Josiah And Family

Josiah and Family

Well here we are back again.

I have preached on how people around you can affect your proximity to God, then my next sermon was about how God uses troubles and trials to bring us to become closer to Him, and then my last sermon was about how we can spend more time with God through the method of praying and reading the Bible. Each of them are methods God uses to bring people to a closer communion with God, or possibly the Devil may use the same methods in drawing you further from God. So today we are going to look at another aspect which will make a huge difference on a Christians walk through life. And that is the Family.

We will look at the family today mostly in connection with King Josiah of Judah, and how the family shaped his walking with God.

The hard part, however, is that family is something we are born into and we don’t get to choose our family. And we know from experience that Christians are drawn in from all walks of life, some are born into very Godly families, some are born into very wicked families. But one thing is certain, that they will take note of how family life affects a person, and seek the Lord’s help when they are called to start their own family.

It is true that the family plays an important role in our lives, but it also follows that we also make a big impact on other members of our family.

I get the feeling that maybe I’m waffling on a little bit, so I hope that in the following sermon that I will be able to make the subject a lot clearer to you by studying the life of King Josiah.

King Josiah’s story can be read in 2 Kings 22 and 23 and also in 2 Chronicles 34 and 35.

I will be turning to quite a few verses in the Bible, so I advise you to keep it handy.

I’m sure you have all heard of King Josiah. He was one of the few Godly kings of Judah. After the reign of a few ungodly kings, it was Josiah who ordered that the temple of God be re-established and encouraged the nation to worship God as He should be worshipped. We must always that the Lord if He blesses our nation with Godly rulers.

But it’s not really with Josiah that I want to start my study, it is with his grandfather King Manasseh, where our narrative really begins. Remember the subject of our sermon, it is the family, and we shall see what effect King Manasseh had on his grandson.

If you know your Bible well you will know that king Manasseh was the wickedest king Judah had ever seen. He completely led Israel astray, encouraging them to worship all kinds of false gods. Why could someone be so wicked? Well, Manasseh was probably thinking that adopting all these false gods was doing Israel a favour... you see, he adopts a god from Egypt, and one from Arabia, one from Babylon, and one from the Persians, and in this way he is bringing Judah closer to the other nations, in effect stopping all chances of war occurring. In a way it looked as if Manasseh was a great king, he might even been labelled the Peaceful King. See how that when we are in sin, the greatest sinners can look like saints!

Well time passes and God brings Manasseh into trouble, he is taken captive by the Assyrians and brought into Babylon and put in prison.

Remember what I said about troubles and trials? God only chastens his sons... if you are a child of God and you are walking in sins, God will not leave you like that, He will cause trouble to come on you that you will realise that you are not doing that which is right in the sight of the Lord.

So it happened that while Manasseh was in prison in Babylon that he saw the error of his ways, and he was given a spirit of true prayer, and prayed unto the Lord, and the Lord heard his prayer, and delivered him out from prison, and he was restored unto his kingdom.

The evidence of Manasseh’s repentance is shown in that he cast out all the idols, and rebuilt the sacred places of God. You see, we can’t repent one day and then live like sinners ever after. If we are living like sinners now, it is quite likely that we never repented in the first place. Paul Washer says that the evidence that we truly repented then was that we are still repenting today.

So in relation to Josiah, how would he have viewed his grandfather? Would he have seen him as the most ungodly king in history?