2 Kings 23

King Josiah heard the Word of God. Humbled by what he now understood, he went forward in obedience to the Lord's commandments. His decision was not merely personal. He called on the elders of Judah and gathered together all the people of God. He wanted them to hear what he had heard. Together they made a solemn promise to obey the Lord.

Once again, as in the days of his great-grandfather Hezekiah, King Josiah removed from Judah all the monuments of idolatry that had filled the land from even before the reigns of Manasseh and Amon. His vehement destruction of every evidence of false worship was recorded for us in some detail.

The list of Josiah's accomplishments presents us with powerful evidence of the sad spiritual condition of Judah. The people were very religious, but they were not dedicated with their whole hearts to the Lord their God. They had merely combined elements of the worship of Yahweh with all the other religious traditions from the nations around them. God had intended that His people would be a light to the world. Instead His nation had become a showcase of strange religious practices that had nothing to do with the commandments of God.

Josiah took his reforms beyond the borders of Judah. The king fulfilled ancient words written about him in 1 Kings 13:2, doing all that he could to desecrate false sacred places that had long been a snare to the Lord's people.

Josiah faithfully sought to obey all the words of the Law that were written in the book that had been recovered in the temple. Nonetheless, nothing would overturn the Lord's settled purposes in sending Judah into exile. Something better than the Law would be necessary for the salvation of the Lord's elect. The era of the Old Covenant needed to move toward a close. A new and even more unexpected King would come. At just the right time He would begin to preach and teach about the kingdom of God. His kingdom would be secured for us by His own blood.

After Josiah's strange death at the hands of the leading powers in Egypt, the king's sons and grandson would reign over Judah. Foreign rulers would effectively have control over this special area of the world for many centuries to come. At just the right time, the new kingdom that Jesus proclaimed would appear on the earth. That kingdom would have a very modest beginning, but as the Hebrew prophets of old had promised, it would eventually reach far beyond the borders of Canaan.