Today’s reading: 2 Kings 21; John 20
It can be easy, when we fall short or utterly fail in the Christian life, to feel like God must be angry with us, if He even still loves us at all, but one thing I couldn’t help but marvel at in 2 Kings 21 this morning is the unbelievable patience and mercy of God for His people…
The author reminds us, in 2 Kings 21, that God had warned Israel to be careful to do all that He had commanded them. We have talked about this a number of times already as we went through those commands, but it’s worth reminding ourselves that this was not a very high bar God was calling them to. When people talk about Old Testament laws, they tend to think about all the minutiae of Leviticus and such, but ordinances for various offerings is not what God is concerned with here. In large part, what God is calling Israel to is to stay faithful to Him, not running after the gods of the nations He drove out before them. That’s about it, it wasn’t that complicated. So as God is getting to the end of His patience with Judah, it’s not because someone forgot to burn the liver of a sacrifice one time, or because someone did something that might have been construed as work on a Sabbath, but is because, “Manasseh led them astray to do more evil than the nations had done whom the Lord destroyed before the people of Israel.”
It’s not that God let Israel degrade to this spiritual state unchecked, having sent prophets to warn the people as things when south, and having brought nations against them as a reminder of their drift away from Him, but that He did not outright destroy them for their disobedience anywhere along the way. God continued to pursue Israel and continued to call them back to Himself, but that whole time He would have been fully within His rights to wipe them out. Israel had been chasing after other gods, sacrificing their children to Molech, using mediums and necromancers, worshipping Baal and Asherah, all alongside ignoring Sabbatical laws (especially the Sabbath year) and failing to enforce God’s justice in Israel while exploiting the weak and vulnerable.
Manasseh was an especially bad culmination, but aside from a few bright spots, like the reign of Hezekiah, Judah had been on a steady trend toward further and further faithlessness.
So as I read about Manasseh’s fifty-five year reign, I can’t help but marvel that God didn’t judge His people even sooner. The patience and mercy of God for His people is absolutely astounding…
It is easy, when I fall into sin, or when I fail to do something God has called me to do, to feel like God must be against me for it, but this is not at all the character God has revealed to us. If God can be so patient and so merciful with His people for so long, and through such incredible disobedience and unfaithfulness, how much more so can we, in Christ, expect that same kind of patience and mercy? If we are seeking the Lord, our hope rooted in Christ, we can have an amazing expectation of God’s longsuffering with us.
I’m not suggesting we should wantonly run forward in sin, or carelessly bank on God’s patience as the basis for our own disobedience, but in those moments where we are struggling to believe that God could really still be for us given how badly we have failed Him, we can find incredible comfort in the fact that we have not run as far from Him as Israel, which should assure us that we have not yet exhausted His patience and infinite love for us in Christ.
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