Hope From the Word

Bill Luebkemann: What happens when the word begins to have an impact in your life? He did what he had to do to fulfill what the law said, and there was no other king like him. He did it with everything he had, with all of his heart. He didn't just say, "I'm going to worship God on Sunday mornings for an hour and only if I don't get a better offer on Sunday morning."

His was with all his heart and all his strength and all his soul, everything that he had. He followed all the law of Moses. And you can see here that this law convicted him and it reached him. And I think it has the same impact on us today if we let God's word get inside of us.

Guest (Male): As it's been said, there must be conviction before there can be conversion. Unless you're convinced you're sick, you won't accept the diagnosis and treatment the doctor prescribes. We'll see a wonderful example of one who truly takes God's word to heart and does something about it. Thanks for tuning in today for Hope From the Word with Pastor Bill Luebkemann.

This is a daily radio ministry of Calvary Chapel of Marlton. As we'll hear, King Josiah believed the diagnosis of God's word and acted, and God blessed him because of it. Find your place in 2 Kings chapter 22 and verse 19. Here's Pastor Bill.

Bill Luebkemann: Josiah, he received the word of God in the fullest sense of the word. It pierced him to his heart. He put all his effort and energy, his whole life, it seems, was into following the things of God, starting when he was young and more and more so as the years went by. And so this prophetess says, tell him this is what God has to say.

Because you humbled yourself and because you were responsive when you heard because of what you've done here, then I'm going to let you live your life in peace. The rest of this land, it's going to become a curse and laid waste. But because you tore your robes and wept in my presence, you are going to be gathered to your fathers and buried in peace.

He gets killed in a war. You could look at that war and say, how can this be right? It says he got buried in peace but he got killed in a war. But he lived in peace his entire life. He went out to fight a guy, if you read in Chronicles there, he went out to fight the Egyptians. And the Egyptians had a beef with the Babylonians and the Assyrians. And the Assyrians were trying to get the Egyptians on their side because Babylon was getting stronger.

And this guy went out to fight, and the Emperor of Egypt said, "I don't have any quarrel with you. Go home. My quarrel's with these other people." But yet this guy insisted on fighting him and so he got killed, which may have been from God because God wanted to end his life so that he could bring on the judgment.

He got gathered, but his entire time that he was king was a peaceful time. And it's a shame he got killed in such a silly way because the Egyptians weren't trying to get him anyway. And by the way, the other thing was, he was at peace with God his entire life. So when you say here, "Well, it says he got buried in peace but he died in war, how could that be?" Well, there's a lot of ways to reconcile that. One of the ways is the disaster came after he died.

He died during a time of relative peace. Now that he was dead, he was at peace, and he was at peace with God the entire time that he was alive. This guy in many ways was a man of peace. Then the king called together all the elders of Judah. So he heard this prophecy, Huldah here gives this prophecy.

All the judgment you read about in the book, everything's going to happen. Israel or Judah, going to get wiped out, carried away in captivity. It's all going to happen, but because you were seeking me, I'm going to let you live in peace and I'll do all that afterwards. If you remember a few chapters ago, we were looking at Hezekiah when Hezekiah was crying because he wanted to live longer.

Chapter 20, Hezekiah became ill and was at the point of death. And you know the whole story, the prophet went to him and said you're going to die and Hezekiah cried out to the Lord and the Lord gave him 15 more years. So the Lord gave him 15 more years. Then foolishly some envoys come from Babylon and Hezekiah shows them everything he has, shows them his storeroom, shows them all his gold and silver and all the stuff he has. He's showing the enemy all his stuff.

And after they leave the prophet came, Isaiah, and said, "Who were those guys?" And he said, "Oh, they were just some friendly Babylonians." Well, that's a contradiction in terms. That's like military intelligence or postal service. And they were just some friendly Babylonians. They came here, I showed them everything I got. Isaiah said, "You showed them everything? Showed them everything!"

Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, "This is the word of the Lord, hear the word of the Lord. The time will surely come when everything in your palace and all that your fathers have stored up until this day will be carried off to Babylon, you fool. You showed it all to them, they're going to lust after it until they carry it away for themselves. Nothing will be left, says the Lord. And some of your descendants, your own flesh and blood that will be born to you will be taken away and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon."

This bad thing is going to happen because of what you've done. "The word of the Lord you have spoken is good," Hezekiah replied, for he thought, "Will there not be peace and security in my lifetime?" He thought, "Well, who cares if it happens after I die?" And I think it's interesting because Josiah could have thought the same thing.

He could have said, "Well okay, there's going to be peace and prosperity in my lifetime. I'm going to die in peace so I'm just going to kick back and relax, get a large screen TV, see what's on the sports channel, just not going to worry about too much, just going to enjoy life because it's going to happen after my reign. So why bother?" He could have acted like that, like Hezekiah did, but he didn't.

Instead, he goes on this massive effort to clean up the kingdom, which had gotten all dirty by the previous king, his father and other kings before him, and it was going to get all dirty again when the next king comes around, his son. So we see here that this guy's response is quite a bit different than Hezekiah's response. Then the king called together all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem.

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. The king stood by the pillar and renewed the covenant in the presence of the Lord to follow the Lord and keep his commands, regulations, and decrees with all his heart and all his soul, thus confirming the words of the covenant written in this book.

Then all the people pledged themselves to the covenant. This guy was on the ball and he calls everybody together here. He calls up all the people, the men of Judah, the people of Jerusalem, the priests and the prophets, everybody from the least to the greatest, the littlest kid to the oldest old guy. He calls them all together and what does he do? He reads the words from this book to everybody.

He doesn't let someone else read it, he doesn't delegate it, he doesn't have the priests read it, which really is what the priests were supposed to do. It's so important to this guy that he reads it himself. Isn't that amazing? He could have been content just to be happy. "Hey, I've avoided disaster." But he wasn't content and he read it himself and these people responded again.

You see the word of God doing a work here. The king stood by the pillar, renewed the covenant, and everybody went along with it. He said, "We're going to follow the Lord, we're going to serve him all of our days, we're going to follow his commands, regulations, and decrees." And he said he was going to do it, and he confirmed the covenant, and the people promised to do it also.

An amazing thing happened here because this guy was so sold out for the Lord and for his word. 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. Things were so bad here in Israel. They actually had these idol worshiping things in the temple of the Lord.

It wasn't like they were down the street or in another town or off on some high place. They were in all those places too, but they actually had them in the temple. And he cleaned it out. He cleaned out the temple and he carried it all down. He burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron Valley and took the ashes to Bethel. He did away with the pagan priests 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. The kings of Judah, his ancestors, Judah, the place that God didn't turn away from first, it was Israel that he turned away from, but Judah, the kings of Judah were actually appointing priests to burn incense to all these false gods, to Baal, to the sun and the moon, to the constellations, to the starry hosts, to whatever.

Orion and Pleiades and they were probably the Milky Way or whatever, the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper. They're offering offerings and burning incense to these things. He cleaned all that stuff out. He took the Asherah pole from the temple of the Lord to the Kidron Valley outside Jerusalem and burned it there. They actually used this pole to do pagan worship and it was inside the temple.

He grounded it to powder and scattered the dust over the graves of the common people. By the way, that didn't mean he was offending the common people. No harm intended to them. He was offending the pole that he had ground up. He was defiling it by spreading it over graves. 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.

So they actually had prostitutes in the temple of the Lord doing things. Some translations show that this weaving that the women did may have been some kind of curtain that they were weaving behind which they did their secret things, sexual acts and things that were part of this idol worshiping system. And he cleaned all that out of there.

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 ruined all of the altars. He desecrated them. These are the pagan altars. 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.

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. Apparently there were some priests that were serving in these high places and he didn't kill them all, but he didn't allow them to serve anymore in the temple in Jerusalem. 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.

This was the place where they offered up their children, where the statue of Molech, which was made out of brass or some kind of metal, and they would heat it up to a real high temperature and put their little children on the arms where they would burn to death. They used to play some kind of drums to drown out the cries of the children that were screaming as they were being scorched and burned to death.

And he desecrated this valley and what was in it so they couldn't do that any longer. 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.

So they had horses and chariots there, idols that were set up by the entrance and he got rid of them and burned them also. 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. Manasseh actually having built altars inside the temple courtyard.

He removed them from there, smashed them to pieces and threw the rubble into the Kidron Valley. 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.

Josiah smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles and covered the sites with human bones. There's not a whole lot more to say about all this stuff. He was just driving some big snow plow. He was driving some big machine and he was just running everything down, pulverizing it, smashing it, burning it, destroying it, desecrating it, defiling it. We're not going to have any more of that stuff around here.

And there were other people in Jerusalem that were afraid to do that or that wouldn't do that. There were other people over the years, there were some kings that didn't do it because they didn't want to, and maybe there were some that were afraid of what the consequences would be. Even when Gideon smashed some idols and some poles, they tried to kill him unsuccessfully.

This guy was brave because there could have been an uprising if the large number of people want to worship these idols and he's smashing them all. They could have come through and really created a big uproar and had a big uprising and had a big problem there and they could have been deposing him as king, assassinating him, putting someone else on the throne, but he wasn't worried about that. It doesn't say that he stopped even for a minute to consider those thoughts.

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. 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.

We saw that when we began back in 1 Kings 13. These very things at this very altar that Jeroboam had set up here, these very, very same things, here it is in 1 Kings 13 again. By the word of the Lord, a man of God came from Judah to Bethel as Jeroboam was standing by the altar there. He cried out, "Oh altar, altar, this is what the Lord says. A son named Josiah will be born to the house of David. On you he will sacrifice the priests of the high places who now make offerings here and human bones will be burned on you."

And everything he said came to pass several hundred years later. By the way, Jeroboam was not too happy when this prophecy was given. If you read in verse 4 it says, when King Jeroboam heard that the man of God cried out against the altar, he stretched out his hand from the altar and said, "Seize him!" But his hand shriveled up so he could not pull it back.

Also the altar was split apart and its ashes poured out according to the sign given by the man of God by the word of the Lord. The king asked the man to pray for his hand and his hand was healed but didn't do anything. Jeroboam continued to be an evil king. You'd think if your hand shriveled up so that you couldn't pull it back and then somebody prayed for you and it got whole again, you'd think you'd pay attention a little bit.

Not so with Jeroboam. The king asked, "What is that tombstone I see?" He's pulling out these bones, burning them, sees another tombstone. "How about that one?" This guy was on a rampage here. "What about that tombstone?" 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."

"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. Didn't disturb those bones. That guy was a prophet and it's interesting the monument had been there all these years and the people knew some 200 or 300 years later. Imagine something that happened in this area in, say, 1750, 250 years ago, and somebody asking you, "Hey, what's that monument over there?" "Oh, that's the guy that did this or that."

We don't even know who was here in 1750 in Marlton. Not too many people. But this guy was remembered. It's amazing his monument stood there all that time. These people knew who he was and the Lord saw to it that his bones were not disturbed. Just as he had done at Bethel, Josiah removed and defiled all the shrines of the high places that the kings of Israel had built in the towns of Samaria that had provoked the Lord to anger.

So he's reaching out now. He's even into Israel. He's the king of Judah, he's into Israel. There is no more Israel. Israel was ended. Israel was controlled by the Assyrians. So he's on their territory. Fortunately for him, the Assyrians were kind of weak at this point in time and so he was able to go in there and do this and they didn't bother with him. They had other problems going on. They were trying to hook up with Egypt to fight against Babylon.

The Assyrians were real concerned about Babylon rising. So he plows all the way through there in the towns of Samaria. Josiah slaughtered all the priests of those high places on the altars and burned human bones on them. Then he went back to Jerusalem. A real house cleaning here. Starting in Jerusalem, working out through Judah, getting into Israel. This guy cleaned up the shop. He even vacuumed when he was done.

The 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." 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. But in the 18th year of King Josiah, this Passover was celebrated to the Lord in Jerusalem.

Passover was supposed to be celebrated every year. It was one of the most significant, if not the most significant events on their calendar. They celebrated how they were brought out of Egypt. The angel of death passed over them and the Lord had told them to celebrate this every year. But it says here, can you believe this? Not since the days of the judges had this been celebrated.

Not even throughout the days of the kings of Israel and Judah. Even in the days of King David, King Solomon, even in the days of the good kings, they weren't even celebrating the Passover. They had lost track of that since the days of the judges before there was any kings. Remember the judges? They had no kings. It was before Solomon, before David, before Saul, back in the time of Samson and Gideon and the others that were judges.

Not since those days had a Passover been celebrated. But in the 18th year of this guy's reign, just before the kingdom is completely overrun, they celebrate one whopper of a big Passover and they are probably pretty excited about it. 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. 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.

So you see here his reforms were far and wide. But it was a wicked time in this nation. And just because he was reforming and some people were going along with it doesn't mean that everybody went along with it. If they had, maybe judgment might not have come to them soon after he died. They had mediums there and spiritists even though the word of God clearly says, "Don't try to conjure up the dead." Don't do that.

That seems to be a big thing today. I was reading somewhere, I wish I could remember where, but somebody had said, "Well, there's not as much interest in those things today as there was, say, 50 years ago." Must have been a magazine article. And somebody wrote in and said, "Have you seen the TV shows? Medium, there's a show called Medium." They're loaded with this kind of stuff. Who are you joking? It still goes on today and it's detestable to God.

They had household gods, idols and other things that were detestable and he did what he had to do to fulfill what the law said and there was no other king like him. He did it with everything he had, with all of his heart. He didn't just say, "I'm going to worship God on Sunday mornings for an hour and only if I don't get a better offer on Sunday morning."

His was with all his heart and all his strength and all his soul, everything that he had. He followed all the law of Moses. And you can see here that this law convicted him and it reached him. And I think it has the same impact on us today if we let God's word get inside of us. He was on the ball here, but the people not necessarily were. 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.

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.'" God's saying he was so angry and I think what's unwritten here between the lines is also not everybody in the kingdom was repenting. Because I think if man for man, woman for woman, if everybody in that kingdom had repented, I think perhaps maybe God would have changed his mind or relented or held back or held off or waited a little bit longer.

Guest (Male): You've been listening to Hope From the Word. We're currently in a study of 2 Kings. You can hear this message and more Hope From the Word with Pastor Bill Luebkemann by going to ccmarlton.org. Pastor Bill's messages can also be found by downloading the Hope FM app on your smartphone or tablet. Or if you prefer to listen via podcast, you can find Hope From the Word wherever you find your podcasts.

We'd love to have you join us at Calvary Chapel of Marlton either in person or online. Our Sunday service begins at 10:00 AM and there's a Wednesday evening service at 7:00. To catch us online you can subscribe to our YouTube channel at Calvary Chapel of Marlton or just go to our website for the link at ccmarlton.org.

And if you'd take a moment to write to Pastor Bill, it would be such a blessing to us. We're thankful each and every time we hear what God is doing in our listeners' lives and we want to pray for you too. Either email us through the website at ccmarlton.org or call 856-983-1662. We'll continue our study in 2 Kings next time on Hope From the Word with Pastor Bill Luebkemann, a presentation of Calvary Chapel of Marlton.