It is hard to imagine a king determining to put up altars of
worship in the house of the Lord, the temple, to worship other gods and burn
his own son as sacrifice, but that is exactly what Manasseh had done in his
long (fifty five years!) tenure as king.
Why would the Lord allow this man to reign that long when he was so
wicked? The ways of the Lord are truly
inscrutable. Our author says, “Manasseh
led them astray to do more evil than the nations had done whom the Lord
destroyed before the people of Israel.”
His divine forbearance with not only the king but the nation is, on one
hand, remarkable and on the other hand I want to ask, why not stop this
madness? He is indeed patient with us
and yet that patience is not forever.
Judgment is announced and the tools are the measuring line of Samaria,
the northern kingdom which is no more, and the plumb line of Ahab, the most
wicked king in the history of that other kingdom. The judgment will be unlike
anything the world has seen and it will result in the complete annihilation of
the city, as a person wipes a dish clean.
Sometimes the only way to move ahead is to destroy that which is, it is
too broken to repair.
In both Mark and Luke we hear of one demon-possessed man in
this story. We presume they tell of only
one because his condition was worse than the other. It is further presumed that
Matthew’s sensibilities are Jewish and that he would be concerned with the law
that requires two witnesses to establish a thing, either positively or
negatively, so he includes both in his telling of the story. The disciples were all there so more than one
witness would have been there but not for those in the country of the Gadarenes
after Jesus and the disciples left. It
would not have been unusual for men to have been isolated from society when the
society judged them to be a danger, similar to what we do with certain mental
patients today. That Jesus took this little excursion to heal these men tells
us of His extraordinary compassion for even those who were not covenant
people. While God’s intervention
sometimes waits as it did with Manasseh, sometimes He breaks in to our
situations in ways and times we could never have imagined as Jesus does here
with these men.
Paul warns the Corinthians against participation in feasts
where the elements of the feast have been sacrificed to idols. Such participation is worship, recognition
that these things are gods of some sort.
We cannot participate in such things without being tainted by them. We have to refrain from such participation in
order to witness that we believe in one God alone and that anything else that
receives worship is a demon. Angels,
throughout the Bible, refuse to accept worship so anything that does accept it
is not of God. Paul is clear that his words apply to things we know are
sacrificed to idols. We have no
responsibility to sort out the provenance of things but if we are told that
they have been sacrificed to idols then it is a witness to decline to eat. My liberty to eat is circumscribed in order
that no one misunderstand my faith. We
can’t send mixed messages about the oneness of God.
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