For our scripture reading today, we turn to 2 Kings 23, reading verses 6-14. 2 Kings 23, 6-14. Beginning to read then with God's word, let us consider it soberly together. And he brought out the wooden images from the house of the Lord to the brook Kidron outside Jerusalem, burned it at the brook Kidron and ground it to ashes and threw its ashes on the graves of the common people. Then he tore down the ritual booths of the perverted persons that were in the house of the Lord, where the women wove hangings for the wooden image. And he brought all the priests from the cities of Judah and defiled the high places where the priests had burned incense, from Geba to Beersheba. Also he broke down the high places at the gates, which were at the entrance of the gate of Joshua, the governor of the city, which were to the left of the city gate. Nevertheless, the priests of the high places did not come up to the altar of the Lord in Jerusalem, but they ate unleavened bread among their brethren. And he defiled Topheth, which is in the city of the son of Hinnon, that no man might make his son or daughter pass through the fire to Malak. Then he removed the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the son at the entrance of the house of the Lord by the chamber of Nathan Malak, the officer who was in the court. And he burned the chariots of the son with fire, The altars that were on the roof, the upper chamber of Ahaz, which were the kings of Judah had made, and the altars which Manasseh had made in the two courts of the house of the Lord, the king broke down and pulverized there and threw their dust into the brook Kidron. Then the king defiled the high places that were east of Jerusalem, which were in the south of the Mount of Corruption, which Solomon, king of Israel, had built for Esthereth, the abomination of the Sidonians, for Chemosh, the abomination of the Moabites, and for Milcom, the abomination of the people of Ammon. And he broke in pieces the sacred pillars and cut down the wooden images and filled their places with the bones of men. May the Lord bless this reading to our good understanding this morning. As we look at this text, it must raise in our minds some question of the meaning. It's not readily apparent that this that this text is about the Reformation of worship in the house of the Lord and that the theme is about the Reformation, the Reformation of worship in the Lord. Now we know that Josiah was a great king of Reformation. What we see here in this chapter, you have to really step back and ask yourself the question about it, and then it comes to you. But we know Josiah was famous for a reformation. If we ask then, well, what was reformed? We see that all of his attention was turned to the temple and to its worship, and mostly in the negative. We have here no positive, exhortations to worship, to liturgy, to psalm singing, let's say. to scripture reading, to the exhortations of the priest. Instead, it's all negative, or it's cast in the negative because there was so much going wrong at this time. Remember, the great reformation of Hezekiah, and then 55 years of decadence under Manasseh, and now we have this younger man, Josiah, who raises up and the Lord favors him again with insights. But where do these insights come? They come or they are focused upon worship. And even the negative side of worship, namely the reform of worship. And so by this we draw, in terms of the sermon today, we draw that there is great need for the reform of worship in all days, but especially that day, and I would argue especially in our day. this great need for reformed worship. And it's not just a labor of negativity, or it's not just a labor of destruction. It is a way of getting out of our own way and opening up our minds and our hearts and our methods of church to the excitement of truly worshiping the Lord God above. So that's the main theme of the message today. And we have to get down in the weeds, as it were, to look at these different verses and see what they what they were being reformed from in order to see what they were being reformed to. But it's a it's a very when you when you analyze it this way, it's a very lively passage. and worthy of our consideration. So let's get right into it. In verse six, we see, first of all, and this is according to your bio outline that's in the bulletin. First of all, we see that there was a significant wooden idol that was very prominently displayed in the temple area. Now, right away, you think, in terms of the Ten Commandments, what is the Second Commandment? You know, the first commandment, thou shalt have no other God but Jehovah, but me, the Lord says. Second commandment, thou shalt make no graven image So in terms of the sanctification of the Old Testament kingdom, in terms of their pilgrimage and their advances in godliness, they didn't even make it through the second commandment before they fell into a gross decay. And there was this prominent wooden image. Now as Josiah considers reforming worship, he, you realize right away, you cannot paper over the bad stuff. You have to, in order to obtain good worship, you have to get rid of false worship. In order to obtain the positive things, you have to jettison the fake things and the fraudulent things. And so immediately he takes upon the, his, his work to bring out this wooden image, and they bring it to the Brook Kidron, which is a small stream outside the city, and they burn it there, and then they grind it to ashes, and they throw the ashes on the, it says, the graves of the common people. Now, in every cemetery, in all of our burial customs, there are different places in our cemeteries. We bury people with people of greater honor, we bury them with greater honor. And at the other end, there is the cemetery or there's a place for people that are basically unclaimed, people that were criminals, people that were without any honor. And that's what it means here when it says that they burned it and they grounded the ashes and threw its ashes on the graves of the common people. It's not the common people in an economic sense, although that can be a part of it, but it's the common people. And one of the translations even suggests the children of bastardy, that is the children without proper or clear parentage. that that was this part of the cemetery for them. So Josiah takes this thing that was so prominent for Israel in one stage of their history, this wooden image, he takes that and he grinds it up, he reduces it to basically sawdust. And then to show his complete degradation and disgust over these things, he casts the dust of this thing over the lowest part of the cemetery where there's the greatest degree of ignominy and the least amount of pride or accomplishment. And so we see here how Josiah is mocking these things. In other parts of the Old Testament, one of the Psalms says, speaking of the idols of the Old Testament age, the idols of the Ammonites and the Jebusites, people like that, it says they have eyes. You think of a totem pole that were used, you might see in Alaska on a trip to Alaska, which is based on paganism, the spirits of the native Aborigines would ascribe to things without naming the God. And these relates to the Psalms and the prophets would mock these things. They say, well, they have eyes, but they cannot see. They have arms, but they cannot feel, they cannot touch. They have no power in them. And so this is a manner, Josiah, as he grinds this thing to pulp, If there was real power in the underworld, if Satan really had power, then you'd think that when you ground up his images that he'd do something, you know, that he'd strike back at you, that you'd feel his wrath, but there's nothing. And so Josiah takes the dust and he spreads it on the part of the cemetery that has the least honor at all to show the degradation and the contempt with which this new reign, this new kingdom under Josiah was going to operate. It's much like our inauguration day tomorrow. You know, the Israelites had the same sense of things like this, a new kingdom. And so Josiah was trying to set the scales high or the truth high in terms of what they were going to do with worship. It was a new day. They weren't going to continue doing the things that they had done before. Now, the second thing that he did here in verse seven, it says he tore down the ritual booths of the perverted persons that were in the house of the Lord, where the women wove hangings for the wooden image. Now, this is like degradation in terms of theology and worship. This is piling degradation upon degradation. I mean, there's a part of the Christian world today that wants to justify homosexuality, wants to say that homosexuality should exist in the church without significant repentance, but that we should be so happy to embrace all people and their sin that we embrace the sin of the people. And that's a big, that's a lively issue in debate today. I've got a book I'm supposed to be doing a book review on from an OPC pastor in Denver, named Sean, and that's the focus of his old book. The effect of this upon the Christian church today. But this is back in the Old Testament day. And so it says that they had ritual booths. These are little areas, or shrines, if you will, within the temple where there was dedication made to for the false gods, and especially they were associated in some way, it says, with the perverted persons or with the sodomites of that day in the house of the Lord. And you might know, even today, where there are homosexual organizations there, which historically were led by men, but in this case it mentions the women, that the women had used their artistic gifts, their sense of aesthetics to weave tapestries. And you can see this, you go to our museums in New York City and you can see the artwork especially in terms of tapestries and these kinds of things that people might do. In this case, they were dedicated not to art or not to beauty per se, but they were dedicated to enhance this paganism and make it more attractive to the people of the day. Isn't it amazing how we, as human beings, how we think we are inspired and we think that we ought to obtain credit by bringing our artistic gifts to play to enhance paganism and false gods. It shows you how pliable the world of art and craft are. that they can be used in these wicked ways and be dedicated to the false things of this world. The amazing thing is that was going on in the temple of the Old Testament. And so Josiah tears these things down. He tears down the shrines. I know some of us have gone to Scotland and visited St. Giles Cathedral on top of the Royal Mile. And if you go into this church, there are shrines, little shrines throughout the church dedicated to some of the great people of their history. So, in a sense, they have combined secular history or political history with the worship. And I, you know, in the best sense of the term, these things have not been used, they're not used in a religious way, per se, they're more in a nationalistic way. But you can see how people are drawn when they have great buildings. They're drawn to create shrines here and there, little cabanas, little cubicles where something can be added. And in this case, they put idols there in these places. so that the people could feel good about their worship. So that was the second thing that Josiah did. And he brought out, it says, verse eight, he brought out all the priests from the cities of Judah and defiled the high places where the priests had burned incense. from Geba to Beersheba. Now, Geba, we know very often the Bible, when it gives the dimensions of Israel, they will say from Dan to Beersheba. Dan was the northernmost significant city in Israel. Dan to Beersheba. Well, Geba was not even close to Dan. Geba was only on the northern border of the tribe of Judah. So it takes, it looks at the, geography of just Judah, from Geba to Beersheba. And it says here that Josiah went after the high places that were around in these cities, and even at the gates, the gates of some of the cities. He mentions the gate of Joshua, the governor of the city. Now, But even more significantly, in terms of verse eight, what we need to see is that Josiah, not only does he go after the physical things, the idols and that kind of thing, but he goes after the personnel that were pushing these things, the people that were associated with enhancing these things and using them in the midst of the liturgies. So some people might say, well, I wouldn't mind a reformation of the stuff, but lay off the people. We have to love everybody. We have to be inclusive. Using words that are popular today. We need diversity. Well, Josiah was not in favor of diversity of people or things when it came to polytheism, to paganism, to idolatry, and all of that kind of thing. So in verse nine, I'm sorry, verse eight, he moves into the cleaning, the sanctifying of the personnel. I don't know if you've heard in terms of politics before, but in politics they'll say personnel are power. In other words, if a new president or if a governor, if he says he's going to change things for the better, but then he doesn't bring in new people who believe in those things, you can be assured that they're not really going to change. This is one of the things that politicians will do. They'll promise great things, but then they'll use the bureaucrats that were in place before and use the same people to push supposedly the new ideas. And what do they push? They basically promote the same old thing. Well, Josiah was not of that ilk, he understood. And so he takes and all of the priests of Israel, now in Judah, all of the priests who lent themselves to the idolatry, who did not distinguish between truth and falsity, he categorized them, he basically defrocked them and told them that they could not serve. And then it says in verse nine that he disqualified them for future leadership, that they were taken out, and he says that they were placed, they had to eat the unleavened bread, which was a bread of remorse in the Passover, that they had to be with the people not with the leadership, especially the spiritual leadership of the country, but they had to be with the people and they were demoted. And so it says, they did not come to the altar of the Lord anymore in Jerusalem, but they ate unleavened bread among their brethren. So they were reduced from the high office of the head of being priests in Israel, now Judah, to being out of the priesthood and Presbyterianism, when someone does something wrong, they are challenged for it to repent. If they don't, then they can be defrocked even and taken out to have their ordination taken away from them. And that's happened in our own Presbytery in the last three or four years. And then when we have some people in the Presbytery would find fault with Josiah because they said, you know, there's nothing that is outside of repentance and these men repented and so they ought to be reinstalled. Well, it's all a question of degree. Did they really repent? What was the crime that they committed? But there's been, in our own Presbytery, there's been a resistance against these ideas. And so the thing that Josiah did here is something that that was necessary to clean up the worship of the land at that time, we might not have done were we in charge as he was at that time. And then lastly in this section, verse 10 and following, we see that he turns to the things that are outside of the temple area, outside of Jerusalem. It mentions that he defiled the high places that were east of Jerusalem. Now, when you go east of Jerusalem, you go down to the valley, you go down toward Jericho, you go down into the wilderness. And so he took his attention off of the civilized places, the capital of Jerusalem, and he goes outside and he finds the places. The reason the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in this area was because it was more of a remote place. There were caves, there were places where people did not go. It was very difficult to get into some of these caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found because there were religious groups that would try to settle in these places when Jerusalem got cleaned up. And so that's where Josiah takes his attention. So to go back to the basic idea, Josiah is trying to reform the country. The way he reforms the country is to reform the church, to reform the temple of his day. And the way he does that is he does some negative things in order to get to the positive things. And that's not fully explained on the surface of the text, but you can see the gist of it. Now, one of the cross references from this from this section of the scriptures goes to Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy chapter 12. And there, Moses says to the people as he this is when the people were they'd come into Israel. and now they were trying to organize Israel as a nation. And so God told Moses to say this to the people. He says, you shall not do all, you shall not at all do as we are doing here today. Every man doing whatever is right in his own eyes. Now, God here is speaking about worship. He's speaking about, if you go back to the previous verses, he's speaking about the temple. So it says, every man doing what is right in his own eyes. So you can see why this was a cross-reference to the place where we are in 2 Kings. For he says, for as yet you have not come to the rest, that would be the Sabbath, and the inheritance which the Lord your God is giving you. But when you cross over the Jordan and dwell in the land which the Lord your God is giving you to inherit, and he gives you rest from all your enemies, roundabout, so that you dwell in safety, then there, now the there is a geographical mark, because you see how that, unfolds here, then there will be the place where the Lord your God chooses to make his name abide. There you shall bring all that I command you, your burnt offerings, your sacrifices, your tithes, the heave offering of your hand, and all your choice offerings which you vow to the Lord. and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God, and you and your sons and your daughters, your male and your female servants, and the Levite who is within your gates, and he who has no portion nor inheritance with you, take heed to yourself that you do not offer your burnt offerings in every place that you see, but in the place which the Lord chooses in one of your tribes. There you shall offer your burnt offerings and there you shall eat. You shall do all that I command you. Well, you see, this was the command that Moses gave to the people through the Lord. The Lord or the Lord gave the command through Moses. He said that when he brought them into the land, he would appoint a special place where they would have their worship. And in that place, that would be unique. There, it's mentioned about three or four times in that text. There, it should be done. And so what do we see in 2 Kings, which is the outcome of many centuries of Israeli rule? There we see that not only did they not worship purely in Jerusalem, but they had all these other places, these high places, where people were doing what was right in their own eyes. They were making up religion as it seemed good to them. On the Internet just yesterday, I noticed there was somebody that put up a big poster on the Internet of people that should not be followed today. And it was all of these tele-evangelists who were plainly heretical. Now, there are plenty of televangelists that are not all that great, but this didn't deal with them. This dealt with the worst of the worst, and the whole page was full of them. This is kind of what was going on in this day. God said, your worship should be in one place that I tell you about, and it should be pure worship. So the people were worshiping all over the place. They were worshiping according to their own dictates. They were using their wonderful powers of creativity instead of simply listening to the Lord. And they were worshiping like they would. And then, worse, in Jerusalem, in the temple, They weren't doing what God had commanded, but they had incorporated into the temple worship, the worship of all these false gods. It mentions burning chariots that were dedicated to the sun. There were special chariots and special horses that were created. that were dedicated to some of these false gods, the sun god. And so in this case, the text says that Josiah ruined those things and took them and ground them in dust and threw them outside the city in the ignoble places. Now, what we draw from this is that the Lord The Lord indicted the people, he brought charges against the people for what they were doing, and he brings a king to place, to bear, who will correct these things. Obviously, this is looking forward to the Lord Jesus Christ and his installation as king of New Testament Israel, who would then purify the church and help the church. That's why it's even worse today when ministers and televangelists, people who have some authority over the church and over the growth of Christianity, how awful that is when they go astray. It's completely counterintuitive with the messianic work of our Lord Jesus Christ. Now, one other thing that we notice here, and I mention that because this is very key with the enhancement of our worship today. I'm preaching to people, I'm preaching to you all who are trying to worship today and trying to bring yourself to a vital worship and a quality worship day. Well, you notice what in that passage in Deuteronomy 12, it says a couple of times, well, in verse 12, after saying that you should be in one place, it says, and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God, you and your sons and your daughters, your male and your female servants, and the Levite who is within your gates, since he has no portion or inheritance with you. So it specifically mentions that in terms of the vitality and the reformation of worship, that you should rejoice, that rejoicing, and that the cultivation of joy in your faith is an important thing. Down below in verse 18, the end of verse 18 in the same section, It says, and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God in all which you put your hands. Take heed to yourself that you do not forsake the Levite as long as you live in the land. So twice in this passage where it's talking about the reformation of worship, it mentions the idea of rejoicing. I had breakfast with Jeremy Jordan. I think it was Thursday. And he brought a book that he wanted me to read. This is the other half of the church, and it's called the Christian Community Brain Science and Overcoming Spiritual Stagnation. So it's certainly an interesting title. But anyway, Jeremy had read this, and he'd been thinking about it, and he'd been passing it out to some of his friends to get their reaction. he wanted to give, he wanted to loan me his copy so that I would give him my reaction to the book. So, um, I, it's, uh, and, uh, what's interesting about the book is that the author is, uh, is a PhD in neurology, brain science. And so he's relating brain science to faith, and especially himself, because he felt like he had made great strides in his Christian life for the first eight years of his life as a Christian, but then he felt like after about eight years, nine years, something, he felt that he began to drift, and his faith became less viable, less fervent. And so he was trying to figure out about this, and he began talking to people that were neurologists and brain scientists. And he realized that the way the brain worked, I think it's the right half, the right half of the brain perceives or gets the information that our senses bring to us. And so that's more of the initial information, the way the information comes into our brains. And then it goes from the back, lower the brain stem to the front, across, and then to the left. And the left half of the brain is more analytical. It's more conceptual. So the right half of the brain, some people will talk about being right-brained or left-brained. They'll say the artist is more right-brained the analytical person was more left-brained. But what this fellow realized in terms of his study of this and its relationship to faith, he said that the idea of joy or the emotional enjoyment of whatever you were perceiving was the first thing that struck your brain when you perceive things. And then it passes from that into more of a reflective stage. And when he applied that to his faith, he realized that, and I haven't read the whole book yet, but evidently as he meditated upon this more and more, he realized how He needed to cultivate more joy about the things that he was perceiving about the Lord. And then meditate on it, left brain, meditate on it, but don't leave off of the joy of the rejoicing that came in the first perception of the things of this world, and in this case faith, or Christ. And evidently, like I said, I haven't read the whole book yet, but evidently he has seen his sanctification increase as he has set himself to this. Now I'm reading this thinking about how am I going to respond to Jeremy Jordan and about this book. And as soon as I heard the statements about the right brain and left brain, I thought, well, the Bible again and again points us to joy, doesn't it? It says rejoice again, rejoice in the Lord. Again, I say rejoice. And even here, I was amazed then in Deuteronomy to see where God is talking about rejoicing here. Now, my sense of these things is I don't, when I see books like this, I don't leap up, I don't leap with joy just because somebody's got a new idea. I mean, if they can point to scripture and say the idea relates to scripture, then I get more excited, you know, that it's not just some other humanistic idea. But in this case, as soon as he starts talking about this stuff, I thought, well, I don't know why he didn't, why he didn't refer to these passages of scripture himself. But I certainly remember that. And I could see where if a person, when we think about worship, When we think about our church services, if we don't exhort ourselves, it begins with yourself and self-exhortation, but if you don't focus on rejoicing about the thoughts that you hear in church, you're going to lose a lot of your ardor. You're not going to get the proper dynamism out of the things of God that you were intended to get. there are so many places in the Bible which talk about our joy in the Lord, about rejoicing in the Lord. And I'm sort of disappointed in myself that I didn't take them more seriously before, because now I can see, at least I'm beginning to see, that this is one of the keys to the cultivation of your faith. If you refuse to receive the things of the Lord that you hear, the attributes of God, the work of Christ, the love of God, if you refuse to rejoice about those things, if you refuse or you just don't see the benefit of turning these things over in your mind, then you will be a much less happy person and you'll be much less ready to really worship the Lord. Worshiping the Lord means that we take the things that are in us and in an excited and thorough way, we give God glory. And so I can see that this is something that the people of Israel failed to do after a season. They treated these things as old. We cannot treat the things of the Lord as old things that we have grown past. we have to keep exhorting ourselves in our minds. So in a worship service like this, when you sing a psalm, when you hear the word of God, you need to be exhorting your heart, get excited about these things. I'll use my own name, Dick. Don't just let these things cruise by your brain as if they're nothing or as if they're old hat, because you need to stir up your own heart to embrace the great things of God. Now you cannot do that if you've got a whole bunch of garbage in the way, and that's what Josiah dealt with in this passage. He had to get rid of the garbage before the truths of the Lord, before the people of God could focus upon the truths of God that he had given to Israel. These things that he speaks about in the Deuteronomy chapter 12. Can we apply these things to ourselves today? I think that we can. See, in one sense, it's my job to try to fire you up some on a Sunday morning, to encourage you. But, you know, if you had that job, and you came into a room and there were a hundred corpses lying there, you could jump up and down like the Baal prophets on Mount Carmel, and you could prod, you could shake, you could dump the bodies out on the floor, you could do all kinds of things with the corpses. But if they're corpses, they're not going to do too much. They're not going to respond. We need to be living, breathing human beings before the Lord. and stir ourselves up in terms of the good things of the Lord. The promises or the helpful insight here is that if you do that, God doesn't give us these exhortations to rejoice in the Lord. And again, I say rejoice. God does not give us that exhortation as a vanity, as a nothing program. Does God tell us anything? If it doesn't have a point to it, If there's not a vital or true outcome of it, I don't think so. And so I'm going to try to bring this exhortation. I'm going to keep reading that book and I'm going to keep drawing comparisons between what I see in scripture and what I see in terms of this guy's ideas. But I can see already that there's something in the Bible that I was not giving due attention to as much as I should have. I've preached on those topics before, I've seen some relevancy of them, but what the book claims is that there's an ongoing relevance to these things that will be helpful to you and your faith and will help you in worship, will help you to enhance your worship so that you won't be like a cadaver upon a cold stone of marble, but you'll be more of a living, breathing person in Israel. And if we are that way, if we behave that way, if we take that to heart, we have a better chance of maintaining our orthodoxy and our purity, our covenant purity before the Lord. Let's close in prayer. Our Father and our God, we pray that thou wouldst not leave us as so many cadavers, but that thou wouldst, like Ezekiel, that Thou wouldst have us look down upon the valley of dry bones and that Thou wouldst enhance us and put us together and make us living and breathing people who enjoy worshiping Thee. Thou art great, O Lord, Thou art altogether lovely. Help us to stir up our hearts and our minds to the greatness of Thy being and to the wonders of all that, that we might be more happy, that we might be stronger, that we might be better witnesses. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.