There are moments in life that jar you back into focus and make you examine how you’re living. Maybe it’s a cancer diagnosis that forces you to re-evaluate your priorities or the job loss that makes you realize you’re not in control of your life. Perhaps for many of us it was a Supreme Court ruling that made us realize afresh the importance of modeling faithful marriages in the midst of a culture that is moving further away from truth and reality by the second. Whatever specific crisis it may be, one of the benefit of crises in our lives are that they often jar us out of our stupor or lackadaisical ways and cause us to become more focused, zeroing in again on what things matter in life. I hope that this is what happens for us this morning as we look at Isaiah 36-39.
Isaiah 36-39 is one of two narrative sections in the book of Isaiah. Most of the book is comprised of long prophecies that were delivered by the prophet Isaiah during his ministry to the southern kingdom of Judah throughout much of the 8th and some of the 7th century B.C. However, there are two sections where we find a historical narrative. And, interestingly, both of these narrative sections deal with crises that Judah was facing, putting the king in a situation where he must choose to trust or not trust the Lord. In chapter 7, you’ll remember, the crisis was that Israel and Syria had made an alliance and were mounting an attack against Judah. Ahaz, the king of Judah at that time, had a choice. Isaiah was telling him put his trust in the Lord who would deliver him from these two attacking countries. However, Ahaz decided instead to put his trust in an alliance with Assyria.
The result of this decision by Ahaz is now coming to the fore in this second narrative section in the book of Isaiah (chs. 36-39). Even though Ahaz refused to trust in the Lord, God still delivered Judah from the Syrian-Israelite attack. However, the Lord did tell Ahaz that one day their ally of Assyria would become an enemy and would attack Judah. That day has now come as we begin chapter 36.
As chapter 36 begins, Hezekiah is king, and he’s been a relatively good king. One thing he’s done is to stop paying tribute to Assyria, which had begun under the reign of Ahaz. This refusal to pay tribute and make Judah an enemy of Assyria has led to Assyria deciding to attack Judah. But before they do, the king of Assyria sends a messenger to negotiate terms of surrender. The hope of the Assyrian king is that Judah can be taken without a fight. This is where chapter 36 begins.
You can see, then, that we are at another point where a Judean king is forced into a place to decide where he will place his trust. Hezekiah has flirted with an alliance with Egypt and even suggested to Babylon that he’d be a good ally for them (something we’ll look at in chapter 39, which in time happened prior to the events of chapters 36-37), but now his only hope is the Lord, in whom he ultimately does put his trust.
Then, chapters 38-39 records another crisis in Hezekiah’s life, a time when he is told that he is about to die. Again he trusts in the Lord, and again he is delivered. Therefore, these chapters are full of crises and expose our need to trust in the Lord. And the nice benefit that this text provides for us is that it does us the favor of letting us look at someone else’s crisis in hopes that we might be jarred back into realizing what’s most important, what we should be doing, and how desperate we are for the Lord at all times. I think the main point we are to see is that because the Lord desires to glorify himself through the lives of his people, he will sometimes bring painful crises into our lives in order to awaken us from any worldly stupor and turn our hearts toward him. I want to show you that this morning by looking at one element of this at a time. So, first, we need to note from these chapters that,
As I’ve mentioned, chapter 36 picks up at a point where Assyria is planning to mount a siege against Jerusalem and destroy the city in 701 BC. Prior to that, however, Sennacherib sends a representative in hopes of talking Judah into surrendering without a fight. The Assyrian messenger is called the Rabshakeh (v. 2) and Hezekiah sends three individuals to meet him. And the conversation that takes place is largely one-sided.
The Rabshakeh first asks the question that is the lingering question throughout the book of Isaiah: “In whom do you now trust, that you have rebelled against me?” (36:5). And he knows that they have attempted to make an alliance with Egypt in the past, so he mocks their hopes in such a people saying that Egypt is like a staff that is broken so that if you rest your hand on it, it will actually pierce you (36:6). That is, Egypt is untrustworthy. Then, he notes that if Judah says that they’re relying on the Lord, then they should probably understand that the Lord is upset with them because Hezekiah has removed all the high places and altars throughout the city and told the people to worship at the temple alone.
Now, we know that this was actually a pleasing thing to the Lord for Hezekiah to do, but this pagan doesn’t know that. He’s just looking in from the outside and trying to figure out how Israel’s worship might work. But his point is that Egypt is unreliable, and Judah has surely done enough to cause their God to turn against them.
More than that, he notes that they are overmatched. In fact, he says that he’ll give them 2,000 horses if they can find men capable of riding them in battle. He even taunts them by saying that the Lord himself is the one that has sent Assyria to fight them.
This is some expert taunting and an impressive demoralizing tactic to use. After all, if the people of Judah hear these things, it could crush their spirit and cause them to question Hezekiah leading them to rebel against Assyria. And the Judean officials realize this, so they ask the Rabshakeh to speak to them in Aramaic instead of Hebrew so that the common people of Judah wouldn’t understand what’s being said.
This would have been in line with any negotiating practice. But the Rabshakeh refuses, reasoning that if the people of Judah don’t surrender, then they’re going to be the ones that suffer. They’ll be starved out by this siege to the point that they’ll eat their own dung and drink their own urine. Whereas if they surrender, they should know that they’ll be given water, figs, wine, and grain. That is, they need to hear what’s being said for their own good so that they can revolt against Hezekiah’s commands and surrender. So, instead of agreeing to speak in Aramaic so that only the officials would understand, he continues to speak in Hebrew and speaks directly to the people of Judah who can hear his voice.
But here is where he goes too far. He directly mocks and challenges the ability of the Lord to defend his people. He says in 36:15 and 18-20, “Do not let Hezekiah make you trust in the LORD by saying, ‘The LORD will surely deliver us. This city will not be given into the hand of the king do Assyria.’ . . . Beware lest Hezekiah mislead you by saying, ‘The LORD will deliver us.’ Has any of the gods of the nations delivered his land out of the hand of the king of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? Have they delivered Samaria out of my hand? Who among all the gods of these lands have delivered their lands out of my hand, that the LORD should deliver Jerusalem out of my hand?”
You can see his reasoning. If you rely on your God to protect you, then you’re no different than any other nation that has been conquered, relying on their gods. Behind Assyria’s trail of conquest lies conquered people and destroyed gods. Surely Israel doesn’t think their god is any better than these other gods. But the people were silent, as Hezekiah had instructed them, saying nothing. But, after the Rabshakeh returns to Assyria, Sennacherib, king of Assyria, sends a letter mocking the Lord again, as we can read in 37:10-13.
But this mocking of the Lord is where Hezekiah understands that the Assyrian king has made a grievous error. The Lord will not be mocked. He will not allow his name ultimately to be profaned. He is intent on displaying his great glory so that all know that he is the Lord.
Hezekiah understands this, and this guides his actions. He first sends messengers to ask Isaiah to pray for them, and notes that key issue: the Lord is being mocked. We read the words of his messengers to Isaiah in 37:4, “It may be that the LORD your God will hear the words of the Rabshakeh, whom his master the king of Assyria has set to mock the living God and will rebuke the words that the LORD your God has heard.”
Then again, after receiving the letter from Sennacherib, which mocked the Lord, Hezekiah unfolds that letter before the Lord in the temple and says in 37:17, “Hear all the words of Sennacherib, which he has sent to mock the living God.” And as he prays, it is a prayer aimed at the Lord’s heart to make his name, greatness, and glory known. He says in 37:20, “So now, O LORD our God, save us from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you alone are the LORD.”
And when the Lord answers Hezekiah’s prayer, speaks against Sennacherib, noting that he will not be mocked. He says in 37:23, “Whom have you mocked and reviled? Against whom have you raised your voice and lifted your eyes to the heights? Against the Holy One of Israel!” That is to say, “Sennacherib, you’ve really messed up now.”
Finally, the Lord says to him in 37:29 and 35, “Because you have raged against me and your complacency has come to my ears, I will put a hook in your nose and my bit in your mouth, and I will turn you back on the way by which you came. . . . For I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David.”
For the sake of his own name and for the sake of the promise he made to David that he would not remove his steadfast love from his line, the Lord will save the city and judge Assyria. And that’s exactly what happened. In one night, 185,000 of the Assyrian soldiers die. Whether the Lord used some sort of sickness or plague, we don’t know. What we do know is that the Lord killed them in one night and Sennacherib went back home, leaving Jerusalem alone. The Lord will not be mocked. He will defend his name.
It’s important for us to recognize God’s passion to exalt his glory and make much of his own name because if the greatest commandment is that we love the Lord our God, then that means that we must love what God loves. That is, we must be a people who are passionate about exalting the Lord’s glory and making much of his name. We must be a people whose utmost concern is that the Lord is known and honored all over the earth.
We see it in Hezekiah’s response. Even in chapter 38 when Isaiah comes and says to Hezekiah that he’s going to die, which causes Hezekiah to pray that the Lord will spare his life, even then Hezekiah pleads from the perspective of the Lord’s praise and honor. He notes that if he dies, he’ll not be able to thank the Lord, praise him, and make known his faithfulness. He says in 38:19-20, “The living, the living, he thanks you, as I do this day; the father makes known to the children your faithfulness. The LORD will save me, and we will play my music on stringed instruments all the days of our lives at the house of the LORD.” That is, if you spare me, it will result in a life of praise, honor, and thanks unto the Lord as I make your greatness known.
So, it is worth asking if this is our utmost desire. Is what most moves your heart and motivates your thoughts and actions a desire to see the Lord known, loved, worshiped, and exalted? Maybe one question we could ask is, “Would our kids say that about us? Would they say that what means most to us is that the Lord is known, loved, worshiped, and exalted?” After all, they see how we live our lives and spend our time. They see what excites us and what saddens us.
I think it has been a bit overplayed to say that we yell and scream at a football game and get much less excited about the Lord. However, it is worth asking if we treasure our favorite sports team winning more than loving Christ and making him known. Or maybe it’s our own reputation that we treasure. We want people to recognize our abilities or to make our own successes known. We’d rather have people recognize us as a good worker, father, or mother more than Christ to be known. Maybe we are far from identifying with John the Baptist, who noted that he must decrease and the Lord must increase. And instead we think that it’s great that the Lord’s name is honored just as long as our name is honored with it.
What is it that holds priority in our desire? What is our treasure? What is it that we’re longing for and desperate for most? If it’s not that the Lord is known and worshiped, then our hearts are not in line with the one whom we are to love above all else, and we need to repent and ask the Lord for grace to cast down the idols of our hearts and come in line with his heart. The great crisis in Jerusalem was not that the city was under threat and that the people stood to lose much but that the Lord was being dishonored. The Lord’s desire is to glorify himself through the lives of his people. That’s what he does as he delivers Jerusalem from the Assyrians’ threats.
But that’s not all we can note from these chapters. We should also recognize that because the Lord’s desire is to glorify himself through the lives of his people . . .
Sometimes we respond to crises in our lives in such a way that we show that there’s a terribly unbiblical theology that lies just under the surface in our hearts. With our mouths we confess the Lord’s purpose is not to make much of us or give us everything we want as if he is Santa Claus and we are spoiled children. However, when painful situations come into our lives, our response can be to charge God with wrong. Think of Job, for example, who eventually seemed to insist that the Lord had no ground for allowing the pain that came into Job’s life.
However, if we recognize that the Lord’s intent is to honor his own name and that the most loving thing he can do for us is to fashion our hearts in such a way that we love him and want to honor him, worship him, and make him known, then it makes sense that the Lord will sometimes bring painful events into our lives in order to turn us to him.
That’s what we see here with Hezekiah. These events that are happening are not a surprise to the Lord. Not only did the Lord know this threat from Assyria would come, he foretold it because he foreordained it. He told Ahaz as far back as chapter 7, about forty years earlier that Assyria would come against Judah, and they would come because they would be like a rod in the Lord’s hand. He would swing it against Judah as discipline for their sin. And he foretold that he would deliver Judah from their attack.
So, what purpose would this serve in Hezekiah’s life? He wasn’t the king when the Lord announced coming discipline for a lack of trust. That was Ahaz. I think we see the reason in 37:14-20. First, look at verses 14-15, “Hezekiah received the letter from the hand of the messengers, and read it; and Hezekiah went up to the house of the LORD, and spread it before the LORD. And Hezekiah prayed to the LORD.”
Then, as Isaiah addresses Hezekiah, telling him that the Lord will remove the Assyrians, here’s what he says in verses 21-22, “Then Isaiah the son of Amoz sent to Hezekiah, saying, ‘Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel: Because you have prayed to me concerning Sennacherib king of Assyria, this is the word that the LORD has spoken concerning him.’” Then, the Lord goes on to tell of Assyria’s destruction.
But did you see the Lord’s reason? It was “Because you have prayed to me” the Lord says that he is delivering Jerusalem. Now, when you consider that the Lord had already foretold that he had foreordained Assyria to come against Jerusalem and then Assyria to be removed in one night, you have to conclude that one reason the Lord had this event take place during this moment in Hezekiah’s reign is because the Lord wanted to use this crisis to move Hezekiah to turn to the Lord in prayer.
Again, in chapter 38 Isaiah comes to Hezekiah as the king is sick and tells him that he’s not going to get well and needs to get his things in order, for he will die. So, what happens? We read in 38:2-3, “Then Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to the LORD, and said, ‘Please, O LORD, remember how I have walked before you in faithfulness and with a whole heart, and have done what is good in your sight.’ And Hezekiah wept bitterly.”
Then, we read in verses 4-8, “Then the word of the LORD came to Isaiah: ‘Go and say to Hezekiah, Thus says the LORD, the God of David your father: I have heard your prayer; I have seen your tears. Behold, I will add fifteen years to your life. I will deliver you and this city out of the hand of the king of Assyria and will defend this city [this shows us that the events of chapters 38-39 are prior to the events of chapters 36-37]. This shall be the sign to you from the LORD, that the LORD will do this thing that he has promised: Behold, I will make the shadow cast by the declining sun on the dial of Ahaz turn back ten steps.’ So the sun turned back on the dial the ten steps by which it had declined.”
Again, amazingly, Hezekiah is saved, and the Lord refracts the sun’s rays as evidence that he is working this healing miracle in Hezekiah’s life. But again, what does the Lord point to as his reason why? He notes, “I have heard your prayer; I have seen your tears.”
So, the Lord ordained for Hezekiah to get sick, knowing he would heal him. Why? It seems that the Lord is showing us that it was so that this crisis would turn Hezekiah to the Lord in prayer. We sometimes poorly reason that if the Lord is sovereign, there’s no need to pray. But the logic of the Bible is that if the Lord is sovereign, then we should pray. So, Hezekiah notes in verse 15, “What shall I say? For he has spoken to me, and he himself has done it.” That is, it’s the Lord who has told me this sickness will lead to death. So, what should I do? His response is to pray to the Lord, asking for healing. So, we read in verse 16, “O Lord, by these things men live, and in all these is the life of my spirit. Oh restore me to health and make me live!” Crises that come into our lives under the hand of our sovereign God are meant to turn our hearts toward him in prayer.
So, again, it’s worth asking ourselves, “How do we respond to small or large crises in our lives?” Is our first response to try to figure out how we could solve the situation? Is our first response to seek the counsel of others? Or do we pray? Now, I’m not saying that reasoning is bad or that counsel should be condemned. These things are fine. But neither is as profitable and effective as prayer.
One reason the Lord may allow crises in our lives is to fashion us into a people of prayer. We aren’t by nature people who get on our faces and desperately cry out to the Lord when everything is dandy in our lives. We need to be trained, and crises are the Lord’s piercing and gracious handmaidens, leading us to prayer.
So, recognize that the Lord’s intent isn’t to destroy you through crises but to turn you to him. And we need to make it our aim to orient ourselves toward prayerfulness at all times in our lives. The Lord, after all, is pleased to hear and answer our prayers.
Finally, I want us to note one other thing from these chapters, namely,
We cannot rest on past faithfulness, but we must persevere and fight to trust, obey, and fight temptation. Hezekiah still flirted with making alliances and not trusting. We’re not immune from falling just because we’ve repented. You might make it through a difficult time and stumble at something that should be easy.
This morning, perhaps you’ve already found your heart convicted. Maybe you’ve thought to yourself, “I do have many idols, and I want to repent of that and make the Lord’s name and glory my passion. I want to love him and make him known. And I want to be a person of prayer, who turns to the Lord continually in intercession.” But I think we also know that the great enemy in these moments is the temptation of lazy drifting and entering into a stupor.
That is, our minds can quickly grow dull in continuing the mindset we have right now. We can easily settle into lazy drifting, and in such case, we never lazily drift toward loving and knowing God more or toward prayerfulness. These things demand focused discipline on the Lord, the Scripture, and the good news of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection for us. Crises met in our lives during seasons of lazy drifting may well be used of the enemy to destroy us.
Now I bring up this point because this section of chapters 36-39 ends tragically. In chapters 36-38, we see Hezekiah trusting in the Lord, turning to the Lord in prayer, and passionately devoting himself to seeking the Lord’s glory. In chapter 39, we see a tragic event in his life.
After Hezekiah has been made well by the Lord, recovering from his sickness, some envoys (messengers) from Babylon come to bring him a present and letters, sharing with him in the joy of his recovery. However, Hezekiah recognizes that countries don’t send envoys just to deliver “Glad you got better” messages. They’ve come to feel out whether Judah might be a good ally. Do they bring something to the table? Would they happily team up with us?
And Hezekiah sends a clear message that he would rejoice to ally with them and would be a powerful ally. We read in 39:2, “And Hezekiah welcomed them gladly. And he showed them his treasure house, the sliver, the gold, the spices, the precious oil, his whole armory, all that was found in his storehouses. There was nothing in his house or in all his realm that Hezekiah did not show them.”
There is no mention of the Lord’s provision from Hezekiah’s lips, nor any statement saying, “But we need no allies; our trust is in the Lord.” This is a moment where Hezekiah reverts to trusting in man and turning away from the Lord.
So, Isaiah comes and asks him about it, ultimately delivering the news that judgment is coming to Judah through the Babylonians no less. He says, “‘Behold the days are coming, when all that is in your house, and that which your fathers have stored up till this day, shall be carried to Babylon. Nothing shall be left, says the LORD. And some of your own sons, who will come from you, whom you will father, shall be taken away, and they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.’ Then Hezekiah said to Isaiah, ‘The word of the LORD that you have spoken is good,’ For he thought, ‘There will be peace and security in my days’” (39:6-8).
That’s a sad ending to this section, isn’t it? And since the events of 39 actually occur prior to the events of 36-37, it’s oddly placed. This is the note that this narrative section ends on. Now one reason is probably because the rest of the book will focus on Babylon and Judah’s captivity under Babylonian rule. However, another reason might be to remind us that we cannot afford seasons of drifting in our lives. It’s hard to think of Hezekiah’s legacy without thinking of this moment.
My prayer for us is that we would labor to fight against lazily drifting through life or entering into moment of stupor where we forget our purpose to glorify God and make our lives about him. And I think the key ways to fight that is to read and hear God’s Word, make prayer consistent in our lives, assemble with believers who might exhort you in the truth, and faithfully remember what God has done for us through the redeeming work of Christ.
My prayer this morning is that looking at the crises in Hezekiah’s life might serve us in reminding us that our lives are to be spent loving the Lord and making him known, devoting ourselves to his glory, turning to him continually in prayer, and laboring to make sure we don’t fall into lazy drifting but continually make the Lord central in our hearts and minds. Let us labor to that end now, even as we come to the table. Amen.