The human heart is so mercurial, the nation can go from best to worst in one generation!
If we’re going to catch the irony, we need a good memory. Joseph’s firstborn son in Egypt he named Manasseh. Why? Because he helped Joseph forget! Forget all the trouble he had been through…and his father’s house—a cure for homesickness! If we hurtle ahead hundreds of years, we find Hezekiah and the son of his old age. What will he name him? Manasseh! If ever there was a son who forgot his father’s house, this would be the one. Look at these two statements. Hezekiah “trusted in the Lord God of Israel, so that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor who were before him” (2 Ki 18:5). “Manasseh seduced them to do more evil than the nations whom the Lord had destroyed before the children of Israel” (21:9). If you want an exhaustive list of all the evil a king can do, read 2 Kings 21. “He rebuilt the high places which Hezekiah his father had destroyed; he raised up altars for Baal,…and he worshiped all the host of heaven and served them.…Also he made his son pass through the fire, practiced soothsaying, used witchcraft, and consulted spiritists and mediums….He even set a carved image of Asherah…in the house of…the Lord.…Moreover Manasseh shed very much innocent blood, till he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another” (vv 3, 6, 7, 16). And then, to your horror, you read, “Now the rest of the acts of Manasseh…are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?” (v 17). You mean there’s more? Surely if there was a man—whose father was Judah’s godliest king, and who was born as a result of a divine miracle—if there was a man who deserved the merciless wrath of God, it would be Manasseh. But then, what exactly was recorded of him in the chronicles of the kings? You’ll be amazed!