And he did what was evil in the sight of the LORD, according to the despicable practices of the nations whom the LORD drove out before the people of Israel.
Hezekiah prayed, and God gave him fifteen more years of life. The son born in those years grew up to copy the very nations God had thrown out of the land. Why does godliness so often fail to pass down? And what does God do with the wreckage?
A godly father, an ungodly son
Manasseh was not raised in ignorance. He was born in the fifteen extra years God gave Hezekiah after his illness. He grew up in a home where the truth was taught.
W. W. FeredayManasseh was twelve years old when he took the throne after his father Hezekiah. So he was born during the fifteen extra years of life God granted Hezekiah in answer to his prayers and tears (Isaiah 38:5). There is no doubt that Manasseh was taught the ways of God with great care... Despite his early advantages, Manasseh became the most wicked king Judah had ever known.
What a father has from God he cannot hand on like property.
Samuel RidoutThere is no such thing as succession in grace. The son of the most faithful father needs to be born again as well as the most degraded of mankind.
What "abominations" means
The word is not a general term for bad behaviour. In the Old Testament it points at one particular sin.
The Bible TreasuryOf all sins, the one God finds most abominable is idolatry. It is an open, outright denial that He is God, and it puts the creature in the place of the Creator Himself. So in the Old Testament the word "abomination" has a special use: it means an object of false worship.
A name that became an indictment
The king's name was a memorial of God's kindness to his father. It became a description of what the son did with that kindness.
Arno Clemens GaebeleinManasseh means "forgetting." No doubt Hezekiah gave him that name because the LORD had rescued him and made him forget his troubles and trials. He was born three years after Hezekiah recovered from his sickness. And now Manasseh forgot all the goodness and mercy of the LORD and threw himself headlong into the worst kind of falling away from God.
Worse than the nations God evicted
The verse measures Manasseh against the pagan nations. Judah did not just match them. The people who carried God's name sank lower.
C. KnappIt was the worst of all corruptions — the corruption of the best. The higher the fall, the deeper the plunge... And what must the nations around them have thought of a record like this — Judah "worse than the pagan nations"? Of Manasseh and Judah you could truly say what the apostle, by the Spirit, wrote seven hundred years later: "The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you."
One writer lists what those practices were, and what they cost the nation.
W. W. FeredayHis crimes made it impossible for the LORD to tolerate the people staying in His land. Manasseh practised every form of idolatry. He was deeply involved in contacting spirits. And he freely killed everyone who dared to oppose his evil ways.
The longest reign in the record
Manasseh reigned longer than any other king of Judah or Israel. That fact corrects a common mistake about suffering and prosperity.
H. L. RossierOften a time of revival is followed by an even quicker slide downward. Strikingly, we are not told that God marks this out by sending special judgments. The reign of Manasseh, marked by a real flood of idolatry, is the longest reign recorded in the history of the kings of Judah and Israel. You cannot judge a man's condition by how severe or how gentle God's ways with him are. That was exactly the error of Job's friends. They judged his character by his troubles, and argued as if a man with fewer troubles must be more righteous.
Why the record ends in darkness here
Kings tells this story without a happy ending. It is not the whole account.
H. L. RossierThe book of Kings stops once it has recorded the king's responsibility. Chronicles shows us grace working through judgments to restore him. What a blessed thought, that the hardest hearts can become the objects of grace! Many will be found in the Lord's presence whose lives, like his, seemed broken by judgment, and who were beyond doubt touched by a repentance that leads to salvation.
Summary
- Inherited nothing. Manasseh had a godly father and careful teaching. None of it transferred. Grace has no line of succession.
- Forgot everything. His name meant "forgetting," given in thanks for God's mercy to Hezekiah. He lived it out in reverse and forgot the God who gave it.
- Copied the condemned. He copied the nations God had already thrown out for those very practices. Judah carried God's name, and still sank below people who never knew it.
- Reigned longest. The longest reign in the record, and no special judgment fell on it — so ease is no verdict of approval and affliction no proof of guilt.
- Was still reached. Kings closes the file on his responsibility. Chronicles reopens it on God's grace, and God broke and restored the hardest heart in the book.