FBC Morning Light – March 2, 2022

Hezekiah Restores the Passover in Judah

Well, a good Wednesday morning to you. Here we are in the middle of our work week already, and I hope your week's been going well. And I trust that the Lord is blessing you in the labors of your hand, whatever your hand's fine to do.

I hope you're doing it with all your might, and you're seeing God bless that. Well, today we're in 2 Chronicles chapters 30 and 31, continuing the story of the reign of Hezekiah, the king of Judah. And if you remember, if you tuned in the other day on Monday, we looked at the beginning of his reign, and right at the beginning, talking about Hezekiah, there's a summary of his reign as a whole.

And the narrator summarized Hezekiah's reign in this way. He says he did what was right in the sight of the Lord, and following the pattern of David, his father. And then right after that broad introduction, that general overview of his life, the writer goes on to tell us that one of the ways he expressed his heart for God was by restoring the temple to its glory.

It had fallen into disrepair, decay, got filled with trash, and all that kind of stuff. And he restored it, and that showed his heart. Well, another thing that had been neglected over the years of some corrupt kings was the worship of God through the different feasts, the festivals, that God ordained for the people to gather together and to worship him and to celebrate what God had done in the past.

And one of these feasts is the Passover. So when you come to chapter 30, Hezekiah wants to reestablish the Passover feast that had been so terribly neglected. So, again, we have to give a little background here, just so we're sure we understand the significance of what's going on in chapter 30.

Years before Hezekiah ever became the king, Israel as a nation had been one king. That was under David and Solomon. And then under Solomon's son, Rehoboam, the kingdom split. And Judah was ruled by the descendants of King David, and Hezekiah is in that line.

The northern kingdom, the ten tribes that broke away, they were initially ruled by Jeroboam and a bunch of other kings along the way. And they were all consistently corrupt in the northern kingdom because Jeroboam established the precedent of corruption in the northern tribes, worshiping idols and establishing priesthood contrary to God's word and so forth.

So that whole northern kingdom, if you will, had become apostate. Hezekiah, as the king of Judah, where Jerusalem's capital city, the temple's there, the true worship of God should be taking place there, Jerusalem is where the Passover should be held and these feasts and so forth, haven't been held for a while, Hezekiah wants to restore the Passover.

But in so doing, he also wants to issue a call to any of the Jews living in the northern kingdom and invite them to come and celebrate the Passover. And what he's basically doing is he's issuing a call to national repentance and call for revival.

And so he sends out emissaries to some of these northern tribes, inviting people in those tribes outside of Judah to come to Jerusalem, celebrate the Passover, let's get right with God, let's repent, and let's seek revival for our nation as a whole.

A National Call to Repentance and Revival

All right, now let's pause here and think about this. What do you think would be the response if there was a way to have a national call to repentance in the United States of America where everybody heard that call?

I mean, just say, for example, there was some way to overtake all of the media for five minutes a day for seven days in a row at a time when everybody's going to be seeing some kind of media. So not only all the networks, NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, those networks, but also all the cable channels, every single cable channel would be interrupted for five minutes a day for seven days.

And then YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and every form of media that you can possibly think of for five minutes a day, same time, seven days a week. There is a godly national leader and national speaker who gets on all these media platforms and calls the nation to repentance, calls the nation to get to a Bible-believing, Bible-preaching church on Sunday, March 13th, or let's make it on Easter Sunday to make it a celebration.

Everybody, the whole nation, call the nation to national repentance. Get to a God-fearing, Bible-believing church on Easter Sunday morning to not only celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, but to humble ourselves in repentance, confessing our national sins and seeking God's face, seeking his mercy, seeking forgiveness, a call to revival.

How do you think that would be received by the vast majority of people in our nation? Well, Hezekiah sent out these emissaries to people who were claimed to be the people of God. They were Israelites.

And yet they had forsaken the worship of God. They had forsaken the temple and everything else. And Hezekiah issues a call, come to Jerusalem, celebrate the Passover. And here's what we read. It says in verse 10 of chapter 30,.

So the runners passed from city to city through the country of Ephraim and Manasseh, as far as Zebulun, these northern tribes. But they laughed at them and mocked them. They laughed at them and mocked them.

I think that pretty well summarizes the way the majority of our own fellow countrymen would respond to such a call to national repentance and revival. Don't you think so? And when you think of it that way, doesn't that break your heart?

Doesn't that lead you all the more to pray for our country, for our nation? Because we have, as a people, as a nation, we have so departed from the things of God. And I don't mean to suggest here for a minute that the United States of America is Israel, that the United States of America is somehow a chosen nation like Israel was.

And I don't mean to suggest that the United States of America is a uniquely Christian nation, as if the majority of Americans at any time were true converted people. Not since its declaring of independence.

I don't think so. But I do believe that, for the better part of our nation's history, it has been founded upon Christian principles and ethics and morality and a Judeo-Christian worldview. Well, that's long gone.

That's long gone. So even if you called people back to such a worldview, how do you think the response would come? No, I think we have gone so far as a nation, so far from this worldview that we should honor the precepts and the principles and the basic moral commands of God's word.

That to hear a call to repentance and revival in our land would be met in the same way that Hezekiah's emissaries were met. They laughed at them. They mocked them. They scorned them. Let's pray for our country.

Let's pray for our nation. Let's pray that God would turn hearts to Him so that if there were such a call, there wouldn't be laughing and mockery. There would be a sober march to God's house where we could hear God's word.

I think that's a good prayer request. So Father, on this Wednesday in the middle of the week, in this nation of ours, we grieve over just how far from Your word, Your principles, Your view of life and the world we have strayed.

Father, I pray that by Your grace, You would bring conviction to the hearts of men and women, boys and girls in this land and bring repentance, bring revival. This is something only You can do. And we pray that You would be merciful to us as a people and be gracious.

We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Alright, well, have a good rest of your Wednesday and I trust God will bless you in it as you seek Him. Have a good day.