Episode Transcript
All right, it's 10 o'clock time to begin our Bible study this morning In our study of the beginning of King Josiah's reign We were in 2nd Kings chapter 21 in verse 2 and In order to gain more information about the first part of his reign we went to 2 Chronicles chapter 34.
So I would actually like you to turn there this morning, 2 Chronicles chapter 34, and if you're not familiar with the books of the Kings and the Chronicles, then what you should know about them is they're telling the same stories about the same events in time, but just like the Gospels in the New Testament, you get more details in some books of the Chronicles than you may in the Kings and vice versa.
So we sometimes go back and forth to fill in some of the gaps and that's what we're doing right now.
So I don't think we'll get back to 2 Kings 21 today, but if we do, I'll let you know.
But we're in 2 Chronicles.
Yeah, 22, right. 22 is where we were.
We're in 2 Chronicles 34 and last week we studied verse 3 and 4.
We didn't get out of verse 4.
So if you're there I want to go ahead and read verse 4 again.
And they break down the altars of Balaam and his presence and the images that were on high them.
He cut down and the groves and the carved images and the molten images he break in pieces and made dust of them and strode it upon the graves of them that had sacrificed unto them."
Now these were the actions of Josiah the King and those who did this work of tearing these altars down under his command.
And what we learned last week is that he sought the Lord when he was young.
He was eight years old when he was put on the throne of Judah.
It's incomprehensible to us.
We have politicians who act like eight-year-olds, but we haven't actually put an eight-year-old in the White House or in the Senate.
And we won't do that because of the way our Constitution is written, assuming we try to abide by that.
But Josiah had been on the throne for eight years, so that put him at about sixteen years of age, and it was then that he began to seek the Lord.
And so the evidence of the fact that he sought the Lord, his God, is starting to play out in verse 3 and 4 and many verses after that.
So we left off there in the middle of verse 4, it says, "And the images that were on high above them he cut down."
The altar was broken down and now the images high above them were cut down.
Now if you remember, these false religions also have altars like the Old Testament had an altar that God told Moses how to build and what it represented.
And these other religions that tried to copy the one true religion would also use altars and the religion of Baal had altars.
So the altar was down in front of whatever place of worship they had, whether it was a high place or a grove or in some sort of defiled temple.
And then there were images, and the Bible says the images were high above them.
So if you can picture an altar on the ground and an image high above that altar, that's what we're looking at right here.
Now let's think about that image on high and the altar below it.
This is a counterfeit straight from the devil and you'll see how in just a moment.
When those sacrifices were offered on the altar of Baal, the smoke rose up and it literally rose up to the image that was high above it.
Whatever that carved image or molten image was.
And Satan has always tried to counterfeit God's true religion.
You see it in the book of Exodus, or in the book of Revelation, but you see it in many other places and this is one of them.
Now keeping that image in mind of that altar and that image and that smoke from the sacrifice rising up to that image.
Let me give you God's commandment concerning the whole burnt offering in Exodus 29.
Listen to verse 18.
It's Exodus 29 18 if you're taking notes.
God said, "And thou shalt burn the whole ram upon the altar."
It is a burnt offering unto the Lord.
It is a sweet savor, an Now when that offering, that whole burnt offering, was placed upon the brazen altar in front of the tabernacle, or in front of the temple in these days, but it was the tabernacle in those days in Exodus.
When that sacrifice was placed on that altar and it was burned, that smoke went up.
It didn't go over there, it didn't go down, the smoke went up.
And when smoke is left alone, in other words, you don't act upon it with a force such as a wind or a vacuum, the smoke 100% of the time is going to go up.
And because it went up, the image there was that it would be smelled by God who is high above that altar.
Now we know God is omnipresent.
That means he's everywhere all the time.
There's nowhere that God is not and that he cannot see.
And so it wasn't necessary for God to wait until the actual smoke of a burnt offering reached where he was.
He could smell it before it was ever burned, in fact.
But the picture here is of God far above that brazen altar and far above mankind, far above the earth he created.
His worshippers are below him, not only in altitude, but in stature and also spiritually.
And the worshippers of Baal tried to mimic the true religion that God had given to the children of Israel in the Old Testament.
The children of Baal wanted an altar.
The children of Baal wanted a god with a little g who was high above them.
And so they made one and put that god above the altar in the form of an image.
They placed their man-made god above them.
And it's interesting because they actually made their man-made God.
They were actually above their man-made God.
So the religion is all backwards, isn't it?
But what it shows us is they were willing, and in fact found it necessary, to submit themselves to a deity of some kind.
It's that they just didn't want to submit themselves to the one true God.
And continuing here in our text in 2 Chronicles 34 verse 4, we read, "And the groves and the carved images and the molten images he break in pieces, and made dust of them."
Now this is what Manasseh should have done.
Manasseh was Josiah's father, or grandfather, and this is what he should have done in his day.
And it's what the people should have done already.
To make dust out of something is to reduce it to its smallest form, to grind it to powder, to dust.
You can't get any smaller than dust, at least not to the naked eye.
And to grind something to dust is also to make the item no longer recognizable and no longer useful.
There should not have been any images or groves or high places for Josiah to have to deal with in the first place.
So I want you to think about that.
Had he been placed on the throne and had Judah been right with God and carrying out their religion the way God said to do it, Josiah could have just taken them to higher and higher places.
Closer relationship with God.
Edifying the saints and all of that.
Well, he couldn't do that right now because the first thing he was having to do is to tear down that religion of Baal outwardly to take those images down and to grind them into powder.
And all the time and the materials and the effort that were spent building and maintaining and worshipping these images in these high places was wasted.
In God's eyes, and it should be so in the eyes of a Christian, all of that time was wasted.
That time amounted to absolutely nothing but vanity.
And so what Josiah did is similar to what we have to do as Bible teachers.
Some of the people to whom we minister, whether it be in here or online or through the website or across the world, through the books that our pastor's written to guide people back to the truth of the Bible.
Some of the people to whom we minister have submitted themselves to some form of deity other than the one true God.
And they do it in the form of various religions.
Whether it's Mormonism or people who pray to the saints or bow to statues of Buddha or add to the gospel or take away from the gospel, those worshippers have placed themselves under those doctrines.
They've held those doctrines up here and they're down here.
In fact, those doctrines are viewed, and they're bad doctrines, but those doctrines are viewed as high and lifted up by the people.
So even though they're not necessarily carved images that can be seen with the eyes, they're still the same, it's the same principle.
And all that time that those people spent being lured into this false religion, practicing it, being misled by it and misleading their followers.
All of that was wasted time.
And during all that time, those who learn and put their faith in God's word have gone from darkness to light.
Now they haven't wasted their time.
They've believed the gospel because there were believers in those days too.
And those believers, during the time that Josiah was having to tear down all of this evidence of this false religion, the believers had gone from darkness to light, they were on the milk of the word, and they were moving on to strong meat.
They were not wasting their time.
And then they began using the spiritual gifts that God gave them.
Now listen, that's true then and now.
Their kingdom rewards were abounding, increasing.
And they began ministering the same grace to others that they received.
That's not wasted time, that's profitable time.
That's not wasted effort.
That's effort that profits.
And that's what the people of Judah should have been doing when Manasseh cast those idols out of the city.
He didn't grind them to dust like his grandson did, but he cast them out.
The people should have said, "Hey, we're following suit with the king.
He cast them out, we're going to grind them to powder.
We don't want any part of that religion again.
We're going to begin growing in grace."
But instead, two generations of kings later, you have a boy king who's having to deal with the people and the idols that weren't sanctified.
The people weren't sanctified, the idols can't be sanctified.
The only thing you can do with them is destroy them.
But rather than simply following the path of God's truth, the people in Judah have a lot of baggage that has to be done away with.
That's what the king is spending a great amount of his time on here.
Their bad doctrine had to first be broken down.
Just like the carved image, it had to be grounded dust.
You know, if you take someone who is a Buddhist and you tell them the gospel and they say, Oh, that's, that's good.
Jesus sounds like a really nice man.
We'll just add him into our religion and go on.
Well, you can't, you can't be a believer like that.
Say, "Well, we believe Buddha can save us and Jesus can save us if Buddha can't handle the task or maybe they can work together."
The Buddhist has to tear down that religion and the gospel is how that happens.
The gospel is where he sees the truth and he realizes, "Hey, I've got a false religion over here.
I need to get rid of that.
I need to take that statue of that man who hadn't done sit-ups in a while and break it down and grind it to powder.
I think he also went back for seconds at the buffet as well.
I'll have to ask for another day.
You know, with God's word, starting at the beginning of the Bible, which is what our pastor is doing next door with the people in the Genesis to Jesus and now they're a good way through those lessons.
Starting with the beginning of the Bible, those doctrines that people hold precious, those false doctrines start melting away.
They start seeing right away, "Hey, wait a minute.
There is a creator.
There wasn't this big bang that happened and I've never seen an explosion bring anything into order and neither have you.
I've seen it blow things to bits.
Every car wreck I've ever worked resulted in destruction, not repair.
And these people are seeing these doctrines melt away.
In fact, in their hearts those doctrines are being ground to fine powder by the scripture, and that's how that happens.
And you know there are people in these classes that we have and in other similar classes that are taught, people in their middle years of life, sometimes in their older years of life that are just beginning to drink spiritual milk and I'm thankful for that.
I wish it weren't that way.
And I believe when those people become believers, that at some point they look back on their life and they say, "Boy, I wasted a lot of years."
And it's true.
But when you do that, be sure you thank God for the grace that he brought you to salvation in your later years.
Because many go on and they never do come to the knowledge of the Savior.
And that's a sad, sad ending.
But you know the people who begin to learn the first principles of the oracles of God, which is the basics, that's the milk of the word, it's a few years before they can eat the strong meat of the doctrine.
It's a few years before they can put the puzzle pieces together to see the complete picture that's formed by the Old Testament and the New Testament.
And none of the time spent building up these latent believers, you might call them, people who come to faith at later ages in life, none of that time is wasted.
It's precious time, but it should have taken place many years before that.
In the case of Judah, Josiah is having to start this group of people who should have all been on strong meat, at least the adults, the elders.
He's having to start them in kindergarten, breaking down their idols, taking their pacifier away from them, if you will.
He's having to grind those idols to dust.
He's having to show them things that they once thought were high above are actually to be placed under their feet.
And in their place, in the place of those things they once held high, they see, or at least Josiah tries to show them, that God himself is the one who's high above them.
Even higher than the place once held by their esteemed idols and their carved images, but he first had to make dust out of all those things that represented a false religion.
You might imagine a baseball bat in the hands of an all-star hitter.
He can hit that baseball a long way with a good bat, but if you took that bat and you ran it through a wood chipper, you ground it up and then through a blender, it'd be nothing more than fine sawdust, wouldn't it?
And even the best hitter could no longer use that bat to hit a baseball with because it's been reduced to dust.
And when we get through with a person, say in the Genesis to Jesus course, we don't want their former bad doctrines to have any power to lead these precious people astray again.
We don't want our new converts to be under anything other than God's truth.
Now what did Josiah do with this dust?
Look back in the text, it says, "and strode it upon the graves of them that had sacrificed unto them."
Now this is an indictment against the dead who were Baal worshippers.
You know, we've long had a customary saying in this country, and perhaps it's the case in others as well, don't speak ill of the dead.
When someone dies, suddenly people stop saying anything about them that's bad and the, with very few exceptions, the eulogy or the obituary is just a fine aggregate of all the things this person's ever done and you would think, wow, that's the best person who ever lived and then the next one you read says the same thing about them.
And I think AI is writing some of these obituaries by the way.
I don't think these are, they have some of the same adjectives in them, every one of them.
But that's for another day certainly.
Well apparently Josiah didn't get the memo about not speaking ill of the dead.
He wanted the people to know that all these dead Baal worshippers, all they got out of that religion was a bunch of strewn on their graves.
That's all it was worth.
That's all the good that Baal worship did them.
In fact, it did them much harm.
And not only were the altars of the images of Baal reduced to dust, but so will be the case of man today.
You know the very best that any earthly religion can do is to be ground to dust.
That's it.
That's all the value it has is to be ground to dust.
And the very best that an earthly man can do, I'm talking about the physical man, is to be reduced to dust as well.
I don't encourage you to go dig anyone's grave up.
Somebody who may have died hundreds of years ago before we had all this embalming and things like that, but you know what you'll find in there?
You'll find dust and some ragged clothes.
That's the best we can do.
Now let's look at verse 5, "And he burnt the bones of the priests upon their altars and cleansed Judah and Jerusalem."
He burnt their bones.
Do you know what that means?
They dug them up.
They dug those priests who taught the Baal worship.
They dug them up and whereas the dead worshippers, the followers, remained in their graves with dust strewn upon their graves, the priests were dug up and their bones were burned.
How else are you going to burn their bones if you don't dig their bones up?
And this tells us there were several bodies dug up from the grave and several piles of bones that were burned.
Now we would normally see this as very disrespectful, wouldn't we?
We're dishonorable against our customs as respectable people and I don't recommend that you go out to a cemetery and find some apostate preacher who died and dig his bones up and burn them.
That's certainly going to get you put in jail.
But let's think what this really shows.
These dead priests of Baal having their bones dug up and put on some sort of a pile and burned.
The priests in the graves all had two things in common.
One, they taught people Baal worship when they lived.
Two, they're dead.
Those are two things they had in common.
And even though there were some living priests, the ones in the graves were dead.
Even a Baptist and a Catholic could agree on that, right?
They're dead.
They're in a grave.
And speaking in an earthly and physical sense, when a person dies he's no longer accountable to mankind for what he's done.
If that dead person had murdered a hundred people but is now dead we can't file any charges against him for murder.
He's dead.
And the priest taught the people Baal worship which was a wicked thing to do.
In fact in some ways it's worse than murder because it leads many, many more souls into believing a lie which damns them to hell and to the lake of fire.
And with the priests being dead, it would be easy to conclude that man can no longer hold them accountable for the wicked religion they taught while they lived.
And that's true.
However, by digging up their bones and burning them on an altar, Josiah was showing that these priests, although they were dead, were still going to be held accountable for their sin.
They would be judged for their sin with fire.
Now him burning their bones wasn't the judgment, it was a picture of the judgment.
Just like the sin offering being burnt, that was a picture of Jesus Christ.
It didn't actually take away sin, that sin offering.
And so the burning of these bones didn't actually judge these priests of this false religion for what they had done in their lives.
It was a picture of it.
And so this brings us to a spiritual truth.
And that spiritual truth is that death does not spare a person from judgment when it comes to God.
2 Corinthians chapter 5 verses 8 through 10.
2 Corinthians 5 verses 8 through 10.
Now this is part of the Apostle Paul's letter to the Christians at Corinth.
He said, "We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body," that means dead, "and to be present with the Lord.
Wherefore we labor that whether present or absent we may be accepted of him.
For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad.
So you'll notice that this is for Christians.
This is not to determine who goes to the lake of fire and who goes to be with the Lord.
That's already been determined when you placed your faith in Jesus Christ and his finished work, then that was sealed.
So that's who he's writing to here.
But it says you'll, you notice that when we're absent from the body as Christians, we will appear before the judgment seat of Christ at some point after that.
So just because we die doesn't mean we say, "I don't have to go to the judgment seat of Christ."
And that's, again, that's not the white throne judgment where the unbeliever appears.
That is a different judgment.
Okay?
I don't want you to have any confusion about that.
This is the judgment seat of Christ where, just to summarize the teaching on it, the believer appears to receive rewards or to suffer loss of rewards.
There will be a judgment after we die.
Now what about for the unbeliever?
Does death allow them to escape a judgment?
Revelation 20 verses 11 through 13.
Revelation 20 verses 11 through 13.
And we refer to this passage fairly often but we don't always focus on this one aspect of So let me read it first.
John wrote, "And I saw a great white throne and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and heaven fled away, and there was found no place for them.
And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God, and the books were opened, and another book was opened, which is the book of life.
And the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.
And the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them, and they were judged every man according to his works."
So what I wanted you to notice in there is that the dead were judged.
Death may keep a man from being judged and punished by his fellow man, but death is only the gateway through which the unbeliever passes to be judged for his works and his works cannot take away sin.
So if that unbeliever thinks, "Well, I think I've done more good and bad.
I think I have a good chance at that white throne judgment of convincing God to let me in," he's wrong.
His sentence is already pronounced.
It's just a matter of receiving it and having it executed upon him.
And death is also the gateway through which the believer passes to be judged for his works, not for his sin, because that's already been taken away, but it's for his works to see whether he receives the rewards or the loss of reward.
And if you have any questions about that, if you say, "Man, I'm not sure I understand it, please let me know after church," and we'll straighten that out.
I think it's fairly for you if you've been through the Genesis to Jesus class and you've been with us for a while but I certainly don't want anybody to be confused and if you're online and it causes you confusion please message me and I'll be happy to help you understand that.
So the dead were judged.
Now think about this truth when you wonder why Josiah would dig up the bones of the dead priests and and burn their bones on the altar.
And look back in your text, it said, in the end of verse five, "And cleansed Judah and Jerusalem."
Now cleansed is from the same Hebrew word as the word purge up in verse three of this chapter.
If you just look up the page in verse three in the middle of it, it said, "And in the 12th year, "he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem."
That purge is the same word as the word cleansed in the Hebrew language.
And I want you to notice, based on what we've read so far even, and what we'll read after, is that this cleansing, this purging, did not involve sweeping off the sidewalks, edging the grass, wiping down the porcelain or any other kind of outward cleansing, although we see outwardly that these things, these idols were destroyed.
It doesn't involve dressing people in new clothes or putting fancy robes on a priest, that's not what cleanses or purges.
I went to a Catholic funeral a few years ago, I've been to a few of those, but this man who had passed away was the father of somebody who I used to work with, and this man was apparently a very faithful member of his Catholic church, so he got the Cadillac funeral.
He got no expenses spared.
There was a full mass and a homily, which we call a sermon or a message.
And they had communion, which they call the Eucharist because they believe that there is actually power given by the priest to that bread to turn it into the body of Jesus so people who eat it can be saved.
Total misunderstanding of the scriptures.
But they had all of that.
And prayers were said by the priest for the deceased man, hoping that these unclean prayers from unclean lips could get an unclean man into heaven.
That's what he was trying to do.
And afterward, there was a graveside service.
And while we were at the graveside, I observed the priest walk over to the hole that was going to be the grave for this man's casket after everything was over.
And the priest had a small container of what he calls holy water.
Now that water is not in the least bit holy.
In fact, it's not pure water at all.
It's got chlorine and fluoride and all kinds of additives in it and whatever else might be in it but certainly not holy and another reason it's not holy is because it comes from a cursed lake on a cursed earth.
Now the priest took that holy water and he sprinkled it in the hole where this man was going to be buried and he also had a sensor that had smoke coming out of it.
You know it's a little pole with a chain hanging off in a container and they put incense in there and that stuff will choke you to death when they walk through the church with it on their way out the door.
You can't hardly see and you try not to cough especially after COVID.
Everybody thinks you have COVID and so he had that out there and he was waving that over that hole where the man would be buried.
Now the purpose, the stated purpose of this Catholic priest sprinkling that water and waving that smoky censer over that gravesite was to purify it.
That's what he was trying to do, is purify the place where the man would be buried.
It was somehow to make that gravesite clean, which it can't do.
Spiritually, it was a further attempt, just in case all of those other things done at the church didn't take, it was a further attempt to make the dead man clean, which it also could not do.
And if the Catholic Church and all of its offshoots, they're not the only ones guilty of this, all of its offshoots would focus on cleansing that which is on the inside rather than majoring on that which is on the outside, then they would no longer lead their followers into condemnation.
Am I saying there are no Catholic Church members who are Christians?
Of course not.
It doesn't matter what you call yourself if you have put your faith in Jesus Christ as your Savior.
You trust what he did for you, not what you did for him, then you're a Christian.
But the Catholic doctrines and what they preach and practice render the crucified Christ as somehow inadequate for salvation.
Only he can purge the sinner and make him clean on the inside.
And the cleansing and the purging of Jerusalem and Judah was all about replacing the filthy, earthly things that were once worshipped with spiritual things.
Before all of this, the creature was worshipped more than the Creator.
And Josiah attempted to reverse this when he cleansed Jerusalem and Judah.
And it's the only thing that will cleanse the United States of America, Nigeria, the Philippines, Kenya, or anywhere else in this world.
You know, Jesus in his day on earth, he accused the Pharisees of going about this cleansing all wrong.
They wanted to make Jerusalem clean too.
They wanted to see people clean too.
But listen to what Jesus said in Matthew 23, verses 25 through 28.
Matthew 23, verses 25 through 28.
"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!
For you make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within the cup, but within they are full of extortion and excess.
Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also.
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!
For ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.
Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity."
Now I mentioned a moment ago that the Catholic Church is gone about trying to cleanse and purge its members in a fashion that is unscriptural.
Well let me tell you there are other churches that have done that as well just in a different way.
Yes, churches with the name Baptist on them have also made a mess of it too.
You know when a... and I've... listen, I've lived through all this.
I've even been one of these before.
So is your pastor.
But when a Baptist preacher gets up in the pulpit with a purpose, with his stated purpose of skinning people alive as it's put, he puts the cart before the horse.
He tells them, "I question your salvation if you don't come to every worship service and Sunday school and prayer meeting and visitation."
And he says, "You must not be saved if you don't tithe and witness and come down front during the invitation and all that."
And it's just an endless list.
And so what happens is these poor people walk away from church and they start questioning whether they're saved, not based on what Jesus did for them, but what they've done for Jesus.
So they start trying to clean the outside of the cup, thinking, "Wow, man, maybe I need to up my giving some.
And I need to, you know, every time I see somebody at the grocery store, I've got to remember to tell them about Jesus, or I'm not saved."
And then they commit to come to every service and to pray and to memorize scripture and to tithe and witness faithfully.
And then one day they forget to tell someone about Jesus when they had the opportunity.
So they think, "Oh, no, I must not be saved."
And this goes on and on and what that poor person doesn't realize is that it's the inside that needs to be clean.
And meanwhile, rather than preaching the gospel of Christ to his people and having everything spring from that, and rather than showing himself approved unto God, studying, being a workman that needs not to be ashamed, That type of pastor is already preparing his next sermon so he can step on some more toes and offend somebody who's coming short of his expectations.
Friends, we pastors and teachers need to clean the inside out by teaching God's truth.
And when the Bible is taught and received, The extortion and excess Jesus talked about is replaced with charity and moderation.
Dead men's bones are replaced with lively stones.
Hypocrisy and iniquity are replaced with integrity and righteousness.
And all these changes are the result of God's Spirit as He implants His words in our hearts and we believe it.
And going back to what Jesus said, He said, he didn't say don't make the outside clean at all, did he?
He said, "Cleanse first that which is within the cup and the platter, that the outside of them may be clean also."
Now see, we're not done yet.
So a person who is clean on the inside is one who has been saved through faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
And that clean person will find that God will teach him through his word.
And then as he makes the outside clean, as he says, "Hey, I'm going to church every Sunday.
I'm not missing God's Word and the assembly of God's people.
I'm making sure that my tithe gets in there every Sunday."
And all these things that we mentioned a moment ago, he'll find that that's a work of the Spirit, not the work of the flesh.
And it will be done, all of those things will be done because of the salvation that cleansed that person on the inside, rather than being done to bring salvation to that person by cleansing the outside.
Verse 6, "And so did he in the cities of Manasseh, and Ephraim, and Simeon, even unto Naphtali with their maddox round about."
Now this cleansing spread from Jerusalem to the cities, I don't know if you notice this, but to some of the cities that belong to other tribes.
Don't miss this.
Do you remember when the nation of Israel was divided?
Well you weren't there.
I know you don't remember it in that way, but in reading the scriptures back in Rehoboam's day after Solomon And you had a northern kingdom which has been called Israel and also Samaria and also Ephraim.
And then you had the southern kingdom Judah.
Well Judah consisted of the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin and all the other tribes were in the north.
And so what we have is a king who is ruling over Judah, the southern kingdom, why would he cleanse the cities of Israel, of the northern kingdom?
Why would he be involved in that at all?
Because that's what some of these cities are.
Let me take you back as we begin to close to 2 Kings chapter 17 verses 22 through 23.
Just write that down if you want to.
2 Kings 17, 22 through 23.
This is going back in time.
"For the children of Israel walked in all the sins of Jeroboam which he did, they departed not from them until the Lord removed Israel out of his sight as he had said by all his servants the prophets.
So Israel was carried away out of their own land to Assyria unto this day."
Alright, so what we learn from that is from that time until this time there was no Jewish king in Israel.
There was a king in Judah but there was not a Jewish king in Israel.
It was being ruled by Assyria.
And the children of Israel in those cities in Israel had been carried away to Assyria and they'd been replaced with people from Babylon and some of those other nations that were mentioned and remembering that that northern kingdom is also called Samaria.
So those Gentiles who came from Assyria also brought their idols.
I mean the people, the children of Israel had their idols but the Gentiles brought their idols and their false religions to Samaria or Israel.
So listen to this, now we have Josiah beginning to clean house starting in Jerusalem, then Judah, then Israel or Samaria as well.
"And you shall be witnesses unto me in Jerusalem, in Judea, and Samaria, and to the othermost parts of Do you see what's happening here?
He's starting in Jerusalem and he's working his way out.
And that's what the gospel of Jesus Christ does.
It starts in Jerusalem spiritually and it works its way out.
And that's what we ought to be doing right now.
All right, well, let's pray.
Father, thank you so much for the good attention of the people.
Lord, I pray that your truth would find a resting place in our hearts.
We'd meditate upon it.
It would build us up in the faith that we may be able to also teach our children, families and to be better witnesses for you in Kingdom work.
In Jesus' name, amen.
