Study Desk

He was successful, because everything he did for the Temple or in observance of the Law, he did in a spirit of complete loyalty and devotion to his God.

He has human power, but we have the Lord our God to help us and to fight our battles." The people were encouraged by these words of their king.

Hezekiah tells you that the Lord your God will save you from our power, but Hezekiah is deceiving you and will let you die of hunger and thirst.

When did any of the gods of all those countries ever save their country from us? Then what makes you think that your god can save you?

Now don't let Hezekiah deceive you or mislead you like that. Don't believe him! No god of any nation has ever been able to save his people from any Assyrian emperor. So certainly this god of yours can't save you!"

The Assyrian officials said even worse things about the Lord God and Hezekiah, the Lord 's servant.

The letter that the emperor wrote defied the Lord , the God of Israel. It said, "The gods of the nations have not saved their people from my power, and neither will Hezekiah's god save his people from me."

They talked about the God of Jerusalem in the same way that they talked about the gods of the other peoples, idols made by human hands.

Then King Hezekiah and the prophet Isaiah son of Amoz prayed to God and cried out to him for help.

The Lord sent an angel that killed the soldiers and officers of the Assyrian army. So the emperor went back to Assyria disgraced. One day when he was in the temple of his god, some of his sons killed him with their swords.

Besides all this, God gave him sheep and cattle and so much other wealth that he built many cities.

and even when the Babylonian ambassadors came to inquire about the unusual event that had happened in the land, God let Hezekiah go his own way only in order to test his character.

He placed an image in the Temple, the place about which God had said to David and his son Solomon: "Here in Jerusalem, in this Temple, is the place that I have chosen out of all the territory of the twelve tribes of Israel as the place where I am to be worshiped.

In his suffering he became humble, turned to the Lord his God, and begged him for help.

God accepted Manasseh's prayer and answered it by letting him go back to Jerusalem and rule again. This convinced Manasseh that the Lord was God.

He also repaired the altar where the Lord was worshiped, and he sacrificed fellowship offerings and thanksgiving offerings on it. He commanded all the people of Judah to worship the Lord , the God of Israel.

Everything else that Manasseh did, the prayer he made to his God, and the messages of the prophets who spoke to him in the name of the Lord , the God of Israel, are all recorded in The History of the Kings of Israel.

He did what was pleasing to the Lord ; he followed the example of his ancestor King David, strictly obeying all the laws of God.

In the eighth year that Josiah was king, while he was still very young, he began to worship the God of his ancestor King David. Four years later he began to destroy the pagan places of worship, the symbols of the goddess Asherah, and all the other idols.

In the eighteenth year of his reign, after he had purified the land and the Temple by ending pagan worship, King Josiah sent three men to repair the Temple of the Lord God: Shaphan son of Azaliah, Maaseiah, the governor of Jerusalem, and Joah son of Joahaz, a high official.