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Long-lost Law Book Discovered
179
They sacrificed to demons, not to God. ...
Of the Rock who begot you, you are unmindful,
And have forgotten the God who fathered you.
And when the Lord saw it, He spurned them,
[142]
Because of the provocation of His sons and His daughters.
And He said: ‘I will hide My face from them,
I will see what their end will be,
For they are a perverse generation,
Children in whom is no faith.’”
“How could one chase a thousand,
And two put ten thousand to flight,
Unless their Rock had sold them,
And the Lord had surrendered them?”
“Vengeance is Mine, and recompense;
Their foot shall slip in due time;
For the day of their calamity is at hand,
And the things to come hasten upon them.”
Deuteronomy 32:15-20, 30,
35
Young Josiah Does All He Can Do
As King Josiah read the prophecies of swift judgment, he trem-
bled for the future. The sins of Judah had been great. What would
be the result of their continued apostasy?
“In the eighth year of his reign, while he was still young,” he
had consecrated himself fully to the service of God. At the age
of twenty he had removed “the high places, the wooden images,
the carved images, and the molded images.” “They broke down the
altars of the Baals in his presence, and the incense altars ... and
the wooden images ... he broke in pieces, and made dust of them
and scattered it on the graves of those who had sacrificed to them.
He also burned the bones of the priests on their altars, and cleansed
Judah and Jerusalem.”
2 Chronicles 34:3-5
.
The youthful ruler extended his efforts to the portions of Palestine
formerly occupied by the ten tribes of Israel, only a feeble remnant
of which now remained. “So he did,” the record reads, “in the cities
of Manasseh, Ephraim, and Simeon, as far as Naphtali.”
Verse 6
.