Zedekiah is the king whom Nebuchadnezzar placed on the throne of Judah to serve him and pay him the tribute he demanded. Zedekiah is not a son of the royal household of Judah but is an uncle of Jehoachin, whom Nebuchadnezzar deposed. At first this new king keeps the vow of allegiance he made in the name of God to Nebuchadnezzar but later he begins to listen to false prophets and unwise advisors and decides to ally himself with the king of Egypt. The authors of 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles don't give us a description of how and why he rebelled but, when we arrive at the book of Jeremiah, the prophet will explain to us that he himself warned Zedekiah that his bid for independence would not be successful but that Zedekiah preferred to listen to the false prophets who were predicting success.
When we left off our study yesterday we had learned that Zedekiah was stiff-necked and hard-hearted toward the Lord and that many of the people in Judah at that time were the same way, including some of the priests and the top officials. The author of 2 Chronicles said they became "more and more unfaithful, following all the detestable practices of the nations and defiling the temple of the Lord". They are engaging in every abominable practice of the heathen nations around them (likely including the worship of Molek, which involved human sacrifice) and had yet again placed pagan objects in the temple. During this era the Lord is calling prophets to cry out to the king and to the people to repent and change their ways but these pleas are falling on deaf ears. The Lord told the people before He ever brought them into the promised land that if they would remain faithful to Him, no enemy could defeat them, and yet the recurring invasions by the Babylonians has not caused them to take His words to heart and realize that the reason for their trouble is their sin.
Because there is no widescale acknowledgement of sin as there has been on several prior occasions in our study of the kings of Judah, and because the Lord knows everyone's heart and knows there will not be a significant repentance among the populace anytime soon, He does what He said long ago that He would do if the people turned away from Him. "It was because of the Lord's anger that all this happened to Jerusalem and Judah, and in the end He thrust them from His presence." (2 Kings 24:20a) In Deuteronomy 28 the Lord clearly explained the blessings that lay in store for obedience and He outlined the curses that lay in store for disobedience. He warned them that if they turned to the gods of the nations, He would remove them from the land just as He removed the nations that previously inhabited it: "You will be uprooted from the land you are entering to possess." (Deuteronomy 28:63b)
But before Zedekiah listens to lying prophets and before he follows their advice to rebel against the king of Babylon, the Lord sends prophets to him and to the nation time and time again. "The Lord, the God of their ancestors, sent word to them through His messengers again and again, because He had pity on His people and on His dwelling place." (2 Chronicles 36:15) Of course the Lord knows who will listen to the prophets and who will not, and it appears as if the majority did not listen, but His righteousness compels Him to urge them to repent anyway. Have you ever tried to talk to someone about the harm they're doing to themselves? Have you ever felt from the outset that they weren't going to listen to you but you could not just sit back and remain silent? We feel like it's our duty to try even when we know our pleas are going to fall on deaf ears. The Lord knows that the majority of the people won't listen to what He has to say but He cares about them and feels He has a duty to try anyway. None of them will ever be able to say He didn't give them an opportunity to repent.
"But they mocked God's messengers, despised His words and scoffed at His prophets until the wrath of the Lord was aroused against His people and there was no remedy." (2 Chronicles 36:16) Their sins have reached a tipping point. The sins of the northern kingdom of Israel reached a tipping point a little over a hundred years earlier; this is why the Lord allowed the northern kingdom to fall to Assyria. Now He is going to allow the southern kingdom of Judah to fall to Babylon. Later, in the New Testament, we will find the sins of the earth's inhabitants reaching a tipping point in the book of Revelation. When the sins spill over, the cup of wrath is poured out on the earth in Revelation just as we find it being poured out in the Old Testament on Israel, on Judah, and on the pagan nations of the ancient world. The only thing in the Scriptures that holds back the cup of wrath is repentance; where there is no repentance, there is no "remedy", as the author of 2 Chronicles phrases it. The Lord is indeed merciful. He does have pity on mankind. He offers a means of salvation. But if a person does not acknowledge that he or she is a sinner, and if that person does not repent of sins, and if that person does not accept the Lord's means of salvation, then we must conclude today's study session with the solemn words of the Apostle Paul: "How shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?" (Hebrews 2:3a)
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