I'm been thinking a little bit about the way books of the Bible end recently. We're coming to the end of our series in Mark in teen church, Gethsemane on Wednesday, and then five weeks later chapter 16, which poses some problems. I guess everyone who preaches through Mark has to come to a decisions as to what to do about the double ending. Particularly when the last thing you want to do is rob young Christians of their confidence in Scripture.
It wasn't the end of Mark that grabbed by attention this week, but the ending of 2nd Kings. Second Kings is a terrible sad tale of immorality and decline, both personally and nationally with very few bright spots. Probably written at the time, maybe as the official historical record, and then collected some time during or after the captivity, it shows how the northern kingdom fell further and further into the sins of Jeroboam, and how the southern Kings looked more like Adam's sons that David's.
Josiah is a great bright spot. Cut to the heart by what he discovered in the law, he wasn't content to let his reformation by personal, but removed all the altars of false worship from the land. I like the imagine him riding around on a horse, with a sledge hammer in one hand and a map in the other. And maybe that's how it happened, but maybe not. After he's gone though, the decline is quick, and Judah, God's leaders of God's people, find themselves in Babylon.
Second Kings, and, to a greater extent, second Chronicles exist to remind the exiles, and the returners, that the LORD hasn't failed, in fact, it's because He is the one true God that they find themselves in this mess, and the ending of both these books go a long way to show us that.
How does 2nd Kings end? 'Evil-merodach (what a sen.sational name!) king of Babylon...graciously freed Jehoiachin, King of Judah from prison...and every day of his life he dined regularly at the kings table.' So what does King Evil do? He releases the King of Judah from prison, clothes him and feeds him, every day. He resurrects him, essentially. And the King of God's people eats in the presence of his enemies. Everyone in the Old Testament is either Adam or Jesus and here's Jesus. Resurrected after catastrophe, freely dining at the Kings table. 'Faithful Hebrews', says the writer of 2nd Kings, 'it's going to be ok. Look for the resurrected Son of David.'
Second Chronicles ends with an even bigger surprise. To fulfill what was spoken through Jeremiah the LORD stirred the heart of King Cyrus to let the people of Judah go home and build a house for God. Wait...what? Cyrus is going to let his exiles go, and rebuild a temple to a foreign God? That's extraordinary. Remember, faithful labourers at the walls, that you rebuild because God has pout you there, and it doesn't matter what Nehemiah's opponents or Ezra's intermarriers so, God will succeed, because He is the LORD, the only God.
But. The Temple is rebuilt and still the people sin. The people return, and Judah is an insignificant province. No one cowers before it, no one sends tribute, silver is not counted as stone. We need another resurrected King, and we need another returning temple.
Just as the end of the Kings, and the end of the Chronicles (which was organized to be the original end of the Old Testament) reminded Judah that the LORD was sovereign but that this wasn't the return to come, and this wasn't the King to come, so they remind us to look to Jesus. The resurrected King of God's people, the rebuilt meeting place, who brings us to the Father.
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