Not perfect… we are NOT perfect… So of course we should try to always improve ourselves. Yet we don’t want to fall under human force of “conforming to norms”, we want God Himself to guide us, mold us and remodeling us. We do need and want Him to help us. He will. Our Great Physician will hear and heal. 

God is willing and able to teach us the book, not throw it at us. The book is now not just Moses’s book of laws, but THE BOOK, the Word Himself in pages. The whole Book, the Bible, is ALREADY telling us the War is won, Jesus came and will come again. He is Proof of Love. There’s nothing God can do but offer you an open book test because He covers you with the pages that are Living Word. So let us embrace Him who already holds us.

King Josiah of the divided southern kingdom of Judah was good, but he got even better… After a long line of bad kings (who didn’t listen to God) and a few good even great kings who listened but were sometimes led astray, king Josiah decided to restore the Temple (Solomon’s amazing Temple,  where God said His Name would remain). He wanted to return to another level of authentic worship. In doing this cleaning up, his crew (including his priest) found the Book of Laws, written for Moses by God, recorded but lost under dusty years of neglect. Lost but found, just like us. We don’t have to clean up to come to the Lord, we just come “AS WE ARE” and He will take us in.

God said, through a prophet: “Because your heart was responsive… and because you humbled yourself before me and tore your robes and wept in my presence, I have heard you, declares the Lord. Now I will gather you to your ancestors, and you will be buried in peace.“

IN PEACE- that’s where we want to rest too.

This BOOK OF LAWS showed them that although they were good, and willing to try best they knew, they were NOT perfect and saw why God was punishing those who drifted, especially for what the previous BAD king Manasseh had done. Judah like Israel was headed to exile again. Josiah did tremendous clearing of idols, removing of the high places of worship, righting the wrongs to re-center his people’s worship AT THE TEMPLE. He read the book and tried to restore how to live by the book. He even restarted a Passover celebration like none they had ever seen.

We are to try our best, and yet we are NOT perfect either. We have a Shepard leader who knows He is our Temple and He is Book-ing our Best Way to lead us in paths of righteousness, because Jesus came to FULFILL the law given to Moses and the prophets. Jesus came AS a Temple, stuck down but Rebuilt in Resurrection. This is why He wants us to open the Book, teach the Book, live the Book. Help spread this Good News.

We too fall down the path of destruction, like the remnants of Moses’s people in Judah of those days. We too get swept away by idolatry, jealousy, and untruths. Yet when we worship the Lord as king Josiah did—with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our strength – we too will find rest – we will find peace. After earthly kings,  Jesus, our King of kings, Name above all names, Alpha and Omega, will be our Prince of Peace. 

Let’s open up this Book and let Him open up our wounds and heal them.

Let Us Let God.

Amen

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Jesus said: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”(Luke 5:31-32)

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Read about king Josiah here:

2nd CHRONICLES 34: 1-4, 8, 14, 19-22, 26-33 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Chronicles%2034&version=NIV

Josiah was eight years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem thirty-one years. He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord and followed the ways of his father David, not turning aside to the right or to the left.

In the eighth year of his reign, while he was still young, he began to seek the God of his father David. In his twelfth year he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem of high places, Asherah poles and idols.

…

In the eighteenth year of Josiah’s reign, to purify the land and the temple, he sent Shaphan son of Azaliah and Maaseiah the ruler of the city, with Joah son of Joahaz, the recorder, to repair the temple of the Lord his God.

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While they were bringing out the money that had been taken into the temple of the Lord, Hilkiah the priest found the Book of the Law of the Lord that had been given through Moses.

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 When the king heard the words of the Law, he tore his robes. He gave these orders to Hilkiah, Ahikam son of Shaphan, Abdon son of Micah, Shaphan the secretary and Asaiah the king’s attendant: “Go and inquire of the Lord for me and for the remnant in Israel and Judah about what is written in this book that has been found. Great is the Lord’s anger that is poured out on us because those who have gone before us have not kept the word of the Lord; they have not acted in accordance with all that is written in this book.”

Hilkiah and those the king had sent with him went to speak to the prophet Huldah,…

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She said to them: Tell the king of Judah, who sent you to inquire of the Lord, ‘This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says concerning the words you heard:  Because your heart was responsive and you humbled yourself before God when you heard what he spoke against this place and its people, and because you humbled yourself before me and tore your robes and wept in my presence, I have heard you, declares the Lord. Now I will gather you to your ancestors, and you will be buried in peace. Your eyes will not see all the disaster I am going to bring on this place and on those who live here.’”

So they took her [prophet Huldah’s] answer back to the king.

Then the king called together all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem. He went up to the temple of the Lord with the people of Judah, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the priests and the Levites—all the people from the least to the greatest. He read in their hearing all the words of the Book of the Covenant, which had been found in the temple of the Lord. The king stood by his pillar and renewed the covenant in the presence of the Lord—to follow the Lord and keep his commands, statutes and decrees with all his heart and all his soul, and to obey the words of the covenant written in this book.

Then he had everyone in Jerusalem and Benjamin pledge themselves to it; the people of Jerusalem did this in accordance with the covenant of God, the God of their ancestors.

Josiah removed all the detestable idols from all the territory belonging to the Israelites, and he had all who were present in Israel serve the Lord their God. As long as he lived, they did not fail to follow the Lord, the God of their ancestors.

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2nd Kings 23:24-27

Furthermore, Josiah got rid of the mediums and spiritists, the household gods, the idols and all the other detestable things seen in Judah and Jerusalem. This he did to fulfill the requirements of the law written in the book that Hilkiah the priest had discovered in the temple of the Lord. Neither before nor after Josiah was there a king like him who turned to the Lord as he did—with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strength, in accordance with all the Law of Moses.

Nevertheless, the Lord did not turn away from the heat of his fierce anger, which burned against Judah because of all that Manasseh had done to arouse his anger. So the Lord said, “I will remove Judah also from my presence as I removed Israel, and I will reject Jerusalem, the city I chose, and this temple, about which I said, ‘My Name shall be there.’”