March 30, 2008
Background Scripture: 2 Chronicles 34
Devotional Reading: Psalms 119:25-40

I counted more than 32 verses of the Old Testament that say, “He did what was evil in the sight of the Lord,” (2 Chron. 33:2), and practically all of these are evaluations of the kings of Judah and Israel.

So, one of the two most surprising things about 2 Chronicles 34 is that here is Josiah – one of the few kings whom we regard as a good Hebrew monarch, for the writer says of Josiah, “He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, and walked in the ways of David his father; and he did not turn aside to the right or to the left” (34:2). (David was not his biological father, but his ancestor.)
Josiah was “the new kid on the block,” both literally and figuratively. He was only eight years old when he began to reign. By the time he was 20, he was already shaking up things, getting rid of all the pagan sites of worship that had accumulated during the reigns of many kings, including his father, Amon, who was murdered after only two years on the throne, and his grandfather, Manasseh, one of the most despised of all Hebrew monarchs.
With a heritage and bloodline like that, who would have thought he would become a reformer?

Finding the book

At the age of 26, Josiah instituted a massive program of renewing the temple which had become old and seedy. In the midst of that program, someone found a scroll that apparently had lain there unremembered and undiscovered for many, many years. We believe this scroll was probably an earlier edition of Deuteronomy.
When Hilkiah the high priest called out to Shaphan the scribe, “I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord” (34:15), neither could have guessed how revolutionary this scroll would become.

With its laws and rituals of old, Deuteronomy suddenly became a new measuring stick by which to measure the life of the nation. Shaphan was certainly being falsely nonchalant when he took it to King Josiah and said, “Hilkiah the priest has given me a book” (34:18).

But there is nothing dispassionate about the reaction of Josiah: “When the king heard the words of the law he rent his clothes,” a traditional act of anguish and/or remorse. “Go, inquire of the Lord for me and for those who are left in Israel and in Judah, concerning the words of the book that has been found; for great is the wrath of the Lord that is poured out on us, because our fathers have not kept the word of the Lord …” (34:21).

The ‘weasel’

There was yet one person needed to ignite this vital reform, a true prophet who would confirm that this scroll was an authentic revelation for the king and his nation.

There probably were numerous prophets in the land at that time. Unfortunately, most of them told the people what they wanted to hear, not what God wanted them to hear. So, to get the truth – hard to swallow though it might be – they went to a prophetess by the name of Huldah. How ironic that her name probably meant “weasel.”

But she told it as she saw it: Terrible times would fall on the nation because of their apostasy. The scroll would not prevent disaster, but because King Josiah wanted to know God’s will, the disaster would not come during his reign. And it didn’t.

Here we have the ingredients for reform and reformation: a leader who is willing and able to break out of the pattern into which he was born, a measuring stick against which to measure the life of the people and a prophetess, who, like a weasel, tenaciously held on to the truth no matter how much or whom it would wound.

So, the epitaph for Josiah and his people: “And Josiah took away all the abomination ... and made all that were in Israel serve, serve the Lord their God. All his days they did not turn away from following the Lord the God of their fathers” (34:33).