The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
This is our final midweek Lenten service, and it seems appropriate to end the series on the good kings of Israel and Judah with the best king recorded in the Old Testament: King Josiah. His reign began in 640 B.C. and it ended in 609 B.C. In the 57 years prior to Josiah ascending to the throne, Judah had suffered under two of the worst kings in all of Judah’s history — vicious, nasty, pagan men. The first was Manasseh, who reigned 55 years, and then was succeeded by his son Amon, who only lasted two years before he was assassinated. Thanks to Manasseh and Amon, the kingdom of Judah worshiped pagan gods unapologetically for 57 years. During those 57 years, the southern kingdom began to weaken militarily and economically. The moral and religious fabric crumbled under the reign of these two evil men. There was a faithful remnant in Judah, but it was small, it was politically weak, and quite frequently it was hiding in fear of the rulers. And even they, the faithful remnant, had not been properly taught the Torah and the festivals of the Old Testament, for one really good reason: the Old Testament had gone missing. The Torah of Moses was nowhere to be found. The temple itself was in disrepair and once again neglected.
Enter the boy king Josiah. Of this boy the Bible said he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord and walked in the ways of David his father. His reign began with the assassination of his predecessor. In addition to that assassination, Judah was now surrounded by much stronger neighbors who sought Judah’s demise — enemies looking to capitalize on the anarchy that was taking hold in Jerusalem. Judah’s very existence was in question. Could the new king, the boy king, lead the people back to the right worship of God, the God of David his father? Would Judah reclaim its former glory, being faithful and strong and blessed, protected by the Lord God himself? Or would the southern kingdom end up like the northern kingdom, lost forever to pagan gods? As Josiah began his rule, it seemed as though he was the last hope in the Old Testament period for a good and decent king who would create a kingdom that would last for a very long time. But he was a boy, and that was a long shot.
But Josiah instituted many reforms in his youth, including the celebration of the Passover, which hadn’t been done for decades. It was written of King Josiah that there had not been a Passover celebrated like it in Israel since the days of Samuel the prophet, nor had any of the kings of Israel celebrated such a Passover as Josiah did, with the priests and the Levites and all Judah and Israel who were present and the inhabitants of Jerusalem. At the age of 26, ten years after becoming king, he instituted an ambitious restoration project of the temple. And as the carpenters and builders began to work in the temple, amid all the clutter, the chief priest Hilkiah found that long-lost Book of Moses — the Torah. The Torah was supposed to be the centerpiece of religious life, of civil life, of temple life for the people of Israel and Judah, the people of Jerusalem. But it had been gone, lost for decades. It contained the covenant that the Lord God had made with his children, and now the children weren’t even aware of what the covenant was. The Torah had been missing, and it seemed that no one actually really cared about finding it — until the construction project, when Hilkiah found the scrolls. He hurried off to see the king, and Josiah ordered that the scrolls be read to him. He heard the whole Torah. And when Hilkiah read it to Josiah, the king tore his clothes as a sign of repentance and of mourning for all the wrong that the children of God had done those great many decades. King Josiah also called for a national day and time of repentance, that the people were to come to the temple and to sacrifice for their sins. And when the people came, the Law was read to the people. And Second Kings 23:3 says the king stood by the pillar and made a covenant before the Lord, to walk after the Lord and to keep his commandments and his testimonies and his statutes with all his heart and all his soul, to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this book. And all the people joined in the covenant.
The people of Judah were reminded of the promises and the curses that are contained in the Book of the Covenant of Moses. The reading of the covenant produced faith, rekindled and restored the national identity of the Lord’s chosen people, who came to depend more on the Lord God under Josiah than they did military power. The temple was cleansed of all the objects and idols of pagan worship. Josiah restored the observance of Passover in its greatest of details, and he removed all the mediums and necromancers from the land of Judah. Second Kings 23:25: “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.” He was, in the Old Testament, one of a kind king. None — not even Solomon and David before him — matched the religious fervor that he had brought to the kingdom.
But hanging over the reign of King Josiah was the word of a prophetess, a woman, Huldah the prophetess. Summon the messengers from the king, for she had a word to send to the king. She said that disaster would befall the nation and it would be struck down, because they had forgotten the Lord God for so many decades and had worshiped all those idols for all those many years. That would be the thing — but only after Josiah would die. Before finding the Torah, Josiah was honoring the Lord by getting rid of the idols. He knew those were wrong. He didn’t need a book to tell him. And the worship of pagan gods throughout the land of Judah had to stop under his reign and in the city of Jerusalem. Josiah’s faithfulness, you see, stayed the hand of the Lord. But it didn’t cancel the Lord God’s judgment upon their sin. Through Huldah the prophetess, the Lord said, “Because your heart was penitent, and you humbled yourself before God when you heard his words against this place and its inhabitants, and you have humbled yourself before me and have torn your clothes and wept before me, I also have heard you, declares the Lord. Behold, I will gather you to your fathers, and you shall be gathered to your grave in peace, and your eyes shall not see all the disaster that I will bring upon this place and its inhabitants.”
So in the 31st year of Josiah’s reign, he was told of an army marching from Egypt north through his land, Judah. It was going to pass through. Once it crossed the river Euphrates, it would turn north and head to meet the army of the Babylonians. The Egyptian king’s name was Neco, and he was leading his army north to try to defeat the expanding Babylonian kingdom — which would be the same kingdom that would ultimately invade Judah and take away most of its population into slavery in the Babylonian captivity. But Josiah, for some reason, didn’t like the idea of a foreign army marching across his kingdom. So he went out with his own army to meet King Neco and the Egyptians. King Neco had no intention of waging war or fighting Judah, and he wanted to pass through the land in peace. But that didn’t matter, for some reason, to Josiah. He was intent on stopping the Egyptians and turning the Egyptians around and sending them all back. So the two of them, the king of Egypt and the king of Judah, met. And the king of Egypt said, “What have we to do with each other, king of Judah? I am not coming against you this day, but against the house with which I am at war. And God has commanded me to hurry. Cease opposing God, who is with me, lest he destroy you.” However, Josiah would not turn away from him, but he disguised himself in order to fight against him. Nor did he listen to the words of Neco from the mouth of God, but he came to wage war on the plain of Megiddo. A prophet is one who speaks the words of God. God had put the words into the mouth of the king of Egypt — yes, the pagan king — to tell Josiah not to get in the way, to let the army pass in peace. He was an unlikely prophet, and perhaps Josiah did not believe that God would use such a man for prophecy. And the Bible says that the words that came out of Neco’s mouth were the words that came out of God’s mouth. So the king speaks a warning to Josiah: to let the Egyptians pass, or to face defeat. Josiah, for reasons we don’t know, set his feet on a path that ran directly, crashed straight away into the very words and will of God. He was just itching for a fight. He had showed himself over the decades to be a follower of the Lord God. He’d done great things and was among the best of all the kings of the Old Testament. Yet as he was about to go into battle, he puts on a disguise, because he doesn’t want people to know it’s him leading his army. He doesn’t want to be blamed for anything that might happen as a result. He tries to hide his identity, to provide some kind of plausible deniability of being involved. He knew what he was doing, and he knew what he was doing was wrong, and he didn’t want people to know that it was him. He also didn’t do something that all kings normally did before they went into battle: he didn’t pray to the Lord God, Yahweh Elohim. He didn’t call on God for a victory. He went into battle without God’s blessing and against God’s direct, expressed will. He couldn’t hide from God, though. An arrow struck the king in the battle and mortally wounded him. He wasn’t the intended target of the archers, but an arrow struck him nonetheless. And Neco had prophesied that he would in fact die if he went to battle, and his army would be defeated. And it came to pass. There in the valley of Megiddo, the last hope of Judah for a good and faithful king was now dead — one who acted throughout his entire reign, up until that last moment, according to the will and way of the Lord God.
Josiah’s son ascended to the throne, but it was the shortest reign of all. He only lasted three months before the Egyptians, who had now become an occupying force in Judah, installed their own puppet kings. In time, Babylon would invade Judah. One thing led to another. The temple and Jerusalem were destroyed. The chosen people of Israel were led into captivity and slavery in the east. And the prophecy of the prophetess Huldah, as well as the prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah, were thus all fulfilled. In the death of Josiah, Judah would never again be the same. The people of the time understood just exactly how good of a king they had, and they mourned his loss greatly for generations — because the kingdom they could have had was lost there on the battlefield of Megiddo. People loved their king, and they mourned his loss. They loved the future that their nation should have had, and it was all gone. King Josiah was a good king, a truly great king, but he was unable to save himself and his people from his own sinful nature and this one devastating act of rebellion. Josiah delayed God’s judgment against the nation, but he could never stop it. One generation after another followed, and the pattern continued, deeper and deeper into unbelief.
And so it was when the Son of Josiah and the Son of David came to a wicked and sinful generation. He came to a Jerusalem wherein the rulers of the people sought only to maintain their own place, their own offices, their own power, in a kingdom that was subjugated and temporary under Roman rule, which was governed by religious, moral, and political corruption and evil people. The Son of David, the son of Asa, the son of Jehoshaphat, the son of Joash, of Uzziah, of Josiah, came preaching that the kingdom of God was at hand — on a crash course with the religious leaders in Jerusalem. When the Christ of God came to Galilee, Judah, and Jerusalem, he brought to the people the Torah, the words of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms, spoken from his very mouth. But little good did it do them, because, you see, they still had the temple in Jerusalem. In Jesus’s day they had the full complement of biblical scrolls. They had the five books of Moses. They had the major and the minor prophets. They had the Psalms, upon which worship was built. What they didn’t have was a right understanding of what those texts declared. They didn’t understand those texts spoke of Christ, the Son of Josiah, the Son of David, and all the rest. The doctrines and the history in the Old Testament scrolls that they had in the temple of Jerusalem in that day had been twisted into a religion of heritage, bloodlines, and works-righteousness. They worshiped the Lord God of the Old Testament, but they did so without faith and a right understanding — as so many do today. The Son of God came preaching and teaching the Word of God in the temple. He preached and taught the Word of God rightly in the synagogues throughout Galilee. He preached and he taught rightly in the countryside. Those who had ears to hear, he spoke the words of God and never departed. His will was his Father’s will, and his Father’s will was his will. The Son of Josiah brought the Torah and the prophets to the people and taught them the Gospel in all of its truth and purity. Chief among the doctrines of the Old Testament is the teaching that the Son of God, the Son of David, would suffer and die at the hands of corrupt and evil men who would lead their people, of Jerusalem. But then on the third day, the Son of David, the Son of God, would rise.
So there on Palm Sunday, the people cried out, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” as the Son of David entered the city of Jerusalem. Certain of his own fate as the King of the Jews, he knew on Palm Sunday that he was not entering Jerusalem for the purposes of a coronation, but he would be yet another king assassinated by his own. Yet Jesus would not be dissuaded. The Son of Josiah would not disguise himself or hide from his enemies. He would say, “I have spoken openly to the world. I have always taught in synagogues and in the temple, where all Jews come together. I have said nothing in secret.” He opposed nothing that pleased his heavenly Father. Instead, he confronted false teachers whenever and wherever they opposed the will of God or twisted his words. It was his enemies who sought darkness to hide their deeds, out of fear of the crowds. The chief priests took custody of Jesus in the dead of night. And as he would be paraded throughout the darkness of night, back and forth between one politician and judge after another — Herod and Pilate, the Sanhedrin and the like — they would ultimately charge him with blasphemy, a sin punishable by death. By morning, the Son of God was stripped of his clothes and was hung bare on a cross, under a sign that read, “This is the King of the Judeans.” While the crowds called for blood, faithful women wept and lamented, as they did in Josiah’s day. On Sunday morning, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb weeping, his body seemingly taken, vanished in the night. Fear gripped this King’s disciples. He was the one that they had hoped for. They thought he would redeem all of Israel. They believed that he would usher in a new kingdom, a new political arrangement, where people would live in peace and prosperity and the nation would be strong. But now they believed him dead, and the hope of a nation was now gone. Jesus, the last hope and the only hope, was hung on the cross — not shot by archers accidentally, but knowingly betrayed and nailed to a tree by soldiers, and pierced in his side by a Roman spear, with the sign above his head declaring what the priests and Pharisees, Sadducees, and politicians had refused to believe: namely, that this was indeed Jesus, the King of the Judeans.
But the cross and the sign were not the end of the Judean King’s reign. The Son of Josiah turned our mourning into joy when he rose on Easter Sunday. We do not mourn the loss of the temple or Jerusalem. We don’t even mourn the death of our King. The Son of God, our King, lives eternally in his kingdom, an eternal kingdom. And where his people gather around his Word and around his sacraments, there is his kingdom: the church on earth. Come what may in this life — though devils all the world should fill, as the great hymn says — we fear no evil. Our King has conquered sin, death, and the power of the devil with his life, his death, and his resurrection. In the cross and the empty tomb, we see the power of our King, Christ Jesus. We see the power of the Son of David, the son of Asa, the son of Jehoshaphat, the son of Joash, the son of Uzziah, the son of Josiah, and the Son of the Most High God, who is our first and our last hope — for he is our only hope, for his kingdom lasts forever. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.