AP

2 Kings 23:10   [King Josiah] desecrated Topheth, which was in the Valley of Ben Hinnom, so no-one could use it to sacrifice his son or daughter in the fire to Molech.

We must never overlook the significance or importance today of what God is revealing to us in this part of his inspired, infallible Word!

King Josiah of Judah is described in 2 Kings 22:2 – “He did what was right in the eyes of the LORD and walked in all the ways of his father David, not turning aside to the right or to the left.”  Having discovered, during his clean-up of the Jerusalem Temple, the ‘Book of the Law’ (the ‘Torah’, or our ‘Pentateuch’: Genesis-Deuteronomy), and realising that its centuries of neglect, and discounting as irrelevant, had caused God’s Covenant People to lose their way completely, he initiated a total reformation of their widespread detestable practices quite contrary to everything God had so graciously laid out for them as the terms of his Covenant relationship with them.  As we read through these chapters, we find it hard to believe that things could have become SO bad and SO wrong.  But we need to realise that the process was a very gradual, almost indiscernible, sliding away from the truth, over many generations.

The important thing for us to note is that the STARTING POINT for this downgrade process was the setting aside of God’s revealed truth.  It is not hard to see a similar pattern in what has been happening in our society for the last couple of centuries, and especially in my lifetime.  As a nation, we are not a Covenant People as Israel/Judah was, but the Church IS.  And what concerns me is that the Church has been allowing itself to conform, ever so gradually, to the progressive secular humanism of our society, a secular humanism that not only neglects God’s Word, but that actually deliberately opposes it!  Today’s verse refers, in particular, to the pagan practice of sacrificing children to the fertility gods in the cause of prosperity.

We find it hard to believe that God’s Covenant People would stoop to such wickedness.  But what about the difficulty the Church now faces in speaking out publicly against abortion-on-demand in the cause of economic security/prosperity?  This is only one of the things that our ‘cancel culture’ has ‘successfully’ achieved – others include such things as homosexual practice (my hand even shook as I just typed that!) and the uniqueness of the Christian Gospel as the only way to Eternal Life.  O that somehow, by the grace of God, there would arise another Josiah to knock the gathered dust from the Bible to reveal just how corrupt we have become without even noticing it, and how easily we have settled into being silenced from openly declaring its truth!