“And as Josiah turned, he saw the tombs there on the mount. And he sent and took the bones out of the tombs and burned them on the altar.” – 2 Kings 23:16
I love the verbs in this verse: Josiah turned, and he saw. And as he turns, we see. We learn more about the details of the Israelites’ disobedience during Josiah’s repentance than we did during the reigns of the two evil kings that came before him, which is interesting, isn’t it? We learn that in God’s temple, there were kept vessels and altars for idols, houses for male cult prostitutes, and women who wove hangings for idols. We learn they worshipped not just false gods but the sun, moon, and stars. We learn of places made specifically for parents to burn their children as offerings. We learn of the geographical prominence of idolatrous altars and statues. We learn about the timeline of it all: in fact, this section reads like a reverse history lesson, with Josiah undoing the work of predecessors like Solomon and Jeroboam. It must not have been easy to uproot traditions, habits and job descriptions that ran back for generations.
But that is what Josiah does. Before restoring the practices of God’s law, he removes anything that stands against or could distract from God’s truth, and there is something to be relished in how ruthlessly thorough he is. Just when we think he’s done, he turns and unearths more bones in these tombs on the mount.
Sometimes I too find that the more I turn to God, the more I see what I’m turning from. There is something about sin that blinds us. It numbs and habituates, rendering it difficult by nature to see how much we are in the grip of anger, greed, gossip, lust, anxiety, grumbling, selfishness, or any number of things. The more the light that is God’s law (Psalm 119:105) shines into those places, the more we see all the layers of the lure, grip and power of sin in our lives. We don’t see these things by staring straight at the sin itself. We see them by staring at God in his Word, and then turning back from that to see.
The Bible says of Josiah, “Before him there was no king like him, who turned to the Lord with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the Law of Moses, nor did any like him arise after him” (2 Kings 23:25). Wow. Yet even Josiah’s repentance was not enough to undo the sin of his forefathers, as we read in the very next verse: “Still the Lord did not turn from the burning of his great wrath.” It would take one from Josiah’s line, Jesus, to turn away God’s wrath from his people, to restore us who were dead, as dead as those bones in the tomb, to life in Christ.
No comments:
Post a Comment