Pastor John,
I was thinking this morning about the priest Hilkiah – how he found the forgotten book of God’s law during the temple’s restoration. In his effort to obey God, king Josiah had commanded that the temple of Jehovah be restored from its dilapidated condition. The book was discovered during those renovations, and the high priest Hilkiah had it delivered to the King.
I remember how you described that scene, how the king’s servant was giving the king all of the news from the kingdom when he came to the news of the discovery of Jehovah’s lost book. How the good king’s heart must have leaped! What it must have meant to king Josiah to find God’s law, and to learn there was a right way to serve and worship God, and that they were not in it.
The law of God had been lost because the keepers of the law had failed to uphold that most important thing on earth, and all the world along with Israel suffered for it.
Today, the parchment entrusted with God’s law is us, the saints of God, since the day of Pentecost. We are now the holy “book” where God writes with his spirit the only way that is acceptable to him. Our life, born again of Spirit and lived out as a new man for the world to see, now declares God’s heart and his judgments, and the record of his Son, just like the book made of paper and ink once delivered to the king. We declare God’s judgments by executing judgments each day. We declare God’s standards by the standards we continually uphold. The Spirit of God in us and through us lives out the will of God that was once only available in a book.
But if we fail to preserve ourselves, as modern-day keepers of the law, we end up like the holy book when it was buried and forgotten, living invisible and unknown to others, offering no reflection of God’s judgments and standards. We want to preserve ourselves, not just for us but for others looking on, so we are a light on the hilltop.
How many king Josiahs might there be in the world, searching for a God they know must exist? What a shame if we were right beside them, a living testament to Christ, but buried and unseen like the lost book in that story.
Jerry