2 Chronicles 34

The book of the law found in the rubble of the temple is the chapter’s great recovery — the Word lost in the very house of God, and a king who breaks when he hears it. Josiah comes to the throne a child, and while yet young begins to seek the God of David his father. By his twelfth year he purges Judah and Jerusalem — the high places, the groves, the carved images — and presses the reform north into Ephraim and Manasseh and Naphtali, breaking the altars and stamping the idols to powder. The Word will be recovered in a house already swept clean.

How a nation loses the book in its own temple takes explaining, and the likeliest answer is Manasseh. Fifty-five years of a king who set a carved idol in the house and burned his sons in Hinnom is long enough to suppress the law and destroy the copies, and long enough for a generation to grow up who had never heard it read. What Hilkiah found may have been the copy laid up beside the ark itself — the one place a king’s men would not go. The book survived by hiding in the holiest place, and came out when a tender heart was on the throne.

While repairing the temple, Hilkiah the priest finds the book of the law of Yahweh given by Moses. Shaphan reads it before the king, and it came to pass, when the king had heard the words of the law, that he rent his clothes. The tender heart torn open by the Word — Josiah does not argue with what he hears or measure it against the custom of the kingdom; he tears his robe and trembles, knowing how far the nation has fallen from the book it had forgotten it owned.

He sends to Huldah the prophetess — and the errand is stranger than it looks. The men Josiah sends are Hilkiah the high priest, whose lips should keep knowledge, and Shaphan the scribe, whose whole office was the Law. They walk past their own qualifications to a woman in the college whose name appears nowhere else in Scripture, and ask her what the book means. Yahweh will use a woman when the men whose office it was have failed — and the priest and the scribe stand there and take the answer from her.

The answer holds both the wrath and the mercy. Judgment is determined on the place, for the people had forsaken Yahweh; but because thine heart was tender, and thou didst humble thyself before God… thou shalt be gathered to thy grave in peace. Gathered to his grave in peace — Josiah is spared the sight of the evil because he will sleep before it falls. He does not escape death; he is laid to rest, to wait, while the storm he was spared breaks on a later day.

The king then makes the covenant the Word demands: he stands by his pillar and pledges to walk after Yahweh, and to keep his commandments… with all his heart, and causes all present to stand to it. The heard Word answered with a whole-hearted covenant — the same wholeness that marked Hezekiah’s reign three chapters back. The recovered book does not stay on the shelf; it is read, it is felt, it is sworn to, it is obeyed.

Here a push back on the warmth of this reading is worth feeling. Josiah’s reform was a reaction by force of law and not by faith of the heart — the people obeyed because the king insisted, not because they wanted to; he drove them where Hezekiah had led them. And there is evidence: Jeremiah is prophesying through these very years, and his verdict on the same reform is blunt — Judah hath not turned unto me with her whole heart, but feignedly (Jer 3:10). Zephaniah says the same. The king’s heart was tender; the nation’s was not — which is why the wrath Huldah pronounced still falls, and why the greatest Passover since Samuel (tomorrow’s chapter) is kept by people whose repentance was borrowed from their king. The chapter is a true account of one tender heart, not of a converted nation.

The Word can lie lost in the house of God itself — but where a tender heart hears it, it tears the robe and rewrites the kingdom — and a kingdom rewritten is not yet a people converted.

Hosea 2

The wilderness wooing is the chapter’s astonishment: the husband does not divorce the adulterous wife but leads her back into the desert to win her heart again. The charge wants sharpening, and the distinction matters. Adultery, awful as it is, can at least be driven by a real if illicit love — David and Bathsheba. Harlotry is different: it is selling yourself for the pay. Gomer says I will go after my lovers, that give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, mine oil and my drink — that is not passion, that is an invoice. And that is Israel’s sin: not a heart carried away but a heart calculating. It is the same charge laid against Jezebel in the middle of a first-century ecclesia (Rev 2:20) — the one who trades the Truth for the living it can be made to yield is a harlot, not merely an adulteress.

The controversy is laid out first — Israel chased her lovers, the Baalim, and knew not that I gave her corn, and wine, and oil. So Yahweh will hedge her way with thorns, take back the grain and the wine, strip her bare before her lovers — the merciful severity that drives the wandering heart home, the same hand that took Manasseh among the thorns.

Then the great therefore that turns judgment into courtship. Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her — speak to her heart. The second exodus is a honeymoon, not a death-march. He leads her back to the place of the first betrothal, where Israel sang coming up out of Egypt, to begin the marriage over. The latter-day restoration of Israel is figured here as a wooing in the wilderness, the bride brought up to her husband again.

And the valley of Achor is made a door of hope. Achor — the valley of trouble, where Achan was stoned for the accursed thing (Josh 7) — the very ground where sin was judged becomes the gate of hope. The place of the curse becomes the entrance to the covenant; where judgment fell on the accursed thing, the door of mercy opens. It is the pattern of the crucifixion in miniature: sin condemned in the flesh at one place, and that same place made the threshold of life.

The relationship itself is transformed, and the change is in a single pair of names. Thou shalt call me Ishi — my husband — and shalt call me no more Baali — my master, the word that is also the name of the idol. No longer Master, but Husband — the bride who once served from fear and ran to other lords will know her God as a husband, and the very name of Baal will be taken out of her mouth forever. Covenant intimacy replaces both servile dread and idolatry at a stroke.

Then the betrothal, four times over and for ever: I will betroth thee unto me for ever; yea, I will betroth thee unto me in righteousness, and in judgment, and in lovingkindness, and in mercies. I will even betroth thee unto me in faithfulness: and thou shalt know Yahweh. An everlasting betrothal sealed in faithfulness — and the names of the children of Hosea 1 are reversed inside it: I will sow her unto me in the earth (Jezreel sown at last); I will have mercy upon her that had not obtained mercy (Lo-ruhamah pitied); I will say to them which were not my people, Thou art my people (Lo-ammi made Ammi). The disowning of yesterday is undone in the betrothal of today.

The valley of trouble is made a door of hope, and the wife who called him Master will call him Husband — betrothed for ever, and named at last His own.

Acts 16–17

The gospel crosses into Europe through opened hearts and opened prisons, and the thread that ties the day together runs straight through it: the Word recovered, the heart opened, the bride called. Count the hands on the wheel here, and the count is startling: three times in four verses the party is steered by God and not by Paul. They are forbidden of the Holy Spirit to preach the word in Asia; they assay to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit suffered them not; and then the vision at Troas. Two closed doors and one open one, and Europe is on the other side of it. Mark the moment the pronouns change: up to Troas the record says they; from the vision on it says we — Luke has joined the company, and the man writing it down was there. The Macedonian vision — come over… and help us — turns Paul west, and at Philippi the first European convert is Lydia, a seller of purple, by the riverside, whose heart Yahweh opened, that she attended unto the things which were spoken. The heart Yahweh opens is Josiah’s tender heart and Hosea’s wooed bride in one woman — and she is a seller of purple, the color of royalty, the bride being clothed for the King.

The damsel with the spirit of divination is freed, her masters’ trade ruined, and Paul and Silas are beaten and locked in the inner prison. And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and sang praises unto God — and the earthquake shakes the foundations, the doors fly open, every band is loosed. Midnight singing and the prison thrown open — the exodus pattern again, Peter’s chains falling in Acts 12 sung over in a Philippian jail. The jailer, trembling, asks what must I do to be saved? and hears the whole gospel in a sentence: Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.

At Thessalonica Paul reasons out of the scriptures for three sabbaths that Christ must needs have suffered, and risen again, and the city is turned upside down — these that have turned the world upside down are come hither also. At Berea the response is nobler: they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so. The Bereans searching the scriptures are Josiah and Huldah’s heirs — the Word recovered is the Word tested, and the noble heart proves the gospel by the book rather than against it.

At Athens Paul stands on Mars’ hill before an altar inscribed TO THE UNKNOWN GOD and declares the One they worship in ignorance — the God who made the world and all things therein, who dwelleth not in temples made with hands, in whom we live, and move, and have our being. The God who dwells not in temples made with hands lifts the eye past every shrine, even past Josiah’s restored house, to the living Maker whose true temple is not of stone.

And the address ends on the appointed day. He hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead. The resurrection of one man is the assurance of the judgment of all — the future day fixed and guaranteed by the empty tomb. Some mock at the rising of the dead; some cleave to him — Dionysius, Damaris, and others — the firstfruits of Europe gathered to the risen Lord.

The heart Yahweh opens attends, the noble heart searches the scriptures, and over it all stands the appointed day of judgment — fixed and assured by the man He raised from the dead.