The Passover revival

2 Chronicles 30: 15 – 27

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 27 Jul, 2008

MY GREAT hope for Silver Street Mission is a hope for revival. You’ve heard me say that before, and I suppose you will hear it again from me until we have a revival or I retire.

Here we are at another anniversary. We stand in the stream of 121 years of continuous Baptist witness in Marrickville. We were in Marrickville when the Catholics arrived — that’s how long we have been here.

And we stand in the stream of 9 years of determination to be a mission to Marrickville; not just to be a church which has bouts of outreach, but to be constantly focused on bringing change to individuals and to the society in which we and they live.

And an anniversary is a great time to think about revival, because that great Passover in the days of King Hezekiah was a time of revival.

The nation had fallen away from God. The temple had become a ruin and a heap of rubbish. The word of God was not heard, and the light had gone out.

But God met the people when they were willing, and he did a new thing in their midst.

Anniversaries are great times for God to do something new. They are marker times in our lives, and marker times are times for change.

What happened in Israel

King Hezekiah was a good king, who came from bad stock. His father, Ahaz, was a good politician, but spiritually corrupt. We read,

^{2CHR 28:24} Ahaz gathered together the furnishings from the temple of God and took them away. He shut the doors of the LORD’s temple and set up altars at every street corner in Jerusalem. ²⁵ In every town in Judah he built high places to burn sacrifices to other gods and provoked the LORD, the God of his fathers, to anger.

But when Hezekiah came to the throne, he didn’t follow the pattern his father had set.

^{2CH 29:2} He did what was right in the eyes of the LORD, just as his father David had done.

  ^{2CH 29:3} In the first month of the first year of his reign, he opened the doors of the temple of the LORD and repaired them.

Hezekiah wound back what his father had done.

He repaired the temple, and he called the people to share a Passover celebration. And revival came in the sense of the joy they felt in God’s presence over those two weeks.

I want us to notice a few things here.

First, we see that the revival began with Hezekiah's determination to bring the people back to God.

Occasionally, revival comes to unprepared people, but usually someone has to take the initiative and really want it. Of course, once the revival begins, people get swept up in it and maybe had no idea they would be touched until the wave catches them.

It was like this in 1727, when revival broke out in Herrnhut in Germany. The Moravian Christians who settled on the estates of Graf Nikolaus von Zinzendorf had in common that they were experiencing persecution in Czechoslovakia. But they were horribly disunited otherwise. And we know that it is good and pleasant when brethren dwell together in unity, because that is where the oil of the Spirit is poured out and touches each of us.

It was Graf von Zinzendorf who confronted the people’s disunity and spiritual sickness and told the leaders to refocus the people on Christ.

And then, on that day when the entire group met in the Berthelsdorf church, the Spirit was poured on them in power, and people who had barely spoken for years were reunited in love, and such a great missionary movement was launched among them that people still talk about it to this day.

It’s the same thing in Hezekiah's day.

Hezekiah saw the need and did something.

He prepared the temple for worship and he called the people together to restore their relationship with God.

 Not that Hezekiah in any way glossed over the people’s spiritual sickness. He was quite plain:

“...⁸ Do not be stiff-necked, as your fathers were; submit to the LORD. Come to the sanctuary, which he has consecrated forever. Serve the LORD your God, so that his fierce anger will turn away from you. ⁹ If you return to the LORD, then your brothers and your children will be shown compassion by their captors and will come back to this land, for the LORD your God is gracious and compassionate. He will not turn his face from you if you return to him.”

And this means repentance, because it was not possible for the people to have it both ways. They could remain in their filth and continue to experience judgment on their sin, or they could clean up their act — in this case, quite literally.

When the celebrations actually began, grace flowed through the entire event.

First there was the shedding of blood.

As we know, the blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, cleanses us and goes on cleansing us from all sin.

The ancient Israelites were still waiting for the final sacrifice of Calvary, but, in the meantime, they had sacrifices of bulls and goats and other creatures as a stop-gap measure.

²³ The goats for the sin offering were brought before the king and the assembly, and they laid their hands on them. ²⁴ The priests then slaughtered the goats and presented their blood on the altar for a sin offering to atone for all Israel, because the king had ordered the burnt offering and the sin offering for all Israel.

Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sin.

Sometimes people get a bit worried about the finer points. I had an unsigned letter during the week urging me to worship on a Saturday, and to get all of you to worship on a Saturday It misses the entire point that the main issue with what day we keep is to make sure we worship together. Christianity is a corporate religion. It is about community, You can’t have community when people don’t even come together.

People who urge worship on Saturday or on the third Thursday of every even-numbered month are the ones who are wrong, because they stand against community.

But there were people who came to that Passover under king Hezekiah who were not properly prepared. They had not gone through the same set of preparations and preparatory experiences as their fellow Israelites.

There is a place for rituals and set practices, because they help us to feel that we have things in common. And they become a shorthand way of pointing our thoughts towards God.

That is why we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, to give us a shared experience.

Let’s not look down on people who don’t do things our way. God has room for people who sincerely seek him, even if they aren’t quite “proper” in the way we might like them to be.

Hezekiah specifically allowed for the people who didn’t quite fit in, for the people who hadn’t properly prepared. They had a place in God’s blessing, too, and let no one look down on them.

¹⁸ Although most of the many people who came from Ephraim, Manasseh, Issachar and Zebulun had not purified themselves, yet they ate the Passover, contrary to what was written. But Hezekiah prayed for them, saying, “May the LORD, who is good, pardon everyone ¹⁹ who sets his heart on seeking God — the LORD, the God of his fathers — even if he is not clean according to the rules of the sanctuary.” ²⁰ And the LORD heard Hezekiah and healed the people.

And God acted.

^{2CH 30:21} The Israelites who were present in Jerusalem celebrated the Feast of Unleavened Bread for seven days with great rejoicing, while the Levites and priests sang to the LORD every day, accompanied by the LORD’s instruments of praise.

And then we read,

 ^{2CH 30:23} The whole assembly then agreed to celebrate the festival seven more days; so for another seven days they celebrated joyfully. ...

²⁵ The entire assembly of Judah rejoiced, along with the priests and Levites and all who had assembled from Israel, including the aliens who had come from Israel and those who lived in Judah. ²⁶ There was great joy in Jerusalem, for since the days of Solomon son of David king of Israel there had been nothing like this in Jerusalem. ²⁷ The priests and the Levites stood to bless the people, and God heard them, for their prayer reached heaven, his holy dwelling place.

But the real test was that, on their ways back home, the people cleared the idols out of the land. The old idols no longer held value for them.

A revival which doesn’t create change is no revival at all: it is mere celebration and no more.

How it can happen for us

There are many lessons for us. Perhaps the most surprising thing in all of this is that it is the political leader who calls the nation to spiritual change. Generally the politicians are the last to take public spirituality seriously unless there is a vote in it.

I was interested to see that Kevin Rudd consults with the American evangelical, Jim Wallis, on how Christian commitment can be turned into political action. I suppose that what happened with Hezekiah would be a bit like Kevin Rudd calling the Australian people together for national repentance and restored relationship with God. You’d expect Archbishop Jensen or Cardinal Pell to do that, but the Pells and Jensens of Hezekiah’s day, the priests and Levites, were in as much of a spiritual mess as everyone else.

The point is that anyone can call people to repentance and to faith and to a revived relationship with God. It is not something tied to a specific role: it is something to be done by the person with the passion for revival.

We also see that there has to be preparation. Do we see spiritual sickness in our midst? Do we see a need for repentance? Then let’s be honest and declare it,

Revival never comes without a healthy dose of chaos — when things get unpleasant and uncomfortable — because they confront reality.

We don’t read how the people felt when Hezekiah told them how their sins were causing their defeat and their losses. I am sure they were uncomfortable, but they took it seriously and acted on it, and that is what makes the difference.

Then we can also see that there has to be an engagement with the sacrifice of Jesus. Sometimes I can get a bit absorbed with the history and theology of revival, and forget how important it is to keep our focus on Jesus.

When revival broke out among a group of Catholics in a retreat at Ann Arbor University in Michigan about 30 years ago, a key factor was their recognition of the centrality of the cross of Jesus to any renewal they might experience.

When they turned their eyes on Jesus, that was when brokenness came, and they were filled with joy and love towards one another.

Finally, an important and often neglected factor is that we have to allow ourselves to celebrate. The Israelites extended the Passover for another week, and gave themselves time to really experience God in their midst.

What about our anniversary?

Well, I want to conclude with some remarks to put this in our anniversary context.

As I said at the beginning, an anniversary is a great time to think about revival.

First, our anniversary should remind us of how far we have come and still are not revived.

Let’s be thankful to God for preserving us this far; but let’s remember that we need, and we can have, far more blessing than we have experienced so far.

Second, our anniversary is a reminder of where there have been blessings in the past, a reminder of the times when we were doing just what God wanted, and he poured out a blessing on us, times like when we prayed for Caroline’s sister with the advanced bladder cancer, and she was clean from it the very next morning, or when God provided at that time when we couldn’t afford our insurances.

Jesus tells us,

 ⁵ Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first.

When we look back we can see contrasts and know that we must clean out the mess and start again. That’s what repentance is about. Never wait until you have repentant feelings, because you may never have repentant feelings. Repentance is about recognising the truth and doing something about it. It has to do with the mind rather than the emotions.

Third, our anniversary is a time when we are together with singleness of purpose. And that is where revival can come.

The Day of Pentecost was certainly a day of inauguration for the Church, but it was a day of revival as well — revival for a little group of Jews who were really seeking God’s face, and knew they could find him in Jesus.

We should never forget that aspect of Pentecost.

And we read that, on that day the believers were all together in one place.

I sometimes give people a piece of advice when I marry them, and that is, to seek a shared goal, a shared purpose in life, which is bigger than both of them, something so big it will utterly fail unless they both devote themselves fully to it.

I had never realised until this week that what makes soul mates is exactly the same as what makes a revived church.

It is not the project itself, it is the fact that the couple have to learn to put their own personal agendas aside and find a shared agenda, a shared purpose.

As Christians, we have a shared agenda, we have a shared purpose, which is to make Jesus so known, to make him so alive to our world that individuals are converted and brought into the life of Jesus, and so that the structures and systems of our society are transformed by the grace and the love of Jesus and by purposes of justice, righteousness and peace.

As we move into this 122nd year of local witness, and this 10th year of commitment to mission, let’s aim to do it as a revived church, filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, and with a holy boldness sufficient to stand against all storms and to move forwards against the armies of hell itself.

May this be so, and may God be honoured and glorified forever,

AMEN and AMEN.

© Peter R. Green 2008. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)