Let us turn now to the scripture reading today, 2 Kings 18, 1-12. 2 Kings 18, 1-12. Now it came to pass in the third year of Hosea, the son of Elah, king of Israel, that Hezekiah, the son of Ahaz, king of Judah, began to reign. He was 25 years old when he became king, He reigned 29 years in Jerusalem. His mother's name was Abi, the daughter of Zechariah. And he did what was right in the sight of the Lord according to all that his father David had done. He removed the high places, broke the sacred pillars, cut down the wooden image and broken pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made. For until those days the children of Israel burned incense to it, and called it Nehushtan. He trusted in the Lord God of Israel, so that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor were there before him. For he held fast to the Lord, he did not depart from following him, but kept his commandments, which the Lord had commanded Moses. The Lord was with him, he prospered wherever he went, and he rebelled against the king of Assyria and did not serve him. He subdued the Philistines as far as Gaza and its territory from watchtower to fortified city. Now it came to pass in the fourth year of King Hezekiah, which was the seventh year of Hosea, the son of Elah, the king of Israel, that Shalmaneser, king of Assyria, came up against Samaria and besieged it. And at the end of three years, they took it. In the sixth year of Hezekiah, that is the ninth year of Hosea, king of Israel, Samaria was taken. Then the king of Assyria carried Israel away captive to Assyria and put them in Halah, and by the harbor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes, because they did not obey the voice of the Lord, their God, that transgressed His covenant and all that Moses, the servant of the Lord, had commanded. And they would neither hear nor do them." May the Lord bless this reading to our good understanding. Well, this morning, or this week, in terms of the sermon, I was thinking that I was going to deviate from this passage of the Book of Second Kings and look for some typical Reformation verse on either Sola Scriptura or justification by faith alone, some of these great doctrines of Reformation. But then I looked, I thought, well, you know, both Hezekiah and Josiah were great Reformation kings. I wonder, I knew that Hezekiah was coming up here, and so I thought, I'm going to look at that text and just see how that would work for a Reformation sermon. And the more I read it, the more I was just totally delighted in it, because as I looked at it, I just could kick off reasons here and there. All of them were so comparable to what our Reformed forefathers went through, and insights that they had. And I'll try to draw out those comparisons in the sermon this morning. as I preach through it. But I was really excited about it, and I'm really amazed sometimes by the things that you see when you ask a different set of questions of the text. And when I asked the question of the text about Reformation, and the thought of the Reformation that we had in the 1500s, I thought, wow, it's so amazing. Now, the first thing that I noticed was that Hezekiah, just kind of springs out of the mists. There were no antecedents for Hezekiah, except for the prophets that were prophesying. Isaiah was the main prophet, but also Hosea, and there were another one or two of the minor prophets that were prophesying during this era. But in terms of the people, in terms of the kings, he had no real good example that really encouraged him to go in this direction of reformation. Indeed, his father Ahaz, and it says in verse, in the first verse, I guess, I can't see where 2 begins, but in the first verse it says that Hezekiah was the son of Ahaz, a king of Judah. And when you research his father, His father was a real drudge. He got no sanctifying impulses from his father. His father toyed way too much with northern Israel. He had lots of bad ideas. And it's quite remarkable in verse three, in verse four, We'll be speaking about this a little bit more fully, but verse 4, it mentions that one of the first things that Hezekiah did was he removed the high places and broke the sacred pillars. And this is, if you look back at chapter 16, verse 3 through 4, this is one of the first things it says about his father Ahaz. His father Ahaz kept the high places. and the pillars that were there in Israel at this time. So here's the son who comes along, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, makes these reformations in the way that he exhorted the people of Israel. And if you've been reading through these various kings, almost every king that has preceded this portion, almost every king, it says, even the ones that did good, it will say, but they left the high places, and the pillars, the sheriffs, and that sort of thing, that were alive in that day. And the reason for this was that they would do good up to a certain point, but then they were not driven to root out all the evil that was in Israel. And we'll speak a little bit more of the high places in point three, but at this point the thing to notice is that Hezekiah just kind of came from nowhere. Now, we know that Isaiah the prophet was exhorting his father Ahaz, but without effect. Isaiah was prophesying at that time, but Ahaz was pretty much deaf to what Isaiah was saying. And so, I'm thinking, and I don't see in the Bible where it clearly indicates this, but I'm guessing that in the absence of any of his family and the family influences for the good, the most logical explanation is that Hezekiah that the Lord began to take the words of Isaiah, or maybe Hosea, that was preaching at that time, prophesying at that time, that the Lord took that and agitated his heart, so that almost out of nowhere, this idea or this sense for a reformation came. And of course, you know that one of the big things, Isaiah had exhorted Ahaz, his father, not to look for any worldly alliances for protection, but to go to the Lord. And so what did his father do? He went north to Assyria and made a treaty with Tigayath-Pileser, who was a sovereign at that time. And so there was no immediate context for this. Now when we turn to the Protestant Reformation, we see the same kind of thing. We see these men, like Wycliffe, 200 years or 150 years before Luther, we see Wycliffe and then Luther himself, it's like they came from nowhere. And so often today when I hear people being really defeatist, and they say, well, you know, we're going nowhere. The church is just stuck, it's just circling. We have no hope whatsoever. I'll point out to them that it was the same way in Europe in the 16th century, which is the 1500s. John Wycliffe had prophesied in the middle to late 1300s, but he had had quite an effect in northern England and Scotland, but not so much in England and in So when you look at Wycliffe, you have to say to yourself, well, here was this guy who was reading his Bible, and he just got more and more agitated about the things that he saw going on in the church. He saw more and more error. And the more that he compared the Bible with what the church was doing, the more agitated he got. But he had very little encouragement from other people at the time. Even until the end of his life, he was being persecuted by the kings. And they were pursuing him because he wanted to translate the Bible and wanted to spread the Bible all over the land. And he was pursued for that. So if you look for the effective cause Wycliffe's life or Martin Luther's life, you have to say it wasn't men. It was the Holy Spirit of God. And you get the same sense here with Hezekiah. You get the absence here of these preliminary or antecedent causes. And the only real explanation is the Lord moved upon his heart. Now, The second thing that I wanted to draw your attention to was the relationship between David. And we see in verse 3 of this text that this Reformation was referenced by the name of David. And you do not see that with any other kings at this time until Hezekiah. What does it say in verse 3? It says, "...and he did what was right in the sight of the Lord, according to all that his father David had done." And whenever you see David being cited like this, David had his own sins, but he repented of those as he went along. And David's heart was curiously and thoroughly drawn to the greater things, the higher things of Christ. And so, whenever his name is mentioned, his name is not mentioned casually like this. This is very significant when it mentions David's name. Now David was considered, he was said to be a man after God's own heart, And all the kings after David, King Saul was really the great failure. He was the initial king of Judah, well, of the whole of Israel, because it was united at that time. And so Saul was the first king, but he was not a spiritual king at all. David, when he was called to be king, remember, he was a kid in a sense, he was a much younger man. And so in terms of his brawn, he was not like King Saul, who was kind of a man's man. David was a man's man, but in a very docile, maybe, form. And yet he slew the giant, Goliath. He was a great soldier, but he was not a man who was just a man of brawn. And the significance of David was that he had a heart for God. And so when his name is brought up, it's always a signal to the reader that the king that's being compared to David was really significant, was one of the best kings of the Old Kingdom. And so here it does that with Hezekiah. And David also was a messianic. figure. You can figure this out or you can see this through the covenants that were made in the Old Testament. You know, the Creation Covenant or Adamic Covenant in the first couple chapters of the book of Genesis, and then there's the Noahic Covenant. Each of these covenants had deeply spiritual, covenantal, religious value to themselves. And so then you have the Noahic Covenant and And then you come to the Davidic Covenant, and the Davidic Covenant had to do with the kingdom, but even more poignantly, it had to do with the Messianic kingdom. It pointed to the idea that God would send one day a Messiah who would put together or build up a kingdom that would last forever. And so those are the kinds of things that were said about David. all the rest of the kings are called, in Judah especially, they were called the sons of David, and they have this connection with David, and David's got a connection both with the Word of God and the plans of God in the Old Testament, but also into the New Testament. And when you get to the New Testament, there is not a new covenant made until the Lord's Supper, where Jesus makes a new covenant, and he is the Messiah, and so his covenant is the Messianic covenant of the New Testament. So there's this connection between David and Jesus. Jesus and David. And that shouldn't be missed when you're reading the Bible. And so here we have it, and they compare Hezekiah, the son of Ahaz. Ahaz did all these things that were wrong, in his kingdom. But Hezekiah does things that are right, and he's linked to David as the great successful king of the Old Testament. Now the third thing to draw attention to here is the removal of the high places, and I've already mentioned this a little bit. Verse 4, he removed the high places and broke the sacred pillars, cut down the wooden image and broken pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the children of Israel burned incense to it. Now the problem with the high places, the problem with the high places is that they were places of synthesis between true religion, between the true religion, between the pure religion of Moses and the false religions of the day. Now we know that God had commanded Israel to worship in the tabernacle and then finally in the temple. So one of the great seductions of Israel's history was that the people would often set up these shrines upon these high places. And you know what a shrine is? You drive through Cincinnati, you can see these inverted bathtubs, sometimes half sunk in the ground, where they've got a statue of Mary in them or something like that. And then the people, I don't think most of the people out worshipping at their local bathtub, sunken bathtub, but it gives a good feeling to look out in the backyard and see this shrine. That was kind of the same idea of the high places. And there was a real variation between the seduction and the synthesis. Now, synthesis is a good thing sometimes in chemistry, isn't it? It's not a good thing in theology, because God has revealed the way of the Lord to us, and he doesn't want us to synthesize that way with the ways of the world. But that's what people do, and we have so many different, today, independent churches are very popular, and you have the same phenomenon going on back then. with these high places, because if you constructed a high place on your property, which is usually at the top of a hill, and we see how universal this was, because even here in Ohio, there's a high place made by the Native Americans just up 75, about 20 miles. I forget the name of it. But I see it every time we drive home, you know, it's one of the first things I notice, and I think to myself, I've never gone over there and visited that place. So I exhort myself, but I still haven't been there. And here we are, more than 15 years later, 14 years later. But this people, whether it was in ancient Palestine, or around ancient Israel, or whether it was in Africa, or Native America, people have the ideas about establishing a religion, about being spiritual. You'll talk to people today, and they'll say, well, I'm spiritual, but I don't follow, I don't go to church, or I don't follow the things that Christianity does. I have my own definitions of spirituality. That's what you should think of when you think of these high places. They were simply places where there was man-made religion. There were things that appealed to people, and so they create their own church. And that's what we're doing today in terms of so many of the independent churches. They're not linked to any of the great doctrines of the Reformation. Hopefully, at least implicitly they are, but they seem to take such great intrigue or such great excitement from doing their own thing. And very often what that amounts to is that there are as many popes in independency the pastors who are the rule of the roost, and people aren't so much concerned to find out what the Bible says, as they recline and feel safe in what their pastor says. Well, it's really neat to think of these high places in that light. Now, on that basis then, what we see is that Hezekiah, not only did he purify the worship or the worship in the central place, the temple, which a number of kings did. Not many, but a number did. But Hezekiah was interested in going the whole way, you see, of rooting out as much synthesis between Christ and the Antichrist as he could. He had a thirst, in the same way that Jesus set zeal for thy house hath consumed me," quoting from the Old Testament, from the Psalms. So Hezekiah had the same kind of zeal, and that's why he is featured here and applauded by the Scriptures in 2 Kings. Now it says also, this gives even a more polished or more refined view of the synthesis which is possible between the true and the false. It says that he broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made. Now you remember how the children of Israel were sinning, and they were involved in fornication and irreligion, both in terms of their passions and their minds, And God broke out against them in His wrath and killed thousands at that time. And when Moses prayed to God, what can I do? God said to him, can't make a serpent out of bronze. and put it on a staff and then hold it up. And he said, all who look upon the bronze serpent as it glimmers in the sunlight. You know, bronze looks like gold in a sense. It's not quite as bright or shimmery as gold, but it's an approximation of that, especially new bronze. And so the people of Israel that obeyed the Lord and looked unto the bronze serpent did not die. But the people disdained the word of God and said, I'm going to do my own thing. They did die. So it was a great tribulation at that time. And the bronze serpent, as it had been in the instruction of God himself, turned out to be a wonderful token of grace that God gave to the people. Now we find ourselves in the era of the second Kings, hundreds of years later. And now Hezekiah is applauded for breaking down or smashing the Bronze Serpent. Why would that be? Well, it was because the people of that day, the people of that era, had corrupted the Brown Serpent, they had brought a worship that was not scriptural to the Brown Serpent. God had raised up the Brown Serpent for a specific reason, that is to keep people from dying during this period of wrath, where wrath fell upon Israel. But that didn't mean, because God used something for good at one time, that didn't mean that he wanted Israel to incorporate the Brown Serpent into their religious duties or into their worship every week. But this is what had happened. People tend to, if God does something good, remember, and this is one of the things that the reformers had to deal with, was one of the great corruptions of the Reformation, or before the Reformation, was the Lord's Supper. And the Lord's Supper had been given to the church as a blessing and as a good thing, but the people had corrupted it. They had made it a substitute essentially for Christ himself. And they were trusting more in their operations of the Lord's Supper than in the things to which the Lord's Supper pointed. And so the parallels are just remarkable. People say, and Rome said to Luther, said, how can you criticize the mass? The mass was given to us by God. Are you not operating anti-Christ when you do this, when you have this apology against the mass? against the Lord's Supper? We can see in the Bible that Christ gave that to us. Well, He did! But it was not all that had been... all the things that had been added to it, by Rome, had corrupted it. And so Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and Knox, they attempted to do nothing more than Hezekiah did here on this set when the brown serpent was dashed to pieces, because it had become a corruption. The people had super-spiritualized it with their own definition of spirituality. And so we need to remember how we, as a human being, can corrupt anything that God gives us. God gave us the sacrament of baptism. But have we not corrupted that into kind of a substitute for salvation? The Jews would say that the Jews did that with circumcision. And the prophets would come and prophesy, and they would say to the prophets, are we not the sons of Abraham? They said that to Jesus. Are we not the sons of Abraham? Well, God gave us the sacrament of circumcision in the Old Testament and baptism in the New Testament, but with strict definitions. And when we deviate from those definitions and then add our own onto that, we corrupt these things so that they become things of wickedness, much as the bronze serpent had become. And so Hezekiah, because he was moved by the Spirit of God, He understood these things spiritually. He made discriminations that people were not making in that day. And as king, he was a great instrument for good because he helped with the purification of the church itself. He was an example of a great leader, we might say, a great leader of the executive branch of government, who, because of his spirituality and his understanding, led to the reformation of the church in that day. And it's wonderful when church leaders can lead to reformation of the civil sphere, or the executive sphere of government. It's also great when this is done by the executive sphere, or the civil sphere. And this is the position of the Westminster Confession, as it talks about civil leaders and church leaders. Yes, the church and state are separate, but they can both preach to each other, and they can both exhort each other, and they can both work for each other for good. And so this is what was done by Hezekiah. And it was wonderful, and it led to Reformation. The fifth thing that we see here is that Hezekiah was a man of the Word of God. Now it doesn't mention here the inscripturated Word, well it does, because it mentions Moses. It says in verse 4b, I'm sorry, in 5 and 6, it mentions that he was motivated purely by what God said. And it speaks of it that way first, and then it mentions the law of God, which is what God said, written down, it mentions that second. So we see verse four, five and six. He trusted in the Lord God of Israel, immediately, spiritually, so that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor were there before him. For he held fast to the Lord, Now what does it mean to hold fast to the Lord? He did not depart from following him, but kept his commandments, which the Lord had commanded Moses. And so there's this connection between the written word of God and God himself. And that was one of the great points of the Reformation. It was one of the great strengths of the Reformation. If you look at the three cardinal doctrines of the Reformation, it was sola scriptura, justification by faith, and the priesthood of all believers. And that first one, Sola Scriptura, the fact that Scripture alone, Luther, when he was contending with Rome, he found that they kept coming at him and coming at him and coming at him with problems and criticism and that sort of thing. And he finally said, here I stand, I can do no other, because I am founded, my thinking is founded upon the written Word of God. Where are we in our lives? How do we make our decisions? How do we set up the priorities of our lives? Do we have the Word of God as a higher order, a higher mechanism by which we judge the things we do? Or is that just one of the other sources of information that we have? Well, for Hezekiah, The Word of God was the straight thing, that was the thing that was the most important. And we see that when we look at the items of his Reformation, number six. For him, scripture or the Word of God was the key. Now if you look at number six, the details of this are fleshed out in 2 Chronicles 29. It's really 29 to 31, and so I'm not going to turn to that now exactly, but I've got them all listed out here. What did he do? What is behind when it says that he only did the commandments? What did he do? All of these things were commanded by God in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, and so this is what he did. The first thing he did in verse 3 of chapter 29 was to cleanse the temple. Now, Jesus cleansed the temple. But in Hezekiah's day, it was really a mess. It says that in the Holy of Holies, they had turned the Holy of Holy into kind of a joke room. It says that there was all kinds of dirt in there, and all kinds of just stuff that had been stored there and put there. So the first thing he did was he physically cleaned it out. He dusted it. He cleaned. He scrubbed. He had the Levites go in and do this. At this time, Israel's religion that we read about in Deuteronomy had been so corrupted that they weren't even concerned about the dirt and the grime. that was in these places in the temple. And so Hezekiah went and he had the Levites go in and he cleaned the temple in verse 3 and following. He revived the priesthood, verse 4 and following, in that passage. It even says there that the Levites took to his exhortations better than the Aaronic priesthood. You know, there are two parts to the priesthood, the Aaronic priesthood, the priests that come from Aaron, And then the Levites, the priests that come from Levi, and so it says that the Levitical priesthood had more of a heart for God than the Aaronic priesthood, which it should be, just the opposite. But Hezekiah, in verse 4 and following, for quite a long time, it tells of what he did to revive the priesthood. And he was just basically going over Deuteronomy, and Leviticus, and applying these things to what was going on in his day. And then he restored the temple worship. So in this day, even though Judah was following the Lord better than the ten tribes, the northern ten tribes were, yet Judah herself was very lax, and she was not holding worship as God had ordained in the books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus. the true sacrifice was not being done. Verse 20 and following. And so Hezekiah did all these things. And interestingly enough, in verse 30 of chapter 29, it even says, Well, I like verse 31 because it says, So the assembly brought in sacrifices and thank offerings, and as many as were of a willing heart brought burnt offerings. And the number of burnt offerings which the assembly brought was 70 bulls, 100 rams, 200 lambs. These were for the burnt offering to the Lord. And the consecrated things were 600 bulls and 3,000 sheep, but the priests were two The priests were too few, so they could not skim all the burnt offerings before the brethren and help them with the work. So the Levites helped, and the Aaronic priests helped that. I rejoice, though, in verse 30, in this terms of the revival of the worship of Israel, it says, verse 30, moreover, King Hezekiah and the leaders commanded the Levites to sing praise to the Lord with the words of David and of Asaph, the seer. So it identifies Asaph as a prophet, or a seer, And it speaks of the words of David, the Psalms of David. And you know, when you turn to the Psalter, most of the Psalms are either Davidic or from Asaph. And so it says they sang praises with gladness, and they bowed their heads in worship. So here we are in our denomination. We make a big thing of psalm singing. And that was part of the Reformation, or part of the revival of Hezekiah and his reign. And then there was a revival of the Passover. This is chapter 30 and following. And then that led to the prosperity of the society. 29, say 2936, and then also 3121. 2936 says, so the service So the service of the house of the Lord was set in order that Hezekiah and all the people rejoiced that God had prepared the people since the events took place so suddenly. So this Reformation took place suddenly, but the people were glad. And then at the end of chapter 31, it has another that kind of looks at the whole thing and the effect, and it says, this is 3121, it says, and in every work that he began in the service of the house of the Lord, in the law and in the commandment to seek his God, he did it with all his heart, so he prospered. And so Israel prospered at that day, at that time. So this reformation led to all kinds of prosperity in the land. And that's exactly what you see. in the Reformation of the 1500s, 1530, 1517, and thereafter. Germany was blessed through Luther's Reformation. The Northern Europe was blessed through all of those people that came to Luther for lessons and for understanding. And I've talked before about how almost every reformer that worked in the Reformation of Scotland almost every reformer had some sort of connection, some sort of communication with Luther there in Germany. If you go to St. Andrews and you see some of the martyr sites there, and you look at, for example, one of the big ones is the site where George Wishart was burned at the stake. And when you go and examine the life of Jordan Wisher, you find out he was a Greek scholar, and he went to Germany to study with Luther, and then came back to Scotland with Luther's gospel there. And so we see this connection between Luther and Calvin and Zwingli, all these men, kind of suddenly were drawn together to the scriptures and to do things in a new scriptural way, the same way that we see with Hezekiah. Now, brothers and sisters, we are people of this tradition, but people today are not very excited about the Reformation. They're not really excited. They don't see the significance of these things. Just like the people of Hezekiah's day before Hezekiah, They didn't see the significance of purifying the high places, of destroying the high places, of destroying the synthesis between truth and falsity, Christ and Antichrist. They just didn't think, they didn't really value it, they didn't esteem it. Yeah, they'd say, you know, in Old Testament terms, they'd say, oh yeah, I'm all in favor of Christ, but then they'd also be in favor of Antichrist. And what does this say about us? when we synthesize these two things. Does it not demean Christ? Does it not undermine our understanding of true faith in Christ? Does it not make us liars? When we say, well, I'm a Christian. Well, I'm a Christian, but I don't really believe in the Sabbath. You make these adjustments. You build a high place, and then you glorify in it for yourself, whatever the doctrines are, whatever the synthesis is that you've made between Christ and Antichrist. That's why each year we hold these services in honor of our Reformed forefathers. not because we want to venerate Calvin or Luther or Knox or Zwingli, not because we want to venerate men, but because we want to do what they did. We want to be heart sensitive to the things of the Lord and put up walls against the ways of the world and invest ourselves in the mother load, the gold mother load. of the gospel of Christ and the gospel of his kingdom as it comes to us from the scriptures. So let us rejoice that we are here today in a reformed church. Let us hold up the high commitments that we have as part of that church, or this church, and let us be even more determined to fight off the synthesis that we ourselves are so tempted to make at every point in our lives. Our Father and our God, we pray, we rejoice at the fact that little Hezekiah, when he was a child, the Bible says that Ahaz put his son through the fires of paganism, like the Canaanites did and like the Moabites did. And it doesn't say for sure that this was Hezekiah, but Hezekiah is the only son of Ahaz that's mentioned. And so it sounds like Hezekiah came from this place where he was almost killed by these pagan practices to the day when he lived for Jehovah God, for the truth of Moses, the gospel of the Old Testament. He lived for that to such a degree that they compared him his affections to David, King David, the blessed king, the blessed king that forecast and manifested the idea of the messianic kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ. Bless us in this, O Lord, and help us to be more fervent in our place today.