God’s Word for You
2 Chronicles 36:11-14 Zedekiah’s pollution
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Wednesday, June 25, 2025
11 Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem eleven years. 12 He did what was evil in the eyes of the LORD his God. He did not humble himself before Jeremiah the prophet, who spoke from the mouth of the LORD. 13 He also rebelled against King Nebuchadnezzar, who had made him swear an oath by God. He stiffened his neck and hardened his heart against turning to the LORD, the God of Israel. 14 All the leading priests and the people became more and more unfaithful, following all the abominations of the nations and polluting the house of the LORD, which he had made holy in Jerusalem.
Of all of the kings of Israel and Judah, Zedekiah is the last. It’s not easy to also say he would be the least, since there were so many candidates for “worst” or “least” along the way. Sometimes in Bible class I identify the pattern of the kings of Judah as a waltz: “Bad - Bad - Good; Bad - Bad - Good” and so on. But this man was another son of Josiah, the uncle of the previous king, and he had been just a nine- or ten-year-old boy when his father had died of his wounds. If he was influenced in his method of ruling, it came from his brother Jehoiakim, especially in the way he treated the prophet Jeremiah with contempt, and the way he rejected matters of faith with equal contempt.
The lesson of the inspired text is that this king caused even the leading priests and the ordinary people to give up on their faith and to pollute the temple, the House of the LORD. Consider the way this is expressed in the text: They were polluting “the house of the LORD, which he had made holy in Jerusalem” (verse 14). That is to say, they were causing what God had set aside as holy to be unholy. This was a repetition of the pattern of the fall of man. God had made it good, and man brought it crashing down with his sin.
One of the things our prophet emphasizes is that this polluting was the act of both “the leading priests and the people.” There is a note in the margin of our Hebrew text (something called a Masoretic note) which tells us that this is the only time the phrase “the priests and the people” occurs in just this way in the Bible. However, the same phrase does occur with one extra letter (meaning “and”) in Exodus 19:24. And although the two verses are not directly connected, it is worth noticing that the Exodus reference is about the limits God put around the holy mountain at Sinai, setting it apart as holy. He said, “The priests and the people must not force their way through to come up to the LORD, or he will break out against them.” Another check of the chapter number reminds us that this happened just before the giving of the Ten Commandments. The law was about to be presented. Now, following the sin, corruption, and pollution of King Zedekiah, “King Last of All,” the law was going to be enforced in a terrible unalterable way. As Micah foretold, “I am planning disaster against this people, from which you cannot save yourselves” (Micah 2:3).
Polluting, corrupting, sinning—these are condemnations we can lay at our own feet, on our own heads. The Holy Spirit lives in us, the true God in his true and sanctified temple, washed clean, pure and holy with the water of baptism first. And our bodies remain his temples. This, Paul says, is not only our spirit that serves as his temple, but the human flesh, the soma (σῶμα), that is his temple (1 Corinthians 6:19). Paul says this to drive the point home of fleeing from sexual immorality; not to join God’s temple with anyone in sexual sins, because sex is for marriage and for marriage alone. But what is true of God’s temple and the Sixth Commandment is also true of God’s temple and all the other commandments. All the forms of idolatry that Zedekiah and his nephew and brothers committed in those last days of Judah were terrible, but our forms of idolatry are no less terrible. They led their people into those sins, but each of us sins according to our abilities, and we certainly have the ability to lead our families and friends and our children, our dear children, into sins of idolatry. And all kinds of foul language, And hatred, lying, coveting, and on and on up the hill that is nothing but a pile of filth and pollution, corruption and sin, steaming and rotting all around the foundation and walls and windows of what should be God’s holy temple.
So we repent of all those sins, and we know that in Jesus Christ we have the Savior, the Holy One of God, who loves us, who bled and died for us. Even before we wept the first time over our sins, he had scrubbed and swept and cleared out the temple of the Holy Spirit in us. Praise his holy Name, “for this God is our God for ever and ever!” (Psalm 48:14).
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.