God’s Word for You

2 Chronicles 33:7-13 Repentance of Manasseh

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Monday, June 9, 2025

7 He had made an image, an idol, which he placed in the House of God, the place about which God said to David and to Solomon his son, “In this house, and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, I will put my Name forever; 8 and I will not remove the foot of Israel from the land which I appointed for your fathers, if only they will be careful to do everything that I have commanded them, all the law, the statutes, and the ordinances given through Moses.” 9 Manasseh seduced Judah and those who lived in Jerusalem, so that they did more evil than the nations whom the LORD destroyed before the people of Israel. 10 The LORD spoke to Manasseh and to his people, but they paid no attention.

After all of Hezekiah’s reforms, Manasseh worked very hard to accomplish Satan’s task of destroying faith from out of Israel. He came very close this time to wiping out the church of God. Had Manasseh in fact succeeded in wrecking the temple worship, leading the people into idolatry, and personally restoring all of the high places? He had even brought a big, beautiful Baal into the temple, the temple reserved for the name of God alone. Once again, the temple was desecrated and no longer able to be used for right worship. Was the church of the Old Testament at an end?

Firstly, the true church on earth can never cease to exist. This kind of damage had happened before in the days of Elijah, when he thought that there was no one left in Israel with faith in God. But God knows the heart, and the Lord God told Elijah that there were seven thousand who had not bowed the knee to Baal (1 Kings 19:18; Romans 11:4). Christ himself says, “The gates of Hades will not overcome my church” (Matthew 16:18).

However, this and that particular church, or church body, can cease to exist. There was once a Lutheran church in my home town in Wisconsin, which had been a member church of our Wisconsin Synod in the 1800s, but it no longer had any members when I was a boy; everyone worshiped out at the country church where I was baptized, confirmed, and married. And there are whole church bodies which have ceased to exist, either physically because of plague or war, or they are no longer truly Christian on account of false doctrine.

And more than this, all churches without exception—the entire visible church on earth—could “be overshadowed by clouds of corruptions, errors, scandals, heresies, persecutions, etc. It can be reduced to such a state that all its exterior splendor and brightness can cease to exist, so that no clear and evident assembly remains to rejoice in the pure ministry of the Word sounding forth publicly” (Gerhard, The Church Chapter 8, §86). But according to the words of Jesus our Lord, there will always remain some people with the true foundation of faith. For even through a corrupt ministry, the Lord our God produces son and daughters who trust the Gospel, and who belong to the invisible and universal church.

Verse 10 relates that God even spoke to king Manasseh and to his people. Most likely he did this through a prophet—and perhaps this was the final message of Isaiah, or of Micah, who were contemporaries with Manasseh’s father Hezekiah. Micah said, “The godly have been swept from the land; not one upright man remains. All men lie in wait to shed blood; each hunts his brother with a net” (Micah 7:2). But that prophet also prayed to the Lord: “You will again have compassion on us; you will tread our sins underfoot and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea” (Micah 7:19). The Lord has compassion; so we pray for his compassion to cover us in times of trouble and uncertainty.

11 So the LORD brought upon them the princes of the army of the king of Assyria. They captured Manasseh with hooks and bound him with bronze chains and brought him to Babylon. 12 And when he was in distress he sought the favor of the LORD his God and humbled himself very much before the God of his fathers. 13 He prayed to him, and God received his prayer and heard his plea for mercy and brought him back to Jerusalem, into his kingdom. Then Manasseh knew that the LORD is God.

Manasseh was captured by the Assyrians and taken into prison. Whether or not this involved a hook “in his nose” (NIV) or not is a matter of debate, although Isaiah had warned Hezekiah of such a thing (2 Kings 19:28; Isaiah 37:29). The Hebrew text here does not mention the king’s nose, nor does the Greek translation. But we know that the king’s exile was genuine, and that his prayer reached God’s ears. Since God does not hear the prayers of unbelievers (Isaiah 59:2; Romans 10:14; Zechariah 7:13), it must be that some of Manasseh’s childhood memories of the word of God preached in the temple or spoken at the dinner table by his father Hezekiah must have remained in his mind. Otherwise, it is also possible or likely that the Lord sent him a faithful believer, Levite, priest or prophet, to comfort him in his prison cell, and that the word of God was delivered to him in this way. But he prayed and his prayer was heard, and he was released, whatever crimes he had committed to land him there in the first place.

The pattern of churches changing over the decades and centuries, quietly getting their beginning, rising in a kind of spiritual glory, and then fading again, is not so different from the pattern of sin and repentance in each Christian. It has been said more than once that the various troubles or warnings expressed to the Seven Churches in the Book of Revelation show the various phases in the life of the church; each congregation goes through those difficulties in greater or lesser ways. Saint Ambrose compared all of this to the phases of the moon. At times the moon shines brightly with its full light, but at other times it fades, stops shining, and becomes invisible. The Church of Christ shines through in the glory of public worship, but then it may be overshadowed either by heresies or by persecutions. But it emerges after all free from its obscurity and bringing back the glorious victory. And sometimes in this resurgence it may appear smaller and brighter, or larger at other times.

Like the moon, we the church may become overshadowed at times, but the true Christian church cannot cease to exist. May God preserve us in our own lifetime, so that we remain faithful to him whether it is in a time of waxing or waning, of shadowed faith or bright glory. Whatever we do, let us do it to the glory of God.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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