Missed Opportunity: “Placing the Missing Piece of the Puzzle” – 2 Kings 23:1-30

In our last time together in this passage, we saw that Josiah had a missing piece to the puzzle of good behavior, prayerful life, a worshiping spirit, a desire for purity, a priority to lead people in truth, and a servant’s heart for the less fortunate -  the missing piece was an understanding of the Word of God. Apart from that Word, he could not develop a Biblical world view (what the Bible calls “Faith”). He was crippled by a lack of knowledge. Surrender was real, but – to what? As we continue, we will see how the “missing piece of the puzzle is fit into real life choices.

Key Principle: Knowing God’s Word gives us an opportunity to build on truth, but surrendering to the truth in action is what changes the world around us!

The formula for godliness is Biblical perspective (faith) plus careful and thorough surrender equals a God honoring life! Let’s put feet on some of the definition by showing how it worked in the life of Josiah, a leader who wanted to walk with God and reflect a life that was surrendered to the truths he was reading in the Word:

Ten Truths of the Godly Life

1.You cannot change the world without a team! Personal response to the Lord is essential, but corporate exposure of those responsible for change must take place for people to get on board with change.

2 Kings 23:1 Then the king called together all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem. 2 He went up to the temple of the Lord with the men of Judah, the people of Jerusalem, the priests and the prophets—all the people from the least to the greatest. He read in their hearing all the words of the Book of the Covenant, which had been found in the temple of the Lord.

These were responsible people, who were called regardless of their economic status – the amount you own has nothing to do with the standard you live! They engaged a first hand hearing of exactly what the king heard earlier.

2.People can only follow what they can understand! The leader must go out in front and be specific and measurable so that people understand completely the agreement they are making.

2 Kings 23:3 The king stood by the pillar (amud may be pulpit) and renewed the covenant (cut a covenant) in the presence (face of) of the Lord—to follow the Lord (literally to walk behind the Lord) and keep (shamar, to guard or hedge about) His commands (mitsvot), regulations (eduth) and decrees (chookaw: ordinances of displays) with all his heart and all his soul, thus confirming (koom is literally to “raise up”) the words of the covenant written in this book. Then all the people pledged themselves (amad: stood) to the covenant.

Let’s look at the specifics of the passage:

• The king as an official act made the agreement in the face of the Lord (23:3). Yes, He is watching what commitments we make, even when we don’t SEE Him. His face is before us and eyes upon us.
• He promised to walk closely behind the Lord. That means he would both FOLLOW the Lord and not try to set the programs speed, distance or direction beyond the parameters of the Lord. How many a believer has desired to follow the Lord, only to appear to lead Him around by the nose!
• The leader promised to do more than follow – he promised to be a guardian of the Words of God. We cannot simply DO RIGHT as leaders. Part of the work involves helping people gain a proper respect for the Word and fear of the Lord.
• When my heart and soul is pledged, the Word is elevated to its proper place, and God gets taken seriously.

3.Facing up to the past is the starting point! The leader started at the center of the trouble and publicly, permanently and profoundly destroyed the humiliating reminders of past rebellion. He didn’t reuse the items – he crushed and burned them and the place where they were used.

2 Kings 23:4 The king ordered Hilkiah the high priest, the priests next in rank and the doorkeepers to remove from the temple of the Lord all the articles made for Baal and Asherah and all the starry hosts. He burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron Valley and took the ashes to Bethel. 5 He did away with the pagan priests (shawbat: put down; reposed) appointed by the kings of Judah to burn incense on the high places of the towns of Judah and on those around Jerusalem—those who burned incense to Baal, to the sun and moon, to the constellations and to all the starry hosts. 6 He took the Asherah pole from the temple of the Lord to the Kidron Valley outside Jerusalem and burned it there. He ground it to powder and scattered the dust over the graves of the common people. 7 He also tore down the quarters of the male shrine prostitutes, which were in the temple of the Lord and where women did weaving for Asherah.

We will only find ourselves convicted of sin when we see some things we do as WRONG! In a generation of believers that watch the same rated movies as unbelievers, that see no questionable activity in entertaining their eyes with adultery, homosexuality or course language for the sake of a “good show”, who will routinely fill their minds and hearts with “love stories” of the undead vampires or laugh at the jokes of “good witches”, that have lost any blush on their face to premarital sex in a drama “so that it will seem like real life” – where is the opportunity for conviction? We are far to comfortable with things that God has both told us NOT to do, and that wound His heart! We need time to really reflect on what is WRONG in our day.

 Note “close up” some of the specifics:

• Those who were appointed to lead the people spiritually were employed to do the cleaning up (since they were part of the problem!). He didn’t destroy the system, he re-oriented the work.
• Before he dealt with the countryside, he went into the Temple and cleaned house there.
• He did not execute the priests, though he would have been eligible to do so. He understood that the whole country and the kings who sat on Judah’s throne were at fault, not merely a few priests.
• The center of the lascivious sexual experiences of the people had to be destroyed and absolutely crushed. Every aspect of this had to be eliminated.

4. Grace is essential when working together! Those who were led astray earlier were not humiliated or disbanded, but were also not immediately established in the work – they took some time to be gathered and corrected.

8 Josiah brought all the priests from the towns of Judah and desecrated the high places, from Geba to Beersheba, where the priests had burned incense. He broke down the shrines at the gates—at the entrance to the Gate of Joshua, the city governor, which is on the left of the city gate. 9 Although the priests of the high places did not serve at the altar of the Lord in Jerusalem, they ate unleavened bread with their fellow priests.

 5. Some things must simply be removed before right can be restored. The sacredness of life meant that the high places dedicated to a destroyer god, where child sacrifice was the norm, needed to be completely obliterated. He specifically made it UNUSABLE:

 10 He desecrated Topheth, which was in the Valley of Ben Hinnom, so no one could use it to sacrifice his son or daughter in the fire to Molech.

 6. Dig deep into unacceptable attitudes and practices – no matter how long they have been accepted! Now came the time to deal with LONGSTANDING disobedience of the nation. Some of the practices went all the way back to King Solomon, and the beginning of the slide downward. Some were more recent, but all had to be dealt with.

Note that he covered the symbolic place of fertility with HUMAN BONES – a fitting end for the god of lust and what it does. Lusts don’t bring about “romance” or “spice up life” – they bring out death.

 11 He removed from the entrance to the temple of the Lord the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun. They were in the court near the room of an official named Nathan-Melech. Josiah then burned the chariots dedicated to the sun. 12 He pulled down the altars the kings of Judah had erected on the roof near the upper room of Ahaz, and the altars Manasseh had built in the two courts of the temple of the Lord. He removed them from there, smashed them to pieces and threw the rubble into the Kidron Valley. 13 The king also desecrated the high places that were east of Jerusalem on the south of the Hill of Corruption—the ones Solomon king of Israel had built for Ashtoreth the vile goddess of the Sidonians, for Chemosh the vile god of Moab, and for Molech the detestable god of the people of Ammon. 14 Josiah smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles and covered the sites with human bones. 15 Even the altar at Bethel, the high place made by Jeroboam son of Nebat, who had caused Israel to sin—even that altar and high place he demolished. He burned the high place and ground it to powder, and burned the Asherah pole also.

 7. Learn to appreciate and respect those who did right before you – even if they weren’t perfect. Just as the leader bore the weight of the decisions made before him, so also he had to admit that he stood on the shoulders of those who directed him toward a walk with God. Respect for the people of God that went before is a critical element of taking God seriously.

 16 Then Josiah looked around, and when he saw the tombs that were there on the hillside, he had the bones removed from them and burned on the altar to defile it, in accordance with the word of the Lord proclaimed by the man of God who foretold these things. 17 The king asked, “What is that tombstone I see?” The men of the city said, “It marks the tomb of the man of God who came from Judah and pronounced against the altar of Bethel the very things you have done to it.” 18 “Leave it alone,” he said. “Don’t let anyone disturb his bones.” So they spared his bones and those of the prophet who had come from Samaria.

 8. The Bible also has words for those who simply want to live in defiant rebellion! Eventually it came time to deal with rebellious people that openly defied the truth and wanted to cling to wrong. These could not be dealt with in the same way as the grace extended to the priests of God in the high places of Judah. These priests were clearly idolatrous and wholly defiled. Though we do not “destroy” such people today, we are told to limit our exposure to them (I wonder where TV fits in to this!) and not eat meals with defiant people.

 2 Kings 23: 19 Just as he had done at Bethel, Josiah removed and defiled all the shrines at the high places that the kings of Israel had built in the towns of Samaria that had provoked the Lord to anger. 20 Josiah slaughtered all the priests of those high places on the altars and burned human bones on them. Then he went back to Jerusalem.

9. Much will be accomplished to correct by simply doing right! A walk in the Word should lead us to DO SOMETHING POSITIVE, not simply be against things. God had celebrations written into His Word, because He knows what we need. The celebration of the past of His work is a great place to begin!

 2 Kings 23:21The king gave this order to all the people: “Celebrate the Passover to the Lord your God, as it is written in this Book of the Covenant.” 22 Not since the days of the judges who led Israel, nor throughout the days of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah, had any such Passover been observed. 23 But in the eighteenth year of King Josiah, this Passover was celebrated to the Lord in Jerusalem.

 10. Our instruction must be clearly aimed at getting dirt out of the hidden corners. The purging work had to get past the surface of the culture and into the homes, and daily practices. Failure to change on that level was failure to yield to the Lord at all.

 24 Furthermore, Josiah got rid of the mediums and spiritists, the household gods, the idols and all the other detestable things seen in Judah and Jerusalem. This he did to fulfill the requirements of the law written in the book that Hilkiah the priest had discovered in the temple of the Lord. 25 Neither before nor after Josiah was there a king like him who turned to the Lord as he did—with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strength, in accordance with all the Law of Moses.

 One final note: The work of getting right with God cannot be about getting a better outcome for myself and those around me. It isn’t that I won’t get a better outcome, it is that I am to do right because of my reverence for the PLACE OF GOD, not so that I can soften Him up to get something more for myself… The writer closes off the story of the corrections with this note..

 2 Kings 23:26 Nevertheless, the Lord did not turn away from the heat of his fierce anger, which burned against Judah because of all that Manasseh had done to provoke him to anger. 27 So the Lord said, “I will remove Judah also from my presence as I removed Israel, and I will reject Jerusalem, the city I chose, and this temple, about which I said, ‘There shall my Name be.”

 It was a bright Sunday morning in 18th century London, but Robert Robinson’s mood was anything but sunny. All along the street there were people hurrying to church, but in the midst of the crowd Robinson was a lonely man. The sound of church bells reminded him of years past when his faith in God was strong and the church was an integral part of his life. It had been years since he set foot in a church—years of wandering, disillusionment, and gradual defection from the God he once loved. That love for God—once fiery and passionate—had slowly burned out within him, leaving him dark and cold inside. Robinson heard the clip-clop, clip-clop of a horse-drawn cab approaching behind him. Turning, he lifted his hand to hail the driver. But then he saw that the cab was occupied by a young woman dressed in finery for the Lord’s Day. He waved the driver on, but the woman in the carriage ordered the carriage to be stopped.

“Sir, I’d be happy to share this carriage with you,” she said to Robinson. “Are you going to church?” Robinson was about to decline, then he paused. “Yes,” he said at last. “I am going to church.” He stepped into the carriage and sat down beside the young woman. As the carriage rolled forward Robert Robinson and the woman exchanged introductions. There was a flash of recognition in her eyes when he stated his name. “That’s an interesting coincidence,” she said, reaching into her purse. She withdrew a small book of inspirational verse, opened it to a ribbon-bookmark, and handed the book to him. “I was just reading a verse by a poet named Robert Robinson. Could it be…?”

He took the book, nodding. “Yes, I wrote these words years ago.” “Oh, how wonderful!” she exclaimed. “Imagine! I’m sharing a carriage with the author of these very lines!” But Robinson barely heard her. He was absorbed in the words he was reading. They were words that would one day be set to music and become a great hymn of the faith, familiar to generations of Christians:

Come, Thou Fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace’
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.

His eyes slipped to the bottom of the page where he read:

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it—
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

He could barely read the last few lines through the tears that brimmed in his eyes. “I wrote these words—and I’ve lived these words. ’Prone to wander…prone to leave the God I love.’”

The woman suddenly understood. “You also wrote, ’Here’s my heart, O take and seal it.’ You can offer your heart again to God, Mr. Robinson. It’s not too late.”

And it wasn’t too late for Robert Robinson. In that moment he turned his heart back to God and walked with him the rest of his days. [Ron Lee Davis, Courage to Begin Again, (Harvest House, Eugene, OR; 1978), pp. 145-147]

Knowing God’s Word gives us an opportunity to build on truth, but surrendering to the truth in action is what changes the world around us!