Cleaning House

2 Kings 22:8-10

May 26, 2019 • Mount Pleasant UMC

My brother and I could always tell it was “spring cleaning” time at our house when we would come home from school and all the furniture would have been moved around. Unlike Cathy and I, who tend to find one way the furniture works in a room and leave it that way, my parents had several different configurations to their rooms and one way to clean house was to move everything around so that you could clean behind it. Or, in my thinking, clean the places most people never saw. In our lives, honestly, we don’t think about those places behind and under the couches and chairs until those times when we have moved or, more frequently, those times when we have lost something and are trying to find it. Suddenly, we begin looking in all the nooks and crannies. Have you ever noticed that whatever you lost is always in the last place you look? And sometimes when you are cleaning and looking for one thing, you find something entirely different. Maybe even something that will change your life.

This morning, we’re continuing our series, “Power Up,” focusing on the stories and ideas that our Vacation Bible School (VBS) will be studying in just a few weeks. We’re talking about how we can find “power” for life, and so last week we focused on the story of Abram which reminded us that God wants to know us. God is not an impersonal, stand-off deity. He’s not what the Greek philosophers called the “unmoved mover.” He’s personal and he wants to know us. One way we get to know someone is by spending time with them, which is what prayer is all about. If you weren’t here last week, you’ll want to go to our YouTube channel and watch the video of Mary Catherine Couchman talking about prayer. But there is another way we can get to know God, so to explore that, we’re going to turn to the story of a young king named Josiah.

Israel was supposed to be a nation ruled not by a human king but by God. That was the point of all the promises, the commandments, the Law or Torah, and the covenants God made with various people and eventually, through Moses, with the people as a whole. But, as usually happens, the people began to look at the nations around them and decided they wanted to be just like everyone else. They wanted a king, and so, God gave them what they wanted. Sometimes God gives us what we think we want, what we demand, even if it’s not the best thing for us. Moses had warned the people centuries before that if they asked for a human king, that king could very easily turn away from God and lead the people away from God. Moses specifically warned the people against letting a king accumulate lots of money, lots of horses and lots of wives (Deuteronomy 17:14-20). When the people did ask for a king, Samuel the prophet told them again what would happen: a king will take away your children for his army, he will use you to make himself wealthy, he will take your crops and your servants and your flocks. “When that day comes,” Samuel said, “you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day” (1 Samuel 8:10-18). Sure enough, within a very short time, everything both Moses and Samuel had said came true. It didn’t take long at all for the kings to turn away from God and begin to trust in themselves.

So the years leading up to the reign of King Josiah have not been good. His grandfather, Manasseh, is largely seen as the worst king Judah ever had—not in terms of what he accomplished (after all he was king for 55 years), but in terms of his utter disregard for God. That is, after all, how the Bible judges every king: are they faithful to God or not? Manasseh, we’re told, did “evil” in the eyes of the Lord. His son, Amon, also did “evil” and was assassinated by his own officials. And so Josiah, Amon’s son, became king over Israel at age eight.

We don’t know exactly what was different about Josiah from his father or his grandfather, but early on in his reign, he orders some spring cleaning. He carries out a reformation of sorts, focused at least initially on the Temple itself. The Temple had, at one time, been Judah’s proudest building. It was the center of their worship, their life together, their identity as God’s people. I can’t even think of anything to compare it to today, because even a national monument like the Statue of Liberty or the Washington Monument do not define us as a people the way the Temple defined Judah. Or at least it had defined them at one time. By Josiah’s time, the place is a mess. It’s in disrepair. When you have kings who don’t honor God, the faith-life of the nation falls apart, and the Temple reflected that. No one had cared about the Temple for decades. So Josiah the king hires workers to repair it—carpenters, builders, stonemasons. They are to purchase timber and dressed stone to try to restore some of the former glory to the Temple. And I love what he says about the workers he hires: “They need not account for the money entrusted to them, because they are honest in their dealings” (2 Kings 22:7). So the work begins, and at some point in the renovations, the high priest comes to the king’s secretary with something unexpected. I’ve always pictured that they found this scroll inside the walls or behind some furniture somewhere, but the text doesn’t say exactly where it was found. The high priest simply says, “I have found the Book of the Law in the temple of the Lord” (22:8).

Now, think about that statement for a moment. We have copies of the Bible, what we call God’s Word, all over this building. It shouldn’t be surprising to find a copy of God’s Word in God’s House. But in Josiah’s time, after nearly sixty years of kings who ignored God and abandoned his ways, the word of God had been, if not actually, at least functionally lost. It was, apparently, not a part of public worship or public life as it had once been. So, you have to ask, what did the priests do when the people gathered for worship? We don’t really know, and in fact we don’t really know if there were public worship gatherings at all. We know that the Passover, one of the most significant celebrations in the Jewish year that in many ways defined who they were, hadn’t really been celebrated, Kings says, since the days of the Judges—long before any of the kings, long before there even was a kingdom. The Word of God had been functionally lost. Not only was the printed text itself lost in the Temple, the people didn’t know what it said, the king had no idea what was in it, and the priests weren’t reading it.

Today, we have more translations and more varieties of the Bible than ever before. You can get a “study Bible” for just about any interest group and there are somewhere around 450 different translations and paraphrases available in English today. When I open the Bible app on my phone, I can access 1,889 translations of the Bible in 1,299 languages, all for free. And yet, in a time of unprecedented access, we also live in a time of unprecedented Biblical illiteracy. We say this text is important to us, but we don’t read it. While 62% of the American population claims to believe in Jesus, only 14% of the population reads the Bible on a daily basis. We’re more likely to know the latest meme or cat video on Facebook or the more recent celebrity scandal than we are the overall flow and story of Scripture. We might know a verse or two here and there, and we do like to prooftext (that is, to take verses out of context to make whatever point we think needs to be made), but by and large, as a culture, we do not know the Scriptures. This is a few years old, but take a look at what talk show host Jay Leno encountered when he asked questions about what we would probably consider common Bible stories.

VIDEO: Leno Bible

The sad thing is this: what’s true of the culture is also today true of the church. One commentator put it this way: “I don’t expect people who have no interest in learning about my faith to read my scriptures. But I do expect people who adhere to my faith to read them. A Christian that doesn’t bother reading their own scripture is like an athlete that never works out” (https://www.patheos.com/blogs/jaysondbradley/2019/02/bible-literacy/). The Bible is functionally lost in our world. Even in the church, we don’t know the Scriptures. And because of that, our lives are not shaped by the Scriptures. Those who claim the name of Christ are more often shaped by the culture than the Bible. A study released a couple of years ago found that only 17% of those who claim the name of Christ have a worldview that lines up with the Scriptures (https://relevantmagazine.com/god/research-only-17-of-christians-actually-have-a-biblical-worldview/). By “worldview,” the survey-takers means affirming core Christian beliefs like salvation by grace and not works, the existence of absolute moral truth, that God is the all-powerful creator of the universe who is still active today, the accuracy of the Bible and so on. Only seventeen percent affirmed those truths. Other things affirmed by self-proclaiming Christians included the belief that all gods are equal, that meaning and purpose come from earning as much money as you can, and that if your beliefs hurt or offend someone the beliefs are wrong. In our day, as in Josiah’s, the Bible is functionally lost.

So the king’s secretary brings the scroll, which was probably at least part of what we know as the book of Deuteronomy (Konkel, NIV Application Commentary: 1 & 2 Kings, pg. 635), to the king. He doesn’t lead with that news. First, he tells King Josiah about the money (22:9). He takes care of the business of the state first, as if that will somehow soften what is coming next. After that is settled, the secretary says, “Oh, by the way, we found a book in the Temple” (22:10). And then he reads it to the King, and the King is undone. The author tells us Josiah tears his robes (22:11), which was a sign of mourning in the ancient world. Josiah is upset because, as we already know, he is a king who wants to do what God requires, who wants to live the kind of life God wants him to live. Like David before him, he wants to be a godly man. So after he has heard what God requires of his people, he tells the religious leaders to go ask God what they should do about what they have read (22:12-13). So they do, and God answers, assuring Josiah that he will not destroy the nation during his lifetime because Josiah has been faithful. Notice that when the people weren’t all that interested in what God had to say, God kept silent, but once the smallest spark of interest is there, God begins again to speak to the people and to the king. God will not force his way in. He will not insist on being present where he is not wanted. Josiah and the people once again read the Scriptures, and when the king turns back toward God’s ways, God is there waiting.

So in the next chapter there is repentance, and there is a lot of work done tearing down the false pagan altars that had been built in the previous sixty years. If you are a king who wants to make sure that worship is again focused only on the one true God, you have it in your power to make that happen at least in the Jerusalem temple. The only way to assure that other practices don’t take over in the outlying sanctuaries is to close them all down. So what happens in chapter 23 is part religious and part political. The king is once again taking seriously his role as God’s ruler, and he even restarts the Passover celebration. Josiah does everything he can to bring the people back in line with the rediscovered Scriptures, and the author of Kings sums up his reign in this way: “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” (23:25). A renewal took place that shaped the kingdom for many years, all because Josiah took seriously what he read in the Scriptures that had once been lost. Before this event, he knew about God and tried to live as best as he could. Once Josiah heard the Law read, he came to know God himself. The bottom line of his story is this: you can know God through his word.

Can you imagine what might happen in our time if we took the Scriptures seriously, if we really believed we could know God though his word and allowed our lives to be shaped by this word? Josiah’s project initially was to clean house in the Temple, but he ended up cleaning house all across the kingdom, restoring the kingdom’s faith. Once the Scriptures were opened, the whole culture changed. The Scriptures are like that; when allowed to have a real place in our lives, the Scriptures will “clean house” and make us more like the God they reveal.

So I have people tell me they know they should read the Bible but they just don’t know how. The Bible is a different sort of book; it’s not like a novel that you start at the beginning and read through to the end. I mean, you can do that, but most people when they try that get bogged down somewhere around Leviticus. Besides, it wasn’t written that way. The Bible is not actually one book; it’s a collection of 66 books written over several centuries by many different human authors under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And it’s that “inspiration” that explains how such a collection can still have one consistent theme from beginning to end: God wants you to know him. So how do we read Scripture in a way that it shapes us? Well, the first challenge is in knowing what to read. Some folks will choose a book and read it through; if you do that, I recommend you start with a Gospel. For the last four years, we’ve encouraged you to read through one of the Gospels every year. This summer, we’ll be focusing on Luke. If you’ve never read one of the Gospels, Mark is a good place to start. He’s fast-paced and the book is short. If you want to get into a daily routine, we provide Scriptures in the bulletin and on the app every single week that you can read. The passages suggested are ones that will tie back into each week’s message. Honestly, there’s really no wrong place to start. There are 66 books to choose from! Pick a place and jump in.

So the next question I get is this: how do I understand it? Some people put off reading the Bible because it’s hard to understand, and it is. It was written in a different time and place. There are different kinds of literature in there. But it’s not impossible to understand, and it helps to have a good study Bible with background and notes and a translation that makes sense to you. It’s important to read a version that is in your language because none of us speak Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek (the original languages of the Bible) or even Latin (one of the first translations). We need a good, solid translation. But even then, it’s important not to just read it and walk away. Scripture is something that is meant to be meditated on, pondered, internalized. Eugene Peterson, borrowing from the books of Ezekiel and Revelation, used to say we should “eat this book.” We should take it in, get it inside of us. In Ezekiel 3, the prophet is told to eat the scroll; he says it tasted like honey in his mouth (3:1-3). That same sort of scene takes place again in Revelation 10, but that time when John eats the scroll, it turns his stomach sour (10:8-11). I think the message is clear: get the Word of God inside of you, even though sometimes it is tough to swallow. It’s not always comforting because it’s not always what we want to hear. Sometimes it will unsettle you. Sometimes it won’t sit well with you. Even then, when we get it inside us, it will shape us, mold us, help us know God better.

When I teach people how to study the Bible, I encourage them to start by asking three simple questions. These are questions you can ask of any passage you read, and they’re easy to remember (which helps me). What does this passage tell us about God? What does this passage tell us about human beings? What does this passage tell us about the relationship between God and human beings? Simple: God, humans, relationship. If the purpose of the Bible is to help us know God, and if it is possible to know God through his word, then these three questions help us focus on what is most important in any given passage. They help us strain out the “extras” and zero in on the main point. God, humans, relationship.

Another way to go about reading the Scripture so that it “cleans house” is suggested by Richard Foster and summed up in these three words: heart, mind, community. In a lot of ways, this mirrors what happened to Josiah in our passage this morning. We begin with the heart. The Bible is not something we just read with our eyes, as if it is just words on a page. Certainly it is that, but it is more, and if we want to truly allow it to transform us, we need to read it with what Paul called “the eyes of our heart” (cf. Ephesians 1:18). We ask the Holy Spirit to guide us and we remember as we read that the Scriptures were written to help us know God. The Bible is not about getting a quick fix for life, though that’s the way we usually read it. The Bible is not about making us happy or solving our problems. It’s about helping us know God. As Foster puts it, we should be reading for depth, not breadth—reading for transformation and not just reading large amounts. As the lost book of the law was read to Josiah, his heart was touched. If he were a Methodist, he might have said his heart was strangely warmed. He heard the Spirit speaking to him about what God required of him and the people. And that word got inside of him. It will get inside us as well when we read with the heart.

But we also read with the mind. We seek to understand. Reading with the mind involves knowing the context, the larger story, the bigger picture. It’s why I spend some time every week helping us understand the historical context of any given Scripture. It’s not just about knowing more stuff, and in fact that’s one of the dangers for history buffs like me. I can easily get stuck in just learning more about the passage rather than understanding what it’s saying. Context is not an end in itself, but it does help us understand how God is working in that particular setting and it helps us understand how he might work today. Here’s an example: I said earlier a lot of people, when they try to read the Bible straight through, get bogged down in Leviticus. It’s because there are a lot of laws there that just don’t seem to have any relevance for us today. And today we’re all about relevance. But when we come to passages like that, rather than dismissing it out of hand or writing it off as useless, we need to ask what the purpose of the original law was. Why did God give that instruction to the people? When we understand that, we can begin to see modern parallels. Similarly, when we understand why Paul told women to be silent in the church, we can begin to make connections to today. Here’s a hint: it was not because Paul didn’t value women. Nothing could be further from the truth. When Josiah heard this ancient scroll read to him, he could have dismissed the practice of Passover as “only for back then and there,” but instead, reading with his mind, he understood how ritual connected people to God, how it grounds them and gives them focus. And though his situation wasn’t the same as those in the Exodus, he was able to bring forward a practice that had been lost in a way that became meaningful and relevant to the people of his time. We read Scripture with the heart, and with the mind.

And with the community. There is no such thing as a lone-ranger Christian, and Biblically speaking, you can’t be a follower of Jesus apart from the community. It’s okay and important to read the Scriptures on your own, but not only on your own. We need the influence of each other, of saints throughout the ages, and of the larger body of Christ. What we’ve developed today is largely a series of echo chambers, where we only listen to people who agree with us, but when it comes to understanding the Scriptures, that’s a dangerous position to be in. We need to listen to the thousands of years of saints who have come before us. We need to listen to people who are not part of our normal social circle. We need to read the Scripture alongside people we disagree with, even if we don’t end up agreeing. I belong to an online book club in which every year we read a couple of current authors and a couple of historical authors. This year, we read Dallas Willard, who was a deeper thinker than I will ever be, and whose writing challenges me to see depths in the Scripture that I don’t see on my own. And we read an ancient saint I struggled to understand; that reading pushed me in terms of what the Bible says about prayer. And we read a contemporary pastor who challenged my thinking about race, and even though I didn’t agree with him on everything, I was forced to think through why and the ways I read the Bible. We need the larger community, not only in books, but also in real life, in our small groups. That’s where my LifeGroup comes in. Sometimes we discuss books or videos and other times we go directly to the Bible, but no matter what we’re doing, we’re sharpening each other and helping each other follow Jesus better. That’s the point of reading with the community. When Josiah read the book of the law in light of the community, it changed everything about the way the kingdom approached God and their faith. They celebrated the Passover for the first time in generations. They renewed their faith. This changed king changed the nation because he recognized that while faith is personal, it’s never private. We need the community (cf. Foster, Life With God, pgs. 57-129).

Bottom line: You can know God through his Word. Josiah and countless saints through the ages, including some who are sitting right here this morning, can attest to that truth. The question is: will you? Will you take up the challenge to get to know God though this marvelous gift he has given us? And will you let it transform not just you but the community around you? The danger always is that we will read the Bible and then walk away without allowing it to get inside of us, without allowing it to clean house within us. We can do that if we read quickly and don’t pay attention. We can do that when we reuse to allow what we have already decided remain unchallenged. We can do that when we insist that our cultural beliefs are more important than what God has said to us. We know God by living out what his word says to us; that’s the way James put it. Let’s let the brother of Jesus have the last word this morning: “Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do” (James 1:23-25). To that, I can only say, “Amen” and “Let us pray.”