2 Chronicles: Free Will Issues, Transcript

2 Chronicles: Free Will Issues | Secular Bible Study (Episode 14) - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_fJWsH4Mik

Transcript:

(00:00) Welcome to Mind Shift. I'm Brandon. Today is episode 14 of our secular Bible study series. Today we're looking at 2 Chronicles. Now, I probably should have grouped it together with 1 Chronicles. It is important for the role that it plays, so definitely follow along as it's going to lead us into Ezra and Nehemiah. Interestingly enough, Chronicles was supposed to come at the end of all of these. This is kind of a recapping, a retelling, a reframing, etc., so we are getting some information that seems to be the authors trying to fix some things even though they know we're going to see Ezra and Nehemiah and Kings and Samuel.

(00:31) Etc. 2 Chronicles specifically has a little bit of a different focus. Again, originally it was all one book, and we just cut it up for scroll length. So I'm already getting right into the book overview, by the way. But if you look back on 1 Chronicles, this was a reframing of David. We needed to make David more holy, more perfect, as the Messianic promise that was going to come through him to get Jesus from his line needed to have some more significance. We needed to forget about all those bad things David did, forget that he was just like all the other bad kings, really nothing special.

(01:03) It's like we created an archetype hero for ourselves out of David. If you compare him with Saul or Solomon or really any of the others, there's nothing special. He did great things for God, he disobeyed God, he got punished by God. Yeah, you can point to some individual stories because he gets more attention, but that is a curation detail, not that he was actually the best or actually favored. This seems to be created, and so that's a lot of 1 Chronicles. In 2 Chronicles, we get a focus right away on Solomon. So just continuing, we're going to focus on the line of David, the line of Judah. Forget the northern kingdom; that doesn't matter anymore, apparently. We're only looking at the southern kingdom, we're only looking at Judah, we're only looking at the line of David, and we're looking back at them as a way to look forward. We're kind of checking off what we have in terms of the promises from God. Okay, we got the land, we got the people, we got our temple, right? This is a new development, but where's this king? And so we're looking back at all of these kings and saying, you didn't make the cut, you can't be the one that was promised. And again, this is a favorable retelling and curating of the story because there are many who believed that one of these kings would have been the promised king. Now, Jesus won't come for another 400 years, and so a lot of this is making other Bible prophecies work, definitely prophecies in the Old Testament that had absolutely nothing to do with Jesus. We'll see that in Isaiah and some other books, so it is a really interesting framing that is happening here. So again, this book is just the southern kings, and we see their rise and fall. We get a couple of new stories here.

(02:35) And we'll cover a lot of that during problematic passages, which is where probably the bulk of this video will be. And then we have a really strange paragraph to end the book, and this happens from Cyrus the Great. It is cool to see the biblical history here intersect with actual history. Cyrus the Great of Persia has an absolutely phenomenal story, and if you'd like to learn more about that, I'd encourage you to go listen to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast. I think it's episodes 55 and 56 or 56 and 57. I believe the series is called King of Kings. If you don't know about Dan Carlin and you like hearing even these facts, I am sure you'll love Hardcore History. I think I've listened to every single episode. I absolutely love it, but King of Kings is a really interesting way to understand what else is going on in the world at this time and hear about Cyrus from a totally different angle because here Cyrus, we'll read at the end of the book, God works on his heart to fulfill the destiny, which is obviously a very theological implication into the historical context as opposed to what we might see from, again, a traditional historical context. So the last thing to say in terms of book overview would be, again, we're going through all of the kings, and the good ones are the ones that we even perceived as slightly good. We're going to lean on that same way that we did with David, not quite as heavy, but we're going to build up that they were good, and here's why they were good, and here's their blessings. With the bad kings, we're going to double down. They were definitely bad, no good to them at all. In fact, here's what they did that was so bad, and here's the cursings from God. I think that a few things hit me during this book. So again, I think most of the time here is this book overview in point 7. We're going to skip through a lot of the rest, but a few things hit me in reading this book. One is looking at the blessings and cursings again, which have been all over these last 13 books, right? It continues to just strike me how much God is playing out his game. He has something set, he knew what was coming, he's made certain promises, there's a certain destiny to be fulfilled through prophecy for the Messianic King. You know, even in this book, I believe at the end of the book, it's quoting from Jeremiah, which obviously we haven't got to yet. Again, Chronicles would have been here at the end and talking about how God had to arrange things to make what was pronounced in Jeremiah come true. I wonder really how many Christians handle the tension between prophecy and free will. It's one thing to just be foreknowing as a God, to be able to look forward and say, okay, here's the events, but that's not what we see, and even that has its problems, by the way. But what we see is a God that had foreknowledge that then gave prophecy or didn't even give prophecy, just gave promises, blessings, commands, told a mere human what would definitely be happening, and then has to construe to make these things happen. We also see God having his own desires here, which would really cut into the idea of an all-perfect, all-powerful God. He should be self-sufficient, he shouldn't have desires, he shouldn't need things. Again, this is something I want to focus on in its own episode outside of the secular Bible study series, just really understanding the Old Testament character of God because it is extremely different than our conceptualization today. But we see God desiring things, and so he will concoct events to occur to make these desires happen. We see this, the best example that I can think of is going back to the hardening of Pharaoh's heart earlier in the book. It is predicted by God to Moses that he will do these things, that Pharaoh will say no so many times so that God's power can be witnessed and also so that Egypt would bow and know that God is the real God, which by the way, never happens. So we get all of that terror, all of that horror through the 10 plagues, all of the death and destruction at God's hand and interruption of free will to not even fulfill his own promise and desire. But I digress. We are so offhand here for 2 Chronicles, so let's dive into the points 2 through 6 very quickly. We'll talk about 7 and we'll get out of here for today. Point two is authorship and date. No new information here, we covered it in detail last time, but the highlight overview is that it is traditionally credited to Ezra, which does not make any sense for a variety of reasons, but that more than likely this is done in exile or even post-exile. Those are the two real different theories to look at here, and there's good reason to believe in both. I think post-exile might make a little more sense as we are a freed people group at this point because of what Cyrus does. That's the end of the story here, spoiler alert, he lets them out of exile and takes them back to Jerusalem. So either during this period or awaiting period before Cyrus when we're still under Nebuchadnezzar and all the leaders that followed him, or whether we are now going back into Jerusalem and we're talking about rebuilding the temple and everything, and we need to kind of get a cohesive story going for what our people group stands for, what our nation is going to look like, our history again, looking back so that we can look forward. That is really the end all be all of this book. Point three is historical context and accuracy. We've really covered this quite a bit in both the last video and even my opening here with book overview, but again, the intersection of having some of these other famous leaders in history like Cyrus the Great of Persia that we can point to and say, okay, here's a historical figure, here's where the Israelites were definitely in captivity, here's the time that they got back to their land. A lot of this can be known. It's not so much that we have issues with that, it's all of the theological and spiritual and supernatural happenings that are recorded in the Jewish traditions again versus the non-Jewish traditions. And what's so funny is when you get someone like Cyrus that is spoken well of, that is not, you know, an in-group member, he is obviously someone that gave the Jews back their freedom, and we hear all of this information about God working on him. You think if that were true, we would have seen that in the reflections of all the information that we have on Cyrus from the neutral side, the secular side, but that is not how the story goes on that side. So I think that's pretty interesting. That's really it for historical context. There's not much else here than retellings of many things that we already covered. Again, new information about some of the kings, but no new kings. As for point four, which is literary analysis, we have a chronicle, we have a narration, we have a timeline, we have a retelling of events, we have some repetition and parallelism that brings importance to certain things that this canon has already covered. We do get maybe the addition of more speeches in this one from kings, prophets, and priests. We get a few different speeches here, so that's neat. We've seen that before, and it's one that I haven't covered so much, but really that's going to be it for the literary techniques at play here. There is some prophecy, depending on what you consider prophecy. I think that we have to be really careful when we talk about prophecy in the Old Testament because so much of it is construed for sure. So much of the New Testament is bent around trying to make certain things in the Old Testament that weren't originally about the Messiah about the Messiah. Some of these things were prophecy, but not for Jesus or the Messianic rule, but just for other people of their time. And when those didn't get fulfilled, and then we can try to tie them back to Jesus, we get some really messy things. Again, that's going to be covered so much more when we get to the Gospels, when we get to the New Testament, but there are elements of prophecy, especially with this very strange last paragraph about Cyrus and the way that it ends, which we'll talk about here in point 7. So that's probably all I need to say for point 4. Five is main themes. I think with the highlighting of all of the curses of the bad kings and blessings of the good kings, we could definitely look at faithfulness and prosperity. Now, that's kind of putting the positive spin on it. We've also talked about divine justice, we've also talked about God's wrath in terms of themes. There's a lot of ways that you can kind of stretch and play with this, but the way that the author is trying to make this theme come across is definitely that of faithfulness. You know, of all of these kings, very few were good. Of the ones that were good, they did not measure up even to David, and David did not even measure up to the one promised. That's kind of the whole idea here. We're building a hierarchy of divinity, if you will, that has not yet been met in any of these steps. The need for Jesus here, the looking forward, is such a huge part of this book. A second point that is focused on here, especially as we get more into the stories of Solomon, would be temple, temple worship, the importance of the priesthood. Again, getting into these themes that have been kind of dropped since some of the earlier books in the Pentateuch. This, I think, will be an important reminder again as we're looking back to look forward for what's to come as we get back to Jerusalem and we restart on the building of the temple. The last theme that we might want to pull out is that of hope or promises or the future. This book, again, I've said it many times already, looking forward, looking backward to look forward. This is all about hope, and it's easy to do if you're writing this at the end of an exile, right? If you're doing this especially after the exile has happened and you know you're going home, you get to turn the story into hope because you're predicting what's going to come. You get to go back to your homeland, right? If they had just stayed in captivity and continued to curate these books, there might not be that. There might have been, right, these people holding on to promises of God and saying, well, we didn't ever get that king that was supposed to be the king that takes us through the end of the ages. If that promise is true and our God is real, this is yet to come. There is always that hopeful nature with this people group, but especially when freedom awaits or you just got your freedom back. And so we do see a lot of that hope, that future, that looking forward here in this book. But let's move on to point six, which is reception and influence. You know, one thing that I think I skipped for this point when we went through 1 Chronicles would have been kind of the symbolism and iconography of the temple. We get so much description in both 1 and 2 Chronicles about the temple, about the precision, about the glory, etc. And I think that that has trickled down even when you look at the great cathedrals of the past, etc. I think a lot of these allowances for spending more and being grandiose and looking a lot like things we would not expect if we're talking about the early church and how they were meeting and the way that Jesus spoke, etc., are justified and kind of called back to because of what we see in these books about the temple. So I think that's an important one that we've probably missed. Other than that, I think that we've definitely covered the important influences that have been passed down this book over time for both the Jews, the Christians, and even kind of the secular people to take stories from this and archetypes from this as they build out their own stories or compare it with their own worldviews. So enough said there. Let's move right into point 7. We'll start with contradictions, we'll move into problematic passages, and then we will wrap this up. So speaking of that extravagance of the temple and then of Solomon, I think this is where we'll get our first contradiction. This would be from 2 Chronicles 9:22-23. We get descriptions of Solomon's wealth that are not like what we see in 1 Kings 10:23-24. So again, there's some reconning that's been going on here, and if we're trying to talk about the blessings of God for the kings that were good, even though Solomon instituted slave labor, but again, God has no problem with that, then we are looking at the blessings of wealth, which again run so contrary to everything that we see in the New Testament. I think that the biggest thing that I'm getting from my rereading of the Old Testament right now as we go through this series is the impossibility of combining Judaism and Christianity. The fact that Christians had to build off the foundation of Judaism is so very problematic. Would Christianity be what it is without that base? No. Jesus was a Jew. He was believing that he was fulfilling many Old Testament ideas about being the Messiah. You don't get Jesus without Judaism, but you don't get Christianity without Jesus, more specifically Paul. But that's exactly where the split comes. Jesus died, it didn't work out. If the Jews had continued with their own line of thinking and continued this in the same way they had been doing, he would have been just another great man like David who didn't measure up because the prophecies didn't come through. We'd probably rewrite him as not perfect, not divine, not born of a virgin, all of these things to make him fit in with the narrative, and they'd still be waiting, which they are. But then you get Paul and a few other ideas, and you get a new kind of religion, and I think that they are simply irreconcilable. But that'll be more for another video where we compare Paul versus Jesus and things like that. So anyways, very different accounts of the status and extravagance of Solomon and his lifestyle and his wealth. We get simple things like comparing the reign of King Ahaziah in 2 Chronicles 22:2 versus 2 Kings 8:26. There's little things that you could chalk up to copyist errors or translation issues, but King Josiah's death, we have in 2 Chronicles more that he was killed in his sleep, like while he was actually asleep, versus in 2 Kings it seems he was awake and hiding in his bed. Again, not a big deal, not salvation issues, not something that is the hill that I'm going to die on, but when you have 10, 15, 20 of these for every single book that we've covered, they start to add up to some major inconsistencies with what should be more aligned in perfection. Again, if you believe in an inherent style, if you believe this is man-made and totally fallible and you're okay with that, these verses don't bother you. But my claim then is always, if you're fine with knowing that some details can get wrong, why, for the details that work out in your favor, like prophecy, do you never think they could possibly be wrong or misconstrued on purpose or due to man's nature? I just feel like you can't have your cake and eat it too. I think the only way that the Bible works to the point that we're supposed to believe in this God and we're supposed to give our life to this God is with a more literal reading from an inherent standpoint. If this Bible can be wrong, that's what the opposite is, right? If it's not all perfectly true, then some parts are wrong. And if some parts are wrong, it seems like a black or white fallacy to make the leap to the whole thing is wrong, but maybe a better way to say it is the whole thing can't be trusted. And if the whole thing can't be trusted, you're just picking and choosing with what is okay to get wrong, what chapters we shouldn't have included because they're forgeries, right? This is all over the New Testament. Half the Pauline letters are now considered forgeries. The end of Mark is considered a total addition that is not accurate, etc. So why are we okay with believing the things we need to believe from the Bible if we're so okay with the canon being compromised? I have yet to hear a good Christian answer from this. Take it on faith. Why do you take it on faith? Because you have the witness of the Holy Spirit. Why do you think you have the witness of the Holy Spirit? Because of what you read in some of the Pauline epistles. Aren't those subject to debate? Like, this is my point. Anything you're going to pull on to prop this up comes from the Bible. But if the Bible is not perfect, then how can you know? It's so very problematic. I believe the number of captives taken to Babylon is very different from 2 Kings to 2 Chronicles. Not very different, I should say, 8,000 versus 10,000. It's also interesting to see how whittled down the numbers become. If you look at God's plan, this is God's plan for Nebuchadnezzar's invasion, that so many die by the sword that there is not any grace for the virgins or the young, I think is the way that he calls it out. It is interesting that we're just left with 8 to 10,000 men. But again, two very different accounts. If you're going to write down a specific number that's not just rounded, that's not just a biblical numeracy of importance, etc., then why not get it right? Why not be consistent? We have all the information. Man's mucking this up. In 2 Chronicles 31, there is a new depiction. Again, we get new information about some of the kings, and we see Hezekiah reaching out to the northern kingdom, saying, hey, come have Passover with us, which looks like a goal of reunification between the two kingdoms, which had split in a civil war at this point, if you recall. But that doesn't jive with what we read about in Kings as the northern kingdom is conquered by the Assyrians. This seems to be a big problem. Maybe someone tried to, again, make Hezekiah here look a little better, but forgot about the history of the northern kingdom, at least according to its own biblical sources. We get some new but also contradicting information about Elijah's departure in 2 Chronicles 21:12-15. It simply cannot exist at the same time with our earlier account of this prophet. Again, the excuse for a lot of these is, hey, we're just getting more information. It doesn't mean it's necessarily contradicting. But another example would be King Ahaz, and in 2 Chronicles 28:24, we see that he removed everything from the temple and closed the temple doors, but we don't see that same description in 2 Kings where these same events are recorded. We get more contradictions with King Hezekiah's illness between these books. We get issues with Jehoiachin's reign, and even some timelines and lineages, etc., are a little messed up in 2 Chronicles. So altogether, we could go through some more specifics, but I never like to drill too far down into this because some are excused, some are just man-made issues, which many people don't have issues with, but I think there's enough that we cover that just stand separate, that these are mutually exclusive. So let's move on to problematic passages. Now, we could spend all day here. This is a recounting of bad kings and even good kings, and despite whichever one it is, bad or good, they all did horrendous things, and many of those horrendous things were done because the Lord commanded them or because it was in the name of the Lord. I'm not going to go through all of the details, but we will go through a few passages. Let's start in 2 Chronicles 7, and we won't cover verses 1-11 where it's so much animal sacrifice for the beginning of Solomon's temple, which at this point, animal sacrifice seems like the smallest thing. But if you zoom out again and you look at this God, this all-perfect, self-sufficient being that created the cosmos, that created this universe, every galaxy, the trillions and trillions of stars, the billions and billions of Earth-like planets out there that probably have life on them to some degree, and we focus in on this teeny tiny Earth, and then we go in and we go straight to the Middle East, and then we go in and we pick out one chosen tribe that was probably a branch off the other Canaanites, and we get this God that is definitely just part of a pantheon of gods, and he's a son of another god, and he's a storm god, and for these gods to get power, they need sacrifices. This is just the name of the game back at the end of the day, but it doesn't make sense for that bigger, perfect, only true God. Why does something he created need to die? I have been so conditioned for so much of my life to not have a problem with this and actually for it to be good. Jesus's sacrifice is a child sacrifice that all Christians love. They sing about it, they pray about it, they worship about it, they cry about it, etc. It's disgusting. Why? If I made anything, somehow I had the power to create, and there had never been ants, and I made ants for the first time, and I made myself an ant farm because it brought me joy, and I wanted their worship, like already really ridiculous reasoning, and then I just made a slightly smaller creature, less exciting than the ant, and I told the ants, I need you to kill this other creature. I created it, it's obviously something I enjoy, it's something I wanted, it's something that brings me glory. When you look around the world and you see these things, you are to know the creator, but I want you to take those things that are innocent, that I also endowed with the ability to feel pain, and I want you to torture and slaughter them so that I can smell their guts and their inside and the smoke and the blood and the burning flesh. That's going to make me happy, and it's also going to make me less mad at you. Can you imagine what a psychopath you would think I was? And this is the smallest comparison we can possibly do with Yahweh. But let's go to verses 13 and 14 to get back on point. When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain or command the locust to devour the land or send pestilence among my people, if my people who are called by my name humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land. We have God just again having no problem torturing and killing his own people when they don't do exactly what he wants them to do. This is not free will. This is not letting our actions and natural consequences catch up with us, which is the justification that all modern Christians give. This is sheer interference. This is the second biggest takeaway I've had going through this. There's no possible concept of free will left when you really look at the Bible and you look at the things God boasts about. In the context, if you read a little before this, Solomon just finishes building the temple, and God's talking to Solomon. He's like, hey, this is good. I like this place. I'll take it. This is where I'll come to receive my sacrifices. And just so you know, when you guys mess up and I have to shut up the heavens, which is where rain comes from, and I have to send the locust to punish you guys, come here and give me these sacrifices. Come here to seek my face and bend my ear. So much for an omnipresent God. This God had to choose a dwelling. It used to be the tabernacle so he could be on the move with these people, but now it's just this one temple and just for this one chosen people group. Where do you think the Gentiles are right now? How do you think they're connecting with this God through general revelation? God doesn't care at all about non-Jews until after some work that Jesus and Paul do for us. It is just not within the wherewithal of this God to even have a presence, an awareness of his other people, his other creation that he made. It's so focused on this chosen people group. That would be the third thing that I'm getting as I go through these books. I can't believe that any non-Jews care about this God at all because of some PR spin from the New Testament. It is so crystal clear what this God thinks about the rest of us if he were real. Not that I'd even want to be part of the chosen people group because that also looked like it sucked. I did mention as the first contradiction Solomon's wealth and fame and extravagance compared in this book. So here's a quick verse to kind of give you an idea. This would be 2 Chronicles 9:22-23, but really it starts all the way back up at 13 with Solomon's wealth. 13 says, now the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was 666 talents of gold, besides that which the explorers and merchants brought. And all the kings of Arabia and the governors of the land brought gold and silver to Solomon. It goes on and on and on and on and on and on. And then in 22, thus King Solomon excelled all the kings of the earth in riches and in wisdom, and all the kings of the earth sought the presence of Solomon to hear his wisdom, which God had put into his mind. I mean, we go on to hear about his thousands and thousands of chariots and horses and horsemen, etc. It is extravagant to the nth degree. It is in contradiction with what we see in earlier claims, but even outside of the contradiction, it's just problematic once again to point out the inconsistency with what God considers a blessing. No wonder we have prosperity gospel. A couple out-of-context verses in the New Testament, and you look back at how God blesses people like David and Solomon and even Job, etc. They are earthly compensates because we don't have this huge idea of the afterlife built out yet. So the only way to bless someone, to dangle a carrot back in these days, is with physical reward. That gets traded for spiritual reward as the religion develops into the concepts of heaven and hell. But here, when everyone dies and goes to the same place, Sheol, it's about what happens on earth. How do people think this is the same God? I won't read the whole thing, but I'd encourage you to go read 2 Kings 33, specifically verses 1-10. This is about Manasseh. Manasseh is shown to be committing many evil acts, idolatry, killing his own kids, etc. Nothing that we haven't seen before, but the problem here again is God's inconsistency that I want to point out. Read how they absolutely talk about Manasseh being just the worst, so terrible because of these acts that they list out, and then see if you don't find the vast majority of that boasted about by God in other kings. I've said this before, but God has no objective morality here. This is what has become so clear. God is fine with child sacrifice. He did it himself. He rewarded Jephthah, but sometimes it's bad, like when you point to Manasseh, when you point to the Canaanites. God has no problem with murder. He has no problem with lying. In fact, he's instilled spirits that lied on purpose to deceive. He's rewarded people like Rahab for lying. Everything with God is situational to what fits his purpose. That is why this is so dangerous. That is why I laugh so hard when Christians' biggest defense about, first of all, it's just a dumb defense, atheism doesn't work because there's no objective morality. We all have subjective morality. You're outsourcing yours to a god, an ancient god who is absolutely horrific in character. But even this God doesn't hold to his own standards. He doesn't care about any of them. Every single one. Point to anything you think is an objective command from God. Oh, the right to life. Oh, not taking someone's life, not coveting, not having affairs, blah, blah, blah. All of them have not only been allowed by God and condoned by God, but endorsed by God. You point to anything you want in the comments, and I'll show you a verse where God accepts and is okay and or even blesses someone for doing those objectively wrong things. I think it is the stupidest claim out there. There is no consistency in God's morality, and I would say that chapter 33 here can really highlight some of that for us. I could read like 14 more verses about kings that either repented or didn't repent and how God either blessed or cursed them, and sometimes he would still bless the king, and sometimes he would still curse the repentant king. There's, again, just no consistency, and I won't take the time to read them all. Let's go to 2 Chronicles 20:22-23. And when they began to sing and praise, the Lord set an ambush against the men of Ammon, Moab, and Mount Seir, who had come against Judah, so that they were routed. For the men of Ammon and Moab rose against the inhabitants of Mount Seir, devoting them to destruction, and when they had made an end of the inhabitants of Seir, they all helped to destroy one another. So you've got these three enemies, essentially, and God confuses them so that they all kill each other. That's a simple fix. It doesn't even need me to explain this, that there's no free will for these people. Also, if God is so capable of just completely mind-controlling people, why not ever use it for good? Instead of hardening Pharaoh's heart, why don't you soften it? How much better could this God's glory be if he softened Pharaoh's heart to let the people go and bless the people of Egypt that they may follow him instead of cursing them and then still not getting that? Like, we just take it for granted that God had to do these things. These were enemies. Like, if this is an all-powerful God and he's willing to go to these lengths to achieve his will, none of this then needed to happen. Why not mind-control them in the first place to be better? Well, that would rob them of their free will, Brandon. God doesn't want robots worshiping him. So he'd rather have robots that murder each other. There's a ton of more verses I was going to cover about sin and forgiveness and all the issues there. A lot of that shows up in chapter 6 if you want to read it for yourself. If you look in 33, we see so many issues with the priesthood and with idols and everything else. We see the story of Josiah that finds the fifth book of the Pentateuch. This seems like there's some weird happenings. Maybe the other priests were putting it together so that we could get back to social reform. There's so many strange and problematic and immoral and anti-God characteristics found in this book. But we're going to end with the end of it. And the last chapter of 2 Chronicles is chapter 36. This is Judah's decline, and I'm going to read to you two different parts here. We'll start at 17. This is speaking about God. 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 and had no compassion on young man or virgin, old man or aged. He gave them all into his hand. He took into 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. Here's the important part: to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah until the land had enjoyed its Sabbaths. We know it's God speaking. It sounds like it's not for a second, but if you go back up to 15, but they kept mocking the messengers of God, despising his words and scoffing at his prophets until the wrath of the Lord rose against his people until there was no remedy. And then we get those following verses where God's like, fine, you want to mock me? You're out of luck. And he allows his entire people group to be taken, all of his precious things, this precious temple to be completely destroyed, so many people to be killed that only 8 or 10,000 make it into exile. And I'm going to end with this. This is the final paragraph. It's very short here. Stick with me. Verse 22: Now in the first year of Cyrus, the 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. Thus says Cyrus, king of Persia, the Lord has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the Lord his God be with him. Let him go up. It's a very weird ending, but what we see here is God says, okay, I've got some stuff in the works. I've got some plans. I've got some prophecies out there. It's time to go ahead and once again take control of someone's heart. I'm going to stir up his spirit to make my will happen. God's playing chess. Not even chess. That's giving God too much credit. When you're all-powerful and you can do anything and you have desires and you want to help create those desires and actualize them, you just change people's spirits. You harden hearts. You create dissension. You create confusion. You create evil spirits. You allow evil spirits to do evil things. You allow good spirits to do evil things. We've seen all of it so far. God is playing a game with no regard, and I mean no regard, for the individual. So the next time that you as a Christian want to tell yourself God loves you as an individual, God cares about you, he's helping you find your car keys, he's giving you peace because you had a stressful day at your job where you make more money and have more wealth than Jesus ever told you to, cherry-pick your verses and feel close to this being that never felt close to anything or anyone, apparently. Maybe a chosen few that still didn't please him enough to not take on his wrath. Moses denied entry into Canaan. David had his son killed and his wives raped and his other sons turned against him to try to take the kingdom from him and die. And these were God's favorites. But you think he cares about your little problems? You think you're drawing close to him in your quiet time? You don't know this God because you refuse to read about this God accurately, or you've made far too many excuses by utilizing the New Testament, which is less than 25% of this entire story of God. So that's it for today. Thank you for watching. We get to move right into Ezra next week. I'm really excited to start getting into Ezra, Nehemiah, Jeremiah, etc. I think that there is a lot of information and a lot of meat to these things to unpack. We are making progress. I've got a good video for you this Sunday, and until then, keep thinking. I wanted to personally thank my top-tier Iconoclast patrons, Sean Skaggs and Jason Rollins, and my Atheist Advocate patron, Jared Nichols, for their incredible generosity. Also, a big shout-out to my secular scholar patrons, of which we have some new ones. All other patrons are listed in the description of each video. Please consider joining this great group if you enjoy these videos or believe in my mission. Thanks and have a great day.