"He took the carved Asherah pole he had made and put it in the temple, of which the Lord had said to David and to his son Solomon, 'In this temple and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, I will put My name forever. I will not again make the feet of the Israelites wander from the land I gave their ancestors, if only they will be careful to do everything I commanded them and will keep the whole law that My servant Moses gave them.' But the people did not listen. Manasseh led them astray, so that they did more evil than the nations the Lord destroyed before the Israelites." (2 Kings 21:7-9, 2 Chronicles 33:7-9)
The Lord promised the Israelites that they would remain in the land and that they would enjoy peace and prosperity if they would be faithful to Him. But He also warned them that if they were not faithful to Him, He would uproot them from the land just as He uprooted the nations that inhabited it before them. In Deuteronomy 28 we studied the blessings for obedience and the curses for disobedience. If the people, whom He rescued from Egypt and brought into a land flowing with milk and honey, turned away from Him, He would deal with them the same way He dealt with the heathen tribes of Canaan. He warned them: "You will be uprooted from the land you are entering to possess." (Deuteronomy 28:63b)
Manasseh has desecrated the very structure that was the visible symbol of the Lord being in the people's midst. The building that houses the ark of the covenant---the covenant the Lord made with the people---now also houses an abominable "sacred pole" in honor of a hideous false goddess. And because Manasseh will reign over Judah for fifty-five years, he will have many years in which to influence the people to engage in sin with him. A large number of them choose to engage in sin with him, as the passages above informed us, and they refuse to listen to the warnings of the Lord's prophets. Now the Lord foretells a coming judgment upon the people who have not only fallen into idolatry but who are more enthusiastic about idolatry than the pagan tribes whose religious practices they adopted.
"The Lord said through His servants the prophets: 'Manasseh king of Judah has committed these detestable sins. He has done more evil than the Amorites who preceded him and has led Judah into sin with his idols. Therefore this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: I am going to bring such disaster on Jerusalem and Judah that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle. I will stretch out over Jerusalem the measuring line used against Samaria and the plumb line used against the house of Ahab. I will wipe out Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down. I will forsake the remnant of My inheritance and give them into the hands of enemies. They will be looted and plundered by all their enemies; they have done evil in My eyes and have aroused My anger from the day their ancestors came out of Egypt until this day.'" (2 Kings 21:10-15)
He warns the people of Jerusalem that their city will fall just as Samaria, the capitol of Israel, fell. The northern kingdom fell because of idolatry and it's only because it took the southern kingdom longer to fall as deep into sin that it is still standing right now in the text we are studying. The Lord had made it clear to the people of Judah that the reason He allowed the northern kingdom to be conquered is because the people of the northern kingdom had turned from the living God to idols. Manasseh's father, King Hezekiah, understood this and worked hard to begin major religious reforms in Judah as soon as he came to the throne. But now Manasseh is working hard to undo everything his father did. He has lovingly embraced every vile heathen practice that he's ever heard of and he's encouraging all the people to join him in his debauchery and inhumanity. We would be wrong to assume that Manasseh was the only person in the nation of Judah who sacrificed a child to Molek during those days; an untold number of others did the same according to the Lord's harsh words spoken to the people through the prophet Isaiah (see Isaiah 57:9) and through Jeremiah (Jeremiah 32:35) and through many other unnamed prophets.
Manasseh's sin and the sin into which he enticed the people sets all the events in motion which will lead to the downfall of the nation. The Lord makes this very clear when He sends the prophet Jeremiah to say on His behalf: "Even if Moses and Samuel were to stand before Me, My heart would not go out to this people. Send them away from My presence! Let them go! And if they ask you, 'Where shall we go?' tell them, 'This is what the Lord says: Those destined for death, to death; those for the sword, to the sword; those for starvation, to starvation; those for captivity, to captivity.' 'I will send four kinds of destroyers against them,' declares the Lord, 'the sword to kill and the dogs to drag away and the birds and the wild animals to devour and destroy. I will make them abhorrent to all the kingdoms of the earth because of what Manasseh son of Hezekiah king of Judah did in Jerusalem.'" (Jeremiah 15:1-4)
Manasseh and many of the people of his kingdom are far more sinful than anyone who inhabited the land before them. Their sins are so egregious that the Lord declares, "Even if Moses stood before Me to intercede on your behalf, I would not relent of sending judgment upon you! Even if the prophet Samuel begged Me to show you mercy, I would not listen to him!" Manasseh and many of the people have shed the blood of innocent children and that innocent blood cries out to Him from the ground, just as the blood of Abel cried out to Him from the ground when Cain wickedly struck his brother down. The Lord already tried to be merciful by sending the prophets to plead with the king and the people to repent, but they would not repent. In our next session He will bring hardship upon Manasseh in an attempt to get him to repent, but even though Manasseh will respond appropriately to discipline, he has already done too much damage to the spiritual condition of the nation. Events have been set in motion that cannot be stopped---because too many of the people don't want to stop.
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