Judgment and Grace. 2 Kings 21:1-26; 2 Chron. 33

 

In post-Enlightenment western civilization, our culture—by that is not meant the Christian aspect of the culture but the rationalistic aspect of our culture that comes out of the Enlightenment—focuses on the natural as the only realm of human knowledge and perception, that everything within the natural realm, everything within what Immanuel Kant described as the phenomenal—what we see, what we perceive—is reality, and nothing beyond that in terms of modern thought is real or actually exists, is that which we can measure, that which we can quantify, that which we can observe. Rationalism in this sense, in the sense of a philosophy of life, a worldview that is built upon that which is directly observable through the human senses in terms of empiricism, and that which is deductive from that in terms of the autonomous use of human reason; only that is what makes up reality. So when we go to university, go to various other workshops, and we read histories and biographies from a secular viewpoint, what they emphasize is anything related to causation or why things happen the way they do; they exclude completely the spiritual realm. So that these analyses are all based upon various models of behavior, whether it is economic behavior, social behavior, political behavior, military action, these models are somewhat limited because from the very outside presuppositionally these writers, these scholars come to the data excluding God and excluding the impact of spiritual reality from having any genuine causative influence on the trends of history. Not only is God excluded but we also see in this that the existence of angels, demons or Satan himself as the arch enemy of God, as the devil who led a rebellion among the angels against God in eternity past, that the existence and activities of angels and demons have nothing whatsoever to do with every-day events, nothing to do with the movements of history, nothing to do with wars, with the rise of human powers and authorities, and with the trends of politics. Somehow all of that gets excluded because in a secularist mindset the only thing that has real meaning, has quantifiable and measurable value, is that which is observable and measurable. Anything else is just subjectivity.

 

Ever since Immanuel Kant, a famous German philosopher at the end of the eighteenth century, western civilization has redefined how we know truth, and we don’t know truth objectively, we only know it subjectively; we only know our impressions of what happened. So religion is a result of Kantian influence on thought. Religion began to be thought of not as something that expresses and external objective reality, of God who rules in the affairs of men, a God who in human history is part of an overall invisible war or conflict among the angels; that was all rejected so that God, angels and demons are just subjective psychological or emotional facets of our makeup, and things that we try to in some sort of superstitious manner to explain things.

 

But that is not how the Bible presents God or the existence of angels or demons. In fact, what the Bible presents first of all is that there are basically only two ways to look at life. There is God’s way and there is, for lack of another term, Satan’s way. Satan’s way we sometimes talk about in terms of human viewpoint, we talk about it in biblical terms in terms of worldliness, but there are only these two views. God’s view is that which is embedded within His omniscience, His righteousness and His justice which provide the ethical element to His knowledge, and that God’s omniscience is that are of knowledge where God knows all of the knowable. His knowledge is eternal, is immutable; He knows all things and has always known all things, and he didn’t learn things, He knew everything throughout all of eternity immediately, intuitively and comprehensively. And we can’t even come close to comprehending what that actually means. He has an absolute knowledge of all things. And His knowledge, because it is consistent with His righteousness and His justice, is that which sets the absolute ethical standard for all of history.

 

When the creature Lucifer, the highest of all of the angels, rebelled against Him in eternity past what He did in essence was say, I have a better idea, a better way of thinking about everything. He is juxtaposing his way of thinking against God’s way of thinking. So we basically have these two ways of thinking. God’s way of thinking is more monolithic, whereas in Satan’s way of thinking because of the nature of creaturely arrogance it basically fragments into a myriad of options and alternatives so that it is not monolithic. Satan’s way of thinking also has a level of self-justification that provides its own ethic, its own standard, its own right and wrong.

 

There are two characteristics of Satan’s thinking and everything else falls out from these two elements. One is arrogance, the self-promotion of the creature: the creature can do it as well as God; the creature can define reality and define the elements of thought as well as the creator can; the creature can somehow innovate in the area of ethics and in knowledge and generate a view of reality that can compete with God’s view of reality. We know in just thinking about that that it is absurd, but that is exactly what we all do every day when we start operating on arrogance. We think that our view of reality can take over and replace God’s view of reality. We know objectively that that is just nonsense but nevertheless in arrogance we are blinded, we are self-deceived, and so we do not see the error of that as we do when we stop and think about it more objectively.

 

The first element is arrogance; the second is antagonism towards God. When the creature starts to operate autonomously or independently from God then immediately a conflict results, and because of that conflict the creature in arrogance becomes hostile or antagonistic to God. When we look at these two characteristics of arrogance and antagonism, the two primary poles of all satanic thought, then we see the essence of all the world’s religions other than Christianity and all of the world’s philosophies; because they all operate in this assumption that man can define reality without paying attention to what God has said, and that man can define right and wrong on his own terms apart from what God has said, and that man can therefore live his life in terms of this alternate universe that he has created between his ears.

 

Because Satan’s way of thinking is built on this creaturely rebellion, this assertion of independence from God, then all of the world’s religions and philosophies which are based upon human works all fall out in terms of what the Scripture describes as “worldliness.” The way the world thinks mirrors and reflects the father of the world, which is Satan. So that when we are not operating, living on the basis of the Word of God we are operating in some realm, in some ways, within the thinking of Satan. Man in the fall with Adam and Eve, as they rebelled against God, are basically mirroring or reflecting the thinking of Satan in his fall; it is just the second verse of the same song.

 

As we see this breakdown we realize that human history is not operating in a pure physical material reality, but there is an immaterial reality, an invisible reality related to the angels and the angelic rebellion against God that has a direct impact on human history. When we think independently of God we are thinking in the same way that Satan thinks; that is why we call it satanic thought. A lot of people may think that is a little too harsh and that they don’t seem to be satanic at all, and now we have to get into some areas where we have to define terms like what exactly is good and evil? If most were asked to write down the definition of evil they would come up with a definition similar to that which is found in the concise Oxford English dictionary: that which is extremely wicked and immoral. One aspect of its definition defines it as “that which embodies or is associated with the forces of the devil.” That is the biblical definition of what evil is. Evil is not necessarily that which we think of as extreme violence or implacability or hatred or abuse or any of the social ills or things that are defined in each generation as social injustice. That is not how the Bible defines evil.

 

When we look back to what we have studied in Kings, going all the way back to Solomon who became involved with idolatry, and later it was the nation of Israel which was punished by God and there was the rebellion from the ten tribes in the north and Jeroboam set up alternate competing worship centers in the north. He set up a competing deity; he created golden calves to pace in each of the sites and he identified them as the god who had rescued Israel from slavery in Egypt. God said this was what was evil. God therefore defines this religion as evil. Why? Because they practiced violent things? Because later they were involved in human sacrifice? Because it promoted gross immorality? Not necessarily at that time. There were still moral people under Jeroboam. The act is defined as evil because it is an act of treason against God. Evil is evil because it is a rejection of the existence and the reality of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Evil is evil biblically because it substitutes the worship of something in the creation for the worship of God. And at the very center of all thought there is either going to be the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Israel, the God of the Bible, or it is going to be something else—something material in terms of materialism, some other false deity like prosperity or a prosperity god as there was in the ancient world. But once at the very center of thought there is a shift from the true God to some other deity then everything else is moved out in your thinking of God, from the existence of God, and you think about ethics, about law about politics, behavior, all these things. As you move out from that center everything else changes.

 

These are heavy thoughts for some, but the reason for emphasizing all this by way of introduction is to help us understand the nature of evil and its impact under Manasseh. There have been these trends of evil in the history of both the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom for the previous 200+ years, back to the time of Solomon’s defection from God and his orientation to idolatry. Solomon’s idolatry was followed when the nation divided into the northern kingdom and southern kingdom and in the northern kingdom there was the worship of the two golden calves under Jeroboam I, as if we remember as we went through the history of the northern kingdom from one king to the next the comment that God makes is what? That so and so did evil and followed in the path of Jeroboam I. So he becomes the benchmark of evil until we get down to the descendants of Omri, and with Ahab who married Jezebel the daughter of the king and high priest in Phoenicia, and she brings the whole worship of Baalism the worship of the Asherah into the northern kingdom. This moves from the religious observance of what was sort of half true, as it were. The northern kingdom had absorbed and kept part of the traditions of the law, so it had a form of righteousness and a form of morality and a form of obedience to God, even though it was distorted. When it got into the worship of Baal it became extremely perverse and there was also the introduction of child sacrifice, human  sacrifice and the extreme sexual perversion that went on in the worship of the gods and goddesses to encourage them to make the individual worshipper more fertile or prosperous, as it were. So this horror of the fertility religion gets introduced into the thinking of the northern kingdom through Jezebel and Ahab and then by way of their daughter Athaliah into the southern kingdom when she marries into the dynasty of David in the southern kingdom.

 

This created a major problem in the northern kingdom. Eventually it is the reason they are disciplined by God and defeated by the Assyrian empire and removed from history in 722 BC. In the southern kingdom there was this ebb and flow of the influence of Ahab and the worship of the Baals and the Asherah, and we saw that in Hezekiah’s father, Ahaz. Hezekiah cleans house. He comes in and removes all of the high places, destroys all of the idols, cleanses the temple, and he returns the nation to an observance of God and the Torah. But it is instituted from the top down; it is Hezekiah who has truly turned to God, it is not the heart of the people that turn to God. So even though they were delivered by God through the miraculous destruction of the army of Sennacherib outside of Jerusalem and God blessed the nation under Hezekiah the hearts of the people were not truly with God. So when Hezekiah died he was succeeded on the throne by his son Manasseh, and Manasseh rejects everything that his father stood for and he is in such rejection of the authority of his father that he takes the nation back into the paganism of his grandfather Ahaz, and then he intensifies it and makes it even worse so that he becomes the most evil king in the history of the northern kingdom.

 

We are given a divine summary of Manasseh’s reign in 2 Kings 21:1 NASBManasseh was twelve years old when he became king, and he reigned fifty-five years in Jerusalem; and his mother’s name was Hephzibah.” This locates him within the flow of history and identifies him specifically. Most modern scholars suggest that he was a co-regent, although the Bible never specifically talks about co-regency, and that in itself becomes something that is somewhat controversial, and there is a lot of discussion and debate among those who reconstruct the chronology of the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah, it seems to fit because if we take these dates literally then and Manasseh reigns for 55 years and it gets too close to the destruction of the southern kingdom in 586 and the chronology really doesn’t work. Fifty-fives years is a long time and a lot happened during the reign of Manasseh. The change and deterioration didn’t happen over night. At the end of his reign something remarkable takes place because he turns back to God and there is a spiritual recovery to a small degree; which just emphasizes the grace of God.

The next seven verses give us an evaluation of Manasseh’s life. 2 Kings 21:2 NASB “He did evil in the sight of the LORD, according to the abominations of the nations whom the LORD dispossessed before the sons of Israel.” Evil means idolatry, a rejection of the first of the Ten Commandments. He has rejected God as the only God and he has been removing God as much as he can from any presence in the life of the southern kingdom. He is going to do this by obliterating as much as he can, anything that represents God or the Torah. When get to his son, Josiah, who will bring about a tremendous return to the Torah and to the truth we will see that by the time Josiah becomes an adolescent there is no one in the southern kingdom of Judah who even knows or has the Torah available to them. They’ve lost it completely because of these horrible, evil things that Manasseh did. 

So “He did evil in the sight of the LORD…” which doesn’t mean he was a horrible man; it doesn’t emphasize the violence and the murders and the executions that he did enact later on in his reign. As we see this word in the Old Testament it simply means he is a traitor to God who rescued Israel from slavery in Egypt. “…according to the abominations of the nations…” The abominations of the nations specifically take us to idolatry. “…the LORD dispossessed before the sons of Israel.” That focuses us on the Gentile nations, the Canaanites who had inhabited the land that God had promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and God allowed them to live to work out the end results of their religious idolatry to the point that their culture was so wicked and horrible that God had to bring it to an end and wanted them annihilated from the face of the earth.

The interesting word in this chapter is the word for abominations. It is the Hebrew word toebah. It is translated “abomination,” which according to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary means a cause of hatred or disgust, and it is also translated in some versions “detestable.” Something that is detestable is something which is deserving of intense dislike. Both of these words are actually what is called anthropopathisms. Anthropopathism is a figure of speech in which human emotions, which God does not actually possess, are attribut5ed to Him for the purpose of communicating by way of analogy some aspect of His purpose, plans or character. In this case this idea representing the hatred or disgust or intense dislike represents the complete rejection by God of something. He completely rejects their opinions, their beliefs, their ideas, their values without any acceptance whatsoever. It emphasizes His righteous standard and what they are doing, because it is built on a rejection of Him, is completely incompatible with His character.

But the word that is used here also takes us back to understand the historical context and how this relates to God’s absolutes as laid down in the Mosaic law. In Deuteronomy Moses gives his last major address/sermon to the Israelites before he goes to be with the Lord and before they enter into the land. In Deuteronomy 18 he lays out a warning that God gives the nation before they go into the land.

Deuteronomy 18:9 NASB “When you enter the land which the LORD your God gives you, you shall not learn to imitate the detestable things of those nations.” What is Manasseh doing? He is learning to follow the abominations of those nations. [10] “There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire…” Manasseh is going to restore that. What this refers to is the worship of Molech or Chemosh (Two different names of the same deity) where they but these huge idols of Molech and his arms are outstretched, and between his arms is a furnace that is built. The fires are lit there and then the individual who is worshipping Chemosh/Molech will bring their infant child and would put him on the arms, which means he would be immediately immolated by the fires of Molech, and it is a living human sacrifice. That is hard for us to imagine but this had become the norm in the northern kingdom of Israel from the time of Ahab and it is being restored to practice in the southern kingdom. This was warned against by God through Moses in Deuteronomy.  “… one who uses divination, one who practices witchcraft, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer.” What that refers to is those who are involved in demonism, in trying to contact the “supernatural,” like today where we have those involved in channeling spirits, or who are involved in other forms of what we now call the New Age movement (which isn’t that new, it is just the old lie that goes all the way back to this time), those who are involved in demonism. What this does is introduce in a much more active sense demonic thought and demonic ideas into the culture. [11] “or one who casts a spell, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead.” That is, those who are trying to get in touch with the dead. This is all prohibited by the Word of God because whenever one is engaged in this kind of activity—from fortune telling, astrology, or whatever—it opens him up to direct demonic influence at a more active level than he has ever experienced before.

There is a difference between demonic influence and demon possession. Demon possession is when an evil spirit or demon takes up residence or controls a person internally, controls their physical bodily actions, may control other aspects of their being—what they say, what they do, and may bring illness upon them. This is demon possession, but it doesn’t obliterate the personality or the volition of the individual, and the only solution is for that person who is still there to make a decision to reject demonism and to turn to God. That is the only thing that can bring about a true casting out of the demon, it is not based on spells or exorcism or any other kind of mumbo-jumbo that is seen in some of the world’s religions and in some aspects of Christianity.    

Deuteronomy 18:12 NASB “For whoever does these things is detestable to the LORD; and because of these detestable things the LORD your God will drive them [the Canaanites] out before you.” Not only is the act an abomination but those who do it are detestable/an abomination to God. [13] “You shall be blameless before the LORD your God.” In context that means not being involved in these demonic activities. [14] “For those nations, which you shall dispossess, listen to those who practice witchcraft and to diviners, but as for you, the LORD your God has not allowed you {to do} so.” The warning in the Scripture is simply that if Israel got involved in these activities then God would discipline them by removing them from the land.

There are four different Hebrew words that are used in the context of Deuteronomy chapter eighteen, as well as in 2 Kings 21 and 2 Chronicles 33. There words are very close synonyms, so that when we look at the translations often they reverse the translations. The first word anan occurs in the pual stem in the Hebrew and it is translated “soothsayer” by the NKJV and “witchcraft” in the NASB. It refers to someone who foretells the future. The second word, nachash, is the word “witchcraft” in the NKJV and “divination” in the NASB. Kashaph which is translated “sorcery” is someone who is believed to have magical powers. These words are not used that much in Hebrew and they all refer to various kinds of activity very closely connected, trying to tell the future through contact with supernatural beings. The last one is the term ob which is translated “mediums.” The Greek translation was engastrimuthos [e)ggastrimuqoj]–gastra is “gastric” which is where we get our term for the bowels, and muthos is related to the opening of the mouth, and so it has to do with the casting of a voice like a ventriloquist. What would happen in the ancient world is someone would go to a medium who would contact the dead and the dead would not physically appear but it would be as if their voice was coming forth from the ground, the grave. So the demon that possessed the medium would be casting their voice like a ventriloquist to a spot on the ground and then it would sound as if that place in the ground was speaking this voice from the dead. That is why in the episode where Saul went to the witch at Endor and wanted her to contact Samuel that instead of a voice coming from the ground Samuel actually appeared, and it just shocked the witch at Endor as a medium because she had never had this happen before. That is why she immediately knew that something bazaar and unusual was happening and she immediately identified Saul who had been in disguise and realized that God was at work and she was in trouble.

The reason this is brought in is because we do live in a universe that has this two-tiered reality, the reality of the material and the physical and the reality of the immaterial and the angelic or demonic; and that that realm operates at times in a causative way on the affairs of mankind—not that it is a way that overrides human volition but that when  human volition in various cultures are open to the demonic because of their religious philosophies then there is more of a direct active demonic influence in the culture. This happens in false religions. In Deuteronomy 32:17 Moses spoke about this worship of these Canaanite idols and false gods, and the sacrifice to them, and he says: “They sacrificed to demons who were not God, To gods whom they have not known, New {gods} who came lately, Whom your fathers did not dread.” They were actually sacrificing to demons because it is demonic thought and direct demonic influence that lies behind these false religions. What that tells us is that we don’t live in a world that is not separated from the influence of Satan and the demons, that there is this constant influence going on from the demonic realm; so that when we are not thinking biblically we are thinking satanically. We may not like to think of it in that way, that is saying that in its harshest form but it is true. All human viewpoint thinking, all of our opinions that disagree with the Bible are not just human viewpoint, it is a satanic viewpoint. And that is going to culminate in things that also appear to be very moral and ethical. In 2 Corinthians 11, Paul talks about the fact that Satan and his ministers appear as angels of light. That means that they appear to be very good. But their origin is not from the Bible. They, in fact, conflict with biblical ideas and biblical values and they will lead to destruction.

This is what we have described in Manasseh’s reign. To summarize all the evil things that he did, first of all he rebuilt the high places Hezekiah had destroyed. So he is going to reintroduce all of the false religion. Second, he followed in the footsteps of Ahab and Jezebel. Jeroboam isn’t mentioned here, he is worse than the other kings that followed in the footsteps of Jeroboam; he follows in the footsteps of Ahab and Jezebel and erects altars to Baal and the Asherah. Third, along with this he worships the stars and the false gods associated with them. This is indicated by the phrase “the hosts of heaven.” The word “host” is an archaic word that refers to the armies of heaven, and this is a term used in the Scripture to refer to the angelic hosts, whether it is the fallen angels of the holy angels. Fourth, he built altars to the false gods in the temple to the Lord. He goes into the temple of Solomon and removes the furniture and everything there that represents the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and replaces it with idols to the Asherah and these false gods. 2 Kings 21:5 NASB “For he built altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts of the house of the LORD.”

But he goes beyond this to even worse behavior. 2 Kings 21:6 NASB “He made his son pass through the fire, practiced witchcraft and used divination, and dealt with mediums and spiritists. He did much evil in the sight of the LORD provoking {Him to anger.}” So he is going to bring about God’s judgment. [7] “Then he set the carved image of Asherah that he had made, in the house of which the LORD said to David and to his son Solomon, ‘In this house and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen from all the tribes of Israel, I will put My name forever. [8] “And I will not make the feet of Israel wander anymore from the land which I gave their fathers, if only they will observe to do according to all that I have commanded them, and according to all the law that My servant Moses commanded them.’” The second part of verse 7 and the rest of verse 8 all emphasize what God promised to Solomon when Solomon dedicated the temple to God. 1 Kings 9:6-9 NASB “But if you or your sons indeed turn away from following Me, and do not keep My commandments and My statutes which I have set before you, and go and serve other gods and worship them, then I will cut off Israel from the land which I have given them, and the house which I have consecrated for My name, I will cast out of My sight. So Israel will become a proverb and a byword among all peoples. And this house will become a heap of ruins; everyone who passes by will be astonished and hiss and say, ‘Why has the LORD done thus to this land and to this house?’And they will say, ‘Because they forsook the LORD their God, who brought their fathers out of the land of Egypt, and adopted other gods and worshiped them and served them, therefore the LORD has brought all this adversity on them.’”

Example, today if we go to Israel and the temple mount there is no temple there. The question should be, why isn’t there a temple there? Because it was destroyed in AD 70. Why did God destroy it? God destroyed it in AD 70 for the same reason He destroyed it in 586 BC, because of the arrogance of the nation, because they rejected Him, and specifically because Israel had rejected Jesus as the Messiah. So this is a teaching point.

Then back in 2 Kings chapter 21 we get the Lord’s instruction. 2 Kings 21:10 NASB “Now the LORD spoke through His servants the prophets, saying.” Up to this point who has He been speaking by? Isaiah. What has happened to Isaiah? We don’t have anything is Scripture that specifically states it. Hebrews chapter eleven states that Isaiah was sawn in two, and it is believed that it was in the early stages of Manasseh’s reign when Manasseh is rounding up all of those who disagree with him and all of the prophets of God. He is killing them and he had someone saw Isaiah in half. So Isaiah was martyred in the early years of Manasseh’s reign. 

2 Kings 21:11 NASB “Because Manasseh king of Judah has done these abominations, having done wickedly more than all the Amorites did who {were} before him, and has also made Judah sin with his idols.” That makes it look as if he is the one who is the responsible agent, but he is not. If we read Isaiah chapters one and five we see the indictment of the people because they are the ones who chose to go after the idols as well. So they received a leader that they deserved, they did not truly follow with their hearts the reforms of Hezekiah and so when Manasseh took them back into idolatry they willingly followed him. [12] “therefore thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘Behold, I am bringing {such} calamity on Jerusalem and Judah, that whoever hears of it, both his ears will tingle.’” This is the prophecy of the certain coming destruction when the southern kingdom would be destroyed by Babylon in 586, the temple would be destroyed in Jerusalem by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar. [13] “I will stretch over Jerusalem the line of Samaria and the plummet of the house of Ahab, and I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down.” This is figurative speech indicating that God has measured of evaluated the southern kingdom of Judah and they have come up short. They had failed in terms if being obedient, they are measured according to the standard of Ahab, and that means God is going to bring judgment upon them. This is expressed in very vivid imagery when God says, “I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down.” He will empty out Jerusalem.

2 Kings 21:14 NASB “I will abandon the remnant of My inheritance and deliver them into the hand of their enemies, and they will become as plunder and spoil to all their enemies.” Here is God saying that the way I am going to punish the nation is by removing them from their land and they are going to become slaves to their conquerors. Which is exactly what happened. Why? [15] “because they have done evil in My sight…” The ultimate causation was spiritual; the ultimate reason was they had rejected God and they had disobeyed him. It was not because they had a wrong political philosophy, not because they had a problem with immigrants that came into the land; the reason they failed in other areas of the law was because they had rejected God at the very core and were worshipping some other deity. That is the core of evil. “… and have been provoking Me to anger since the day their fathers came from Egypt, even to this day.”

2 Kings 21:16 NASB “Moreover, Manasseh shed very much innocent blood until he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another; besides his sin with which he made Judah sin, in doing evil in the sight of the LORD.” So he basically institutes a persecution against anyone who does not fall in line with his religious beliefs and there is a bloody slaughter of prophets and priests and anyone who is part of the remnant. So the remnant is reduced to almost nothing by the end of Manasseh’ reign. The sin by which he made Judah sin is the evil, and a consequence of that is all of the violence that is subsequent to that. But there is something that is left out of 2 Kings. In 2 Chronicles it is revealed to us in chapter thirty-three. 

God brings Manasseh under personal divine discipline. It is amazing that some people will only turn to God when  God puts them under incredible pressure. Now there are many people who even under the most adverse circumstances will never turn to God because it is not just a matter of circumstances, it is a matter of volition.  2 Chronicles 33:10 NASB “The LORD spoke to Manasseh and his people, but they paid no attention.”

In verse 11 we are told that God personally brought discipline on Manasseh by bringing the army of Assyria back to the southern kingdom og Judah for some infraction of Manasseh’s that we are not told about. He did something that angered Ashur-bani-pal who was now the ruler of Assyria. 2 Chronicles 33:11 NASB “Therefore the LORD brought the commanders of the army of the king of Assyria against them, and they captured Manasseh with hooks [the insertion of leather bands into his nose], bound him with bronze {chains} and took him to Babylon. [12] When he was in distress [now under extreme torture and suffering in prison], he entreated the LORD his God and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers.” Finally he turns to God. It is a genuine conversion, turning to God. [13] “When he prayed to Him, He was moved by his entreaty and heard his supplication, and brought him again to Jerusalem to his kingdom. Then Manasseh knew that the LORD {was} God.” This is the point of Manasseh’s conversion. So what does he do? He is going to reverse what he did at the beginning. He is going to reestablish the worship of Yahweh and he is going to outlaw the worship of the idols, and he is going to then reinforce the military fortifications of the nation. But, 2 Chronicles 33:17 NASB “Nevertheless the people still sacrificed in the high places, {although} [not] only to the LORD their God.” So there is still the syncretism in their religion.

2 Chronicles 33:18 NASB “Now the rest of the acts of Manasseh even his prayer to his God, and the words of the seers who spoke to him in the name of the LORD God of Israel, behold, they are among the records of the kings of Israel.”

So all of this is recorded for us and we see the grace of God at the very end of Manasseh’s life, despite all of the evil that he did. Is there anyone is the Scripture who is more evil in terms of his relationship to God than Manasseh, who commits more violence, who commits more murders in the name of religion, who does more horrible things in terms of his own family—child sacrifice—than this particular individual? Yet God’s grace is so great that when Manasseh humbled himself and turned to God and trusted in Him he is given salvation. Because salvation is a free gift that is given to us, not because of who we are or what we have done, but it is given to us on the basis of God’s character and God’s grace, and the fact that Jesus Christ paid the penalty for sin. So in the Old Testament, even though that penalty had not yet been paid, when individuals humbled themselves under the authority of God and turned to God as the source of their salvation, that is when they are saved in terms of the way we normally talk about these things.

So Manasseh is a great example that we have in the Scripture that salvation is not based on works, observance of the Torah, on any human action or any level of human morality; it is based on turning to God and expecting God to be the one who provides salvation. With the New testament and the fulfillment of those prophecies we know that that comes through Jesus Christ. Acts 4;12 NASB “And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved.” Salvation comes only through Jesus Christ because he is the one who paid the penalty for sin on the cross.

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