God’s Word for You
2 Chronicles 34:14-19 The discovery
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Saturday, June 14, 2025
14 While they were bringing out the silver that had been brought into the House of the LORD, Hilkiah the priest found the Scroll of the Law of the LORD given through Moses. 15 Then Hilkiah said to Shaphan the secretary, “I have found the Scroll of the Law in the House of the LORD.” He gave the scroll to Shaphan. 16 Shaphan brought the scroll to the king, and he also reported to the king, “Your servants are doing everything that was assigned to them. 17 They have emptied out the silver that was found in the House of the LORD and have delivered it into the hand of the overseers and the workmen.” 18 Then Shaphan the secretary told the king, “Hilkiah the priest has given me a scroll.” Shaphan read from it in the presence of the king. 19 When the king heard the words of the law he tore his clothes.
The Lord used the command of the king to cause this moment to come about. The order of Josiah was for all the silver, all of the treasure, to be brought out of the temple so that the work of restoring the temple could be done. It was simply the diligence and obedience of the high priest that finally opened the dusty old cabinet. As they searched through all of the old apartments built by Solomon, the old wooden doorframes creaked and sometimes stuck a little. They were more than three hundred years old, for Solomon had died in 930, and now it was 622. Every shelf would have been dusted off and every corner swept as the workers searched everywhere for each bit of lost silver (Luke 15:8-9). The high priest Hilkiah took it on himself to go through the nooks and crannies, the cupboards and cabinets here and there. And then he found a treasure he wasn’t expecting to find.
It was certainly a scroll, very old, perhaps with ornate handles and a cloth or leather slip-cover made for that very scroll. Perhaps the lips of Abiathar and Zadok, the high priests of Solomon’s time, had kissed the top of the scroll as they opened it to read in those days. But it had been lost, almost forgotten, for a very long time. How long had it been? We are not told. But it had been so long that Josiah had never known it; never heard it read. Perhaps no one living had heard.
By this time, the account of the conquest of Canaan under Joshua, and the Book of the Judges, were well-known and were thoroughly accepted as the Word of God. So was the little account of Ruth, written down in David’s time about David’s family line. The Books of Samuel were recorded and were known, as were David’s Psalms, Solomon’s Proverbs and his other books. The writings of the Prophet Isaiah were well-known, as well as a few other prophets: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Jonah, Micah and perhaps Obadiah. And there was an ancient book set to poetry about a man who lived in the days of Isaac or Jacob: the Patriarch Job. But above all of those seventeen books were five others: the Five Books of Moses.
It was one of those books—perhaps Exodus or Deuteronomy—that Hilkiah handed to Shaphan to read before the king. We can pay attention to the preposition “in” which is there in the Hebrew original: He read “in it,” or as we would say, “He read from it.” That is, he did not necessarily read the entire document, but a portion of it. One medieval Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, thought that the text meant that in a single day, these two mean read the entire book (assuming it was Deuteronomy) twice. He complained: “What a contrast to our present-day kings and magnates! If once a year they hear the word of God preached, they find it nauseating and leave the church before the end of the sermon!”
If the high priest had read from Deuteronomy, he would only have needed to read five chapters (just a few pages of Hebrew) to get to the Ten Commandments. But the text doesn’t imply that he read from the beginning, only that he read in or from the book. It was enough, whatever passages were read, to convict the young king’s heart. He knew that what they were doing did not live up to God’s holy standard of perfection. He knew that there were sinful things happening throughout the kingdom despite all of his efforts at purging the physical idols from the land. Spiritual idols remained. Sins remained everywhere. The light of the text of Moses was like an investigator shining a black light on a crime scene. What looked like clean floors and furniture displayed the remains of sins everywhere.
This is what the law does to the heart of the believer. It displays sins where we had forgotten to look, didn’t try to look, didn’t want to look, or didn’t know we should look. But the sins are there, just the same. Josiah tore his clothes in grief and repentance. But Joel had proclaimed, “Tear open your hearts and not your clothes” (Joel 2:13). The heart that grieves over sin but trusts in forgiveness through Christ is a heart that has true faith, and is truly redeemed by the blood of Jesus our Lord. Trust in him always.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.