What is the significance of 2 Chronicles 12:5–8?

The Lord allows King Shishak of Egypt to almost conquer all of Israel because of King Reheboam’s rebellion. “You abandoned me, so I have abandoned you to the hand of Shishak” (vs. 5). The officers and king repent, so the Lord responds by saying, “They have humbled themselves; I will not destroy them, but I will grant them some deliverance, and my wrath shall not be poured out on Jerusalem by the hand of Shishak” (vs. 7).

This is another example of God modifying his sincere intentions to judge a nation in response to their repentance, a feature of God that is hard to reconcile with the classical understanding that the future is exhaustively settled in God’s mind from before the world began (cf. Jer. 18:7–10).