The Worst and the Best

Good Friday Reading from John 19

Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

And now, here's a message.

From Pastor Chris Roseberg. The Holy Gospel according to St. John, the 19th chapter. Then Pilate took Jesus and flogged Him, and the soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on His head and arrayed Him in a purple robe.

They came up to Him saying, Hail, King of the Jews! And they struck Him with their hands. Pilate went out again and said to them, See, I am bringing Him out to you so that you may know that I find no guilt in Him.

So Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, Behold the man. When the chief priests and the officers saw Him, they cried out, Crucify Him! Crucify Him! Pilate said to them, Take Him yourselves and crucify Him, for I find no guilt in Him.

The Jews answered him, We have a law, and according to that law, He ought to die because He has made Himself the Son of God. When Pilate heard this statement, he was even more afraid. He entered his headquarters again and said to Jesus, Where are you from?

But Jesus gave him no answer. So Pilate said to him, You will not speak to me? Do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you? Jesus answered him, You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given to you from above.

Therefore, he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin. From then on, Pilate sought to release Him. But the Jews cried out, If you release this man, you are not Caesar's friend. Everyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar.

So when Pilate heard these words, he brought Jesus out and sat down on the judgment seat at a place called the stone pavement and an Aramaic Gabbatha. Now it was the day of the preparation of the Passover.

It was about the sixth hour. He said to the Jews, Behold your king! They cried out, Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him! Pilate said to them, Shall I crucify your king? The chief priest answered, We have no king but Caesar.

So he delivered him over to them to be crucified. So they took Jesus and he went out bearing his own cross to the place of a skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha. There they crucified him and with him two others, one on either side and Jesus between them.

Pilate also wrote an inscription and put it on the cross. It read, Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews. Many of the Jews read this inscription for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city.

And it was written in Aramaic, in Latin, and in Greek. So the chief priest of the Jews said to Pilate, Do not write the king of the Jews, but rather that this man said that I am the king of the Jews. Pilate answered, What I have written I have written.

Then the soldiers, when the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his garments and divided them into four parts. One part for each soldier, also his tunic. But the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom.

So they said to one another, Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see whose it shall be. This was to fulfill the scripture which says, They divided my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.

So the soldiers did these things. But standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother's sister Mary, the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, Woman, behold your son.

And when he had said, then he said to his disciple, Behold your mother. And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home. After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said to fulfill the scripture, I thirst.

A jar full of sour wine stood there. So they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth. And when Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, It is finished. And he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

Since it was the day of preparation, and so that the bodies would not remain on the cross on the Sabbath, for that Sabbath was a high day, the Jews asked Pilate that their legs might be broken and that they might be taken away.

So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and of the other who had been crucified with him. But when they came to Jesus, they saw that he was already dead. They did not break his legs. But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water.

He who saw it has borne witness. His testimony is true. And he knows that he is telling the truth, that you may also believe. For these things took place that the scripture might be fulfilled. Not one of his bones will be broken.

And again another says, They will look on him whom they have pierced. After these things, Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews, asked Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus.

And Pilate gave him permission. So he came and took away his body. Nicodemus also, who earlier had come to Jesus by night, came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about 75 pounds in weight. So they took the body of Jesus and bound it in linen cloths with the spices, as is the burial custom of the Jews.

But in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had yet been laid. So because of the Jewish day of preparation, since the tomb was close at hand, they laid Jesus there.

The Warning of the Commandments and Human Disobedience

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. You may be seated. In Luther's small catechism, at the close of the commandments, Luther asked this question, What does God say about all of these commandments?

He says, I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.

And again, Luther's famous question that he asks, Was ist das? What does this mean? God threatens to punish all who break these commandments. Therefore we should fear his wrath and not do anything against them.

But he promises grace and every blessing to all who keep these commandments. Therefore we should also love and trust in him and gladly do what he commands. Have you noticed that the world seems to think so little of God's Word?

But here's the thing, it's not just the world, it's you and I as well. That's kind of our problem. Have you ever noticed or had a time in your life when you thought you knew better than those who were in authority over you when they gave you a command or gave you a warning?

I remember as a kid my mom and I and my brother, well we all lived with our stepdad in the mountains, the foothills of Monrovia, California. Now if you guys are familiar with California at all or Southern California, you'll note there seems to be an annual event that happens every fall.

Southern California catches on fire. It's a thing, it's a thing. And the reason why is because during the summer months the Mojave Desert that's north of Southern California, well it warms up and it warms up big-time.

And when you get into the fall season you start getting these high-pressure systems that come right over the Mojave Desert and high-pressure systems with a lot of energy like that kick up a lot of winds.

And so you get these winds that come off the Mojave Desert down into the Southern California basin and it gets hot. Like 105, 110, 112 hot. But don't worry, it's a dry heat, right? But here's what happens.

Those winds, they get to gusting 35, 45, 50, 60 miles an hour and they are hot. And always and again some hapless person chucks a cigarette butt out of a window in a dry place and next thing you know Southern California is on fire.

And we lived in the foothills so we had a lot of brush and shrubs and and growth and things like that. We were not in a good place. And so my mom and my stepdad would always warn me about playing with fire.

Did I listen to them? Not even close, right? You old people don't know what's going on. And it was during this time in my life that I discovered a wonderful thing that I enjoyed doing and that was killing ants.

Alright, forget army men, okay? We had trails of little black ants and they would go all over the place. If a mouse died in the yard they would be all over its corpse pretty quick and consume that thing lickety-split.

And so I enjoyed killing time by killing ants. And one of my friends introduced me to this idea that you can take an open flame and a can of raid and when you put those two together you have napalm. You have a flamethrower.

And boy, this was an escalation of the ant-killing technology that I embraced fully. But again, my parents had warned me that we live in a very dangerous place and fire is not something that you play with.

Did I listen? No. So one day I was out killing ants using this new technology that I discovered. And there were in our yard these little baby palm trees. And the thing about baby palm trees is they have this hair on them.

And that's not even the right way of putting it. It's this fibrous thing that they emit from the very trunk itself. And it's like kindling. And when you take a flamethrower and that kindling together there's a sound that it makes when the two come together and the sound is, right?

Well, when this happened my eyes got as big as a saucer. I went into full panic mode. I was terrified at this point because I had started a fire and it wasn't very far from our garage. I mean the overhang of the garage was like dangerously close.

And at this point the adrenaline was going so big inside of my body I can hear my heartbeat in my ears and time itself seemed to slow down. Quickly ran, got the hose that I washed the cars with, came back over and sprayed down this palm tree.

And I successfully knocked that fire down, thankfully. But that didn't get rid of the smell nor the fact that the palm tree was now black. And I had some explaining to do. And when my mom got home from work everything gets really fuzzy in my memories at this point, right?

But here's what I had done. I had taken the words of my parents and I didn't listen. And what was just theory, fire starting something dangerous? Man, it no longer was theory in my mind anymore. From that day forward I realized that God was gracious to me because I easily could have burned our house down and started a wildfire that would have resulted in other people's houses and properties being destroyed.

And I would have been the cause of that. And that event still haunts me to this day. And I think God in his mercy allowed me to see the consequences of my disobedience. But see him in a way that really got my attention.

Manasseh's Idolatry, Child Sacrifice, and the Judgment of God

And with that we consider today. You'll note during the Lenten season we've been working our way through 2 Chronicles and we've been focusing on the good kings of Judah. But it's here today I would like to formally introduce you by way of the biblical text, probably one of the worst kings of Judah who ever lived.

And why he was so bad will become very apparent from the text. As a king of Judah, you'll note that if you know your Mosaic covenant, he would have been required by God's law to hand write, copy word for word, every word of the Torah.

All the first five books of the Bible. One wonders if he did that because of what the scripture says. Manasseh was 12 years old when he began to reign. And I'm in 2 Chronicles 33. And he reigned for 55 years in Jerusalem.

And he did what was evil in the sight of Yahweh. According to the abominations of the nations whom Yahweh drove out before the people of Israel. And here's where we have to note something today. People today are engaging in all kinds of evil.

And you know what? They think it's totally fine. It's okie-dokie. You know why they think it's fine and it's okie-dokie? Because they're doing what is good in their sight with no regard for what is evil in God's sight.

We do not define good. We do not define evil. God has that prerogative. And when we are doing evil, we have no right to say that God is just fine with it. He's hunky-dunky when he's not. So he did all according to the abominations of the nations whom Yahweh had driven out before the people of Israel.

He rebuilt the high places that his father Hezekiah had broken down. He erected altars to the Baals and made Ashtaroth and worshipped all the hosts of heaven and served them. He built altars in the house of Yahweh of which Yahweh had said, in Jerusalem shall my name be forever.

And he built altars for all the hosts of heaven in the two courts of the house of Yahweh. He burned his sons as an offering in the valley of the son of Hinnom and used fortune-telling and omens and sorcery and dealt with mediums and necromancers.

He did much evil in the sight of Yahweh, provoking God to anger. Provoking indeed. I would note here what a horrible, horrible king this is who would take not a son but sons. It says sons plural. That is a horrifying sentence.

He burned his sons as an offering in the valley of the son of Hinnom. That can mean only one thing. He was into the worship of Molech. And as I've pointed out before, no follower or believer in this false demonic God, Molech, would have ever called him Molech because that's not the name for him.

It just so happens that the name for Molech is actually the same word that we use in Hebrew for king, Melech. But there's some defiance in the Masoretic text. Whoever pointed the Old Testament refused to point it in a way that would give even the remotest, slightest honor to such a horrible deity who would demand the sacrifice of infant sons.

And so rather than calling him Melech as his followers would have invoked him, they repointed it. And the vowels they used instead were the vowels that turn into the word Molech, which means shame. And indeed it is horrifying.

How is it that he could possibly believe? How could Manasseh possibly believe that he is doing good by murdering his own children? And I would note something here, and that is that scripture is clear that we all have inherited Adam's sin.

As the scripture rightly says, none is righteous, no not one. No one seeks for God. All together have become worthless. And also as Paul writes in Ephesians, we were all born dead in trespasses and sins.

And as a result of that we note that before God none is righteous. But you'll note that the purpose of government is to punish an evildoer. And an evildoer is to be punished and put to death only on the testimony of two or three witnesses.

If one is brought up on charges and those charges cannot be proven before the state, before the government, before the king, one is to be considered innocent. The government cannot take the life of people who are innocent.

And yet that's exactly what Manasseh did. He put to death his own innocent children, his own innocent sons. That's how wicked he is. He engaged in fortune-telling, the reading of omens, and sorcery, dealt with mediums and necromancers.

Sounds like Bethel Church in Reading, doesn't it? Right? He did much evil in the sight of Yahweh, provoking God to anger. And the carved image of the idol that he made he set in the house of God. You'll note that the author here can't even bring himself to saying what this is really going on here, but we know what it is from the cross references.

He did much evil. He carved an image, an idol, and he set it in the house of Yahweh. This was the guy who made an Asherah for Yahweh so that Yahweh can have a girlfriend, a female deity consort. And the author of the Scriptures can't even bring himself to give all the details.

He just mentions it as that, that carved image, that one, right? And all of this, despite the fact God had said to David and to Solomon, in this house, in this temple in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, I will put my name forever.

And I will no more remove the foot of Israel from the land that I appointed to your fathers, if only they will be careful to do all that I have commanded them. All the law and the statutes and the rules given through Moses.

And Manasseh led Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem astray to do more evil than the nations whom Yahweh destroyed for the people of Israel. Just consider the irony here. The people who were driven out by Joshua and the tribes of Israel as they came into the Promised Land, they didn't even engage in this much evil.

Manasseh has set a new low-water mark when it comes to flat-out disobedience and idolatry. So, what does God decide to do? You'll note, is it God's will that any should perish? Not even one, including Manasseh.

So the Lord spoke to Manasseh and to his people. He sent them prophets. When you read the book of 2 Kings, it's very clear he sent him prophets who are calling him to repentance. But they paid no attention.

None whatsoever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, God. Right? Paid no attention to God. Completely discounted his words, cast them behind them, paid no attention. And believe me when I tell you, it's not a wise thing to take God's words and cast them behind your back and act like he will not act because he will.

Therefore, Yahweh brought upon them the commanders of the army of the king of Assyria who captured Manasseh with hooks and bound him with chains of bronze and brought him to Babylon. What a spectacle that had to be.

The reigning monarch of Judah captured with hooks like he's a fish. Bound with chains like he's a criminal or a slave. Made to march of his own strength all the way to Babylon. Are you paying attention yet, Manasseh?

But here's the thing. Don't we do this every single day? Take God's words, his commandments? Maybe we've become accustomed to just being so forgiven of our sins that we think it's okay to go ahead and make the cross just a little bit of a license to sin.

It's no big deal. It's all forgiven anyway, right? Sometimes we do this. Sometimes we just don't want to hear God's words. We know that it's wrong, but don't confuse me with facts. Our sinful nature, just like that horrible plant, says, feed me, right?

And fools that we are, we feed it. There's a lot of Manasseh in all of us, isn't there? There's too much of it in me. So, God had mercy on him. Had him captured with hooks, bound with chains, marched off to Babylon.

And it says, when Manasseh was in distress, and I can't imagine how distressing this had to be, he comes to his senses. He entreated the favor of Yahweh, his God, and he humbled himself, and I love the adverb here, greatly before the God of his fathers.

He prayed to him, and God was moved by his entreaty, and heard his plea, and brought him again to Jerusalem into his kingdom. And then Manasseh knew that Yahweh was God. And in bearing fruit with keeping with repentance, Manasseh then sets about the business of trying to undo all of the damage that he has done.

Unfortunately, the damage he has done is so devastating and so great, and the hearts of the people are dead set on the worship of these false gods, that even these reforms only last for such a short time.

So, he built an outer wall for the city of David, west of Gihon, in the valley, and for the entrance into the fish gate. He carried it around Ophel, and raised it to a very great height. He also put commanders of the army in all the fortified cities in Judah.

He took away the foreign gods and the idol from the house of Yahweh, and all the altars that he had built on the mountain of the house of Yahweh, and in Jerusalem. He threw them outside of the city. He also restored the altar of Yahweh, and offered on it sacrifices of peace offerings and thanksgiving.

And he commanded Judah to serve Yahweh, the God of Israel. Nevertheless, the people still sacrificed at the high places, but only to Yahweh, their God. But still, they were not supposed to even be doing that.

Now the rest of the acts of Manasseh and his prayer to his God, and the words of the seers who spoke to him in the name of Yahweh, the God of Israel. Behold, they are in the chronicles of the kings of Israel, and his prayer, and how God was moved by his entreaty, and all his sin, and faithlessness, and the sites on which he built high places, and set up the Asherim, and the images before he humbled himself.

Behold, they are written in the chronicles of the seers. And so Manasseh slept with his fathers. They buried him in his house, and Ammon, his son, reigned in his place. And then, centuries later, the great-great-great-grandson of Manasseh, Jesus Christ, is born in Bethlehem.

Born of the Virgin Mary, and he sets about the course of his life. And we're going to note there are big differences between Jesus and Manasseh. At no point did Jesus ever not listen to God's commands, and not heed the warnings of God's commandments.

At no point did Jesus ever sin. He was tempted in every way that you and I are tempted, and yet was without sin. At no point did he ever break a single command of God. And it's important to note why. It wasn't in order to set an example to us about the fact that God's law, well obviously it's easy to keep, Jesus kept it, so get busy and get doing it.

That wasn't the point. Jesus did this to make him qualified to be the sinless, spotless Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Your sin and mine. He did it so that he can impart to us by faith his own sinless righteousness.

Because you'll note, rather than causing innocents to be murdered and sacrificed for Jesus, Jesus is the innocent one who, rather than calling for other people's blood, willingly lays down his life and sheds his blood for you and for me.

And in our case, he did so before we were even children. Before we were even thoughts in the hearts and minds of our parents. He did this out of his great kindness and mercy. In fact, you'll note here that the sermon hymn for today was not a funeral dirge.

And I would remind you all that Good Friday is not a funeral for Jesus. Instead, we heard these words, sing my tongue the glorious battle, sing the ending of the fray, now above the cross the trophy, sound the loud triumphant lay, tell how Christ, the world's Redeemer, as a victim, won the day.

Christ's Victory Over Sin, Satan, and the Record of Debt

And here's the best bit of all of this, is that Jesus Christ knew what he was doing and Satan had no clue what was going on. Because Satan played into it perfectly. In fact, it was brilliant beyond all reason.

Because if you think about it, look at the world around us. Have you noticed the supreme lack of kindness that there is? The growing acrimony, malice, hatred, strife? One has to wonder if historians in the future will look back on this time and say that the bloodshed of the Second American Civil War hadn't already begun.

Because people are losing their lives right now. Blood is being shed over ideological reasons. And you'll note that the world is just a hot mess of malice, hatred, discord, strife, murder. The list goes on.

And you know what? It makes perfect sense. You see, we were all conceived and born in sin and we are all, because of our fall into sin, children of the devil. And children are just like their papa, right?

Is it any wonder? Can anyone look at humanity and say, oh there's a great species, noble in all that they do. We are a screwed up race. Me as well as you and everyone on down the line because of sin. And so Jesus chose to conquer sin and to conquer the dominion of darkness and the devil in one of the most brilliant moves ever.

And the devil couldn't figure it out. It was written clearly for him what God was going to do in the Old Testament. Did we not read about the crucifixion of Christ as we recited Psalm 22 today? I think the devil was completely blind to it because he can't comprehend anymore because of his sin and his fall.

He cannot even begin to comprehend love, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control. He doesn't understand it at all. He rules the world through rage. He rules the world through the threat of murder.

Bend the knee or die is how the devil operates. And so the devil has conquered humanity with death and the threat of death for millennia. It's the one thing you can count on him doing. And so Jesus comes and he pulls the ultimate jujitsu move of all time.

He lays down his life. And the scripture is clear that if the devil had really understood what was going on, he would have never consented to having Jesus crucified. Never consented to it. But we learn about something about the nature of Satan.

Satan's big job, if you would, and this is one of the reasons why I think attorneys are so evil, is he is the accuser of the saints. The picture in heaven prior to Christ's death, burial, resurrection, and ascension is the one of Satan being the accuser of who?

The saints. Ha-Satana, the accuser, is how it goes in the Hebrew. And you think about it this way, how is the only way that you can silence an accuser of this? Because it's not as if the devil is like completely out to lunch when he sits there and goes, would you just look at this saint of yours?

You call him holy? Didn't you see what he said to his spouse? Didn't you see how he handled his children? I saw what he did. He wasn't totally truthful. You call him a saint. I call him a sinner. And Satan constantly accusing the saints.

Isn't that what he did with Job? I'll consider my Saint Job here. Well, the only reason why he's so holy is because you've made his life cushy. Take all of his stuff away and he'll curse you to your face, God.

You're on, right? So how does one silence an accuser like this who is so litigious that he's constantly filing lawsuits in the courts of heaven against the saints of God? Christ, the King of kings, the Lord of lords, the judge of all the earth, he becomes one of us.

And by going to the cross, he propitiates the wrath of God for you. In the book of Colossians, it talks so beautifully about how Christ took the record of debt that stood against each and every one of us.

That is a record of each and every one of your transgressions. And believe me, the list is a lot longer than you think. Every single commission, omission, everything you should have done but didn't do, everything you did do that you shouldn't have done in thought, word, deed, down to the nanosecond is recorded in that record of debt.

And believe me, phone books pale in size in comparison to what's in those books for you and for I. And what does Jesus do with that? By bleeding and dying for our sins, he propitiates the wrath of God.

And he cancels then the record of debt that stood against us and nailed that thing to the cross. And it cannot accuse us ever again. And so now when Satan tries to accuse you, do you not see what your saint just did?

Jesus says, I have no idea what you're talking about. I can't find any record of it here in this record of debt. You must be mistaken, sir. I don't think he calls Satan, sir. But you get the idea. But all of this is what Christ was doing.

His death on the cross is not a defeat, it's a complete victory. And it's the greatest victory of all time. It is the thing that sets us free from the dominion of darkness, sets us free from the consequences of our sins.

We said it in our responsory tonight when we said, we have an advocate with the Father. Jesus is the propitiation for our sins. By the way, propitiation would be one of those great words to use in a Scrabble game.

If you can ever figure out how to pull it off, I can't imagine how many points you'd get for that. But then again, I've never beat my wife in a single game of Scrabble in the 30 plus years that we have been married.

It's a little bit of a dry spell. I'm trying to figure out how to remedy this. But all of that being said, if I were to ask you, what does propitiation mean? Not a lot of people know what it means. A good way to think of it is this, is a propitiation is kind of like, and let me give you a couple of analogies, it's kind of like if God were throwing a thunderbolt at you, maybe Zeus style, a propitiation would be a shield that then would deflect that thunderbolt and cause it to ricochet and go off somewhere else.

That's one example of it. I don't usually like invoking Zeus though, so here's a better way to think of a propitiation. You see, there's some guys, they're in a foxhole, they're in a firefight, the enemy is really coming at them hard, and next thing you know, a grenade has just come over the top of their foxhole.

And what is one to do in something like this? And then one of the men of the battalion throws himself onto the grenade, just as it's going off, so that his buddies could live. That's a propitiation. That's what Jesus did.

He took the grenade for you, and in so doing, he didn't lose, he won. He was delivered up to death. He was delivered for the sins of the people, including North Dakotans and Minnesotans, and people from South Carolina.

That's a strange breed, by the way. No matter where you are, Christ was delivered up to death for your sins. And blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, and in whose sin is put away. Your sin is put away.

It can no longer accuse you anymore. There is no record of it to even accuse you with it. And we are not set free to sin, we are set free from sin. And so I must leave you with this warning here. If you do not think that God has wrath, you have not yet considered what on earth Jesus was doing on the cross.

You want to get a picture of God's wrath, you look at Jesus suffering, bleeding, and dying, and crying out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? You see, I don't think we take sin seriously enough.

There's a stanza coming up, a verse in the hymn that we're going to be closing with. The name of the hymn is, O Darkest Woe. And verse three reads thus, O child of woe, who struck the blow that killed our gracious master?

It's a great question. It was I, it was I, thy conscious cries. I have wrought disaster. And that's the thing about our sin. Look at the lives of all of us. Who of us have not been touched by the destructive nature of sin?

Who of us's sin has not wrought disaster? And you're going to note here, the disaster that your sin and my sin has caused is much greater than me catching a palm tree on fire when I was a kid. My sin has wrought disaster because my sin has killed Jesus Christ.

And so is yours. But that's not a complete picture of the cross. That's only one deep facet of it. The full picture is this, on the cross we see God's wrath for sure. We see the consequences of our sin borne out with each struggling breath of Christ as he pushes against the nails in his wrists in order to raise himself up just enough to breathe while all the splinters from that cross dig deep into the wounds of his open back while he languishes in the dark, suffering, bleeding, dying.

Yes, the wrath of God is truly there. But like I said, it's incomplete. You see, the scriptures are clear. It was for the joy set before him that Christ endured the cross, despising its shame. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son into death so that you and I might have eternal life.

So we see the wrath of God and we see the love of God colliding at the cross. But the love of God is the thing that that wins the day because the whole thing was planned and orchestrated before the foundations of the earth because of God's great mercy, love, and kindness to us.

So it is true, our sin has wrought disaster. There's no way around it. Yet that disaster is the very thing that brings us the joy of eternal life, the promises of the forgiveness of our sins, the propitiation that assuages the justice of God and fulfills it so that you and I can be forgiven.

And so we are. And so this day we ponder the horror of the cross and also its wonder. And you'll note that there's a lot of Manasseh in I, there's a lot of Manasseh in you, and so today consider the contrast between the worst and the best kings.

And unlike Manasseh, Jesus does not have a son who will take to the throne upon his death. He dies childless. But here's the thing, as we're gonna hear in just a few days, death couldn't hold him because he truly was innocent.