In the span of about 20 verses, King Manasseh of Judah gets rid of the idols he had been worshipping, his son Amon brings them back, and his grandson Josiah gets rid of them again. The dramatic changes of direction we see across these three generations is a representative sample of the storyline of the entire book of 2 Chronicles and, in many ways, the entire Old Testament and even our own Christian lives. But in spite of the back-and-forth movement that we see at a human level, God is faithfully moving history forward toward the coming of Christ. So too in our lives, even when it seems we are making little progress or even going backward in our growth in godliness, he is at work to conform us to the image of his Son.