That I may Know HIM - A Devotional

Day 21: Revisiting Manasseh

Day 21: Revisiting Manasseh

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Manasseh entered into Scripture as the king who "wrought much evil in the sight of the LORD, to pro­voke him to anger"; who "made Judah and the in habitants of Jerusalem to err, and to do worse than the heathen, whom the LORD had destroyed before the children of Israel”(2 Chroni­cles 33:6, 9).

He is reputed as Judah's version of Jeroboam and Ahab, the notorious kings of the Northern Kingdom of Is­rael. Surprisingly, his father, Hezekiah, had been one of the best and most religious that the kingdom of Judah had had. God reckoned with Hezekiah so much that, for his sake, the world lost 40 minutes as the sun re­turned ten degrees (2 Kings 20:1-11). He is remembered in the chronicles of the kings of Israel for "his goodness. "'When he died, he was not only buried among his royal forebears such as David and Solomon, but was "buried... in the chiefest of the sepulchers of the sons of David" (2 Chronicles 32: 32-33). It was the son of such a man who became a notori­ous king, undoing all the re­ligious reforms that his father had taken so long to estab­lish. According to his name, which meant "one who for­gets" or "causing to forget," Manasseh seemed to have forgotten, and caused his kingdom to forget, the good­ness of God, which all had enjoyed only a few years before, under his father.

Josiah, his grandson, however, did much to wipe out the idolatrous atrocities of Manasseh, the man who did "wickedly above all that the Amorites did"; who "shed innocent blood very much, till he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another" (2 Kings 21:11, 16; 24:4). In spite of Josiah's repu­table rigorous reforms and revival of godliness, we read, sadly, in 2 Kings 23:26: Notwithstanding the LORD turned not from the fierceness of his great wrath, wherewith his anger was kindled against [not just Manasseh the sinner-king himself but against all the kingdom of] Judah, because of the provocations that Manasseh had provoked him withal. This declaration of doom was coming at least thirty years after the said Manasseh had "slept with his fathers.”  Because of Manasseh's apparently in­delible sin, God threatened in verse 27 of 2 Kings 23, to "remove" Judah and Jerusa­lem into exile. Four kings later, during the reign of Zedekiah, (which was as many as six kings after Manasseh, rep resenting about fifty-seven years after the trouble maker had gone) we still hear God speaking thus through the prophet Jeremiah: 1          Though Moses and Samuel stood before me, yet my mind could not be toward this people: cast them out of my sight, and let them go forth . 2          Such as are for death, to death; and such as are for the sword, to the sword; and such as are for the famine, to the famine; and such as are for the captivity to the captivity. 3        And I will appoint over them four kinds ; saith the LORD: the sword to slay, and the dogs to tear, and the fowls of the heaven, and the beasts of the earth, to devour and destroy. 4          And I will cause them to be removed into all kingdoms of the earth....   In case Jeremiah was wondering why God was being so irrevocably fierce, God added the following clarification, that the judg­ment was coming because of the sins of a king as many as seven regimes before (that is, about fifty-seven years previous):'.. .because of Manasseh the son of Hezekiah king of Judah, for that which he did [where?] in Jerusalem [the capital city, in his capacity as King]” (Jeremiah 15:1-4). There was no more ques­tion at this point, because everyone knew about Manasseh and his atrocious regime. The several kings after Manasseh discovered sadly that it had not been enough to rejoice at Manasseh's death that the bad man was gone at last for good. They realized that, beyond the man him­self, they needed to have dealt with the legacy of destruction had bequeathed on the land. The epilogue on the reign of King Zedekiah, the man during whose tenure the fi­nal phase of the judgment for Manasseh's sins was to be­gin, is a very sad one (2 Chronicles: 36:11-20): Zedekiah started to reign at the age of twenty; he reigned for eleven years, "And he did that which was evil in the sight in the LORD his God, and humbled not himself be­fore Jeremiah the prophet...."  In his ungodly regime, even "the chief of the priests and the people transgressed very much... and polluted the house of the LORD....”   When God sent messen­gers to warn them, "they mocked the messengers of God and despised his words, and misused his prophets." At last the peo­ple, their treasures, and their princes went into exile where they became "serv­ants" to the king of Babylon and to his sons, while their city was given to the flames and ruins. Manasseh must be cred­ited, however, for his repent­ance in his last days. At the height of his unbearable idolatry and seduction of others into the same sin, God allowed him to be con­quered in battle and taken captive into Babylon. It was a harrowing humbling experience, which turned him Back to the God he had re­jected for the better part of his reign. Now penitent, God al­lowed him to return to Jerusalem and be restored to his throne, like Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4. Thenceforth, Manasseh began to undo the evils he had wrought over several years in the land. He took away the strange gods he had introduced into the land; he removed from the temple of God the idol he had placed there; he took away all the demonic altars he had raised in the land; he repaired the altar of God, etc. (2 Chronicles 33:11-17). But what about the people he had seduced by royal might into his practice of ungodli­ness in the days before he was "humbled"(2 Kings 21:9-10)? Not ail of them came back with him. Many of them had become accustomed to the ways they had learned from him, although they did lip service to the new re­forms. God's displeasure in the subsequent years, then, was not so much against the king who did the evil, but against that peculiar evil which had become an un­godly national culture, being continued even though the one who had introduced it into the kingdom had long expired. Does that make sense to us? 'Manasseh' may well have gone for good. Thank God. But Manasseh may still be revisited painfully, if... (In fact, is being revisited painfully because) the peo­ple of the present do con­tinue in the instituted iniqui­ties of the past. Jeremiah 15, which was quoted from, begins with the words, "Then said the LORD unto me, though Moses..." (v.1). The word "then," which introduces the prophecy, in­dicates that that word of the Lord was a response to something which had been said earlier, that the prophecy was an event in a sequence of others. The context to the prophecy is provided in chap­ter 14, which reports the fam­ine ("dearth") that had come about (probably) in the dying days of the kingdom of Judah, during the reign of Zedekiah the last king of Judah before the captivity to Babylon (2 Kings 25: 1-3).  That famine was one of the irreversible four final judg­ments that God had spelt out against Judah in chapter 15, that chapter being God's re­ply to the prophet's earnest intercession for mercy on the land, in chapter 14, in the midst of the famine. From that point of the famine (which was probably the last year of Zedekiah's eleven-year reign) to Manasseh (for whose sake Zedekiah the present ruler was suffering a famine) was, at least, fifty-five years. Manasseh's private peni­tence in the dying days of his regime, had not been able to avert the present national disaster of a famine result­ing from that infamous past. Why? It would appear that a distinction was being made between national repent­ance (for sins which might even have been committed privately, but in the name of the nation and through the instruments of rulership) and personal repentance in the corner of one's bedroom at the set of sun. Does this parable of Manasseh say anything to us? Perhaps it reminds someone of King David's predicaments in 2 Samuel 21:1. Three years in David's reign, there was an acute famine. The earth, defiled with blood by royal murders, protested against man. Godly David was not the king when bloody Saul did what he did. However, for the abominations committed in the reign of the bloody man, the blood still protested in the reign of the godly man.  ... and Manasseh seduced them to do more evil than the nations whom the LORD de­stroyed before the chil­dren of Israel (2 Kings 21:9). They who seduce are a great snare to the land, but that in no way justifies they who have been seduced, who would continue in the bloodiness, idolatry and wickedness of those whom God has already judged. They are a greater threat. Does this say anything to us, O my people?