The Speed of the Collapse Text: 2 Chronicles 36:9-10
Introduction: God's Clock, Not Ours
We live in an age that has a peculiar relationship with consequences. On the one hand, our therapeutic culture wants to insulate everyone from the natural outcomes of their foolishness. We want to be able to sow thistle seeds and reap a harvest of figs, and we get indignant when the thistles come up. On the other hand, when judgment does fall, we are often shocked at its speed. We watch institutions that seemed solid for generations crumble in a decade, and we wonder how it all happened so fast. The truth is that rot can work for a long time under the floorboards, but when the floor gives way, it gives way suddenly. The final collapse is always faster than you think.
The kingdom of Judah in its final days was just such a house. The rot of idolatry and covenant-breaking had been eating away at its foundations for centuries. God, in His immense patience, had sent prophet after prophet to warn them, to call them back, to plead with them. He sent reformation under kings like Hezekiah and Josiah. But the people, by and large, loved their sin more than their God. And so, when the end came, it came with breathtaking speed. The final verses of 2 Chronicles are like watching a building fall in fast motion. One bad king is carted off, another is installed, and he is carted off, and then another. It is a rapid-fire succession of divine judgment.
This is a hard lesson, and it is one the modern church desperately needs to learn. We want to believe that God's patience is infinite in a way that means He will never actually bring the hammer down. We have confused longsuffering with indifference. But the Scriptures teach us that God is patient right up until the moment He is not. And when the time for judgment arrives, it is swift, it is thorough, and it is righteous. The passage before us this morning is a stark, two-verse case study in the velocity of God's discipline when a people have become utterly incorrigible.
The Text
Jehoiachin was eight years old when he became king, and he reigned three months and ten days in Jerusalem, and he did what was evil in the sight of Yahweh.
And at the turn of the year King Nebuchadnezzar sent and brought him to Babylon with the valuable articles of the house of Yahweh, and he made his relative Zedekiah king over Judah and Jerusalem.
(2 Chronicles 36:9-10 LSB)
A Rotten Little King (v. 9)
We begin with the reign of Jehoiachin, if you can call it that.
"Jehoiachin was eight years old when he became king, and he reigned three months and ten days in Jerusalem, and he did what was evil in the sight of Yahweh." (2 Chronicles 36:9)
There are a few things to notice here. First, his age. The text says he was eight years old. The parallel account in 2 Kings 24:8 says he was eighteen. This is a well-known textual variant, but it is of little theological consequence. Whether he was eight or eighteen, the central point remains the same. The modern mind, soaked in sentimentalism, wants to excuse him on account of his youth. "He was just a boy," we say. But God's Word does not grade on a curve. The evaluation is stark and absolute: "he did what was evil in the sight of Yahweh."
This tells us something crucial about the nature of sin and the nature of God's evaluation. First, sin is not primarily about a lack of experience or a difficult upbringing. It is a matter of the heart. This boy, whether eight or eighteen, was the heir of a thoroughly corrupt dynasty. He was the rotten fruit of a rotten tree. The court, the culture, the whole system was bent away from God. He simply went with the grain of his fallen nature and his fallen culture. His evil was not an aberration; it was the norm. His personal culpability is one thing, but his reign represents the corporate reality of Judah's apostasy. He is a symbol of a nation that was corrupt from the top down.
Second, God's standard is what matters. The text does not say he did what was evil in the sight of the Babylonians, or the Egyptians, or even his own people. He did what was evil in the sight of Yahweh. This is the only audit that counts. All our attempts to justify ourselves, to plead our circumstances, to compare ourselves with others, are just so much dust in the wind. The question is not whether you are better than the man next to you; the question is whether you are righteous in the sight of a holy God. And the answer, for every one of us apart from Christ, is a resounding no.
Notice also the precise length of his reign: "three months and ten days." This is the Holy Spirit's way of telling us that God is counting. He has the stopwatch. This is not an approximation. God's sovereignty is not general; it is meticulous. He gave this king exactly 100 days to show his colors, and the colors he showed were black. And so, his time was up.
God's Babylonian Courier Service (v. 10)
The consequence for this evil is immediate and is delivered by a pagan king.
"And at the turn of the year King Nebuchadnezzar sent and brought him to Babylon with the valuable articles of the house of Yahweh, and he made his relative Zedekiah king over Judah and Jerusalem." (2 Chronicles 36:10 LSB)
"At the turn of the year" was the customary time for ancient kings to go to war, when spring made travel and foraging for armies possible. But we should see this as more than just a note about the military campaign season. This is God's appointed time. God's judgment is not haphazard; it runs on a divine schedule. When the 100 days were up, God dispatched His instrument.
And who is His instrument? King Nebuchadnezzar. We must be clear about the lines of authority here. Nebuchadnezzar thinks he is acting in his own interest, securing his western flank, and putting down a rebellious vassal. But from the perspective of heaven, he is nothing more than God's errand boy. The prophet Jeremiah repeatedly calls this pagan tyrant "my servant" (Jer. 25:9, 27:6). This is the doctrine of God's absolute sovereignty over the affairs of men and nations. God will press a pagan emperor into His service to chastise His own covenant people. He will use the ungodly to punish the unfaithful. This should terrify us. If God's own people will not be holy, He will use the godless to bring a profane form of sanitation. He will use Babylon to clean up a Jerusalem that will not clean up itself.
And what does Nebuchadnezzar, God's servant, do? He takes two things. He takes the king, and he takes the temple treasures. The removal of the king is the removal of political authority. The removal of "the valuable articles of the house of Yahweh" is the removal of spiritual glory. This was not just plunder. This was a theological statement. These articles, the gold and silver vessels dedicated to the worship of God, were tangible symbols of God's presence and blessing. To have them carried off and, as we know from the book of Daniel, placed in the temple of a pagan idol, was the ultimate humiliation. It was God saying, "You have profaned my house with your idols, so I will allow my things to be carried into an idol's house. You have abandoned me, so I am removing the signs of my presence from you." God is repossessing the furniture from a house that has broken its lease.
The final act of humiliation is the installation of a new king. Nebuchadnezzar "made his relative Zedekiah king." Judah does not even get to choose its next leader. The conquering emperor appoints a puppet. This is the end of their independence. They are now fully subjugated, a client state of a foreign power. This is the political reality that mirrors the spiritual reality. Because they would not have Yahweh as their king, they now have Nebuchadnezzar as their overlord, with a weak-willed man named Zedekiah as his proxy. This is what happens when you trade the lordship of Christ for the lordship of self. You do not get autonomy. You get a far worse master.
Conclusion: The Non-Negotiable Throne
The story of Jehoiachin is a grim one, but it is a necessary one. It reminds us that God is not to be trifled with. Rebellion has a cost, and the bill always comes due. Nations that forget God, that institutionalize evil and call it good, will find themselves on a similar trajectory. They will find their treasuries emptied, their leaders feckless, and their sovereignty handed over to others. God's justice is not slow, not ultimately. It just feels that way to us because we have short attention spans.
But this is not the end of the story. The reason God records this history for us is not to drive us to despair, but to drive us to the true King. Jehoiachin was a false king, a placeholder in a line of failures. Zedekiah was an even greater failure. This whole period of history is meant to make God's people long for a king who would not do evil in the sight of the Lord. It is meant to make us long for a Son of David who would be faithful.
And God provided just such a King. The Lord Jesus Christ came and did only what was good in the sight of His Father. And yet, He was the one who was truly "brought" away. He was taken outside the city, not to a palace in Babylon, but to a cross on Calvary. The wrath of God that men like Jehoiachin deserved was poured out upon Him. All the judgment that we deserve for our own evil reigns in our hearts fell on His head. He was stripped, not of temple treasures, but of His own garments and His own life, so that we might be clothed in His righteousness and filled with the treasure of His Spirit.
The choice before us is the same choice that was before Judah. We can have our own little puppet kings, our own pet sins and idols, and reign for our "three months and ten days" before the inevitable collapse. Or we can bow the knee to the true King, the Lord Jesus. We can surrender our worthless treasures to Him and receive in return the inexhaustible riches of His grace. He is the only King whose throne is not negotiable, and His is the only kingdom that cannot be shaken.