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Christ Community Chapel is a church in Hudson, OH, that invites people to reimagine life because of Jesus. Learn more about us at ccchapel.com.
Second Chronicles
36, verses 17 through 23.
Therefore he brought up against them
the king of the Chaldeans,
who killed their young men with a sword
in the house of their sanctuary,
and had no compassion,
a young man or virgin,
old man, or aged.
He gave them all into his hand,
and all the vessels of the house of God
great and small,
and the treasures
of the house of the Lord,
and the treasures of the king,
and of his princes.
All these he brought to Babylon.
And they burned the house of God,
and broke down the wall of Jerusalem,
and burned all its palaces with fire,
and destroyed all its precious vessels.
He took and exile in Babylon
those who had escaped from the sword,
and they became servants to him
and his sons,
until the establishment
of the kingdom of Persia.
To fulfill the word of the Lord
by the mouth of Jeremiah,
until the land had enjoyed its Sabbaths
all the days that it
laid desolate,
it kept Sabbath to fulfill 70 years.
Now in the first year of Cyrus,
king of Persia,
that the word of the Lord
by the mouth of Jeremiah
might be fulfilled.
The Lord stirred up
the spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia,
so that he made proclamation
throughout all his kingdom.
It also put it in writing.
Thus says Cyrus, king of Persia,
the Lord, the God of heaven,
has given me
all the kingdoms of the earth,
and he has charged me
to build him a house at Jerusalem
which is in Judah.
Whoever is among you of all his people,
may the Lord his God be with him.
Let him go up.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome.
Great to have you here at Christ
Community Chapel. Glad that you,
But you guys are the hardy ones.
Good job coming out.
Love that you're here.
This is the second week of advent.
And advent implies anticipation.
Waiting.
And that's why we have this little set
up, like a like a waiting room.
By the way, this was Zach's idea.
He is entering into the realm of props,
which I'm really excited about
because I want to see where this goes.
But we wanted to do it like this
because waiting is hard.
And there are,
different ways of waiting.
Of course.
I mean, it's one thing to wait.
When you know
there's going to be an end
to your waiting, like,
if you're pregnant,
you know that it's going to end
in about nine months.
You might go two weeks,
be two weeks past due date,
which would be a very hard two weeks.
But you're not going to go two years
past due date.
It's a different kind of
waiting when you're waiting for,
let's say, a job,
and you're wondering
when and if you will ever get that job.
It's a different kind of waiting.
We chose this, theme
because at Advent,
Christmas,
the entire world was waiting.
And what we now call the first century,
we call it the first century.
Because Jesus finally came.
Jesus was born Emmanuel, God with us.
And we changed the way we keep time
because of Jesus.
But back then,
it wasn't the first century.
It was just another century,
another hundred years
of what seemed like waiting.
This passage
that we're going to look at,
tonight is a very unusual passage
for Christmas series.
I don't know if you're
paying attention.
Well, it was being read.
The reason we chose this
passage is because God loves patterns.
God loves patterns.
And I say that for a couple of reasons.
One is the way that Jesus taught.
When you read
the Gospels,
Jesus is constantly pointing
to different things around him
that show
the pattern of what
he's trying to communicate.
In John chapter 12,
right after
Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey
and what we call the triumphal
entry Palm Sunday.
He knows that by Friday
he'll be hanging on the cross.
He gathers people
and he begins to teach them.
And he says this
unless a grain
of wheat falls in the ground and dies,
it remains alone.
But if it dies, it bears much fruit.
What he was saying is that wheat,
every grain, every seed,
is a pattern of death and resurrection
that points to him.
In Luke chapter 15,
when Jesus is trying to describe
to people the heart of God,
he says to them,
listen,
if a shepherd had 100 sheep
and one wandered off,
will he
not leave the 99 and go after the one?
And what Jesus is saying is,
if you want to know the heart of God,
if you want to know
how God feels about you, just look
at a shepherd.
The way a good shepherd
treats his sheep.
You know,
I think about the seasons here
in Northeast Ohio.
We've just been catapulted
into winter, right?
And winter is a time
where everything seems like it dies.
The trees become sticks and the
the grass turns brown
and the flowers all die and go away.
And then in spring, right around
when we will celebrate Easter,
all of Northeast
Ohio will come back to life.
It will resurrect
because God loves patterns.
Second Chronicles 36 is a pattern.
Let me tell you the story,
and then I'll show you the pattern.
In the three points
that I'll have for you. But,
if you have your Bibles,
go ahead and
turn to Second Chronicles 36.
If you don't know where it is,
then, join the crowd.
This is a hard one to find.
If you're going to use,
you can do it the easy way.
You can just wait for it
to come up on the screen.
If you're going to use
one of our pew Bibles,
I can tell you it's on page 361.
Page 361.
All right.
I'm going to read it for us again.
So it's fresh in your mind,
and then I'll explain the story.
This is what it says
beginning in verse 17.
Therefore, he brought up against them
the king of the Chaldeans,
who killed their young men
with the sword
in the house of their sanctuary.
Had no compassion
on young man or virgin,
old man, or aged.
He gave them all into his hand,
and all the
vessels of the house of God
great and small,
and the treasures
of the house of the Lord,
and the treasures of the king,
and of his princes.
All these he brought to Babylon.
And they burned the house of God,
and broke down the wall of Jerusalem,
and burned all its palaces
with fire, and destroyed
all its precious vessels.
He took him to exile in Babylon.
Those who had escaped from the sword,
and they became servants to him
and to his sons,
until the establishment
of the kingdom of Persia.
To fulfill
the word of the Lord
by the mouth of Jeremiah,
until the land had enjoyed its Sabbath
all the days that it laid desolate,
it kept Sabbath to fulfill 70 years.
Now, in the first year
of Cyrus, king of Persia,
that the word of the Lord
by the mouth of Jeremiah
might be fulfilled.
The Lord
stirred up the spirit
of Cyrus, king of Persia,
so that he made a proclamation
throughout all his kingdom,
and also put it in writing.
Thus says Cyrus, king of Persia,
the Lord,
the God of heaven, has given me
all the kingdoms of the earth,
and he has charged me
to build him a house in Jerusalem
which is due in Judah.
Whoever is among you of all his people,
may the Lord his God be with him.
Let him go up.
All right.
So
there's a pattern here.
And,
this passage is a very brief summary
of one of the darkest times
in Israel's history.
And I'm calling, this particular sermon
awaiting in defeat
because Israel was decimated
by Babylon.
And the reason that,
that Israel was decimated
is given in verse 21.
And this is what it says
to fulfill the word of the Lord
by the mouth of Jeremiah,
until the land had enjoyed its Sabbaths
all the days that it laid desolate, it
kept Sabbath to fulfill 70 years.
I'll explain that.
So when God brought Israel
into the Promised Land,
he set them up for success.
He wanted, Israel to be,
the the very best place
the world had ever seen.
So he gave them instructions
on how to create such a place.
And the people of Israel, for whatever
reason, decided to treat God's
instructions as God's suggestions.
And I say that, like,
for whatever reason, I know the reason.
It's the same reason that you do it.
It's the same reason that I do it.
I mean, there are certain instructions
that God gives that make sense
and there are certain instructions
that God gives
that don't seem like they make sense.
And for Israel,
one of the instructions
was that every seven years,
God wanted them to let the land rest.
He called it giving the land a Sabbath.
They were to let it lay fallow right.
And that,
you know,
now we know from agricultural sciences,
that's a very good thing to do,
that when land is allowed
to lay fallow,
that the nutrients are replenished
and actually the crops
become more nutritious.
Later years after it has laid fallow.
But they didn't know that at the time.
So it didn't make sense to them.
So they didn't want to do it.
And we still do that.
I just recently read an article.
It's one of many articles I've written.
I've read, from non-religious
sociologists about cohabitation,
because now they're finding
that couples that cohabitate
have a much lower success
rate in marriage
than those who do cohabitate,
because it made popular sense to people
that you you test drive before you buy.
That's was the kind of the terminology.
But now we find out that
God's instructions
really did make sense.
But so we still do it.
But the Israelites had
trouble with the idea of a Sabbath
year, of letting the land lay fallow.
And if they had done that, it
not only would have replenished
the nutrients in the soil,
it also would have reminded them
that the land wasn't theirs.
That land was God's land.
And that's also a hard concept
to really buy into that
my car's not my car.
My house is not really my house.
It's God's house.
Can you imagine
having to move out of your house
every seven years just to be reminded
that it's not your house,
it's God's house,
or giving 10% of your paycheck
every paycheck
to remind yourself it's not your money.
It's God's money.
You see, it's still hard
not to take God's instructions
as God's suggestions.
So it didn't make sense to the people
because the land still
could have could produce crops
so that
when the seventh year rolled around,
they went ahead and spread seed
and they wanted to see
maybe if God really
wants the land to rest,
God won't allow it to sprout up.
You know, that's the way we think.
Sometimes we think,
you know,
I know God doesn't want me to do this,
but if he really doesn't
want me to do this,
somehow I won't be able to do it.
And they don't make obedience easy.
But that's not the way it works.
If you want to disobey God,
you can always disobey God.
That's a pattern.
So they go ahead
and throw the seed out, and sure
enough, it begins to sprout
and when it was harvest time,
they went ahead and harvested
that seventh year.
And when they did it,
they probably felt a little bit guilty.
But there were 12% richer.
So they got over their guilt.
And then when the next seven years
rolled around, the next Sabbath year,
they did it again.
Because it's always easier
to sin the second time
than it was the first time.
And it's easier
still the third time
than it was the second time.
And that's the way it went.
And there was another rule
that was even harder for them
that every seventh Sabbath year.
So after 49 years, the 50th year
God said was
was what he would call
the year of Jubilee.
In the year of Jubilee,
every debt was canceled,
every slave was set free,
and all the land went back
to the original families
that owned the land.
So in Israel,
if they had followed that,
there would have been
no generational poverty
and no trust fund babies.
Everyone would have had to work
the same amount
like their grandparents
and their parents.
But that really didn't
make sense to them.
So they never did that either.
So what happened with them?
Oh, by the way, the
the year of Jubilee
would have been easier
had they been doing
the Sabbath year
every seven years,
because big obedience
is always easier after small obedience.
If you ever want to be a person
who is able to obey big,
you have to be a person
that does a lot of small obeying
anyway.
So they decide
they're going to disobey.
They're not going to
trust God and do the Sabbath years.
And they never
they don't do it,
and they don't do it for a long time
in the course.
They never do the year of Jubilee
either.
They don't do it for 490 years,
for that's
almost twice
as long as the United States of America
has existed.
So for 40 or 90 years, 70 Sabbath
years, they skipped.
And that's what verse 21 is about.
Let me read it again and you'll see.
This is what verse 21 says
to fulfill
the word of the Lord
by the mouth of Jeremiah.
Until the land had enjoyed its Sabbath
sake,
God saved up all the Sabbath
they had not done.
And he did it all at once.
All the days that it laid
desolate, it kept Sabbath to fulfill
70 years, 70 years.
So it happened all at once.
And the way it happened
all at once, as they lost
the promised Land,
the way they lost
the Promised Land were the Babylonians.
And that is summarized
very briefly, just four verses,
where it says,
therefore he brought up against them
the king of the Chaldeans,
who killed their young men
with the sword
in the house of their sanctuary,
had no compassion,
and young man
or virgin, old man or aged,
he gave them all into his hand
in all the vessels of the house of God
great and small, and the treasures
of the house of the Lord,
and the treasures of the King
and his princes.
And all these he brought to Babylon.
And they burned the house of God,
broke down the wall of Jerusalem,
burned all his palaces
with fire, and destroyed
all his precious vessels.
He took and exile Babylon.
Those who had escaped from the sword,
and they became servants to him
and to his sons,
until the establishment
of the kingdom of Persia. Okay,
here are my three points.
This is the pattern of God
waiting in defeat.
When?
What? Why?
When it's your fault, you're waiting.
What God does while you're waiting
and why God does it
first when it's your fault,
you are waiting.
You know it's one thing to be waiting,
or to be suffering,
or to have your life rocked
by something
that you didn't really have a hand in.
I talked to a woman three weeks ago
who was just diagnosed with stage
three lung cancer.
She's never smoked.
That's one type of suffering,
and it brings its own questions.
But I always think
with that kind of suffering,
if you're sitting in a waiting room,
it's easy
to imagine
that Jesus can be right next to you.
And you may have questions for Jesus.
Like,
I don't understand
why this is happening,
but will you sit with me?
Will you stay with me?
Will you walk with me?
Will you help me?
Those seem like all reasonable things.
But if your life is a wreck
and it's your fault,
and there's a direct line
with your decisions
and your sin and your disobedience
and the chaos in your life,
it feels different.
It feels like it.
It's harder to go to God.
It's like the difference between
going to a friend for help
when you need it,
and going to a former friend
who you've had a falling out with,
and it was your fault
you had the falling out with them.
You knock on their door,
they open the door
and they say you have some nerve
showing up here.
I have talked to countless people
over the 40 years I've been in ministry
who fall into this category
where there's a direct line
into the destruction and chaos and pain
in their lives and their decisions
and their sin.
And when that
happens that
it's it's easy to think,
it doesn't matter if you try to obey.
Now
and it
there's nothing
you can do to undo the mess
that your life has become.
And God's
not even someone you can turn to
because it seems like
God is not for you,
but he's against you.
And that's
when it's important to know patterns,
to know your Bible,
to be able to see a story
like in Second Chronicles chapter 36
and see the pattern.
Because when it seems like God
is done with you, he's not.
And that brings me to my second point
what God does while you're waiting.
One of the worst things
about being in a waiting room,
I think, is
when you're just waiting for someone
to tell you something, right?
I've been in waiting rooms,
and every time the door opens where
whatever's happening is back there
and the doctors are all back
there, I'm looking to see
maybe they're going to come over to me
and give me an update.
Maybe this will be the time
I'll get some information.
But it's
different
when you're waiting in defeat.
It was different for the Israelites.
It's different
when you feel like
you've already
gotten the news that you dreaded.
It's already happened.
You're not in a waiting room anymore.
You're in rubble of your life.
But this is important.
Don't miss this.
When it comes to God,
you are always in the waiting room.
You're not in trouble.
God never leaves you
in complete defeat.
Right?
And I say that
because of what happens here
in Second Chronicles
36, in this
dark time in Israel's history,
when they think God
has completely given up on them
and it's their own fault
that God is at that moment moving
kings and kingdoms
like there's so many chess pieces.
Nebuchadnezzar,
the king of Babylon
who destroys Israel, he dies and he
he leaves the kingdom,
the kingdom of Babylon,
to a series of his sons,
the last of which is a son
named Belshazzar.
Belshazzar weakens
the kingdom of Babylon to the point
where Darius the Mede conquers Babylon.
Darius
the Mede is famous
for throwing Daniel in the lion's den.
Daniel gives way, or Darius
the Mede gives way to Cyrus
the Persian, and Cyrus
the Persian wakes up one morning
and says, I know what I'll do.
The God of the universe wants me
to rebuild his house in Jerusalem,
and to tell every Jew,
if you want to go back,
you can go back.
But when I say that God was moving
kingdoms and kings like chess pieces,
what I mean is that
there was no one in all of Israel
who even thought this
was a possibility.
E no one could have ever dreamed
that Cyrus would make this proclamation
in his first year.
There weren't
there weren't
a group of wealthy,
successful Jewish businessmen
who went to Cyrus with the proposal.
They had nothing to offer Cyrus.
They had no cards to play.
And this is the other thing.
When you have run out of cards to play,
God still has a card to play for you.
God always has a card to play for you,
and that's what he does with Cyrus.
But that brings me to the last point,
which is why.
Why does God do what he does?
Hey,
I think it's it's really interesting
how specific look at verse.
This is verse 23.
This is the proclamation that he makes.
Thus says Cyrus, king of Persia,
the Lord,
the God of heaven,
has given me
all the kingdoms of the earth, and he's
charged me to build him a house
at Jerusalem, which is in Judah.
Okay.
The reason that hits me is, you know,
sometimes it helps me
to try to see
what the Bible doesn't say,
so I can appreciate what it does say.
What Cyrus doesn't say is that,
he he has not developed
a compassion for Israel.
It's not like he met
some Jewish people and he felt bad
they no longer had a country,
so he wanted them
to have their country back.
That's not it.
He wasn't into nation
building like we did
at the end of World
War Two with Japan and Germany.
He didn't send the Jews back with seed
and plows
in order to make it fertile again.
He was very, very specific.
He said,
The God of the universe wants me to do
one thing is to rebuild his house
in Jerusalem.
The house of
God in Jerusalem was called the temple.
Solomon built the temple.
Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the temple.
Cyrus rebuilt the temple.
The temple was the place of sacrifice.
The temple was a place
where you made atonement for your sin.
The temple was a place you went
to come home to God
to be reconciled to him.
That's what the temple was for.
Do you see what God was doing
and why God was doing it?
That Israel,
even though they were waiting
and it was their fault,
even though it was their sin
that had brought judgment.
God was working.
And the reason he was working
was he was inviting them home.
You know, I mentioned Luke chapter 15.
Luke chapter 15 is one of my all time
favorite chapters in the Gospels.
Because Jesus tells three
back to back to back stories.
About the same thing.
There's the story of the lost
sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son.
And the point of each story is
God's relentless
love.
For no matter how far
someone is away from,
no matter what decisions
they have made,
God never gives up.
God is always working to provide
a way back home to himself.
I think I
I started by saying
advent is a time when all the world
was waiting,
and whether they realize that or not,
all the world was waiting
for an opportunity to come home to God
because we were all estranged
and God sent Jesus as a way home.
Listen, whoever you are,
wherever you are, whatever your life is
like and whatever reason
your life is like that,
the invitation from God is
the same because Jesus is the same,
and Jesus is God's way of saying,
you come home
and be connected to me again.
Be reconciled, be forgiven
through my Son Jesus.
That's advent, that's Christmas.
Would you pray with me?
Father in heaven,
thank you for, your grace,
which is so, so great.
And,
when I was preparing
for this message,
I know there are so many times that,
my life has been messed up
and it's been my fault,
but you have never given up.
And I'm so grateful for that.
I pray for, all of us here
that you would,
give us a heart to obey,
that we wouldn't,
take your instructions,
like, suggestions and ignore them.
But I also pray that when we do that,
we be reminded that you're a
God who loves patterns.
And your
pattern is to
provide a way back to yourself
because of your love.
Thanks for Jesus.
We pray this in his name. Amen.