First Things First Text: 2 Chronicles 29:1-4
Introduction: The Debris of Apostasy
We live in an age that is choking on the consequences of our fathers' sins. We are surrounded by the debris of apostasy. The previous generation, much like the wicked king Ahaz, decided it would be a grand idea to shut the doors of God's house, to board up the access to heaven, and to set up cheap, tawdry altars to foreign gods on every street corner. Ahaz, the father of our man Hezekiah, was a world class idolater. He had shut down the temple worship, desecrated its instruments, and turned Judah into a spiritual wasteland, a client state of paganism. He was an innovator in rebellion, even sacrificing his own sons in the fire. Hezekiah did not inherit a fixer upper; he inherited a toxic waste dump.
And this is where we find ourselves. We look at the moral, spiritual, and intellectual ruin of our own nation, and we are tempted to despair. We are tempted to think that the only sane response is to manage the decline, to find a comfortable corner in the rubble and wait for the end. But the story of Hezekiah is a trumpet blast against such faithless resignation. It teaches us that God delights in raising up reformers in the darkest of times. And it teaches us the non negotiable starting point for any true reformation. When a nation has gone as far off the rails as Judah had, or as America has, where do you possibly begin? Do you start with tax policy? Foreign relations? Judicial appointments? Hezekiah shows us the divine blueprint. You start with worship. You always start with worship.
The health of a nation is not determined in its legislative halls or on its battlefields, but in its sanctuary. The heart of any culture is its cult, its worship. What a people adores is what a people becomes. Hezekiah understood this. He knew that all the political and military problems plaguing Judah were merely symptoms. The disease was theological. The cancer was idolatry. And so his very first act as king, in his first month on the throne, was not to form a committee on cultural renewal, but to take a crowbar to the doors of the temple.
The Text
Hezekiah became king when he was twenty-five years old; and he reigned twenty-nine years in Jerusalem. And his mother’s name was Abijah, the daughter of Zechariah. And he did what was right in the sight of Yahweh, according to all that David his father had done. In the first year of his reign, in the first month, he opened the doors of the house of Yahweh and repaired them. And he brought in the priests and the Levites and gathered them into the square on the east.
(2 Chronicles 29:1-4 LSB)
A Godly Son from a Wicked Father (v. 1)
We begin with the basic facts of the man God raised up.
"Hezekiah became king when he was twenty-five years old; and he reigned twenty-nine years in Jerusalem. And his mother’s name was Abijah, the daughter of Zechariah." (2 Chronicles 29:1)
Hezekiah takes the throne at twenty-five. He is a young man, full of vigor, but old enough to have witnessed the full scope of his father's disastrous reign. He had a front row seat to the apostasy. This is a profound encouragement. God can raise up a reformer from the very household of a tyrant. Grace is not hereditary, but neither is apostasy. The son of the wicked Ahaz can become one of Judah's greatest kings. This is a testimony to the unmerited, surprising grace of God. God did not abandon His covenant promises just because the king went off the deep end.
The mention of his mother, Abijah, is significant. The Chronicler often includes the king's mother as a way of indicating the spiritual climate of the court. While Ahaz was a monster, it is highly likely that God preserved a remnant of faithfulness in the royal family through this woman. Her father was Zechariah, who may well have been the faithful prophet mentioned by Isaiah (Is. 8:2). In the midst of national collapse, God often works through quiet, faithful women, preserving the seed of righteousness for the next generation. While the men are chasing political power and pagan novelties, the mothers are teaching their children the ways of Yahweh.
The True Standard (v. 2)
Next, we are given the standard by which Hezekiah's entire reign is to be judged.
"And he did what was right in the sight of Yahweh, according to all that David his father had done." (2 Chronicles 29:2)
The first and most important thing to see is the ultimate measure: "what was right in the sight of Yahweh." The standard for a king, a president, a pastor, or a father is not what is popular, not what is pragmatic, not what is approved by the experts, but what is right in God's sight. Public opinion is a fickle and foolish god. True leadership is accountable to an audience of One.
But notice the historical benchmark: "according to all that David his father had done." Why David? His immediate father was Ahaz. The text deliberately leapfrogs over generations of compromise and outright rebellion to get back to the true standard. Reformation is not about returning to the 1950s. It is not about making things the way they were a generation or two ago. Reformation is always radical in the truest sense of the word; it goes back to the radix, the root. For Israel, the standard was the covenant faithfulness embodied by David. David was a sinner, to be sure, but he was a man after God's own heart, a king who sought to rule according to God's law. When you want to rebuild, you don't study the ruins; you pull out the original blueprints. For us, this means our standard is not the early church fathers, or the Reformers, or the Puritans, as much as we can learn from them. Our standard is the Word of God alone, as embodied perfectly in the Son of David, Jesus Christ.
Radical Immediacy (v. 3)
Here we find the heart of the matter, the key to Hezekiah's entire project.
"In the first year of his reign, in the first month, he opened the doors of the house of Yahweh and repaired them." (2 Chronicles 29:3)
Notice the speed. "In the first year... in the first month." This was item number one on day number one. Hezekiah wastes no time. There is no dithering, no polling, no establishing of a blue ribbon commission to study the problem of liturgical decline. There is immediate, decisive action. This is what repentance looks like. It is not a slow, meandering drift toward righteousness. It is a sharp, right angle turn.
And what is this first, urgent act? He deals with the house of God. He understood that all of Judah's problems, the military defeats, the economic decay, the moral rot, were all downstream from their corrupt worship. When you get worship wrong, you get everything wrong. When you neglect the first table of the law, you cannot hope to keep the second. A nation that will not honor God will not long honor men. Hezekiah knew that the path to national restoration ran straight through the temple courts. Before he could deal with the Assyrians, he had to deal with the abominations in the sanctuary.
He "opened the doors" that his father Ahaz had shut in a final act of defiant apostasy. This is a picture of what reformation does. It reopens access to the presence of God. And he "repaired them." It was not enough to simply unlock the doors. The neglect and abuse had taken their toll. The damage had to be fixed. True reformation is both negative and positive. It involves tearing down the idols, yes, but it also involves rebuilding the altar. It means clearing out the rubbish and then restoring true and beautiful worship.
Summoning the Ministers (v. 4)
Hezekiah knows he cannot do this alone. The king has his role, and the priests have theirs.
"And he brought in the priests and the Levites and gathered them into the square on the east." (2 Chronicles 29:4)
The king, as the civil magistrate, has the authority and duty to command that which is right. He is God's deacon for justice and order. But he does not perform the priestly functions himself. Hezekiah provides a beautiful example of the proper relationship between church and state. He does not usurp the role of the priests, but he does use his God given authority to call them to their duty. He commands them to do what God's law already required them to do.
He gathers them publicly, "into the square on the east." This is not a private memo. This is a public muster. Reformation must be done in the open. The filth had accumulated publicly, and so the cleansing must be done publicly. He is summoning the spiritual leadership of the nation. For reformation to succeed, the ministry must be reformed. A corrupt or cowardly pulpit cannot lead a nation to revival. Hezekiah starts by confronting the men who were responsible for the spiritual state of the people. The fish rots from the head down, and so the cleansing must begin at the head.
Conclusion: Where Our Reformation Begins
The lesson for us is painfully direct. We look at the state of our own civilization and we wonder where to begin. The lesson from Hezekiah is this: Begin with the House of God. Begin with worship.
Before we can hope to see a political reformation, we must have a liturgical reformation. We must throw open the doors of our churches that have been shut by fear, compromise, and worldliness. We must repair the damage done by generations of man centered, therapeutic, entertainment-driven worship. We must recover the preaching of the whole counsel of God. We must restore the centrality of the Lord's Table. We must sing the psalms with masculine vigor. We must teach our children the catechisms. We must recover a robust, joyful, and obedient sabbath.
This is where it begins. It begins when individual Christians, and families, and churches decide, in the first month of their repentance, to put first things first. We must cleanse the sanctuary before we can hope to cleanse the nation.
Hezekiah was a great king, but he was just a shadow. He cleansed a physical temple made of stone, but his work did not last. His own son Manasseh would undo it all and become the most wicked king in Judah's history. But Hezekiah points us to the true and better King, the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus came and cleansed the temple, not with a crowbar, but with a whip of cords. And He did something more. He declared that He Himself was the true temple. And through His death and resurrection, He has not just opened the doors to God's house; He has torn the veil from top to bottom. He has made us the temple of the Holy Spirit. The reformation Hezekiah began is the reformation that Christ is now completing in His church. Our task is to join Him in that work, starting, as Hezekiah did, with the simple, radical, and world-altering priority of putting the worship of the one true God first in all things.