WWUTT 574 The Fall of Judah?

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Josiah was the last righteous king in Judah, and he desired to obey the

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Lord so much that he brought about the most thorough reform there had ever been, but not in the hearts of the people, when we understand the text.

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This is When We Understand the Text, a daily study of God's Word, that we may be filled with the knowledge of His will.

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For questions and comments send us an email to whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com.

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Here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky. So this week, as we've been studying in 1 Timothy 1, verses 8 -11, we've been considering how the law brings a person to an awareness of their sin.

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When you hear the law of God proclaimed, like the Ten Commandments, for example, you realize that you've broken that law, the sovereign decree of the

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Creator of the entire universe. And what you deserve for breaking that law is the judgment of God.

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If when you realize you have sinned against God, you experience in your heart a godly grief, it brings you to repentance, and you ask

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God for forgiveness. And that's when the gospel comes in to ease and soothe the guilty conscience.

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When we are told that God loved us so much that He sent His Son Jesus to die on the cross for our sins, so that all who believe in Him will not perish, but your sins will be forgiven.

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They've been atoned for by the precious blood of Jesus. And by faith in Christ, you have right standing with God.

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And not only will you not experience His wrath, but you've become a fellow heir of the kingdom of God through His Son Jesus Christ.

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That's the beautifulness of the gospel of Christ. That's what hearing the law brings us to.

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That our mouth may be stopped, we would not proclaim our own righteousness, but instead realize our sinfulness, and that we would repent and come to faith in Jesus Christ.

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Last week in our study of 2 Kings, we considered King Josiah, the last righteous king in Judah.

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He heard the law read in his presence. It was found in the temple. The book of Deuteronomy was then read to the king.

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And Josiah grieved, because when he heard it read, he realized that all of Judah had broken that law.

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They were not following any of it. And he rent his garments, he tore his clothes, and sent his men to find a prophetess of God and ask her if God would forgive them for their sins.

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But God said through this prophet to Josiah that the sins of Judah were too far gone, and they were going to be turned over into the hands of their enemies.

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But Josiah was still a righteous man and desired to do what was right in the eyes of God.

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And so he brought about reform in Judah. And it was the most comprehensive reform there probably has ever been.

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All of the sins that we've read about Israel and Judah committing, all the way through 1 and 2

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Kings up to this point, Josiah undid all of that. It was like reading through a house cleaning of all of the mess that had been made in Israel and Judah over the last several hundred years.

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When we read about these things in 2 Kings 23, the high places were torn down, the altars were defiled, the priests of false gods were slaughtered, on and on the list goes until every single form of idol worship or paganism was obliterated in Judah.

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And we're actually picking up the story now about halfway through those reforms. So this is 2

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Kings 23, starting in verse 21. The king commanded all the people, keep the

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Passover to the Lord your God, as it is written in this book of the covenant. For no such

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Passover had been kept since the days of the judges who judged Israel or during the days of the kings of Israel or the kings of Judah.

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But in the 18th year of King Josiah, this Passover was kept to the

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Lord in Jerusalem. Can you imagine that? This celebration, this holiday that God told

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Israel to never forget, as long as they were in the promised land, they needed to keep this holiday and be reminded how

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God had rescued them from slavery in Egypt. They needed to teach it to their children and to their children's children.

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And that had not been happening. It hadn't been happening since the days of Joshua, when we read about the

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Israelites taking the promised land and then dispersing the land among the tribes. It hasn't been since then that Passover has been practiced.

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And so all these hundreds of years later, because Josiah read about it in Deuteronomy, read about how this needed to be a regular practice among the people of Israel.

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Here he is instituting that holiday custom once again. Verse 24,

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Moreover, Josiah put away the mediums and the necromancers and the household gods and the idols and all the abominations that were seen in the land of Judah and in Jerusalem, that he might establish the words of the law that were written in the book that Hilkiah the priest found in the house of the

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Lord. Before him, there was no king like him who turned to the Lord with all of his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses, nor did any like him arise after him.

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Still, the Lord did not turn from the burning of his great wrath by which his anger was kindled against Judah because of all the provocations with which

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Manasseh had provoked him. And the Lord said, I will remove Judah also out of my sight, as I have removed

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Israel, and I will cast off this city that I have chosen, Jerusalem, and the house of which

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I said, My name shall be there. Even though Josiah was a righteous king and he brought about all this reform in Judah, that doesn't mean that the people's hearts were turned back from worshiping these false gods and turned to worshiping

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God. See, one of the things that Martin Luther understood during the

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Protestant Reformation, during the start of the Reformation, is that true reform happens in the heart.

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Now all of these things that Josiah did were very good, but reform was not happening in the hearts of the people of Judah.

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So when Josiah died, the people would remain unmoved to worshiping the

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Lord God and him only. And we read about Josiah's death in the next portion of chapter 23 here, starting in verse 28.

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Now the rest of the acts of Josiah and all that he did, are they not written in the book of the Chronicles of the kings of Judah?

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In his days, Pharaoh Nico, king of Egypt, went up to the king of Assyria to the river

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Euphrates. King Josiah went to meet him, and Pharaoh Nico killed him at Megiddo as soon as he saw him.

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And his servants carried him dead in a chariot from Megiddo and brought him to Jerusalem and buried him in his own tomb.

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And the people of the land took Jehoaz, son of Josiah, and anointed him and made him king in his father's place.

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Jehoaz was 23 years old when he began to reign, and he reigned three months in Jerusalem. His mother's name was

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Hamutal, the daughter of Jeremiah of Libna. And he did what was evil in the sight of the

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Lord. See, here we go. We go right back to all the evil things that had been going on before Josiah became king.

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So there was all this reform, and it was extremely thorough. But the reform had not happened in the hearts of the people.

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Josiah was indeed a righteous king, but the people were not. So that even his own son would rise up in an evil place as king over Judah.

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He did what was evil in the sight of the Lord according to all that his fathers had done. And Pharaoh Nico put him in bonds at Riblah, in the land of Hamath, that he might not reign in Jerusalem, and laid on the land a tribute of a hundred talents of silver and a talent of gold.

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And Pharaoh Nico made Eliakim, the son of Josiah, king in the place of Josiah his father, and changed his name to Jehoiakim.

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But he took Jehoaz away, and he came to Egypt and died there. And Jehoiakim gave the silver and gold to Pharaoh, but he taxed the land to give the money according to the command of Pharaoh.

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He exacted the silver and the gold of the people of the land from everyone according to his assessment, to give it to Pharaoh Nico.

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Jehoiakim was twenty -five years old when he began to reign, and he reigned eleven years in Jerusalem. His mother's name was

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Zebida, the daughter of Padiah of Rumah. And he did what was evil in the sight of the

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Lord according to all that his fathers had done. In his days,

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Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came up, and Jehoiakim became his servant for three years.

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Then he turned and rebelled against him, and the Lord sent against him bands of the Chaldeans, and the bands of the

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Syrians, and bands of the Moabites, and bands of the Ammonites, and sent them against Judah to destroy it, according to the word of the

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Lord that he spoke by his servants the prophets. Surely this came upon Judah at the command of the

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Lord, to remove them out of his sight for the sins of Manasseh, according to all that he had done, and also for the innocent blood that he had shed.

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For he filled Jerusalem with innocent blood, and the Lord would not pardon. Now the rest of the deeds of Jehoiakim and all that he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?

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So Jehoiakim slept with his fathers, and Jehoiakim his son reigned in his place, and the king of Egypt did not come again out of his land, for the king of Babylon had taken all that belonged to the king of Egypt, from the brook of Egypt to the river

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Euphrates. And this is a fulfillment of a prophecy that was made by Isaiah. If you know something about the book of Isaiah, perhaps you're aware that Isaiah walked around naked for three years.

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This was according to the word of the Lord, and he was showing by his obedience to what

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God had said for him to do, how Egypt was going to be conquered by the Chaldeans. That they were going to be exiled out of their own land, and their people would be exiled out naked.

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And so that's what is going on here, that the Egyptians were conquered even by the

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Babylonians. It's showing how powerful the Babylonians truly were at this particular time, because at one point

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Egypt was the superpower, and now Babylon has even enslaved

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Egypt the way that Egypt had once enslaved the people of Israel. So now we go on into verse 8,

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Jehoiakim was 18 years old when he became king, and he reigned three months in Jerusalem.

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His mother's name was Nahusta, the daughter of Elnathan of Jerusalem, and he did what was evil in the sight of the

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Lord, according to all that his father had done. So you can see things here are starting to speed up, you've got kings that are reigning for short times, all of them are doing what is evil in the sight of God, we're getting closer and closer to the end of Judah.

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At the time, at that time, verse 10, the servants of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came up to Jerusalem, and the city was besieged.

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And Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came to the city while his servants were besieging it.

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And Jehoiakim, 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.

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The king of Babylon took him prisoner in the eighth year of his reign, and carried off all the treasures of the house of the

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Lord and the treasures of the king's house, and cut in pieces all the vessels of gold in the temple of the

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Lord, which Solomon, king of Israel, had made as the Lord had foretold.

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And this is exactly what God had foretold through Isaiah to Hezekiah. And Hezekiah had that flippant attitude of, well, that's fine.

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As long as this siege is not going to happen during my reign, then I don't

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I don't care whenever it happens. Verse 14, Nebuchadnezzar carried away all of Jerusalem and all of the officials and all of the mighty men of valor, 10 ,000 captives and all of the craftsmen and smiths, none remained except the poorest people of the land.

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And he carried away Jehoiachin to Babylon, the king's mother, the king's wives, his officials and the chief men of the land he took into captivity from Jerusalem to Babylon.

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And the king of Babylon brought captive to Babylon all the men of valor, 7 ,000, and the craftsmen and the metal workers, 1 ,000, all of them strong and fit for war.

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And the king of Babylon made Mataniah, Jehoiachin's uncle, king in his place and changed his name to Zedekiah.

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So among the people that were carried away from from Judah and Jerusalem here at this point, this also includes

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Daniel and his friends. This includes the prophet Ezekiel. We don't read about them here, but when you get into the major and the minor prophets, some of the more personal names kind of start to fall into place here.

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We're kind of seeing a general overview. It's kind of like you're standing outside of land of Judah watching it get sacked.

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You don't necessarily say see people's faces or exactly who's involved in those who are being taken captive and exiled out.

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But then when you get in close and you tighten the picture a little bit in some of the later books, you start to know some of the names that were involved here and what happened during what time.

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So then in verse 18, Zedekiah was 21 years old when he became king and he reigned 11 years in Jerusalem.

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His mother's name was Hamutal, the daughter of Jeremiah of Libna, and he did what was evil in the sight of the

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Lord. According to all that Jehoiakim had done for because because of the anger of the

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Lord, it came to the point in Jerusalem and Judah that he cast them out from his presence and Zedekiah rebelled against the king of Babylon.

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So what's being stated here is that God is not in Judah. He's his presence is not in the temple.

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He's not there with the people because of all the evil that had done. Josiah was the last righteous king.

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And once again, the reform that he instituted in Judah did not happen in the hearts of the people.

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It certainly was thorough in Josiah's heart in the way that he attempted to bring about this reform in Judah.

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But it did not echo in the hearts of the people. And so for all of this evil, God has turned them over to the hands of their enemies.

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And Judah is becoming less and less of of a picture of what it once was.

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Chapter twenty five. And in the ninth year of his reign in the tenth month on the tenth day of the month,

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Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came with all of his army against Jerusalem and laid siege to it.

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And they built siege works all around it so that the city was besieged until the eleventh year of King Zedekiah on the ninth day of the fourth month.

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The famine was so severe in the city that there was no food for the people in the land. Then a breach was made in the city and all the men of war fled by night by the way of the gate between the two walls by the king's garden.

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And the Chaldeans were around the city and they went in the direction of the

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Arab, but the army of the Chaldeans pursued the king and overtook him in the plains of Jericho and all his army were scattered from him.

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Then they captured the king and brought him up to the king of Babylon at Riblah, Babylon at Riblah, and they passed sentence on him.

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They slaughtered the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes and put out the eyes of Zedekiah and bound him in chains and took him to Babylon.

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And all of these things that are being talked about right here were prophesied by Ezekiel. This is the siege that Ezekiel prophesied in Ezekiel chapter four, where you read about Ezekiel's bread and that whole thing.

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OK, that was a prophecy concerning the siege. That was not that was not instructions on eating healthy bread,

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Ezekiel four nine bread. It was it was within the recipe of that bread that God was telling through Ezekiel just how thorough this siege and famine was going to be.

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Verse eight in the fifth month on the seventh day of the month, that was the 19th year of King Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, the captain of the bodyguard, a servant of the king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem and he burned the house of the

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Lord and the king's house and all of the houses of Jerusalem, every great house he burned down.

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And all the army of the Chaldeans who were with the captain of the guard broke down the walls around Jerusalem and the rest of the people who were left in the city and the deserters who had deserted to the king of Babylon, together with the rest of the multitude.

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Zebuzaradan, the captain of the guard, carried into exile. But the captain of the captain of the guard left some of the poorest of the land to be vinedressers and plowmen and the pillars of bronze that were in the house of the

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Lord and the stands and the bronze sea that were in the house of the Lord. The Chaldeans broke in pieces and carried the bronze to Babylon and they took away the pots and the shovels and the snuffers and the dishes for incense and all the vessels of bronze used in the temple service, the fire pans also and the bowls.

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What was of gold, the captain of the guard took away as gold and what was of silver as silver.

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As for the two pillars, the one sea in the stands that Solomon had made for the house of the Lord, the bronze of all these vessels was beyond weight.

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The height of the one pillar was 18 cubits and on it was a capital of bronze.

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The height of the capital was three cubits, a lattice work and pomegranates, all of bronze were all around the capital and the second pillar had the same with the lattice work and the captain of the guard took

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Saria the chief priest and Zephaniah the second priest and the three keepers of the threshold and from the city he took an officer who had been in command of the men of war and five men of the king's council who were found in the city and the secretary of the commander of the army who mustered the people of the land and 60 men of the people of the land who were found in the city and Nebuchadnezzar the captain of the guard took them and brought them to the king of Babylon at Riblah and the king of Babylon struck them down and put them to death at Riblah in the land of Hamath.

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So Judah was taken into exile out of its land and over the people who remained in the land of Judah whom

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Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon had left, he appointed Gadalia the son of Ahikam son of Shefan governor.

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Now when all the captains and all their men heard that the king of Babylon had appointed Gadalia a governor they came with their men to Gadalia at Mizpah namely

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Ishmael the son of Nethaniah and Johanan the son of Kereah and Saria the son of Tanumeth the

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Natophathite and Jazaniah the son of the Macathite and Gadalia swore to them and their men saying do not be afraid because of the

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Chaldean officials live in the land and serve the king of Babylon and it shall be well with you but in the seventh month

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Ishmael the son of Nethaniah son of Elishama of the royal family came with ten men and struck down Gadalia and put him to death along with the

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Jews and the Chaldeans who were with him at Mizpah then all the people both small and great and the captains of the forces arose and went to Egypt for they were afraid of the

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Chaldeans and in the thirty -seventh year of the exile of Jehoiachin king of Judah in the twelfth month on the twenty -seventh day of the month evil

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Meredok king of Babylon that was his name evil Meredok in the year that he began to reign graciously freed

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Jehoiachin king of Judah from prison and he spoke kindly to him and gave him a seat above the seats of the kings who were with him at Babylon so Jehoiachin put off his prison garments and every day of his life he dined regularly at the king's table and for his allowance a regular allowance was given him by the king according to his daily needs as long as he lived and that is our conclusion to the books of first and second kings the church today is in desperate need of reformation but it's not something that can happen on the outside it has to happen on the inside true reformation happens in the heart and this can only occur when we return to the sound teaching of the gospel of our lord

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Jesus Christ it is God who changes hearts and he does that through the gospel so let us be devoted to sound doctrine and preaching the gospel and the holy spirit will do the work of saving those whom

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God means to save let us pray our lord God I pray that we would be indeed devoted to your word and the sound teaching of your word so that all who hear it would be cut to the heart they would be convicted of their sin and they would know the hope that is found in the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ alone let us be faithful to this word and the proclamation of this message from our pulpits and in the streets where we live that all may hear the gospel and turn from their sin and live and we pray these things in Jesus name the only name in heaven and on earth that we can be saved by amen thank you for listening to when we understand the text with pastor

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Gabe Hughes if you'd like to support this ministry visit our website www .wutt