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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.
Reformation
Series 2 Kings
| Sermon ID | 102924417215468 |
| Duration | 40:17 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday Service |
| Bible Text | 2 Kings 18:1-12 |
| Language | English |
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