II Chronicles 36:23 Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia, All the kingdoms of the earth hath the LORD God of heaven given me; and he hath charged me to build him an house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Who is there among you of all his people? The LORD His God be with him, and let him go up
Imagine you walk into a room of some elementary school and there are a hundred kids running around, throwing paper airplanes, pushing and shoving one another, screaming at the top of their lungs, and running every which way in complete pandemonium. You may have experienced this before. Maybe it even describes your house at about 4 o’clock in the afternoon.
In any event, what would your first question be if you saw a bunch of kids and no apparent order? You might say to yourself, “Who is in charge here?” Now, let all those kids grow up, give them power, money, and their own ideologies, then scatter them the world over, and you have what the world is today. It seems to be just a mass of confusion, a bunch of chaos, fighting, and anarchy. You look at the world and think, “Who is in charge?” That is not the first time this question has been asked. I think it is a question about as old as mankind itself.
II Chronicles 36 is the sad account of the demise of God’s people in Judah and how they were taken captive. It wasn’t really just one event. It was a succession of events of rebellion, sin, conquest, foreign power, and ultimately God’s judgment. You find a variety of kings and powers both foreign and domestic that led straight to a pandemonium of chaos and war.
There are a variety of chances God gave to His people in Judah. Verse 16 says, “But they mocked the messengers of God.” God’s own people mocked the messengers of God, the prophets. It continues, “And despised his words, and misused his prophets, until the wrath of the LORD arose against his people, till there was no remedy.” Let me just pause and say that no one is beyond hope except the person who refuses help. That is what God’s people had done. They had refused the help God had sent through His prophets. Time and again the prophets had risen up and spoken the truth and time and again God’s people had rebelled. So, what ensued was pandemonium and then slavery.
But as you look at the end of the chapter, a bigger picture begins to emerge. Verse 21 says that all these things happened, including the burning of the house of God, the breaking down of the wall of Jerusalem, the burning of the palaces, and the destruction of all the goodly vessels, “to fulfill the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her sabbaths: for as long as she lay desolate she kept sabbath, to fulfil threescore and ten years.”
Notice two things. One, all this trouble was in fact judgment. It wasn’t random. It was to fulfill the word of God through the prophet Jeremiah. Second, the Bible says that because the Jews refused to keep the sabbath that God had instituted, the land was left desolate and so by necessity the land kept her sabbaths. The point is that God was in charge. Verse 22 talks about Cyrus king of Persia who says, “All the kingdoms of the earth hath the LORD God of heaven given me; and he hath charged me to build him an house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Who is there among you of all his people? The LORD his God be with him, and let him go up.” Here is a pagan king who was fulfilling God’s design for God’s people.
Years ago, my wife and I were walking on a trail in Oklahoma and up ahead I saw one lonely little prairie dog up on her little mound. I pointed out to my wife, “Hey, there is a prairie dog.” Then, as my eyes focused upward a little bit, I saw two more prairie dogs just beyond her. Then, as we walked a little way, I saw ten more beyond those, and then ten more beyond that, and then, as I began to take in the grand sweep of this large field of several acres, I realized that we were in the middle of a prairie dog minefield. There were literally hundreds of them. We had walked into a prairie dog metropolis. What I thought was one prairie dog was actually connected to hundreds more.
Sometimes, when you are hiking through the forest, you can’t see the forest for the trees. When you hike in a big space like the Grand Canyon, you don’t realize how exposed you are on the cliff until you go back, wind around, and look back to the spot from which you came. Then you realize how exposed that precipice is. In every case, you are getting a bigger picture. In II Chronicles 36 we get a bigger picture. We see all these random events, Egypt, Babylon, Persia, the destruction of God’s temple, and we realize that God was fulfilling His Word. He was keeping His sabbath and even using a pagan like Cyrus of Persia. The Bible gives the big picture.
Maybe today you are trying to string together all the elements of your life, a little chaos here, a little discouragement there, a little disappointment somewhere else, and maybe failure, but it is hard for us as humans to see the big picture. Sometimes it is hard to see who is really in charge until you take in the grand sweep of the big picture. The only one who has the big picture is God and the place He has given us that grand sweep is His Word. Today, take heart, take in God’s Word because it is hard to see who is in charge until you take in the big picture. That big picture is given in God’s Word.