Manasseh took over for his father. Hezekiah had been a very godly man. Remember when Hezekiah was a young man in his twenties and came to rule the nation of Israel, he established, the first thing he did was call the people to sanctify themselves.
He called the priests and the Levites to sanctify themselves. He called them to tear down the high places, the groves, the idols. There had been things that had desecrated the temple.
Hezekiah cleaned all of that out. He re-sanctified and redid all of the temple instruments. So there was nothing left that would desecrate the temple.
He called the people to repentance and to turn to God. There was real revival under Hezekiah and the nation of Israel turned to the Lord. We also saw under Hezekiah there were miracles that were done. 184,000 Assyrian troops died as God slew them. Hezekiah’s army did not have to go to battle against them. These were the things that Hezekiah did.
Manasseh was born during the last years of Hezekiah’s life. Manasseh, it says, came to rule when he was 12. Hezekiah asked God for an extension to his life.
God gave him 15 more years. Manasseh was born during that period of time. Everything that Hezekiah was, Manasseh was the opposite.
We’re going to be taking a look here and reading chapter 33. Let’s just read that and see what is and who is Manasseh.
Manasseh was twelve years old when he began to reign, and he reigned fifty and five years in Jerusalem:
2 But did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, like unto the abominations of the heathen, whom the Lord had cast out before the children of Israel.
3 For he built again the high places which Hezekiah his father had broken down, and he reared up altars for Baalim, and made groves, and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served them.
4 Also he built altars in the house of the Lord, whereof the Lord had said, In Jerusalem shall my name be for ever.
5 And he built altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts of the house of the Lord.
6 And he caused his children to pass through the fire in the valley of the son of Hinnom: also he observed times, and used enchantments, and used witchcraft, and dealt with a familiar spirit, and with wizards: he wrought much evil in the sight of the Lord, to provoke him to anger.
7 And he set a carved image, the idol which he had made, in the house of God, of which God had said to David and to Solomon his son, In this house, and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen before all the tribes of Israel, will I put my name for ever:
8 Neither will I any more remove the foot of Israel from out of the land which I have appointed for your fathers; so that they will take heed to do all that I have commanded them, according to the whole law and the statutes and the ordinances by the hand of Moses.
9 So Manasseh made Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to err, and to do worse than the heathen, whom the Lord had destroyed before the children of Israel.
10 And the Lord spake to Manasseh, and to his people: but they would not hearken.
11 Wherefore the Lord brought upon them the captains of the host of the king of Assyria, which took Manasseh among the thorns, and bound him with fetters, and carried him to Babylon.
12 And when he was in affliction, he besought the Lord his God, and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers,
13 And prayed unto him: and he was intreated of him, and heard his supplication, and brought him again to Jerusalem into his kingdom. Then Manasseh knew that the Lord he was God.
14 Now after this he built a wall without the city of David, on the west side of Gihon, in the valley, even to the entering in at the fish gate, and compassed about Ophel, and raised it up a very great height, and put captains of war in all the fenced cities of Judah.
15 And he took away the strange gods, and the idol out of the house of the Lord, and all the altars that he had built in the mount of the house of the Lord, and in Jerusalem, and cast them out of the city.
16 And he repaired the altar of the Lord, and sacrificed thereon peace offerings and thank offerings, and commanded Judah to serve the Lord God of Israel.
17 Nevertheless the people did sacrifice still in the high places, yet unto the Lord their God only.
18 Now the rest of the acts of Manasseh, and his prayer unto his God, and the words of the seers that spake to him in the name of the Lord God of Israel, behold, they are written in the book of the kings of Israel.
19 His prayer also, and how God was intreated of him, and all his sins, and his trespass, and the places wherein he built high places, and set up groves and graven images, before he was humbled: behold, they are written among the sayings of the seers.
20 So Manasseh slept with his fathers, and they buried him in his own house: and Amon his son reigned in his stead.
Dearly beloved Father we come before you this afternoon.
Lord help us to be very sober as we look at the life of Manasseh. How much of his life was wasted and how he destroyed the faith of the nation. Lord I pray that you would just help us to learn that our decisions have consequences and that which we worship reaches far beyond our own belief system to touch many lives. Lord I pray that you would just speak to us through your word this afternoon we pray in Jesus name. Amen.
The amazing thing is that Manasseh was exactly the opposite of his father Hezekiah when he was a young man. Hezekiah as a young man like I mentioned desired to worship God. He desired to exalt the Lord. He desired that the people would sanctify themselves in the temple and that worship would be the focus of the people and that God would be the center of not only their lives but of the whole nation of Israel.
When Manasseh came to power and his father Hezekiah had died the first thing that he did was to begin to desecrate everything that Hezekiah had been holding. He brought back in all of the high places and altars of worship to false gods. It says in the text that we just read that it became so that the nation of Israel was worse under Manasseh than the land had been when Israel had come into the land and he had the Canaanites there and God told Israel to destroy the Canaanites because of their wicked and vile worship.
He did the same things that they did. He worshipped the same gods that they had worshipped and he went to the extremes. I don’t know if you caught it but when we were reading the text one of the things you may have seen is that it says that he caused his sons to pass through the fire.
What it means by that is he sacrificed his own children to these false gods. One of the gods was the god of Molech. In Molech they would build a statue and he would have his arms out like this.
They would cause the statue, which was built of a material that you could heat, they would cause the statue to be heated by fire being placed in it so that the arms of the statue would literally be burning with heat and then they would take the children and place them in the arms of this demonic statue and god causing the children to burn to death. This man did that to his own kids. You can see how demonic and deranged he was when he first came to rule in Israel.
Not only that, everything that Manasseh did came directly against God. The scriptures don’t tell us what happened that caused this because his father had been very godly. Now his father made error in the last portion of his life in that he allowed his materialism and pride to take over and he was very proud of all the accomplishments that he had gained.
But one of the greatest accomplishments that he should have sought to gain was to teach Manasseh about the Lord. He studied last week about going back to Deuteronomy chapter 6 and reading what the father’s responsibility was. The father’s responsibility was to make God the center of the house and everything that the father would do would be used for teaching of how to walk with God.
And that was the importance of what a father was to do. Well, it’s evident that if Hezekiah did this, Manasseh totally rebelled against it or Hezekiah who became enamored with his own materialism and the pride in what he had gained had lost sight of the importance of teaching his son to be humble. There is no mark of greater pride than when a man rises up and just shakes his fist in the face of God and says, I don’t care what you say to do, I’m going to do the exact opposite.
God had said, Jerusalem shall be my city forever. God had said, the temple shall be my place forever. God had said, you should come there and there would be a special worship that would occur at that temple that would all be pointing to the coming Messiah that would take away the sins of the world.
And the fact that all men needed forgiveness and that there was no forgiveness apart from the shedding of blood. So they had sacrifices that were offered upon a holy altar to God done strictly according to the way that God had said it should be done. Well, Manasseh went in and he began to desecrate all the altars.
He replaced the altars with pagan gods’ altars. He even put statues of pagan gods in the temple of the true and the living God. That is how vile and corrupt he became.
But he didn’t just do it for his own pleasure. He encouraged all the nation of Israel to become involved in this false worship. And that’s what I’m saying is, you can impact the lives of many people when you go a wrong direction.
It became so bad. God judged Manasseh. Now, remember when the Assyrians had come against Hezekiah, his father, the Lord had protected them and gone out and killed 184,000 of the Assyrian soldiers and Hezekiah didn’t have to lift a sword.
That was not the case with Manasseh because he was not seeking out God nor was he calling the people of Israel to worship God but he was calling them to go back into idolatry and false worship. And so what happened is when God caused the Assyrians to come again, and if you look at history of the world at this particular time, Assyria was still a power and they were still the main power. Babylon was beginning to rise up and become a power but they had not risen to their greatness.
That would happen later on, about a hundred years later, or not quite a hundred years later, when they would rise up and be after Josiah who was Manasseh’s grandson, a godly king, would come to power and then his children would be those that would come to power after them. That’s when Babylon had its power. So you’re about four generations away from Babylon becoming a very powerful nation.
But they still were a recognizable nation. And we see that Assyria evidently used Babylon as a place to take some of their captives to. Assyria invades Judah, they take the city, they capture Manasseh, and they take him and those of his court and they take them to Babylon.
And they’re put, if you would, in prison or enslaved in Babylon. And Manasseh realizes he has no power, he has no hope. Babylon would be about 500 or more miles away from Jerusalem and he has no army, he has no strength, and he is a captive of Assyria living in Babylon.
It’s at this time that something clicks in Manasseh’s head. For the first time in his life, he realizes he’s been a fool. And he begins to call on the Lord.
Now I want you to see a couple things. First of all, is anybody beyond redemption? Is there anybody you know that is so wicked, so evil, that God could not redeem me? Well, if you look at Manasseh, you don’t get much wickeder than him. Some of the very things that the people that are evil in the Middle East are willing to do today, Manasseh was doing back then.
You don’t get any wickeder. Killing your own children, desecrating everything that God loves and stands for. Well, when Manasseh cries out to the Lord, he cries out weeping to God and asking God for his forgiveness.
And God forgives Manasseh. It’s an amazing thing. Not only does he forgive him, but he restores him once again to his throne in Jerusalem.
Which only God could do. Because the Assyrians, they didn’t want a king back in their neighborhood who could be rising up in war against them. And so they sure wouldn’t take him back there unless God led them to take him back there.
And so we see that the Lord causes Manasseh to go back and sit upon his throne. And when Manasseh gets back and sits on his throne, the first thing he does is begin to do what his father Hezekiah had done. He begins to clean out the desecrating items within the temple.
Destroy the idol that was in the temple. Repair the altar of the Lord. Begin to offer proper sacrifices on the altar.
And begins to clean up the land that was idolatrous. But there’s one difference. Manasseh’s changed, but Judah hasn’t.
And we see that even though the people come to the temple to offer sacrifices, then they go back to their grove to worship their false god. They’d been taught well by Manasseh, and they hadn’t forgotten their lessons. We were just talking in the Sunday school class this morning about the nation of Israel and how that when Moses was leading them out of the land of Egypt, that the people brought idols with them.
And Moses instructed them to remove the idols, but Moses did not go into their tents and take them from them. They had to make that choice themselves. Just as the people had willfully chosen to follow the false gods, the demonic entities, worship wizards and spirits, and speak to dead beings through necromancy and other things, they had willfully chosen to do that.
They needed to willfully choose to follow God. And God wasn’t going to force them. And the vast majority of the people did not turn back to the Lord.
And it’s a sad account. That under Hezekiah and his leadership, he called them to repentance and they repented. Under Manasseh’s leadership, he led them into wickedness, and he caused them to go into that, and they willfully chose to follow him there.
These people did not go back and read what was spoken to them when they came into the land under Joshua. When they came into the land under Joshua, and Joshua came to the end of his life, he gathered all the tribes of Israel together, all the people together, the leaders of the various families, gathered them all together. And if you would turn with me to the last chapter of Joshua, Joshua chapter 31, we’ll once again read what Joshua said.
But again, even Joshua did not choose for the people, but he demanded that they would choose for themselves. It turns me to Joshua chapter 24, beginning at verse 14. Joshua is looking, and he’s looking at the land that lays before them, this inheritance, this land of milk and honey that God had promised to them, but it’s inhabited by pagans who worship false gods and who do despicable things in their worship.
Everything that Manasseh introduced back into Israel, these people had done. And Joshua is preparing the people. He’s divided the lands.
He’s told them what their responsibilities are. They’re to go in and drive the people from the land. And when they do that, they have to make choices.
And so this is what he tells them, beginning at verse 14 of chapter 24. Now, therefore, fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in truth, and put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the flood, and in Egypt, and serve you the Lord. Now, if you’ve been with us through the study of the kings, you’ll know that the kings of the northern tribe of Israel, they didn’t hear this at all.
They didn’t adhere to this at all. But they went back and they even worshiped the gods of Egypt to the point that they established the golden calf worship again. But Joshua continues to go on in verse 15.
And if it seemed evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom you will serve. And so he makes it evident that it’s a choice. They choose.
God doesn’t choose for them. They have to make the choice. And he’s saying, you either choose to serve God or you’re going to serve somebody else as your God.
And the choice is yours. And he says, whether the gods of your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land ye dwell, but as for me in my house, we will serve the Lord. Now, it’s interesting.
The people said and the people answered and said, God forbid that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods. For the Lord God, He it is that brought us up and our fathers out of the land of Egypt from the house of bondage, which did those great sins in our sight and preserved us all the way wherein we went and among all the people through whom we passed. And so they recount everything that God’s done for them, but they still do not have the complete faith that Joshua does.
Go down to verse 21, And the people said unto Joshua, Nay, but we will serve the Lord. And Joshua said unto them, Ye are witnesses against yourselves, that ye have chosen you, the Lord, to serve Him. And they said, We are witnesses.
Now therefore put away, said he, the strange gods which are among you, and incline your heart unto the Lord. And the people said unto Joshua, The Lord our God, we will serve, and His voice we will obey. Now it’s interesting, Joshua told them, Okay, if you’re going to serve the Lord, this should be the condition.
Put away the false gods. Get rid of them. Throw them away.
Burn them. Destroy them. And they said, They didn’t respond to Joshua and say, Yes, we will destroy them.
We will get all the false gods. And you don’t read that that’s what they did. Instead they say, We will serve the Lord our God.
And that’s kind of like what the people did when Manasseh came back into the land and he started destroying all the false places of worship and the false gods and cleaned up the temple. And the people said, Oh good, well we’ll serve the Lord, but we’re not going to get rid of our false gods because they still mean too much to us. And the lesson that we need to learn is really a three-fold lesson.
First of all, God is a merciful and gracious God and God will forgive sin if we call on his name and ask him to forgive us. Manasseh is living proof of how vile and wicked and evil man you can be and yet God will forgive you and transform your life and change your character. The second thing I want you to see is that people oftentimes will give lip service to following God and we can even do that as Christians and not really get serious about it.
And the third thing that I want you to see is that if we don’t get serious about it, we’re going to hang on to idols and there are idols in our life that we can hang on to. And there are things that mean more to us than God that we will not let go of. That’s what the people that were left in the land of Judah when Manasseh came back did.
They said, Oh, we’ll serve God. We’ll go to the temple. We’ll worship.
We’re thankful that you cleaned up the altar and we’re offering proper sacrifices again. But we’re still going to go back to the hills and the groves and the high places and offer sacrifices to our gods too. Well then what you’re doing is you’re saying God really doesn’t matter and God really isn’t the true and the living God.
So Manasseh is an interesting study. An interesting king. And a man who should have known better but made his own choices to rebel against God.
And then God was still merciful to forgive him and he cried out for help. That’s his closing prayer. Lord, I pray that you just help us to understand this.
Help us to learn from the life of Manasseh. Help us to see a man who had everything given to him as far as a father who loved you. A nation that had been purified of all the false gods.
A temple that had been cleansed. And yet he willfully chose to defile it all. And then when judgment began to come on him and he cried out for forgiveness you in your mercy forgave.
What a blessed God you are. Because you could have left any of us in our sin to face your judgment. But you allowed us to experience your mercy and grace that we can be your children. Lord, help us to understand the lessons and help us to apply them to our lives. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.