2 Chronicles 33

Manasseh is the chapter’s astonishment: the worst king of Judah brought home by mercy, a standing proof that no one is past the reach of a humbled prayer. He undoes his father Hezekiah’s whole reform — rebuilds the high places, rears altars to Baalim, makes groves, worships all the host of heaven, builds pagan altars in the house of Yahweh itself, and caused his children to pass through the fire in the valley of the son of Hinnom. He uses enchantments and familiar spirits and sets a carved idol in the temple. He seduces Judah to do worse than the heathen. The depth of the flesh’s corruption is fully exposed; the chapter does not soften it. And Yahweh speaks anyway — Yahweh spake to Manasseh, and to his people: but they would not hearken — the same deafness that will bring the fire at the end of the book, already running.

One detail has an ache in it. Manasseh’s mother was Hephzibah (2 Kgs 21:1) — my delight is in her, the very name Yahweh will give to restored Zion when the desolation is over: thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken… but thou shalt be called Hephzibah (Isa 62:4). Judah’s worst king came out of a woman named for Yahweh’s delight. There is an old tradition that she was Isaiah’s daughter; that is tradition, not Scripture. The name is Scripture, and it is enough.

Then Yahweh brings the captains of Assyria, who took Manasseh among the thorns, and bound him with fetters, and carried him to Babylon. The hooks and the chains are the mercy in disguise. Bondage does for the king what fifty-five years of throne could not: it breaks him. The same Babylon that will swallow Judah for her sins becomes, for this one man, the place where pride is finally emptied out.

The turn is the gospel in a single verse. And when he was in affliction, he besought Yahweh his God, and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers, and prayed unto him: and he was intreated of him… and brought him again to Jerusalem into his kingdom. Grace reaches the chief of sinners — the idolater, the child-burner, the defiler of the temple — the instant he humbles himself. Heaven is not grudging; the moment the proud heart bows, it is heard.

And what affliction taught him is named: Then Manasseh knew that Yahweh he was God. The knowledge of God born in the furnace — not the throne, not the prophets his father heard, but the fetters in Babylon finally teach him who Yahweh is. Restored, he tears out the idols he had set up and commands Judah to serve Yahweh.

But the ending should not be made tidier than it is. Forgiven is not the same as undone. Manasseh spent fifty years filling Jerusalem with innocent blood, and the men who could have helped him rebuild were the men he had killed. He commands Judah to serve Yahweh and Judah does — nevertheless the people did sacrifice still in the high places, yet unto Yahweh their God only: obedience with the king’s eye on it, and the old worship waiting under the floor for his son. Mercy reaches all the way; consequences still run their course. The prayer in Babylon saved Manasseh. It did not save Amon, and it did not save Judah.

His son Amon is the dark foil. He sins as his father had sinned but humbled not himself before Yahweh, as Manasseh his father had humbled himself. The hardened heart that will not bow does the same evil and refuses the same repentance — and is cut down by his own servants in two years. The difference between the two kings is not the sin; it is the humbling.

No sin is too deep for the prayer of a broken heart — but the heart that will not bow under the same hand is cut off.

Hosea 1

Hosea’s marriage is a prophecy in flesh: the prophet is told to take a wife of whoredoms because Yahweh’s own wife has played the harlot — and the man told to do it is named Hosea, salvation, from the root that means to free, to succor, to save. It is the same root as Joshua and as Yahshua: Moses called Hoshea the son of Nun Jehoshua, laying the Name on the front of it. The prophet named Salvation is sent to marry a harlot — which is the gospel before a word of it is spoken. Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms: for the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from Yahweh. He takes Gomer, and the marriage becomes a living oracle of the covenant between Yahweh and Israel — the spousal pattern that runs from Ezekiel 16 to Ephesians 5 to the marriage of the Lamb. The husband is faithful; the bride is not.

The three children are named as judgments, and the names are the message. Jezreel — God sows, and also God scatters — for Yahweh will avenge the blood of Jezreel on the house of Jehu and cause to cease the kingdom of the house of Israel. The same name holds the sowing and the scattering; the field where Israel is broken is the field where Israel will one day be planted again.

The second child is Lo-ruhamah — not having obtained mercy, not pitied — for I will no more have mercy upon the house of Israel. The third is Lo-ammi — not my people — for ye are not my people, and I will not be your God. The covenant formula is run backwards: the people who were Ammi, my people, are unsaid into Lo-ammi. It is the most fearful word in the chapter — the husband declaring the marriage void, the children disowned by their names.

And then, without warning, the reversal — and it is the gospel breaking the judgment open. Yet the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea… and it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people, there it shall be said unto them, Ye are the sons of the living God. Lo-ammi is unsaid back into Ammi. The disowning is not the last word; the same names that spoke judgment will speak adoption.

There is a word to watch through the whole prophecy: shuwb, return, turn back — it runs through Hosea some seventeen times, from I will go and return to my place to O Israel, return unto Yahweh thy God. Yahweh returns to his place; Israel is called to return to him; and the whole book lives in the space between those two turnings. Wherever shuwb is on the page, the door is not shut. And the chapter’s last note is a returning too: they shall appoint themselves one head, and they shall come up out of the land — one head over a gathered people, coming up out of the earth. The resurrection is already in the reversal.

Paul takes exactly this verse for the calling of the Gentiles and the remnant — I will call them my people, which were not my people (Rom 9:25–26), and Peter echoes it: which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy (1 Pet 2:10). The not-pitied are pitied; the not-people become the sons of the living God. And the chapter ends pointing forward: great shall be the day of Jezreel — the day El sows his scattered people back into the land, the kingdom restored to Israel.

The names that spoke the disowning will speak the adoption; Lo-ammi becomes Ammi, and the not-people are called the sons of the living God.

Acts 14–15

The arc of these two chapters is the door of Hosea’s reversal swung open in history: the not-people sought, and the apostles refusing to be anything but men. At Lystra a man lame from birth is healed, and the crowd, sure the gods have come down, calls Barnabas Jupiter and Paul Mercurius and brings oxen to sacrifice. The apostles rend their clothes and run in among them crying, We also are men of like passions with you, and preach unto you that ye should turn from these vanities unto the living God. Men of like passions — no apostle takes the worship a Herod took; they point past themselves to the living God who made heaven and earth.

The crowd that would have sacrificed to Paul stones him within the chapter, drags him out for dead — and he rises and walks back into the city. Consider what that stoning must have been to him. He had stood at another stoning once, holding the coats, consenting; and when the blood of thy martyr Stephen was shed, I also was standing by. Now the stones are his. He is given the fellowship of Stephen’s sufferings, on the receiving end of the death he once approved — and unlike Stephen, he gets up. Stoned and rising, he is a figure of the death-and-resurrection road he declares, and he names that road for the disciples plainly: we must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God. The kingdom is entered through the furnace, not around it — the same whitening Daniel saw in the saints under the empires.

The council at Jerusalem in chapter 15 settles the question the whole month has been pressing: on what ground do the nations come in? Some demand circumcision and the law of Moses. Peter answers that God put no difference between us and them, purifying their hearts by faith, and asks why they would put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples that the fathers could not bear. The heart purified by faith, not the neck bowed under a yoke — Hezekiah’s prepared heart and Cornelius’s cleansed house, made doctrine.

James seals it with Amos: After this I will return, and will build again the tabernacle of David, which is fallen down… that the residue of men might seek after the Lord, and all the Gentiles, upon whom my name is called. The rebuilt tabernacle of David is the frame for the Gentile calling — the kingdom restored to Israel is the larger building, and the present ingathering of the nations is its firstfruits. The same day Hosea promises is here being entered: the not-people, upon whom my name is called, seeking the Lord.

The apostles refuse the worship of men and open the door for the nations — the not-people sought, the heart purified by faith, the tabernacle of David rising again.