2 Kings 23:4-15

When the king had finished reading the words of God's holy law, he proceeded with an holy zeal to bear testimony to God's truth, in the destruction of all that God's holy law had forbidden. And what a blessed work was here wrought. Reader! are you not astonished to behold, and read the account! How was it possible for the great enemy of souls to have kept up his cursed empire in the heart, and even in the midst of God's own people, from generation to generation, in this manner! Reader! do you wonder at it? Look within! See what a body of sin and death, even in the midst of grace, (if in mercy the Lord the Spirit hath regenerated you) you carry about with you! if we recollect, moreover, that Josiah had sat upon the throne, at the time that this great work was done, about eighteen years; during which time he had set his people a good example, it is not a little wonderful that, under the blessings of such a reign, idolatry should have held out to such an extent. Reader! what will example do? nay, what will even reading the sacred word of God do, unless that reading of God's own word be accompanied with his own power? It is hardly possible to read this account of what Josiah destroyed, but with fear and trembling. There were vessels of Baal even in the temple of the Lord: there were idolatrous priests who, at the command of the former kings, had dared to burn incense in the high places: there were even houses for the transaction of such abominable filthiness and unnatural uncleanness, as are not to be once named among us, as becometh saints. And all these not merely in the suburbs of Judea; not near the cloisters of God's church; but in the very church itself. There were horses given to the sun, that were, as it should seem, kept for the worshipping of the sun by them. Perhaps, as some have thought, at sun-rising the idolaters went forth on them, to make exercises in honor of this creature of God, the sun. And strange to think, the stables of these beasts were in the very temple itself. And the image of Moloch, in the valley of Tophet, was among the horrible services of the people, where they committed these unnatural and unfeeling crimes, to make their own children, in honor of this dunghill-god, pass through fire. Reader! pause as you read, and let our souls he humbled to the dust in the view of such a state of degradation to which, by sin, the human mind is capable of being brought. Let us never lose sight of one unquestionable truth, as we read the awful account, namely, that by the fall of man, all men are by nature the same. What one man, or one nation is capable of doing, all are equally prone to. It is grace, free, sovereign, distinguishing grace which maketh all the difference. And therefore think, Reader, (and oh! my soul, do thou never, never for a moment lose sight of it) what unspeakable, what endless mercies do we owe to Jesus, who, in the fulness of grace and truth, came to repair the desolations of many generations, and to raise up the ruins of David which were fallen down. Oh! thou precious, blessed, adorable Redeemer! Hail! thou glorious, gracious Benefactor of mankind! Amos 9:11.