Hey, welcome back to A Year in the Bible with Daily Grace.

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We're starting the book of Second Chronicles today.

Scott, we just wrapped up First Chronicles and now we're jumping into Second Chronicles.

We mentioned this before, but these books were originally one book, but there's still some

things we can probably keep in mind as we start Second Chronicles, right?

Yeah, this was one long book, like you said, kind of like Samuel and Kings. And so pretty much

everything I said about First Chronicles in that very first episode about

that book applies here.

But we'll cover that again, too, in case you're just hopping in.

So essentially First and Sent Chronicles, this super long book is a retelling of Israel's history

for the Jews had returned to Jerusalem from exile.

So decades earlier, because of their sin, God sent

the Babylonian Empire to destroy Jerusalem, carry its population into exile, into Babylon.

And now they are back. Some of them have come back, and they're starting to rebuild their

lives there, and that includes rebuilding a temple. But there's a lot of discouragement

in this community for a few reasons. The temple, the new one is way, way smaller than Solomon's

temple was. Life is just hard being back. And, you know, they're still not free. They're part of

the Persian Empire still. So they don't, they, they can't govern

themselves. And there's no king on David's throne anymore. And so, you know, just what we see

from the Bible is this is kind of a hard time for these people. They're just struggling with a lot

of despondency, despair. But Chronicles is an attempt to push back against that negativity

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