high places and groves for false gods such as Baalim. He became king at a very young age of 12. He worshipped baal and the gods of the heavens and practiced witchcraft too. He built alter to false gods in the Lord’s temple. That disgraced the temple and made God very angry. This tore the people away from God. Israel was considered to be even worse than the heathen. The Lord tried to talk to the people but they would not listen. They were already brought too far away from him by Mannaseh. In Mannaseh’s story the circumstances, unlike Saul’s blindness on the way to Damascus, wasn’t necessarily against God. His troubles came from his enemies who captured him and afflicted him. He called on God to help him, probably from remembrance of his father’s calmness in situations, and the Lord answered his prayer. Then he knew his father’s God was the one true God.Not much unlike Saul’s example of acceptance of the Lord, baptism, was Saul’s tearing down of the false god’s groves and high places like his father Hezekiah. This action showed his true repentance. Though he may not have been as good a king as his father, he did eventually turn back to him.Now putting these two men into perspective we can see outwardly yes, Saul was a better person “humanly speaking”, but both of them were in need of saving faith just as much as the other. With out this saving faith they both are equally worthless, no matter what they did where they went or how they were on the outside. All that matters in both of these men is that the Lord brought them back to himself. As Psalm 22:4 says,”… they trusted and thou didst deliver them.”...
