One of the most encouraging things I take out of the story of King Josiah is not only that bad legacies can be changed for the better, but that God’s will doesn’t have to be perfectly clear all at once in order to be found. I was struck by this because the whole spiritual revolution of Judah and restoration of the people to obeying God actually started as a much smaller step of faith: Josiah’s decision to fix up the temple.
Kings and Chronicles tell Josiah’s story a little differently – in Kings, nothing is said about his reign until the 18th year, while Chronicles tells us “in the eighth year of his reign, while he was yet a boy, he began to seek the God of David his father, and in the twelfth year he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem of the high places, the Asherim, and the carved and the metal images… Now in the eighteenth year of his reign… [he sent people] to repair the house of the Lord his God.” (2 Chron 34:3, 8, emphasis mine) Either way, what we see in Josiah’s reign is a journey towards obedience and submission to God, not someone who pulled it all together all at once. He began in the right direction, and as he did what was right, more and more became clear. Continue reading “God’s Will, One Step at a Time”