Broken Kingdoms: WK5 - THU
2 Kings 23:25 (NLT)
"Never before had there been a king like Josiah, who turned to the Lord with all his heart and soul and strength… and there has never been a king like him since."
A friend told me about her grandmother, someone she didn't particularly like growing up. She seemed cold, a bit harsh, not the warm grandmother type. It was only later, as an adult, that she found out her grandmother had raised seventeen children. Seventeen. And suddenly everything she'd written off as meanness started to look completely different. The sharpness was efficiency. The distance was someone who'd learned to ration her emotional energy across an almost unimaginable load. My friend said it changed how she saw her entirely, like she'd been reading the same person in a completely different translation.
I think about that story when I read this verse. Because the commendation Josiah receives is the kind that usually only makes sense in retrospect, when you know the full weight of what someone was carrying. This is one of the most remarkable things Scripture says about anyone. And what's striking is what it doesn't say. It doesn't say he was the most successful king, or the most powerful, or the one who finally fixed everything. It says he turned to God with everything he had, it's an incredible commendation. That's what gets remembered.
And then, if you keep reading, you find something that takes a moment to sit with. Even Josiah's extraordinary faithfulness doesn't reverse the long-term consequences of generations of drift. The exile still comes and the kingdom still falls. He does everything right and the system is simply too broken, the damage too deep, the momentum of generations too strong.
I've sat with people who carry a version of this weight. Parents who were present and faithful and watched their kids walk away from faith. People who showed up with integrity for years inside institutions that were too compromised to be changed from the inside. There's a particular kind of grief in that, the grief of faithfulness without resolution.
But I think Scripture is doing something careful here. The writer doesn't record Josiah's story as a tragedy. He records it as a commendation as if the wholehearted devotion itself is the thing, not what it produced, not what it prevented, just the orientation of a life toward God in the middle of circumstances he couldn't ultimately control.
Friends, sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is keep showing up honestly in a situation that isn't going to resolve the way you hoped. Most people around you won't see it clearly until much later, if ever. Josiah didn't know how his story ended. He just kept turning toward God with what he had. And two and a half thousand years later, that's still what gets said about him.
"Never before had there been a king like Josiah, who turned to the Lord with all his heart and soul and strength… and there has never been a king like him since."
A friend told me about her grandmother, someone she didn't particularly like growing up. She seemed cold, a bit harsh, not the warm grandmother type. It was only later, as an adult, that she found out her grandmother had raised seventeen children. Seventeen. And suddenly everything she'd written off as meanness started to look completely different. The sharpness was efficiency. The distance was someone who'd learned to ration her emotional energy across an almost unimaginable load. My friend said it changed how she saw her entirely, like she'd been reading the same person in a completely different translation.
I think about that story when I read this verse. Because the commendation Josiah receives is the kind that usually only makes sense in retrospect, when you know the full weight of what someone was carrying. This is one of the most remarkable things Scripture says about anyone. And what's striking is what it doesn't say. It doesn't say he was the most successful king, or the most powerful, or the one who finally fixed everything. It says he turned to God with everything he had, it's an incredible commendation. That's what gets remembered.
And then, if you keep reading, you find something that takes a moment to sit with. Even Josiah's extraordinary faithfulness doesn't reverse the long-term consequences of generations of drift. The exile still comes and the kingdom still falls. He does everything right and the system is simply too broken, the damage too deep, the momentum of generations too strong.
I've sat with people who carry a version of this weight. Parents who were present and faithful and watched their kids walk away from faith. People who showed up with integrity for years inside institutions that were too compromised to be changed from the inside. There's a particular kind of grief in that, the grief of faithfulness without resolution.
But I think Scripture is doing something careful here. The writer doesn't record Josiah's story as a tragedy. He records it as a commendation as if the wholehearted devotion itself is the thing, not what it produced, not what it prevented, just the orientation of a life toward God in the middle of circumstances he couldn't ultimately control.
Friends, sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is keep showing up honestly in a situation that isn't going to resolve the way you hoped. Most people around you won't see it clearly until much later, if ever. Josiah didn't know how his story ended. He just kept turning toward God with what he had. And two and a half thousand years later, that's still what gets said about him.
- How do you define success in your spiritual life, by results or by faithfulness?
- Where might God be inviting you to stay wholehearted even without immediate outcomes?
- What helps you keep a tender heart in a hard environment?
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