Broken Kingdoms: WK5 - FRI

2 Kings 23:26–27 (NLT)
"Even so, the Lord was very angry with Judah because of all the wicked things Manasseh had done… The Lord said, 'I will also banish Judah from my presence just as I have banished Israel.'"

I’m hopeless when it comes to cars. A few years ago, I tried to replace a broken taillight. I watched the YouTube video, it looked straightforward enough, so I went out to the car feeling confident. I got the housing off fine and then there was a connector that simply would not budge. I tried everything, different angles, more force, less force, a screwdriver, watching three more videos to make sure I was doing it right. An hour later I was standing in the driveway having made things slightly worse than when I started. I ended up taking it to a mechanic who sorted it in about four minutes. Some things look fixable from the outside until you get in there and discover the problem is further down than you can reach.

That's where Josiah's story ends because after everything, the rediscovery of the scroll, the tears, the covenant renewal, the sweeping reforms, scripture lands with a heavy conclusion. We realize that the damage done by generations before him runs too deep to reverse. The exile to another country is still going to happen. One faithful king, however wholehearted, cannot carry the weight of that much accumulated and broken history.

This isn't a critique of Josiah. It's just honest about how far leadership can reach and where it runs out. America spent decades declaring a war on drugs, changing laws, increasing sentences, funding enforcement, cycling through administrations that each promised to finally fix it. And the overdose numbers kept climbing. Because the legislation was addressing the supply while the despair that created the demand went largely untouched. You can change a law without changing what people love. You can reshape behaviour without touching the thing underneath that keeps driving it.

Most of us have felt this somewhere, perhaps for you its a family pattern that keeps reasserting itself across generations no matter how much therapy or good intention gets applied. A wound in a community that keeps reopening despite everyone's genuine desire to move on and bury it. You do the right things, make real progress, and yet underneath it all there's something that doesn't shift because it’s further down than you can reach.

So Josiah's story doesn’t end with the satisfactory resolution of a 30min soap opera, but with longing. If even the best king, the most wholehearted, the most sincere, the most courageous cannot ultimately heal a broken kingdom, then something more is needed than better leadership or more sincere reform. Something that doesn't just change what people do but reaches whatever it is inside them that keeps pulling them back.

Josiah, like all stories in scripture, points forward without knowing it, toward a different kind of king, one who doesn't just rediscover the law but fulfills it from the inside out, one who doesn't just remove idols but slowly, painstakingly reshapes what people actually desire. The whole long arc of this story is leaning toward something Josiah couldn't provide but couldn't stop needing. Broken things need more than good leadership. They need resurrection. And that's a different kind of work entirely.

Where in your life have you been working at the surface level of a problem that might have deeper roots than you've been willing to look at?
Is there something you've been waiting for a person, a leader, or an institution to fix, that might actually need a different kind of healing altogether?
What would it mean for you personally to stop trying to manage the broken thing and instead bring it to the one who can reach further down than you can?