Worship by the Book: The Passover of Reformation Text: 2 Kings 23:21-23
Introduction: The Great Forgetting
We live in an age of liturgical amnesia. The modern evangelical church, in her desperate quest to be relevant, has forgotten who she is. She has forgotten her story, she has forgotten her King, and consequently, she has forgotten how to worship. We have traded the scriptural ordering of worship for a slap-dash collection of whatever we think might work. We have replaced the fear of the Lord with a focus group. We have substituted the Means of Grace for marketing gimmicks. The result is a worship service that is a mile wide and an inch deep, full of emotional froth and spiritual malnutrition.
The problem is that we think worship is something we invent. We believe it is our job to be creative, to be innovative, to design a worship experience that will attract the masses. But this is the very essence of idolatry. It is the sin of Jeroboam, who set up his own convenient worship centers with his own priests and his own calendar. It is the sin of a people who have lost the book. When the book is lost, the people will do what is right in their own eyes, and their worship will become a mirror reflecting their own desires, not a window looking out onto the glory of God.
Into this modern malaise, the story of Josiah's reformation comes like a thunderclap. Here we have a king who finds the Book of the Law buried under generations of neglect and compromise. And what is his first response? It is not to form a committee to study the book's suggestions. It is not to survey the people to see if they would be open to a few changes. No, his response is repentance and immediate, radical, book-driven obedience. And where does this reformation find its climactic expression? It is not in a political program or a social campaign, though those things have their place. The reformation culminates in a great act of corporate worship, a Passover celebrated exactly as God had commanded it. This passage teaches us a fundamental and non-negotiable truth: true reformation is always liturgical reformation. To find our way back to God, we must find our way back to worship by the Book.
The Text
Then the king commanded all the people saying, "Celebrate the Passover to Yahweh your God as it is written in this book of the covenant."
For such a Passover had not been celebrated from the days of the judges who judged Israel, nor in all the days of the kings of Israel and of the kings of Judah.
But in the eighteenth year of King Josiah, this Passover was celebrated to Yahweh in Jerusalem.
(2 Kings 23:21-23 LSB)
The Regulative Command (v. 21)
The first thing we must see is the foundation of this great act of worship. It is grounded in a command, and that command is grounded in the Word of God.
"Then the king commanded all the people saying, 'Celebrate the Passover to Yahweh your God as it is written in this book of the covenant.'" (2 Kings 23:21)
Notice the chain of authority. The king commands, but his command is not based on his own authority or wisdom. He is simply a herald for the Book. His authority is a derived authority. He tells the people to do what is written. This is the very heart of the regulative principle of worship. The question in worship is not "What will please us?" or "What will be effective?" The only question that matters is "What has God commanded?" God alone determines the terms by which He will be approached. Our task is not innovation; it is faithful obedience.
The standard is explicit: "as it is written in this book of the covenant." For generations, Israel had been "worshiping," but they had not been doing it according to the book. They had the temple, they had priests, they had sacrifices. They had all the external trappings of religion. But they had lost the script. Their worship was a syncretistic mess, a blend of Yahweh-worship and pagan custom, a dash of tradition and a heap of human invention. And God considered it an abomination. Josiah's reformation cuts through all that fog with a sharp, simple principle: we will do what is written.
Furthermore, this command is for "all the people." This is not a private devotion. It is a national act of covenant renewal. Worship is the central, public, corporate act of the people of God. It is the moment when we declare together who our God is and who we are as His people. A nation is defined by what it worships, and for Judah to be the people of Yahweh again, they had to worship Yahweh as a people, in the way He commanded.
A Damning Indictment (v. 22)
The next verse gives us a shocking historical assessment. It reveals just how far the people had drifted from the written Word.
"For such a Passover had not been celebrated from the days of the judges who judged Israel, nor in all the days of the kings of Israel and of the kings of Judah." (2 Kings 23:22 LSB)
Let the weight of this sink in. For centuries, nobody had done it right. This spans the period of Samuel, Saul, David, and Solomon. It includes the reigns of other reforming kings like Hezekiah. This does not mean they never celebrated the Passover at all. We know Hezekiah did (2 Chron. 30). But it means that none of them had celebrated it "as it is written." They had failed in some essential aspect of the command. They were going through the motions, but the worship was deficient. It was not according to the Book.
This is a devastating critique of mere traditionalism. The argument "we have always done it this way" is shown to be utterly worthless. For hundreds of years, they had "always done it" the wrong way. Tradition is only valuable insofar as it faithfully transmits the written Word of God. When tradition departs from Scripture, it becomes a chain that binds men to error, not a cord that binds them to God.
This also teaches us about the nature of spiritual decline. It is a slow, generational drift. It is a series of small compromises, a little neglect here, a little innovation there, until centuries have passed and the people are practicing a religion that bears little resemblance to what God actually commanded. They still called it "Passover," but it wasn't God's Passover. And this is the great danger for the church in any generation. We can keep the name on the sign, we can sing some of the old songs, but if the Book is not our absolute and final authority for worship, we will inevitably drift into apostasy.
Reformation in Time and Space (v. 23)
The final verse grounds this liturgical reformation in concrete history. This is not a fairy tale; it is a historical event.
"But in the eighteenth year of King Josiah, this Passover was celebrated to Yahweh in Jerusalem." (2 Kings 23:23 LSB)
The specifics matter. It happened at a particular time, "the eighteenth year of King Josiah," and in a particular place, "in Jerusalem." God works in history. Our faith is not an abstract set of ideas; it is rooted in the mighty acts of God in time and space. And the central act of the people of God is to remember and reenact those mighty acts in corporate worship.
What was the Passover? It was the celebration of God's great, foundational act of redemption for Israel. It was the commemoration of the blood of the lamb that caused the angel of death to pass over God's people. It was the feast of their deliverance from bondage in Egypt. To forget the Passover, or to celebrate it improperly, was to forget who they were. It was to suffer from covenantal amnesia. Their identity as a people was constituted by this redemptive act, and their worship was meant to be a continual renewal of that covenant identity.
And this is precisely why this story is so critical for us. The Passover was a shadow, and the substance is Christ. The apostle Paul tells us plainly, "For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed" (1 Corinthians 5:7). The Lord's Supper is our Passover meal. It is the central act of our corporate worship, where we remember and celebrate our redemption from the bondage of sin through the blood of the Lamb of God. It is where our covenant with God in Christ is renewed and reaffirmed.
Conclusion: Recovering the Book
The church in the modern West is in a Josianic moment. The Book of the Covenant has been lost, buried under a pile of pragmatism, emotionalism, and man-centered worship philosophies. We have torn down the high places in our doctrine, but we have left the high places in our liturgy untouched. We have convinced ourselves that so long as the sermon is orthodox, it doesn't matter if the rest of the service is a chaotic, sentimental free-for-all.
Josiah's reformation shows us the way out. The way back is not forward into more innovation. The way back is to recover the Book. It is to repent of our liturgical arrogance and to submit ourselves once more to the principle of "as it is written." It is to understand that worship is a covenant renewal ceremony, and it must be structured according to the pattern God has given us: a call from God, a confession of our sins, a consecration through His Word, communion at His Table, and a commission to go out in His name.
When Josiah commanded this Passover, it was a declaration of war. It was a stake driven into the ground. It was a public announcement that Yahweh, and not the whims of the people, would be the king in Judah. In the same way, when the church today abandons her man-made worship services and returns to worship by the Book, it is a revolutionary act. It is a declaration that Christ is Lord, not just of our hearts, and not just of our homes, but of His church when she gathers for worship. It is the only path to true reformation, because it is the only path of true obedience.