Hank Smith: 00:05 Hello, my friends. Welcome to another followHIM Favorites. My name is Hank Smith, and I’m here with the amazing John Bytheway. Welcome, John.

John Bytheway: 00:12 Hi, Hank.

Hank Smith: 00:12 If you’ve been following followHIM Favorites this year, you know that we are taking a single question from each week’s lesson and studying it just for a few minutes. John, in the manual for this week’s lesson of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah, there’s a lot of syllables there, it says right in the beginning, “Reading the Old Testament often means reading prophecies about destruction. The Lord frequently called prophets to warn the wicked.” And then this question is posed in the very first paragraph, and this is our question today, “Why is it valuable to read these prophecies today?” So John, what would you say to someone who’s reading these three books going, “Wow, this is a lot of destruction. Why do I have to read this?” What do you think?

John Bytheway: 00:53 The first thing that comes to my mind is that they have been warned, they have been taught, and now they are getting consequences. And one of the things that I think Satan tries to do is say there’s no consequences. Like, jumping over to the Book of Mormon and the Korihor story, when a man is dead, that’s the end. Whatsoever a man did was no crime, no consequences. And here we’re finding out, wow, they learned the hard way that choices have consequences. Every choice has a consequence, and that can be a good thing. I remember raising my kids. If they did something wrong, “Do I get a consequence?” And I didn’t want them to think of consequence as a negative word because sometimes consequences are wonderful.

Hank Smith: 01:34 Can be positive. Yeah.

John Bytheway: 01:35 So Elder Neal A. Maxwell said once, “We had better want the consequences of what we want.” So maybe that’s a good lesson here. And my mission president used to say, “Wise people learn from experience, but super wise people learn from others’ experience.” What are the scriptures but the experiences of others? And maybe we can learn from these destructive consequences. Okay, what choices did they make that brought this on? How can I avoid those choices?

Hank Smith: 02:03 Excellent. I see the word woe coming up in Habakkuk a lot and in Zephaniah, and woe is warning. Watch out for this. So we can use these books and this destruction as a warning to not follow their same footsteps. So every time you see “woe,” I would mark that and say, “Watch out. Be careful.” Don’t follow that same path or you’re going to end up in the same place. Also, the joy of the Lord, John, and the blessings of the Lord, the hesed, as we’ve been talking about this year, which means mercy of the Lord, wouldn’t mean anything if he wasn’t saving us from something, if the mercy of God wasn’t saving us from something. When we repent, we’re saved from this destruction. Well, if the destruction was never going to happen in the first place, how valuable is that gift? To me, watching that this destruction does come says, “Yeah, the mercy of the Lord is that wonderful because it’s stopping something that really is on its way, that really is coming. I want to take part of that.”

John Bytheway: 03:05 Yeah, it’s really positive and see all the destruction, but notice that our merciful God is still there. Verse 17, “The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty. He will save. He will rejoice over thee with joy. He will rest in his love. He will joy over thee with singing.” So make sure you notice the hope in the midst of all the destruction when you read it too.

Hank Smith: 03:27 So when you see this destruction coming and you can learn to value repentance more, then you value the mercy of the Lord and the goodness of the Lord in saving you from all this destruction that can happen as a result of sin. Well, we hope you’ll join us on our full podcast. It’s called followHIM. You can get it wherever you get your podcasts. We’re with Dr. Josh Matson this week. You’re going to love his expertise when it comes to these smaller books of the Bible. And then join us next week as we come back for another followHIM Favorites.