2 Chronicles 29:1-11, 16-19 About Those "Good Old Days"...

Observation: Following up one of Judah's worst kings (Ahaz), Second Chronicles tells of Hezekiah, who "did what was right in the sight of the Lord". In this case, that means repairing and re-opening the doors of the temple, beginning incense sacrifices again, and removing false idols. There are a lot of reforms to be made, because as Hezekiah says, "our ancestors have been unfaithful". 

Application: It seems like all too common of a tactic when things in the present day are not going well, that we tend to romanticize a certain past period of time. Maybe it's the time of our childhood, maybe some historic era...the 1980's? the 1950's? The time of the pioneers? Colonial times? I've seen a great deal of this recently, as we face more complex problems and a more divided culture. But any period we might call the "good old days" had problems of its own. Maybe we sense that teenagers "grew up" faster in the 1940's when they helped win World War Two, but I don't think any soldier who was 18 at that time would want any other generation to have to go through that. Maybe we long for the freedom of living off the land as an early American settler, but I doubt any parent who lost children to what today would be an easily curable disease would think themselves better off than we are. 

We do this in the church all the time. We tend to enshrine a certain era--whether it's the mid-20th century, when mainline Protestant churches were busting at the seems with Sunday School kids, or the Reformation era when our forbears were getting "back to basics", or the early church--and say, "if we could just get back to that, things would be better. But I think Hezekiah and those who had to clean out the temple would remind us that our ancestors were sinners just like us. They didn't have fewer problems: just different ones. Even if we could turn things back to their time, which we can't, it would just be "out of the frying pan, and into the fire." Lucky for us, God waits for us in the future, just as God guided our ancestors through the past. 

Prayer: Dear God, thank you for the witness and hard work of previous generations, and what it can teach us--both good and bad--about our own time. Help us to greet the challenges of our present day, not grudgingly, but willingly, knowing you have made us not for any other time, but for this time, in this place. Amen.