Latest / truthunedited / Fall Asleep to the Story of Manasseh _ The Most Evil King in the Bible Who Was Still Forgiven

Transcript

Fall Asleep to the Story of Manasseh _ The Most Evil King in the Bible Who Was Still Forgiven · truthunedited

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Before we begin to night, I want to ask you something.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Think of the worst thing you have ever done. Not
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: the small failures, not the ordinary accumulation of ordinary mistakes
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: that most people carry without too much weight. The worst thing,
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: the one with a name, the one that costs someone
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: something real. Now ask yourself this question. Do you believe
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: that thing is forgivable? To night? We are going to
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: follow a man whose worst thing was worse than yours.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: A man remembered in ancient tradition as the murderer of
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: a prophet, who sent his own child through fire in
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: a valley outside the city walls, who spent fifty five
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: years systematically destroying everything his nation had been given to protect.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: A man whose reign the Bible describes as darker than
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: any king Judah had ever known. His name is Manasse,
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: and the most astonishing thing about his story is not
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: what he did, It is what happened after settle in.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: Close your eyes. This story will go to dark places
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: before it finds the light, but it will find the light.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: And when it does, what you find there may be
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: the most important thing you hear this year. We are
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: just beginning chapter one, The Shadow of a Great Father.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: The year is approximately seven hundred and fifteen years before
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: the birth of Christ. The city of Jerusalem sits on
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: its ridge of limestone in the hill country of Judah.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: The morning air is dry and cool, the streets are still.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: The temple, on its elevated platform, catches the first light
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: before the rest of the city does, the way high
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: places always catch the light first, as if the stone
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: itself is waiting for something. And inside that temple, for
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: the first time in living memory, the doors are open.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: A twenty five year old king named Hezekiah has just
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: given the order. The priests and the levites have been
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: called together and told plainly that the neglect is finished,
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: that the House of God will be restored, that what
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: his father AHAs broke will be repaired. Beginning to day,
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: the priests worked for sixteen days cleaning the temple, sixteen days,
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: moving through rooms that had gathered the dust and disorder
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: of years of misuse, removing the debris of a sacred
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: space that had been treated as anything but sacred. And
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: when it was done, Hezekiah led the people in worship,
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: and the account of it in second Chronicles cannot contain itself.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: The worship was so fervent so unexpected after so many
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: dry years, that the priests could not keep up with
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: the offerings. The levites had to help. The whole assembly bowed,
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: the singers sang, the trumpets sounded, and the text says
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: that Hezekiah and all the people rejoiced because God had prepared,
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: spared the people for the thing came about suddenly, Suddenly,
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: after years of silence and drift, and the quiet accumulation
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: of small compromises that had hollowed out the center of
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: the nation's life, the fire came back. Picture the faces
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: of the older people in that assembly, the ones who
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: remembered what it had been before, who had held the
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: covenant in private during the long years when holding it
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: in public had become dangerous, who had taught their children
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: in whispers and prayed without an altar, and wondered in
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: the long watches of the night whether the God of
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: Israel was still there. They were there that morning in
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: the restored temple, with the sound of the trumpets filling
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: the stone corridors, and they wept. That is the world
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: into which Manassa was born. But before we come to
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: the child, we must go further into the Father, because
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: the shadow Hezekiah cast over his son's life was not
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: only the shadow of a good king. It was the
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: shadow of a man who had stood at the edge
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: of death and been given back his years. And that
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: story matters more than almost anything else for understanding what followed.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: In the fourteenth year of Hezekiah's reign, the most powerful
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: army the ancient world had yet produced, arrived at the
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: borders of Judah. The Assyrian Empire under s Nacarib had
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: already destroyed the northern Kingdom of Israel. City after city
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: in Judah had fallen. The roads were full of refugees
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: and the smell of smoke from burning towns. And now
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: Sir Nacarib sent his field commander to stand outside the
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: walls of Jerusalem and shout in Hebrew loud enough for
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: the defenders on the walls to hear every word that
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: resistance was finished. No god of any nation had stopped
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: to Syria. Hezekiah was deceiving his people. They should open
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: the gates. The men on the walls stood in silence.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: The text says they did not answer him a word,
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: because the king had commanded them not to. They stood
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: and listened and said nothing, which is one of the
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: harder things a frightened person can do. That night, Hezekiah
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: went into the temple and spread the Assyrian letter on
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: the floor before God. He did not perform confidence, he
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: did not feel. He prayed with the honesty of a
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: man who has no other option. He said, God, you
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: see what these people are saying about you. You see
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: the contempt, you see the threat. Now do something not
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: for our sake, for the sake of your own name.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: That night, one hundred and eighty five thousand Assyrian soldiers
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: died in their camp. The text does not explain how.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: It says the Angel of the Lord went out and
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: struck them, and when the people of Jerusalem rose early
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: in the morning, the camp that had been full of
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: torches and the sound of an army the night before
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: was silent. One hundred and eighty five thousand bodies. In
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: the morning, life Senacharim packed what remained of his army
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: and went home to Nineveh, where he was later killed
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: by his own sons. The people of Jerusalem stood at
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: the walls and looked out at what the night had done.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: Now feel the texture of the city. In the days
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: after that morning, the stunned relief, the particular joy of
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: people who had been prepared to die and had not died,
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: who had stood in silence on the walls while a
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: foreign commander mocked their God, and who had woken to
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: find that the silence had been exactly the right answer.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: That was the Jerusalem. Manassa grew up in a city
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: shaped by the memory of an impossible mourning. But there
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: is a third layer to Hezekiah's story, and this one
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: is darker. Not long after the Assyrian Crisis, Hezekiah became
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: mortally ill. The prophet Isaiah came to him and said, directly,
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: set your house in order, for you shall die and
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: not recover. And Hezekiah turned his face to the wall
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: in the dim light of the sickroom, and wept and prayed.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: And God responded through Isaiah with words that must have
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: felt like the ground shifting under the prophet's own feet.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: Tell him, I have heard his prayer. Tell him I
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: have seen his tears. Tell him fifteen more years have
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: been added. As a sign, God moved the shadow on
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: the sun dial of AHA's backward ten steps. The shadow
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: went the wrong direction, time itself in some way, the
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: text preserves without fully explaining reversed as a sign of
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: a mercy that was reversing what should have been irreversible.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: Fifteen years were added to the life of a man
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: who should have been dead, and it was in those
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: fifteen added years that Manassa was born. Sit with that
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: for a moment. The child who would become the most
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: destructive king in the history of Judah was born in
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: the borrowed time of a miracle. He would not have
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: existed with other the grace extended to his father in
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: a moment of weeping and prayer. His very life was
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: a gift, and the gift would be spent for most
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: of its length in a direction that seems to make
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: no sense of the grace that made it possible. But
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: there is one more thing about those added years. In them,
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: Hezekiah received visitors from Babylon, envoys sent by the Babylonian
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: king who had heard of his illness and recovery, and Hezekiah,
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: in a moment the text records, without harsh judgment but
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: also without apology, showed them everything, the silver and the gold,
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: the spices and the fine oil, the armory, the treasury,
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: all of it displayed to men from the empire that
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: would one day come to take it. Isaiah came to
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: him afterward. He asked what Hezekiah had shown them, And
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: when Hezekiah described the tour, Isaiah said these words, without
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: softening them. The days are coming, and when everything in
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: your house and everything your fathers have stored up until
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: this day, will be carried to Babylon, nothing will be left,
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: and some of your own sons will be taken away
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: to serve in the palace of the King of Babylon.
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: Hezekiah's response has troubled readers for three thousand years. He said,
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: the word of the Lord is good, for he thought
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: there will be peace and security in my days. He
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: was relieved the judgment would not arrive in his lifetime.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: He accepted it and went on living in the comfort
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: of the borrowed years. Manassa was somewhere in the palace
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: when Isiah delivered that prophecy. We do not know how
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: old he was. We do not know whether he was
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: in the room or heard it later in fragments. But
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: the prophecy was now part of the heir. The palace breathed.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: The city that had watched one hundred and eighty five
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: thousand bodies in the dawn light. Was also a city
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: that had heard its greatest prophet say, the Babyloni are coming,
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: and your sons will not escape them. What does that
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: do to a child growing up inside those walls? We
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: cannot know for certain, but we will see the effects. Now.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: Let us speak about the name, because in the Hebrew tradition,
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: a name is never simply a label. A name is
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: the first declaration a being is given before it has
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: done anything at all. The name Manassah comes from the
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: Hebrew root nassah, meaning to cause, to forget, to bring
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: about the forgetting of something painful. When Joseph named his
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: first born manasse in the Book of Genesis, he said,
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: it is because God has made me forget all my
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: hardship and all my father's house. The name was a release,
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: a grateful exhale, the forgetting of suffering. When Hezekiah named
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: his son Manassa, perhaps he meant something similar. This child
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: born in the added years makes me forget how close
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: I came to death. This child world is the sign
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: that the borrowed time was worth having. But there is
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: another way to read that name. Knowing what Manassa became,
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: he caused the forgetting, not of suffering of God. He
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: caused an entire nation to forget the God who had
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: moved the shadow backward on the sun dial of ahaz,
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: to forget the morning of the one hundred and eighty
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: five thousand, to forget the sound of trumpets in a
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: restored temple, and the weeping of people who had waited
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: years to hear that sound again. He caused the forgetting,
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: and the forgetting lasted for the length of the longest
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: reign in the history of the kingdom, fifty five years.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: But we are not yet to the darkness. We are
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: still here in the long golden light of the Father's story,
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: still in the city that woke up to the miracle,
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: still hearing the trumpets and the singers, and the weeping
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: of old people who had held the covenant in whispers
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: during the long years, and who stood in the rics
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: stored temple that morning and heard the sound return. The
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: thing came about suddenly. That word belongs to the tradition
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: that preserved this story. It is the word for the
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: thing that happens when every visible sign says it is impossible,
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: and it happens anyway. Hezekiah knew that word in his bones.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: He had lived it twice. His son would spend fifty
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: five years trying to make a nation forget it. He
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: would not fully succeed. The word is still here tonight,
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: in this room, in the tradition that has carried it
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: across twenty seven centuries without losing it. Suddenly. Chapter two,
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: a child king in a broken world. Manassa became King
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: of Judah at twelve years old. Twelve, not twelve in
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: the way we sometimes imagine ancient kings as small adults,
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: already hardened by the world they were born into, twelve,
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: the way twelve has always been caught between not yet
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: and already old enough to understand that his father was
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: gone and that the throne was his, not old enough
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: to understand what either of those things fully meant. The
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: streets of Jerusalem on the morning of his coronation would
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: have been quiet in a particular way, the quietness of
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: a city waiting, of a people who understood, in the
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: way that people always understand these things before they can
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: say them out loud, that the death of a great
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: man and the crowning of a child in his place
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: was a moment of enormous vulnerability, That the door was
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: open that whoever walked through it first would shape what
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: came next. Those who walked through it first were not
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: people who loved the child. They were people who had
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: been waiting for the child's father to die. Because there
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: is always a silence when a powerful person dies, and
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: there are always people who have been patient and still
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: and strategically quiet watching for exactly this. The priests of
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: the gods Hezekiah had suppressed had not disappeared. Their altars
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: had been torn down and their practices driven from public life.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: But the people who believed in those practices, or profited
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: from them, or simply resented the disruption that the reform
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: had brought to the comfortable arrangements of the previous generation.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: They were still there, waiting for a twelve year old
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: who had no formed convictions of his own and no
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: farther to protect him from the people who were about
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: to fill that absence with their own agendas. Some one
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: who has spent decades working with young people whose formation
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: happened in the wrong hands puts it this way. The
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: child given enormous responsibility before they have the inner resources
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: to carry it is not simply a child who will
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: make mistakes. They are a child who will be made
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: into something by the people who move into the space
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: their vulnerability creates. The question is never only what choices
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: did they make? The question is always also what was
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: done to them first and by whom? And in the
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: years when the formation could not yet be refused. Both
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: questions matter, neither one counsels the other. Think about the
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: voices that would have filled the silence left by Hezekiah's death.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: Your father was a great man, yes, but his reforms
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: created powerful enemies. His insistence on centralizing worship at Jerusalem
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: offended people who had worshiped faithfully on the hills for generations.
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: The gods that the Assyrian Empire honors and prospers under
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: your father's rigidity in refusing them was, if we are honest,
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: a liability, A wise king honors the powers that govern
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: the world, And there are many powers, young king, there
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: are always many powers. We do not know those were
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: the exact words, but they were the available arguments, and
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: they were being made by men who had everything to
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: gain from From a twelve year old deciding that his
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: father's legacy was a limitation rather than a gift. There
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: is something else. The tradition does not state directly, but
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: which the geography of Manassa's childhood makes almost unavoidable. He
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: had never seen his father's greatest moments. The Assyrian Crisis
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: happened before he was born, the restoration of the temple,
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: the great Passover, the morning the trumpets sounded and the
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: old people wept with joy. All of that was finished
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: before Manassa existed. He grew up in the afterglow of
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: things he had not witnessed, hearing stories about a god
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: who had done extraordinary things for his father, looking at
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: a temple that had been restored, yes, but which must
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: have looked as the years settled, the extraordinary into the ordinary,
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: increasingly like simply a building in a city full of buildings.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: He had never seen the fire fall. He had only
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: heard that it had fallen once for his father, in
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: a world that no longer looked exactly like that world
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: any more. This is a grief the tradition recognizes, even
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: when it does not name it directly, the grief of
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: the generation that comes after the revival. The children of
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: the people who wept in the temple, they did not weep.
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: They arrived after the weeping sit to a world changed
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: by something they did not experience first hand, and were
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: expected to live as though they had. Some of them
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: find their own fire. In the tradition, they inherit. Josiah
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: will be one of those. But Josiah is many years
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: and two kings away from where we are standing now.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: Manassa went looking for fire in other places, and he
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: found it. Not the fire that fell on Elijah's altar
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: on Mount Carmel, not the fire of God descending into
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: a restored temple while the trumpets sounded and the people wept,
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: a different fire, the fire that would eventually give the
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: world its word for the place where hope runs out entirely.
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: But we are not yet there. We are still here
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: in the morning of the coronation, with a twelve year
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: old boy in the clothes of a king, the streets
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: outside the palace quiet, the voices inside already speaking, the
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: silence left by his father, very large and very full
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: of people who were not his father. Before we follow
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: him into the darkness he is about to build. It
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: is worth pausing here to grieve the boy, not the king,
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: not the man who will make the choices. The history
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: records the boy, the one who lost his father too soon,
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: and inherited too much and was surrounded by people whose
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: first interest was never him. The tradition that preserved this
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: story did not preserve it to condemn without understanding it.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: Preserved it because his story contains things that are true
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: about power and formation and what happens to children given
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: more than they can hold and less than they need hold.
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: Both questions what did he do and what was done
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: to him? First? The story is only beginning chapter three
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: the systematic dismantling. A king does not simply rule a kingdom.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: A king defines its imagination. He tells the kingdom what
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: is real, what is legitimate, what the gods require, whether
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: the old obligations still apply or whether the new world
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: has outgrown them. When a king builds an altar, he
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: is not only building an altar. He is telling every
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: person in the kingdom that the building of that altar
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: is acceptable, that the god it honors is worth honoring,
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: that the world is the kind of world in which
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: that altar belongs. Manasse began to build. He rebuilt the
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: high places his father had destroyed. He restored the altars
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: to bale. He erected an asher, a pole in the
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: temple of Yahweh. He built altars to the host of
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: heaven in the two courts of the temple itself. He
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: introduced divination and augury, and the use of mediums and spiritists.
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: He made his son pass through fire. The text of
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: Second Kings lists these things with a precision that is
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: itself a form of grief. Each item recorded, each location
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: specified as if the writer understood that the weight of
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: what happened could only be conveyed by refusing to summarize it,
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: by making the reader stay with each specific desecration in
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: each specific place before moving to the next. Let us
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: stay with that precision for a moment. The high places
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: were the ancient worship sits scattered across the hills and
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: valleys of the land. Long before Israel arrived in Canaan,
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: these elevated locations had been used for religious ceremonies. The
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: peoples who lived there believed the gods were more accessible
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: at height. When Israel entered the land, the covenant required
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: a single authorized site of worship where sacrifice would be
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: offered under proper oversight. The high places were supposed to
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: be replaced instead. Over generations, many Israelites had continued to
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: use them, some for the worship of foreign gods, some
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: in sincere but unauthorized attempts to worship the God of
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: the covenant. Hezekiah had destroyed them all, not selectively, all
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: of them, because the fragmentation of worship across hundreds of
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: private altars made the shared covenant practically impossible to sustain.
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: When everyone has their own altar on their own hill,
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: the concept of a national covenant with a single god
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: who holds everyone to the same standard becomes a courtesy
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: rather than a reality. The center cannot hold what the
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: periphery keeps quietly undoing. Manasse rebuilt what his father had
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: torn down. Baal was not a new problem in it Israel.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: He was the storm god, the rain god, the deity
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: whose favor was believed to determine whether crops grew or
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: failed in an agricultural society where rain meant survival. The
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: argument for Baal was not primarily theological. It was the
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: argument of neighboring peoples who pointed to their productive land
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: and their prosperous cities and asked, simply, why are you
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: insisting on an invisible god whose demands are so comprehensive
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: when these gods are available and known to deliver on
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: the things that matter most. It was the argument that
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: had worked on Israel for generations before Elijah stood on
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: Mount Carmel and called fire from heaven to answer it directly.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: Under Manassa, it worked again, But Manassa did not stop.
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: At the high places and the altars of Baal. He
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: erected an ashera pole in the Temple of Yahweh, in
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: the house Solomon had built, in the place where the
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: ark of the cover and rested, in the most sacred
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: space in the entire nation, the one place above all
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: others reserved for the undivided worship of the God who
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: had brought Israel out of Egypt. He placed the symbol
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: of the fertility goddess there. This was not compromise. It
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: was a statement. It said, in physical form and without apology,
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: that the house of Israel's God was large enough for
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: other gods, that the first commandment, you shall have no
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: other gods before me was negotiable, that the God who
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: had said, I am the Lord your God, and there
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: is no other, was going to share space. He also
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: worshiped the host of heaven. The Assyrian empire that dominated
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: the political world of Manassa's reign was deeply invested in
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: astral religion. The movements of the sun and moon and
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: planets were tracked obsessively. The stars were understood as gods
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: or expressions of gods, whose positions determined the fate of
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: king's kingdoms. Judah was a vassal state under Assyrian dominance
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: for most of Manasse's reign, and vassal states absorbed the
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: religious practices of the dominant power the way smaller rivers
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: absorb the current of larger ones, not always by force,
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: sometimes simply by the desire to be modern, to be
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: part of the larger world, rather than the isolated people
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: who insisted on their peculiar covenant with an invisible god.
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: Pause here for a moment. Let that picture settle. The
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: two courts of the Temple of Yahweh, the house his
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: father had restored with such cost and such joy, now
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: holding altars to the movements of the stars, the sacred
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: space of the covenant repurposed as an observatory for gods
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: that the covenant had named as rivals. This is the
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: center giving way. Someone who has spent a career studying
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: ancient Near Eastern political history puts it this way, we
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: should not mistake what Manassa did for chaos. It had
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: a logic, the logic of a small nation trying to
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: survive in the shadow of the largest empire the ancient
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: world had yet produced, the logic of cultural accommodation, of
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: deciding that the distinctive claims of your own tradition were
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: a liability in a world where the empire's religious framework
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: was the framework that mattered. That logic does not excuse
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: what followed, but it explains how it could spread so
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: completely and last so long. And then came the practices
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: divinasjun auguri, necromancy, the summoning of the dead for consultation,
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: the use of mediums and spiritists, all of it explicitly
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: forbidden by the Law of Moses, not as minor regulations,
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: but as fundamental betrayals of trust. Because in the world
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: view of the Covenant, these practices were not simply ineffective.
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: They were the declaration that the God of Israel was
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: not enough, that the future he held was not sufficient
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: to navigate, that other powers needed to be consulted to
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: fill what God had left uncertain. Manassa declared by royal
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: practice that God was not enough, and the people followed.
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: He was not compromising at the margins. He was compromising
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: at the center, and the center, once compromised, bleeds outward
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: into everything connected to it. The prophet Isaiah, who had
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: served through the entire reign of Hezekiah and had seen
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: the restoration and the revival and the morning after the
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: one hundred and eighty five thousand, was watching all of this,
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: watching the work of decades being dismantled, watching the temple
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: that had been cleansed being defiled, watching the people who
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: had wept with joy at the return of worship being
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: led generation by generation back into everything the covenant had
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: been given to protect them from. He could not be silent.
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: He had never been capable of silence, and that incapacity
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: would cost him everything. There is one more item in
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: the accounting of these years, one that belongs in a
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: chapter of its own, because the weight of it cannot
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: be carried alongside the others. The altars and the pole
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: in the temple, and the practices introduced into the sacred
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: courts are things that human beings have done in every culture,
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: in every age, when the invisible God has seemed too
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: distant or too demanding, what Manassa did next is not
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: in that category. It happened in a valley just outside
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: the walls of Jerusalem, in a place whose name the
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: world has never been able to forget. Chapter four, The
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: Fire of Molek. South of Jerusalem's walls, where the city
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: ends and the land drops away into a steep and
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: narrow ravine, there is a valley. Its name in Hebrew
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: is gay Ben Hinnom, the valley of the Sun of Hinnom.
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: No record survives to tell us who Hinnam was. He
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: appears nowhere else in the historical documents. He left behind
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: only a place name and a geography that would carry
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: for centuries after his time the weight of what happened there.
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: To day, the valley is a quiet park. There are
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: trees and walking paths and the ordinary green stillness of
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: a place that has learned to wear a peaceful face
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: over a memory. It does not advertise. People walk there
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: in the morning, children play there. Nothing about its present
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: appearance asks the questions that its history requires. But during
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: the reign of Manassea this valley held a site called tofith.
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: The exact origin of the word is debated. Some scholars
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: trace it to a route connected to hearth or fireplace.
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: Others suggest the name itself may have been altered at
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: some point by scribes who could not bring themselves to
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: preserve the original without marking it with the horror it carried.
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: What happened at Tofith was the offering of children in fire.
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: We must be honest about what the scholarship looks like here,
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: because the tradition requires us to be truthful rather than sensational.
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: The exact nature of the ritual has been debated for generations.
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: Some careful scholars have argued that the fires involved a
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: ceremony of dedication rather than outright death. Others examining the
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: same Biblical texts alongside archaeological evidence from related sites, have
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: concluded that the practice was lethal. The Biblical text uses
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: language that leans toward the more terrible interpretation. The prophet Jeremiah,
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: writing in the Generation after Manassa, says explicitly that God
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: never commanded this, and that it never even entered his mind.
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: The specific emphasis that it no ever entered his mind
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: suggests something entirely outside the imaginative framework of the Covenant,
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: not a distorted version of something commanded, something wholly foreign
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: to everything the Covenant represented. The text of Second Kings
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: records that Manassa made his son pass through fire. We
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: will not dwell on the images beyond what the record requires,
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: not because the tradition softens them. It does not, but
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: because this is sleep content, and the tradition's own restraint
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: in describing these events is itself a form of respect
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: for those who suffered them. The tradition preserved this to remember,
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: not to display. Let us speak instead about the geography,
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: because here the landscape of Manassa's sin becomes the landscape
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: of the New Testament's language. For ultimate consequence, Yi ben
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: Hinnom the valley of the Sun of Hinnom. In the
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: Aramaic spoken by the time of Jesus, this contras acted
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: to Gehinum. In the Greek of the New Testament, it
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: became Gehenna, the word that most English translations render as hell.
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: When Jesus uses the word Gehenna in the Gospels, he
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: is pointing to a place his listeners knew, a location
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: outside Jerusalem's walls that had been associated for centuries with
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: the worst that human beings could choose. The fires that
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: burned in the time of Manasseh had left a permanent
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: mark on the imagination of the tradition. The valley became
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: across the generations the symbol for the ultimate consequence of
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: following the road away from God far enough and long
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: enough to arrive at its actual destination. Jesus did not
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: invent the language. He inherited it from this valley, and
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: his audience understood immediately what he was pointing to, not
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: an abstraction, a real place, just outside the walls of
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: the city, where his own ministry would end, and where
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: the smoke had once risen. And the tradition had said this,
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: this is what the road looks like when it reaches
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: its end. Manassa put Gehenna on the map of the tradition,
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: not by naming it, by filling it. Now let us
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: ask why, not to excuse, but to understand. In the
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: religious framework surrounding the worship of Molek, the sacrifice of
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: the most precious thing a person possessed was the highest
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: expression of devotion. You could not offer more than your child.
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: And if the stakes were high enough, if the survival
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: of the kingdom seemed to depend on securing the favor
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: of the most powerful deity available, then the terrible arithmetic
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: of the offering made its own terrible sense to those
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: who had already accepted the framework that made it sensible.
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: This is not an explanation that removes guilt. It is
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: an observation about how human beings can arrive at atrocity
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: through a series of steps that ea each seem within
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: the logic of where they have already gone, like the
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: next reasonable thing. Manassa had been building toward Topeth for years.
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: Each altar erected in the wrong place was a step.
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: Each foreign god installed in the sacred courts was a
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: redefinition of what the sacred meant and what it required.
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: By the time the fires of Tofeth were burning, the
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: man who lit them had traveled very far from the
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: world his father had tried to build. There is one
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: more thing to say before we leave this valley. The
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: children who died there had names. The text did not
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: preserve them. The tradition could not recover them. They are
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: among the unnamed, the ones the record failed to hold individually,
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: but they were known the God who had said, before
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Who
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: had said a sparrow does not fall apart from the Father,
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: that God was watching the valley of the Son of Hinham,
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: was watching and recording. In the accounting that no human
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: document can access every name the human document failed to preserve.
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: The tradition insists on this not as a resolution of
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: the horror, but as the only truthful thing that can
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: be said when the worst has happened and the names
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: have been lost, and the valley has grown quiet again
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: under the mercy of passing time. They were known. Then
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: they are known still. The fires have been cold for
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: three thousand years, but the God who watched them burn
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: has not forgotten a single one. Chapter five, The Blood
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: of Isaiah. In the eleventh chapter of the Letter to
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: the Hebrews, there is a passage that has stopped careful
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: readers for two thousand years. The writer is moving through
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: the heroes of faith in the Hebrew scriptures, naming them,
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: honoring them, describing what they trusted and what their trust cost.
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: And then, after naming those famous enough to name individually,
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: the writer turns to those whose stories are too numerous
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: to tell and says simply that they were tortured and
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: refused release, that they faced jeers and flogging, that they
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: were chained and imprisoned, that they were stoned and killed
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: by the sword, and then a single phrase inserted among
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: the others without elaboration, they were sworn in two Not
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: a common method of execution. Not the kind of detail
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: a writer includes for rhetorical effect. The kind of detail
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: that is included because the tradition behind it was specific
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: and old, and the writer expected his readers to know
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: which story he was pointing to. Ancient Jewish tradition preserved
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: most fully in a text known as The Martyrdom and
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: Ascension of Isaiah, records what that tradition believed happened to
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: the greatest prophet of the Hebrew Scriptures during the reign
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: of manasse This document exists in multiple ancient languages. It
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: describes Manassa's turn to idolatry, the systematic persecution of the prophets,
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: and Isiah's withdrawal into hiding in the wilderness with a
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: small group of those who remained faithful, and then it
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: describes the end. According to this ancient tradition, soldiers were
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: sent to find Isaiah. They found him, and the tradition
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: says he was placed inside a hollow log and executed there.
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: We must be clear about what this is and what
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: it is not. This account is not in the canonical
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: books of Kings or chronicles. It is an ancient tradition
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: preserved in texts outside the Hebrew Bible, whose historical reliability
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: cannot be confirmed the way canonical texts can be engaged.
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: What we can say is that the tradition is old,
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: that it is consistent a cross multiple ancient sources, that
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: the phrase in Hebrews eleven appears to point toward it,
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: and that the account in Second Kings, which says Manassa
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: shed very much innocent blood until he had filled Jerusalem
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: from one end to the other, is fully consistent with
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: a climate in which this kind of death was possible.
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: What the ancient tradition remembers is this Isiah died during
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: the reign of Manasseh, and if that tradition holds, he
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: died because he could not be silent about what he saw.
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: That silence would have required him to stand down from
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: the commission he had received in the year Usiah died
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: in the vision of the throne room filled with smoke
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: and the sound of Seraphim calling Holy, Holy, Holy, When
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: a cold from the altar was pressed to his lips
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: and a voice said, go and speak. He had been
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: speaking for decades, through the reign of Jotham, through the
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: reign of Ahaz, through the long years of Hezekiah. He
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: had been in the room when Hezekiah prayed toward the wall.
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: He had delivered the word about the fifteen added years.
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: He had warned about Babylon. He had seen the restoration
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: of the temple and heard the trumpets and the weeping,
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: and then he had watched Manassea begin to dismantle it.
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: He could not have watched in silence. The book that
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: bears his name makes this clear across every chapter. The
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: God who had touched his lips with a cold from
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: the altar and said go and speak, had not rescinded
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: the commission when speaking became dangerous, And so, according to
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: the ancient tradition, the prophet who could not be silent
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: was silenced in the most final way available to the
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: king who needed him quiet. The voice was stopped, the
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: words were not This is the first and most important
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: thing to say about the meaning of what the tradition remembers.
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: The Book of Isaiah survived him, was copied and preserved
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: and carried through the exile and included in the Cannon,
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: and became by the time of the New Testament the
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: prophetic book more frequently than any other. The words outlived
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: the man who spoke them by twenty seven centuries and
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: are still being heard tonight. Manassa, if the ancient tradition
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: is accurate, intended to end the voice. He ended only
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: the man, and the man had already said everything that
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: needed to be said. The prophet who wrote about the
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: one who would be wounded for our transgressions, crushed for
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: our iniquities, whose punishment would bring us peace, whose wounds
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: would bring healing. Those words outlived the man by twenty
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: seven centuries and are still arriving in rooms to night.
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: You cannot kill a word by killing the man who
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: spoke it. There is a grief in this that the
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: tradition has never resolved into something comfortable, and should not.
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: Isaiah had seen further than almost any one who had
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: ever lived. He had written about a child to be born,
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: about a government on his shoulders, about a name that
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: would be called wonderful counselor Mighty God, everlast Father, Prince
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: of Peace. He had written about the one who would
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: be despised and rejected, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief,
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: who would be led like a sheep to the slaughter
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: and not open his mouth. And then, according to the
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: ancient tradition, he died in a hollow log at the
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: order of a king, whose story, as we will see,
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: was not yet finished. The prophet who described the suffering
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: servant became in the tradition's memory, one of them. The
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: Letter to the Hebrews says, of those who died this
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: way of whom the world was not worthy, Let that
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: land do not move past it. The world was not
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: worthy of them, not the other way around. The city
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: that filled its valley with fire, and silenced its prophets,
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: and built its altars in the courts of the House
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: of God was not worthy of the voice. It extinguished.
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: It rarely is. And yet the voice did not stop.
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: The commission given in the year Usiah died in the
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: temple filled with smoke, and the sound of Holy, Holy,
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: Holy was not concluded by the hollow log. It was
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: still in motion, still traveling through the centuries, still arriving
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: tonight in this room. In the tradition that carried it
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: without losing a word. The voice was not silenced, not then,
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: not ever. Chapter six, The silence of God fifty five years.
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: Say that number slowly, and let it take up the
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: space it deserves. Fifty five years. The reign of manasse
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: over the Kingdom of Judah lasted fifty five years, the
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: longest reign of any king in the history of Judah,
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: Longer than David's forty years, longer than Solomon's forty years,
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: longer than the reigns of Hezekiah and Josiah combined. Fifty
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: five years of the most destructive leadership the Covenant people
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: had ever experienced, and the man at the center of
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: it died peacefully in his own bed and was buried
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: in the garden of his own house. If you have
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: ever sat in a long season of apparent divine silence
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: and felt the cold logic of it pressing against your faith,
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: this chapter is for you. The silence of God during
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: the reign of Manassa is one of the most difficult
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: passages in the entire story of Israel to sit with. Honestly,
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: not the silence of a chapter or a year, the
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: silence of more than half a century, fifty five years
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: during which the altars stood and the fires burned in
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: the valley, and the prophets died, and the culture of
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: the Covenant was systematically replaced by everything the Covenant had
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: been given to protect Israel from. And the sky did
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: not open. No angel came in the night to destroy
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: Manassa's forces, the way an angel had destroyed the Assyrian
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: camp in his father's time. No fire fell on the
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: False ord as the way fire had fallen on Elijah's
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: altar on Mount Carmel. No voice spoke from the cloud,
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: No earthquake shook the high places down. For fifty five years,
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: the silence held, And the question that silence asks is
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: the question that every generation of honest believers eventually has
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: to face. Where was God? Let us not rush past
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: that question, let us not cover it with a tidy
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: theological answer before it has actually landed, Because it is
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: the question of the psalms of Lament, the question of
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: the Book of Job, the question that Jesus himself cried
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: from the cross in the words of the twenty second psalm,
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? The
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: tradition does not answer this question by eliminating it. It
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: holds it intens with everything else. It knows begin with
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: what the silence was not. The silence was not ignorance.
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: Second King's records that God spoke through his servants the
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: prophets during this period. The Lord said, because Manassa king
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: of Judah, has committed these abominations and has done things
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: more evil than all that the Amorites did who were
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: before him, I am bringing upon Jerusalem and Judah such
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: disaster that the ears of every one who hears of
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: it will tingle. I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down. The
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: prophets were still speaking, not into silence on God's side,
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: into the silence of a culture that had decided it
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: already had all the voices it needed. God was not absent,
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: not unaware, not looking elsewhere. He was speaking into a
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: room that had redecorated itself with other gods and closed
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: the windows against the voice it did not want to hear.
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: The silence was also not permission. This is the temptation
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: that long silence creates. The old went up, and the
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: sky did not split open. The fires burned in the valley,
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: and the temple was not consumed in protest. The prophets
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: were killed, and the sun rose the next morning, and
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: the city continued to function, And in the logic of
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: a man who had committed himself to a particular course,
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: this ongoing normalcy became readable as validation, as the absence
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: of disapproval. There is a Hebrew phrase that speaks directly
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: to this temptation. The phrase is rik apaim, literally long
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: of nostrils. It refers to the flaring of the nostrils
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: in anger. A short tempered person has short nostrils. Metaphorically,
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: the anger rises fast and expresses itself immediately. God's nostrils
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: are long. The patience is real, and the patience is long,
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: and the patience must never be mistaken for indifference. Eric
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: Apaim Manassa spent fifty five years testing the length of
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: those nostrils, and the patience held not because the God
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: was absent, because the God, whose patience is one of
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: his most consistent and most misunderstood attributes, was doing something
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: with the silence that the people inside the silence could
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: not see. Someone who has spent years teaching the Hebrew
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: scriptures says this to students who struggle with the silence
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: of God in this period. The hardest thing about reading
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: these fifty five years is that you are reading them
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: from the outside. You can see the whole ark. You
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: know what comes after. You know about the exile and
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: the return, and the book found in the temple, and
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: the Covenant renewed under Josiah. But the people living inside
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: the fifty five years could not see any of that.
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: They only knew that the altars were up, and the
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: prophets were dying, and the sky was not opening. That,
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: she says, is actually the more honest reading position, because
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: most of us and not standing outside our own story
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: watching the whole ark. Most of us are somewhere in
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: the middle of our own fifty five years, watching the
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: altars go up, waiting for the sky to open, not
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: knowing what the next chapter contains. The silence of God
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: during Manasse's reign was not the silence of a God
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: who had given up or lost interest, or been out
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: maneuvered by the scale of the unfaithfulness around him. It
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: was the silence of a God whose patience is genuinely
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: longer than human patience, and whose purposes move through time
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: at a pace that does not conform to the urgency
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: of the moment inside which we are standing. This is
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: hard theology. It does not make the silence comfortable. It
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: does not make the deaths of the prophets less terrible,
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: or the fires in the valley less real, or the
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: fifty five years feel shorter from the inside. But it
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: is honest, and honesty is what this tradition has always
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: insisted on, even when comfort would have been easier. Now
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: let us speak about the seven Thousand. You will remember
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: them from the story of Elijah. When Elijah sat under
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: the broom tree and declared himself the last faithful person
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: remaining in Israel, God told him there were seven thousand
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: in Israel whose knees had not bowed to bal seven
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: thousand whose faithfulness was quiet and individual and invisible to Elijah,
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: because it was expressed not in dramatic public confrontations, but
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: in private, daily, uncelebrated fidelity. The principle holds in the
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: days of Manassa, in the fifty five years of his reign,
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: there were people in Jerusalem and throughout Judah who had
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: not forgotten, who kept the Covenant in private when keeping
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: it in public had become dangerous, who taught their children
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: in whispers what the law said, and who the God
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: of Israel was who copied the words of Isaiah on
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: to new scrolls and hid them and passed them to
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: people they trusted and waited in the faithfulness the tradition
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: honors for something they could not yet see. Their names
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: are not in the text, Like the children in the
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: Valley of the Son of Hinnham, they are among the unnamed.
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: But the tradition itself survived. The scrolls were kept, the
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: words were not lost. When the silence finally broke and
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: the long arc of consequence arrived, there was still a
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: community who remembered what they were being restored to, who
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: knew what the trumpets in a restored temple sounded like,
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: who could weep at the reading of the words, because
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: the words were reaching something in them that had not
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: been fully extinguished. No matter how long the silence had lasted,
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: the silence of God during Manass's reign did not extinguish
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: the faithful. It concentrated them. It removed from the community
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: of the Covenant everyone who was there only because it
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: was comfortable and socially approved, and left behind the people
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: who were there because they could not imagine being anywhere else.
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: And now, after the inventory of the altars, and the fires,
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: and the dead prophets, and the long silence of the sky.
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: The text brings us to the words that finally broke it.
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: I will bring upon Jerusalem and Judah such disaster that
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: the ears of every one who hears of it will tingle.
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: it and turning it upside down. I will forsake the
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: remnant of my heritage and give them into the hand
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: of their enemies. The measuring line of Samaria stretched over Jerusalem.
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: The plum line of the House of Ahab dropped against
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: the walls of David's city. The silence was over, the
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: verdict was recorded. But the story of Manassa does not
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: stop at the verdict, Because somewhere in the distance, in
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: the imperial machinery of the Empire, Manassa had spent fifty
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: five years accommodating something was being prepared for him, something
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: that would arrive not as the fire from heaven he
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: had been testing the patience of God to produce, but
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: as something altogether more personal. Chains, and the chains, as
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: terrible as they were, would turn out to be the
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: most merciful thing that ever happened to him. Rest here
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: in the weight of the verdict and the stillness of
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: what is coming. The silence is over, and what comes
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: next will change everything. Chapter seven, Chains of Babylon. A
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: senior commander in the Assyrian Imperial Army had seen many
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: defeated kings. He had watched them brought in from the
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: western provinces, from the coastal cities and the hill kingdoms,
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: and the small, stubborn nations that had miscalculated their position
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: in the imperial order. He had watched them walk the
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: long corridor of the Administrative Palace in Babylon, still wearing
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: the clothes of their courts, but wearing them differently now,
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: the way a man wears the clothes of a previous
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: life when the previous life is finished. He had watched
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: their faces in the moment when they understood finally and
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: completely that the world they had built around themselves was
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: not coming back. He had seen many of them, but
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: he had rarely seen one arrive the way this one arrived.
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: The King of Judah came in hooked and chained. The
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: practice of leading a defeated king with a hook through
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: the nose or cheek was documented in Assyrian military records
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: and depicted in the bas relief sculptures that lined the
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: corridors of Assyrian palaces. It was not simply a method
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: of restraint. It was a statement. It said, the man
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: who arrived here, believing himself sovereign over his own person
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: and his own kingdom, has discovered that he was neither.
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: He is led now the way animals are led by
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: a ring through the most vulnerable part of his face,
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: by the instrument that removes the last pretense of dignity.
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: The man who had spent fifty five years installing the
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: gods of the Assyrian world in the temple of Yahweh
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: was led through the gates of Babylon in bronze chains.
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: The text of Second Chronicles is brief. The commanders of
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: the army of the King of Assyria captured Manassa with
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: hooks and bound him with bronze chains, and brought him
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: to Babylon. No description of the battle or the siege,
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: or the political miscalculation that preceded it, only the fact
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: of the chains and the hook and the foreign city.
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: But the brevity is not emptiness, it is compression. The
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: tradition has packed into those two lines the entire weight
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: of what it means for the most powerful man in
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: a small kingdom to discover that his power was always
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: conditional on the patience of a larger power. He had
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: spent fifty five years accommodating and imitating and appeasing, and
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: had somehow never fully understood was not his friend. Let
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: us ask the histo oracle question honestly, because it matters
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: for understanding what we are reading. The Assyrian Empire, under
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: Isahadden and his successor Ashurbanipal, maintained detailed administrative records, lists
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: of vassal kings, tribute accounts, documents naming the rulers of
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: subject territories and recording their obligations to the empire. And
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: in documents unearthed from the ruins of ancient Nineveh, there
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: are references to a king of Judah. The documents list
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: him as Manasi of Yordi Manasseh of Judah. He appears
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: in at least two separate Assyrian records, once in a
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: list of kings commanded to provide building materials for a
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: royal construction project, and once in a list of kings
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: participating in a military campaign on behalf of the Assyrian
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: king These records do not describe his capture. They describe
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: his service as a functioning vassal, but they confirmed that
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: he was real, that his relationship with Assyria was documented
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: on both sides, and that the biblical account of Judah's
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: position within the Assyrian imperial system is historically coherent. The
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: man in the chains was a man the empire's own
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: records remembered. The capture fits a pattern that Assyrian records
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: document for other vassal kings. When a vassal was suspected
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: of disloyalty, of reaching toward a rival power, or of
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: failing to deliver adequate tribute. The response was personal and swift,
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: not simply a military campaign against the kingdom. The king
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: himself was taken, removed from his throne, brought to the
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: imperial center as a demonstration that no local authority provided
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: protection against the long reach of the empire. Why Manassa
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: specifically at this specific moment, the text does not say.
• 55:55
  Speaker 1: The historical context of the mid seventh century before Christ
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: as one of significant instability in the Assyrian Empire. The
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: transition between Esa Hadden and Asherbanopl produced the kind of
• 56:08
  Speaker 1: uncertainty that vassal kings sometimes interpreted as opportunity. Coalitions formed,
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: alliances were tested. Kings who had been compliant under one
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: emperor sometimes miscalculated their position under the next. Perhaps Mnasse
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: reached toward the wrong power at the wrong moment. Perhaps
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: he withheld tribute. Perhaps he appeared suspicious to an imperial
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: administration watching its periphery carefully for signs of rebellion. Perhaps
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: the empire simply decided it was time to remind Judah
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: of its place. We do not know, and the why
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: of the capture matters less than the what of it.
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: The what is this? The man who had spent fifty
• 56:53
  Speaker 1: five years installing the gods of the Assyrian cultural world
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: in the Temple of Yahweh, who had built his entire
• 57:00
  Speaker 1: reign around the political and religious accommodation of the Empire,
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: was taken by that empire in chains. The gods he
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: had honored did not send soldiers to rescue him. The
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: host of Heaven, whose altars he had built in the
• 57:13
  Speaker 1: two courts of the temple, gave him no warning. The
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: mediums and diviners whose council he had sought had not
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: seen this coming. The Baal, whose reign he had courted
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: for fifty five years did not send a storm to
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: scatter the Assyrian soldiers. Everything he had trusted failed him
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: at the moment he most needed it to hold, and
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: he arrived in Babylon. The geography matters, not Nineveh, the
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: traditional Assyrian capital, Babylon the secondary administrative center used particularly
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: for the management of western vassal territories, and Babylon was
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: not simply a city in the imperial bureaucracy. In the
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: imagination of the Hebrew tradition, Babylon was the symbol the
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: city of human power are mad against the purposes of God,
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: the city that Isaiah had named in the prophecy he
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: delivered to Hezekiah in the palace that Manassa grew up,
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: in the city that would one day take everything Hezekiah
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: had shown to its envoys. Manassa arrived in that city
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: in chains. He had been building toward Babylon for fifty
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: five years, in ways he could not have chosen, and
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: would not have understood. Every altar erected in the courts
• 58:28
  Speaker 1: of the temple, every prophet silenced, every child sent through
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: the fires of the valley outside the walls, every step
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: taken in the direction of the Assyrian religious world had
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: been a step in the direction of this arrival. The
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: city Isaiah had named was the city his choices had
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: been accumulating toward all along. He arrived at the end
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: of everything he had built, and for the first time
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: in fifty five years, Manassa was alone with himself, not
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: physically alone, guards sir him. The machinery of imperial captivity
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: was entirely present, but inwardly alone in a way he
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: had not been since he was twelve years old, and
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: the palace had filled with voices eager to fill the
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: silence his father's death had left. Those voices were gone now.
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: The priests of Baal were in Jerusalem tending altars that
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: could not help him. The advisers who had shaped a
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: twelve year old into the king they needed were far
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: away and unreachable. The entire apparatus of the religious and
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: political system he had constructed across fifty five years, the system, designed,
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: among other things, to insulate him from certain questions, was
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: on the other side of a long road and a
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: set of bronze chains. And the question that the apparatus
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: had been insulating him from was right there in the cell,
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: in the dark, in the silence that was different from
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: the silence of the fifty five years. That silence had
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: been the silence of God holding judgment while his prophets
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: spoke and the culture drifted and the fires burned. This
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: silence was the silence of a man at the absolute
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: bottom of everything, with nothing left between himself and the
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: question he had been running from since before he knew
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: he was running. What is true, not what is useful,
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: not what is politically expedient, not what the men around
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: him had needed him to believe for their own purposes,
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: not what the silence of the sky had seemed to permit.
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: In a cell in Babylon, Hooked and chained, Stripped of
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: the throne and the altar and the court and the
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: fifty five years of accumulated justification, Manassa had nowhere left
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: to run from that question, and so for the first
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: time in his life, he stopped running and turned to
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: face it. Chapter eight, The Prayer in the Darkness. Let
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: us begin with a document. It is short, it is old.
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: It has been preserved in multiple ancient languages across more
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: than two thousand years, copied by monks in cold scriptoria,
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: and debated by scholars in warm studies and included in
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: some Christian Bibles as part of the duterocanonical texts, and
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: excluded from others, and argued over by careful readers who
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 1: cannot fully settle its trend, origins or its date. Before
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: we read from it, we must say clearly what it
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: is and what it is not. This prayer is not
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: found in the books of Kings or chronicles. It is
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: not part of the Hebrew Bible's canonical record. It is
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: a later ancient text associated with Manassa, preserved in certain
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: manuscript traditions and appearing in some versions of the Christian
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: Bible under the title the Prayer of Manassa. Second. Chronicles
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: mentions that Manassa prayed and that his prayer was recorded somewhere,
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: but that record has not survived in the canonical scriptures.
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: What we have instead is this ancient text, which many
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: scholars believe was composed in the spirit of what such
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: a prayer might have contained, drawing on the theological tradition
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: and the specific situation of the man described in Chronicles.
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: Are we read it tonight not as the verified words
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: of Manassa himself, but as the tradition's most sustained attempt
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: to imagine what a man at the absolute bottom of
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: everything might have said when he turned finally and completely
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: toward the God he had spent fifty five years avoiding.
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: Whether it is his exact words or a later composition,
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: what it says is either true about the nature of God,
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: or it is the most extravagant and beautiful piece of
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 1: theological fiction ever composed. There is no middle position. The
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: prayer opens with praise, not the polished liturgical praise of
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: a man trained to open prayers correctly, the praise of
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: a man stripped of everything false and left with only
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: what is real. And what is real in this moment
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: is the overwhelming fact of who God is. Lord, Almighty
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: God of our ancestors, of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: and their righteous offspring, You who made heaven and earth
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: with all their adornment, You who shackled the sea by
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: your word of command, who inclosed the deep and sealed
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 1: it with your awesome and glorious name, You before whom
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: all things shudder and tremble because of your great power.
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: The man who spent fifty five years installing the images
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: of other gods in the temple of this God is
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: standing before him now in chains in Babylon. And the
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: first thing he does is describe him accurately, not the
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: diminished God of the compromised reign, the God who had
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: to share space with bal and a shearer and the
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: host of heaven, the God who made heaven and earth,
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: the God before whom all things shudder and tremble. He
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: is not negotiating, He is not positioning. He is speaking
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: to someone He now knows is there has always been.
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: There was there during every year of the fifty five.
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: Was there in the valley of the son of Hinnham,
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: Was there watching and recording and grieving in ways the
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: silence had concealed but had not negated. He knows now
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: that the God is real. The chains taught him that,
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: The hook taught him that. The foreign city and the
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: foreign guards, and the absolute collapse of everything he had
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: built his world around taught him that. And knowing this,
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: he continues, Your mercy is immeasurable, and your goodness is
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: beyond reckoning. You are the Lord long suffering, most merciful,
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: and you relent at human suffering, long suffering. Eric Apaim
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: long of nostrils, the phrase from the Hebrew tradition that
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: describes the patience of God as a physical slowness of anger,
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: a genuine and structural un willingness to move immediately to judgment.
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: Manassa had spent fifty five years living off the far
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: edge of that patience, and now in the chains it
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 1: had finally delivered him to, he was naming it, acknowledging it,
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: recognizing that the patience which had allowed the fifty five
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: years was not the indifference of an absent God, but
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: the restraint of one whose mercy is immeasurable and whose
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: goodness is beyond reckoning. He reaches the center of the prayer. You, Lord,
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: God of the Righteous, have not appointed repentance for the righteous,
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: for Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who did not sin against you.
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: But you have appointed repentance for me, who am a sinner,
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: for me, who am a sinner. Five words, but they
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: carry the weight of a lifetime. The man who had
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: filled Jerusalem with innocent blood, who had put the asher
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: a pole in the temple and the altars of Bahal
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: in the courts, and sent his son through the fires
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: of Tophith, who had, according to the ancient tradition, ordered
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: the silencing of the greatest prophet his nation had ever produced.
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: That man is saying, without qualification and without the subtle
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: reservation of a person who is confessing in form while
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: holding something back in substance, that he is a sinner,
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: that the repentance God has appointed is for him, That
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: he is exactly the person who needs exactly what God
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: is being asked to provide. The prayer continues, for my
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: sins are more in number than the sand of the sea.
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: My transgressions are multiplied, Lord, they are multiplied, and I
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: am not worthy to look up and see the height
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: of Heaven because of the multitude of my iniquities. I
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: am weighed down with many an iron fetter, so that
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: I cannot lift up my head because of my sins.
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: He is using the language of his literal chains as
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: a metaphor for the moral weight he carries. The iron outside,
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: and the eye and inside have become the same thing.
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: He is not claiming the external chains are unjust. He
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: is saying the external chains are the truth, that they
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: represent something real about his condition before God, that the
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: years of the reign, with all their altars and justifications,
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: had been obscuring. And then out of all that weight,
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: the prayer turns, and now I bend the knee of
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: my heart, imploring you for your kindness. I have sinned, Lord,
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: I have sinned, and I acknowledge my transgressions. I earnestly
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: implore you forgive me. Lord, forgive me. Do not destroy
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 1: me with my transgressions. Do not be angry with me forever.
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: For you, Lord, are the god of those who repent,
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: and in me you will manifest your goodness. For unworthy
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: as I am, you will save me according to your
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: great mercy. The knee of my heart one of the
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: most striking phrases in all of ancient prayer literature. Not
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: the knee of his body, though that was bent as well,
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: The knee of his heart, the innermost place of his will,
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: the place that had been upright and self directed and
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: resistant for fifty five years, the place that had decided
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: which gods to install and which profits to silence. That
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: place was kneeling for the first time. The innermost place
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: in Manassa was bent toward the mercy of God. Not
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: because the bending was sufficient in itself to cover the debt.
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: No act of a human heart is sufficient to cover
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: the kind of debt Manassa had accumulated. The prayer is
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: honest about this. He does not claim to deserve forgiveness.
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 1: He does not offer a calculation. He says simply, I
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 1: have sinned. The sins are numberless. I am not worthy
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: to lift my head. Forgive me anyway, because you are
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: the kind of God who does that, Because your goodness
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: is beyond reckoning, because you appointed repentance for people exactly
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 1: like me. That is the only ground the prayer stands on.
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 1: Not adequacy, not merit, the nature of the God being
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: addressed in me, You will manifest your goodness. Now, let
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 1: us ask the question the tradition has been sitting with
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: for three thousand years. Can God forgive this? Not as
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: an abstraction, as the specific question this specific man's story
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: forces on to the table. Can God forgive the man who,
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: according to the ancient tradition, ordered the silencing of Isaiah,
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: who sent his own child through fire in the valley
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: of the son of Hinnom, who spent fifty five years
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: leading an entire nation away from the covenant that had
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: been given to protect them. The text of Second Chronicles
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: answers with a directness that should stop us cold. He
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: prayed to him and God was moved by his entreaty
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 1: and heard his plea, and brought him again to Jerusalem
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 1: into his kingdom. God was moved. The Hebrew word behind
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: that phrase is vajayata, from the root atah, which in
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: its basic form means to burn incense, and in this
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: verbal form carries the sense of being opened, of a
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: closed space being entered by something rising through it. As
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: the Hebrew word describes it, the space opened. The God,
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 1: who had been watching for fifty five years, who had
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 1: spoken through his prophets and been ignored, who had sent
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: the chains, was moved by the prayer that the chains
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: had finally produced. He heard his plea. This is the
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: most theologically demanding moment in the entire story of Manasse,
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: more demanding than the altars or the fires, because those things,
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: terrible as they are, are within the range of what
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: human beings do. But God being moved by the prayer
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: of the man who did those things is not within
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: the range of what we can easily accommodate in our
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: understanding of justice. It feels wrong. It feels like the
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: scales are being manipulated, like the weight of the innocent
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: blood and the silenced prophets and the fires in the
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 1: valley is being set aside in a way that is
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: not fair to those who bore the cost of Manasse's choices,
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: and who cannot benefit from the forgiveness the way he can.
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 1: The tradition does not resolve this tension neatly. It holds it.
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: Both things remain true at the same time. The cost
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: was real, the forgiveness was real. The cost was not
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: erased by the forgiveness. The forgiveness was not diminished by
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: the cost. The Christian tradition understands the mechanism by which
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: forgiveness of this magnitude is possible without the cost being
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: simply waved away. The cost is born, not ignored, not
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: set aside, carried by the one who stands between the
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: debt and the debtor and absorbs what cannot be absolved
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 1: by the debtor's own repentance alone. The prophet who wrote
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: he was wounded for our transgressions, He was crushed for
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 1: our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was on him,
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: and by his wounds we are healed, was describing the
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 1: one through whom this forgiveness would become fully visible, the
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 1: one the Christian tradition knows as Jesus Christ, who would
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: walk the roads very near the valley of the Son
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: of Hinham and carry to the cross the weight that
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: no human prayer, however genuine, is sufficient to pay on
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: its own. Gehenna and Calvary are close to each other
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: on the map of Jerusalem. That proximity is not accidental.
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 1: For Manassah in the prison, the full shape of this
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: mercy was not yet visible. The suffering servant was still
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: a prophecy, not yet a person who had walked the
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 1: roads of Galilee. But the God who would one day
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: make the mechanism fully visible, was already operating on its terms,
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: already moved by the knee of the heart bent toward
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: his mercy, already hearing the plea of the man at
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: the bottom of everything, already bringing him home. The knee
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 1: of the heart bent toward the mercy of God is enough,
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 1: not because the bending is adequate in itself, because the
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: God it bends toward has in Christ, made a way
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: for exactly this gesture to be received. In me, you
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: will manifest your goodness, And he did. Chapter nine, The
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: Return and the Reformation. God brought him back to Jerusalem
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 1: four words. But those four words describe something that requires
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: a moment of genuine stillness to receive, because what they
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: mean is this the King of Assyria, the representative of
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: the most powerful empire in the ancient world, relief to
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 1: vassal king he had taken in chains and sent him home.
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: We do not know the mechanism. The text does not
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 1: tell us whether it was a diplomatic negotiation, a change
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 1: in imperial administration, a decision to install a more compliant vassal,
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: or something else entirely operating in the corridors of Assyrian power.
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: What we know is that Manassea walked back into Jerusalem.
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: After the chains and the hook, and the foreign city
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: and the prayer on the prison floor, he came home.
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 1: Think about what that walk was like. The road back
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: from Babylon to Jerusalem crosses hundreds of miles of varied terrain,
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: flat alluvial plain giving way gradually to the rising hill
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: country of the west, the landscape familiar and foreign at
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: the same time, the way the landscape of a life
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: you have left and returned to always feels the same
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: shapes on the horizon, the same quality of light in
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 1: the late afternoon over the hills of Judah, but everything
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: seen now from inside a different person. He had been
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: gone long enough for the city to have continued without him,
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 1: long enough for the altars he had built and the
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: practices he had introduced to have become for many people
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: in Jerusalem simply the way things were, the way things
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: had always been, for those young enough to have no
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 1: memory of Hezekiah's revival, no memory of the weeping in
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 1: the restored temple, no memory of the morning after the
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 1: one hundred and eighty five thousand. He walked back into
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: that city a different man than the one who had
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: been taken out of it. Not a perfect man, not
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: a man whose fifty five years had been retroactively corrected
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: by the prayer in the darkness. A changed man, a
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 1: man who had been to the bottom of everything and
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 1: had found at the bottom the god he had spent
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: his life avoiding, who had been moved by what he
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: found there in a way that the chains had made possible,
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 1: and the comfort of the throne never would have. The
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: text of Second Chronicles gives us the account of what
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: he did when he returned. He took away the foreign
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 1: gods and the idol from the House of the Lord,
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: and all the altars that he had built on the
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: mountain of the House of the Lord and in Jerusalem,
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: and he threw them outside of the city. He undid
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 1: his own work, with his own hands, or at his
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 1: own order. The man who had installed the asher a
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: pole in the Temple of Yahweh had it removed the
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: altars he had built in the two courts. The altars
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: whose construction the text had recorded with such painful precision,
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: were torn down. The foreign gods that had shared the
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: sacred space of the Covenant were carried out and thrown
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: beyond the city walls. Some one who has spent many
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: years working alongside people trying to rebuild what they destroyed,
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: says this, The hardest moment in genuine rebuilding is not
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: the decision to change. The decision is hard, but it
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 1: has its own painful clarity. The hardest moment is the
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: first week of dismantling, when you go back to the
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 1: places where the damage happened and take a part, peace
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 1: by peace, the structures you built during the years you
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 1: were running from yourself. You cannot remove an altar without
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: standing in the place where you stood when you put
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: it up, without feeling the full weight of what the
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: putting up meant. The dismantling requires you to look at
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: each thing as you remove it, and acknowledge without negotiation,
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: what it was. Manassa removed the altars. He stood in
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 1: the place where he had put each one, He felt
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 1: the weight of each. He also restored the Altar of
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 1: the Lord and offered on its sacrifices of peace offerings
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 1: and of thanksgiving. And he commanded Judah to serve the Lord,
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 1: the God of Israel, the same command his father had
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 1: given at the beginning of the revival, the same command
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: that had once produced weeping and trumpets and a people
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: who rejecist for a thing that came about suddenly. And
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: here is where the text delivers one of its most
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: quietly devastating observations. However, the people still sacrificed at the
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 1: high places, though only to the Lord their God. Still,
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: after everything, after the removal of the foreign gods and
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 1: the restoration of the altar and the royal command to
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 1: serve Yahweh, the people still went to the high places,
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 1: not to bail anymore, not to the host of heaven,
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 1: to the Lord their God. They had abandoned the foreign deities,
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: but they had not abandoned the habits of decentralized, unauthorized
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: worship that Hezekiah had spent his reign eradicating, and Manassa
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 1: had spent fifty five years rebuilding into the hills of Judah.
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: The high places were still there, and the people still
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 1: went to them. This is the moment in the account
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 1: of Manassa's reformation where the tradition refuses to let us
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: be comfortable, where it insists on a complexity that simple
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 1: accounts of repentance tend to flatten. Manassea changed. The text
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 1: is clear God was moved by his prayer and brought
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 1: him home, and the evidence of the reformation is specific
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 1: and documented and cannot be dismissed. But the people he
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 1: had formed during the fifty five years were not changed
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: by his change. They had been shaped. The culture had
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: been shaped, the habits of worship, the comfort with the
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 1: high places, the normalization of a decentralized and privately managed
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: relationship with God that the fifty five years had authorized.
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: These things had been built into the fabric of Judah
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 1: across a generation and a half and a king's repentance,
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 1: however genuine, and however costly, and however publicly enacted cannot
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 1: reach into the formed habits of a culture and rewire
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 1: them by decree. This is the honest account of what
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 1: repentance can and cannot do. It can and change the
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 1: person who repents deeply, genuinely in ways the tradition celebrates
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: and the god of the tradition responds to. By being moved,
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: the relationship is restored, the direction is reversed. The person
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 1: is genuinely different. But the world the person made during
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: the years before the repentance does not unmake itself. The
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: altars they built, even the ones they tear down with
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: their own hands, have already done their work. The habits
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 1: they installed in the people around them have already taken root.
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 1: The children they shaped or failed to shape, are already
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: on their own paths, with their own choices, forming in
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: the crucible of everything the repenting parent gave them. Before
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 1: the repentance came, the high places were still there, and
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: Manassa's son was watching. Chapter ten Amon and the Inheritance
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 1: of Darkness two. That is the entire length of the
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: reign of Ammon, son of Manasseh, King of Judah, two
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: years eight verses in the Book of Second Kings a
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: few more in second chronicles, and then it is over.
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: Amman was twenty two years old when he became king.
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: He was born somewhere in the middle of his father's reign,
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 1: in the years before the chains and the prayer and
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 1: the return. He was a child of the dark years,
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: not of the reformed years. The world he was born
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 1: into and formed by, was the world of the altars
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 1: and the asher of Pole, and the fires in the valley,
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: and the systematic dismantling of the covenant. By the time
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 1: Manassa came back from Babylon, changed, by the time the
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 1: idols were being removed from the temple and the altar
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 1: was being restored, Amon was already shaped. The formation had
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 1: already happened in the years when the court was what
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 1: it was and the gods on the altars were the gods.
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 1: A young prince grew up seeing honored and feared. He
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: did not witness the prayer in Babylon. He did not
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: feel the chains. He did not experience the collapse of
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 1: everything false that had produced the genuine humbling. He saw
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: the aftermath of it. A changed father, yes, but also
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: a kingdom still full of high places, still carrying in
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 1: its cultural memory, the practices and permissions that the fifty
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 1: five years had installed, still living with the residue of
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 1: a world that the Reformation was working against but had
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: not yet fully undone, and Amon chose the part he recognized.
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 1: He sacrificed to all the carved images that his father
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 1: Manassa had made, and served them. He did not humble
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: himself before the Lord, as his father Manassa had humbled himself.
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 1: But Ammon incurred guilt more and more. Some one who
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 1: has spent years working with families across generations of broken patterns,
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 1: puts it this way. The grief that no one prepares
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: you for is the grief of watching your own children
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: carry the person you used to be, the person you
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 1: changed from, the person you worked so hard to leave behind,
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 1: and then you watched them walk in through the door
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: of that person, as if they never got the news
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 1: that the door was supposed to be closed, because for
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 1: them the door was never fully closed. They were formed
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 1: before you closed it. They lived inside the open door
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: for the years when their formation was happening, And the
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: closing of it, however real and however hard won, and
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: however costly to you, came after the formation was already complete.
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: That is the inheritance of darkness. It is not the
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: child's final word, but it is the word the child
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 1: speaks first. In the years when the formation runs ahead
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 1: of the choice. Amon reproduced what he was built to reproduce.
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 1: His own servants conspired against him and killed him in
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: his own house. Two years into the shortest reign of
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 1: any king in the history of the Davidic dynasty, Amon
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: was dead. The people of the land rose up and
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: executed the conspirators and placed Amon's son on the throne.
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: Josiah was eight years old. Let us stay for a
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 1: moment longer in the short and terrible chapter of Amon's reign,
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: because the brevity of it should not mislead us about
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 1: the weight of what it carries. Aimon is the answer
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 1: to the question that the story of Manassa's reformation has
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 1: been quietly posing since the moment the reformed king commanded
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 1: the people to serve the lord, and the people still
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 1: went to the high places. The question is this, what
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 1: does a child inherit from a parent who changes too late,
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 1: not too late for the parent. Manassa's change was not
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 1: too late for Manassa. The prayer was heard, God was moved.
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 1: The knee of the heart bent toward the mercy of
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 1: God was enough because the God it bent toward, as
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: in Christ, made a way for exactly this gesture to
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 1: be received. The relationship was restored, the Reformation was real.
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: But for Amon, the change came after the Formation. The
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 1: father who came home from Babylon was not the father
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 1: who had raised him, and the gap between those two fathers,
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 1: the fifty five years of one and the last years
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: of the other, was the gap that Amon had already
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 1: fallen through before he was old enough to choose which
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 1: side of it to stand on. This is one of
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: the heaviest truths in the entire story. There are things
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: that repentance cannot undo, not because God's forgiveness is incomplete,
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: because human formation is irreversible in ways that forgiveness does
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 1: not directly address. The person who repents is changed. The
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 1: people formed by the person before the repentance carry what
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 1: they were given and carry it forward into their own
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 1: lives and their own choices. And the changed parent must
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 1: live with the sight of the unchanged children without the
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 1: comfort of being able to explain to them in any
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: way that reaches the formed place in them. Why the
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: change means what it means. Manassa cannot have been unaware
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 1: of what Aimon was. He had watched his son grow up,
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 1: had watched him absorb the world the dark years had built.
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 1: Had perhaps tried in the reformed years to show him
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 1: something different. But the showing came after the forming, and
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 1: Amon had been too fully formed by what came before.
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 1: The two years of Amon's reign are one of the
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 1: price tags of the fifty five, not the only one.
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 1: The exile is still coming, The wiping of the dish
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 1: is still coming. The measuring line of Samaria stretched over
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: Jerusalem is still coming. But this one is the most
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 1: intimate of the prices, paid not by enemies or foreign armies,
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 1: but by the family, by the next generation, by the
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: child who was formed in the workshop of the years
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 1: before the prayer, and who reproduced what the workshop had made.
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 1: Amon is buried with his father in the garden of Uza,
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 1: and his son is on the throne, eight years old,
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: in a kingdom shaped by generations of compromise and two
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 1: years of accelerated darkness, and one genuine and costly reformation
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 1: that changed the man at the top but could not
• 1:27:24
  Speaker 1: reach all the way down into the culture the man
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 1: had made before he changed. The Book of the Law
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 1: is somewhere in the temple, lost in the rubble of
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 1: a house that has been through more than any building
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: should survive, waiting in the dust of a neglected room,
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 1: for the moment when some one would be there to
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 1: find it and receive it with the kind of heart
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 1: that could actually hear what it was saying. The Long
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 1: Mercy is not finished. It is only between chapters Chapter eleven,
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 1: Josiah and the Long Mercy. Josiah was eight years old
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: when they put him on the throne, eight years old
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 1: in a city shaped by everything we have been through
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 1: to night, by the fifty five years, and the fires
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 1: in the valley, and the chains, and the prayer on
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 1: the prison floor, and the reformation that changed the man
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: at the top, and the two years of a mon
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 1: that reproduced the worst of what the man had been
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 1: before the change. Eight years old, and the Long Mercy
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 1: was already in him. We do not know how. The
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: tradition does not offer a mechanism. It offers the fact
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 1: without the explanation, as if to say, some things cannot
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 1: be traced through the visible lines of cause and effect,
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 1: because they do not travel those lines. They travel through
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 1: the hidden workings of a God whose patience is longer
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: than the worst any generation can produce, and whose mercy
• 1:28:51
  Speaker 1: finds the crack in the hardest stone and works through
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 1: it toward the place where a heart is still soft
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 1: enough to receive it. The limestone streets of Jerusalem in
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 1: the early morning, the temple on its elevated platform, catching
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: the first light, the smell of the hill country, air
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 1: dry and clean. An eight year old boy in the
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 1: palace of David, in a city shaped by the memory
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 1: of things he had not seen, and the residue of
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 1: things he wished were not there. The text says Josiah
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 1: was sixteen when he began to seek the God of
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 1: his father David. Not the God of Manasseh, not the
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 1: God of Amen, the God of David, the God of
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 1: the ancient Covenant, the god who had made promises to
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 1: a shepherd boy in the fields outside Bethlehem, that was
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 1: still being honored in ways not yet fully visible. Seven
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 1: generations later, in the person of a sixteen year old king,
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 1: sitting on a throne too large for him, in a
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 1: kingdom full of high places, he was seeking something he
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 1: had not been given. Reaching back past the direct line
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: of his inheritance passed the father who had produced the darkness,
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 1: and the grandfather who had caused the forgetting, to the
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 1: deeper source, to the well that had been dug before
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 1: the compromise and the corruption, and the fifty five years
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 1: of altars built in the wrong places. He found something there,
• 1:30:15
  Speaker 1: not the full thing yet, but enough to begin. At
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 1: twenty He began to purge Judah and Jerusalem of the
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 1: high places, the carved idols, the metal images, the altars
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 1: of Ba'al. He had them torn down and ground into dust,
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 1: and scattered over the graves of those who had sacrificed
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: at them. He went throughout the land, doing with greater
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 1: thoroughness and wider reach than either Hezekiah or the reformed
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: Manasse had managed the long work of undoing what the
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: dark years had built. He was working without the full text.
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 1: He had not yet found the book. He was working
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 1: from what he had found in his own, seeking from
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: the fragments of the tradition that had survived in the
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: people who had kept the Covenant in private during the
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 1: long years, Working from the unnamed faithful, from the ones
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 1: who had held the scrolls and taught their children in
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 1: whispers and waited for something they could not yet see.
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 1: He worked from the fragments they had preserved, and the
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 1: fragments were enough to get him started. Then, in the
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 1: eighteenth year of his reign, he commissioned the repair of
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 1: the temple. Workers were clearing and cleaning a house that
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 1: had been through more in the previous century than any
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 1: sacred space should be asked to survive, moving through rooms
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 1: that had not been properly tended in longer than anyone
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: could remember. And Hilcaia, the priest, working in the rubble
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: of one of those rooms, found something in the dust
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: ah scroll. He brought it to Chaffan, the Secretary. Chaffon
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 1: read it, and then Chaffon brought it to the king
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 1: and read it in the king's presence. The Book of
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: the Law, the Words of Moses, the Covenant document given
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 1: at Sinai and intended to govern the life of the
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: Covenant people from the day they entered the land. Found
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 1: in the rubble of a neglected room in a temple
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 1: that had been through Hezekiah's restoration and Manassa's defilement, and
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 1: the two years of Amon and the eighteen years of
• 1:32:20
  Speaker 1: a king who had been working from fragments. It had
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: been there the whole time, lost, not destroyed, buried under
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 1: the accumulated disorder of a century of misuse and neglect,
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 1: waiting in the rubble for the moment when some one
• 1:32:36
  Speaker 1: would be there to find it and receive it with
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 1: the kind of heart that could actually hear what it
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 1: was saying. Josiah heard it, and when he heard it,
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 1: he tore his clothes. He did not already know what
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 1: it said. Let that land. The King of Judah, twenty
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 1: six years old, eighteen years into his reign, who had
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 1: spent the last ten years tearing down high places and
• 1:32:59
  Speaker 1: restoring the infrastructure of the Covenant, had been doing all
• 1:33:02
  Speaker 1: of it without having heard the full words that the
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: Covenant was built on. He had been working from fragments.
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 1: The full text, the complete and authoritative words of the
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 1: Covenant document he had never heard, and now he was
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 1: hearing them. And what he heard was not a validation
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 1: of what he had already been doing. What he heard
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 1: was the full distance between what the law required and
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 1: what the kingdom had been the weight of the judgment
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 1: the law had spoken for exactly the kind of unfaithfulness
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 1: that Manassa's reign had enacted in full, the full accounting
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 1: laid out in words that had been waiting in the
• 1:33:39
  Speaker 1: rubble for exactly this moment, in front of exactly this heart,
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 1: he tore his clothes, and then he said to the
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 1: men around him, go and inquire of the Lord for
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 1: me and for all the people, concerning the words of
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 1: this book that has been found. For great is the
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 1: wrath of the Lord that is kindled against us, because
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: as our fathers have not obeyed the words of this
• 1:34:02
  Speaker 1: book to do according to all that is written concerning us.
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 1: Our fathers have not obeyed, no deflection, no careful language.
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: Our fathers failed. The book contains the record of what
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 1: was required and the record of what was done instead.
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 1: And I am holding the book, and the weight of
• 1:34:22
  Speaker 1: that gap is real, and I am not going to
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 1: pretend otherwise. The Prophetess Hulder was consulted. Her name is
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 1: recorded here because the tradition refused to let it disappear.
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 1: A woman whose voice was sought at the highest moment
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 1: of the most significant reformation in Judah's history, after Hezekiah.
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 1: She delivered a word that held both judgment and mercy
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 1: in the same breath without collapsing either one. The judgment first,
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 1: the disaster that had been prophesied, the measuring line of Samaria,
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 1: the plum line of the House of Ahab, the wiping
• 1:34:58
  Speaker 1: of the dish was not evoked. The consequences of the
• 1:35:02
  Speaker 1: fifty five years had been set in motion, and Josiah's reformation,
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 1: however genuine and however thorough, could not fully stop what
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 1: had already been set moving. Jerusalem would fall, the exile
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 1: would come, and then the mercy for Josiah himself. Because
• 1:35:21
  Speaker 1: your heart was tender, and you humbled yourself before the
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 1: Lord when you heard what I spoke against this place,
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 1: because you tore your clothes and wept before me, I
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 1: also have heard you. Therefore I will gather you to
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 1: your father's and you shall be gathered to your grave
• 1:35:36
  Speaker 1: in peace, and your eyes shall not see all the
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 1: disaster that I will bring upon this place. Your heart
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 1: was tender. Three words that carry the weight of everything
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 1: this story has been building toward. The story of Manasseh
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 1: is not only the story of a man who did
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 1: terrible things and was forgiven in a foreign prison. It
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 1: is the story told across four generations from Hezekiah, who
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 1: wept at the edge of death, to Manassa, who caused
• 1:36:03
  Speaker 1: the forgetting, to Amon, who reproduced the darkness, to Josiah,
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 1: who sought the God of David at sixteen and wept
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 1: when he heard the words, and tore his clothes in
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 1: the honest grief of a man whose heart had not
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 1: been hardened against the truth, your heart was tender. Josiah
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 1: gathered all the people great and small, and went up
• 1:36:24
  Speaker 1: to the house of the Lord and read in their
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 1: hearing all the words of the Book of the Covenant
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 1: that had been found in the House of the Lord.
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 1: He read the whole thing to everyone in the temple
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 1: in the city of David, to the descendants of the
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 1: people who had wept with joy when Hezekiah restored worship,
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 1: who had then watched Manassa dismantle it, who had grown
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 1: up in a kingdom full of high places, Now hearing
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 1: the Covenant document read aloud in the place where it
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 1: was supposed to have been the center of everything. And
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 1: then Josiah stood by the pillar and made a covenant
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: before the l to walk after the Lord and to
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 1: keep his commandments and his testimonies and his statutes with
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 1: all his heart and all his soul to perform the
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 1: words of this covenant that were written in this book.
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: And all the people joined in the covenant. Do not
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 1: move past that too quickly. All the people joined, the
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 1: descendants of the people who had gone to the high places,
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 1: the grand children of the culture that Manassa had built
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: across fifty five years, standing in the temple that had
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 1: been defiled and restored, and defiled again, and was being
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 1: restored again, and joining in the Covenant. The Long Mercy
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 1: had found them. Josiah went on to celebrate the Passover,
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 1: and Second Chronicles says that no passover like it had
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 1: been kept in Israel since the days of Samuel the Prophet,
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 1: more than seven centuries, seven centuries since the Covenant. People
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 1: had kept the Passover with the fullness and the preparation
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 1: and the complete participation that the occasion required seven centuries
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 1: of drift and reform, and drift and darkness and prayer
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 1: on a prison floor and a book found in the rubble.
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 1: And then the passover celebrated the way it was supposed
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 1: to be celebrated. The Long Mercy had been patient enough
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 1: for seven centuries. Now, let us speak about what Manassa
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 1: did not know. He did not know Josiah. He died
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 1: before Josiah came to the throne, was buried in the
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 1: garden of his own house, in the garden of Uza,
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 1: before the people of the land placed the eight year
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 1: old on the throne. He went into the ground, not
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 1: knowing that the line he had nearly destroyed would produce
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 1: two generations later the king who found the book and
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: wept and stood at the pillar and led all the
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 1: people in the covenant. He did not get to know that.
• 1:38:51
  Speaker 1: And this may be the most quietly merciful thing in
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 1: the entire story, because if Manassa had known about Josiah,
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 1: the knowing might have become another way to manage the
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 1: weight of what he had done, another layer of distance
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 1: between himself and the full accounting the ark bends toward
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 1: restoration in the end, he might have told himself everything
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 1: more or less works out. He was not given that comfort.
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 1: He died not knowing whether the damage was irreparable, whether
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 1: anything beyond the reach of his repentance was still moving
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 1: in the direction of restoration, whether the line he had
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 1: bent so severely would straighten again. He had to trust
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 1: that without seeing it. He had to leave the accounting
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 1: to the God who had been moved by his prayer
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 1: and brought him home, and who would say, many years
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 1: later to the grandson Manassa, never met your heart was tender.
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 1: The prayer in the dark and the tender heart in
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 1: the temple are connected by the long mercy that moved
• 1:39:53
  Speaker 1: between them through the generation of a man who reproduced
• 1:39:56
  Speaker 1: the darkness, somehow surviving the reproduction, somehow arriving intact in
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 1: the one heart that had stayed soft enough to receive it.
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 1: That is what the long mercy does. It moves through
• 1:40:09
  Speaker 1: the broken generations. It finds the crack in the hardest
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 1: stone and works its way through. It does not give
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 1: up on the line because one man bent it nearly
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 1: to breaking. It does not abandon the covenant because the
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 1: covenant was abandoned for fifty five years. It does not
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 1: stop looking for the tender heart because the intervening generation
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 1: did not have one. It keeps moving at the pace
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 1: of God, which is not the pace of human urgency,
• 1:40:38
  Speaker 1: through the terrain of human brokenness, toward the heart it
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 1: will find on the other side of the darkness. Manassa
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 1: prayed in the dark and did not see the dawn.
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 1: Josiah found the book and wept, and did not know
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 1: what his grandfather's prayer in a foreign prison had cost.
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 1: The mercy moved between them and to night, in this
• 1:40:59
  Speaker 1: room room, in whatever chapter of the long story you
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 1: are currently living, that same mercy is still moving, still persiant,
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 1: still finding the cracks, still traveling through the broken generations,
• 1:41:13
  Speaker 1: toward the tender hearts. It will find there, if those
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 1: hearts remain open enough to receive it. You are somewhere
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 1: in the middle of the long mercy to Night, not
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 1: at the beginning and not yet at the end. In
• 1:41:27
  Speaker 1: the middle, where most of the living happens, where most
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 1: of the waiting happens, where the book is sometimes found
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 1: in the rubble and sometimes is still buried, Where the
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 1: dawn is coming but has not yet arrived. The long
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: mercy is still moving. It has not stopped. We have
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 1: come to the end of a long road. The question
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 1: that opened to Night was not rhetorical, what do you
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 1: do with a man who did everything wrong and was
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 1: still forgiven? It was a genuine question. And now, having
• 1:42:01
  Speaker 1: walked the full length of this story, from the shadow
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 1: of Hezekiah to the chains of Babylon, to the garden
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 1: of Uza, from the valley of the Son of Hinham,
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 1: to the temple where Josiah wept when he heard the words,
• 1:42:13
  Speaker 1: and all the people joined in the covenant. You are
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 1: in a position to sit with the answer. The answer
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 1: is not simple. The tradition did not preserve this story
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 1: because it was simple. There are three kinds of people
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 1: who hear the story of Manasseh and recognize something in
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 1: it that arrived in this room tonight, not as history,
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 1: but as a mirror. The first are the people who
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 1: are carrying something they believe is too heavy to be forgiven.
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 1: Not ordinary guilt, something specific, something with a name and
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 1: a face and a cost that was borne by real
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 1: people in ways that cannot be undone, something that makes
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 1: the standard reassurances about grace feel insufficient, because the standard
• 1:42:57
  Speaker 1: reassurances do not seem to account for the specific weight
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 1: of the specific thing. If you are that person, this
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 1: story was preserved for you, not to tell you that
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 1: your thing does not have the weight it has it does.
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 1: The tradition is honest about weight. It recorded the full
• 1:43:16
  Speaker 1: darkness of Manassa's fifty five years without softening a line
• 1:43:20
  Speaker 1: of it. And then recorded the forgiveness without softening that
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 1: either both a fool. The weight is real and the
• 1:43:28
  Speaker 1: mercy is real. And the mercy is not made smaller
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 1: by the weight, it is made more visible by it.
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 1: The knee of the heart bent toward the mercy of
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 1: God is enough, not because the bending is adequate in
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 1: itself to cover the debt, because the God it bends
• 1:43:44
  Speaker 1: toward has, in Christ, made a way for exactly this
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 1: gesture to be received. He appointed repentance for people exactly
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 1: like you. He said, in me, you will manifest my goodness.
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 1: He was moved by the prayer that rose from the
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 1: prison floor in Babylon. He is moved by the same
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 1: gesture now in this room, in whatever form the prayer takes.
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 1: When it rises from the specific bottom of the specific
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 1: life you are living, you are not outside the range
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 1: of what happened in Babylon. The second kind of person
• 1:44:17
  Speaker 1: is the one who is watching someone else, someone they
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 1: love or once loved, or are watching from a careful distance,
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 1: who is deep in their own version of the dark years,
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 1: building altars in the wrong places, going further in the
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 1: direction of damage rather than turning around. And this person
• 1:44:35
  Speaker 1: has been watching and praying and grieving in the particular
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 1: way people grieve for the living when the living are
• 1:44:42
  Speaker 1: choosing the wrong direction and wondering whether the turning will
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 1: ever come. If you are that person, this story does
• 1:44:50
  Speaker 1: not give you a guarantee. The tradition is honest about that.
• 1:44:55
  Speaker 1: Not every story has a Babylon, not every dark rain
• 1:44:59
  Speaker 1: ends with a prayer on a prison floor. The tradition
• 1:45:02
  Speaker 1: does not pretend otherwise. But it preserved this one. It
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 1: preserved the account of the worst king who ever sat
• 1:45:10
  Speaker 1: on the throne of David, praying in a foreign prison
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 1: and being heard, not as a promise that every story
• 1:45:16
  Speaker 1: ends this way, as a testimony that this kind of
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 1: ending is within the range of what is possible. That
• 1:45:23
  Speaker 1: the God who was moved by Manassa's prayer is the
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 1: same God who is watching the person you are watching,
• 1:45:29
  Speaker 1: that eric Apaeim is real. That the nostrils are long.
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 1: You cannot bend the knee of another person's heart. You
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 1: can only keep the space open. The story of Manassa
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 1: is one reason to keep it open. The third kind
• 1:45:44
  Speaker 1: of person is the one who grew up in someone
• 1:45:46
  Speaker 1: else's valley, who did not build the altars, but is
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 1: living in their shadow, who did not light the fires,
• 1:45:53
  Speaker 1: but has been shaped by the world those fires made,
• 1:45:57
  Speaker 1: who inherited the high places they did not choose, and
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 1: the broken formation they did not ask for, and the
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: lost book that no one handed them. If you are
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 1: that person, Josiah is in this story for you, not
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 1: as a promise that your version of the Tender Heart
• 1:46:13
  Speaker 1: will have the platform Josiah had. Not everyone gets a
• 1:46:16
  Speaker 1: kingdom to reform, but as a testimony that the thing
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 1: broken in the generation before you does not determine what
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 1: is possible in the generation after that. The long mercy
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 1: moves through broken lines that finding the book, even when
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 1: no one handed it to you, even when you had
• 1:46:34
  Speaker 1: to look for it in the rubble of what the
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 1: people before you left behind, is the only thing necessary.
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 1: The tender Heart is not inherited, it is found, It
• 1:46:45
  Speaker 1: is kept. It is the daily decision to remain open
• 1:46:48
  Speaker 1: to the words when the words arrive, to not let
• 1:46:52
  Speaker 1: the accumulated weight of the broken years build a shell
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 1: around the place where the words land. Josiah kept his
• 1:46:59
  Speaker 1: heart tender in a world that gave him every reason
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: to be hard. That is the invitation. His story extends
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 1: tonight to whoever in this room needs it. You do
• 1:47:09
  Speaker 1: not have to be manassa, even if you came from one.
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 1: The long Mercy is already moving. It is already in
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: the generation that comes after yours, working toward the tender heart.
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 1: It will find there if the space is kept open.
• 1:47:23
  Speaker 1: That is what you do with a man who did
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 1: everything wrong and was still forgiven. You listen to his story,
• 1:47:30
  Speaker 1: You find yourself in it, and you receive from it
• 1:47:33
  Speaker 1: whatever piece of the Long Mercy has been traveling toward
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 1: you through the broken generations, carrying your name, arriving tonight
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 1: in this room, in this dark in the only form
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 1: it could take to reach you. Here, the long Mercy
• 1:47:49
  Speaker 1: is here. It has been here the whole night. It
• 1:47:52
  Speaker 1: does not leave when the story ends. Father, we have
• 1:47:59
  Speaker 1: been in a diffict room to night. We sat with
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 1: fires that burned in a valley outside Jerusalem's walls, with
• 1:48:06
  Speaker 1: chains in a foreign city, with the hollow log that
• 1:48:10
  Speaker 1: the ancient tradition remembers, and the prayer on the prison
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 1: floor that the text preserves, with the high places that
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 1: stayed standing after the Reformation, and the sun who reproduced
• 1:48:20
  Speaker 1: the darkness, and the grandson who found the book in
• 1:48:23
  Speaker 1: the rubble, and wept when he heard the words for
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 1: the first time. We have been in all of it tonight,
• 1:48:30
  Speaker 1: and we are tired. Some of us are tired in
• 1:48:33
  Speaker 1: the way that Manassea was tired in Babylon. Not the
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 1: tiredness of a long week, the deeper tiredness of a
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 1: person who has been carrying the specific weight of specific
• 1:48:44
  Speaker 1: things for longer than they meant to, who chose one
• 1:48:48
  Speaker 1: degree at a time, the altars that were easier and
• 1:48:52
  Speaker 1: the gods that demanded less. Who arrived at the bottom
• 1:48:56
  Speaker 1: not by accident but by direction, And who is sitting
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 1: in the room to night because the bottom turned out
• 1:49:02
  Speaker 1: to have a floor, and the floor turned out to
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 1: have a presence on it, and the presence turned out
• 1:49:08
  Speaker 1: to have been there the whole time. To that person,
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 1: the knee of the heart bent toward your mercy is enough,
• 1:49:16
  Speaker 1: not because the debt is small, because you are the
• 1:49:19
  Speaker 1: God who has in Christ made away for exactly this
• 1:49:23
  Speaker 1: gesture to be received. You appointed repentance for people exactly
• 1:49:28
  Speaker 1: like us. You said in me, you will manifest my goodness.
• 1:49:32
  Speaker 1: You were moved by what rose from the prison floor
• 1:49:35
  Speaker 1: in Babylon, and you are moved to night by whatever
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 1: is rising from this room. Some of us are tired
• 1:49:42
  Speaker 1: in the way of those who have been watching, who
• 1:49:45
  Speaker 1: have been keeping the space open for someone they love
• 1:49:48
  Speaker 1: who is still in the dark years, who have been
• 1:49:51
  Speaker 1: praying into the silence for long enough that the silence
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 1: has begun to feel like an answer in itself to
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 1: that person. The nostrils are long, the patience is real.
• 1:50:03
  Speaker 1: The same God who was moved by the prayer Manassa
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 1: prayed after fifty five years, is watching the person you
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 1: are watching. You cannot see what is being prepared. You
• 1:50:14
  Speaker 1: can only keep the space open, and the keeping open.
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 1: However exhausting, is not wasted. It is the work of
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 1: the long mercy, done through human hands. And some of
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 1: us are tired in the way of Josiah, who grew
• 1:50:29
  Speaker 1: up in the aftermath, who inherited the world that other
• 1:50:32
  Speaker 1: people made, and have been working against the grain of
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 1: it for years, seeking the God of David in a
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 1: kingdom full of the high places that some one else built,
• 1:50:42
  Speaker 1: who found pieces of the book in the rubble and
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 1: have been reading from fragments, waiting for the moment when
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 1: the full text arrives and lands on the part of
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 1: them that has stayed soft enough to receive it. To
• 1:50:54
  Speaker 1: that person, your heart is tender. That tenderness is not weakness.
• 1:51:00
  Speaker 1: It is the most durable thing in this story. It
• 1:51:04
  Speaker 1: survived Manassa's fifty five years and amons too, and arrived
• 1:51:08
  Speaker 1: intact in an eight year old on a throne in
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 1: a broken kingdom. It will survive what you have been through.
• 1:51:15
  Speaker 1: It is the thing the long mercy has been protecting
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 1: in you through everything that has tried to harden it.
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 1: It will find the book, or the book will find
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 1: it for all of us to night, the tired ones
• 1:51:28
  Speaker 1: and the watching ones, and the ones at the bottom,
• 1:51:31
  Speaker 1: and the ones working against the grain of the broken
• 1:51:34
  Speaker 1: inheritance give us what Manasseah found at the bottom of everything.
• 1:51:39
  Speaker 1: Not the resolution of the situation, not the immediate reversal
• 1:51:43
  Speaker 1: of the consequences, the knowledge that the situation, exactly as
• 1:51:48
  Speaker 1: it is, is not outside the reach of the God
• 1:51:51
  Speaker 1: who was moved when the knee of the heart bent
• 1:51:53
  Speaker 1: toward his mercy on the floor of a foreign prison,
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 1: the God who has in Christ made a way for
• 1:52:00
  Speaker 1: exactly that gesture to be received. The breath is still coming,
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 1: the night is still holding the long mercy is still moving.
• 1:52:09
  Speaker 1: In the garden of Uza, Manassa rests beside the Sun
• 1:52:13
  Speaker 1: who reproduced his darkness. In the temple, Josiah hears the
• 1:52:17
  Speaker 1: words for the first time and weeps. In the valley
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 1: of the Sun of Heenom. The fires have been cold
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 1: for three thousand years, and the God who watched them
• 1:52:27
  Speaker 1: burn has not forgotten a single name that the record
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 1: failed to preserve, not one to the God who justifies
• 1:52:35
  Speaker 1: the ungodly, who receives the knee of the heart bent
• 1:52:39
  Speaker 1: toward his mercy, who has in Christ made a way
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 1: for the gesture to be received, who sends the long
• 1:52:47
  Speaker 1: mercy through the broken generations, who finds the tender heart
• 1:52:51
  Speaker 1: in the place where tender hearts had no reason to survive,
• 1:52:55
  Speaker 1: Who was watching the whole time, Who is watching now?
• 1:53:00
  Speaker 1: Be glory in this room, in this breath, in this
• 1:53:04
  Speaker 1: night forever, Amen sleep. Now the story is complete, and
• 1:53:12
  Speaker 1: you are somewhere inside it, held by the same mercy
• 1:53:16
  Speaker 1: that held manasse in the dark and Josiah in the temple,
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 1: and every unnamed person in between, who kept the covenant
• 1:53:24
  Speaker 1: in whispers when keeping it aloud had become too costly.
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 1: You are held by the mercy that has been moving
• 1:53:31
  Speaker 1: through broken generations for three thousand years without stopping. It
• 1:53:36
  Speaker 1: has not stopped tonight. It will not stop. Good Night,