Josiah and Bible Work

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 12, 1872

Josiah and Bible Work.

It was a wonder that Josiah had a spark of piety in him. Grandfather Manasseh had led the nation down the incline of iniquity at lightening speed, and plunged it into the filth of heathenism, and father Amon had helped it wallow there. And yet out of all this comes an angel. At sixteen years of age he is radiant with the reflected light of Heaven.

We look for a cause. In Joash’s reign, two centuries before, it was good old Jehoiada, the centenarian. In Jehoshaphat’s, it was the faithful king Asa. But there are none of these helps for Josiah. We are utterly at a loss. We can only guess. “His mother’s name was Jedidah, daughter of Adaiah, of Boscath.” Eight years old when his wicked father was murdered in the palace, and he became king! Who else had charge of the boy but this Boscathitess? She was Sultana Valide; she was queen mother, which is the very fountain of authority in the East. The light comes through her. Now we guess how the angel came. Josiah must have had faithful instruction in divine things, to come out such a full-blown saint at sixteen, and that, too, in a soil rank with the abominations of idolatry.

He was no milk-and-water believer. He was a hero. Nobody led him. He led everybody. The high-priest, chief priests, and Levites, simply followed in his grand wake. The young king, at twenty, went through the land with the broad sweep of reform, and its iniquities slunk away into caverns to hide from the lad.

Again, at twenty-six, when he had found the long-lost Bible, gathering new knowledge and strength from the holy book, he passes from limit to limit of his country, with the hammer of an iconoclast in his hand, wielding it right lavishly on Baal and Astarte, until every relic of idolatry is broken into ugly deformity. How the people must have cursed him! But he did not care for the curses of idolaters. Think how many priests and servitors of temples and chapels and shrines all through the land, must have been thrust out of office penniless into the cold! How many family and social arrangements, confirmed by the idolatrous customs of more than half a century, must have been turned topsy-turvy! The few who sympathized with the king, were what we call “a corporal’s guard.” But yet how sturdily he strikes! Beautiful statues! Oh, in the name of Art, spare them, good king! Down go the lovely nudities. The art-plea will not do. (Oh, for a Josiah to clear away the mixture of the beautiful and lascivious that, in the specious name of Art, seduces the modesty of the young among us!)

Solomon’s fine-art galleries on Olivet, where Pinacotheks and Glyptotheks, in honor of Chemosh and Moloch, had been preserved four hundred years, must succumb. How the sentimental young ladies and the accomplished artists of Jerusalem must have howled! They can’t see the sense of being so “awfully religious.” It is sheer ugliness and Puritanism (whatever the Hebrew for that may be). Why be so illiberal and narrow as to crush out the mere name of the heathen deities, and that at the expense of real beauty, that has cost the skill and labor of ages?

Ah! poor, weak worldlings, Josiah has found the Bible! And when the Bible is found by the heart, the heart will have nothing to do with compromises. It plucks up root and fibre. It sees danger where the blinded soul feels secure. It guards against incipient evils. It crushes the eggs of the serpent. It is zealous for the Lord God, and no beauty will justify a rivalry with God in its sight.

Tophet was the choice suburb of Jerusalem. There were the king’s gardens. Graveled walks, shady lanes, sweet-scented bowers, sparkling fountains, luxurious villas and kiosks—there they were, and amid them all the shrine of Amon’s cruel god. All that luxury is identified in the public mind with the Amonitish idolatry, just as theatres now are identified in the public mind with fashion, carelessness, loose morals, and irreligion. The young hero of God does not spare these ancestral treasures. Tophet is defiled, and all its pride turned into disgrace. The place, made vile, is to be a symbol for all that is abominable, and its name shall be a synonym for hell.

Glorious King Josiah! It was written by the Lord himself, and read by the admiring hosts of Heaven, that “like unto him was there no king before him that turned to the Lord with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his might.” Let the model be imitated. O ye Christian compromisers with fashionable sin, look at Josiah, and learn his royal style of serving your God and Redeemer!—American Messenger.