2 Chronicles 34:1-13

2 Chronicles 34:1–13✞: Josiah’s Reforms

Passage

In this passage we begin the reign of Josiah, one of Judah’s good kings.

The text kind of glosses over it (in both Kings and Chronicles), but Josiah doesn’t necessarily start out as a good king; verse 3✞ tells us he doesn’t begin to “seek the God of his father David” until the 8^th year of his reign – however, since he started reigning when he was 8, meaning that he was only 16 when he began seeking God, and given that his father had been leading Judah into sin, I’m not exactly blaming Josiah!

A few years after that, Josiah gets serious about purging the land of idolatry:

³ 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. ⁴ Under his direction the altars of the Baals were torn down; he cut to pieces the incense altars that were above them, and smashed the Asherah poles and the idols. These he broke to pieces and scattered over the graves of those who had sacrificed to them. ⁵ He burned the bones of the priests on their altars, and so he purged Judah and Jerusalem. ⁶ In the towns of Manasseh, Ephraim and Simeon, as far as Naphtali, and in the ruins around them, ⁷ he tore down the altars and the Asherah poles and crushed the idols to powder and cut to pieces all the incense altars throughout Israel. Then he went back to Jerusalem.

verses 3–7✞

Then, in the 18^th year of his reign, he begins work on restoring the Temple. Verses 9–13✞ give details on this, and the next passage will get into the Book of the Law that they find there.

Thoughts

As alluded to above, it occurred to me as I was reading through the passage that Josiah’s reforms don’t start immediately, and neither do they come all at once. (It’s easy, when I’m reading through the Old Testament, to gloss over details like this, but for some reason I thought about the math this time.)

• He doesn’t worship God for the first 8 years of his reign. Again, I’m not saying this in judgement! It’s hard to judge an 8 year old (or a 12 year old or even a 16 year old) for not faithfully following God!
• Once he starts seeking God, he still doesn’t start ridding the land of idols for another 4 years.
• It’s another 6 years after that before he begins repairs on the Temple.

The text doesn’t say, but I’m guessing there are some very practical reasons for these “delays” in Josiah’s reforms:

1. Again, he was young! He started reigning when he was 8, which means he was still only 16 when he started following God, only 20 when he started ridding the country of idols, and only 26 when he began repairs on the Temple.

• • Frankly, he might not have had power to enact reforms early in his reign, even if he wanted to – at that age, it’s not like they just plop him on the throne and let him at it! He would have had a regent—that is, someone who’s reigning on the king’s behalf while the king is too young—who was actually making the decisions.

3. Remember that Amon, Josiah’s father, had been a bad king who’d been pulling the people away from God – and Josiah is his son. There’s always going to be a tendency to follow along with how things had already been working, even if we’re uncomfortable with them – and, early in his reign, Josiah probably wasn’t uncomfortable at all!

• • This is also significant because the regent who’d have been running things on Josiah’s behalf would have been from Amon’s court; he’d be happy with how things were working anyway.

5. Things don’t just change immediately because the king would like them to. There would have been preparations involved, and likely a very unwilling population that didn’t want Josiah’s reforms. (At least at first. I’d like to think the people got on board and started following God at some point…) Had Josiah just immediately rushed in and started removing idols and high places the people might very well have revolted, and his reforms might have come to nothing. It’s good to have zeal for the LORD, but it’s also good to have wisdom.
6. As for the Temple… again, the text doesn’t say this, so I don’t want to push this too hard, but it’s possible that the Temple was simply an after thought for Josiah. He starts following God, goes out and purges the land of idols, and then… oh yeah! There’s the Temple, too! And that’s going to take a lot more work than just ripping out some Asherah poles; money has to be raised, and workmen hired, and… (And Josiah might also have been taking to heart the lesson of his ancestor Hezekiah, and the trouble he had to go to to ensure that taxes were properly being captured to keep the Temple going!)

• • Another reason I don’t want to push this point too hard is that there’s also a chance it’s simply untrue. If Josiah was following God he was also probably going to the Temple regularly to worship, so he would have seen the state it was in.
  • But there’s still the inertia problem: the Temple is like that, in Josiah’s eyes, because it’s always been like that! He’s used to seeing it the way it is, and needs his eyes opened as to what it’s supposed to be like.

I mention this all of this because of the w-word I used above: even in modern-day contexts, Christians who are zealous for God and want to further His Kingdom still need wisdom. We see the story of Jesus charging into the Temple and overturning the moneylenders’ tables and think this is what we’re supposed to be doing—and there are times when large changes should come about in short order—but there are also times when we should slow down and do things right, to enact changes that will last. Knowing which approach is required in a given situation requires prayer and consideration.