2 Kings chapter 21. Manasseh was 12 years old when he became king, and he reigned 55 years in Jerusalem. His mother's name was Hephzibah. And he did evil in the sight of the Lord, according to the abominations of the nations whom the Lord had cast out before the children of Israel. For he rebuilt the high places which Hezekiah his father had destroyed. He raised up altars for Baal and made a wooden image, as Ahab king of Israel had done. And he worshipped all the hosts of heaven and served them. He also built altars in the house of the Lord, of which the Lord had said, In Jerusalem I will put my name. And he built altars for all the hosts of heaven in the two courts of the house of the Lord. Also, he made his son pass through the fire, practiced soothsaying, used witchcraft, and consulted spiritists and mediums. He did much evil in the sight of the Lord to provoke him to anger. He even said a carved image of Asherah that he had made in the house of which the Lord had said to David and 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. And I will not make the feet of Israel wander anymore from the land which I gave their fathers, only if they are careful to do according to all that I have commanded them and according to all the law that my servant Moses commanded them. But they paid no attention, and Manasseh seduced them to do more evil than the nations whom the Lord had destroyed before the children of Israel. And the Lord spoke by His servants the prophets, saying, Because Manasseh, king of Israel, has done these abominations, he has acted more wickedly than all the Amorites who were before him, and has also made Judah sin with his idols. Therefore, thus says the LORD, God of Israel, Behold, I am bringing such calamity upon Jerusalem and Judah, that whoever hears of it, both his ears will tingle. And I will stretch over Jerusalem the measuring line of Samaria, and the plummet of the house of Ahab. I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down. So I will forsake the remnant of my inheritance, and deliver them into the hand of their enemies. And they shall become victims of plunder to all their enemies, because they have done evil in my sight, and have provoked me to anger since the day their fathers came out of Egypt, even to this day. Moreover Manasseh shed very much innocent blood, till he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another, besides his sin with which he made Judas sin, in doing evil in the sight of the Lord. Now the rest of the acts of Manasseh, all that he did, and the sin that he committed, are they not written in the book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah? So Manasseh rested with his fathers, and was buried in the garden of his own house, in the garden of Uzzah. Then his son Amon reigned in his place. Amon was twenty-two years old when he became king, and he reigned two years in Jerusalem. His mother's name was Meshulameth, the daughter of Haruz of Jotbah. And he did evil in the sight of the Lord, as his father Manasseh had done. So he walked in all the ways that his father had walked, and he served the idols that his father had served and worshipped them. He forsook the Lord, God of his fathers, and did not walk in the way of the Lord. And the servants of Amon conspired against him and killed the king in his own house. But the people of the land executed all those who had conspired against King Amon. And the people of the land made his son Josiah king in his place. Now the rest of the acts of Ammon, which he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? And he was buried in his tomb in the garden of Uzzah. Then Josiah his son reigned in his place. The grass withers, the flower fades, the word of our God stands forever. Let's pray. Almighty God, our Father in heaven, Show us Your heart tonight, we ask. Free us from distractions, from fleeting, foolish thoughts. Help us to focus on You, to see Your hatred of sin, and Your commitment to judge those who sin against You. Father, teach us to hate our sin as You hate our sin. Help me to speak boldly pray these things in the name of Christ. And all God's people said, Amen. Last week, we saw judgment postponed. The last episode recounted from Hezekiah's life was of the Babylonian ambassadors coming and looking at all his treasures. Hezekiah, of course, showing them his stuff. The narrator is making it very clear that that's where Judah will end up. These last four chapters are just the story of how Judah got to Babylon. So we saw judgment postponed last time, but tonight we see judgment sealed. After Manasseh, there is no turning back. Judah's fate is indeed sealed, and there's nothing that can be done to change it. Even Josiah, the best king of Judah, is not enough to turn away God's wrath. God's promise and God's threat are clearly juxtaposed in this chapter. Why? Well, to help us see how much God hates sin. God will not ignore sin. He will wipe it out from among His people as you and I wipe off a dish. That's the message of this chapter. The first 16 verses contrast Manasseh's evil with God's righteousness. Then we have Manasseh's epitaph in two verses, which again is absolutely dripping with sin. And then we have Manasseh's wicked clone, his son Amon, who reigned a mere two years and yet did as much evil as his father had. And that's our chapter. Sin and God's attitude toward sin. Even sin in His chosen people, even sin in a descendant of David, even sin in someone who's in the line of the Messiah. It doesn't matter who the sinner is, God hates sin. Manasseh reigned 55 years in Jerusalem. He reigned longer than any other Judean monarch. Part of us, of course, wonders why. God, why do you let the wicked prosper so long and strike down the righteous in their prime? Josiah reigned 31 years. Not bad, but why couldn't he have reigned 55 years and had more time to do good? This is a mystery of providence. God is not afraid to let us have enough rope to hang ourselves. My brother-in-law told me last week that they're installing a net underneath the Golden Gate Bridge at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars because so many people try to kill themselves by jumping off that iconic American landmark. Well, don't count on God having a safety net spread for you. If you want to throw yourself wholeheartedly into the abyss of sin, there might not be a safety net halfway down. There was from Manasseh. You can read about his conversion in Chronicles. God is not afraid to let sinners sin. Even grow old in sin and die in sin. So don't let sin's enticements fool you. There may be no turning back. It's a hard lesson to learn. Absolutely vital. When Manasseh did evil in the sight of the Lord, he unhallowed the city of God. Jerusalem, God's holy city, so called in the Bible, Manasseh deliberately sought to make unholy. He did according to everything that had been done by the nations whom God cast out before the children of Israel, verse 2. And if you do what got people kicked out of the land in the first place, what's the hint? What's the idea? Well, God's going to kick you out just like he kicked out those who were doing those things in the first place. So Manasseh adds a bunch of foreign gods in Jerusalem. Baal, wooden image, the host of heaven, altars in the house of the Lord. And then verse 4 juxtaposes this with God's statement about it. The Lord had said in Jerusalem, I will put my name. God had chosen this city as his place, the place that would reflect his name, the place that would show the world who he was, the city on a hill that could not be hidden. And what did Manasseh do? Manasseh said, oh, we'll take this city that shows the world who God is, and we'll make it about false gods. And we can do this in our lives. Manasseh's sins obscured the glory of God's name, and your sins will obscure it too. We tend to think, well, the gods of our age and place are wealth, comfort, security, peace, prosperity. Why can't I have wealth, comfort, security, peace, and Jesus? And the fact is, you can have all those things, Just you can't have all of them as gods. A god is anything you're willing to sin to acquire. And if you're willing to sin for the sake of wealth, comfort, prosperity, or peace, then that's functionally your god. And you can't have that and Jesus. Manasseh could not have the true God and these other gods that he added into his system. So don't unhallow your life, yourself. You are a city on a hill, Jesus says. Jerusalem used to be that city. Now we, God's people, are that city on a hill. God put his name on us in benediction every Sunday. The Lord bless you and keep you. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship in the Holy Spirit, that's God's putting his name on you. Number six, God revealed the priestly blessing and then he says afterwards, so you shall put my name on the children of Israel and I will bless them. And you've also had God's name put on you in baptism. You were baptized into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And so just as God's name dwelt in Jerusalem in Manasseh's time, God's name dwells in you. And your sin, our sin, besmirches God's name every bit as much as Manasseh's sin did. So don't unhallow God's city. Don't unhallow God's people. Manasseh also unhallowed God's temple. He built altars for all the hosts of heaven in the two courts of the house of the Lord. So he added in God's temple things that did not belong. He made God's temple a place where other things were worshipped. Is that a popular human pastime with the church? Absolutely. Very easy to find churches where other things besides the living God are worshipped. Whether that's aesthetic experience in the form of music, light, sound, architecture, stirring oratory, Or whether the church becomes a social club that's about human relationships and human goods and those things are the be-all end-all of what that church is about. Or whether a church gets wrapped up in the wrong things and thinks, well, we can't worship God without wireless microphones and chairs. and hymnals and makes those things, the be all end all, those are nice, but we can worship God without those things. To do like Manasseh is to add into the worship of God, to take God's house, God's place, God's people, enrich them to some other purpose. What do we bring into God's church that doesn't belong there? Well, fights and grudges. gossip and complaining, wrong beliefs about what's important. It's not just Manasseh who can add things into God's house that don't belong. But not only did he bring in things that didn't belong, he also did things that were downright evil. He made his son pass through the fire. We've talked about this many times in Kings. it is not only possible, it's downright easy to sacrifice your children to your false gods. Whether that's your favorite TV show, or your own personal peace and ease, caring about your stuff, your house, your time, your schedule, more than you care about your child's soul, is to sacrifice your child to your false god. And of course, there's the ultimate example of this, that our land is full of, abortion. Sacrificing your child to your false god of personal convenience. That's what Manasseh did, and that's what millions of our fellow Americans do, and that's what we do. Every time you get frustrated with your kid, every time you raise your voice unlawfully, sacrificing your child to a false god. God says do not do that. That's why Manasseh was condemned. So what's God's response to Manasseh's sin? It's to reiterate his promise, verse 7. In this house and in Jerusalem I will put my name forever and I will not make the feet of Israel wander anymore from the land which I gave to their fathers. This promise of God's presence with His people and His land, a tremendous promise, the promise that drives the narrative of the entire Old Testament. And yet it's a conditional promise. Verse 8, if, if they are careful to do according to all that I have commanded them. So God's promise was, you get to live here forever. If you pay attention to what I said. But they paid no attention, verse 9. God's response to sin is to reiterate His promise and remind us what we're losing. You want your sin? Fine, but remember what you could have had. Remember the opportunity cost of sinning. The opportunity cost of sinning is that you lose me. That's what God tells them. You could have had this land. You could have not wandered anymore. But they preferred to wander. They picked sin. So why is it that God couldn't dwell permanently with His people? Why did they have to leave the land? Well, because the Levitical system that they had could not deal with sin. The blood of bulls and goats couldn't take away their sin. It was not sufficient to keep them in that land. This was planned to be temporary. God planned to bring in a better way of dealing with sin. The way that they had for dealing with their sin couldn't handle the amount of sin that they threw at it. They overloaded the system and it broke down and they were thrown into exile. Now is it possible to sin too much for Jesus? Can you overload the Son of God with sins? No. But you can choose sin instead of Christ. Don't. Don't throw yourself off that Golden Gate Bridge thinking that there's a safety net. What kind of penalty did this sin bring? Verses 9 to 15 describe it. And notice that this word of judgment is the only prophetic word that came during the days of Manasseh. Micah, Isaiah, Hosea, all finished their prophetic careers before Manasseh came to the throne. And then the later prophets, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, none of them started prophesying until after Manasseh's reign. The rabbis noticed long ago that there's a silence from the writing prophets during the reign of Manasseh. God cut his people off, he let them go, and this is all he said during the reign of Manasseh. Because Manasseh, king of Judah, has done these abominations, therefore thus says the Lord God of Israel, Behold, I am bringing such calamity upon Jerusalem and Judah, that whoever hears of it, both his ears will tingle. And of course our ears do tingle when we read about the devastation that God brought. I will stretch over Jerusalem the measuring line of Samaria and the plumb line of the house of Ahab. In other words, poetically, the exact same fate that befell Samaria is going to befall you. I destroyed Samaria, I will destroy Jerusalem. God says, this is my attitude towards sin. I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish. I will clean up this town, as they used to say in the Old West. God came to Jerusalem and he kicked out all the evildoers. He wiped them out. Just took a giant towel and cleaned that city up. And then he promises to forsake the remnant of the inheritance, verse 14, to deliver them into the hand of their enemies so that they can be victims of plunder because they have done evil. And then notice the final verdict. It's not that Manasseh was suddenly so bad and everyone else had been so good. No, verse 15, they have provoked me to anger since the day their fathers came out of Egypt, even to this day. Manasseh differed in degree, but not in kind, from the other kings of Judah. They had all been like that and 800 years of constant reiterated wickedness overloaded the Levitical system and sent them into exile. Has God changed? No. He still has this intolerant attitude toward sin. He still promises to wipe it out from among His people. That's who God is. This doesn't mean that you can lose your salvation. It's not what the passage is saying. It's warning you instead that if you give yourself over to sin, you will be punished. More so, nationally and internationally, if the church as such gives itself over to sin, God will judge. And if you're a righteous person in the midst of that, guess what? You'll suffer right along with the wicked. The penalty for sin is removal from the presence of God. That's what God is saying. I will throw you out of my land. I will remove my presence from your temple. and you'll get to go away to Babylon, the land of Nod, eastward, toward the east country, where Cain wandered away from the presence of God. Well, that comes back, and that's where Judah will go. Has the church, by and large, been better than Israel? Have we been significantly more faithful? Had significantly better leaders? It's awfully hard to say yes. And this means that we ought to expect chastening and judgment as a church. God has not changed. God hates sin. So is there a chance for us? Yes. Not in the Levitical system, but in Jesus Christ. You cannot overload Him with sin. There is forgiveness in Him. We'll talk about that in a minute. But Manasseh murdered the people of God, verse 16. Shed very much innocent blood. Do you see a murderer? He was an idolater first. Do you want to become a murderer? Worship idols. Pick some false god that you want to serve and serve that god then you just might end up by killing someone. That's what Manasseh did. The idolatry-murder connection is very strong. Well, Manasseh's epitaph absolutely drips with sin. You notice that. He's the only king whose sin is mentioned in his epitaph. Now, the rest of the Acts of Manasseh, all that he did, are they not written? It doesn't just say that. It adds. And the sin that he committed. And he's buried in the Garden of Uzzah. Where did we last see that name? 2 Samuel 6, Uzzah is the man who touched the Ark of God and was struck dead. Manasseh and Ammon are buried in this Garden of Uzzah as if as a kind of a final reminder that the Corruptor of God's worship is buried in the tomb belonging to this other famous Corruptor of God's worship. If you corrupt God's worship, you might be remembered. And then, of course, Manasseh's wicked clone reigns in his place. Did you notice this? His father, his father, his father mentioned three times across verses 20 and 21. He did evil in the sight of the Lord, as his father Manasseh had done. He walked in all the ways that his father had walked, and he served the idols that his father had served. Contrasted with, he forsook the Lord, God of his father's. He forgot his ancestral religion to worship the false gods that his father worshipped. He was a wicked clone of his dad and his reign lasted two years and then his servants conspired against him and that was it. There's a little tiny bit of hope here because the people of the land still have a mind to justice. They execute those who conspired against him and then they made his son Josiah king in his place. You would almost think that they would be done with the house of David. No. We are not going to have any more of these wicked Davidic kings. We're done. Right? No, not what they said. They were still going to trust God and His promise to David's line. The people of Judah didn't give up on David's line, and we shouldn't either. No matter how many wicked Christians we know, You see the measure of how much God hates sin is not seen in the smoking ruins of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. It's seen at the cross of Christ. That's truly where we see how much God hates sin and how much He'll wipe it out. He punished it even in His own Son. And that's good news for us that no matter what happens in history to God's people, no matter how the unfaithful church suffers, God is still faithful and there is still forgiveness in Christ. We might suffer along with the wicked church. We might be the wicked church. Our call is not to give up and say, oh well, I guess we're going to suffer. Our call is to turn away from sin Say, God, forgive me. God, change me. God, don't hold my sin against me. Because you punished it in your Son. If you sin, God will not spare you. The cross teaches us that. But if you repent, as a righteous judge, God will forgive the sin of all those whose sins are covered in Christ. Do you want to defy God and suffer His punishment or do you want to submit to Him and take refuge in Jesus? The choice is clear. Don't be like Ammon and Manasseh. Take refuge in Christ. Let's pray. Our Father God, we pray that You would deliver us from these forms of wickedness. Help us to hate every form of evil. Please forgive us, Father, for entertaining evil thoughts, for saying evil words, for doing evil things, for corrupting Your worship with corrupt hearts and corrupt practices. Father, we pray that You would turn us away from sin, that You would help us to see our sin and loathe it and turn back to You and rejoice in Your holiness, Your righteousness, Your goodness, and Your truth. Father, we pray that you would bring us safely to your heavenly kingdom, that you would deliver us from every evil. We pray it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, who bore the penalty of our sins, and all God's people said, Amen.