The Importance of the Word
II Ki 22:8-11
8 One
day Hilkiah the High Priest went to Shaphan the secretary and exclaimed, "I have discovered a scroll in the Temple, with God's
laws written on it!" He gave the scroll to Shaphan to read.
9 When
Shaphan reported to the king about the progress of the repairs at the Temple, he also mentioned the scroll found by Hilkiah.
Then Shaphan read it to the king.
11 When the king heard
what was written in it, he tore his clothes in terror.
(TLB)
We have here in the book of kings and also in chronicles a very interesting story of the
king Josiah.
He was installed as king in Judah when he was 8 years old during a very dark time in the
history of the nation.
His father had not served the lord nor did many of his predecessors.
Much of the ways of God had been totally lost and even people who wanted to serve God
didn’t know how.
There is an interesting verse in chronicles describing his search for God.
2 Chr 34:3
3
For when he was sixteen years old, in the eighth year of his reign, he began to search for the God of his ancestor
David; and four years later he began to clean up Judah and Jerusalem, destroying the heathen altars and the shame-idols on
the hills. (TLB)
Josiah was an interesting man because he was a light in a very dark world. When a nation
turns away from God and stays that way for a long time everything changes. Not only do people fall into sin but sin becomes
the norm so much so that even the church allows it and ultimately practices it. Not only do people fall into sin but society
as a whole changes. Over a long period of time with the changing of generations things once known to be wrong become acceptable
and even good people embrace them. The problem is if something is wrong it has a consequence to it weather a good person or
a bad person does it.
If I am speeding up through the community and a child runs out in fornt of me and I can’t
get stopped it will have the same effect as if the worst murderer in the land did the same thing.
Josiah was trying to clean up a nation.
Others before him had plunged it into sin some had partially cleaned it up but no one
had ever succeeded.
II Ki 14:1
1
During the second year of the reign of
King Joash of Israel, King Amaziah began his reign over Judah.
2
II Ki 14:3-4
3
He was a good king in the Lord's sight, though not quite like his ancestor David; but he was as good a king as his
father Joash.
4
However, he didn't destroy the shrines on the hills, so the people still sacrificed and burned incense there. (TLB)
The danger in half cleaning up a problem of this nature is that people think that because
some of it has been changed the parts that haven’t been changed must be all right. So the end result is the evil that
has not been purged out is all the more firmly entrenched.
When someone who is known to be bad does
wrong the wrong that he does in not acceptable. But when someone who is for the most part good and considered to be a leader
does wrong with a group of others who are considered the same the wrong becomes acceptable.
This is why there is such a responsibility on us to know the ways of God.
You often here a grown woman say something like this. My mother was a wonderful woman.
She read the bible every morning took us to church in the winter walked in the freezing cold, prayed at the meals and she
always had some drugs on the weekend it must be all right.
Now this is the problem that Josiah finds himself in.
He is trying to lead a nation into the ways of God but he doesn’t know them himself
yet.
He knows the obvious problems and he goes about to fix them but he has no model nor manual
to go by to fix the less obvious things.
Prov 11:9
… by knowledge the righteous
are delivered.
(RSV)
Often good people make a mess of their homes, their businesses or their health because
although their heart is in the right place they do not have the proper information.
Probably more than half of what we practice in our homes is not learned in the church
at all. More than half of how we behave in society is the result of what society itself has taught us.
In our information age we are passed the lifestyle of hollywood a lot more than we realize
every day.
But something happened in Josiah’s experience that changed his life.
After he had sought God for a number of years and after he had made great reforms in the
nation some of which were probably not all that popular a discovery was made. It looks like to me quite by accident.
2 Chr 34:14
14
While they were bringing out the money that had been brought into the house of the LORD, Hilki'ah the priest found the book of the law of the LORD given through Moses.
(RSV)
