Let's pray together. Father, as we open your word, speak to us by your spirit, Lord. Lead us into truth. Father, fill us with deep conviction about who you are and what you have done and who you are and what you will yet do. Father, I pray that as we look at this list of long names and many, many dates, Father, you would help simplify these things in our mind, that we would see truth flowing through these words. Lord, these things we ask in Jesus' name, amen. I found myself thinking just the other day about the irony that found me standing in front of the entire senior football team of the Simcoe Composite Sabres. The best players on that field gave me their absolute attention and their absolute obedience. If I said to the best player on the team, go take a lap, they went and took a lap. If I said, drop and give me 20, they said, yes, coach, they dropped and gave me 20. The irony of the moment came back as I thought to my four years of high school there on that same field. Never once did I ever don football pads or a football helmet. However, I did have to play on that field because you were mandatory to play phys ed Remember my high school football teacher, the head football, not football, the head, well, he was head of football, but also head of phys ed was a man named Ed Reedy. Some of you who went to Simcoe Composite School might remember Ed Reedy. Ed Reedy had been there long enough that he had been my dad's phys ed coach. And I can remember running the Harrier. Anybody here Simcoe Composite School students that had run the Harrier? That delightful run all the way around the property, down past the river and back? And I remember running right at the end of the pack, and here comes Mr. Reedy, old Mr. Reedy with his three stripes on his polyester shorts, and he's running up alongside me. And he'd come alongside me, he'd look over at me, he'd say, come on, Donnie, I know you can run faster than this. I had the disadvantage of looking an awful lot like my father at the same age. Basically, that's still true today. If you saw my dad at 48 and me at 48, so I kind of know what I'll probably look like you know, 30 years from now. And I would say, Mr. Reedy, I know Donnie ran faster than me, but Donnie's my dad and I can't run that fast. I just wasn't that good. If you wanted to know which of my parents' children had their walls plastered with baseball statistics and football statistics and could tell you the ERA or the yards per down gained by the Buffalo Bills, that was my sister. Her nickname in those days was Brother Don because the guys thought she knew more about sports than I did. I was a music student. I played trombone. I aspired to be a musician. And if you had suggested to anybody in my grade nine class, say, go around and select the person who will, 35 years from now, be the football coach of the program, the senior program, I would have been the last name. the last name chosen. I was the last guy chosen for everything and nobody would have suspected that. History has moments like that as well. If you had suggested to the three major superpowers that were contending for dominance over the region of Palestine and the world beyond it, that the little tiny nation of Judah and the city of Jerusalem, which was genuinely a gem in the Middle East, a great fortress, but if you had suggested that the Davidic kings, that line of Davidic kings that sat upon that throne, would have any sort of meaningful influence in the history of the world, they would have laughed at you. I mean, Judah, whose armies could not beat the third-rate armies of the third-rate imperial power, Egypt, in battle, they don't matter. They're of no significance. And the three major powers were Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon. And every one of them, at a certain point, held sway over Judah and all that happened in Judah. Judah, Jerusalem, and the Davidic kings spent the last hundred years or so of their existence as vassal state to one of these three superpowers. Now, if you look on the back of your bulletin, you're gonna see, I've drawn out for you a timeline because there's a lot of big names, there's a lot of dates, and I'm gonna work through these things, but I don't want you to walk away going, boy, I didn't get any of that. And so we're going to move fairly quickly through some of the historic overviews of the geopolitics in Palestine. But I think it's important for you to know this. And the Bible writer thinks it's important for you to know it, because he wrote it down. So you'll see there, the first date I have on there, I don't actually have a copy of the bulletin up there. Let me borrow that for a minute. Thanks. So you see right at the top there 687 BC. At that point Judah becomes vassal to Assyria. Assyria has been growing in power for a long time before that and for quite a little while Judah has been able to kind of hold her own. Assyria has come down and caused trouble with all of the northern neighbors, the Philistines, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Israelites, but Judah has held their own. But finally there comes a point where Judah becomes a vassal state. Judah retains their king and their kingdom, but they don't have freedom. They have to pay tribute back to Assyria. And from 687 BC onwards, Judah is a vassal to Assyria. Now, it's about 47 years after that, that Josiah comes to the throne. And Josiah comes to the throne at quite an opportune time. Josiah is age 8 when he comes to the throne. His father Manasseh has spent his entire reign, 55 years, under the thumb of Assyria. And all of the regions around Judah have been swallowed up by Assyria. The northern kingdom, by the time Josiah comes to the throne, the northern kingdom is long gone, carried away into a permanent exile. And you'll see that in 626 BC, Now the Bible doesn't record this, but history does. In 626 BC, the Babylonians rebelled against their Assyrian overlords. The Assyrians were a very severe people. They conquered people, and the people they conquered hated them for it. They had no kindness at all towards the people. They were brutal in their treatments of all of their captive people. And the Babylonians were a mighty nation that had been captured by the Assyrians and were under Assyrian rule, but the Babylonians joined together with the Medes and the Babylonian and Median army came against the Assyrians and at the same time the Scythians came down from the steps of Russia as a barbaric horde and were attacking the other side of Assyria and so Assyria found themselves fighting on two fronts fighting a powerful foe in Babylon and Media fighting a ruthless foe in the Scythians and the result of that is around 626 BC is that the Assyrians needed to concentrate their forces and so they pulled up the forces that were down in Palestine to fight on these two fronts and so for most of the reign of Josiah, although he was technically a vassal to Assyria, the Assyrians were nowhere to be found. So much so that Josiah found that he could make his reforms, could press his reforms up, could make reforms in Samaria, which was genuinely Assyrian territory, and could take territory all the way up as far as Megiddo, which is way up in Galilee. So this is kind of the side effect of all these things happening in history, that the Assyrians are so busy up here fighting off the Babylonians and the Scythians, that they have no time to pay attention to what's going on down south. And the people down south are just fine with that. Josiah is just fine with the fact that the Assyrians haven't shown up for a decade to check in on him. Moreover, even further south than Judah, when we get to Egypt, Egypt, who has been in the past a great superpower and still vies to be a superpower, finds that this absence of the Assyrians is very helpful, and they like the fact that they're able to kind of have a little bit of freedom in their region and a little bit north into Palestine. And so Egypt sort of takes their own space. Run down a little further to 612 BC. In 612 BC, the city of Nineveh, which is the capital of Assyria, falls to the Median Babylonian army, and the Assyrian Empire is in steep decline, their armies in deep retreat. The Assyrian armies are still intact, but they no longer have a capital city, and so they make their way over towards the Euphrates. But the writing is on the wall, the Babylonians are the power to beat, the Assyrians are in decline. Now here's the interesting thing, the Egyptian pharaoh who has been under Assyrian rule for all of these years, has found that as the Assyrians have been weakened, he likes the liberty he has. And hearing the news that the Babylonians are making their way south towards the Euphrates, the Egyptian king decides he will prop up the Assyrians. You go, why would he do that? The Assyrians are his overlord, and he's like, only in name. They actually don't have any power down here, and we're able to do whatever we want. and better the devil you know than the devil you don't and the Babylonians are coming will prop up Assyria and so King Necho of Egypt agrees to support the Assyrian armies and sends his armies northward to support them against the Babylonians. His hope is we can make a beachhead up here at the Euphrates and hold out the Babylonians and that will really allow an Assyrio-Egyptian empire to exist down here and we can do whatever we want. And so here is in 609 BC, Pharaoh Necho coming up with his armies and this is what we heard about last week where Josiah takes exception to the fact that this pharaoh is traveling through his territory and he rides out to meet him to do battle with him. And so Josiah and Pharaoh Necho meet at Megiddo in northern Israel for a battle. Josiah is defeated and killed. But it's interesting, history doesn't quite say why, but it may be this. Pharaoh Necho is late to the battle to prop up the Assyrians, and as a result, the Assyrian-Egyptian armies are defeated at the Battle of Hamath, and the Babylonians are victorious. The Assyrians are utterly shattered. After that point, there is no more Assyrian army. Assyria vanishes from the world scene. Nineveh is gone. The Assyrians are gone. The Assyrian empire, which had dominated everything, is destroyed in a matter of a decade or so. And was Pharaoh Necho late to that battle because he had to stop and do battle with Judah? It's quite possible. But the result of that is even though the Babylonians are victorious and the Assyrians are shattered and the Egyptians are defeated in a joint action up there, the Babylonians are going to spend the next three or four years consolidating power on the north side of the Euphrates. And so that's where Babylon spends all their time, which leaves Egypt the de facto ruler of Palestine. And so you're going to find, and we're going to get into this story in just a moment, that Egypt begins to dictate terms to Judah. The city of Jerusalem and the nation of Judah is under vassalage, this time to Egypt. They've got to pay tribute to them. And you'll hear a little bit more about that in just a moment. But let me take you just a little further down in the historic sketch here. In 605 BC, The Egyptian and Babylonian armies clash once more at a very famous battle, the Battle of Carchemish on the Euphrates. Again, the Egyptians come all the way up to the very top of their territory, to the top of Palestine, to the Euphrates River, to try to keep the Babylonians out. The Babylonians, having consolidated power on the north side of the Euphrates, meet them at Carchemish, and there's a great battle. Both armies are badly mauled, but the Egyptians fare far worse. They will never again march out over the Nile. Nebuchadnezzar, the commander of the Babylonian armies, is now the ruler over all Palestine. And so he pays a visit on Jerusalem. And in that visit, he carries off a handful of people, the best and the brightest of the young men. We read about it in Daniel chapter one, and the Lord gave Jerusalem into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar. This is when Daniel is carried into exile. This is the first deportation. And he dictates terms to Jehoiakim, who's now the king of Judah. And for about three or four years, Jehoiakim is obedient and he pays his tribute to Babylon. But because the Babylonian army was so badly mauled at the Battle of Carchemish, they have to return home to resupply. And they're absent from the area for a period of time, which leads Jehoiakim to think, I can do whatever I want. And he rebels against the Babylonians, which brings the Babylonians down against him. and the Babylonians lay siege to Jerusalem in 597 BC. Jehoiakim dies, we think probably by assassination. And his son is made king, but his son only reigns three months because when Nebuchadnezzar finally breaks through, when the city finally surrenders, he takes Jehoiachin, the son of Jehoiakim, as a captive to Babylon, along with 10,000 of the most influential and important citizens and everybody who could make war. This is the second deportation, and they carry them away. Most of these people are deposited not in the city of Babylon, but at Susa, which is the median city under Babylonian command. And this is when Ezekiel the prophet is carried off into exile. And he makes another son of Josiah king, Mattaniah, and changes his name to Zedekiah. Now it's interesting, we hear of two kings whose names are changed, and part of that is just the overlord flexing his muscles, right? I mean, if your name is Micah, and somebody comes in and says, you're gonna be in charge, but from now on, everybody's gotta call you Dave, right? In doing that, you go, but my name is Micah. And he says, I don't care. I'm in charge here. You're Dave. Every time everybody calls you Dave, it's a reminder that wasn't the name that your father gave you. That's the name that your overlord gave you. And every time you say, hey, hail King Dave, everybody goes, yeah, we're still under the thumb. So this is what's going on with these name changes. This is a way of flexing on the city of Jerusalem. And so, finally, in 586, and we won't get there today, but I'll just tell you, in 586, once again, the king of Judah rebels against Babylon, and Babylon comes down in power, and breaks down the walls of Jerusalem, and burns the temple to the ground, and carries all the rest of the treasures away, and finally deports everybody, except for the smallest little handful that are left under Gedaliah. The governor, even Jeremiah the prophet, is carried away in exile, Although partway to Babylon, they ask him, do you want to go to Babylon or do you want to go home? He says, I want to go home. And they send him home. So that's the historical sketch. And for those of you who love history, there you go. You've got it on the back of your bulletin. I want to take just a moment and look here at the reign of the brother kings. And then we're going to look for some application that comes out of this text. So we're backing up here just a little bit to hear the reign of the brother king's three brothers. Three brothers rule in the last 22 years, and one extra, who's the son of one of the three brothers. With the death of good King Josiah, the kingdom passes, first of all, to the hands of his middle son, It's worth noting that Josiah knew that no good could come to Judah. In his days, they found the lost book of the law. He read it. He discovered we are under the curse of God. The wrath of God is being poured out upon us because of our wickedness. The number of violations that he discovered in his own land were myriad. over and over again they found they were in violation of the law and it's been probably 60 plus years since anybody has even seen this law. He sends to Huldah the prophetess and she says the Lord will not spare and yet Josiah with the knowledge God will not spare Judah says what shall I do knowing that nothing I do can change the future? He says I'm gonna do what is right. with all my heart." And Josiah does that better than any king before him. With all his heart, he pursues reform. His sons, knowing that nothing can change, say, what shall I do? They say, whatever I want. Whatever I want. And so we hear of Jehoahaz, who is the middle brother of Josiah. Jehoahaz is 23 years old when he begins to reign. He reigns for three months in Israel. And he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. And Pharaoh Necho, who had killed his father at the Battle of Megiddo, comes down and orders him to show up at Riblah. You say, why did he go? Well, he doesn't have an army. The army's been defeated. He has to go. He goes to Riblah at Hamath. And there, the king of Egypt takes him into bondage to carry him off to Egypt. He puts a heavy tribute on the land, says the land must pay to Egypt every year this amount of silver and this amount of gold. You must tax your people to get that. And then he takes the older brother, whose name is Eliakim, and he changes his name. And he says his name will now be Jehoiakim. And so Jehoiakim is the second son of Josiah to sit on the throne of Jerusalem, the Davidic throne. And Jehoiakim shows very quickly how poor his quality is. He is loathe to hear the word of the Lord. If you want to hear the extended story of Jehoiakim, you've got to read the book of Jeremiah. Jehoiakim is all over the book of Jeremiah. And Jeremiah jumps back and forth all through his book. We find the fourth year, the seventh year, the third year. It just keeps going like that. But in Jeremiah chapter 22, we discover that not only does Jehoiakim tax the people in order to pay the levy that has been laid upon him by the Egyptian pharaoh, but he also taxes the land and uses forced labor because he wants to build himself a more glorious palace. And so we hear this word from Jeremiah, Jeremiah chapter 22, verse 13. Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness and his upper rooms by injustice, who makes his neighbors serve him for nothing and does not give him his wages, who says, I will build myself a great house with spacious upper rooms, who cuts out windows for it, paneling it with cedar, painting it with vermilion. Do you think you are a king because you compete in cedar? Did not your father eat and drink and do justice and righteousness? Then it was well with him. He judged the cause of the poor and the needy. Then it was well. Is not this to know me, declares the Lord? But you have eyes and heart only for your dishonest gain, for shedding innocent blood and practicing oppression and violence. This is Jehoiakim, who competes in Seder, who is determined, I'm going to have a better palace than Egypt. I'm going to have a better palace than anybody else. I'm going to use forced labor. I'm already taxing the people to pay Egypt what I owe them. I'm going to tax them more. I'm going to make them work for free. I'm going to build myself an elaborate house. And Jeremiah the prophet says, it's injustice. Didn't your father do righteousness and do justice? Didn't it go well with him? And here's the interesting thing. There is still an opportunity even though the judgment of God is coming down upon Judah. That's a certain thing. Jeremiah says to him in Jeremiah 22 verse 4, You, Jehoiakim, will indeed obey this word, then there shall enter the gates of this house kings who sit on the throne of David, riding in chariots and on horses, they and their servants and their people. But if you will not obey these words, I swear by myself, declares the Lord, that this house shall become a desolation. But Jehoiakim shows utter disregard for the word of the Lord. In Jeremiah chapter 26, we read of a prophet named Uriah, never wrote a book, but Uriah prophesies against Jerusalem and against the temple, and so enrages the king, Jehoiakim, that he sends agents to pursue him. They pursue him even to Egypt, and when they find him, the prophet of the Lord, they drag him out and murder him. King Jehoiakim would have done the same to Jeremiah the prophet. if he could, more than once he sought to kill Jeremiah. And Jeremiah went into hiding. And when the scroll of Jeremiah is brought and read to the elders of Jerusalem by his secretary, Baruch, the secretaries are in deep mourning. They're in deep grief. They're terrified at the words of the scroll of Jeremiah. So they bring it to Jehoiakim. And maybe you remember the story. Jehoiakim has Baruch read the scroll. And every time he reads a paragraph, Jehoiakim takes out his knife and slices a piece off and throws it in the fire until there's no more scroll left. And so it is that in the days of Jehoiakim in the middle of his reign, The Babylonians, having defeated the Egyptians, arrive and they come to the city and they take some of the treasures out of the temple and they take some of the finest men, Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and carry them away into captivity. These Babylonians, I think, probably came in with a list that had been written up about 75, 80 years ago when they first visited when his grandfather, Hezekiah, was king there. For three years he obeys his Babylonian masters, but in the fourth year he rebels. which leads to the great siege of Jerusalem. Jeremiah has prophesied in his word twice, he says, you will have the burial of a donkey. And so it is that Josephus, the Jewish historian, tells us that when Jehoiakim died, they dragged him out and just tossed him over the hill like you would the carcass of a dead animal. That's how Jehoiakim ends. He makes his son Jehoiachin king, but his reign only lasts for three months. Jehoiachin was 18 years old when he became king and he reigned three months in Jerusalem. At that time, the servants of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came up to Jerusalem and the city was besieged. And Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came to the city while his servants were besieging it. And Jehoiachin, the king of Judah, gave himself up to the king of Babylon himself and his mother and his servants and his officials and his palace officials. And the king of Babylon took him prisoner in the eighth year of his reign. That's the eighth year of Nebuchadnezzar's reign. and carried off all the treasures of the Lord's house and the treasures of the King's house and takes 10,000 captives. Why does Jehoiachin give himself up? Because of the siege. There's no more water, there's no more food. You've got to open the doors or you'll all perish. He opens the doors and he's taken away And so he is taken away captive to Babylon. Many of the Jews think of Jehoiachin as the last rightful ruler of Israel. They look at Zedekiah, who comes next and who is the very last, as almost an imposter because he's the puppet of Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar takes Jehoiachin, takes the final living son of Josiah. So this is the third son of Josiah to sit upon David's throne. His name is Mattaniah, but he changes his name to Zedekiah. Once again, I can change your name. They can call you Dave if I want them to. Zedekiah is 21 years old when he becomes king, reigns 11 years, and does what is evil in the sight of the Lord. And next week we'll take up the final days, the utter darkness that finally fall upon this nation of Judah. Today we're just looking at this gathering gloom. One last son of David is left to sit upon the throne of Jerusalem. Though Jerusalem is now an empty shell, its temple has been looted, It's been sacked, its city stripped of all but her poorest citizens. There's yet one more chapter to write. How easy it would be as we hear all these things, and I know some of you are kind of glazing over. Wow, that's a lot of history. That's a lot of history. Here's what I want you to think, here's what I want you, wake up for a minute, think about this. As you hear this history, as you hear the geopolitics, as you hear of Assyria, this massive superpower, headquartered in Nineveh, that ruled for over a hundred years, being defeated, and then you hear of Egypt, this ancient city of, or land of pyramids coming up and holding sway. And then you hear of Babylon, who held two of the wonders of the ancient world, the city of Babylon itself having running water, and the hanging gardens of Babylon, the great walls of Babylon coming down and taking power. As you look at these movements of these massive geopolitical powers, it would be easy to believe that the lodestone of history would be located in one of these places, in Nineveh, or in Babylon, or in Memphis, that's the capital of Egypt in those days, or maybe later on in Rome, but who would ever look in the city of Jerusalem In these days, as kingdom after kingdom after kingdom is coming down and sacking it and looting it and breaking down its walls and burning its temples and changing the names of their kings at will and saying, this place matters. How easy it would be for the church to look at itself in this point in its history and say the church does not matter, has no significance, has no power, has no influence. How easy it must have been for Pontius Pilate to sneer at the ragged man they brought him. To laugh, I was reading today in my biblical readings of the trial before Pontius Pilate, and you can almost hear the sneer in his voice every time he says, are you the king of the Jews? Or when he asks the Jews that have brought him, do you want me to deliver to you Barabbas, or do you want the king of the Jews? He's laughing. He's saying, this guy doesn't matter. This guy is of no significance. It's a joke. that anybody would suggest that he has claimed to make himself the king of the Jews. The Jews themselves brought him because they said this guy is a joke because he claims to be the son of God and Jesus confirmed that, I do claim that. How easy it must have been to write him off as some ragged Jewish peasant. Yet herein lies one of the great evidences for the authenticity of the scriptures. There is no point in the history of the world from the beginning until now, there is no point at which the Jewish nation has held sway over the world. They have never been great in influence. They have never been great in power. There has never been a Jewish army that was written in as this was one of the great armies of the world. They have always been a minority. They have always been small. They have often been persecuted and pursued and dominated by their neighbors. and in 586 BC they ceased to have a land and ceased to have a king and ceased to have a government and will continue that way for over 2,500 years. The fact that they exist at all is a marble that should cause us to scratch our heads. The fact that they exist at all, that we should talk about Israel, that we should talk about Jews, When there are no more Assyrians, and there are no more Babylonians, and there are no more Medo-Persians, and the Roman Empire is long gone, all these great powerful beings, can you name five Caesars? Maybe you can. If I put the busts of ten Caesars up here, could you put the right names to the right faces? You couldn't. But these names, these were the powers, these were the influences, this was the places, the movers and the shakers of the world, these are the people that matter. And yet, the name of Jesus, known the world over. And even today, and get this right, understand this correctly, because too often the church gets this wrong. Even today, the eyes of the world turn towards Israel. Not always in a positive sort of way. In fact, there are many who look negatively at Israel, but the fact that they're talking about Israel the fact that they're thinking about Israel, the fact that Israel exists, the fact that there is a Jerusalem, and that Jerusalem is one of the major lodestones of human history where over and over again power seems to come together here seeking to hold sway here. the end of the world and the history of the world will finally be determined in Palestine, in Jerusalem, with one more Davidic king who will reign on that throne. Now get this right church, that does not mean that every single thing Israel does is good and right and commendable. Over and over and over again throughout the Old Testament history we hear of kings and he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. This is not a blank check for Israel to do whatever they want and the church to applaud and say, yes, Israel is doing it, it must be right. Israel often does what is wrong and what is evil, but the fact that they continue to exist, the fact that there is a Jerusalem, the fact that there are Jews is one of the great markers of history to say the promises of God are real. and God is not yet done, there is coming a day when you will see the final Davidic king, the great bright light, Jesus himself come and sit upon that throne. And that should give you a great check to any sort of idea that the world knows how history is going to come together. I may have been the surprise of the SCS football field, but that's small potatoes compared to the surprise the world will one day be dealt when they discover that Jesus is indeed the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Father, I thank you for this word. Father, in the midst of terrible oppression, In the midst of the utter doom of Israel and Judah and Jerusalem and the temple as even the walls are brought down and the temple goes up in smoke. Father, your promises are sure and true and certain. Father, help us in the midst of this to know these truths that even in our own lives when it seems everything is shaken, When everything goes wrong, when all of our plans come to naught, when we are brought to the end of ourselves, Lord, that the promises you have made over us, that he who has begun this good work and you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus, that you have made us co-heirs together with Christ, Lord, that you will keep your promise. And that all of our best days are yet to come. Lord, for this we are grateful. We give you thanks in Jesus name. I'm in.