The God of Second Chances
Res Spears
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Happy New Year, everybody!
If you are one of those people who make New Year’s resolutions, I hope that you haven’t given up on them yet.
A Forbes magazine article on New Year’s Eve stated that about a quarter of Americans planned to make New Year’s resolutions.
The most popular resolutions are pretty much the ones you would expect:
23 percent of those who intended to make resolutions planned to resolve to live healthier lifestyles;
21 percent planned to resolve to be happier;
20 percent planned to resolve to lose weight;
16 percent planned to resolve to meet career or job goals;
11 percent planned to resolve to improve relationships;
And 7 percent planned to resolve to exercise.
Is your resolution on that list somewhere?
I wonder what it is about turning the calendar over to a new year that causes us to commit ourselves, however faithfully or unfaithfully, to changing our lives.
Why are we so much more likely to make these kinds of commitments on January 1 than on April 5 or June 23 or October 10?
I suppose there must be something within us that resonates with the symbolism of tearing off one calendar page and starting fresh with the next one. “New Year, new you” and all that stuff.
Perhaps we see the new year as a second chance to be better people in some regard, an opportunity for a fresh start.
And maybe there’s something to it, as the idea of second chances is ingrained in our culture. A search of the Internet Movie Database turns up 353 different movies and television shows tagged with the keyword “second chance.”
There’s the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life, television shows ranging from Star Trek to Happy Days, and even a movie called Second Chance, about a rich stockbroker who buys a Nevada town as a community for people who need a second chance at life.
One of the great true stories about someone getting a second chance is that of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist who invented dynamite in the 19th century.
Nobel awoke one morning, picked up that day’s newspaper and read his own obituary: “Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who died yesterday, devised a way for more people to be killed in a war than ever before, and he died a very rich man.”
Clearly the paper had made a mistake; in fact, it was Alfred Nobel’s older brother who had died.
“But the account had a profound effect on Nobel. He decided he wanted to be known for something other than developing the means to kill people efficiently and for amassing a fortune in the process. So he initiated the Nobel Prize, the award for scientists and writers who foster peace.
“Nobel said, ‘Every man ought to have the chance to correct his epitaph in midstream and write a new one.’” [Leadership Ministries Worldwide, Practical Illustrations: Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians (Chattanooga, TN: Leadership Ministries Worldwide, 2001), 117.]
I suspect that deep within each of us, there exists some desire for a second chance, some wish that we could go back and repair a broken relationship or take away some hurt that we have caused.
I suspect that all of us, at one time or another, have desired to have a fresh start, and maybe that’s what New Year’s resolutions are all about.
I have good news for you: The God of the Bible is the God of fresh starts. He is the God of second chances.
We see it throughout Scripture. Adam and Eve got a fresh start after they’d sinned in the Garden of Eden. Jonah got a second chance after he tried to run from God and the prophetic ministry to which God had ordained him.
Peter got a second chance after denying Jesus three times. Paul, who had persecuted the young church, got a second chance when the risen Christ met him in a blinding vision on the road to Damascus.
In fact, the entire story of Scripture is the story of a God who pursues rebellious mankind, not to condemn us but to offer us reconciliation through His Son, Jesus Christ.
And there may be no greater example of second chances in Scripture than that of Judah’s King Manasseh, which we will read about today in 2 Chronicles, chapter 33.
Now, as you’re turning to that passage, let me give you some background about the history of Israel during the times of the kings.
Perhaps you will recall that, after the death of King Solomon, the nation broke into two kingdoms, the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah.
The books of 1 and 2 Chronicles and 1 and 2 Kings give us the biblical accounts of the kings of Israel and Judah during this 345-year period, and they don’t hold back on the sordid details of these men’s lives.
It’s interesting to note that both Israel and Judah had the same number of kings — 20 of them apiece — during the time they existed as sovereign kingdoms. What’s really interesting about this is that Israel’s lifespan was only 209 years, compared to Judah’s 345 years.
The root of the difference is the fact that Scripture describes every one of the Northern Kingdom’s 20 kings as evil. For the Southern Kingdom of Judah, things were more complicated.
There were plenty of evil kings in the history of Judah’s monarchy, but there were enough good ones in the mix that God blessed the Southern Kingdom with a much longer lifespan that that of Israel to the north.
Hezekiah was one of the greatest of Judah’s kings, and because of his devotion to God, the Lord gave him protection from the growing threat from Assyria, and God also answered the king’s prayer for healing when Hezekiah learned he was mortally sick, granting him 15 years more of life.
When Hezekiah died in about 686 B.C., his son, Manasseh became king over Judah. And, as we shall see, Manasseh was not devoted to God the way his father, Hezekiah, had been.
So, let’s pick up the narrative in 2 Chronicles 33:1:
Manasseh was twelve years old when he became king, and he reigned fifty-five years in Jerusalem. He did evil in the sight of the Lord according to the abominations of the nations whom the Lord dispossessed before the sons of Israel.
When God led His chosen people into the land of Canaan, this promised land was already inhabited. Indeed, part of the reason that God sent His people into the land of Canaan was to bring His judgment upon the people who lived there, whose wickedness was so great that God said it had defiled the very land upon which they lived.
In fact, God had commanded the people of Israel to completely eradicate the Canaanites when they entered the Promised Land, because He knew the people of Israel would be sorely tempted by any survivors to turn away from God and to take up the very wickedness for which God was judging Canaan.
But God knew His people, and He knew that they would be — much as we would be — horrified by the prospect of what was essentially genocide, even if it was merited by the utter wickedness of those whom God had ordered to be killed.
And so, He had warned the people of Israel not to intermarry with the Canaanites who remained once Israel had fully occupied the land, and He had warned them against taking up the evils of the desperately wicked Canaanite people.
We see this in several Old Testament passages, but let’s look at one from Deuteronomy, chapter 18.
“When you enter the land which the Lord your God gives you, you shall not learn to imitate the detestable things of those nations. “There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, one who uses divination, one who practices witchcraft, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who casts a spell, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. “For whoever does these things is detestable to the Lord; and because of these detestable things the Lord your God will drive them out before you.
So, more than 700 years after God had warned His chosen people not to imitate the detestable things that had caused Him to bring His judgment against the people of Canaan, what we see back in the passage from 2 Chronicles is that Manasseh is doing the same evil in the sight of the Lord, evil according to the abominations of the nations that had been routed from the Land of Canaan.
Let’s pick that account back up in verse 3.
For he rebuilt the high places which Hezekiah his father had broken down; he also erected altars for the Baals and made Asherim, and worshiped all the host of heaven and served them. He built altars in the house of the Lord of which the Lord had said, “My name shall be in Jerusalem forever.” For he built altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts of the house of the Lord.
King Hezekiah had torn down the places and the altars where the people of Israel had worshiped false gods, but his son, Manasseh, had rebuilt them. Indeed, he went so far as to build altars to those false gods in the very temple.
He not only worshiped other gods, he went so far as to essentially spit in the one true God’s face by defiling the temple where God’s presence was located in Jerusalem.
And Manasseh didn’t stop there in his wickedness. Look at verse 6.
He made his sons pass through the fire in the valley of Ben-hinnom; and he practiced witchcraft, used divination, practiced sorcery and dealt with mediums and spiritists. He did much evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking Him to anger. Then he put the carved image of the idol which he had made in the house of God, of which God had said to David and to Solomon his son, “In this house and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen from all the tribes of Israel, I will put My name forever; and I will not again remove the foot of Israel from the land which I have appointed for your fathers, if only they will observe to do all that I have commanded them according to all the law, the statutes and the ordinances given through Moses.”
In verse 6, where it says “he made his sons pass through the fire,” that refers to the practice of infant sacrifice by fire. In the Ancient Near East, there were some herbs and other means that could be used for abortions, but another common means of dealing with unwanted children was to sacrifice them to pagan gods in the hope of receiving some blessing through the child’s death.
So, Manasseh had turned from the one true God as the source of all blessings and was seeking blessings from false gods by killing his own children.
He also practiced witchcraft and sorcery, and he sought the counsel of mediums and spiritists, all things that you’ll recognize from that passage I read out of Deuteronomy.
And finally, in the greatest affront to the God who had given this Promised Land to a people whom He had rescued from slavery in Egypt, Manasseh set up an idol of one of these false gods in the temple, God’s very house in Jerusalem.
In the parallel account of Manasseh’s reign, which appears in the 21st chapter of 2 Kings, we learn that he also slaughtered many of his own people in Judah, establishing a reign of terror in Jerusalem.
He wasn’t a nice man, and he was a terrible king.
And we see in verse 9 that Manasseh’s great wickedness spread to the people.
Thus Manasseh misled Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to do more evil than the nations whom the Lord destroyed before the sons of Israel.
It would be hard to find a more evil character in Scripture than King Manasseh, and his reign really marks the beginning of the end for the southern kingdom of Judah, because we see in the next verses the beginning of God’s judgment against Manasseh and the people of Judah.
The Lord spoke to Manasseh and his people, but they paid no attention. Therefore the Lord brought the commanders of the army of the king of Assyria against them, and they captured Manasseh with hooks, bound him with bronze chains and took him to Babylon.
Assyria is the nation that had conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, and it was, by this time, well on its way to its own fall, which took place in 605 B.C. It was not the nation that would ultimately destroy Jerusalem and carry off so many of its people into exile — that would be Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian empire.
But Assyria would still be strong enough during Manasseh’s time to cause problems for the people of Judah, and God used the Assyrian army to pour out his anger upon King Manasseh for his great blasphemies and his great evil.
And so, King Manasseh was bound with bronze chains and dragged out of Jerusalem by a hook through his nose and taken to Babylon.
Now, let me stop the historical account here to make an observation. The account that appears in 2 Kings doesn’t mention Manasseh’s capture, nor does it include anything about the verses that follow in 2 Chronicles.
In 1 and 2 Kings, the focus is on the long-term, national effects of the sins of the kings of Israel and Judah. But the focus of 1 and 2 Chronicles is more often on the personal consequences of sin.
So, it’s not surprising that we would see an account in 2 Chronicles of Manasseh falling under the judgment of God. The point of this account is to remind us that sin brings pain and suffering and death.
We were made to be people who exist in perfect shalom — in wholeness and happiness and contentment and peace in the presence of the God who created us in His image.
But our sins break that shalom. They do violence to God’s peace, and they cause us to be discontent and incomplete.
You may never have burned your sons in the fire, but your sins are just as much the cause of your discontent as were Manasseh’s. And discontentment is the very root of our desire to make New Year’s resolutions for ourselves. We recognize that we are not the people we should be.
Sometimes that recognition is a simple matter of stepping on the scales one day. Sometimes, it comes during a long period of self-loathing over hurtful things we said or did to others that we wish we could take back. Sometimes it comes from the recognition that we simply haven’t been the kinds of people we know we should be.
And the world’s answer to all this is for us all to try a little harder this year, to resolve to be better. But that same Forbes article I mentioned earlier says that only 8 percent of those who make New Year’s resolutions achieve them. And even for those who do, there still exist many ways that we will fail to be the people we were created to be.
Thank the Lord that we serve the God of second chances, the God who sent His own Son to pay the just penalty that we deserve for our sins so that those who repent for their sins and believe in Jesus can be reconciled to God — adopted into His family as sons and daughters and given the promise of eternal life with Him.
This is the lesson of the next few verses in the story of Manasseh. Let’s pick it back up in verse 12.
When he was in distress, he entreated the Lord his God and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers. When he prayed to Him, He was moved by his entreaty and heard his supplication, and brought him again to Jerusalem to his kingdom. Then Manasseh knew that the Lord was God.
Manasseh humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers. He repented of his sins. He came to God in prayer, acknowledging his wickedness and the fact that he was spiritually bankrupt and completely dependent upon God’s grace and mercy.
This is a picture of what each of us must do to be saved. We must recognize that we have rebelled against God in our sins. We must understand that there is nothing we have done or can do to put God in our debt.
And we must agree with God that we are utterly lost without His grace, which He lavished upon us in the sacrificial death and supernatural resurrection of His very Son. We must recognize that we can be saved only by placing our faith in God by having faith in Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf.
Salvation by grace through faith in Jesus is God’s offer of a second chance to the lost, to sinners who are destined for hell without it.
Manasseh had grown up under good King Hezekiah, who loved the Lord and would have taught his son about the God who is good and gracious and eager to forgive.
But Manasseh turned his back on what he had learned about God for many years, and he pursued evil just as hard as he could do so. And then, one day in a prison cell in Babylon, wrapped in bronze chains, he hit rock bottom, and he found that the Lord was right there waiting for him.
He is waiting for you, too. Perhaps you have never really turned to Jesus in faith, and your life is a wreck. That’s how it was for me when I was saved. I had my own litany of sins that would make you blush, and my life was falling apart around me.
But there was Jesus, waiting for me, ready to begin putting me back together into something so much better than I’d ever been or imagined, waiting to reconcile me to His Father, giving me the opportunity for a fresh start as a child of God.
All it took was for me to humble myself, to repent of my sins and place my faith in Jesus. And that’s all it will take for you, too. He is not waiting to punish you; He is waiting to give you a ring and a robe and call you a son or daughter.
But God also gives second chances even to those who already have followed Jesus in faith. I don’t know how far you have fallen from the Christ you followed in faith at some earlier point in life, but Manasseh’s story should be comforting to you if you have strayed outside the light of Christ and found yourself wandering in the darkness.
We serve a God of second chances. And third chances. And fourth chances. He is waiting for you to do like Manasseh did — to humble yourself before Him, to repent of your sins, and to turn back to the lighted path.
He may very well give you trouble and distress to remind you how far you have wandered, but His goal for you is restoration and reconciliation.
And He longs for you to remember that He is God, that He is the God who saves, that He is the God who makes all things new, that He is the God of light and life.
Maybe your life as a Christian has been marked by one defeat after another. Instead of living as the overwhelming conquerors of Romans 8, you find yourself caught up in the snare of sins you know you should have left behind long ago.
Let me tell you that the God of second chances is waiting for you, too. He has not turned His back on you. He still waits for you to humble yourself, to come to Him in repentance, and to know that the Lord is God.
Whatever you’ve done — whatever your situation — you have not fallen outside of the immeasurable grace of God.
He is waiting today to give you a second chance. He is waiting today to give you a fresh start. And, unlike most folks’ New Years resolutions, His mercies never fail. They are new each morning.