King Josiah is the most faithful of the kings of Judah. His reforms are sweeping. His devotion to Yahweh is unrivaled. But he still dies a tragic death on the battlefield because he didn’t recognize that the God he loved was speaking through the mouth of Neco, the king of Egypt. Why? Well, our text doesn’t give us a ton of details, but it seems to me the most likely answer is that Josiah is a fighter, a warrior for the truth. And warriors are not terribly great at recognizing when a war isn’t theirs. For those whose hearts are devoted to orthodoxy, their zeal often prevents them from listening when God tells them this is someone else’s fight.
I think this is something that devout Lutherans often struggle with. We see a world that’s utterly indifferent to doctrine, a world where most people simply don’t care about God’s will and word. And so we fight the good fight. We study the Scriptures and we get the right answers and we share them with anyone who will listen. We lean on the Lutheran confessions to shape and form our understanding and we seek out others who do the same. We rejoice in the liturgy, in reverent worship, and we urge people to embrace these gifts when they are drifting from them.
But sometimes battles come up that aren’t ours to fight, and yet we insist on joining. We judge people God hasn’t called us to judge. We try to impose ourselves on those over whom God hasn’t given us authority. We make the perfect the enemy of the good, alienating with our arrogance those who are 90% of the way with us. We get restless, always looking for something to fix and make holier, which only results in us staring our neighbors in the face looking for faults. In all of this, we don’t listen to God’s word when He calls us not to judge those who belong to someone else, when He calls us to bear with one another in love. We make excuses to justify putting on Josiah’s disguise and taking up fights that aren’t ours.
So do what the otherwise faithful king didn’t do. Trust your God to fix the things that need to be fixed when He hasn’t called you to be the fixer. Rest in the forgiveness, the salvation, the blood of Jesus Christ. And the more you trust in His victory over sin, death, and the grave, the more you will trust His promise that He will preserve His church through everything. And the more you trust that promise, the less you’ll feel that urge to fight battles not given to you.
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