytheway:               21:43                   I love that we talked about that. I mean, the Bible could have ended here. Because everything that comes after is dependent on… And look at it, stole him from among the king’s sons that were slain. She came and rescued him. But I love the idea that King Noah’s son, Limhi, says he was not ignorant of the crimes of his father. He himself being a just man. You as you said, Heather, get to the point where you can say, my parents went this direction. I’m going to go this direction.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        22:13                   I know I would love to see Jehosheba’s story be one that’s like the story of Esther. Such an inspirational story.

Hank Smith:                      22:20                   I love it. That’s one of my new heroes. Jehosheba. What do we do next, Heather?

Sis. Heather Farrell:        22:25                   All right, let’s jump to Hezekiah. Hezekiah is living in a time that is very scary because the northern tribes of Israel are getting attacked by Assyria. This is when the scattering of Israel happens is the Northern tribes are attacked and they get scattered to all corners of the earth. Cause remember, the Assyrians, their philosophy is deport everybody and break up all the families. He sees this happen in Israel and gets scared. He’s remembering these covenants, the one about the temple and the one about the Davidic line. And he’s like, we got to turn again to the Lord. The way that he does this is that he focuses again on the temple. He’s emphasizing the temple and turning away from those false teachings. Then he also institutes the Passover as a bigger celebration than it had been. Hank, will you read verse five of chapter 30?

Hank Smith:                      23:21                   “They established a decree to make proclamation throughout all Israel from Beer-sheba even to Dan, that they should come to keep the Passover unto the Lord God of Israel at Jerusalem for they had not done it of a long time in such sort as it was written.” They had not been keeping Passover for a while.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        23:38                   And maybe even they’ve been keeping it, but not how it was supposed to be kept. If you think about Passover, that’s a family affair. If you’ve ever been to a Jewish Passover, you know, it’s a family thing. This is not something that was celebrated in the official religion and the temple or this is something you did in your home. Interesting here that we see Hezekiah get those traditions in place because they’re so important. And it’s interesting that when people ask what’s the most important Jewish holiday, usually people say Passover, which is true. It’s probably the most important one. A Jewish friend said, no, it’s not Passover. It’s the Sabbath. The Sabbath is the most important Jewish holiday. It’s so important we celebrate it every week. And there’s certain rituals and things that they do that help that day become so meaningful and so important. And the Passover is very full of rituals and things you read and things you eat and certain foods, different practices you do that are all based on that household religion.

                                           24:35                   But here, I see when Hezekiah is watching people be destroyed and he’s thinking, what do we do? And he prays to the Lord to know what to do. The Lord’s answer is, focus on the home. Focus on what the people are doing in the home. How are they living their religion in the home? What traditions do they have? What are they doing that is turning their heart to God? Not in our official religion here, but in their home. That’s so beautiful. And we see that it does change the people when they start living and practicing this Passover. It changes them and they make a deeper commitment to the Lord to follow his ways. The Lord’s solution is to take it home first, to take it back to those home-based practices. And I think that’s powerful. And I see our church doing that in so many ways and saying, hey, the teaching needs to happen in your home. What are you doing in your home to make this happen? I think that’s a spot where all of us could do a little bit of an examination of our homes and our personal lives and our personal worship of how are we prioritizing that or how are we putting that forth and making it important?

Hank Smith:                      25:33                   I love the little speech Hezekiah gives to the Levites. “My sons be not now negligent for the Lord hath chosen you to stand before him and to serve Him.” That’s great. He’s like, we’re going to turn this around and I need your help.

John Bytheway:               25:48                   Hank, I was just thinking of they had not done it of such a long time in such sort, feeling a little bit of guilt. Are there some things that we haven’t done very well in our family for a long time that we need to fix?

Hank Smith:                      26:02                   The way it was designed?

John Bytheway:               26:04                   Yeah. And how cool of Hezekiah to go, hey, we’re doing this, but we’re not doing it as well as we could. Let’s fix this. Isn’t it interesting that the Passover is all about remembering?

Hank Smith:                      26:16                   Yeah. I think we did that a little bit with Easter where we started to lose the way it was designed because it feels like we’ve come around to that.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        26:26                   And I like that done too, because I feel like sometimes in your family you can think, oh, we haven’t done family prayer for years, or we haven’t done this, and oh, we just can’t start doing it all of a sudden. But the truth is you can. It’s okay if you haven’t done it for a long time. Just start.

John Bytheway:               26:41                   And it’s like Hank said, be honest. Heavenly Father, we haven’t done this for a long time. Or you could even use these words. We have not done it enough a long time in such sort.

Hank Smith:                      26:50                   As it was written. Yeah.

John Bytheway:               26:52                   But we’re going to do better.

Hank Smith:                      26:54                   I think that’s a great thing. Yeah. The best time to start was yesterday. Let’s go now.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        27:00                   Right. And you might regret it in the future if you hadn’t started already right when you were prompted to.

Hank Smith:                      27:05                   That’s great. I love it.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        27:07                   I want to finish our discussion about 2 Chronicles with the story of Huldah. Some people might not have ever heard the story, but she is one of the central women in the Old Testament. She is one of the ones you can hold up as a role model for young women and for women. Her story is told in 2 Chronicles 34. This is maybe a generation or so past the time of Hezekiah that we just talked about with the Passovers. This is a generation or so in the coming and there’s a king named Josiah. He begins to reign when he is eight years old. He probably is not reigning himself when he’s eight years old. He’s having advisors or a regent or somebody. It says that while he was yet young, he began to seek after the God of David, his father. And I love that, that when he was young, because he may have had an awesome father as well, right?

                                           27:55                   But that could have been his mother’s influence right there as we’ve seen this influence of the queens of Judah, that when he was young, his heart was turned towards the Lord. I like to think that’s because there’s a woman in his life directing that heart. And when we were in Israel, we went to go visit the tomb of King David. And it’s a little tiny tomb and it’s split in half. A lot of tombs of these famous people or people in the Bible are places of worship now for the Jews. His tomb is split in half. One half is for the women. One half is for the men. With my family, the girls went in on the girls’ side and the boys went on the boys’ side. And it’s little tiny space and there was people praying in there. And we walked in and my daughters and I were kind of like, ooh, we don’t really feel comfortable in here. Let’s just go out.

                                           28:37                   So we went out and we just stood outside the boys side waiting for the boys to come out. And they were in there a long time. I was thinking, what are they doing in there? As we’re waiting for them, all of a sudden this line of so many four-year-old Hasidic Jewish boys. So if you think about them and they’re cute little sweaters with their ringlets, and they’re all walking out so reverently. And I was like, there were 40? How did they all fit in there? And I was on the woman’s side and I did not hear anything. There’s just like a veil in between and I did not hear anything from those boys. How were their… All those little boys, like four-year-olds on that side of the men’s tomb, coming out with them are these illustrious looking rabbis. I was thinking oh, maybe there’s some babysitters with them or something, but these are really important Jewish men.

                                           29:19                   You can just tell these are revered rabbi type men that are coming out and they’re leading and guiding this little group of boys. My husband came out and he was like, “Heather, I have never seen anything like that in my entire life. There were all those little boys in there and every single one of them was being taught how to go up to David’s tomb, how to respectfully approach it and then move back. And they were all reverent. There were these men, these rabbis, these men that were teaching them. And I’ve never seen anything like that.” So I was talking to a friend about this and I was telling about this experience. He said, “Oh, yeah.” He’s like, “In the Jewish culture, the highest position you can have is the teacher of young children.” So he said, “That’s the highest position.” He said, “That’s where they put their very best men.”

                                           30:01                   The very most illustrious rabbis, the ones who know the most. People we would think of the stake president or general authorities, they’re the ones that teach the very youngest. And that has just stayed with me, the power of teaching young children. And sometimes we see the nursery or we see Primary as a lesser calling, or sometimes even women can feel like, well, why don’t the men ever do this? And then they just give to the women because the men don’t want to do it right. But I feel like after seeing those rabbis and seeing that experience, it’s really reinforced to me that that is where real power and influence can come is in shaping that younger generation and shaping those young children in their hearts. I love this verse here that he taught when he was young to seek the Lord his God. And that makes all the difference in this story.

John Bytheway:               30:47                   Just recently, a friend of ours was called to be in the Primary presidency and I’m thinking, oh, I want her to hear that story. Thank you.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        30:57                   Yeah, you’re welcome. The story goes on that Josiah is fixing the temple. They find a book. They can’t really read it or understand what it says and they don’t know if it’s from God and they’re not sure what to do with this, but they know that it’s scripture. They know that this is something important. It says, 34:14, Hilkiah, the priest, found a book of the law, the Lord that was given by Moses. And Hilkiah answered and said into Shaphan the scribe, “I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord.” And they take the book to the king and they ask well, what should we do with this? And he says, well, can we find somebody that can read this? So verse 21, Josiah says, “Go inquire of the Lord for me and for them that are left in Israel and in Judah, concerning the words of the book that is found. For great is the wrath of the Lord that is poured out upon us because our fathers have not kept the word of the Lord and do not all that is written in this book.”

                                           31:49                   In Judea at this time, Jeremiah is alive here and so is the prophet Zechariah. Even this could have been the time that Lehi, he might have been young at this time, but Lehi is also, this is his time period. This is the end of the Bible. We’re moving into the Book of Mormon story here at this point. He could also have been here at this time. So they have all these options for prophets, but who do they take the book to? They take it to a woman named Huldah who’s called the prophetess. And it says that she’s the keeper of the wardrobe, which there’s lots of different ideas about it, but it could have been that they’re talking about the priestly wardrobe. You think about the temple worker that takes care of the clothes in the temple or something. And she dwelled in the college of Jerusalem, which is not a college like we think. It’s a part that was added on to Jerusalem. So when the northern kingdom was destroyed, there was a ton of refugees that came from the north down into Jerusalem. So Jerusalem added on a whole nother part to it that is called the second part. And that’s where a lot of those refugees settled. And so she’s in that part of Jerusalem.

Hank Smith:                      32:51                   That’s interesting because we know Lehi’s family is from Manasseh. We wonder, is that part maybe where his family was? And also it reminded me of you, Heather, she dwelt in Jerusalem in the college with her bicycle.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        33:08                   I love that application. I had never put that together, Hank. That was amazing. I might need a shirt or something with that on. I love here that she is called a prophetess. The idea of a prophet was a little bit more ambiguous back in this day than we have. Like we saw in some of the stories, we had multiple prophets. The person who was kind of like what we would consider the prophet was the high priest of the temple in this time period. He was the leader of the Aaronic priesthood. The high priest is the official religion leader, the one that’s in charge. But there are other prophets that show up, like Jeremiah and all these people that are moved by the Spirit of the Lord to speak truth. I love that she’s called a prophetess because I feel like that’s something that women can embody, that idea of being a speaker of truth, of testifying of Jesus Christ, of standing for what is right, of giving predictions of the future, all those types of things that we kind of think of a prophet can do.

                                           34:01                   Anciently, they also believed that women could hold that. And this was really driven home to me again when we lived in Jerusalem because my very favorite spot in Jerusalem is a place called the Huldah Gates. Okay, you could say like Heather, it’s your favorite because it’s, has the word Huldah in it and you love Huldah. Yes, that’s one reason too. But the Huldah gates are, were the main entrance into the temple in Jesus’ day. They’re sealed up, but you can still see the outlines of where they are and they have excavated the stairs that come down from those gates. If there was one place in all of Jerusalem or all of Israel that you could be like almost 99% sure that Jesus actually touched his foot to it would be those stairs because they’re the original stairs that go up to the temple and we know that Jesus went to the temple.

                                           34:49                   He went up that way. And they’re called the Huldah gates because Huldah’s tomb was believed to be right outside them. But the thing that just really hit me as I was standing on these stairs is that when you’re there, you feel like you’re up in the sky, that you’re just ascending to the Hill of the Lord because the valley is below you and you’re moving up these stairs and the Temple Mount is high up on this mountain. It just feels like you are ascending to the house of the Lord. In my heart, I was imagining what it would be like to be a woman in Jesus’ day and what it would feel like to walk up those stairs in through the Huldah gates, this big, beautiful main entrance to the temple named for a woman who was a prophetess. Imagine if we had a huge gate at Temple Square that said, this is the Emma gate and it’s beautiful and it’s huge and that’s where everybody goes in.

                                           35:38                   Your idea of Emma and women would be like, whoa, I am important here. This is where I belong. Welcome Heather to the Temple Square through the Emma gates. Here I am. That must have been how women felt going to the temple is that they were walking through the Huldah gate, the gate of the prophetess into a sacred place where they were invited. Even within the temple we see Anna the prophetess, right? A prophetess in Jesus’ time named Anna that’s there. She’s described as a prophetess. I love that imagery and that feeling in my heart when I was there and standing of what that must have felt like and how empowering and how beautiful that would be to have been a woman in Jesus’ day and to have walked in through those gates named for Huldah.

Hank Smith:                      36:18                   Oh, that’s beautiful. When I go there with my groups, I tell them that Neil Armstrong said that when he was taken there, to stand here means more to me than standing on the moon.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        36:29                   Yeah. It’s the most incredible place.

Hank Smith:                      36:32                   And to get a picture with the Huldah gates right behind you and –

Sis. Heather Farrell:        36:35                   Yeah.

Hank Smith:                      36:36                   That’s going to mean even more to me now. It meant a lot before.

John Bytheway:               36:40                   Another name that a lot of folks call that is the South Steps because it’s on the south part of the temple. I wanted to sit there for hours because I knew this was that spot and probably also the spot where Jesus sent the man who was born blind in John chapter nine down those stairs to the pool of Siloam to wash because that’s where it goes. That’s where those steps go. The Huldah gates. I had no idea the first time I went there that that would become one of my favorite spots ever in the world was sitting there on the south steps.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        37:17                   It’s a little piece of heaven for sure.

Hank Smith:                      37:20                   Yeah, it is. Thank you for telling us that. What is her message?

Sis. Heather Farrell:        37:24                   She reads this book and she sees it and she declares that it’s scripture, that it’s holy. And Camille Fronk Olson always makes a great point about that. She’s the first person to declare a written text a scripture. We could just read her words. John, would you read 2 Chronicles 34:23 and 24?

John Bytheway:               37:44                   And she answered them, thus saith the Lord God of Israel, tell ye the man that sent you to me. Thus saith the Lord, behold, I will bring evil upon this place and upon the inhabitants thereof, even all the curses that are written in the book which they have read before the King of Judah.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        38:03                   So not good news, right? She’s like, oh, sorry, guys. Not looking good. She’s telling them that there’s going to be destruction coming. She’s prophesying the end of the temple and the end of the Jewish people. She’s prophesying of that. She sees that coming. But she also gives a promise to Josiah. We have these two promises and we see those two promises even here when she’s talking. We have this promise to the people that’s around the temple. And then we have this promise to the Davidic kings to the Jewish line. And she speaks to him here too. Hank, would you read verses 27 and 28? And this is her words to Josiah.

Hank Smith:                      38:37                   “Because thine heart was tender.” Hey, John, that’s you. “And thou did humble thyself before God when thou heardest his words against this place and against the inhabitants thereof. And humbledst thyself before me and didst rend thy clothes and weep before me. I have even heard thee also saith the Lord. Behold, I will gather thee to thy fathers and thou shall be gathered to thy grave in peace. Neither shall thine eyes see all the evil that I will bring upon this place and upon the inhabitants of the same. So they brought the king word again.”

Sis. Heather Farrell:        39:09                   Yeah. In verse 28, we have thine eyes. I’m seeing that theme through all this about thine eyes. Even though she’s prophesying that there’s going to be destruction, that it’s almost too late. They’re going to be destroyed. She says, but I’ve seen your heart. I know what you have done personally. Even if the people haven’t done it, I know you as a king, I can see your heart. The Lord is saying, “I will gather thee home to your fathers.” I’ve seen what you’ve tried to do. And I love that emphasis there again, how we worship in our hearts and how we worship personally. The Lord cares deeply about that. And after this, it does. It happens. This is the destruction of the temple and the Babylonians come in and they destroy the temple and they take all the kings of Judah. They carry them off to Babylon.

                                           39:53                   And this is a time when Lehi would’ve left. This is the end of the Bible story and the beginning of the Book of Mormon, which if we think about this, this one is not the end in our book, but it is the end in the Hebrew Bible. And I love that where the Hebrew Bible ends, the Book of Mormon picks up. It’s like, okay, we’re done here and now the Book of Mormon, we’re keeping the story going. Here’s another line. It’s tragic. It really is. It’s one of those ones that you read this after going through and you study these people and you love them. And at the end, it’s all gone. It’s all destroyed. And that’s a hard end to a book. But with that promise at the end that we read before at the beginning from Cyrus, that promise of going back to the temple, going back and that theme of turning your heart and your eyes.

                                           40:41                   Remember way back in Solomon’s prayer, he asked, even if we’re in captivity and we pray to the land where the temple is, will you hear us? And God says yes. Even then. So that yearning and that desire and that forward looking for the temple and for the Messiah, I love that that’s the end. The end of the Hebrew Bible ends right there with that looking forward to the temple and the promise of the Messiah. And the fact that the Book of Mormon steps in right there and answers it’s like, hey, here we go. You want to know about the Messiah? You want to know about the temple? Here we go. Here’s where it goes. And I love it. In my mind, it’s a beautiful continuation that continues and points us towards Jesus Christ and towards the true Messiah and towards the true temple.

John Bytheway:               41:21                   Right when we get to the book of 2 Chronicles, we can think about, here comes Lehi, contemporary of Jeremiah. And Lehi’s told, take this part of the house of Israel, of the seat of Abraham. I’m going to move you. Sometimes they get scattered because they’re wicked, but in Lehi’s case, it was get scattered to preserve.

Hank Smith:                      41:44                   Right. You the exact same name. Do you remember 1 Nephi chapter one verse four? It came to pass in the first year of the reign of Zedekiah, King of Judah. That Zedekiah is in 2 Chronicles 36:10. Made Zedekiah, his brother, king over Judah and Jerusalem. That is a beautiful connection. Thank you, Heather. Heather, you have showed us quite a journey here. I think our listeners, those who are still with us, would love to hear a little bit of your journey. As John and I have gotten to know you, you have an interesting journey. You called it not the standard or not the norm.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        42:23                   Yeah, non-traditional.

Hank Smith:                      42:25                   Yeah. Tell us a little bit about that.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        42:28                   Right in my introduction, I’ve always loved the scriptures. I feel like that’s a spiritual gift I brought with me from the pre-existence. It’s just in my heart. You know, maybe I am a prophetess like Huldah with that in my heart. When I was at BYU, I took the seminary teaching courses and wanted to be a seminary teacher. And I actually got accepted into the seminary teaching, student teaching program. But at that time, I found out I was pregnant. It was like the week that they asked me, I had just found out I was pregnant. At the time, the rule was that you couldn’t teach seminary if you had children. And I struggled to get pregnant. And so I was really excited about that. So I was like, okay, I’m going into this. But there was a part of me that was really sad that I was passing up this opportunity because teaching is such a part of my heart and my soul, I guess.

Hank Smith:                      43:14                   And you’re a gifted teacher.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        43:16                   Thank you. So I told God, I said, I know that I’m supposed to stay home with this baby. It was after that that I got the inspiration really to start writing about women in the scriptures. I had taken a class at BYU from Camille Fronk Olson. I started writing about what I learned. I was just writing about what I was studying. And people started reading it. And I was like, I remember one time somebody even commenting like, I’m really surprised that a blog, this is back in the day of blogs, a blog about women of scriptures has this many followers. Who would’ve thought like this is a… But I just realized that there were so many women like me that were hungry for these stories of women because the women’s stories are in there, but so often we just don’t take the time to think about them or find them or to dissect them.

                                           43:56                   Or sometimes, like we said, they’re really messy and so we’re like, ooh, let’s stay away from that one. I just really started digging into these stories and loving them and finding that they were connecting with women in all different types of ways and realizing that there’s no cookie cutter stereotypical way to be a woman, a righteous woman. There’s so many women that blow every stereotype out of the water. There’s just so much diversity in God’s women. So for me, it became a testimony that God really does love his daughters and that we’re not forgotten and that we have a place and we’ve always had a place. Finding those ancient evidences of powerful women and influential women in the scriptures has been really meaningful to me. With this process of writing my blog, I was able to write the books. Walking with the Women of the Old Testament, Walking with the Women of the New Testament, and Walking with the Women of the Book of Mormon.

                                           44:43                   I am working on a Doctrine and Covenants one as well, but it’s taking me a long time. I’m going slow on that one. A couple years ago, I wrote a blog post. It was actually something that I wrote fairly quickly. It was not even something that I spent a lot of time on, but I’d had a conversation with my friend. We’d had a conversation about how God comes to women and we were feeling… Actually, it came out of angst, if I’m honest, because I was watching the Book of Mormon videos and there’s a video of Enos in the video of the Book of Mormon video. He like kisses his wife goodbye and he, and all these kids sleeping on the floor and he takes off to the forest to hunt. I was just like fuming inside. I said, you know what is not fair?

                                           45:18                   Is that he’s going off. I know he’s going to have this amazing experience because he’s all by himself. He’s going to have time to pray for a whole day. And she’s home there with all those kids. She’s never… When is she ever going to have time to pray? I was really feeling really angsty. And this was also during COVID, so just add that layer on top, right? And I was just like, oh, when do women have these times to do this? Because there’s so much that’s expected of us. This friend, she’s like, well, Heather, that’s why God comes to women. And that just blew my mind. I was like, whoa. So the idea that God will meet us and I think he does it for men too. I don’t think it’s just women, but I think it’s especially meaningful for women. Sometimes our lives are so confined by our biology, right? By our physical female bodies and the responsibilities that come with that and children. And I think that God sees that and he sends messengers to us and he comes to us.

Hank Smith:                      46:08                   And there’s lots of examples of that.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        46:10                   Yeah. There’s tons about we have the woman at the well, right? Like Jesus was there waiting for her when she was doing her work. Even Mary and Martha, he’s in their house. We have Hagar, who the Lord comes to her, finds her in the wilderness.

Hank Smith:                      46:22                   The men go up to the mountain. Moses goes up to the mountain. Abraham goes up to the mountain. But God comes to women. I love it. Yeah.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        46:31                   My husband actually, when we were engaged, he was down on one knee. He said, will you marry me? And I said, yes, but I have three conditions. Which girls, this is the time to ask, to just negotiate for anything you want in life is when a guy is down on his knee.That’s the time to know what you’re going to ask him because he’ll be ready to say yes to anything. I told him that I said, I need to go to Israel. This was something that the Lord had planted in my heart years before. And honestly, if I was Jewish, I probably would’ve immigrated to Israel and moved to Israel because it was just that strong drive there. But I just didn’t know what to do with it, right? I’m like, so you have to take me to Israel, was one of the conditions. And he was like, okay, fine. You know, in his head, he’s thinking like, we’ll sign up for a tour with Hank and John, and we’ll go.

Hank Smith:                      47:10                   You’re like, no, that’s not what I mean.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        47:12                   Yeah. Well, I didn’t really know what it was at time. I didn’t really know. I just knew that I was supposed to go. Time goes on and we have kids and life just happens. And then during COVID, I realized that a lot of the programs in Israel were going to be online. So I took a Hebrew class and learned Hebrew for the first time. And I was like, maybe my whole master’s degree could be online, John. I could do the whole master’s degree during COVID. So I started, but then everything opened back up. And they were allowing us to go to Israel. And my husband was like, well, I promised you we’re going to go. Let’s go. And I was like, with six kids? Can we do this? Can we go to Israel for two years so I can go to school? The truth is that God makes things happen for us in our lives.

                                           47:47                   And I feel like that’s the story of my life. Back to this disappointment about not becoming a seminary teacher. I mean, maybe I would’ve been a great seminary teacher, but I just look at all the doors that God has opened up for me and all the paths that He’s given and all the ways that He’s taken and directed my life and given me the opportunities. Somehow He had this big miracle of Israel and it worked out and we went with six kids and it was the best of times and the worst of times. It was incredible and it was amazing. I just feel so grateful and I know my testimony that came out of that was that God knows the desires of our hearts, that He knows our talents and our strength. And no matter what our life circumstances are, He will guide us and direct us and help us to accomplish what’s in our hearts.

                                           48:27                   Especially for women, I feel like so often women have to feel they have to choose between family and career. I don’t think that’s true at all. It’s definitely hard to juggle. I will not say that is not true. But I definitely think that choosing children and choosing a family is very much in line with reaching your dreams and accomplishing amazing things. And I feel like the Lord will open doors and move mountains for people who are following the path that he’s guiding them on.

Hank Smith:                      48:54                   I love it.

John Bytheway:               48:55                   I just want people to know that book is called God Comes to Women and I can’t wait to read that one. I think that’s an empowering thought. I think it’s beautiful and I think it’ll bless a lot of people. I’m so glad you mentioned that. It’s so interesting. I’m going to be chewing on that for days.

Hank Smith:                      49:13                   Heather, womeninthescriptures.com, that’s still being updated as much as you can?

Sis. Heather Farrell:        49:18                   Yeah. It still is a treasure trove of all the things I’ve written before on there and the resources. I haven’t been as good about updating it recently because I’ve been doing school and other things, but there’s still a lot of good things on there and a lot of good resources.

Hank Smith:                      49:32                   Hopefully it can handle a little bit of high traffic this week. I’m sure our listeners are all big Heather Farrell fans and want to head over there and check that out. How wonderful. Heather, this has been a superb day. I love 2 Chronicles, John. And you’ve never heard me say that before.

John Bytheway:               49:50                   Yeah. We’ve never chronicled so much before, but we are chroniclers now.

Hank Smith:                      49:55                   Yeah. Let it be chronicled that we love 2 Chronicles. Thank you for your time, Heather, and your preparation. Thank you.

Sis. Heather Farrell:        50:02                   Yeah, you’re welcome. And thank you so much for a wonderful conversation.

Hank Smith:                      50:06                   Yeah. It has been a treat having you here. With that, we want to thank Sister Heather Farrell for being with us today. We want to thank our executive producer, Shannon Sorensen, our sponsors, David and Verla Sorensen. In every episode we remember our founder, Steve Sorensen. We hope you’ll join us next week. We’ve got more Old Testament to do on followHIM.