Jeremiah 22:29-30. God tells Jeremiah to write down Coniah, the current king of Judah, as "childless, a man who shall not succeed in his days; for none of his offspring shall succeed in sitting on the throne of David and ruling again in Judah."

This is right before Babylon conquers Judah and takes the Jews, including Coniah and his family, into exile, and God alludes to that in previous verses (Jeremiah 22:24-25). So obviously, Coniah, who I had never heard of before, was the king in Jerusalem when the Babylonian army sacked it. This verse tells me why I never heard of him before - God did not mean him to be remembered.

It doesn't seem like Coniah was a particularly evil man, he was just one of the people who had been so inured to Judah's evil ways that he didn't even see the evil. But it is sinful not to see evil and therefore to participate in it. We have a duty to seek the truth, and a king has a greater duty then anyone to do so.

When we just go along to get along, tolerating or even participating in the sinfulness of our day, we become like a "broken pot, a vessel no one cares for" - we are not fulfilling our purpose, and therefore we have no meaning in our lives. We therefore cannot succeed, since we don't even really know what we are supposed to be doing, and our children do not succeed because they have no role models or education on what it is they are supposed to be doing. Better for the whole generation to go into exile and learn there what their proper purpose and place is.