“I am your God and you shall be my people.” –God

The phrase, “I am your God and you shall be my people,” appears in various forms throughout the Bible, most notably in Leviticus 26:12, Jeremiah 30:22, and Ezekiel 37:27. These words command attention and reverence for the words are God’s covenant promise from Him to His chosen people, symbolizing a relationship of protection, guidance, and belonging.

However, down through the ages, the people wanted more than God. God’s people were distracted by the power, riches, and influence that the kings of other nations around them seem to have and hold.  They cried out to God for a king like that to rule over them!  How this must have grieved the heart of God. Who is like the Lord God?  He supplied all they needed and knew them from the inside out! God protected them with The Law given to Moses for the purpose to govern each other with included His character of love, mercy, justice, grace, peace, and joy! But they thought they knew better than God! 

“We want a king!” they kept demanding. So God, through his prophets, gave them exactly what they wanted—a human to rule over them.  Those chose a human to follow over the God of all, who knows all, and is in all because He created all.  There is no one like our God.  God/Jesus/Holy Spirit is King of kings and Lord of lords but they wanted someone they could see even if it meant this person made life miserable for them—and most times that is exactly what happened. 

Thinking with kings they would be self-sufficient, life took a turn for the worse.  The Kingdom of Israel was split in two.  Other kings who had once impressed them warred against them.  Kings were at war with each other as part of their “job description.” God stood by, helping when they asked, as He waited for them to return to Him. God allowed His people to live with the consequence of their decision of having a king rule over them instead of God, Himself.

After the house of Israel in Samaria fell to the enemy; God’s people in Judah carried on with life. (God protected this lineage of Judah. From the line of Judah, Jesus, promised Messiah, would be born!)  But most of Judah’s kings were evil. Some, like Josiah were as dedicated to God as David was but most were not. Soon selfishness and pride took over their hearts. The sins of their fathers were passed down so evil gave birth to the sin of forgetting God completely. “Doing what was evil in the eyes of the Lord” was their way of life. The relationship God sought from the beginning to be their God and for them to be His people was broken.

Turning to evil was the rejection of God and became their way of life. This independent-of-God lifestyle rejected God and His Law. They worshiped everything but God. They worshiped their evil kings.  They worshiped the stuff of life that turned them away from their God who provided the stuff for them!  Some combined idol worship with thoughts of God but adding their idols to the pure worship of God alone was unholy and detestable to God.  God’s Law that told them how to live in peace with each other was not only set aside, it was hidden and never spoken of until a young king’s workers found it in the rubble of the Temple in need of repair. Finding it caused a revival but soon the fire was extinguished with the kings that followed.

The people and their leaders became so hard hearted against God, they stop listening to God. God was so far out of mind they could no long hear His voice. It is time to end the foolishness of their own desires. Kings who had impressed God’s people now enslaved them.  God’s chosen were now exiled to Babylonia—a kingdom of evil governed by an evil king, Nebuchadnezzar.  This chapter and verse will end our study of the kings of God’s people. What will happen next? Stay turned—God is not finished yet!

2 Kings 25

So in the ninth year of Zedekiah’s reign, on the tenth day of the tenth month, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon marched against Jerusalem with his whole army. He encamped outside the city and built siege works all around it. ² The city was kept under siege until the eleventh year of King Zedekiah.

³ By the ninth day of the fourth month the famine in the city had become so severe that there was no food for the people to eat. ⁴ Then the city wall was broken through, and the whole army fled at night through the gate between the two walls near the king’s garden, though the Babylonians were surrounding the city. They fled toward the Arabah, ⁵ but the Babylonian army pursued the king and overtook him in the plains of Jericho. All his soldiers were separated from him and scattered, ⁶ and he was captured.

He was taken to the king of Babylon at Riblah, where sentence was pronounced on him. ⁷ They killed the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes. Then they put out his eyes, bound him with bronze shackles and took him to Babylon.

⁸ On the seventh day of the fifth month, in the nineteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, Nebuzaradan commander of the imperial guard, an official of the king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem. ⁹ He set fire to the temple of the Lord, the royal palace and all the houses of Jerusalem. Every important building he burned down. ¹⁰ The whole Babylonian army under the commander of the imperial guard broke down the walls around Jerusalem. ¹¹ Nebuzaradan the commander of the guard carried into exile the people who remained in the city, along with the rest of the populace and those who had deserted to the king of Babylon. ¹² But the commander left behind some of the poorest people of the land to work the vineyards and fields.

¹³ The Babylonians broke up the bronze pillars, the movable stands and the bronze Sea that were at the temple of the Lord and they carried the bronze to Babylon. ¹⁴ They also took away the pots, shovels, wick trimmers, dishes and all the bronze articles used in the temple service. ¹⁵ The commander of the imperial guard took away the censers and sprinkling bowls—all that were made of pure gold or silver.

¹⁶ The bronze from the two pillars, the Sea and the movable stands, which Solomon had made for the temple of the Lord, was more than could be weighed. ¹⁷ Each pillar was eighteen cubits high. The bronze capital on top of one pillar was three cubits high and was decorated with a network and pomegranates of bronze all around. The other pillar, with its network, was similar.

¹⁸ The commander of the guard took as prisoners Seraiah the chief priest, Zephaniah the priest next in rank and the three doorkeepers. ¹⁹ Of those still in the city, he took the officer in charge of the fighting men, and five royal advisers. He also took the secretary who was chief officer in charge of conscripting the people of the land and sixty of the conscripts who were found in the city. ²⁰ Nebuzaradan the commander took them all and brought them to the king of Babylon at Riblah. ²¹ There at Riblah, in the land of Hamath, the king had them executed.

So Judah went into captivity, away from her land.

²² Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon appointed Gedaliah son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, to be over the people he had left behind in Judah. ²³ When all the army officers and their men heard that the king of Babylon had appointed Gedaliah as governor, they came to Gedaliah at Mizpah—Ishmael son of Nethaniah, Johanan son of Kareah, Seraiah son of Tanhumeth the Netophathite, Jaazaniah the son of the Maakathite, and their men. ²⁴ Gedaliah took an oath to reassure them and their men. “Do not be afraid of the Babylonian officials,” he said. “Settle down in the land and serve the king of Babylon, and it will go well with you.”

²⁵ In the seventh month, however, Ishmael son of Nethaniah, the son of Elishama, who was of royal blood, came with ten men and assassinated Gedaliah and also the men of Judah and the Babylonians who were with him at Mizpah. ²⁶ At this, all the people from the least to the greatest, together with the army officers, fled to Egypt for fear of the Babylonians.

Jehoiachin Released

²⁷ In the thirty-seventh year of the exile of Jehoiachin king of Judah, in the year Awel-Marduk became king of Babylon, he released Jehoiachin king of Judah from prison. He did this on the twenty-seventh day of the twelfth month. ²⁸ He spoke kindly to him and gave him a seat of honor higher than those of the other kings who were with him in Babylon. ²⁹ So Jehoiachin put aside his prison clothes and for the rest of his life ate regularly at the king’s table. ³⁰ Day by day the king gave Jehoiachin a regular allowance as long as he lived.

WHAT DO WE LEARN—HOW DO WE RESPOND?

God warned the people for over one hundred years that continued disobedience would lead to disaster. We get into trouble when we forget what God has done for us along with who He is!  Namely, the One in control and is sovereign over all He has created!

Moses wrote a song about God; “Who is like You, O LORD, among the gods? Who is like You, glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders?” (Exodus 15:11) These words of questioning are rhetorical, used to declare God’s unique greatness. David wrote many songs of the greatness of God, too.  Psalm 113:5 also uses a similar phrase to express God’s exalted position; 

The Lord is high above all nations, and his glory above the heavens!
Who is like the Lord our God, who is seated on high, who looks far down on the heavens and the earth? Psalm 113:4-6

There is no one like our God!  If you know, you know!  Many others whose hearts are fully committed to the heart of God in relationship with Him know!

Those who listened to God’s prophets, certainly knew the promise the Lord had given through Jeremiah that the captivity would last seventy years and then the exiles would be allowed to return to Judah. God’s purpose was to give them “a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:11), but they must accept that promise by faith and live to please Him.

Our response has only two choices:

1. God, who sent His Son, Jesus who is now King of kings and Lord of lords who provides salvation and freedom with life eternal. God is all knowing and loves beyond our wildest dreams.
2. Or door number two, evil who distracts, deceives, with the sole purpose to destroy our faith in God who leads us to the captivity of darkness to be exiled to eternal death.

Who is King of your life?  Choose wisely—it truly is a matter of life or death!

After all the kings and kingdoms, God sent Jesus to reconnect us to a relationship with Him.  Here’s how:

“You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! Not only is this so, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.” Romans 5:6-11

Justified, saved, redeemed, reconciled to have a forever beautiful relationship with God!

There is NO ONE like our God!  God or a human king?  I choose God.

Lord,

You loved each one of us, who live all over your created world, enough to die for us!  Yes, there is no one like you!  Why trust anyone but you?  I cannot. I love you because you first loved me.  I trust you above anyone else.  I worship you alone for you are the One and Only worthy to be praised.  Lead me, Lord.

In Jesus Name, Amen