In this compelling episode, we delve into the transformative reign of King Josiah, a ruler who dared to steer his nation back to its spiritual roots. We uncover the surprising rediscovery of the Book of Law and how it became a pivotal moment for Judah, sparking a series of reforms that would challenge the pervasive idolatry and lay the groundwork for a national revival. Explore how Josiah’s tender heart and his unwavering faith influenced his administration, leading to significant cultural and religious changes.
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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Almost any nation will get a little tired and old in 300 years.
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The house of Israel only made a little more than 250 years. That’s just really a little bit longer than we’ve gone as a nation. And Judah, well, Judah must have been worn out by the end of the long reign of King Manasseh, which I think he died around 330-some years after the death of Solomon. No one did more to corrupt the worship of God than did Manasseh in his day. The strange thing about this was it was not so much ordinary sin that destroyed Israel. There was enough of that. But that wasn’t what took them down the wrong road particularly. It was idolatry. And the idolatry was not merely a pattern of setting up idols and bowing down to them and burning little incense here and there and singing little songs perhaps and making chants and what have you. The idolatry involved destroying the lives of their own children. both in human sacrifice and in temple prostitution. It’s kind of shocking when you find out what was done and why it was done, and wonder sometimes why the Bible is not more explicit. Well, the Bible’s going to be read by children, and it just doesn’t want to go into some of those details. What makes idolatry different from any other sin is it destroys the way back to God for the repentant sinner. Even when you may realize I’ve done something hurtful, the way back is not open. By the time King Manasseh died some 330 years after the death of Solomon, the worship of Jehovah was on the rocks in Judah. Finally, Manasseh slept with his fathers and was buried in the garden of his own house. And Ammon his son reigned in his stead. The story continues in 2 Kings 21, verse 18. Ammon was 22 years old when he began to reign. He reigned two whole years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Meshulameth, the daughter of Heraz. He did that, this man Ammon, what was evil in the sight of the Lord, just like his father Manasseh did. He walked in all the way that his father walked in. He served all the idols his father served, and he worshipped them. He forsook the Lord God of his fathers and didn’t walk in the way of the Lord. And I guess after 50 years of Manasseh, after all these years have gone by and all the frustration, that finally the people had had enough of it because the servants of Ammon conspired against him and killed him in his own house. Well, yes, that happened. But then the people of the land, who didn’t like the direction this was going… rose up and killed all those who had conspired against King Ammon, and the people of the land made Josiah his son king in his stead. It’s fascinating. The people finally had had enough. No more, they said. We’re not going to put up with this. So they bypassed the normal way of things, killed those people who had killed Amon, and set up a young man named Josiah as his king. It was a bloody and violent time. Amon was so vile, even his own servants conspired to assassinate him. The people decided they had to do something. 2 Kings 22, we find what they did. Josiah was eight years old when he began to reign. He reigned 31 years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Jedidah, the daughter of Adiah, and he did what was right in the sight of the Lord and walked in all the way of David, his father, and didn’t turn aside to the right hand or to the left. Now, I always have a thought crosses my mind when I see he did what was right, like David and his father did. And I say to myself, what? Because I know the terrible mistakes that David made. I know what all the Bible has to say about the man’s weaknesses. But you have to remember that with all of David’s weaknesses, he never, ever went after another god. He never even thought about it. The idea was foreign to him. For him, there was one god, always would be. He served that god and trusted that god, and he never corrupted the worship of God. He knew better than that. So, for David, the way back to God when he had sinned was always open. He could always find his way home, as it were. Well, it came to pass in the 18th year of King Josiah. He’s now 26 years old. The king sent Shaphan the scribe to the house of the Lord, saying, I want you to go up there and tell Hilkiah, who’s the high priest, to start totaling up the silver that’s brought into the house of the Lord. Let’s start keeping an account on this stuff. Let them deliver the money into the hand of the doers of the work that have the oversight of the house of the Lord. Presumably, there were people assigned to take care of maintenance work on the house of God, the temple. Give it to the doers who are doing the work in the house of the Lord to repair the breaches of the house. So apparently a lot of stuff that needed to be done had been left undone, and the place was getting downright run down. To the carpenters, the builders, the masons, give it money to buy timber and cut stone and let them repair the house. They didn’t even bother making a reckoning with the workers from the money that was delivered into their hands because they dealt faithfully. There was still somewhere in the heart of the people of Judah a right heart. The people were still coming. They were still contributing money for the maintenance of the temple. And these men who wanted to do the work of the temple wanted to deal faithfully with it. But then follows a truly remarkable discovery. Hilkiah said to the high priest, or said to the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord. Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan, and he read it. Now, this is really an astonishing revelation, because apparently the book of the law had been lost somewhere. Somewhere in the dusty recesses of the temple, no one knew the content of this book. How on earth Israel had gotten this far down in their history? How the worship of God had fallen into such disuse? No one ever consulted the book of the law. No one even knew where it was, and no one knew what it said. Now, you know, when you look at this period of history and you see what’s happened, it’s hard to imagine that anything like what the Jews call the oral law survived intact during this period. I mean, if no one knew what the written law said, why would anyone think the oral tradition should survive this period of terrible neglect of the house of God and the worship of God? Well, Shaphan the scribe came into the king, and he brought the king word and said, The servants have gathered the money that was found in the house. They’ve delivered it to the hand of those that do the work, and they have begun the oversight of the house of the Lord. And Shaphan the scribe showed the king, saying, Look here, Hilkiah the priest has delivered me a book. And Shaphan read it before the king. All right, the king is 26 years old, a very young man, still in the prime of life. And for the first time in his life, he is coming into contact with the book of the law. Well, it came to pass when the king heard the words of the book of the law, he tore his clothes, and he commanded Hilkiah the priest to Hicham, the son of Shaphan, Achor, Shaphan the scribe, and Ahaziah, a servant of the king, saying, Go, inquire of the Lord for me, and for the people, and for all Judah, concerning the words of this book that is found. Because it’s clear. that the wrath of God is great against us because our fathers have not listened to the words of this book to do according to what’s written concerning us. We have made a huge mistake here. Now I want to know where God wants us to go and what he wants us to do. So Hilkiah and the other fellows went to a woman named Huldah, a prophetess, the wife of Shalom, who lived in Jerusalem. They communed with her, and she said to them, Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Tell the man who sent you to me, Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon this place, upon the inhabitants of this place. I’m going to bring even all the words of the book which the king of Judah has read. Why? Because they have forsaken me, They have burned incense to other gods that they might provoke me to anger with all the works of their hands. So my wrath shall be kindled against this place, and it cannot be quenched. However, to the king of Judah who sent you to inquire of the Lord, I want you to tell him this. Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, touching the words which you have heard, Because your heart was tender, and you have humbled yourself before the Lord, when you heard what I spoke against this place, against the inhabitants of this place, that they’re going to become a desolation and a curse, and because you have torn your clothes, which is a sign of mourning and sorrow, and you have wept before me, I have heard you, says the Lord. Behold, therefore, I will gather you to your fathers. You should be gathered unto your grave in peace, and your eyes shall not see all the evil which I will bring upon this place. And they brought the king word again. Now, when I read this, and it always touches me, why was Josiah given this personal blessing, this personal exemption from what was coming? Because his heart was tender. I think there’s a lesson in this for us, in this hard-hearted, materialistic generation we live in. The difference, and it’s all the difference, is in tenderness of heart. Stay with me.
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There’s much more to this story, and I’ll be right back. The book of Kings includes so much valuable history, and it lays the foundation for understanding the rest of the Bible. The entire series of programs on Kings and the book of Samuel is available for a special price this week only. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas. 75791 or call toll-free 1-888-BIBLE-44 and tell us the call letters of this radio station.
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2 Kings chapter 23. The king did not want to make a move on this without the broad support of the people, so he gathered all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem together. He went up to the house of the Lord. All the men were there. All the inhabitants of Jerusalem came around, and the priests, and the prophets, and all the people, small and great. And he read in their ears all the words of the book of the covenant that had been found in the house of the Lord. And he stood by a pillar, and he made a covenant before the Lord to walk after the Lord, to keep his commandments, his testimonies, his statutes with all their heart and all their soul to perform the words of the covenant written in the book. And all the people stood to the covenant. Okay, you know, a covenant’s a deal. So they are cutting a deal with God. They’re saying, we have your words. We’re going to live by them. Then the real housecleaning began. The king commanded Hilkiah the high priest and the second layer of priests, the keepers of the door, to bring out of the temple of the Lord all the vessels that were made for Baal. Now think about that. In the temple were all sorts of vessels that were in there that were made to worship Baal in the temple of God. If that wasn’t enough, they were also going to carry out of there everything that was made for the Asherah, the sex goddess herself, for all the hosts of heaven. And he burned them outside of Jerusalem in the fields of Kidron, and he carried the ashes of them clean out of the country to Bethel. Bethel was a border with the house of Israel, the old time. They got the ashes out of the country. He put down the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense in the high places all over the cities of Judah, in the places around about Jerusalem. He put down all those that burned incense to Baal, to the sun, to the moon, to the planets, and all the hosts of heaven. He also brought out the Asherah, a wooden idol of a female figure, from the house of the Lord outside of Jerusalem to the brook Kidron. He burned it at the brook Kidron and stamped it to small powder and cast the powder thereupon upon the graves of the children of the people. Now, this incident seems strange to me, this casting of the powder on the graves of the children of the people. The NIV and other modern translations call this the graves of the common people. But that doesn’t make any sense. Why should the ashes of the Asherah be put on the graves of the common people when they were being led by the people who were not so common into that worship? But the same Hebrew expression is found elsewhere, and it basically is talking about the children of the people or sons of the people. It’s hard to see any significance whatever of the scattering of the ashes of a burned Asherah idol on the graves of the common people. But if these are indeed the graves of children, it’s another matter altogether. for it is a deliberate connection to the deaths of the children, those who died as children. And it’s a token of justice for what was done to the children by the original sex goddess, who through down through history has presided over sexual idolatry, over sex worship, over temple prostitution, and oftentimes over the buying and selling of little children to serve as sex slaves in the temples of their gods. He broke down the houses of the Sodomites that were by the house of the Lord, where the women wove hangings for the grove. Sodomites were male temple prostitutes. Apparently, they had booths around the temple enclosure. Now, what on earth anyone thought that had to do with the worship of Jehovah is lost to any of us. And it’s staggering, though, to realize what corruption had been allowed to just waltz right into the temple environments. and be practiced there. He brought all the priests out of the cities of Judah. He defiled the high places where they’d burned incense from Geba to Beersheba. He broke down the high places of the gates, the entering of the gate of Joshua, the governor of the city. He just did it all, just tore all this stuff down. Nevertheless, the priests of the high places that did not come upon the altar of the Lord in Jerusalem, but they did eat of the unleavened bread among their brethren. He defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the children of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter pass through the fire to Moloch. I don’t know if you’re aware of this or not, but this valley of the sons of Hinnom is one of the places that gave its name to hell. One of the words translated hell in the New Testament is Gehenna. It is the valley of the children of Hinnom. Why was it hell? because there were the fires of Moloch, where innocent children were burned to this God. Jeremiah will have much to say about this place a few years hence. He took away the horses that the kings of Judah had given to the sun at the entering of the house of the Lord. There’s sun God right there at the entering of the temple by the chamber of the chamberlain who was by the suburbs and burned the chariots of the sun with fire. the altars that were on top of the upper chamber of Ahaz, which the kings of Judah had made, the altars which Manasseh had made in the two courts of the house of the Lord. He beat them all into small dust, broke them down from this, and cast the dust of them into the brook Kidron to be carried away. All the high places that were in front of Jerusalem, on the right hand of the mount of corruption, which Solomon the king of Israel had built for Ashtoreth, the abomination of the Zionians, and for Chemosh, the abomination of the Moabites, for Milcom, the abomination of the children of Ammon. The king defiled all these things, destroyed them, broke them down. This expression, the mount of corruption, is fascinating because what he’s saying essentially is, The mountain that Solomon, where Solomon built the houses for Ashtoreth, for Chemosh, for Milcom, whose idols and whose gods were the gods of the wives he had taken, whom he was trying to please. All these had turned this mountain into a mount of corruption. It’s incredible to think about how thoroughly Israel had been penetrated by the gods around them. And it started with Solomon. Well, Josiah broke in pieces the images. He cut down the groves. He filled the places with the bones of men. The altar that was at Bethel, the high place which Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who made all of Israel in the north descend, he took that altar, the high place, he broke the whole thing down and burned it, stamped it to powder, and burned down the Asherah poles. As Josiah turned himself, he spied the sepulchers there in the mount. He took the bones out of the sepulchers and burned them on the altar and polluted it, where God had proclaimed long ago those words, Men’s bones will be burnt on you. Then Josiah spotted a title on one of the tombs. He says, What’s that? And the men of the city told him, It is the grave of the man of God who came from Judah, who proclaimed the very things that you have done against the altar of Bethel. And Josiah said, Let him alone. Let no man move his bones. So they let him lie with the bones of the prophet that came out of Samaria. All the houses of the high places in the cities of Samaria that the kings of Israel had made to provoke the Lord to anger, Josiah took away, and he did to them what he had done in Bethel. And he slew all the priests of the high places that were there upon the altars, burned men’s bones upon them to fulfill that old prophecy, and returned to Jerusalem. Josiah really cleaned house. But grab a pencil and a piece of paper. I want to give you a phone number, an address, and an offer.
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For a free copy of this radio program that you can share with friends and others, write or call this week only. And request the program titled, Kings No.
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25.
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Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44. And tell us the call letters of this radio station.
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And the king commanded all the people, saying, Keep the Passover unto the Lord your God, as it is written in the book of this covenant. Surely there was not held such a Passover from the days of the judges that judged Israel, nor in all the days of the kings of Israel, nor the kings of Judah. Now, that’s fascinating in a way. It’s not implying that there was no Passover kept, just that there was never anything like this kept. And you can imagine, with the complete immersion of the land of Judah into idolatry as it was, that the Passover couldn’t be observed as the dominant feature of the community’s worship and religion. It had been forced into the corners, into the backgrounds, into the homes away from the temple of God. In the 18th year of Josiah, wherein this Passover was held to the Lord in Jerusalem, it was a major revision and a major return. Moreover, those who worked with familiar spirits, the wizards, the images, the idols, and all the abominations that were spied in Judah and Jerusalem, Josiah put away, got rid of them, all of the occult stuff. Now, it may not seem to us today that the playing around with the occult doesn’t matter very much because it doesn’t even exist in most cases. But the point is, it has no place here. in a holy people. He got rid of it, that he might perform the works of the law which were written in the book that Hilkiah the priest found in the house of God. And like unto him there was no king before him that turned to the Lord with all his heart and all his soul and all his might, according to all the law of Moses. And in fact then there never was another one like him. This man, Josiah, was the high point in Judah from the death of Solomon all the way to the end of the kingdom. However, the Lord did not turn away from the fierceness of his great wrath, wherewith his anger had been kindled against Judah. Because of all the provocations of Manasseh, there was just so much stuff built up, you couldn’t keep a lid on it. You have to realize that even though the religion of these idols had been suppressed, it could not be eradicated once it had taken root as it had. And when Josiah was no longer there to lead, everything began to go back. And the Lord said, I will remove Judah out of my sight. Just as I have removed Israel, I will cast off the city Jerusalem, which I chose, and the house of which I said my name shall be there. Now the rest of the acts of Josiah, all that he did, isn’t it written in the book of the Chronicles of the kings of Judah? In his days, Pharaoh Necho, king of Egypt, went up against the king of Assyria to the river Euphrates. Big battle beginning to shape up. between the Assyrians and the Egyptians. King Josiah went against him, and at Megiddo, when they met, King Josiah was killed. His servants carried him in a chariot dead from Megiddo, brought him to Jerusalem, and buried him in his own grave. And the people of the land took Jehoahaz, the son of Josiah, and anointed him, and made him king in his father’s stead. Monarchy has something to say for it in that it gives a continuity. It has the image of legitimacy. But every man that comes along is his own man and free to make his own mistakes. Jehoahaz was 23 years old. He began to reign. He lasted three months. His mother’s name was Hamital, the daughter of Jeremiah of Libna. And he did what was evil on the side of the Lord according to all his fathers had done. And Pharaoh and Echo put him in bands at Riblah in the land of Hamath, that he might not reign in Jerusalem. And Pharaoh set up the whole land to tribute a hundred talents of silver and a talent of gold. And he made Eliakim the son of Josiah king in the room of Josiah his father. He changed his name to Jehoiakim. and took Jehoahaz away. He came to Egypt, and he died there. Now Israel is completely subservient to Egypt. Jehoiakim gave the silver and the gold to Pharaoh, but he taxed the land to get the money. And Jehoiakim was 25 years old when he began to reign. He reigned 11 years in Jerusalem.
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And he did evil in the sight of the Lord according to all his fathers had done. The Born to Win radio program with Ronald L. Dart is sponsored by Christian Educational Ministries and made possible by donations from listeners like you. If you can help, please send your donation to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at 1-888-BIBLE44 and visit us online at borntowin.net.
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