The Babylonian Captivity

Simply Put

Ligonier Ministries

Religion & Spirituality, Christianity

5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 May 2025

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Lord is slow to anger, but His patience with religious hypocrites does not last forever. Today, Barry Cooper considers what Israel’s exile into Babylon teaches us about the danger of becoming complacent with our sin.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	How patient is God? When I was in my mid-teens, I presumed God would always be patient with me.
0:07.9	I wasn't living a life that honoured him and I hadn't been for years at that point and I was doing
0:12.4	that quite deliberately, assuming that when all was said and done, he would forgive me because
0:18.2	everyone knows that forgiving is what God is supposed to do.
0:22.9	And of course I was going to church regularly, so there was that too.
0:26.6	In my mind, going to church was a sort of weekly disinfectant,
0:30.5	a kind of spiritual car wash I passed through on a regular basis,
0:34.6	which would hose off the muck of the past week.
0:37.3	And even if it missed a
0:38.3	spot here and there, God would surely see me going to worship him every week. Be suitably impressed
0:45.3	with that, given the ever-decreasing number of church goes in the UK, especially young ones,
0:49.9	and then overlook whatever sin I'd chosen to get into during the previous six days.
0:59.4	However, and this is why I'd like to talk about the Babylonian captivity,
1:05.2	God's patience with religious hypocrisy does not last forever.
1:15.2	The Babylonian captivity, or Babylonian exile, is a historical event that occurred around 586 BC. Centuries earlier,
1:21.0	God had made a covenant with his people Israel, and he had made the terms of that covenant very clear. God said, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the Lord
1:31.3	your God that I command you today by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways and by keeping
1:37.2	his commandments and his statutes and his rules, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you. But if your heart turns away
1:48.4	and you will not hear but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you
1:55.9	today that you shall surely perish. So just imagine, you're one of God's people, you're conscious every day
2:05.4	that you've been set apart by him, that you're chosen, privileged, special. The Lord God Almighty
2:11.6	has made this covenant with you and with no other group of people. And maybe your awareness of that privileged status is
	...

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