How could I have been such a fool?  And for so long?  My father, Hezekiah, was loving and good.  Everyone thought he was wonderful and admired his faith.

Yet the moment I became king I worked as hard as I could to undo every good thing he ever did.

I’m going to go through a list of some of the things I did, without trying to excuse myself.  Here is a list of some of my evil practices:

Overall, I reigned with a reign of terror.  I filled Jerusalem from end to end with blood.  The blood of righteous people and knaves, of God’s servants and his enemies.  I have no idea how many people were killed at my command or as a result of my attitudes and the brutal friends I cultivated.

This, however, is only a list of some of the wrong things I did.  It makes no mention of the things I should have done but did not do.  My father did not just avoid evil things: he did good things.

So on both sides of the coin, I went wrong.

I cannot explain what it is like to feel that everybody in my kingdom has known the death of relatives or friends, just because of me.  Everybody, from the servants who clean my floors to the gatekeepers who greet me as I pass.  Everyone I meet on the street and everyone who cooks my food.  No-one has escaped my vicious brutality.

I cannot explain how it feels to have led everybody in my kingdom away from Yahweh to the bloodthirsty worship of empty idols.  Nobody who worshipped Yahweh has been allowed to do so without my best efforts being expended towards leading them into different worship.

No man who maintained a clean life and clean speech was left alone.  My men would bring such innocents before me and we would do our best to degrade their morals and their language.  If they refused to laugh at our vile jokes, they would be immediately punished and we would try again.  Not very many refused to obey my commands, so most pure men were led to impurity by me.  Any who did utterly reject my demands, died: possibly they were the only ones who benefited from my rulership.  At least they maintained their faith.
Faithful husbands were encouraged and threatened into unfaithfulness.  Woman were molested and perversion promoted.  And all at my insistence.

This continued for more than 40 years.

And then, suddenly, it happened.  Without warning, a rather small army from Assyria marched straight through Israel and arrived at the undefended walls of Jerusalem.  I was busy offering sacrifices to Baal and Ashtoreth as the commanders of Assyria marched in through the open gates of Jerusalem.

I was seized in the temple of Yahweh which I had stolen and used for my own gods – not one of which could protect me when I needed it.  I was publicly humiliated in the courts.  I felt a little of the suffering I had inflicted on so many as a large sharpened hook was pushed through my nose.  It was agony and I had no idea what would happen next – was I to be killed in the sort of torture for which the Assyrians are justly famous?  A chain was attached to the hook and I was led back and forth through the city, presented to my people as a powerless prisoner.  If I ever moved too slowly, or failed to obey any of the shouted instructions to bow or kneel, the chain was tugged until I did as I was told.  I could feel my nose being torn apart and knew that soon the hook would be wrenched free.

The Assyrian commander walked with me and clearly enjoyed my suffering.  So did the executioner who had done the work and still kept an eye on me.  I knew that kind of man.  I had used them myself, and now I was giving such a man pleasure.  We returned to the temple court and the executioner examined me again, pulling the chain firmly to see what condition I was in.  He decided that the hook might tear out, so they needed something else to control me.  He took a larger hook and showed it to me in detail, explaining what was to happen.  Then he pushed it through the bottom of my lower jaw and made sure it was fastened in place.
They led me away from Jerusalem as a mutilated prisoner, humiliated and ridiculed.

I knew that there was no hope.  I had lost my throne and my kingdom, and nothing could ever restore them.  In telling you my story, you must understand and believe this, or you will not learn the lesson I am trying so desperately to teach.

So let me say it again: I knew that there was no hope.  None.  And it was only in this situation that I finally began to realise that the gods I had worshipped could never help.  I couldn’t even believe in them myself.  But now I was suffering exactly as the prophets of Yahweh had warned.

As we made our way to Babylon, where I was to be displayed as yet another king who had been defeated by Assyria, I began to think.  My nose and jaw slowly healed as much as they could, but the chains were still used to control me as necessary.  The chains and manacles of bronze that weighed down my hands and my feet ensured extra discomfort and made sure that I could never forget what had happened.

Slowly, I started to think.  My life had been long and luxurious, and this was probably the only way to get me to review and reconsider.  My prophets had not warned me of any of this.  My soothsayers had not told me any news, and none of the dead people whom I had supposedly spoken to had whispered a word of it in the dark séances I had enjoyed.

None of the gods I had worshipped had known anything about this, or if they had known, they had not cared to warn me.  The only one who had was the very God I had loathed and persecuted.

It took me several weeks to finally come to this conclusion and to honestly admit that I had been completely wrong in choosing who I would worship.  Utter hopelessness accompanied this realisation.  I recited in my mind the catalogue of my wrongs, gradually expanding it until I could no longer bear the magnitude of my crimes.  Thousands – it had to be at least thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands – of people more righteous than I had died at my hand.  Members of my own family, members of my court, gatekeepers, soldiers, guards, prophets, priests, scribes, shepherds, carpenters, stonemasons, builders, and so many others.  I imagined mediums bringing all of those dead men to me, imagined all the dead attacking me and dragging me into the place of the dead to suffer with them.  When one has imagined for decades that the dead still have voices and power, a guilty conscience like mine leads to terrors in the night.

If I had been left alone at any time during that journey, I would have ended my life with thankfulness.  Guilt made life completely unbearable, and there was nothing I could do about it.  Nothing could bring back the people I had killed, nothing could repair the damage my reign had done to the entire nation.  Continuing life was impossible to contemplate.

Then from somewhere came memories of what many prophets of Yahweh had said to me – often their last words before I had them executed.  They had spoken of repentance and claimed that Yahweh was a forgiving God even toward someone like me.  Naturally, I couldn’t suddenly rise from such depths of guilt to ecstatic happiness in the certainty that I had been forgiven.  It was weeks longer before I could even begin to wonder if repentance might really be possible.  There was no doubt that I was sorry.  No doubt that I was certain I had done wrong.  But hadn’t I done too much wrong for forgiveness to be possible?

It was not until we arrived in Babylon after three months of travelling that I finally decided to take my sorrow and repentance before Yahweh.  All of the other gods I had completely repudiated.  Only Yahweh seemed worthy of worship.  I knew nothing about prayer except for the prayers I had heard from my father when I was very young, and in the lowest of all possible situations, I tried to pray and acknowledge Yahweh as the one true God.  I knew, or thought I knew, that I could never do anything to remedy what I had done.  But I did want to admit that Yahweh was true and powerful.

That is where the miracle comes in.  This is where you must learn a lesson from me about the forgiveness and inexpressible kindness of Yahweh.  Assyria never allows its captive kings to return to their kingdoms.  I returned to Jerusalem.  Assyrian never allows a kingdom it has once conquered to have freedom again.  I returned to Jerusalem as king of an independent Judah, answerable only to Yahweh.

Can you see how utterly impossible that was?

Can you see how I can never again have any doubts that Yahweh is God and there is no other god beside him?

I returned to Jerusalem and sat again on my throne.  My nose and jaw are permanent reminders of my time as a captive.  The rest of my life is dedicated to trying to fix the wrongs I did.  But some things, I will never be able to fix.  More than 40 years of concentrated evil can’t be overcome in just the few years I may have left.  I think my son Amon is already beyond help.  I try, but he reminds me of myself and the way I responded to my father.  My grandson Josiah is different and I have high hopes for him.  He is a godly child and I hope he will grow up to become a godly man and a godly king.  Maybe he will be able to overcome all the evil that I did.  I hope so.

I, Manasseh, am once again king over Judah in Jerusalem.  This is irrefutable proof that Yahweh, the God of Judah, is in control of the nations.  Listen to me and learn from me.  Wrong can only be righted to some extent.  The only way to truly fix wrong is never to do it.  But if you have done wrong, I urge you now – repent!  God does forgive.  He even forgave me.