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Prophets and Kings
king had dared hope for: “All the people stood to the covenant.”
Verse
3
.
In the reformation that followed, the king turned his attention to
the destruction of every vestige of idolatry that remained. So long had
the inhabitants of the land followed the customs of the surrounding
nations in bowing down to images of wood and stone, that it seemed
almost beyond the power of man to remove every trace of these evils.
But Josiah persevered in his effort to cleanse the land. Sternly he met
idolatry by slaying “all the priests of the high places;” “moreover the
workers with familiar spirits, and the wizards, and the images, and the
idols, and all the abominations that were spied in the land of Judah and
in Jerusalem, did Josiah put away, that he might perform the words of
the law which were written in the book that Hilkiah the priest found in
the house of the Lord.”
Verses 20, 24
.
In the days of the rending of the kingdom, centuries before, when
Jeroboam the son of Nebat, in bold defiance of the God whom Israel
had served, was endeavoring to turn the hearts of the people away
from the services of the temple in Jerusalem to new forms of worship,
he had set up an unconsecrated altar at Bethel. During the dedication
of this altar, where many in years to come were to be seduced into
idolatrous practices, there had suddenly appeared a man of God from
Judea, with words of condemnation for the sacrilegious proceedings.
He had “cried against the altar,” declaring:
[402]
“O altar, altar, thus saith the Lord; Behold, a child shall be born
unto the house of David, Josiah by name; and upon thee shall he offer
the priests of the high places that burn incense upon thee, and men’s
bones shall be burnt upon thee.”
1 Kings 13:2
. This announcement had
been accompanied by a sign that the word spoken was of the Lord.
Three centuries had passed. During the reformation wrought by
Josiah, the king found himself in Bethel, where stood this ancient
altar. The prophecy uttered so many years before in the presence of
Jeroboam, was now to be literally fulfilled.
“The altar that was at Bethel, and the high place which Jeroboam
the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, had made, both that altar and
the high place he brake down, and burned the high place, and stamped
it small to powder, and burned the grove.
“And as Josiah turned himself, he spied the sepulchers that were
there in the mount, and sent, and took the bones out of the sepulchers,