The King Who Came Home in Chains

There are two books called Chronicles. Chronicles tells the history of Saul, and David, and Solomon, and the kings of Judah after them. It was written down for people who were coming home from the country they had been carried away to. They had lost nearly everything, and Chronicles was put together to tell them who they were: this is the line you come from, this is the house God chose, this is what happened to it. There are two of them because it is a long history. The first book is mostly David: lists of who belonged to which family, and then the ark of God brought up to Jerusalem with shouting and horns, and the singers and the doorkeepers he set in order for the house of God, and the great pile of gold and cedar and stone he gathered for a temple he was never allowed to build, and the plans he put into Solomon’s hands. The second book starts with Solomon building it, and then goes king by king all the way down to the end. It begins with name after name, going all the way back to Adam.

Hezekiah had been a good king. He pulled down the shrines on the hilltops where people burned offerings to other gods, and when the Assyrian army was outside the wall he trusted God, and the city was not taken. His son was Manasseh. Manasseh was twelve years old when he became king, and he reigned fifty-five years — longer than any other king Judah ever had. And he undid every single thing his father had done. Fifty-five years is a long time. A baby born the year Manasseh came to the throne could be a grandmother before he died, and never once in her whole life have seen the house of the Lord kept the way it was meant to be kept. He rebuilt the shrines on the hilltops. He set up pillars to the Baals, and planted the sacred groves, and bowed down to the sun and the moon and all the stars. He built altars to them inside the house of the Lord itself, in both of its courts — in the one house on earth about which God had said: “In Jerusalem my name will be forever.” And he set a carved image, a thing he had made with his own hands, inside the house of God. He used every kind of magic. He read signs and he read omens, he worked sorceries, and he kept men about him who said they could speak with the dead. And he burned his own children in the fire, in the valley below the city. And Manasseh spilled so much innocent blood that he filled Jerusalem with it from one end to the other. God spoke to Manasseh and to his people. He sent men to say so out loud. Nobody listened.

So the Lord brought the commanders of the king of Assyria against them. They took Manasseh, and put him in irons, and bound him with chains, and marched him away to Babylon. Hezekiah had stood on that wall and watched an Assyrian army go away again. His son did not. He had been a king since he was twelve years old. Now he was one more prisoner in a line of prisoners, walking the road his whole people would walk later. And there, in a foreign prison, with the crown gone and the throne gone and the fifty-five years gone, he looked for the face of the Lord his God, and he was brought very low in front of the God of his fathers. And he prayed. There was not one word in it about being let out. It went like this.

“Lord Almighty, God of our fathers — of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and of the children who came after them and did what was right — you made heaven and earth and everything that makes them beautiful. You tied the sea up with a word. You shut the deep and sealed it with your name. Everything there is shakes in front of your power. Nobody can stand under the greatness of your glory, and nobody can bear your anger at what is wrong. But the mercy you promised is past measuring and past searching out. For you are the Lord Most High: kind, slow to anger, full of mercy, and you change your mind about doing harm to people. You did not appoint a change of heart for the righteous — for Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, who did not sin against you. You appointed it for me, who did. For I have sinned more times than there are grains of sand by the sea. The wrong I have done has piled up, Lord, it has piled up, and I am not fit to lift my head and look at the height of heaven, there is so much of it. I am bent down under many iron chains, and I cannot raise my head, because of my sins. There is no rest for me anywhere. I made you angry. I did what was evil in front of you. I set up hateful things, and I did it again and again. And now I bend the knee of my heart, and beg you to be kind. I have sinned, Lord, I have sinned, and I know what I have done. I ask you, pleading with you: forgive me, Lord, forgive me. Do not destroy me along with the wrong I have done. Do not stay angry forever, storing up harm for me. Do not send me down to the lowest places of the earth. For you, Lord, are the God of people who turn back. You will show how good you are in me; unworthy as I am, you will save me, because your mercy is great. And I will praise you all the days of my life, because every power in the heavens sings to you, and the glory is yours forever. Amen.

And God heard him. He prayed, and God heard him, and listened to his cry. And he brought him back to Jerusalem, and gave him his kingdom again. And Manasseh knew that the Lord — he is God. Then he spent what was left of his life pulling down what he had spent his life putting up. He carried the foreign gods out of the house of the Lord, and the carved image with them, and every altar he had built on the temple hill and in the city, and threw them outside the town. He set the altar of the Lord upright again and made his offerings on it, and told Judah to serve the Lord, the God of Israel. He built the wall outside the city of David, from the southwest round toward the spring, and raised it very high, and put commanders in all the walled towns of Judah. Not everything came right. The people went on making their offerings up on the high places — only now it was to the Lord their God, and to nobody else. And Manasseh slept with his fathers, and they buried him in the garden of his own house.

His son Amon was twenty-two years old when he became king, and he reigned two years in Jerusalem. He did the evil his father had done at the beginning. He sacrificed to all the images Manasseh had made, and served them. But he was not brought low as his father had been brought low. Amon only did more wrong. His own servants made a plot against him and struck him down in his own house. Then the people of the land killed the men who had done it, and made Josiah his son king in his place. Josiah was eight years old.

The rest of what Manasseh did, and his prayer, and how God listened to him — and all his sins, and the places where he set up his images before he turned back — are all written down in the words of the seers. Then comes the end: the city burned, the walls broken, the people carried away to Babylon, and the land lying empty and keeping its rest for seventy years. And then a Persian king stands up and tells them they may go home.