Sixty Days: Day Forty-Five

Today's Reading:

• 2 Kings 17-25
• Proverbs 21-24
• Hosea 6-10
• John 17
• James 1

Reading Time:  2 hours

I was thinking today about the power of influence a patriarch can have on future generations of his family.  Proverbs talks about disciplining your children often and early.  Hosea shows the love of God to children who are not actually his.  Jesus prays for those God has given Him, and for all those whom God will give Him.  But the most profound example I found was in the closing chapters of 2 Kings, chapters that record the final years and the fall of the Kingdom of Judah.

King Manasseh reigned the longest of any kings of Israel or Judah--55 years.  The son of the righteous King Hezekiah and raised in a Spiritual climate heavily influenced by the prophet Isaiah, Manasseh turned out to be the most wicked king Judah ever had.  He built temples to worship every kind of foreign god.  He sacrificed his own children in the fires of Molech and Chemosh.  He did evil in the sight of the Lord like no one had ever done before.  He killed so many innocent people the streets of Jerusalem ran red with their blood, including that of the prophet Isaiah, who was sawn in half on Manasseh's orders.

If you will allow me to skip to the part of the story I know but haven't yet read in 2 Chronicles, Manasseh was taken captive by a foreign king, and while in prison, in his old age, he repented of the sinful deeds he had committed and was restored to his kingdom.  So we can assume his end was better than a misspent life of idolatry, immorality, and evil.

But for the next 100 years, the record of each king, good and bad, is accentuated by one caveat:  Manasseh's sins were still the source of God's wrath and the reason for His judgment on the Kingdom of Judah.  No revival, no restoration of the temple, no national call for righteousness could reverse the effects of Manasseh's godlessness on five generations of his descendants, and the entirety of his people.  His great-grandson saw the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, the execution of his sons and civic leaders, and a remnant of Jews being marched into exile in Babylon...just before they gouged his eyes out and led him away in chains.  This was the third and final wave of captivity for the Jews, which would culminate 50 years after this point with King Cyrus of Persia granting the Israelites permission to return and rebuild the temple of God.

Then there is an obscure government official, a court secretary named Shaphan, whose children and grandchildren keep showing up in the closing chapters of 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, and Jeremiah.  They were righteous men, godly men, men committed to the survival of God's Chosen People.  They rescued the prophet from an unjust imprisonment, they pleaded with kings to heed the word of the Lord, they tried to shepherd Israel through the dark days following the destruction of Jerusalem.  Even though we don't know anything about Shaphan, surely we can surmise from the actions of his offspring what kind of man he was?  Surely we can understand the kind of influence it took to produce multiple generations of people who continued to serve the Lord while the world around them beat a speedy trail to destruction.

My wife has left for a two-day retreat with other church women, leaving two small sons in my care.  Last night at Bible Study, one of the ladies asked me, "Is April taking the baby with her?"  When my reply was no, she looked at me in horror and said, "Who's going to take care of the baby?!?"  I raised my hand and said in all sarcastic seriousness, "I AM a capable father.  And April has left me with plenty of frozen milk."  But there is such spiritual significance to that as I write today.  My heart truly is filled with the desire to be a father as capable and influential as Shaphan.