Now I See

NOW I SEE — Part One

There are moments in life when everything suddenly becomes clear—moments when the fog lifts, the shadows part, and what we could never understand in our blindness finally comes into focus. Grace has a way of doing that. It finds us when we are running, speaks to us when we are hiding, and opens our eyes when we cannot open them ourselves. Jean Valjean had such a moment. King Manasseh had such a moment. John Newton had such a moment. And every believer who has ever come home to God has whispered the same testimony in one form or another: “I was blind… but now I see.”

We begin today with a story the world never stops telling—Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. The French have called it “the fifth gospel” because running through its pages is the great struggle of the human heart: the struggle between Law and Grace. On one side stands Javert, the relentless inspector who believes justice can save the world. On the other side stands Jean Valjean, a hardened man whose entire life is rewritten by one undeserved act of mercy.

You remember the moment. Valjean steals silver from the priest who showed him kindness and shelter. The police catch him. They drag him back. He is thrown at the priest’s feet. He expects condemnation. He expects wrath. He expects the full weight of the law to crush him.

Instead, the priest lifts the silver and says to the officers, “This man is my friend. I gave him this silver. But Jean… you forgot the candlesticks.” And he hands Valjean the most precious items he owns.

That moment breaks him. It shatters the darkness covering his soul. It is grace in its purest form—irrational, undeserved, overwhelming. And it becomes the turning point of his entire life.

Grace does that.

Grace changes people.

Grace opens blind eyes.

Later, at the barricade—the story’s symbolic Calvary—Valjean carries the wounded young man who loves his daughter. For hours, step after agonizing step, he carries him on his back through the underground of Paris. When he finally emerges, exhausted, he lifts his eyes to God and cries, “Lord, let this young man live. If need be—take my life.”

A man who once stole silver now offers his life for another.

That is the miracle of grace.

But grace does not only operate in novels. Grace operates in the tangled streets of Scripture. Grace operates in the wreckage of our own stories. Grace walks into the darkest corners of the human soul and turns on the light. And nowhere does that become clearer than in the story of King Manasseh.

Turn with me to 2 Chronicles 33.

Manasseh was the son of one of the most righteous kings Judah ever had—King Hezekiah. Under Hezekiah’s leadership, the nation had returned to worship, returned to faithfulness, returned to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The temple was restored. Idols were torn down. Revival swept through the land.

And then came Manasseh—only twelve years old when he took the throne.

Can you imagine it? A crown on the head of a child. Authority without maturity. Power without wisdom. Influence without experience. The throne that required a prophet’s mind and a father’s heart now rested on the shoulders of a boy with neither.

And that boy unraveled everything.

Scripture says he did not merely drift—he ran into darkness. He reversed his father’s reforms. He rebuilt the high places his father had destroyed. He erected altars to Baal. He placed Asherah poles—phallic fertility symbols—inside the very courts of God’s holy temple. He bowed down to the sun, moon, and stars. He practiced sorcery, witchcraft, divination. He surrounded himself with mediums and spiritists.

And he didn’t simply sin privately—he led a whole nation into corruption publicly.

Scripture says he became worse than all the kings before him, and he made Judah worse than the nations God had driven out of the land. That’s how far he fell.

But the darkest moment was this:

Manasseh sacrificed his own sons in the fire.

In the Valley of Hinnom, the idol Dagon stood with iron arms stretched forward. Worshipers built fires beneath those arms until the metal glowed red. They placed their children on the idol’s palms, rolled them down into the flames, believing they were earning the gods’ favor.

Manasseh did that.

A king of Judah.

A son of David.

Burning his children.

This is the man we meet in Scripture. A man who desecrated the sacred. A man who reversed revival. A man who led a nation into darkness. A man who went so far into spiritual blindness that he could no longer recognize right from wrong.

And yet… his story is not over.

Because rebellion rarely stays isolated to the spiritual realm. Eventually, Manasseh made the mistake of rebelling against the Assyrians—a political disaster. Assyria was the superpower of the world. Manasseh’s name appears on the prism of Ashurbanipal—the clay inscription of the Assyrian king—listed among the rulers who paid tribute.