In the Second Chronicles, chapter seventeen, verse seven, the Holy Spirit gives the theological and moral reasons why God brought about the downfall of His redeemed covenant people and removed them from His presence, as in verse eighteen. They forgot the love and grace manifested in their redemption from Egypt. They served the gods of the pagan societies around them, thinking they would find success, well-being, and guidance, as in verses seven, twelve, and seventeen, respectively. They adopted the customs and lifestyles of the ungodly world in verses eight through eleven and fifteen to seventeen. They rejected God’s prophets and their message of righteousness in verses thirteen through fifteen and Acts seven, verse fifty-one.
The Israelites openly rebelled against God’s written Revelation. They failed to keep the covenant as in thirteen to sixteen. They gave themselves to spiritism and various kinds of immorality, as in verses nine, fifteen through seventeen, respectively. The message warns all of God’s people under the new covenant. God will remove from His kingdom all individuals and churches who fail to abide faithfully in His Word and love. The results of abandoning God are judgment, ruin, suffering, and ultimate rejection, as in Revelation two, verse five, chapter three, fifteen to sixteen.
For so it was that the children of Israel had sinned.
There is an impressive vindication of the divine procedure in punishing His highly privileged but rebellious and apostate people. No wonder that amid so gross a perversion of the worship of the true God and the national propensity to do reverence to idols, the divine patience was exhausted and that the God whom they had forsaken permitted them to go into captivity, that they might learn the difference between His service and that of their domineering conquerors.
Those who bring sin into a country or family deliver a plague into it and will have to answer for all the mischief that follows. As vast as the outward wickedness of the world is, the secret sins, evil thoughts, desires, and purposes of society are greater. There are outward sins of a shameful and bad reputation. However, ingratitude, neglect, hostility to God, and the idolatry and impiety that proceed from that place are far more malignant. People cannot escape without turning from every evil way and keeping God’s statutes to walk in the path of godliness. Still, this must spring from the belief of the testimony as to wrath against all ungodliness and unrighteousness and his mercy in Christ Jesus.