Verses 3-20
A MEMORABLE YEAR
‘The eighteenth year of king Josiah.’
Josiah mounted the throne when he was eight years old. He was the son of Amon and the grandson of Manasseh, both of them evil rulers who had forgotten God. It is therefore all the more surprising and delightful to light on the tender heart of this young king. It was to Jedidah that he owed everything, under God. Where Boscath (her ancestral city) stood, we do not know. It was a town somewhere near the Philistine border. But it is not there that we must seek her monument. It is in the character and work of King Josiah.
I. Josiah had given his heart to God.—He had sought God early, and according to His promise had found Him. His religion began in the home of his own soul, but a religion that begins there, cannot stop there. Josiah looked out on the people God had given him. His father’s lineaments seemed stamped upon them. They called themselves the servants of Jehovah, yet how corrupt and how debased they were! Men were still worshipping the host of heaven. Fathers were offering their children to the fire-god. Altars still smoked with sacrifices to Baal. Idolatrous things still stood in the Temple Court. Josiah had a mighty task before him. He had cleansed his heart—could he ever cleanse his land? I think it shows the earnestness of the king that he began resolutely with what was in his power. If he could not call his people back to God, at least he could repair the House of God. The Temple had fallen into sad disrepair since Joash had renewed it two hundred years ago. So Josiah set to work upon the Temple. Let him begin there, and greater things will follow. We find him paying the carpenters and masons, and God was to pay him back a thousandfold. Do we not need to learn that lesson still? Are we not often tempted to do nothing, simply because there is so much to do? Josiah teaches us that the road to victory begins in doing what we can do, to-day. As Newman sings—
(1) ‘John Newton was very wild and wicked when he was young. But his mother also was Jedidah—“beloved,” and when he became a Christian he used to say this. He used to say, “Even when I was very wild, I could never forget my mother’s soft hand. When going to do something wicked, I could always feel her soft hand on my head. If thousands of miles away from her, I could not forget that.” Without question it was so with young Josiah.’
(2) ‘A Bible found in the monastery of Erfurt had an incalculable influence on Luther. A pedlar’s tract, brought to his father’s door, was the means of the conversion of Richard Baxter. The accidental discovery of a little volume on an old soldier’s window-head at Simprin gave new spiritual life to Thomas Boston, and through Boston to thousands over Scotland. Surely (as Wordsworth writes in the “Excursion”) God is
A Being
Whose everlasting purposes embrace
All accidents, converting them to good.’
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