Well, if you would, this evening, turn with me to 2 Kings. We'll be looking at 2 Kings chapter 23, verses four through 20. 2 Kings 23, four through 20. Just a little bit of the context here. Remember, this is King Josiah. He is considered one of the good kings of Judah. He is someone who we have seen from a young man was trying to do what was right in the eyes of the Lord. And of course, during his reign, as they began to clear out the temple, they found the book of the law. And then when he heard the law, he was convicted of the sin of the people and the judgment to come and the terrible situation of God's wrath upon his people. And he read that word to the people at the beginning of chapter 23, and he uses that as a renewal of the covenant. And we see it as an impetus. probably to continue the reforms he has already started if we compare the Second Kings and Second Chronicles accounts of this particular setting of reform. And this really is a laundry list. You know, it's really kind of intimidating to read this list. There is an extension here of the active faith of Josiah in trying to reform not just his own house, but the entire kingdom of Judah and even beyond, but to look at this list, there are really questions about how terribly thorough the corruption of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were. So as we read these words, let us be reminded of the joy of seeing Josiah lead the people in trying to remove the idolatry amongst them, but also just the reality of sin in the hearts of God's people. Picking up at verse four. And the king commanded Hilkiah the high priest and the priests of the second order and the keepers of the threshold To bring out of the temple of the Lord all the vessels made for Baal, for Asherah, and for all the host of heaven. He burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron and carried their ashes to Bethel. And he deposed the priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to make offerings in the high places at the cities of Judah and around Jerusalem. Those also who burned incense to Baal, to the sun, and to the moon, and the constellations, and all the hosts of the heavens. And he brought out the Asherah from the house of the Lord outside Jerusalem to the brook Kidron and burned it at the brook Kidron and beat it to dust and cast the dust of it upon the graves of the common people. And he broke down the houses of the male cult prostitutes who were in the house of the Lord where the women wove hangings for the Asherah. And he brought all the priests out of the cities of Judah and defiled the high places where the priests had made offerings from Geba to Beersheba. And he broke down the high places of the gates that were at the entrance of the gate of Joshua, the governor of the city, which were on one's left at the gate of the city. However, the priests of the high places did not come up to the altar of the Lord in Jerusalem, but they ate unleavened bread among their brothers. And he defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, that no one might burn his son or his daughter as an offering to Moloch. And he removed the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the son, at the entrance to the house of the Lord by the chamber of Nathan Melech the Chamberlain, which was in the precincts, and he burned the chariots of the sun with fire. And the altars on the roof of the upper chamber of Ahaz, which the kings of Judah had made, and the altars that Manasseh had made in the two courts of the house of the Lord, he pulled down in broken pieces and cast the dust of them into the brook Kidron. And the king defiled the high places that were east of Jerusalem to the south of the Mount of Corruption, which Solomon, the king of Israel, had built for Ashtoreth, the abomination of the Sidonians, and for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, and for Milcom, the abomination of the Ammonites. And he broke in pieces the pillars and cut down the ashram and filled their places with the bones of men. Moreover, the altar at Bethel, the high place erected by Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, That altar with the high place, he pulled down and burned, reducing it to dust. He also burned the Asherah. And as Josiah turned, he saw the tombs there on the mount. And he sent and took the bones out of the tombs and burned them on the altar and defiled it, according to the word of the Lord that the man of God proclaimed who had predicted these things. Then he said, what is the monument that I see? And the men of the city told him, it is the tomb of the man of God who came from Judah and predicted these things that you have done against the altar at Bethel. And he said, let him be. Let no man move his bones. So he let his bones alone with the bones of the prophet who came out of Samaria. And Josiah removed all the shrines also of the high places that were in the cities of Samaria, which kings of Israel had made, provoking the Lord to anger. He did to them according to all that he had done at Bethel, And he sacrificed all the priests of the high places who were there on the altars and burned human bones on them. Then he returned to Jerusalem. As we consider these words rather discouraging in some ways, but also rather encouraging that Josiah would commit these reforms, let us bow briefly in prayer. Lord, this too is your word. It is living and active. It exposes sins. and reveals your salvation. Father, we pray that your spirit would use this word to convict our hearts, to change us, and to mold us, and to reveal to us, once again, your plan for your people. Father, give us ears to hear it and hearts to understand it. I pray, Lord, that all the things done here, said here, thought here, if they are not consistent with that, your word, let them pass away, never to be heard from again. In Jesus' name, amen. Well, a lot of corruption, a lot of a big, long laundry list. Well, Jennifer told me the other day that there was a smell emanating from the kitchen. I'm not good at locating smells. My nose doesn't work too well. In fact, my grandmother had no sense of smell. And from what I understand, I don't remember, I was too young, but from what I understand, her cooking wasn't that great either. And then my dad, he inherited a poor sense of smell as well. In fact, one of the things that I remember with my dad is when he drank some half-spoiled milk and he just didn't even notice. So I'm not good at finding those smells. Well, we searched in the kitchen. We searched the trash can. We searched the dog pen that was under one of the tables. And we searched the sink and we tried to find where the smell was. We didn't locate it. And we couldn't find the cause. The next day, Jennifer, went to cook and she was going to use potatoes in her supper preparation. And lo and behold there was a rotten potato. And that rotten potato was so rotten that all she had to do was touch it and it went puff into corruption all over the place. And that was the smell. Now the only problem here is that that potato was around two potatoes that looked pretty good. But she was afraid to use those potatoes in the cooking. You see, our house had been contaminated by a corrupt, decaying potato. But if you were really to look at our house and try to find the things of corruption, you would notice that the yard needs to be mowed. The weed eater needs to be fixed so the owner can go out and chop down the weeds. There are bugs that come into our house, and we need to get, once again, the pest control to come out. There are spiders weaving webs, particularly on the outside of our house. In fact, there are also some other kinds of things building their nests on the side of the house. The garage needs to be cleaned out. There's clutter here or there. There are little things like those little plaster spots behind the doors that didn't have stoppers. You know, the doors hit the wall and cause a little hole where the lock is or where the bottom of the door is. Also, the refrigerator keeps Building up ice in the bottom of the freezer. I know that there's probably a problem with the line that goes out to the drain. All of those things. We could look at the laundry list of everything and we could look at how even sometimes we disregard those things and just let them go. It's disheartening. It's disheartening when we look at all the things that we could improve in our house. And yet, if we were to make the same list of all the ways in which we dishonor the Lord, that list too would be lengthy. In fact, we're told that even our good deeds are tainted by our sin and our sin nature. And in fact, if we were to go around here in the church and go through all the history of the church and all the people of the church and all the activities of the church, the church being the people of God, and we were to go into all their homes, we would find lots of things, lots of actions, Lots of things engraved on their heart that are corrupt. And so like Josiah, there are times we must begin to work our way through that list and begin to seek to honor God in the places where we have been dishonoring him. You see, we don't do these things to please God. We do these things because we are aware of who God is and what he has done. And because he has saved us from our sins, then we begin that process of sanctification, where we begin to work together with the Lord by the power of his word and spirit to clean up our lives. The cleanup in Judah and Jerusalem and Israel was lengthy. You'll see here, first of all, the first few verses talk about cleaning up the temple, the heart, of the place where God's worship was. Then there's a section that talks about cleaning up the nation of Judah from one end to the other. And then Josiah did not stop there. He also began to clean up the northern kingdom of Israel. But first of all, a little bit of a look at the list of cleaning up the temple. And if you weren't aware of what was going on in the temple, these words are so discouraging. Look at just some of these things. First of all, he sought to remove and burn idle equipment or vessels. In other words, the altar and all the accouterments, all the vessels, all the things that were used in sacrificing to these false gods and in false worship, notice where they were. In the temple. And he began to bring them out. And first of all, he brought them out and he put them in this valley the Kidron Valley and along the Kidron Brook, and he began to burn them. Now, this is not a new practice. In fact, both Kings Asa and Hezekiah also took things out to the Brook Kidron regarding idolatry and so forth, so this is not a new thing. But note that this was where. It says very clearly, to bring out out of the temple of the Lord, Yahweh, Jehovah, those four capital letters in our English, L-O-R-D in our English translations. This is the very name of the covenant God. This was in his temple, the place where his name dwelt, the place where the people were supposed to go and meet with him in the mediation he offered through the priests and the sacrificial system. And they were bringing out things that were opposed to the very heart of the worship of God. But that was just one thing. The next verse reminds us that he deposed the priests. These were syncretistic priests, evidently. Those priests, as it says here, these priests, the kings of Judah had ordained to make offerings in the high places of the cities of Judah and around Jerusalem, and who also burned incense to Baal, the sun, the moon, the constellations, and all the hosts of the heavens. In other words, it seems to be they may have been Levitical priests or of the priestly line, but they were syncretistic. That is, they were seeking to combine idolatry worship with the worship of the true God. And Josiah had to go in and remove them from office. And again, not just the equipment, not just the priests, but also the idol itself. It says in verse six, he brought out the Asherah from the house of the Lord outside Jerusalem to the brook Kidron and burned it at the brook Kidron and beat it to dust and cast the dust upon the graves of the common people. And here it is. In the very house of God was a pillar or an image of this fertility God mentioned throughout the Old Testament, mentioned as an abomination to the people, something that had been in place for decades, if not centuries. And here, this particular image itself was removed. But that's not all. You see, when people worship those images, they also adopted the worship practices associated with those idols or images. And verse seven tells us how bad it is. He broke down the houses of the male cult prostitutes. In other words, there were these individuals who were in there and they were living in the temple and they were dwelling there in this orgastic worship of an idol in the temple of God. And if this wasn't enough there were also women there who wove images and different types of weavings to this particular idol and probably involved themselves in other details of that worship as base and crude as it was. And all of those things had to be removed from the temple. This is awful. We've been told about the many homeless encampments around the country. We've been told that in California, where they have the most homeless, they have begun to clean up the homeless encampments. When they clean up these encampments, It's not just the drug paraphernalia. It's not just the tents. It's not just the other things. It's also the garbage that is there, the sewage that they find, but it's also the people. The people, some of whom have been left in the holes of society and others by their own sin or perhaps by mental illness or other things. They have found themselves in that place as the lowest rung of society. But whenever you come to a situation in which evil or the consequences of evil are present, you have both the equipment, the idols, and the people. In this case, in the scriptures, it was in the temple itself. Wickedness and all that it entailed was in the place where God put his name. God has put his name in your house if you're a believer in Jesus Christ. What are you gonna find there? In fact, we're told that we, the church, the people of the church are the temple of the living God. How is it that that temple in those houses, in those places, we can find within our hearts some of the wicked deeds of the evil one? How is it that we can find some of the accouterments and some of the vessels and equipment and some of those that we might associate with in our house that are not associated with the name of God, but are opposed to him? You see, God wants us to clean up the temple too. But Josiah didn't stop there. It wasn't just the temple, it was all through the land. Verse eight begins this long list through verse 14. In fact, we're told that there are eight to 10 different things that he does in Judah here. Notice just a few of them. First of all, he got rid of all the high places in all Judah. This must have taken some time, which tells us it probably was more than a year's venture. It probably had already begun even before they found the book of the law. And by removing these high places, it means he also had to remove the priests. He had to defile these places. You see, after all, once you try to remove a place, unless you defile that place, they would just build it up again. It would come back. Again, you know, it's like that rotten potato. You can take the potato out, but if the potato has infected the other potatoes and you don't take them all out, then the whole thing will spread. And here it is. He got rid of the high places in all Judah from Geba to Beersheba. These are the words from the northern territory of Judah all the way to the south and east. He demolished one particular known place. We don't even know exactly all the details of this at the gate of the governor, Joshua. Evidently there was a place specifically and well known to the people of Jerusalem or Judah. And as they came into the gate, they would perhaps give to this high place sacrifices or other things. He would demolish that place. And then there's this little strange phrase that says in verse nine, the priests of the high places did not come up to the altar of the Lord in Jerusalem. but they ate unleavened bread among their brothers. You see, what he did is he demoted them. He demoted them to a priest of ineligible status. In other words, they could not any longer be eligible to serve as a priest in the temple of the Lord. They could still eat the things provided to the priests through the unleavened bread and others, but they could not serve at the altar because of the corruption they had made of their lives in service to idolatry. All through Judah, he began to remove these things. Then we get to the next verse, verse 10. We read about this place called Topheth. Topheth means the spitting place. He's defiling the spitting place of Moloch. And Moloch, of course, was the God to whom people sacrificed their children. You might have heard over the last few years A reference to the fact that in our country when we abort our children we are in essence sacrificing them to Moloch. This is the same concept here. He's defiling the place where people would sacrifice their children to appease that terrible God. In our society that would mean those who sacrifice their children in order to gain their own pleasure or privilege or status or something. because they're more interested in themselves than they are in caring for their own children. So he defiled this terrible, abominable practice of place where they offered children to sacrifice. And if that wasn't enough, then you see that they also had perhaps even living horses as well as chariots designated to the sun. Verse 11 says, Josiah removed the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun And it tells us he also burned the chariots of the sun with fire. In other words, he removed these instruments that had now been dedicated to the sun of all things, a reminder that they were worshiping the heavenly hosts, the sun, the moon, the stars, the constellations, and so forth. And again, we would think, surely, surely that's enough. But then we get this long list of things that were the bane of previous kings. First of all, he tells us about the altars on the roof of Ahaz's upper chamber. Verse 12 reminds us that there were these altars that were there, assumedly to these false gods. Ahaz, one of the most wicked kings of the nation of Judah, had installed them on the roof of his house. Where he slept, he could go out up onto the roof and sacrifice to these false gods. Josiah removed them. Manasseh had installed altars in two of the temple courts. We're told in the Chronicles that towards the end of his life, in his conversion, he removed these things, but evidently his son Amon, who ruled just a short time, put them back. And now Josiah had to take them down again. And we think here, of course, we see in Ahaz and Manasseh and Ammon these things. But perhaps the most disturbing thing is how long this has been taking place. Verse 13 says, and the king defiled the high places that were east of Jerusalem to the south of the Mount of Corruption, which Solomon, the king of Israel, had built for these gods, Ashtoreth, Chemosh, and Milcon. And notice how it says with each one of them, the abomination. the abominable thing of this God, the abominable thing of that God, the God of the Sidonians, the God of Moab, the God of the Ammonites. And we know that what happened was, is Solomon broke the rules of a godly king, and he married all kinds of women, he let these women come in from all these nations around them, and he had them bring their gods, and he developed this mount of corruption where they could worship their gods right there in Judah. In fact, some of the studies seem to indicate this might have been out towards the Mount of Olives in the New Testament. This had been going on for hundreds of years now. It wasn't a short-lived thing. Now you all know I'm a baseball fan. And I have to say, we're getting towards the end of the baseball season. People who are sports nuts are thinking of football and other seasons and all those things, but this is the season for firing in baseball. Managers are fired. General managers are fired. And they begin, sports organizations, when they fire their coach or their managers or whoever it might be, they often clean house. In fact, they find out that they think they were losing because not just the leadership of one man, but there might have been deep-rooted flaws by multiple regimes throughout the entire organization. Maybe they were teaching the practice of hitting wrong. Maybe they weren't adapting to the modern methods of pitching. Maybe it was that their discipline was not correct as they sought to discipline their athletes. Whatever it is, they go through and they clean house and get rid of all kinds of coaches, all kinds of practices, all kinds of things, sometimes even faulty equipment or things like that. Well, after David, there wasn't a single king's regime that was free from the first commandment-breaking polytheism of idolatry. When Solomon instituted these idols east of Jerusalem, notice from that time until the time of Josiah, Those particular abominable practices of idol worship in these false gods continue through king after king after king, through regime after regime, by one generation after the next. The good news is that Josiah here in removing these things apparently is seeking to restore Judah to a pre idolatry state in which David claimed the monotheistic religion of worshiping the one true God. But you know, sometimes we find ourselves worshiping more than one God too. We worship the God of politics. We worship the God of sport. We worship the God of pleasure. We worship the God of this or that. And then we come and we worship the true God. What does God want from us? He is a jealous God. He wants us to worship him alone. What is it in your life that needs to be cleaned out? You see, it might not be a reference here to the very temple of God, but this is a reference to the people of God in the land of Judah and in their everyday lives. Every day, there were people going up to these high places to sacrifice. Every day, there were those who would try to appease a different God and perhaps get favor from him. Every day, they would go out and they would live their lives in this sense of worshiping on the one hand, the true God, but on the other hand, all the gods of those around them. And we are so prone. We are so prone to do the same thing. What does God want from us? He wants us to clean up the idols out of our lives. But Josiah, again, he didn't stop there. He didn't stop with the temple. He didn't even stop with Judah. In fact, he went across the borders and boundaries to the northern kingdom, which had already been destroyed. In fact, living there now, was a mixture perhaps of the poorest of the poor who were left and those who were deposited there from the Assyrians from other places throughout their kingdom, later to become known as the Samaritans. And in verse 15, he tells us that the first thing he did in that northern kingdom was burn the infamous Jeroboam altar of Bethel. You remember we've been going through Second Kings and time and time again when we heard about the kings of Israel, we would hear this refrain. They continued the practice of Jeroboam the son of Nebat and the sin which he caused Israel to commit. And what was that sin? This altar was the altar where Jeroboam, when he was given the 10 northern tribes, he was told by God that if he were to follow God, His reign and the generations after him would reign on the throne of Israel. But instead what Jeroboam did in fear that the people would go down to Jerusalem and worship and not be loyal to him and to his kingdom in the north, he built this altar first in Bethel and then also in Dan. And he said, by the way, These idols, these golden calves that were set here, these are the gods who brought you out of Egypt. And from that time forth, through the rest of the reign of the Northern Kingdom, king after king, even dynasty after dynasty, they all worshipped at these altars and it was a bane for Israel. And what did Josiah do? He totally defiled this particular idol with human bones. He looked around him and got bones out of the graves and burned them on the altar. But then he was also told about the prophet who prophesied by name that Josiah in the future would do this to this particular idol, verifying the word of God after a 300 year old prophecy. And so here he burned the infamous Jeroboam altar. And then he began to remove the high places in Samaria. It says the houses or shrines were removed. It reminds us that the priests were removed. This word for sacrifice in verse 20 is the word for slaughter. He slaughtered the priests. Some people ask the question, well, why did he just demote the priests in Judah and slaughter the priests in Samaria? Was it something that he was an ethnic issue? Was it something about the difference between the two kingdoms? It appears here that the priests in Judah were of the Levitical line, but these priests were total pagans and totally devoted to the worship of these gods. And so he had them slaughtered. And the altars were defiled with their bones. You know, there's something else that happened, not in our house now, but in our house in South Dakota before we moved here. We discovered that in our basement bathroom, which had a shower in it, that there was mold growing on one of the panels. And we told the plumber that we were using, we said, there's mold there. And he just kind of scoffed at us. And he said, well, I don't think that's really much of a problem or anything like that. until he got down and we had bought some things to replace the shower in our bathroom. And so he opened that panel and lo and behold he said, this is the worst mold I have ever seen. He had to remove the shower, he had to remove the paneling, he had to even clean or remove the studs in the wall. It was just awful. It reminds us that once that corrupt practice or that corrupt mold, in this case, got into the house, unless it was stopped, it would continue to affect everything or infect everything in the house. In fact, if we read the Old Testament law, we understand that even God recognized this and he gave laws for what to do if you had mold in your house. There were certain things you were supposed to do with your house or with your implements. So what does it take? takes the complete removal of false teaching and unrepentant brothers. This is why discipline in the church is so important. This is why discipline in our own lives is so important. You see, if there's just one infection, it can spoil the whole pot. So what are we to make? What are we to make here at Josiah Cleaning House? Was it perhaps that he was trying to dissuade the Lord from bringing judgment? It can't be the case because Josiah believed God's word. God had already told him earlier in chapter 23, it's too late. Judgment is coming. It is certain. In fact, we find out by The end of this chapter in verses 26 and 27, even though he had all these reforms, even though he'd done all these things, next week we're gonna look at the reinstitution of the Passover and the reformation of that worship. Yet despite all these things, God's wrath was not appeased by the sins of Manasseh and the kings of Judah. So that can't be the place. Was it to gain materially or spiritually from the Lord? Was it so that Josiah could have a better reign and a more peaceable reign? No, he did it because it was the right thing to do. He did it because he loved the Lord. He did it because he believed the promises. He did it because on the one hand, though it would not clearly stop judgment and that it was too late for these covenant blessings to come upon Judah because God's judgment was coming, yet for the love of God and for the love of the people, He wanted to remove the wickedness and the evil and the idolatry among them. You see Josiah here this was the way he was seeking God and his kingdom and his righteousness first. You see when we clean house it's not so that we can be better people. We clean house because we want to honor God and we clean house because We want others not to be corrupted by the corruption we have introduced. You see, Josiah here is the reigning king of Judah, and because of that, the example he sets, the worship he does, all of those things can either lead the people to seek righteousness and the true God of heaven, or they can lead people to misbelieve, unbelieve, disbelieve, whatever you want to say with that, and seek to follow the idols of the world because they see us doing the same thing. You see, we must burn these idolatrous altars. And this practice didn't stop in the Old Testament. If you remember the New Testament, when they came to certain places, they came out and brought all their things with the magic arts and Ephesus and they burned them. Even though they were worth many invaluable Much money, very valuable things. They burned those things. Why? Because they were turning from their idols and their witchcraft and their sorcery and whatever else it was, and they were seeking to turn to the living God. What is it that needs to be cataloged in your life? What needs to be removed? By God's grace, may he give us the strength to do so. Let's pray. Father, whether it's in the church, whether it's in our homes, whether it's in our hearts, we can't remove these idols without the power of the Holy Spirit. Help us, Lord, to seek to please you, not to earn your favor, but Lord, because we love you, we see your salvation, and we want to please you. Lord, help us as a church, as individuals, as families, to remove the idols amongst us. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.