May 8, 2021: Day 63 – II Chronicles 30

Even if you don’t know exactly what you are doing and if you don’t have everything exactly right, it is still important to praise the Lord.  This is what we find here with King Hezekiah who is really trying to rally the people to worship God in the best way possible.  He calls on all of the surrounding nations and the surrounding tribes of Israel to come into Jerusalem and worship the Lord on the Passover.  It had not been done correctly in decades.  Many of those who received the messenger mocked the message and did not take seriously this attempt by the King to bring them closer to God.  We are doing just fine.

But those who came were still in great number.  If you were going to worship in the temple you had to be ritually clean in order to enter.  Well, that wasn’t necessarily followed by the people because they simply were out of practice and did not know what it took in order to be ritually clean.  Hezekiah asks the Levites, all of the priests to pray for the people so that God would know that they were at least trying, even if they didn’t get everything right.  At least they were trying to follow.  

God, of course, blesses them and the time is so significant, this week together of being blessed and sanctified before the Lord, that they decided to extend it another week.  As we read in vs.26 that this was a singular event: “there had been nothing like this in Jerusalem.”  Hezekiah is finally doing what all of the kings before him should have done.