2 Kings 24:1-7
"24 In his days, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came up, and Jehoiakim became his servant for three years. Then he turned and rebelled against him. 2 And the Lord sent against him bands of the Chaldeans and bands of the Syrians and bands of the Moabites and bands of the Ammonites, and sent them against Judah to destroy it, according to the word of the Lordthat he spoke by his servants the prophets. 3 Surely this came upon Judah at the command of the Lord, to remove them out of his sight, for the sins of Manasseh, according to all that he had done, 4 and also for the innocent blood that he had shed. For he filled Jerusalem with innocent blood, and the Lord would not pardon. 5 Now the rest of the deeds of Jehoiakim and all that he did, are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah? 6 So Jehoiakim slept with his fathers, and Jehoiachin his son reigned in his place. 7 And the king of Egypt did not come again out of his land, for the king of Babylon had taken all that belonged to the king of Egypt from the Brook of Egypt to the river Euphrates."
We are moving quickly now into the final act of the tragedy of Judah, and the threat of Necho of Egypt gives way before the still greater terror of Babylon. One is able to see the inexorable logic of events unfolding here, Babylon - and the others mentioned in 2 - was drawn towards Judah because of the threat of Egypt from the south, and we can now see the fateful consequences of Josiah's rashness in going out against Necho. If only he had let the Egyptians pass unmolested, Judah would never have attracted the attention of Nebuchadnezzar! We see here something of the terrible entail of sin, and something of its tragic complications and ramifications in the inevitable involvements it brings in its train. But our historian goes further. He traces it all back to Manasseh's sins, 'which the Lord would not pardon' (4), and we are again brought face to face with this grim and terrifying reality of a point of no-return which was reached in the enormities of that evil king's reign. And so, the troubling and oppression all around them were not only permitted but commanded by the Lord (3) as an expression of His righteous indignation against the sin of His people. Ah, God is not mocked; He means what He says. His warnings are not idle tales!