Finally, a good King comes along...and there was much rejoicing! He tore down the worship places to other gods and had people worship Jehovah...you remember him right. The God of our Father's... Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
What I found interesting this morning is that King Hezekiah also destroyed the bronze serpent that Moses had made back in the day. The people of Israel had begun to make offerings to it. It even had a name: Nehushtan. Never underestimate the longing we have to worship something. And never underestimate the how quick and easy it is to forget the one true God and replace him with just about anything.
This idea of how we offer ourselves to worship so quickly and easily has been one of those proofs for the existence of God. This constant hunger that is exhibited in humans beings worldwide for all time. A hunger to give praise to, expect attention from...something. The ease with which almost anything can become an idol for us. It doesn't even have to make sense to us, we're just tempted to do.
Hezekiah did the right thing. Recognized that a cool artifact had become something more than the physical reminder of a good story of God's healing power in the desert. Artifacts are not the same as the God that makes the artifact interesting. Traditions become the same for people. Worshipping the wrong the thing instead of our God who gave that thing meaning.
It tripped them up then, it trips us up now, it will trip people up in the future. The important thing is to see what Hezekiah saw and do something about it.
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