Day 199 – Josiah (Southern King 31 years)

• Today we meet the last “good” king in Judah’s history. We’re going to be spending a few days looking at events in his lifetime, and that of the prophet of his time, Jeremiah.
• Josiah is another young king. Very young, indeed! What would you have done if you were king at the age of 8 (after your afternoon nap!)?
• What good things does Josiah do in his earlier years as king?
• In the first chapter of Jeremiah, we read about how Jeremiah’s role as a prophet is established. Like Josiah, he gets the “job” at a young age. In fact, Jeremiah and Josiah were born in the same year.
• What was Jeremiah’s fear in the first chapter, and how did God encourage him and equip him to do God’s work?
• The end of Jeremiah 1 shows that judgement is coming (the “boiling pot”). Does God say that everyone will listen to Jeremiah? How does God tell Jeremiah to deal with those who don’t accept his message? It’s encouraging! When we share the gospel with people, our measure of success – as Jeremiah will show – is how faithfully we follow God’s directions, not on the number of people who listen to us!
• We’re going to find out that Jeremiah didn’t have an easy job as a prophet, and repeatedly bemoaned the unrepentant nation he preached too. In the final reading, we skip forward to a word he has for today’s king, Josiah. What was that dreadful message? We’ll find out more about how this came true later in our reading plan.

When we read about “another” king and “another” prophet, try to think about them as real, individual people. Just as all the kings were different, so were all the prophets. Jeremiah is an important prophet. His book is long and not particularly easy to read. The book is mostly about judgement, which makes sense because he was prophesying in the final years of Judah before the exile to Babylon and the destruction of Jerusalem.

Jeremiah is often described as an “emotional” prophet, or “the weeping prophet”, as he felt intense compassion for people, and deep anguish as he witnessed the destruction of the city. As we’ll read, Jeremiah also gives us the clearest glimpse of God’s “new” covenant with his people – a covenant written on peoples’ hearts rather than stone tablets, and made perfect in Jesus.