Sermon on 2 Chronicles 36: The end of Israel as a nation, and the hope that follows
A sermon by James de Costobadie, Senior Pastor at Latimer Church, concluding a series on the book of Chronicles.
Summary
James de Costobadie delivers the final sermon in Latimer Church's series on Chronicles, using 2 Chronicles 36 — the account of the last four kings of Judah, the Babylonian conquest, and the destruction of Jerusalem — as the basis for two contrasting lessons: that there is no hope for anyone apart from God, and that there is full hope for anyone who comes to God. He argues that Judah's fall was not the result of ignorance but of persistent, wilful rejection of God despite every privilege and repeated warning, and that God's judgment, when it finally came, was total and irreversible by human means. The sermon then pivots to the closing verses of the chapter — and of the entire Hebrew Old Testament — where Cyrus king of Persia, moved by God, issues an open invitation for God's people to return to Jerusalem, which de Costobadie reads as a foreshadowing of the gospel invitation extended to all people through Jesus Christ. The sermon closes with a summary of the three major themes of Chronicles as a whole: God's promises are unchanging, humble trust is required, and humble repentance is always met with forgiveness.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction: Chronicles as a whole
James de Costobadie: Today we come to the last in our studies looking at this ancient book. And if this is your first day at Latimer, or you're just visiting today, it's actually a great day to come, because in the last one of the series you get the summary of what the whole series is about.
Chronicles is the book that teaches us that the grace of God is greater than humanity's sin. Originally it was one book — just because of its length it got split later on into 1 Chronicles and 2 Chronicles. And in teaching us that the grace of God is greater than humanity's sin, it teaches us that whatever hole we get ourselves into in life, the grace of God fulfilled in Jesus Christ is sufficient to get us out, so that we don't have to pay eternally for our misdeeds in this life. There may be some consequences on earth, but not eternally.
The original readers of Chronicles needed to know that. Here they were, perhaps 100 or 200 years after the end of the exile, when the people came back from Babylon to find that the promises had not been fulfilled as they hoped they would be. There was no new Jerusalem at this time. It felt to them as if the promises had been forgotten, that they had been forgotten, that their hopes had not come to fruition. And we can understand that, because we too are waiting — waiting for the return of Jesus. To the naked eye, often there is not much to cheer us on in our faith in Jesus. To the naked eye, in this world, the world is still broken and we're still broken. There's no evidence that the final countdown is on. And so Chronicles is a book for us as much as for these original readers, to teach us that through the grace of God, which is greater than our sin, God will sustain his people until the day that he brings about the fulfilment of those promises.
The three lessons of Chronicles
In particular, in summarising the whole book, here are three lessons that we've learnt.
First of all, God's promises are unchanging. That is, the readers may not see the fulfilment, they may not feel the fulfilment, but they should be under no illusion that God is working to a plan, and what God has promised he certainly will deliver. So, for example, the first nine chapters of 1 Chronicles are these sort of impenetrable genealogies. What do they teach us, if not that God has a plan and is working through the chosen line to bring about that plan — fulfilled one day in Christ, but also that those who believe, even today in the year 2026, are part of that line, so to speak. We become part of the story. Then all those chapters about David — you get a ton of chapters about David in 1 Chronicles — and Solomon into 2 Chronicles, reminds us that God has promised to put a king on the throne. And the Chronicler has such a high, such an exalted view of kingship, that you don't get anything about Bathsheba, you don't get anything about Solomon turning away from the Lord — not because those things didn't happen, but because he wants us to see that the kingship is key to God bringing about his plans. And we're waiting for the perfect king to come into this world, the Lord Jesus Christ, whose beautiful reign will be marked with kindness, love, and care for all of his people.
Think too of the temple. There's a set of promises about the temple. You get eight chapters in 1 Chronicles about the preparation of the temple, and then another four in 2 Chronicles on the building of the temple. Why? Because God had promised that he would one day come to dwell with his people, and those promises will one day come about. So here is the God whose promises are unchanging.
Secondly, 1 and 2 Chronicles teach us of the need for humble trust — humble trust, which really comes out of the first thing we've just learned. If God keeps his promises, then he's to be trusted, because what kind of person do you trust in life? You trust the person who's trustworthy. And God is trustworthy, so therefore we should trust him. And what we've seen so often is the kings of Judah — so quickly they turn away from God. You know, they get an obstacle in the way and suddenly they sort of panic, start making alliances with this person and that person, they try and sort out the problem for themselves. It's all self-reliance. Whereas in Chronicles, what's being commended to us is the need for humble trust, looking to God for our strength and our hope. And that's why 2 Chronicles has got some of the best prayers in the whole Bible — they're in 2 Chronicles, on the theme of trusting God. So, for example, you remember Jehoshaphat in chapter 20, verse 12: "Lord, we do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you." What a great prayer to begin every day with. We don't know what to do — our eyes are upon you. The need for humble trust.
And then thirdly, the power of humble repentance — maybe the most famous verse in the whole of Chronicles, chapter 7 verse 14 of 2 Chronicles. We read that "if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and I will forgive their sin and heal their land." If a person humbly repents, they will always be forgiven by God, because his grace is always greater than our sin. And the readers of Chronicles needed to know that. They knew the sin of the nation — they're still living in the shadow of the exile, what their ancestors had done. What they needed to know was that there is a way back from the dark paths of sin. And we need to know the same. We can make some dreadful decisions in life. We can do some awful things, things that we never thought we would do. But with God, there is always a way back. There's always a second chance, if we humble ourselves and repent, put up our hands, admit our faults, and come back and submit to him.
2 Chronicles 36: The last four kings and the fall of Jerusalem
And that really brings us to this last chapter. I don't know what you were coming to church hoping to receive this morning, but chapter 36 of 2 Chronicles is the lowest point of the whole of the Old Testament. We've commented before how in the original Hebrew Bible, Chronicles was the very last book. I don't think we want to make too much of that — the order doesn't matter too much — but yet at the same time I think it does add something to understand that it was the very last book of the Old Testament. And here at the end of that book, we read the nadir, the low point, as we see the end of the nation. This is the end of Israel as a nation.
I don't know if you've been watching the last couple of days about the 25th anniversary of 9/11. For some of you who weren't alive then — for some of us we remember it well — there was footage of people on the street, some of them looking up, hearing the screeching of the aircraft and seeing the plane going into the building, just looking aghast. I don't know if you saw that footage of President George W. Bush when he was told about what was happening — the very famous scene where he's in that primary school, sitting on a kid's chair, and then one of his advisors, secret service or whatever, comes over and whispers to him. The man later said what he told the President, which was: "A second plane has gone into the building, and America is under attack." Now, to Americans, that was unthinkable. What do you mean, America is under attack? Parts of Europe had lived under terrorism — I lived under terrorism growing up in the UK in the 70s and 80s — but America had not had terrorism on that scale. It was unthinkable that America would be invaded. But sometimes the unthinkable happens. Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction.
And here the unthinkable had happened to Israel. I think it's very hard for us to understand the psychology here. They were God's nation. It was unthinkable — unthinkable — that Israel could come to an end. God had made those promises that he would always be for them. But in chapter 36 we see the end of the nation, and more surprising still, it was God who had brought it about.
So let's look through this, and then consider in closing the lessons it teaches us.
The chapter presents the last four kings of Judah and the three waves of exile which signal the end of the nation. Big picture: you remember how God had rescued his people from Egypt and brought them through the Red Sea to bring them into the promised land. Here is the reversal of that. God is now expelling his people from the promised land.
The first king we read of is Jehoahaz, son of Josiah. Verse 1: "The people of the land took Jehoahaz son of Josiah and made him king in Jerusalem in place of his father." He becomes king aged 23. He only lasts about three months before being deposed by the king of Egypt, whose name is Necho, there in verse 4. We didn't have time last week to see the end of his father Josiah. Josiah's final years end with him taking on Necho, king of Egypt, and Necho beat him in that particular battle. And presumably to ensure that no Judean king crossed the line again and caused him trouble, he took Jehoahaz away to Egypt. He rubs salt in the wound by looting money out of the temple treasury, which you read in verse 3. Then Necho chooses the next king, which is Jehoahaz's brother. Verse 4: "The king of Egypt made Eliakim, a brother of Jehoahaz, king over Judah and Jerusalem, and changed Eliakim's name to Jehoiakim." Now, you make clear who's boss when you've got the power to change the name of the next king. That's what Necho can do — he's won the victory, so he can decide who the king is and what they'll be called.
Jehoiakim, who is now a sort of puppet king, reigns for 11 years. Within that 11 years, Egypt itself gets overthrown, and the next superpower — you know, countries come and countries go, empires come and empires go — in comes Nebuchadnezzar. The hanging gardens of Babylon, one of the seven wonders of the world — it was Nebuchadnezzar that built them. And here he is, he's now the top dog. But nothing changes for Judah. They now get sat on by Nebuchadnezzar, and he attacks. Verse 6: "He bound Jehoiakim with bronze shackles to take him to Babylon." So here is the first wave of deportations. You remember Daniel and his friends, Daniel and the lion's den — this is when they get taken out of the land and taken off to Babylon. The axe is falling over the nation. God's judgment is falling upon them. If you were here a few weeks ago, you might recognise that language of bronze shackles — it's the same language that was applied to Manasseh, the most wicked of the kings of Judah. But this time there is no redemption for Jehoiakim.
That leads to the third king, Jehoiachin, who only reigns — verse 9 — for three months and ten days. So this is now like a revolving door. This is a country in decline. This is like the UK with its prime ministers — they sort of reign for about three months on average. Again, he's described as evil in the Lord's sight, because God sees everything. He sees our hearts with his x-ray vision; he sees everything that happens. And verse 10: "In the spring, King Nebuchadnezzar sent for him and brought him to Babylon, together with articles of value from the temple of the Lord, and he made Jehoiachin's uncle Zedekiah king over Judah and Jerusalem." Here's the second wave of deportations, where Jehoiachin gets led off to Babylon along with precious articles from the temple.
Which brings us to the 19th and final king of Judah, called Zedekiah, who we're told Nebuchadnezzar again chose to be king. So Zedekiah is a puppet ruling over Judah, and it's Nebuchadnezzar who is pulling the strings of the puppet. He too, we're told in verse 12, did evil in the eyes of the Lord his God. He did not humble himself before Jeremiah the prophet, who spoke the word of the Lord to him. And it's in his reign, Zedekiah's reign, that the final judgment of God falls.
And when it comes — look how complete the judgment is. Have a look at verse 17: "He brought up against them the king of the Babylonians, who killed their young men with the sword in the sanctuary and spared neither young man nor young woman, old man or aged. God handed all of them over to Nebuchadnezzar. He carried to Babylon all the articles in the temple of God, both large and small, and the treasures of the Lord's temple and the treasures of the king and his officials. They set fire to God's temple and broke down the wall of Jerusalem. They burned all the palaces and destroyed everything of value there. He carried into exile to Babylon the remnant who escaped from the sword, and they became servants to him and his sons until the kingdom of Persia came to power."
This was a total disaster. This is judgment on a grand scale. The people are carried off. The temple is set on fire. They burn the palaces. They destroyed everything. And if you're not killed by the sword, you get taken off — verse 20 — to become servants of the king of Babylon and his sons. These were the people of Israel. They're supposed to be the servants of the living God. But now they have been wrapped up in chains, bound and taken off. It's utter humiliation. And it's God who brings it about. You see that? It's God's anger. Verse 17: God is the subject. "He brought up against them the king of the Babylonians."
Lesson one: There is no hope for anyone
What do we learn from this? Well, two things for us this morning.
The first — you cannot get away from the bleakness of this message. There is no hope for anyone. And I say there is no hope for anyone because Judah was not the worst of the worst. The point about Judah is they had the greatest privileges. If there was any nation on earth that had the best chance with God, it was Judah. They weren't ignorant of God. They were the ones who'd received the promises of God, passed down to them. We saw that under Josiah they'd even discovered a scroll — they had the words of the living God. We've seen reference in this passage to the words of Jeremiah. And yet what did they do? They rebelled — persistently, consistently.
Their leaders — we've seen many times — set the tone. In our day, leadership is under the spotlight, and maybe it should be. Leaders carry responsibility. But failure in leadership is nothing new; it happened here all the way through. And the people willingly followed them, worshipping other gods.
And again, you see in verse 15 how privileged the nation was. Look at this: "The Lord, the God of their fathers, sent word to them through his messengers again and again, because he had pity on his people and on his dwelling place." God wants to give them chance after chance after chance. He is the God who is patient. But there was that poet, John Dryden, who had a line in one of his poems: "Beware the fury of a patient man." In other words, when you have someone who is patient who then becomes furious, that is real fury. And here the patience of God runs out. Because verse 16 — how did they treat God's messengers? "They mocked them, despised his words, scoffed at his prophets, until the wrath of the Lord was aroused against his people and there was no remedy."
Now I think we should pause for a moment on those last few words: there was no remedy. You know, it's just a feature of humanity that we think we can improve ourselves, that when we're in a tight spot in life we think we can get through it. It's the classic human optimism that the trajectory of humanity is just going up and up and up and up, and we'll just keep on improving. This happened — you know, moving from the 19th century to the 20th century, the industrial revolution: "This is marvellous, humanity's on the up." Oh no — First World War. Oh no — Second World War. More people were killed in the 20th century than in every other century put together. "Now don't worry — new millennium, 21st century, it'll all get better, better, better, better." Well, we're a quarter of the way through it. I was reading this morning that the chief executive of Anthropic has warned that he thinks we need to slow down on AI. What? Hang on a second — but you're the company that's actually making the AI. Even he, along with others, has a genuine concern: where is this going?
So humanity always wants to be on this upward trajectory. But the story of humanity is that we're not. There is no remedy. There's no remedy for us. That is, we can't sort out our hearts. It's not a question of technological progress. It's a question of the human heart. And the human heart never changes. There is no remedy for us as a race, and there is no remedy for us individually.
I don't know what sort of person you are in life — whether you're someone who's always managed to duck and dive and sort things out, and so it'll all be all right in the end. That doesn't work when it comes to God. There is no remedy between us and God. We might be able to sort other things out, but we cannot change our position with God. And what we need to learn from 2 Chronicles is that when God's judgment comes, it will be worse than we ever imagined. When the judgment comes — well, Jesus says in his day it will be so bad that people will cry out to the rocks and the mountains to cover them, because that would be preferable.
I remember the footage from 9/11 — a lot of it's been replayed this week. I remember footage at the time of seeing a man in a suit, obviously a businessman, running away from those twin towers. This was at the moment when the towers collapsed, and there was that kind of tsunami of dust — nuclear dust and cloud and shards of metal and bricks — and this businessman was just running, his face ashen, ash over his shoulders as well, just running to get away, trying to run away from the danger, sprinting, going around the corner. Now Jesus says that when he returns to bring about the judgment of God, it would be better for someone like that to turn around and run in the other direction, back into the cloud, because that would be preferable to meeting God in our sins. That's how bad it will be. And that is the fate of every person.
There is no hope for anyone. And if we start thinking — well, what about our good deeds? Good deeds? That's like that man getting out a pack of band-aids in the face of a tsunami. It doesn't really work. What about human religion? That too is no remedy. Our Bible reading, our prayers, our church attendance — none of it can help. That's like another band-aid. We cannot fix the situation with God. And here's one of the big lessons of the Old Testament: humanity cannot save itself. We always like to think we can, but we can't. There is no remedy.
There's a warning for us individually here — that if we have a grain of self-confidence before God, we are badly mistaken. And there is a warning for us as a church. We should be aware of this. We're about to move into a beautiful new building — five weeks today, God willing, is the first service. But if our trust is in that, or our resources, or our people, or our leaders, or something else, we will be dreadfully exposed. There was no remedy back then. There is no remedy today. There is no hope for anyone.
Lesson two: There is full hope for anyone
Until, right at the end of the book, suddenly out of darkness comes this shaft of brilliant light. Have a look at verse 22: "In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia" — which is now the dominant empire, having taken over from the Babylonians — "in order to fulfil the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah, in line with God's plans, the Lord moved the heart of Cyrus king of Persia to make a proclamation throughout his realm and to put it in writing." And this is what he says: "The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah. Any one of his people among you — may the Lord his God be with him, and let him go up."
"There is no hope for anyone" turns into a second lesson: there is full hope for anyone. You see here that these are God's promises coming to fruition, and not even God's promises can be undone by human actions — not by yours, not by mine, not by anyone else's. His plans stand forever, and he will enact them with us or without us. And so here, in line with his promises, he moves the heart of this mighty king, King Cyrus. And Cyrus even acknowledges that it's God who's moved his heart, and that he has appointed Cyrus to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah. A temple — a new temple, a temple where people could meet with God again.
And these words here are pregnant with meaning. You imagine — this is the last book of the Hebrew Old Testament. "Any one of his people among you — may the Lord his God be with him, and let him go up." So the Old Testament finishes with this offer, this invitation, to go to Jerusalem to meet with God. And then you flip over the page into the New Testament and see that God has come down to earth to make this meeting possible. You remember how Jesus described his body as a temple. And so here is Jesus — as we would say — leaving his comfort zone, the palace of heaven, lowering himself down into this stinking world and into our stinking lives, so that we could meet with the living God. And as it says here at this last verse, verse 23, so that anyone — "any one of his people among you" — could meet with him.
Here is the open invitation to humanity. For how God treats Israel is like a microcosm of how he treats the whole earth. And so in Jesus, the offer goes out to the ends of the world. Think of Jesus and some of those invitations he offered. John chapter 7 — we're told on the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles, Jesus stood up and cried out: "Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink." Anyone. There is the open invitation. There is hope for anyone — whatever life we have lived, however long we have been away from God, however tough the last few years have been. Anyone who is thirsty.
And I wonder this morning — are you thirsty? Are you thirsty to know the peace of God? Are you thirsty to have hope beyond this life? Are you thirsty to have joy in your life? It is Jesus who brings peace, hope, and joy. Yesterday I was talking with someone who is in their 40s, and I said, "Oh, how's the last wee while been?" He said, "I had a heart attack a couple of months ago." I said, "How are you now?" He said, "Well, physically I'm okay, but I found it quite hard coming to terms with my own mortality." Quite hard — it's impossible. You cannot come to terms with your own mortality. It's too difficult for us. There is no hope for anyone until Jesus comes into the picture and into a person's life. And then there is full hope for anyone. And that man has the best news in the world just around the corner, waiting for him, if he comes to know Jesus.
These words here of Chronicles were written for believers — those readers who, after the exile, thought that God had forgotten them. And maybe sometimes we feel the same. You know, nothing really changes in life. One day is the same as the next, and one month is the same as the last. It always feels like nothing is changing. But these verses — the book ends — showing that God is on the move. And that reminds us that he will one day soon be back. There is hope for anyone — a hope that cannot be extinguished, as long as our trust is in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.
You remember Paul's certainty: "I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Here is the hope of the gospel. There is nothing that can separate us from him. Our background can't. Our own stupidity can't. Our sin can't — if we remain in Christ.
Closing summary and prayer
And so as we come to the end of Chronicles, we are reminded to have our hope in the ultimate king. Every king in the line of Judah — those 19 kings — were a disaster, more or less. But they all point forward to the greater king, beautiful in his person and amazing in his deeds. And through Jesus we're reminded of that most important lesson that we learn through the history of Chronicles: that God's grace is indeed greater than our sin. And I hope that brings you encouragement on your dark days — the days ahead, the days that who knows what will bring — that God's grace is always greater than our sin and the situation in which we find ourselves.
Let's pray together. Dear God in heaven, we thank you for this history written down for us — a history of human failure, but also a history where we see the thread of you working, one day to bring back your people to yourself. Lord, thank you for doing that in our lives, bringing us back to Christ. So I do pray for anyone here this morning who's not yet come to know Jesus — I pray that you would work in their hearts to bring them back to yourself by faith in him. Help us, Lord, to wait for his return with patience, also with expectation. And as we do so, Lord, please, we pray, would you help us to speak of the one who has come into this world and enables us to meet with you — not as enemies, but as friends, indeed as your children. We ask in Jesus' name. Amen.