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Weimar University

David Shin

A Reformation that Lasts

This message was recorded on the campus of Weimar University.

For more information, visit our website, weimar.edu.

Our Father in Heaven, we ask for your presence to help me this morning.

You know the burden that you placed on my heart and we all recognize that my lips are made of clay.

And I pray that during these next few moments that you would use this weak vessel to communicate, to touch hearts.

We ask that the Holy Spirit that inspires would also be the spirit that instructs.

We ask these things in the precious name of Jesus Christ.

Josiah was 8 years old when he became king.

My son just turned 8 a couple months ago.

And the thought of him sitting in the Oval Office, surrounded by Secret Service, with access to the nuclear codes, is enough to give this poor father an aneurysm.

And so, Josiah, at the age of 8, turns king, and he inherited a mess.

His father only ruled for 2 years and was assassinated.

His grandfather was really the legacy that he had to follow.

And Manasseh was a young king starting out as well.

And he ruled for 55 years, half a century.

The Bible says that he did evil in the sight of the Lord.

In 2 Kings 21.6, the Bible says He sacrificed His own son in the fire.

He put Isaiah in a log and cut him in half.

The Bible says in 2nd Kings chapter 21 verse 16, Moreover Manasseh also shed so much innocent blood that he filled Jerusalem from end to end.

In 2 Kings 21, verse 6, he practiced divination, sought omens, and consulted mediums and spiritists.

Manasseh was having seances in the conference office.

His youth ministry consisted of giving out Ouija boards and getting kids addicted to pornography.

This was the legacy that Josiah had to follow.

At the age of 16, he made a decision to follow God with all of his heart.

And at the age of 20, he started a revolution.

The Bible says in 2 Chronicles 34.4, Under his direction the altar of Baal was torn down.

He cut it to pieces, the incenses that were above Him, and smashed the Asherah poles and idols.

These He broke to pieces and scattered over the graves of those who had sacrificed to them.

He burned the bones of the priests on their altar and so he purged Judah and Jerusalem.

And the Bible says, neither before nor after Josiah was there a king like him who turned to the Lord as He did.

There's something that always bothered me when I read the story of Josiah.

He's killed by a sniper in battle, old time sniper, the archers he bled to death in his chariot.

Jeremiah delivers the eulogy, and 3 years later is a 70 year captivity.

And I was troubled by the juxtaposition Of Josiah's legacy of 31 years of faithfulness, the Bible says that there was no 1 like him before nor after that sought God with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his strength.

And he serves God, dies in battle, 3 years later his kingdom crumbles and they're 70 years in captivity.

And I did a little bit of digging and I began to realize that Josiah's greatest legacy was not in the institution that he left behind, but the individuals that he impacted during his Reformation.

Daniel was taken into captivity in the first Babylonian deportation in 605 BC.

Josiah dies in 609 BC, which means that roughly calculated, Daniel is about 15 years of age, he was around 11 when Josiah died, which means that Josiah's parents were the beneficiaries of the reforms that Josiah instituted.

And D'Angel grew up in a culture and an environment of over 20 years, 31 years of reformation in Israel that was unprecedented to this point.

Jesus in Matthew 24 verse 15 is the greatest book endorsement.

He says, if you're living in the end of time, 1 book in particular you better read is the book of Daniel.

So you can see A lineage from Josiah to Daniel to Jesus.

And this morning in the brief time that we have I want to look at the life of Josiah and look at the keys, the characteristics that made his reformation last.

You see, Hezekiah's reformation was undone in 1 generation by his son.

But Josiah's reformation continues on to this day.

And so I want to look just for a few moments this morning at some of the keys and the characteristics of Josiah's life that led to a reformation that kept on lasting.

When Josiah heard the words of Deuteronomy for the first time, everything changed.

Things had gotten so bad in Judah that they lost the Bible.

There was 50 years of moral depravity to the place where the Bible indicates that Manasseh took the sanctuary and put into the sanctuary goddesses and idols in the sanctuary and it came to a place of disrepair and many of you know the story while he's restoring the temple Hilkiah the priest comes across something probably in a back corner somewhere dilapidated and dusty he gets the dust off of it and he recognizes that this is 1 of the books of Moses, the book of Deuteronomy.

This was the first time that Josiah had heard the book of Deuteronomy.

And he weeps, he recognizes that judgment is coming because you remember in the book of Deuteronomy It was composed of blessings and cursings.

If you followed God, this is what's going to happen.

If you don't, you're going to be carried away into captivity.

And he could see the handwriting on the wall.

He calls for a prophet, a prophetess by the name of Haldah.

You can see some lessons in his interaction with Haldah.

Number 1, her opinion, her message was not treated as an opinion.

She didn't advise, she declared, Thus saith the Lord.

The result, Immediate action, national reformed, reform unquestioned obedience.

A reformation that lasts is always grounded on the Word of God and guided by the Spirit of Prophecy.

There were multiple prophets that were contemporaries of Josiah, Jeremiah, Haldah, Zephaniah, Abakuk.

Josiah had a very high regard for the Bible and for the gift of prophecy.

I was sitting in a class at the feet of a professor that will go unnamed.

And the professor went on to talk about Ellen White.

Before the class started, he said, no recordings in this class.

And he said, Ellen White's statement of living without a mediator is pure blasphemy.

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A Reformation that Lasts

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