3.198 Turned Not Aside

In Matthew 5, Jesus calls us the salt of the earth and the light of the world, reminding us that our lives are meant to preserve, illuminate, and point others to him. This season on Savory Salt, we'll walk through the Old Testament, one verse and one thought each day. Perhaps these moments will add greater savor and brighter light to our lives as we seek to truly live as Savory Salt.

Hello, my friends. It's a new day with new opportunities. Choose ye this day whom ye will serve.

If you've never traveled to the state of Utah in the United States, I hope that you have an opportunity to perhaps search the image of what I'm going to talk about inside of this episode. There is an area down in southern Utah called Zion National Park. And inside of Zion, there's hikes all over the place.

You can do all sorts of different types of hikes down there. One of them is called Angel's Landing. And I want to talk to you a little bit about Angel's Landing today, especially when it comes to our verse for today.

You see on that hike, it's a hike back that's going to give you this incredible overview at the end of the hike over the canyon of Zion National Park. But in order to get there, now, if you can imagine what's happening with this drop-off on both sides. In fact, there are those that have accidentally slipped and fallen to their deaths on the way out to Angel's Landing.

I want you to consider if you were to do that hike and have the opportunity to look over that incredible view, how hard would you focus on the chain? If your friends encouraged you to simply run across that area, how quickly would you be excited to do so? That's the image I want you to hold on to as we get into our verse for today.

Our verse for today is going to be inside of 2 Kings chapter 22. We're taking a leap forward here as we talked about Hezekiah yesterday, but we're going to start piecing together these foundational pieces that I started the week off with our conference talk and with the book of Alma. We're going to have two players inside of here.

If you look at chapter 21, you're going to see what Manasseh does as a king and basically the son of Hezekiah. He rebuilds everything his dad tore down for the idolatry and all those things. And then we're going to have in chapter 22, Josiah come along and he's going to witness things that his dad does in terms of child sacrifice and other things happening in the high places in the groves.

And he doesn't like it. So we're going to get a rise of Josiah and he's going to try and turn Judah to righteousness. But we get another insight to him that I think is just as insightful and as powerful as this characteristic we got from Hezekiah yesterday.

Let's take a look at our verse for today and see how it connects to our hike at Angel's Landing. Our verse for today is 2 Kings chapter 22 verse 2. In describing Josiah, we get this verse, "And he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord, and walked in all the way of David his father, and turned not aside to the right hand or to the left." Now, there are plenty of verses, if you've been reading through our 2 Kings chapters here, you see plenty of them start out with: "He did that which was right in the sight of the Lord." "He did that which was not right in the sight of the Lord." That one's a very common verse inside of describing these kings.

But the interesting additional piece that we get here with Josiah is this second half of the verse. "He turned not aside to the right hand or to the left." My friends, when it comes to this image of the iron rod we talked about yesterday a little bit and the idea of cleaving to the Lord, perhaps if we add to it the idea of Angel's Landing as our own mortal experience, the road in which we have to walk for the Lord, the covenant path, is not a wandering, wide path where we just kind of willy our way across the meadow. It is narrow, it is straight, and the opportunity for us to stay on the covenant path. We are going to talk more about that and connect I'm going to connect Alma with these readings here in the next couple of days.

But I just wanted to give you that image and the idea that perhaps we are on our path and it is more like Angel's Landing than we consider in our days. Thanks for watching. You and I have come here for such a time as this.

Step forward in faith and let's be savory salt. We will be here tomorrow and we hope you are too.