Good morning. The Lord is risen. Amen. If you would turn to a second Kings chapter 24, and although we're going to be going through a number of verses in second Kings 24, like last week, we will also reference a number of other verses. And when I do that this time, I'm going to put it up on the screen. But before we begin, let's open in prayer. Our Heavenly Father, we thank you again for the opportunity to study your word. We ask that you would lead and guide us, not only as I speak, but also for the hearers, that you would give us ears to hear your word. We pray in Jesus name. Amen. Well, before we get into the meat of today's lesson, I'm going to do a little more extensive summary from last week. for several reasons. One, because a lot of us are not very familiar with this period of biblical history. And there's a lot going on, not only in Judah, but in the superpowers surrounding Judah with Egypt and Assyria and Babylon. And there's also those pesky name changes where it's a little hard to keep track of all the J's. So last week, We saw that the Lord is warning His people. Indeed, in beginning with all the way back to Moses, the prophets had warned about the consequences of sinning against the Lord, of displeasing Him. Not only that there would be judgment in their day, with famine and drought, and being harassed by the kings of the nations around them, but the ultimate biggie had been hanging over them for centuries. Exile. But the Lord was patient, and he waited hundreds of years, giving his people opportunity to repent. And as we saw last time with our wonderful chart that was provided to me by Pastor Walker, we saw on 722 that The northern tribes of Israel were taken away by the Assyrians. About 122 years later began the Babylonian exile. The primary prophet was Jeremiah. During the exile, the primary prophets were Ezekiel and Daniel. Then Cyrus's decree in 538 BC, the people began to return to the land. And Haggai is the first post-exilic or post-exile prophet. And so When we began our look at the fall of Jerusalem in this period, in the exile, we started with Judah's last godly king, Josiah. We saw that he undertook some important reforms, especially in the temple. And as I mentioned, as we go through this, as we will see, the temple is extremely important throughout scripture, the Old Testament, and in the book of Haggai. But Josiah, he disobeys the Lord, and he picks a fight with Egypt, mighty Egypt, and he loses. Not only the battle, but he loses his life. And upon his death, Jo has ascends the throne. And although he only reigns for three months, he's adjudged a wicked man, a wicked king. No doubt he had been a wicked man all his life, and his reign of three months is adjudged as wicked. So meanwhile, Pharaoh, after defeating Josiah at the Battle of Megiddo and killing Josiah, makes his way up to Haran. and he battles King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylonia at Haran. Now when I say that, Perhaps there's a faint memory bell that rings in your head of Haran, because Haran is mentioned previously in the scriptures in regards to Abraham. But you're thinking, well, where is Haran, and what's the context of that? Well, I don't know about you, but when I was a little kid, I loved looking at maps, spreading them out on the floor. Digital maps don't have the same fun feel to it, but they can be useful. And so I found a digital map, and here is World Powers of the Sixth Century. You can't see that very well, but orange is Egypt, green is Babylonia, and it's not a real good high resolution, but you can see Haran. of the left-hand corner there. It's basically on the border of Syria and Turkey. So when we say that Pharaoh had gone up, and here's another map. This may be better resolution. There's Iran right in the middle of your screen there, right? So you can see how far it is from Jerusalem, right? So it's about 500 miles away. So we're talking quite the journey. So Pharaoh Necho goes up, gets his clock cleaned by the Babylonians, and he's on his way back, and he stops by Judah to take care of some business. He imprisons Jehoaz, makes his brother Elohim the new king, and this is where we run into that fun name change business. So a reminder of what we looked at last week, this little chart that I put together. King Josiah has three sons, Jehoaz, Jehoiakim, and Zedekiah. Jehoiachin is the son of Jehoiakim, the grandson of King Josiah. And King Jehoiakim, and we'll come back to this chart later on, Jehoiakim is facing a problem. He's got to send off 8,000 pounds of silver to the king of Egypt and 80 pounds of gold. It's a lot of money. His solution? Taxes. Raise the taxes. More importantly, we're told that Jehoiachin follows his brother and his a great-grandfather and his grandfather in the path of wickedness. And last week we left off where we see that the Lord is merciful to him and sends him warnings. And in Jeremiah 36, verse one through three, we read, and it came to pass in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, that this word came unto Jeremiah from the Lord saying, take thee a roll of a book and write therein all the words that I have spoken unto thee against Israel and against Judah and against all the nations from the day I spake unto thee from the days of Josiah even unto this day. It may be that the house of Judah will hear all the evil which I purpose to do unto them, that they may return every man from his evil way, that I may forgive their iniquity and their sin. So Jeremiah receives this prophecy and we get the details a little bit more in the following verses. And he is confined. We don't know why he's confined. Maybe he's sick. Maybe he's under house arrest. There's some other reason. And he's unable to go to the temple to deliver the message. Instead, he sends his assistant, Baruch. The implication of the text seems to be that Baruch is preaching for a period of time. It's not just one time that he delivers this message, but for a period of time. And we're told in the fifth year of the reign of King Jehoiakim that the people declare a fast. Is this the fruit of the preaching of God's Word? Or are they declaring a fast because of God's judgment, there's a famine, a drought in the land? Or are they starting to get nervous? Do they see what's happening on their borders? Do they see what is going on with Egypt and Assyria and Babylon and all the threats that are coming towards them? We don't know, but they do proclaim a fast and the text says it's before the Lord. And once again, Baruch, on this day of the fast, delivers the message. Now a son of one of the priests hears the message and is alarmed. And he somehow gets a copy of the scroll of the message, and he takes the message to the leaders, the princes of the land. And the princes are so alarmed by what Jeremiah has delivered to them about the impending doom, the judgment that's coming upon them, that they say among themselves, we've got to give this to the king. The king has got to know what's going on here. Let's take it to the king. They are compelled to do so. It's the middle of winter. And like anyone stuck in the palace in the middle of winter, he's warming himself by a nice fire. And the princes come in. King, you've got to listen to this message. And they read the message to the king. And how does he respond? Does he respond like his father, King Josiah, when Hilkiah found the scroll in the temple and reads it to him? And he rents his clothes, he tears his clothes, a symbol of an inward work of repentance and grief and despair before the Lord? Oh, he responds quite dramatically, but not in a godly way. He grabs the scroll, he takes a knife, and he slices the scroll, and he tosses it into the fire. A double disdain, if you will. He just doesn't toss it into the fire. No, he's got to slice it as a demonstration of his rebellion against the Lord. So how do we respond to the word of the Lord? Are we like Josiah and do we repent? Are we on the edge of our seat, willing and anxious to hear his word and to apply it to our hearts? Or are we like Jehoiakim? We're rebellious and we tear it up. Or are we somewhere in the middle? I've been reading a book by Os Guinness called The Call or The Calling, I can't remember. It's really good. And he had this sentence that I read just a couple nights ago. All too often our familiarity with the Gospels, and we could insert there Old Testament stories, the Bible, whatever. All too often our familiarity with the Gospel breeds inattention. Interesting word, inattention. We're not paying attention. We all pay attention with our whole heart to the teaching and preaching of the Word. So obviously, with King Jehoiakim's response to the Word of the Lord, disaster is not averted. Indeed, just a few years later, 605, they are liberated from Egypt. There is another huge battle, one of the world's great battles, at Carchemish. which is just a few miles from Haran. And once again, it's between the armies of Egypt, who are allied with the remnants of the Assyrian Empire, and they're battling Babylon, which has allied itself with the Medes and Persians and Scythians. And once again, Egypt and the Assyrians are defeated. Indeed, the Assyrians are so decimated that they are no longer in the picture. They collapse. So following the defeat, Nebuchadnezzar, now the commander of the Babylonian army, crosses the Euphrates, and he makes his way down to Palestine, and he visits Jehoiachin, and he brings him under his protection. And in 2 Kings 24, we're finally getting to our text, verse 1, We read, in his days, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came up and Johiakim became his servant three years. So he comes, conquers the land, and he takes away a number of prisoners, this time including Daniel. Daniel's taken away to Babylon. And now Nebuchadnezzar does all this in just a matter of weeks, because we know that on August 16th, 605, his father Nebuchadnezzar dies. And Nebuchadnezzar leaves. He takes off, he's crowned king, and he has to take care of all the kingly things that he does when someone becomes a new king. So for three years he's gone. Jehoiachin, for some reason gets into his mind that, well, you know, the cat's away and I'm just a little mouse, so I think I'll play. And what does he do? The end of verse one, it tells us, then he turns and rebelled against him. Maybe because he had rebelled, because we see that Nebuchadnezzar had done something else, skipping down to verse 7. And the king of Egypt came not again any more out of his land, for the king of Babylon had taken from the river of Egypt unto the river Euphrates all that pertained to the king of Egypt. So he wiped out all of the influence of Egypt. So he not only crushes Assyria, but he also pushes Egypt all the way back into their own land. He's also undertaken several other campaigns, including along the boundaries of Judah. So maybe Nebuchadnezzar's preoccupation with all these things emboldens Jehoiakim to rebel. But retribution is swift. Nebuchadnezzar sends troops from Babylon and some of his vassal states, verse 2. And the Lord sent against him bands of the Chaldees, which is the Babylonians, and bands of the Syrians, and bands of the Moabites, and bands of the children of Ammon, ancient enemies of Israel right on their border, Nebuchadnezzar is using to scourge Judah, and sent them against Judah to destroy it, according to the word of the Lord, which he spake by his servants the prophets. So following the attacks of his soldiers, his allies, Nebuchadnezzar himself finishes the job. He comes down, and we're told in 2 Chronicles, against him up, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, and bound him in fetters to carry him to Babylon. This is referring to Jehoiakim. So he comes in and he takes the king of Judah and he binds him. as if he's going to take him to Babylon. However, we're not really sure if he actually did that. Historians and scholars think perhaps that really didn't happen, that he just binds him as if he's going to take him away, but he doesn't. And the reason why they say that is because in verse six of 2 Kings 24, we read, so Jehoiakim slept with his fathers. It doesn't say that he's taken to Babylon. It doesn't say that he dies in a foreign land, but rather that he sleeps with his father. He's buried in the king's cemetery. But Nebuchadnezzar just doesn't stop there with binding Jehoiakim. Oh no, he's got other things up his sleeve. 2 Chronicles 36.7 gives us a little more details than the account in 2 Kings. Nebuchadnezzar also carried of the vessels of the house of the Lord to Babylon and put them in his temple at Babylon. What great shame. What a great humiliation for the people of God for a foreign pagan king to take articles from the temple, not just to take them and melt them down and use them as coin, but to take the vessels and put them in his own pagan temple. A great humiliation, part of God's judgment. So Jehoiachin, until his death in 598, remains a slave, a servant of Nebuchadnezzar. And verse 3 and 4 reminds us in 2 Kings 24 why this happened. So after he dies, His son, Jehoiachin, becomes king, we read in the last part of verse six, in Jehoiachin, his son reigned in his stead. So a reminder of where we're at here. Once a king, here's King Josiah. And his son, Jehoiachin, his son, Jehoiachin, has now become king, King Josiah's grandfather. So what does Kings have to tell us about his character, what he is like? Well, in verse eight and nine, Jehoiachin was 18 years old when he began to reign. And he reigned in Jerusalem three months. And his mother's name, Wanaheshetah, I think that's how you pronunciate it, the daughter of El Nathan of Jerusalem. And he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, according to all that his father had done. So like his uncle Jehoaz, he reigns only for three months. But like his relatives, he is also subject to rebuke and prophecy delivered by Jeremiah. Reading from Jeremiah, chapter 22, verse 24 and 25. As I live, saith the Lord, though Keniah, adding to the challenge of keeping track of the names, here's another name for Jeconiah, Keniah, the son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, were the signet upon my right hand, yet would I pluck the events. And I will give thee into the hand of them that seek thy life, and into the hand of them whose face thou fearest, even into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, and into the hand of the Chaldeans. The Lord tells Jehoiachin, even though you might be a valuable ring, a gold ring with diamonds, I'm going to take you and pluck you thence. Such dramatic, powerful language. And this time, there is no offer of restoration. There is no command to repent. There's just simply judgment. The judgment of the Lord will fall upon you. And we're not told exactly what Jehoiachin does. But we know that he's still like his relatives, thumbing his nose at Nebuchadnezzar. He's still rebellious. He's doing that which invites retribution. And sure enough, Nebuchadnezzar, once again, invades. Only after three months in power, the city was surrounded by the Babylonian army. And in Nebuchadnezzar's seventh year of his reign, 598 to 597 began another siege of Jerusalem. Verse 10, 2 Kings 24. At that time, the servants of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came up against Jerusalem, and the city was besieged. And Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came against the city, and his servants did besiege it. And Jehoiachin, the king of Judah, went out to the king of Babylon, he and his mothers, and his servants, and his princes, and his officers. And the king of Babylon took him in the eighth year of his reign. So the city fell in Nebuchadnezzar's eighth reign, and we know it was on March 16th, 597. So unlike the first time around with Jehoiakim, under Jehoiachin, he does not restrain his wrath. Instead of just simply binding him and perhaps letting him go and taking a few articles from the temple, this time he lays waste, not just to the palace, not just to the temple, but the whole land. The details are in verse 13 through 16. And he carried out thence, all the treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king's house, and cut in pieces all the vessels of gold which Solomon, king of Israel, had made in the temple of the Lord, as the Lord had said. And he carried away all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all the mighty men of valor, even ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and smiths. None remained. saved the poorest sort of the people of the land. And he carried away Jehoiachin to Babylon, and the king's mother, and the king's wives, and his officers, and the mighty of the land. Those carried he into captivity from Jerusalem to Babylon. And all the men of might, even seven thousand, and craftsmen and smiths a thousand, all that were strong and apt for war, even them the king of Babylon brought captive to Babylon." So the judgment of the Lord falls. Nebuchadnezzar pillages the temple, takes the treasures of the palace. He cuts in pieces. Perhaps what he's doing here is he's stripping the gold that lines the doors and various articles. He carries away the princes, including the kings and his family. So there's no hope here of Jehoiachin, of his son reigning on the throne. They're taken away to Babylon, including 7,000 mighty men fit for war. And he takes the craftsmen and the blacksmiths, the key men who fashion weapons for war, who are integral to the economy of the land. They're gone. They're taken away. At this time, he also takes away Ezekiel. None remain except the poor. What's interesting, though, is that even Jehoiachin reigns only three months, and he's taken away to Babylon, never to come home. He never returns to the land of Jerusalem. And yet the people regard him as the true son of David until the day of his death. Indeed, in Matthew chapter one, he is listed in the line of Christ. And in Babylon, the Lord extends mercy to this three-month wicked ruler of the people. We read in 2 Kings, skipping to the next chapter, the end of the book, starting with verse 27. And it came to pass in the seventh and thirtieth year of the captivity of Jehoiachin, king of Judah, in the twelfth month, on the seventh and twentieth day of the month, that evil Murdoch, king of Babylon in the year that he began to reign, did lift up the head of Jehoiachin, king of Judah, out of prison. And he spake kindly to him, and set his throne above the throne of the kings that were with him in Babylon, and changed his prison garments. And he did eat bread continually before him all the days of his life. And his allowance was a continual allowance given him of the king, a daily rate, for every day all the days of his life. So Jehoiachin is in prison for 37 years. So scholars estimate that he's about 55, 60 years old. And the king of Babylon has mercy upon him. And he raises him up above all the other kings that have been taken captive. Why does he do this? Maybe it's indifference to the long line of the Judean kings, maybe the reputation of King David and King Solomon. Jewish tradition holds that this king had himself been imprisoned by his father and that in prison he became friends with Jehoiachin. Another tradition states that Daniel interceded on his behalf, being an officer of the kingdom, and lobbied him to be kind to Jehoiachin. We don't know for sure. What we do know is that the Lord in his providence raises him up. And this is very significant because not only does the book of 2 Kings end with this story, but Jeremiah ends with this story as well. And so when we're told that he raises him up, he's kind to him, he sheds his prison garments, he gives him bread. Those are rich symbols there in the Word of God, are they not? Bread. putting away your dirty sinful clothes, putting on the clothes of righteousness. He gives them an allowance. He doesn't have to worry. There's no anxiety anymore. All of these are foreshadowing a token of God's kindness that he will fulfill his prophecy by Jeremiah that after 70 years, he will restore his people to the land of Judah. And it's also a huge encouragement to the people of Judah because this time Jeremiah Unlike Ezekiel and Daniel, he's not in Babylon, and he's not in the land of Judah, but he's in Egypt. He's probably 80 to 90 years old. So when he ends his book with the story of Jehoiachin, that means that this story of what had happened to him in Babylon was spread throughout the empire. The word of God's kindness had gone throughout, and people began to have hope. a sign of God's mercy and encouragement to them. And so let us also take hope in the kindness of the Lord. We're in the middle, perhaps we hope, the tail end of COVID, but we don't know what the Lord has for us. We don't know if a variant will raise its ugly head and the world will be slung back into the slough of lockdowns. But we do know that the Lord in his providence is kind to us. And we can look and see at how merciful he is and how kind, and like the people of Judah, have hope in the Lord. Next week we'll pick up with the last king. You would think that after this climactic event, which indeed when we look at the history of Israel, next to Exodus, the fall of Jerusalem and the exile are the cataclysmic events of biblical history. And we're looking at this again as a reminder because we're setting the historical setting of Haggai. So let's close in prayer. Heavenly Father, we thank you again for this opportunity to study your word. We ask that these stories would resonate in our heart and that we would remember that this is your word given to us for your purposes. We ask that you would give us hope. Day by day, we pray in your name.