The Only Basis for Genuine Reform. 2 Kings 21:1-26; 2 Chron. 34:1-32

We are in the midst of an election cycle. Everybody is promising hope and change, one way or the other. There are those who over the past few years have had their hopes tarnished because there hasn’t been enough change and fear that they are not going to have everything that they achieved the last few years reversed. Then there are others whose hope is that all of the change will be reversed and once again we can “bring in the kingdom.” But then there are those of us who have a biblical perspective and recognize that if there is ever going to be real hope it does not come from political change. It doesn’t matter whether they are democrats, Republicans, Libertarians or Independents in charge, if the basic core problem is not changed then nothing really changes. Some of us have been around long enough to have observed a number of election cycles and many of us would say that the general trajectory of the political process over the last fifty years has been in the same direction and it really has only slowed down or sped up, that there are certain foundational, fundamental realities and philosophies and no matter which party is in control things continue to be the same, because they all buy into some of the same fundamental beliefs—such as Keynesian economics, such as relativism in terms of governmental absolutes and other related issues. So it really doesn’t matter about the party, you just get one thing or the other liked, so our hope has to be in something that has enduring value, something that continues; and we must recognize where real change must take if there is going to be real substantive social change.

We see a wonderful example of that 2 Kings chapter twenty-two. Another word for change is reform. Reform means to take something that has deteriorated, something that has been corrupted and to bring it back to its original standard. That is what happens, starting in chapter 22, in the southern kingdom of Judah with a change in administration. But just a change in administration doesn’t bring about solutions to the ultimate problems. There had already been a recent change in administration for when the evil king Manasseh died the problems brought up by the prophets weren’t because of a governmental problem but because of a deeper problem. Israel was in a horrible, horrible mess and they faced various problems.

We have to analyze the problems because there are various similarities to what we as a nation, in terms of the USA, and as a culture in terms of western civilization face. Many other nations do as well. Israel, though, faced these specific problems. There was a foreign threat, the threat of Assyria. Assyria had risen to great heights, they had already conquered and destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and had removed the population, wiping out their ethnic and national integrity. They had economic woes. Hezekiah had the moral and spiritual courage to resist paying the tribute to Assyria, for which he was going to be punished by Sennacherib, but God intervened and punished Sennacherib. But when Manasseh became king these economic woes intensified. Once again Assyria asserted its dominance over the Middle East so that the southern kingdom of Judah under Manasseh paid an exorbitant tribute to Manasseh. Tribute is another word for tax.

There is violence in the land (USA), there is anger. Whenever we see these kinds of things going on in a culture, the kind of pressure that is put on people financially, they become desperate and that results in a lot of mental attitude sins—anger, resentment, bitterness. This manifested itself after Manasseh’s death, his son Amon became king, and it was within two years that those within his administration rose up and assassinated him. The violence that was in the land was just another manifestation of something deeper. There were social inequities, the poor were oppressed, the widows and orphans were not taken care of, all of these other things, and it wasn’t a problem with government, it wasn’t a government solution, it was an individual solution, an individual problem, and that was increasing. We can read some of those descriptions in Isaiah as well as in Jeremiah. There were foreigners who were exercising an undue influence—a parallel to what we have in our culture today. The undue influence of the foreigners was the influence of the pagan religions—the sexual fertility cults, Baalism and the Asherah, and the influence this was having on the thinking of the culture. Then there was also corrupt leadership. Manasseh was the most evil of all the kings of the southern kingdom and he was extremely corrupt.

We see all of these kinds of things going on in our culture today. Too often people want to identify these as the problems. These are not the problems; don’t be deceived. These are simply the symptoms, the tumors of a massive, malignant cancer; and if we go about trying to resolve the problem by dealing with each individual tumor without addressing the underlying cancer then we will get nowhere. But that is the usual approach that the political solutions take. We want to solve the problem of this symptom and that symptom without addressing the underlying problem. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be addressing some of the symptoms, but addressing the symptoms without addressing the underlying cause will just result in more symptoms developing. So we have to understand that the crisis a culture faces, whether it is the crisis of Judah in the seventh century BC or whether it is the crisis of the United States of America and western civilization in the 21^st century, or whether it is the crisis of western civilization in the 16^th century.

We have another reform to talk about: a parallel to the reform of Josiah, and that is the reform that began with Martin Luther on October 31^st, 1517. We can connect the dots on all three of these to learn some important lessons today.

As we look at what was going on in the southern kingdom of Judah, if anybody had any sense about them they could easily generate a list to identify these symptoms, these surface problems that the nation faced. We can do the same thing today. These problems are very real, they affected every individual in that culture, the are affecting every individual in our culture; but it takes an astute observer, someone with additional information, to really identify the core problem. That additional information can only come from revelation from God, and that is what we see demonstrated in this first part of chapter twenty-two.

We need to be reminded of something because we live in a culture that is so dynamic and secular that people have lost this particular value—unless they are people who have been under the teaching of God’s Word for some time. We can learn a lot of things through observation. Science has made remarkable progress, technology has made remarkable innovations and inventions have come as a result of simple human observation, what is known as empiricism—observing the way things work within the universe. The use of human reason has also been responsible for many great advances and improvements in civilization. However there is a limitation to both reason and the use of empiricism. They operate only to a certain extent and beyond that they can’t go; they can’t get us ultimate answers. Whenever philosophers have pursued the path of pure rationalism or pure empiricism they always run into the brick wall of the limitations of human reason and limitations of human experience. They can never get to ultimate answers, there has to be information that comes from outside of the creation, outside of the finite universe, outside of our finite experience and reason in order to provide that which orders and organizes all of the data.

A perfect example is what comes out of the first three chapters in Genesis. God created Adam and Eve and placed them in the garden. He told them that they could eat from every tree in the garden, and that they were to go out and rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and over every living thing. And so as they began to exercise their dominion over God’s creation the first thing that happened was that Adam was supposed to start naming the creatures. This involved observation, categorization, classification, and he began to identify and name all of the animals. There was so much that they could learn through simple observation. The same thing with the use of human reason: there was much that they could learn, many conclusions that they could derive as they thought along a proper logical path. But there was one piece of information that affected all of the other pieces of information that, in fact, ordered and organized the rest of the information that they could not gain from simple observation or reason alone. That was the information that there was one tree in the garden of which if they ate there would be immediate consequences of spiritual death, and this judgment would be enacted by God because of their rebellion and disobedience to His command. What those teach us is that human reason can only go so far and human experience can only go so far but there are realities that go beyond human experience and human reason and the truth of those realities can only be learned by direct revelation from God. So at the very core of real substantive change, at the very core of reality, is the Word of God.

We see this exemplified in this particular episode in 2 Kings chapter twenty-two. We have the introduction of a new king and a new administration, but just changing the administration and changing the political leaders is not the real issue. Often it doesn’t change anything. It didn’t change anything when Amon became king after Manasseh died. Manasseh finally turned to God in the last few years of his life and when he died Amon again reversed that course, that small reformation that Manasseh had begun, and Amon was once again introducing and promoting evil in the southern kingdom of Judah. So the change to Amon had produced a negative change, a loss of hope; but a change to Josiah was going to bring in something that the people had not expected. What is interesting is that it was the people who were behind the selection of Josiah, and it was the people who had promoted or validated the assassination of Amon. That doesn’t make it right; this is not advocating assassination, just observing what the text says. 2 Kings 21:23 ^NASB “The servants of Amon conspired against him and killed the king in his own house.” Conspiracy to destroy authority is always wrong in the Scripture because authorities have been established by God, even when those authorities are evil.

What we see in this particular episode is that these servants of Amon conspired against him and they killed the king in his own house. But the people of the land took justice in their hands. The king is gone and they executed all those who had conspired against king Amon. They recognized the principle of obedience to authority and that rebellion against authority and assassination was wrong. 2 Kin 21:24 ^NASB “…and the people of the land made Josiah his son king in his place.”

2 Kings 22:1 ^NASB “Josiah was eight years old when he became king, and he reigned thirty-one years in Jerusalem…” This is the last high-water mark in the history of the southern kingdom, and it is only due to one factor and that is his devotion to God. “… and his mother’s name {was} Jedidah the daughter of Adaiah of Bozkath.” This is repeated in 2 Chronicles 34:1, and additional information is given in that chapter. The evaluation of Josiah’s reign: 2 Kings 22:2 ^NASB “He did right in the sight of the LORD and walked in all the way of his father David, nor did he turn aside to the right or to the left.” That means he gets an A⁺, he did what the law said to do; he was obedient to God. That doesn’t mean he was perfect or sinless, but it means that he was devoted to God, he was devoted to the application of the Torah consistently within the land.

He began to address the real underlying problem, and this we see in verse 3: ^NASB “Now in the eighteenth year of King Josiah, the king sent Shaphan, the son of Azaliah the son of Meshullam the scribe, to the house of the LORD saying,” This takes us to when he was eighteen years of age. What happened in between? Between the time that he was eight and the time that he was eighteen he had already begun to institute key reforms in the land. He began to clean things up. We are not informed why he did this or where he got the information. We are not informed who influenced him in that direction. We just know that from the beginning of his reign when he was eight years old he began to seek the God of his father David—2 Chronicles 34:3-7. He is positive to God, he understands that there is one true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God who gave the Torah to Moses; but he doesn’t know what the Torah really says. They have just come out of fifty-five years of the horrors of Manasseh, and Manasseh destroyed all copies of the Law. Just as other periods in ancient history, the time when the Greeks were in charge of Judea under Antiochus Epiphanes in the inter-Testament period, it was punishable by death of you had a copy of the Torah. The same thing happened under Manasseh, so that no one had copies of the Torah. Nobody knew what God said. The only thing they knew was what had been passed on orally from tradition, from parents to children, and so there was a cultural memory, a sort of popular religion idea that was held over but they didn’t have the actual Word of God anymore. But it was on the basis of that tradition that Josiah is acting.

2 Chronicles 34:3 ^NASB “For in the eighth year of his reign while he was still a youth, he began to seek the God of his father David; and in the twelfth year he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem of the high places, the Asherim, the carved images and the molten images.” In those four years he was learning but it took time before there was application. Sometimes people want to run application way ahead of knowledge. He has knowledge first and then he begins to apply it. All of the idols had to go. [4] “They tore down the altars of the Baals in his presence, and the incense altars that were high above them he chopped down; also the Asherim, the carved images and the molten images he broke in pieces and ground to powder and scattered {it} on the graves of those who had sacrificed to them.” He goes out and is actively engaged in destroying all of the false worship sites.

Application: In all of our thinking we have Baalist-type thinking that has come into our thought through the thinking of the world, the cosmic system around us. We have to get rid of those ideas. There is only one way to do that and once we get rid of them then we have to replace them with something; they have to be replaced with the truth. There has to be an activist agenda in our head to get rid of the evil that comes in via the culture and various atheistic-secular-materialistic-mystical philosophies, whatever they might be.

So what Josiah is doing is getting rid of the external manifestations of that internal type of thinking. 2 Chronicles 34:5 ^NASB “Then he burned the bones of the priests on their altars and purged Judah and Jerusalem.” He executed the priests of these false religions and then burned their bodies and their bones on their altars with the result that he cleansed Judah and Jerusalem. This is the same word used in the Mosiac law for ritual cleansing in order that the nation now can be prepared to come to God. They had to go through this cleansing process. We cannot come into the presence of God without cleansing from sin; that is the principle. In the church age we know that this cleansing is grounded upon the payment for sin, but in the Old Testament there was not only personal salvation but there was also ritual cleansing that had to take place. According to the Torah there a cleansing and a removal of all of the idols and all of the false religions from the land, and it is after that that he begins to renovate the temple. That is the order.

2 Chronicles 34:6 ^NASB “In the cities of Manasseh, Ephraim, Simeon, even as far as Naphtali, in their surrounding ruins.” This is the northern kingdom. But the northern kingdom, remember, was destroyed by Assyria and the people were taken out. But there were still a few Jews living in the northern kingdom, there was no organized kingdom there but this was still part of the land that God gave to Israel. That is an important principle. Even though God had fulfilled His promise of judgment on the Israelites in the northern kingdom by removing them from the land the land was still Israel’s even though it was now inhabited by different people.

Application: The Palestinians are making a fraudulent claim to the west bank; the land is still Israel’s by right of God’s promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Just because it is not under the political control of an Israeli state at this point doesn’t mean it is not theirs. The northern kingdom, even though they were destroyed politically by Assyria, was still Israel’s land. This is the precedent for that, and this just wipes out all of the anti-Zionist arguments, all of the arguments from the liberals who always want to take the Palestinian side as being the victims of injustice. Yes, they are the victims of injustice. They are the victims of the injustice of Islam, the victims of the injustice of the Arab nations that have kept them there. The Arabs despise the Palestinians and the only time they talk about anything positive about the Palestinians is when they are using them as a wedge against Israel in reference to western support of Israel. God never has revoked Israel’s title to the land.

So there is a reformation taking place in the land and this is instigated by Josiah. Then after he has been on the throne ten years something remarkable happens. 2 Kings 22:3 ^NASB “Now in the eighteenth year of King Josiah, the king sent Shaphan, the son of Azaliah the son of Meshullam the scribe, to the house of the LORD saying, [4] ‘Go up to Hilkiah the high priest that he may count the money brought in to the house of the LORD which the doorkeepers have gathered from the people.’” This refers to the collection of the tithe; this was the tax system of the Mosaic Law. This was the basis for government supporting the priesthood.

We see two things there just by way of passing. First there is fiscal responsibility. Second, there was also fiscal integrity. Responsibility and integrity go hand in hand. We know that they counted the money. They knew how much money they had; they weren’t spending money they didn’t have. They weren’t into Keynesian deficit spending as a path to prosperity. On the basis of how much money they have they are going to distribute that money to various builders and contractors and those who are responsible for the work and these were men who possessed integrity, so much so that just as under Solomon they don’t have to give an account for every dollar they spend because these are men who deal faithfully. There was integrity among the leadership and there was no doubt whatsoever that they were going to spend the money on exactly what they were supposed to spend it on. There was no corruption.

2 Kings 22:8 ^NASB “Then Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan the scribe, ‘I have found the book of the law in the house of the LORD.’ And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan who read it.’” What an announcement that must have been. It has been 57 years—55 under Manasseh and 2 under Amon—and the people have been in darkness because there has been a government assault on the truth of God’s Word. There had been a government attempt to completely eradicate the Law of God from the knowledge of the people, but it never has been in history and it never will be eradicated.

There is some discussion, we don’t know whether this is the entire Torah or whether this is just a portion of the Law. Some believe it is only the punishment, judgment sections of the Mosaic Law—Leviticus 26 or Deuteronomy 28. We believe it is much more than that; it may have been the entire book of Deuteronomy. It more likely was all of the Mosaic Law, but especially the focus is on those judgment sections, the five stages of discipline that God promised that He would take the nation through if they disobeyed Him.

When there is the reading of the Word of God this is what is the true basis for change, because it is not coming from human experience or human reason, it is not coming from our relativistic standards, our individual opinions, but it is coming from the absolute truth that has been addressed from the throne of God to human beings, to His creation.

2 Kings 22:9 ^NASB “Shaphan the scribe came to the king and brought back word to the king and said, ‘Your servants have emptied out the money that was found in the house, and have delivered it into the hand of the workmen who have the oversight of the house of the LORD.’ [10] Moreover, Shaphan the scribe told the king saying, ‘Hilkiah the priest has given me a book.’ And Shaphan read it in the presence of the king.”

The response: 2 Kings 22:11 ^NASB “When the king heard the words of the book of the law, he tore his clothes.” He become aware of the sin of the nation and his own personal sin. We do not become aware of this real crisis problem apart from revelation from God. It is only the Word of God that reveals the real problem that mankind has. The real problem that we have isn’t economic, isn’t military, isn’t political, it doesn’t have to do with wrong business models, with problems in leadership or corruption in the culture; all of those are simply the tumors that indicate that there is a deep, profound cancer eating away at the core of the human race, and that is sin. Sin is not some big egregious sin, it has to do with the basic orientation of the human heart to solve problems apart from God, to live independently from God and to live life on one’s own terms. Man is standing shaking his head at God and saying I am going to do it my own way. That is the essence of sin and it manifests itself in thousands and thousands of different ways. Some are clothed in what appears to be good, others are clothed in what a society generally recognizes to be bad or what it would call evil. What the Bible means by evil, though, is that ultimate act of rebellion against God. We can only know about that if God exposes it through His Word. When God’s Word is not given a priority position among a people or in a culture then the result is always going to be the shift to paganism, the shift to corruption; and the malignancy of the cancer of sin is just going to destroy the culture from within.

There is only one basis for hope and that is a return to the Word of God. The first place that ought to start is in our own individual lives. In the early 16^th century there was an incredible spiritual darkness on Christendom in western Europe, and that spiritual darkness was called the Roman Catholic church. The theology of the Roman Catholic church had spiritually and intellectually enslaved western Europe for approximately a thousand years. The root of this was the loss of the Bible. The root of it was the elevation of a priest craft, the Roman Catholic priesthood to be the sole interpreters of the Word of God. Only a priest could do that because the Bible was in Latin which was not the language of the people. The Bible was originally written in the language of the people—Koine Greek means common Greek, everyday language of the everyday person on the street. The same thing with the Hebrew of the Old Testament: everyday people could read it and understand it and know what God had to say. In the Roman Catholic church they hid the Word of God from the people via the use of language, and they were opposed to anyone who translated the Bible into the everyday language of the people. They persecuted and oppressed those like John Wycliffe and his followers in the 14^th century in England because they were translating the Bible into the English vernacular. So the loss of the Bible in the hands of the people, the knowledge of the truth, enslaved the people to spiritual darkness. This led, because of the loss of the Word of God, to a loss of understanding of grace.

Under the control of Roman Catholic theology the concept of grace was perverted into works so that grace came to mean works, and the way that you receive grace from God is through earning it and then grace was meted out to you. The idea was that Jesus, because He was the Son of God and because He was perfectly righteous when He died on the cross, had all of this excess righteousness because He was perfect and didn’t need it to save Himself, had all of this righteousness put over in what was called “the treasury of merit.” Then there were all of the saints. It is important to understand this. These were the especially holy ones who had more righteousness than they really needed to get into heaven. They all had a little bit of extra righteousness and so all of this extra righteousness was stuffed over in the bank account called the treasury of merit. Those of us who didn’t have quite enough righteousness to get into heaven could get some of their righteousness if we did certain things, like confess all of our sins. When we confess our sins before Bible class we don’t have to confess all of our sins, 1 John 1:9 does not say that. It says, “If we confess our sins God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” That includes all of the thousands of little sins and big sins that we didn’t confess. They are all cleansed. But in the teaching of Roman Catholicism in the Middle Ages you had to confess all your sins. If you didn’t get them all named, confessed, you wouldn’t get into heaven; you didn’t have enough righteousness. So you had get righteousness and one of the ways you did this was by purchasing indulgences. You could buy indulgences by giving money to the church. By paying so much money you would get so many years taken off of your time in purgatory. This put a burden of superstition, a spiritual bondage, upon the people.

Then came along a young man by the name of Martin Luther. He was one of those bothersome types of people who just has a hypersensitive conscience. Every little thing he did wrong bothered him and he was just living a life basically in fear. And rightly so because in Roman Catholic theology they are threatened with eternal punishment in hell fire unless they confess every single sin. So one day as he was traveling he was caught in a thunder storm and was almost killed by a bolt of lightning. As he fell off his horse he swore an oath to St. Ann, because he was a good Roman Catholic, that he would become a monk. His father wanted him to be a lawyer so that he could take care of his mother and Dad in their old age. Martin trots off to the monastery and angers his father, and for the next several years he is just consumed with guilt.

It was about this time that he was sent to Rome in order to represent his region at various functions in Rome. There he discovered how corrupt the priesthood was. He always realized how corrupt he was and he just about had a mental breakdown when he had to conduct his first mass because he didn’t think he was worthy enough. When he went to Rome he discovered he was almost morally perfect compared to these priests in Rome. They were so corrupt and were in such sexual perversity that they thought you were virtuous if you were having sex with a woman! He went back to Germany absolutely overwhelmed by the sinfulness of the church and the clergy and his own sinfulness. Then he was transferred to a small town called Wittenburg. Frederick the Wise, the ruler of Saxony, had just started a new university there and wanted it to be very successful. So Martin Luther was sent there because he was so brilliant. His supervisor within the Augustinian order recognized some of his problems and said the thing that he probably needs to focus on is the Bible. He sent Luther to Wittenburg to be the professor of the Bible and theology.

But Luther didn’t know anything about the Bible, he just knew about church tradition and what the fathers taught. He had never really read or studied the Bible before. The same thing happens in Judaism and in many branches of Christianity today. People don’t read their Bible they just listen to somebody tell them about the Bible. They listen to what the rabbis tell them about the Old Testament but they never read the Old Testament. So now Martin Luther has to start teaching the Bible. Starting in about 1513 he is starting to teach Psalms, Romans and Galatians and as he is reading the Bible he begins to be aware that what the Bible teaches is that all are sinners, no one is good enough to measure up to God and no one can earn their way to God. No one can get grace by buying indulgences; grace means undeserved merit.

Then in 1516 as the month of October was approaching Frederick the Wise wanted to raise more money to really get the university going. He got permission from the Pope to sell indulgences in Saxony to raise money for this university. The big sale day is on All Saints Day, November 1^st, because they were going to be purchasing indulgences to get the righteousness from all these saints. The day before All Saints Day was called All Hallows Eve, now known as Halloween. So on Halloween they prepare for All Saints Day. Luther began to really think things through at that point. It took him another year to connect all the dots, during which time the Roman Catholic church started to promote the sale of indulgences to raise money to finish the St Peters at the Vatican. So remember that the money which paid for that came from people who were buying their way into heaven. By October 1517 Martin has this all figured out finally and he realizes you can’t be justified in the presence of God on the basis of what anybody else does, because they are all sinners as well; you can only be justified by God if someone has paid the full penalty for your sins, and we can never remember all of our sins. He came to an understanding of justification by faith alone, that a person is justified by God only on the basis of believing that Jesus Christ died on the cross.

How did he get that? He got it from studying Romans. He didn’t get it from studying canon law from the church, he didn’t get it from studying what other theologians had said, the church fathers; he got is from studying Romans and Galatians. It is the Word of God that changes people, it is the Word of God that changes nations, it is the Word of God that changes history. And history changed with Martin Luther, history changed with Josiah, because they took people back to the Word of God. If we don’t get the people, the culture, back to the Word of God which is the real basis for change then there is no hope. The only hope we have is in the Word of God and in Jesus Christ, and the fact that He is the one who can solve the core problem. If we don’t get the core cancer solved it doesn’t matter what the politicians do with the tumor because there will just be more tumors. But we have real hope and real change and that only comes from the Word of God.

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