May the Good Lord Pardon

Have you ever done the right thing badly?

You knew it was the right thing, and you went at it anyway with about half the effort or forethought you should have brought. You showed up to help and got in the way. You tried to say something true to somebody who was hurting, and you said it wrong. You were sincere through all of it. You just did not do it well.

There is a chapter in the Old Testament where a whole crowd of people did exactly that. What happened to them next is very surprising.

Hezekiah was the king of Judah. He sent letters to the north, past his own border, to people who were not his and had not worshipped with Jerusalem in a very long time. He asked them to come to the house of the Lord at Jerusalem (2 Chronicles 30:1). Some of them laughed at the men carrying the letters. Some of them came.

And then they got there and they got it wrong.

Here is the verse. “For a multitude of the people, even many from Ephraim and Manasseh, Issachar and Zebulun, had not purified themselves, yet they ate the Passover otherwise than prescribed” (2 Chronicles 30:18).

That is no small thing to do. The law governing this meal was not vague about it. “But the person who eats the flesh of the sacrifice of peace offerings which belong to the Lord, in his uncleanness, that person shall be cut off from his people” (Leviticus 7:20). There was a penalty directed at the people and everybody in the room knew it.

So, the chapter leaves us asking a question. What does God do with people who came when they were called and then handled it wrong?

Before the answer, back up a few verses, these are usually skipped and they change the perspective of the whole passage. Nobody in this chapter shrugged.

Verse 15 says the priests and Levites “were ashamed of themselves and consecrated themselves.” Verse 17 says the Levites did the slaughtering “for everyone who was unclean, in order to consecrate them to the Lord.” Read those in order and you have a sequence. A problem was found. Work was done on it. And when the meal was finally eaten, some of the problem was still there.

Nobody there was brushing off the problem. That is what it looks like when people work at a problem and do not get all to the bottom of it before the day comes.

Then comes the prayer. “For Hezekiah prayed for them, saying, 'May the good Lord pardon everyone who prepares his heart to seek God, the Lord God of his fathers, though not according to the purification rules of the sanctuary’” (2 Chronicles 30:18-19).

Notice what Hezekiah refuses to do there. He does not tell God it did not matter. He does not leave it out of the prayer and hope it goes unmentioned. He goes straight to the point, directly to God: though not according to the purification rules of the sanctuary. The irregularity is addressed by the very man who is asking for the pardon.

Then notice what he adds. Everyone who prepares his heart to seek God. That is the description he ascribes to the people he prayed for. A prepared heart is not a careless one. Whatever else was true of that crowd, they had come a long way to seek God and Hezekiah expresses that before God.

The best part is, “So the Lord heard Hezekiah and healed the people” (2 Chronicles 30:20).
Nothing follows it. The chapter did not stop to explain how far that pardon reached or what exactly was healed. The text does not explain it, so I will not try to explain it.

What the text does say is that a king prayed for a crowd who had done a right thing badly. And the Lord heard him and healed the people.

I want to be careful, because this passage sometimes gets misused. Some try to use it to prove that sincerity covers anything at all so long as the heart is right. Others just skip past it entirely scared of how to address it. The chapter itself resists both. Verse 15 and 17 will not let you say the manner did not matter, because everyone in the room was working on the manner. And verse 20 will not let you say the manner was everything, because God heard.

Now the least expected part comes after the feast is over.

“Now when all this was finished, all Israel who were present went out to the cities of Judah, broke the pillars in pieces, cut down the Asherim and pulled down the high places and the altars throughout all Judah and Benjamin, as well as in Ephraim and Manasseh, until they had destroyed them all” (2 Chronicles 31:1).

Read the last part again. Ephraim and Manasseh. Those are northern towns. Those are the men from verse 18, the ones who at it wrong, going home and pulling down the altars in their own towns with their own hands.

Nobody made them do it. The letter had not asked for it. They had already been prayed for, and the feast was already over and they were free to go home and get back to work. They went home and dismantled the thing that had been wrong with their worship for generations.

So, the pardon did not leave them unchanged. It sent them home with something to tear down.

Which leaves the question of how any of them got there in the first place. A letter went out. It crossed a border it had no business crossing, and it reached people who had every reason to throw it away. What that letter asked for is the part I want to spend Sunday morning on. It is not what most people would guess.

“The Passover in the Second Month,” from 2 Chronicles 30, is this Sunday, August 23, at Cornerstone church of Christ, 9:30am EST, 5051 Wilmington Pike, Dayton, OH 45440. If you are close enough to be with us, we would be glad to have you, and you would be our honored guest. If you cannot be there in person, you can listen to it online.

And if you are reading this as somebody who quit going a long time ago, or who never started, read verse 18 one more time. That crowd came a long way with the wrong preparation. A king prayed for them and God heard him. You would not be the first person to walk in unready.