2 Chron. 34:22-28; Jeremiah 3:10, Religious Pretense

In the latter years of Judah, the southern kingdom, there were two amazing celebrations of Passover.  Under Hezekiah, in the Passover celebration, there was great joy in Jerusalem, for since the time of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel, there had been nothing like this in Jerusalem (2 Chron. 30:26).  Years later, under Josiah, there had been no Passover kept in Israel like that since the days of Samuel the prophet (2 Chron. 35:18).  Both were big events but under Josiah it was apparently bigger and better than under Hezekiah. 

Perhaps we should rethink the celebration under Josiah as being better because it was bigger.  It was Jeremiah who, in reflecting on the “revival” under Josiah, said it was all pretense (Jer. 3:10).  Pretense?  How can this be?  The answer to that question is, we believe, very evident in the account of these events in 2 Chronicles.  And it is an answer we need to hear in our own day of mega-churches combined with the death of thousands of churches in the United States each year (fyi, up to half of these closures are unsuccessful new churches).

We should note that neither of these revivals outlasted the king under whom they occurred.  Hezekiah’s reign was followed by that of Manasseh, the king who brought about the irreversible decision of the Lord that Judah would be removed from the land (2 Kings 21:11-14; Jer. 15:4).  Josiah was followed by several sons and a nephew, the last (Zedekiah) being carried off to Babylon when Jerusalem and the temple of Solomon were destroyed. 

Such is the nature of revivals.  In Judah they often revolved around the king or some other key personality (e.g. in the case of Joash, he followed the Lord until his mentor, the High Priest Jehoiada, died; 2 Chron. 24:17-22).  In our own Western societies the same thing has happened.  Revivals generally revolve around key figures and the death of those figures generally leads to institutional embodiment of the revival so that the spiritual energy dissipates over time.  When you walk into a church building and are greeted with pictures of previous pastors and key figures in the history of that church you just might suspect that it is a church that is in trouble. 

Having noted these things about revival we still come to look at the moving of God under Hezekiah and Josiah and recognize that there was a difference in terms of the long-term result.  In Hezekiah’s day the Kingdom of Judah’s life was extended when God miraculously delivered Jerusalem from the hand of Sennacherib and the Assyrians (2 Chron. 32:1-23).  It is also true that under Hezekiah the specter of Babylon arose on the horizon for the first time (2 Chron. 32:24-31).  In the case of Josiah, the revival had no benefit for Judah but only for the King.  The prophetess Huldah prophesied that judgment would still come on the nation but that King Josiah would be spared and blessed (2 Chron. 34:22-28).

In the end the revival of the nation under Hezekiah was recognized by God as genuine while that under Josiah was seen as pretense (lit. it was a lie, fraud and vanity).  With this background we will look at these two revivals, with a view to the practice of true worship in our own lives.