Episode Transcript
We are in 2 Kings chapter 23 and verse 8.
2 Kings chapter 23 and verse 8 will be our new text today.
We'll give you a chance to turn there.
Ann and Nelda thought they were going to get to talk to my wife this morning.
And it was 9.
58, I said she hadn't made it past Alice.
There's no way it's going to happen.
They made it happen, though.
They sure did.
I'm pretty amazed.
I love seeing that fellowship.
That's wonderful.
King Josiah removed the Sodomites.
He removed the houses where they lived.
And therefore, the place where the women made houses for the shrines of Asherah, and we covered all that last week.
So today we continue looking at Josiah's cleansing of Jerusalem and Judah, Jerusalem being the capital city of Judah.
And Josiah in our last few verses dealt with the places and the people of perversion.
And now he's going to deal with the priests of perversion.
So let's go to verse 8 here in 2 Kings chapter 23.
And he brought all the priests out of the cities of Judah. and defiled the high places where the priests had burnt incense from Giba to Beersheba and break down the high places of the gates that were in the entering in of the gate of Joshua the governor of the city.
Which were on a man's left hand at the gate of the city.
So let's look first At this statement that he brought all the priests out of the cities of Judah And defiled the high places where the priests had burned incense from Giba to Beersheba.
I wonder if they had a country song with those two towns' names in there because they rhyme.
You just never know, do you?
But.
That's possibly for another study.
How ashamed these priests should have been.
For Josiah to remove them from their office.
And it says that he defiled their high places.
That means he polluted them.
That's kind of ironic, isn't it?
These high places are already defiled.
And so what you're looking at is This defiling, this polluting of these high places from the priest's point of view.
Because to these priests, these high places were wonderful.
They were holy shrines and all of that.
And to Josiah they weren't.
So he made these places which were unclean unclean.
He made them unclean in the sight of those priests.
And those high places had been esteemed as clean by the unclean priests.
Who also esteemed themselves to be clean.
Isn't that something, the distortion that they had about what they were doing and who they were?
They thought they were clean and they thought they were Burning incense in a clean place.
And that cleansing that Josiah did was something that must have seemed unclean to these unbelieving priests Now I'll tell you, and you know this perhaps by experience, but certainly by reading your Bible.
Is that doing the Lord's work will never be popular with the kingdom of darkness?
Never will.
And one of the mistakes that the churches have made over the years is trying to make friends with the kingdom of darkness.
Now, they certainly don't think of it that way.
If you were to ask a priest or a pastor, an elder somewhere at one of these different churches, do you in your congregation try to make friends with the kingdom of darkness?
And they'd say, oh, no, no, no.
But then, when you examine some of the things they do in the name of the Lord Jesus, things that he did not command in his word, then you see, in fact, that they are.
Matthew chapter 12, verses 22 through 24.
Matthew 12, verses 22 through 24.
Then was brought unto him one possessed with a devil, blind and dumb, and he healed him, that's Jesus, insomuch that the blind and dumb both spake and saw.
Now that's the work of the Lord, isn't it?
Jesus just did his work, the work of the Lord.
And then the verses continue.
And all the people were amazed and said, Is not this the Son of David?
But when the Pharisees heard it, now who are the Pharisees?
They're the kingdom of darkness.
They said, This fellow doth not cast out devils but by Beelzebub, the prince of devils.
We might say it this way today.
The Pharisees said, Jesus.
Yes, he cast out devils, but he did it by the prince of devils.
He did it by the power of the prince of devils.
And so you could be sure that these wicked people who were in Judah had the same attitude.
That what Josiah was doing was not pleasing to them.
He was reform or trying to reform Judah and Jerusalem.
And so they weren't pleased with it when Jesus did it.
The Pharisees accused him of using the power of the devil to do it.
They're not pleased in our day.
They weren't pleased in Josiah's day.
And so, something else the church has to remember: not only don't make friends with the kingdom of darkness, but keep on doing what God called us to do, regardless of who doesn't like it.
God never, when Jesus gave the great commission, he said to go ye into all the world.
Now that sums it up right there, everywhere.
Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.
Go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son of the Holy Ghost.
So he said All of you go to all of the world and do it the same way everywhere.
Regardless of where you are, regardless of whether the people receive it or not, this is the message you take to them.
And Josiah could not allow these false priests to remain in their positions.
They were disqualified.
First of all, they were unbelievers.
And secondly, trying to rehabilitate them while they were in office was nothing more than a fool's errand.
I've seen and known pastors who fell into sin.
And I mean, it was no secret.
And they many of them remained in the pulpit in spite of their gross sin being known to others.
And they in some cases, and you perhaps you read the newspaper about all it seemed like almost every week For a while, a preacher was falling in Dallas.
And I don't mean falling down the steps.
I mean fell in sin.
You know, whether it's adultery or even worse crimes against children being discovered.
All of that.
And some of these pastors and their congregations try to leave the man in the pulpit and rehabilitate him while he's pastoring.
Now, listen, God can fix anyone.
He can fix anyone.
However, a pastor who is in the clutches of adultery or pornography, theft, drug, alcohol abuse, child abuse, cannot be effective as a pastor.
He just cannot.
He's disqualified from the office.
It doesn't mean he's disqualified from being a Christian.
We're all qualified to be Christians because we're sinners.
That's your qualification, is you're a sinner who needs to be saved.
But he can't be a pastor.
And in these days that we're reading about a priest who was steeped in Baal worship.
Burning incense in the groves and generally making a mess out of the house of the Lord was not fit to continue to serve in that capacity.
In Leviticus chapter 21, Leviticus 21, and this is where these people needed to go to understand that what Josiah was doing was not done on a whim.
He had scriptural basis for doing it.
In Leviticus 21, God tells the priests that they were not to defile themselves.
By having contact with a dead body other than their near kinsman.
But listen to the rules for the high priest.
When it came to defiling themselves by having contact with a dead body.
And it's found in verses 10 through 12.
So that's Leviticus 21.
Verses 10 through 12.
It says, And he that is the high priest among his brethren, upon whose head the anointing oil was poured. and that is consecrated to put on the garments, shall not uncover his head, nor rend his clothes, neither shall he go into any dead body.
Nor defile himself for his father or for his mother.
Neither shall he go out of the sanctuary, nor profane the sanctuary of his God.
That's the house of the Lord.
For the crown of the anointing oil of his God is upon him.
I am the Lord.
Now imagine that.
If you were the high priest and your mother died.
You could not go into the room where her dead body was.
You couldn't have any contact with her dead body whatsoever.
You couldn't tear your clothes as many of them did when they were grieving.
You couldn't uncover your head as many would in their sorrow.
How is it that churches Allow the pastor of their congregation to live like the world and stay in the pulpit.
And it happens all over the world.
If God wouldn't even allow the high priest to be defiled or made unclean by touching his mother's dead body.
Giving her a kiss on the forehead.
You know, there are all kinds of customs that people have to give themselves closure at the time of death.
You know, for your mother or dad, or God forbid, a child, then if that wasn't okay for a priest to do.
Why would a pastor think it's okay for him to defile himself with the uncleanness of this world and stay in the pulpit?
Listen to what the Apostle Paul wrote in 1 Timothy chapter 3 Verses 1 through 7, 1 Timothy chapter 3, verses 1 through 7, concerning a bishop, which is just another word for overseer.
We don't call our pastor Bishop Fulton.
He's Pastor Fult.
It's the same thing.
It's an overseer.
That's what a pastor is.
And here's what that passage says.
This is a true saying.
If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work.
A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife.
Vigilant, sober, of good behavior, given to hospitality, apt to teach, not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre, but patient, not a brawler, not covetous.
One that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity.
For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?
Not a novice.
Being lift up with pride, he fall into the condemnation of the devil.
Moreover, he must have a good report of them which are without, lest he fall into the reproach and the snare of the devil.
Now, there it is.
Now, let's suppose Timothy.
Who was the pastor at the church at Ephesus had decided he was going to be like Solomon.
After all, Solomon was a great king, a wise king, very wealthy, very influential.
And he was going to be like Solomon and have hundreds of wives.
He decided he hadn't caught his limit.
I caught my limit.
One is the limit, by the way.
And he decided, let's say he decided he was going to find a way to profit from his role as a pastor.
By charging people in exchange for praying for them.
I mean, he'd get his regular salary, but then he had this little side ministry here, side ministry.
I'll pray for you extra if you'll bring money.
Suppose Timothy were to do something like that.
And suppose he had a horrible temper and was known for striking anyone who disagreed with his preaching.
Well, had that been the case, the Christians at Ephesus would have been wrong to accept that behavior.
Leave him in the pulpit and try to help him cut down the size of his harem.
Or to stop extorting church members so much and to be less violent, but we still want you in the pulpit preaching.
Now that wouldn't work, would it?
Timothy would need to be removed and replaced with a qualified pastor.
So the church would not be defiled.
So the church would grow the way the Lord wants it to grow.
And so the pastor in the church would not fall into reproach.
So the church would have a good report of them outside the church.
That's what it means.
Of them without, it's the people outside.
What do they think about Central Baptist Church?
Is the worst thing they can say?
Well, all they do is talk about the Bible in there.
Well, praise God.
I don't know what people say about this church.
I'm really not concerned as long as they know that we do preach the Bible here.
So if they love God's Word, they'll come.
And if they either don't love God's Word or don't love the way we teach it, then they can go somewhere else.
But the Christians at Ephesus wouldn't have put up with that.
And so when God or when the Apostle Paul charged Timothy About all these things, he was telling not just Timothy, but telling everyone who's a pastor.
This is your standard right here.
You want to be a pastor?
That's a good calling.
That's a good thing, he said.
However, this is your standard.
These are the rules for you to be an effective pastor.
And they're not unreasonable, are they?
None of them are unreasonable.
In fact, every Christian would do well to say, well, I want to do that too.
Doesn't make it mean you're going to be a pastor any more than. anything else.
But you you've you've got to take what God's word says, and that's the standard, and that's what it was for the priests.
And yet they'd moved so far from that.
And you know why?
Because the people tolerated it.
As we've studied before.
So, in ridding the Lord's house of these defiled priests, Joshua was ensuring, or excuse me, Josiah, Josiah was ensuring that both the Jews and the Gentiles, those outside, Would respect the work and the workers of the house of the Lord.
Even if they didn't agree with them, they wouldn't have anything bad to say about them.
And most of all, when Josiah cleaned house like this, the Lord would approve Of the priests he put in there and the work they did, because he would put the right ones in there.
And not only did Josiah remove the priests, but look back in your text, he also Defiled the high places where the priests had burned incense from Giba to Beersheba.
You know, the Lord foresaw.
That the children of Israel would have high places.
He already knew what they were going to do.
He foresaw that, well, before the foundations of the world, he always knew it, but he tells us about it back in Leviticus chapter 26.
Leviticus 26, verses 30 through 31.
Now they didn't have any high places when he gave this commandment.
But he knew they would, and so he said, and I will destroy your high places.
Now they were probably thinking, Lord, what do you mean, our high places?
Oh, believe me, you're going to have them.
If not you, it'll be the next generation or the next generation, but there will be high plac He said, and I will destroy your high places and cut down your images and cast your carcasses upon the carcasses of your idols. and my soul shall abhor you, and I will make your cities waste, and bring your sanctuaries unto desolation, and I will not smell the savour of your sweet odours.
So Josiah is actually fulfilling this prophecy in the near term.
This is if you've not been exposed to that theological Teaching, and that is in prophecy, there's a near-term fulfillment and a far-term fulfillment.
One that you may see right away or see just in a few years.
And one that's yet to come.
It's down the road.
It may even have a spiritual component to it.
But Josiah is fulfilling this prophecy that was given.
Back in Leviticus 26, because it is one, God said, I'll tear your high places down and do all these things.
So Joshua's doing exactly that.
But Jesus will fulfill it in the long term.
What Josiah did was confined to an earthly judgment.
What Jesus will do will be a spiritual and earthly judgment.
He's doing the whole thing.
And when he does it, it'll be a complete judgment.
We know because we're here in the Bible and we have a whole lot more Bible left that what Josiah does is going to be undone.
And done again and undone.
And it's Josiah's not going to be able to completely judge these priests, because they'll just be replaced by more after he dies.
He can tear down these high places and these groves, and somebody will build them right back up when he goes off the scene.
But that won't happen when Jesus does it, because his judgment is going to be complete.
Josiah can remove the priests of darkness only temporarily.
But Jesus will do it permanently.
In fact, Ezekiel prophesies of that in Ezekiel 6, verse 3.
Ezekiel 6, verse 3, where he tells Ezekiel, and say, ye mountains of Israel.
Hear the word of the Lord God.
Thus saith the Lord God to the mountains and to the hills, to the rivers and to the valleys.
Behold!
I, even I, will bring a sword upon you, and I will destroy your high places.
The high places in our text are where the wickedness took place.
And they represented the spiritual high places that we see mentioned all the way over in Ephesians chapter six.
Verse twelve Ephesians six, verse twelve, where he wrote, For we wrestle not against flesh and blood.
But against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness, where?
In high places.
Spiritual wickedness in high places.
Now, those high places or celestial places are above us.
However, don't take that to mean that there is evil in the third heaven where God, in the presence of the Lord.
That's not the case.
When Lucifer sinned and was cast down, it was because he had committed wickedness in the highest place.
And he and his followers were cast down from that high place.
2 Peter chapter 3 and verse 12.
2 Peter chapter 3 and verse 12, speaking of the manner of living that Christians ought to have.
And speaking of that in terms of us knowing the day of the Lord will come He wrote, looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens Being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat.
Now, that's not the third heaven being destroyed, that's the abode of God.
That's never going to be destroyed.
But here you have a literal destruction of the heavens, which obviously would not include the third heaven.
And you have the destruction of the elements, which are the rudiments, the basic things from which all things are made.
But the completion of the destruction of this wickedness in high places is told to us in Revelation chapter 20.
Revelation 20 and verse 10 And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone Where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night forever and ever.
And then, if you go down to verse 14 in the same chapter.
And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire.
This is the second death.
Now, although Josiah couldn't do all of that, he couldn't do any of that.
He was a representation of the one who will.
But Josiah continued his cleansing of Judah.
If you look back, 2 Kings 23, verse 8, it says, And break down the high places of the gates that were in the entering in of the gate of Joshua the governor of the city.
Which were on a man's left hand at the gate of the city.
You may say, Well, I've heard of Joshua.
Well, it's not the same Joshua.
There are a lot of Joshuas in the Bible.
It's like there are a lot of people named Earl in Maybank, right?
I don't know how many Earls there are here, but there's got to be quite a few.
But this Joshua was A governor there in Judah.
And so Josiah wasn't done taking out these high places just because he took out the high priest.
And their high places.
Now he turns to a government official and his high places.
And his high places were by his gate.
If a country is going to be clean, the church needs to be clean, and the government needs to be clean.
World governments are so deeply infected with corruption that the only thing to be done to them is for the Lord to break down their high places too.
If you think for a moment that Putin and Donald Trump and Zielinski meeting in a trilateral conference on an airbase somewhere is going to solve the problems over there, You're mistaken.
It's not.
Oh, we can have temporary ceasefires and agreements and accords and covenants.
What happens to every one of them?
They get broken.
So, what happens when man makes a covenant?
That's why the contracts are longer.
That's why the contracts are in finer print than they were before, so you really can't read them.
But until the Lord takes down the high places of all these governments.
The infected, the corruption that's infected them will continue.
And while judgment begins at the house of the Lord, the Bible says, listen to what Peter wrote.
In 1 Peter 4, verses 17 through 18.
1 Peter 4, verses 17 through 18.
He said, For the time has come that judgment must begin at the house of God.
Now that's what Josiah did.
He went to the house of God and he said, Get that stuff out of here and get these men out of here.
Get these sodomites and their place away from here.
We're going to tear that thing down.
We're removing them.
And these women who've been weaving these shrines for Asherah, that's gone.
Judgment began at the house of God.
And he said, if.
And if it first begin at us, what shall be the end of them that obey not the gospel of God?
And if the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?
That is, the unsaved sinner So, yes, the house of the Lord was the beginning of Josiah's judgment, but the high places of the governor of the gates of the city would not be spared.
Josiah didn't stop and say, Well, that's good enough.
Let's just work on the house of the Lord and everything else can keep running.
No, government officials also need to be removed when they're corru Just like a pastor should be removed when he's corrupt.
Just like a sheriff or a police chief should be removed when he or she is corrupt.
And this governor's name was Joshua, which means Jehovah is salvation.
Now, how ironic is that?
A man whose name was the same as Joshua, who led the children of Israel into the promised land.
Led them to victory in Jericho and was a mighty man of God.
Governor Joshua, on the other hand, was a poser.
And while he carried the name of Jehovah, literally, he walked according to the course of this world.
2 Timothy chapter 2, verse 19.
2 Timothy chapter 2, verse 19 Nevertheless, the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal.
The Lord knoweth them that are his.
And let everyone that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity.
Now, Governor Joshua wanted it both ways.
I'm sure that he was proud in the flesh, excuse me, that he carried the name of Jehovah.
I'm sure when somebody called him Joshua, he said, You know what that means, don't you?
That means Jehovah is salvation.
That's my name.
And yet, he was too proud to submit himself to the commandments of the Lord.
He was even too proud to go to the house of the Lord, as bad a shape as it was in.
He was too proud to go to the house of the Lord and worship with the false worshipers there.
He was too proud to go to other people's high places, so he had his own.
Governor Joshua just had church at his gate.
In his way.
He didn't need organized religion.
I've heard people say that organized religion is the real problem.
And that couldn't be further from the truth.
The real problem is disorganized religion.
God is a God of order and organization, and those really go hand in hand.
And you cannot escape this fact when you read of the exacting, tedious detail that he gave Moses.
Concerning the building of the tabernacle, the making of the priests' clothes, the ordinances, the law, and all that pertain to those things.
They were very exact.
And after writing to the Corinthians about their sinful practices in taking the Lord's Supper.
The Apostle Paul wrote this at the end of the chapter.
It's found in 1 Corinthians 11.
Verse 34B.
Little B.
1 Corinthians 11, verse 34B.
That's the second half of the verse.
Where he wrote, and the rest will I set in order when I come.
I'll organize it when I come, I'll set it in order.
When Paul wrote to that same church about the errors they committed in speaking in tongues, He wrote this at the end of the chapter.
It's 1 Corinthians 14:40.
1 Corinthians 14:40.
He said, and the rest will I set in order when I come.
Same thing he said about the Lord's Supper.
And the Greek word translated order means to arrange.
To arrange something, you have to organize it, don't you?
When Paul wrote to Titus, who was the pastor in Crete.
About ordaining elders, Paul was again concerned with order, with organization.
And he wrote in Titus 1:5, For this cause I left thee in Crete That thou shouldest set in order the things that are wanting or lacking, and ordain elders in every city as I had appointed thee.
Order is very important in the church.
Organized religion is nothing more and nothing less than following God's Word when it comes to practicing our faith.
That's what it is.
Organized religion does not mean having this association with all these administrators taking up About 45% of the money that the churches send.
That was one of the knocks that I had on the Southern Baptist, Southern Baptist Convention and Southern Baptist churches. is I looked at the pie.
You know, you've seen those where it tells you what percentage of the money is spent. 45% went to administration.
I want 100% of my giving to missions to go to the missionary on the field and ours when we send money to Brother Wisdom or we send money to Brother Candela, it's going straight to them.
We don't route it through a middleman at all.
But those organizations, that's not organized religion.
That's a bureaucracy that Hinders, in many cases, the work of the church.
And I won't go into everything about all that.
There's some.
There's some people I love very much who are part of those churches.
And my papa, the greatest Christian I ever knew, he was a Southern Baptist preacher.
So he would probably.
Set me down and say, Now, sonny boy, you don't know everything.
But organized religion is that's not what that is.
And now, there are a few reasons that people say they don't like organized religion.
I'm talking about order.
In the church.
Number one, they've never been a part of organized religion, only disorganized religion.
And they thought it was organized.
Maybe they grew up in a church where the preacher just hollered and screamed the whole time.
And he may have waved his Bible around and thumped it and slammed it on the edge of the pulpit, but he rarely taught it.
They learned that what the pastor said was right and wrong was what was right and wrong.
And that's what they went with until he changed his mind, and they'd go with whatever he changed over to.
And they grew up physically taking a Bible to church, but they were never spiritually taking that Bible home with them.
Took the book to church, brought the book home, knew no more about it when they left than when they arrived.
A second reason that people say, well, I don't like organized religion.
Is they just don't want to make the commitment to go to church with the saints.
To them, organized religion means I've got to go on Sundays and I've got to go on Wednesdays and I've got to do this and do that.
We've never made anybody come here since I've been here.
We just opened the doors, and if you want to come, you come on.
If you don't, you stay home, and that's between you and the Lord.
And we're going to talk about you.
We are going to preach about you.
But we're doing it in love.
You know why?
Because we want you to come.
We want you to listen.
And if you're online and you say, well, you know, we can't be there, you can be in front of that computer, can't you?
Don't tell me that the iPad doesn't have a charge.
You charge that thing.
You fill your car up with gas, you can charge your iPad and watch online and be fed right where you are.
And so you have people who they say, well, you know, I like my Sundays free.
So they don't want to commit one day out of seven to dressing up and sitting in the pews and they think about all the fun they're missing outside.
And I doubt many of those people that do that are Christians, but I know there probably some are.
They just have kind of a skewed view of the church.
And it could be because they grew up in a disorganized religion.
A third reason people say they don't like organized religion Is they were once a part of it, and they may have spent time at a church that taught the Bible.
Had a godly pastor and had spiritually mature members.
Now, that's a good fix, right there.
But somewhere along the way, they got offended.
Someone said something mean to them, or maybe one of their family members.
Somebody gossiped about them.
The preacher preached on something with which they disagreed, and they decided to die on that hill and leave.
And some of them go somewhere else for a while, and then they just quit going.
And they reason within themselves that Organized religion just was unhealthy for them.
It just wasn't a good fit.
So they just decided to have their own worship at home, away from all these people, all these hypocrites, they may say.
And really what they're doing is they're taking themselves away from the saints and away from solid Bible teaching, and that is so sad.
And I know people like that, and I love them, and I wish to see them again.
But you know Governor Joshua here was not a fan of organized religion.
He didn't like the religion that God gave to Moses.
He was in the same club as these wicked priests.
And after all, what could those priests say?
What if one of the priests would have sent a chariot over to Joshua's house and saying, Hey, we We missed you at Sunday go to meeting.
You weren't there.
Well, the Sabbath in this case.
We missed you at the annual sacrifice to Baal.
You weren't there.
They couldn't really say much to him about not coming to their so-called church because they too were practicing a disorganized religion, one that God had not instituted.
I was asked the other day by somebody, not here, how many religions there are in the world.
And I thought, well, you must think an awful lot of me.
I've accused some of the people I work with of thinking I'm their Google when it comes to the law.
I said, you can look that up just as easily as I can.
But I said, Well, I suppose there are over 2,000 church denominations in the world, but there are really only two religions, if you're asking.
There's the religion that organized and there's the one that's disorganized.
There's the one that God gave, and then there's the one that man came up with.
And the one that God organized is the one Satan tries to disorganize.
Because he took God's organized religion and he disorganized it, and Judah and her priests had done the same thing.
Jerusalem and her governor, Joshua, had done the same thing.
And after this overthrow of the perverted priests and their high places.
And the perverted governor in his high place, here was the response from the priest of those high places Now remember, they've had a knot jerked in their tail.
They've been thrown out of the house of the Lord.
Look in verse 9.
Where it says, Nevertheless, the priests of the high places came not up to the altar of the Lord in Jerusalem.
And next week, we'll break that down and see what all that entails.
Let's pray.
Father, thank you for your word.
Thank you for the people who love your word. and it's a pleasure to teach them.
And we ask now that you be with us during the next hour, that what we do would be pleasing to you.
And Father, we thank you for the religion you organized in your word, for the gospel which is Our hope, it's our life, it's our salvation, and it's organized.
And I pray that if there's one here today who doesn't believe the gospel, That they would be convinced as your Spirit does a work in their heart, and that they too would trust Jesus for salvation.
We pray this in Jesus' name.
Amen.