Today’s passage: 2 Chronicles 36:1-23
Helpful thoughts:
- After Judah and King Josiah’s defeat to the Egyptians, the combination of foreign assertion and Judah’s abandonment of the Lord resulted in a steady decline.
- Not everyone in Judah abandoned the Lord. This period is where we see the lives and ministries of men like Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, etc.
- The Sabbath years were to have been kept every seven years (Leviticus 25:1-7). Israel and Judah had not kept the Sabbath year for 490 years (Leviticus 26:34-35).
- Jerusalem has fallen, but the Lord never did (Verse 23). Even the king of the Persian Empire was under the sovereignty of God.
Questions to consider:
- Why do you think the kings of Egypt and Babylon were taking kings away and installing their brothers as king over Judah? What message would they have been sending about who was in charge? What would those newly installed kings have been tempted to think about those who had given them their new power?
- Did the government and the nation of Judah make God’s people God’s people? Did Daniel, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Ezra and Nehemiah cease to be God’s people for seventy years because they were in a different land and Jerusalem was not functioning as a city?
- What makes a Christian a Christian? Is it ethnicity? National citizenship? Geographical location? Where is the headquarters of Christianity on the earth today? Where is our home? What is our mission in this foreign land? (1 Corinthians 3:16-17, Revelation 7:9-12, Matthew 28:18-20)