But I have this against you: You tolerate the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and teaches and deceives my servants to commit sexual immorality and to eat meat sacrificed to idols.
‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her. How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!
But they were disobedient and rebelled against you. They flung your law behind their backs and killed your prophets who warned them in order to turn them back to you. They committed terrible blasphemies.
But they kept ridiculing God’s messengers, despising his words, and scoffing at his prophets, until the Lord’s wrath was so stirred up against his people that there was no remedy.
So Manasseh caused Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to stray so that they did worse evil than the nations the Lord had destroyed before the Israelites.
‘Therefore, this is what the Lord God says: Because you have been more insubordinate than the nations around you #– #you have not walked in my statutes or kept my ordinances; you have not even kept the ordinances of the nations around you #– #
but walked in the ways of the kings of Israel. He even sacrificed his son in the fire, imitating the detestable practices of the nations the Lord had dispossessed before the Israelites.
She has rebelled against my ordinances with more wickedness than the nations, and against my statutes more than the countries that surround her. For her people have rejected my ordinances and have not walked in my statutes.
so that you will know that I am the Lord, whose statutes you have not followed and whose ordinances you have not practised. Instead, you have acted according to the ordinances of the nations around you.” ’
You are to say, “This is what the Lord God says: A city that sheds blood within her walls so that her time of judgement has come and who makes idols for herself so that she is defiled!