2 Kings 23:21-23
"21 And the king commanded all the people, “Keep the Passover to the Lordyour God, as it is written in this Book of the Covenant.” 22 For no such Passover had been kept since the days of the judges who judged Israel, or during all the days of the kings of Israel or of the kings of Judah. 23 But in the eighteenth year of King Josiah this Passover was kept to the Lord in Jerusalem."
The keeping of the Passover was the culmination of the great movement of reform. (See 2 Chronicles 35:1-19 for a full account of it), and we need not doubt but that there was a great symbolic significance in Josiah's ordering it. For the Passover commemorated the beginning of God's dealings with Israel as a nation, and in celebrating it the nation was now being recalled to its origins and assured of a new beginning in grace, with the fresh possibility of experiencing the power that had brought them out of the land of Egypt and the house of bondage. It is not difficult to see in this the pattern of death and resurrection that is imbedded in the heart of spiritual experience. When we fall, when we drift from the things of God, we must follow Josiah's example, and allow ourselves to be challenged and probed by the Word, confess our sins, renew the covenant, put away our idols, tearing them from the throne of our hearts, and take a fresh stand under the shadow of the Cross. In other words, we must die all over again, in order to rise again to newness of life. Josiah's experience in fact illustrates the application of the principle of the Cross to individual and national life, and indicates both its costliness and the rewards and blessings it brings when it is applied wholeheartedly and unreservedly.