We need to understand that God’s mercy does not negate the consequences of our sin in this fallen world. A person who drove their car DUI and killed someone can repent and find God’s mercy but there will still be serious consequences.

Hezekiah was one of the most godly, rightous kings of ancient Judah. His son Manasseh however turned out to be the most evil king of Judah (illustrating that righteous parents are no guarantee of righteous children; Proverbs 22:6 is not a promise but a principle). Second Chronicles 33 provides the story of Manasseh. He instituted idol worship and implemented child sacrifce, even burning his own son alive as a sacrifice to Molech (2 Kings 21:6). “He practiced divination and witchcraft, sought omens, and consulted mediums and spiritists. He did much evil in the eyes of the Lord, arousing his anger” (2 Chron 33:6) He “led Judah and the people of Jerusalem astray, so that they did more evil than the nations the Lord had destroyed before the Israelites” (33:9). “Manasseh shed very much innocent blood, till he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another” (2 Kings 21:16)

So great was the evil of Manasseh that in Jeremiah 15:4, the prophet Jeremiah predicts “four forms of destruction” will come for the people of Judah because of the evil done by Manasseh. The Assyrians took Manasseh captive and brought him to Babylon as recorded in 2 Chronicles 33. (Tradition holds that the Baylonians tortured him by roasting him alive in a brazen bull, a torture device invented in ancient Greece.) In his distress, Manasseh repented and sought the Lord who subsequently restored him to his kingdom in Judah (2 Chron 33:12-13). He then tried to undo much of the evil that he had perpetrated (2 Chron 33:15-16).

While Manasseh found God’s mercy, his sin incurred inevitable destructive consequences. In Jeremiah 15:3-4, God pronounces that judgement is coming upon the nation because of the evil perpetrated by Manasseh. “I will appoint over them four kinds of destroyers, declares the LORD: the sword to kill, the dogs to tear, and the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth to devour and destroy. And I will make them a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth because of what Manasseh the son of Hezekiah, king of Judah, did in Jerusalem.”

Manasseh’s grandson was Josiah, the last godly king of Judah, who implemented reforms and sought to bring the nation back to the Lord. Josiah’s reforms are described in 2 Kings 22–23 and 2 Chronicles 34–35, where he centralized worship in Jerusalem and removed idols and high places after the Book of the Law was discovered. But his reforms only delayed judgment; it could not deter the coming judgment. The lesson here is that repentance can be real yet the sin can still inflict serious multi-generational consequences.

The anount of evil now perpetrated in our country would be astounding to Americans a century ago: widespread abortion (modern child sacrifice), an attack on male/female genders with transgender lunacy, militant homosexuality, violence, sexual perversion, theft, euthenasia, assisted suicide, corruption, greed, blasphemy, vulgarity, profanity, pornography, child pornography, heresy, etc, etc.

The question is whether our culture has “crossed the line” incurring a coming inevitable judgment upon our country even if someone godly (like Josiah) arises to undo much of the evil. If so, the best we can hope for now is a delay in inevitable judgment.