JESUS' DESPICABLE GRANDDADDIES - MANASSEH

Transcript

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Hello everyone. This is Pastor Dean Thompson with the word of hope. Jesus' despicable granddaddy's Manasseh. The child killer, the occultist, the most evil king who ever lived. Hezekiah, the father of Manasseh. Manasseh, the father of Ammon.

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Matthew one verse ten. Manasseh is the most extreme test case in this ex entire in Jesus' entire genealogy. If you think Judah was bad and David was worse, then Manasseh should leave us speechless. He reigned for fifty-five years, the long the longest reign of any king in Judah's history. And scripture describes those fifty-five years in terms that make the reader physically uncomfortable. His father Hezekiah was one of the greatest kings Judah ever produced. A man who tore down pagan altars, reopened the temple, and personally witnessed the angel of God strike down 185,000 Assyrian soldiers in a single night. A man who prayed his way back from a terminal illness and was given fifteen extra years of life. Manasseh had a front row seed to the power and faithfulness of God. He grew up in a household of miracles. He chose darkness anyway, deliberately, systematically, comprehensively. The list of Manakes Manasseh's abominations in 2 Kings ten twenty one and second Chronicles thirty three reads like a catalogue of every evil the human heart is capable of. He rebuilt every pagan shrine and altar his father Hezekiah had destroyed. He erected altars to Baal, he made ashera poles, carved wooden obscenities to a fertility goddess. He bowed down and worshipped the entire host of heaven, the sun, the moon, the stars. He built altars to these gods inside the courts of the temple, the house of God almighty, and placed carved idols there. He practised sorcery, he practised divination, he consulted mediums and spiritists, he trafficked with the occult in every available, in every form available to him, and imported more. He was not a man who dabbled in darkness, he was a man who drove into it head first and pulled a nation in behind him. And then there is the crime that defies comprehension. Manasseh sacrificed his own sons in the fire. In the valley of Benhinom, outside Jerusalem, there was a place called Topeth, a site of pagan worship, where children were burnt alive as offering to the god Molech. The screaming of the children was drowned out by drums so that the parents would not lose their nerve. Manasseh sent his own sons there, his own flesh and blood into the fire. He shed so much innocent blood in Jerusalem that scripture says he filled the city from one end to the other. Jewish tradition recorded in the Talmud preserves the account that it was Manasseh who had the prophet Isaiah, the great Isaiah, whose prophetic scrolls begins the New Testament's most quoted Old Testament source. Seized and hidden inside a hollow cedar log, then had the log sown in two with Isaiah inside it. Manasseh, led Judah and the people of Jerusalem astray so that they did more evil than the nations the Lord had destroyed before the Israelites. God sent prophet after prophet. God warned him, God pleaded with him through messenger. Manasseh killed them and kept going. The damage he did to the spiritual fabric of the nation of Judah was so catastrophic that even after Manasseh was dead and gone, God told the prophet Jeremiah that Judah's coming destruction was sealed because of what Manasseh had done. One man's evil was that consequential. He was by any measure the worst person in this entire genealogy.

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He may be the worst person in the entire Old Testament even. God brought the Assyrian army.

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The commanders of Assyria came, seized Manasseh, put a hook through his nose, the ancient humiliation reserved for conquered enemies. Like a beast led to slaughter, bound him with heavy bronze shackles and carried him to Babylon. The man who had wielded total power over an entire nation was now a prisoner with a hook in his face, shuffling in chains through a foreign city. Everything was gone. The throne, the altars, the power, the armies, the occult advisers, the idols, everything he had trusted in, everything he had built his life around, stripped away. And he sat in that prison in the dark with nothing left but the memory of every evil thing he had ever done. And in that darkness Manasseh looked up. In his distress he sought the favour of the Lord his God and humbled himself greatly before the God of his ancestors. And when he prayed to him, the Lord was moved by his entreaty and listened to his plea. So he brought him back to Jerusalem and to his kingdom. Second Chronicles 33 verses twelve and thirteen.

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The Lord was moved. Can you imagine that?

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The God whose prophets Manasseh had murdered, the God whose temple Manasseh had desecrated, the God whose people Manasseh had led into Jerusalem generations of wickedness, the God in whose honor children had been burnt alive. That God heard Manasseh's prayer from a Babylonian dungeon and was moved by it. Moved. Not just willing to tolerate the prayer, not just grudgingly agreeing to process the repentance. Moved. The word carries the sense of God being genuinely stirred, touched by the cry of his broken, shackled, ruined man. He brought him home. He restored the kingdom. And Manasseh returned to Jerusalem, and for the rest of his life he tried to undo what he had done. He removed the foreign altars, he restored the altar of the Lord. He commanded Judah to serve the God of Israel. It wasn't enough to save the nation. The rock had gone too deep, but it was enough to save Manasseh. And God included him in the family tree of his son. The man who burnt his children in the valley of Hinnom is in the genealogy of the one who would tell his disciples, Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them. For the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these. Can you imagine? The man who saw the God's prophet in half is in the lineage of the word made flesh. The most evil king in Israel's history is a grandfather of the Lamb of God. If that does not take your breath away, just read it again. The grace of God is not a small thing, brothers and sisters. It is a violent, relentless, unstoppable force, and it found Manasseh in the deepest pit a human being can dig for himself.

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Jeremiah twenty nine verse eleven.

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For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Matthew chapter one did not have to look like this. God could have ordered the lineage of his son through a row of spotless patriarchs. He could have scrubbed the record, but he chose not to. He left every scar, every scandal, every shameful chapter right there, where it was. Because the genealogy of Jesus is not a testimony to human virtue, it is a testimony to divine grace. Judah was a sellout who lived in hypocrisy for twenty years, but God broke him open and turned him into the ancestor of the King of Kings. David was an adulterer and a murderer who abused his power to destroy an innocent man. But when he fell on his face before God, with nothing left but honesty, God called him a man after his own heart. Manasseh murdered prophets, burnt his own children, trafficked in the occult, and dragged an entire nation into the darkest period of its history. And God still heard his prayer from a prison from a prison cell and was moved. These are not feel-good stories about basically decent men who just made some mistakes. These are stories about men who committed acts of profound evil, men who by any reasonable human standard should have been written off, cast out and forgotten. And God refused to write them off. He refused to cast them out. And he was most certainly he has most certainly refused to forget them. He put their names in the family tree of his own son, where every generation that has ever read Matthew chapter 1 would see them and be forced to reckon with what they mean. And they mean this there is no sin beyond the reach of this grace. None. Not what you did ten years ago, not what you did last week, not the secret, secret you have never told another living soul. Not the addiction, the betrayal, the violence, the years of hypocrisy, the children you failed, the marriages you destroyed, the people you used, the God you ignored or openly defied. None of it. Not one single chapter of your broken story puts you outside the reach of the God who was moved by the prayer of Manasseh. What God requires is not that you have a clean past, He requires what Judah gave him, honest confession. What David gave him, a heart that ran toward God in its shame instead of away from him. What Manasseh gave him, a desperate cry from the bottom of the pit with nothing left to offer but the ruins of a wasted life. That is enough. It has always been enough. The same God who pulled these men out of their wreckage and moved their stories into the lineage of the Savior of the world is the same God who is reading the story of your life right now. And he's not done with writing it. The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. Luke 19 verse 10. As bad as things may be, God still has use for you. You are not too broken, you are not too late, you are not too far gone. Just look up and reach out and come home. Grace did much more abound. Romans 5, verse 20. Oh God, we thank you for your amazing grace. This grace that can take the filth of humanity and clean us up and make us into your honored servants. Help us, oh God, to embrace this grace, to receive it, to be moved by it, to be transformed by it. And help us to extend this same grace to others. Amen. God bless you, brothers and sisters.