Broken Kingdoms: WK5 - MON
2 Kings 22:8–11 (NLT)
"Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan the court secretary, 'I have found the Book of the Law in the Lord’s Temple!' Then Shaphan read it to the king. When the king heard what was written in the Book of the Law, he tore his clothes in despair."
In 1947, a Bedouin teenager named Muhammad edh-Dhib was wandering the cliffs near the Dead Sea looking for a lost goat. Bored, he threw a rock into a cave and heard something shatter. So he climbed in to investigate, and found clay jars, and inside them, linen-wrapped scrolls that turned out to be the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible. He wasn't on a spiritual quest, he was just a kid chasing a goat and throwing rocks and he stumbled on The Word of God, hiding in ordinary rocky ground.
That's sort of what's happening in 2 Kings 22. A bit of background helps here. By the time we reach this chapter, Israel has been through generations of kings — most of them bad, a few of them catastrophically bad. The people have drifted so far from the God who brought them out of Egypt that other gods have moved into the temple itself. Altars to foreign deities, pagan rituals, the whole thing. It hasn't happened overnight. It's been a slow, generational erosion, each king nudging things a little further in the wrong direction, until eventually nobody alive can quite remember what faithfulness was supposed to look like.
Into this mess is born Josiah. He becomes king at eight years old, and somewhere in his teenage years something shifts in him. He starts caring about God and one day he orders the grown ups to restore the temple.
It's during that restoration project, while workers are patching walls and clearing out decades of neglect, that the high priest finds something in the rubble.The Book of the Law, the actual words God gave Moses. The document that was supposed to be shaping everything. Just sitting there in the dust. It would be like finding the declaration of independence in a dumpster behind a Chipotle.
I rang my sister a while back, nothing significant, just one of those calls you keep meaning to make. Her first words were "Andreas, it's been ages!" I laughed, said something like "I know, I know," and we got talking. But after the call I sat there thinking, has it really been ages? I pulled up our messages. It had been months. Actual months. And the strange thing was I hadn't noticed. I hadn't decided not to call her, and hadn't been avoiding her. Life just kept moving and somehow she'd drifted from the foreground into somewhere further back without me registering it.
I think that's what Josiah is reckoning with when he hears the scroll read aloud. The tearing of his robes isn't a cringey performance, it's someone suddenly seeing the gap between where they are and where they thought they were. It’s not that the kingdom had collapsed, nobody had staged a coup against God. But it was the kind of drift that happens when you're busy keeping things running and you assume the things that matter will keep mattering without any particular attention.
The grace in this story is that the scroll was still there, waiting to be discovered. God's voice hadn't disappeared, it had just been waiting for someone to stumble across it again in the middle of ordinary work. And the fact that it could be found at all, that's the thing that keeps me. Broken things begin to heal the moment honesty arrives. Not perfectly, not instantly, but honestly.
"Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan the court secretary, 'I have found the Book of the Law in the Lord’s Temple!' Then Shaphan read it to the king. When the king heard what was written in the Book of the Law, he tore his clothes in despair."
In 1947, a Bedouin teenager named Muhammad edh-Dhib was wandering the cliffs near the Dead Sea looking for a lost goat. Bored, he threw a rock into a cave and heard something shatter. So he climbed in to investigate, and found clay jars, and inside them, linen-wrapped scrolls that turned out to be the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible. He wasn't on a spiritual quest, he was just a kid chasing a goat and throwing rocks and he stumbled on The Word of God, hiding in ordinary rocky ground.
That's sort of what's happening in 2 Kings 22. A bit of background helps here. By the time we reach this chapter, Israel has been through generations of kings — most of them bad, a few of them catastrophically bad. The people have drifted so far from the God who brought them out of Egypt that other gods have moved into the temple itself. Altars to foreign deities, pagan rituals, the whole thing. It hasn't happened overnight. It's been a slow, generational erosion, each king nudging things a little further in the wrong direction, until eventually nobody alive can quite remember what faithfulness was supposed to look like.
Into this mess is born Josiah. He becomes king at eight years old, and somewhere in his teenage years something shifts in him. He starts caring about God and one day he orders the grown ups to restore the temple.
It's during that restoration project, while workers are patching walls and clearing out decades of neglect, that the high priest finds something in the rubble.The Book of the Law, the actual words God gave Moses. The document that was supposed to be shaping everything. Just sitting there in the dust. It would be like finding the declaration of independence in a dumpster behind a Chipotle.
I rang my sister a while back, nothing significant, just one of those calls you keep meaning to make. Her first words were "Andreas, it's been ages!" I laughed, said something like "I know, I know," and we got talking. But after the call I sat there thinking, has it really been ages? I pulled up our messages. It had been months. Actual months. And the strange thing was I hadn't noticed. I hadn't decided not to call her, and hadn't been avoiding her. Life just kept moving and somehow she'd drifted from the foreground into somewhere further back without me registering it.
I think that's what Josiah is reckoning with when he hears the scroll read aloud. The tearing of his robes isn't a cringey performance, it's someone suddenly seeing the gap between where they are and where they thought they were. It’s not that the kingdom had collapsed, nobody had staged a coup against God. But it was the kind of drift that happens when you're busy keeping things running and you assume the things that matter will keep mattering without any particular attention.
The grace in this story is that the scroll was still there, waiting to be discovered. God's voice hadn't disappeared, it had just been waiting for someone to stumble across it again in the middle of ordinary work. And the fact that it could be found at all, that's the thing that keeps me. Broken things begin to heal the moment honesty arrives. Not perfectly, not instantly, but honestly.
- What truths about God or yourself might have been quietly buried under the pace of life?
- Where have you been going through the motions without reconnecting to what matters most?
- What would it look like to rediscover God’s voice in your life this week?
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