2 Kings 22:3-7 - Honoring God's dwelling place

Josiah became a king young and as a youth, he already had a deep hunger for God. So the first part of 2 Chronicles 34:3 said that “…in the eighth year of his reign while he was still a youth, he began to seek the God of his father David.” In the same verse, we are told that in the 12^th year of his reign he started religious reform. It was said that he “began to purge Judah and Jerusalem of the high places, the Asherim, the carved images and the molten images.”

Since he began so early in life seeking the true God and removing false worship, we surmise that it was his desire to restore genuine worship in Judah.  Hence, it is not strange to read in 2 Kings 22:3-7 that in the 18^th year of his reign he started repairing the temple so that worship could be made central in the community. He got his scribe, Shaphan to the house of the Lord to speak to Hilkiah the priest.  The instruction was for the fund collected from the worshippers to be used for the repair of the temple.  Hilkiah was to count take the money collected by the doorkeeper and give it to the supervisors of the workmen of the temple. They in turn would give the money directly to the workmen who were responsible for the different tasks of repairing the temple. In other words, the funds were directly given to the carpenters, the builders, and the mason so that they could get the building materials for their job.  Josiah trusted the integrity of the workmen for they had dealt faithfully.   

 

Having removed the idols and cleansed the temple, the next important task was to have the broken parts of the temple rebuilt. That was what Josiah did.  In the same way, we who have turned our back on the world, need to build our relationship with God. Like Josiah, the place that we should start is the altar of our life where we honor and worship God. Hear what Paul has to say in 1  Corinthians 6:19. “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? It matters how one treats his or her body for 1 Corinthians 6:20 tell us that a believer’s body belongs to God. We have been bought with a price: therefore we must glorify God in our bodies.