Preached June 19, 2011
from
Isaiah 36-37
Theme: When we conform ourselves to the purpose of our sovereign God in a time of trial, we place ourselves in the safest place in all the universe that we can possibly be.
(Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture references are taken from The Holy Bible, New King James Version; copyright 1982, Thomas Nelson, Inc.)
We continue our study this morning of the Kings of Judah—and particularly of the godly king Hezekiah.
King Hezekiah’s story is such a full one, and the lessons to be learned from it are so great, that we have needed to break our study up into the four great biblical events of his life. Not long ago, we studied the first great event of his life; that is, the great spiritual revival that God established through him in the nation of Judah. It was from that first great event that we learned that God can utterly transform the course of an entire nation through the influence of just one godly individual who faithfully draws others to Him. And now, we come to the second great event of Hezekiah’s life. It’s a story of a great trial that came upon Hezekiah and his people. But to my mind, it’s also one of the most exciting stories in all the Old Testament.
This particular story is told to us in the Old Testament historical books of 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles. But it’s my belief that Isaiah was the one who originally wrote about it. And so; I ask that we turn to the 36th and 37th chapters of Book of Isaiah, and learn together from this story.
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The story has to do with what happened shortly after that great spiritual revival that God had brought about in His people through King Hezekiah.
If you’ve sought to walk with the Lord for any length of time, you’ll know that a new level of faithfulness and obedience to Him is often followed by a time of testing and trial. The enemy of our souls, it seems, quickly jumps in to try and divert us from any renewed commitment to God; and seeks to draw us away from a pure faith in Him. But everything that comes into the lives of God’s precious people is under God’s sovereign control—even those times of severe testing and trial that the devil is permitted to bring upon us. God permits the devil to test and try us, so that our faith in God Himself will be refined and strengthened.
The particular test that God allowed to fall upon Hezekiah and his people came in the form of a threat from the dreaded Assyrian empire.
Isaiah 36:1-2 tells us;
Now it came to pass in the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah that Sennacherib king of Assyria came up against all the fortified cities of Judah and took them. Then the king of Assyria sent the Rabshakeh with a great army from Lachish to King Hezekiah at Jerusalem. And he stood by the aqueduct from the upper pool, on the highway to the Fuller’s Field1 (Isaiah 36:1-2).
It’s hard to express what a terrifying situation, humanly speaking, this would have been. The Assyrians were, at this time2, a numerous and remarkably brutal people. They were experts at surrounding a city and holding it in siege—pounding it with battering rams, and firing upon it with spears and arrows—until they were able to enter it and conquer it. Ancient artwork of the time showed that the Assyrian king would pierce the lower lip of the kings he would overcome, and pull them around by a leash as if they were his dogs. And the things that these ancient drawings showed that the Assyrians would do to the people they conquered are, frankly, too brutal to describe in church.
It hadn’t been very long, before the events found in this morning’s scripture passage, that the Assyrian king Sargon II had conquered the northern kingdom of Israel and displaced all of its people. King Hezekiah’s father had submitted himself to that Assyrian king3; but once Hezekiah had taken his father’s place, he rebelled against him 4. But Sargon’s son Sennacherib came into power; and he began to move against Jerusalem and against King Hezekiah. By Hezekiah’s fourteenth year on the throne, the armies of Sennacherib had surrounded and captured the city of Lachish—the vital fortification city that had protected Jerusalem. And now, Sennacherib’s official representative, the Rabshakeh—backed up by great army of troops drawn from the siege of Lachish—now stood at a very public place at the edge of the city of Jerusalem, to mock the people of Jerusalem and to set forth his terms of surrender.
Hezekiah sent three of his officials out to meet the Rabshakeh—with the people of Jerusalem watching fearfully from the city walls to see what would happen next. And this is what the Rabshakeh told them:
“Say now to Hezekiah, ‘Thus says the great king, the king of Assyria: “What confidence is this in which you trust? I say you speak of having plans and power for war; but they are mere words. Now in whom do you trust, that you rebel against me? Look! You are trusting in the staff of this broken reed, Egypt, on which if a man leans, it will go into his hand and pierce it. So is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who trust in him. But if you say to me, ‘We trust in the LORD our God,’ is it not He whose high places and whose altars Hezekiah has taken away, and said to Judah and Jerusalem, ‘You shall worship before this altar’?”’ Now therefore, I urge you, give a pledge to my master the king of Assyria, and I will give you two thousand horses—if you are able on your part to put riders on them! How then will you repel one captain of the least of my master’s servants, and put your trust in Egypt for chariots and horsemen? Have I now come up without the LORD against this land to destroy it? The LORD said to me, ‘Go up against this land, and destroy it’” (vv. 4-10).
Speaking on a strictly human level, the Rabshakeh’s argument against Judah’s military strength was compelling. Judah was not strong enough militarily at this time to resist Assyria; and if King Hezekiah had been trusting in support from Egypt, the Rabshakeh was right to say that it was like trusting in a broken read that will pierce the hand of whoever leaned on it. Egypt was a notoriously unreliable ally.
But the Rabshakeh had very badly misunderstood the God in whom Hezekiah had placed his trust. He thought that, in all Hezekiah’s spiritual reforms, it was God’s altars that he had destroyed. And of course, it wasn’t. It was the altars of the false gods that the surrounding nations that were torn down. The Rabshakeh also claimed that it was God who had sent the Assyrians up to destroy Judah. And while it’s true that Assyria had been the instrument in the hand of a sovereign God to punish the surrounding nations and to discipline His own people, it was not for the destruction of Jerusalem. In fact, in Isaiah 10:5-11, God says;
“Woe to Assyria, the rod of My anger
And the staff in whose hand is My indignation.
I will send him against an ungodly nation,
And against the people of My wrath
I will give him charge,
To seize the spoil, to take the prey,
And to tread them down like the mire of the streets.
Yet he does not mean so,
Nor does his heart think so;
But it is in his heart to destroy,
And cut off not a few nations.
For he says,
Is not Calno like Carchemish?
Is not Hamath like Arpad?
‘Are not my princes altogether kings?
Is not Samaria like Damascus?
As my hand has found the kingdoms of the idols,
Whose carved images excelled those of Jerusalem and Samaria,
As I have done to Samaria and her idols,
Shall I not do also to Jerusalem and her idols?’” (Isaiah 10:5-11).
The sovereign God is able to use the nations of this world—even the ungodly and pagan nations—as His instruments that fulfill His sovereign purposes and accomplish His will. But in the case of Assyria, the instrument that God was willfully boasting in its will against God’s people. As God Himself had put it, the “ax” was boasting itself “against him who chops with it” (Isaiah 10:15).
The representatives that Hezekiah sent out to the Rabshekah requested that he speak to them in the official language of Aramaic—and not in Hebrew in the hearing of the people on the wall. But the Rabshakeh refused. Speaking to all the people on the wall in a loud voice—and in Hebrew!—he said;
“Hear the words of the great king, the king of Assyria! Thus says the king: ‘Do not let Hezekiah deceive you, for he will not be able to deliver you; nor let Hezekiah make you trust in the LORD, saying, “The LORD will surely deliver us; this city will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria.”’ Do not listen to Hezekiah; for thus says the king of Assyria: ‘Make peace with me by a present and come out to me; and every one of you eat from his own vine and every one from his own fig tree, and every one of you drink the waters of his own cistern; until I come and take you away to a land like your own land, a land of grain and new wine, a land of bread and vineyards. Beware lest Hezekiah persuade you, saying, “The LORD will deliver us.” Has any one of the gods of the nations delivered its land from the hand of the king of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? Indeed, have they delivered Samaria from my hand? Who among all the gods of these lands have delivered their countries from my hand, that the LORD should deliver Jerusalem from my hand?’” (vv. 13-20).
Think of what this representative of the Assyrian king was daring to say! “Don’t let Hezekiah deceive you into trusting in the Lord! The Lord is no better than any of the gods of the other nations that I’ve destroyed! He will not be able to deliver Jerusalem from my hand!” What arrogance! What blasphemy! What a mouthpiece of the devil this man was!
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Now; Hezekiah had carefully instructed his people to say nothing in response. And that’s always the best policy in the face of such a threat. The Bible warns us to withdraw ourselves from “useless wranglings of men of corrupt minds and destitute of the truth” (1 Timothy 6:5). But the three representatives of king Hezekiah came back to the king from their meeting with the Rabshakeh with their clothing torn in sorrow. What a sorrowful sight that must have been for the people on the wall.
And when they made their report to Hezekiah, he too responded in sorrow. Look at the first verse of chapter 38. We’re told,
And so it was, when King Hezekiah heard it, that he tore his clothes, covered himself with sackcloth . . . (Isaiah 38:1a).
What a serious situation this was! What a dreadful threat! What a horrible thing to have happen—and immediately after having made so much progress in turning the people of Judah back to the Lord!
But notice also that this verse also adds,
. . . and went into the house of the LORD (v. 1b).
And this leads us to the first important lesson we learn from this great event in the life of King Hezekiah. The sovereign God has established a purpose—a purpose that stands supreme even over the nations of this world. The safest place for His people to be in a time of trial is in conformity with His sovereign purpose. And we make the first important step toward fitting in with His purpose . . .
1. WHEN WE TURN TO HIM FIRST IN OUR TRIAL.
In this great time of trial—even with his clothes torn in sorrow, and covered with the sackcloth of humility, Hezekiah went to the house of the Lord (that is, to the temple) to worship God and seek perspective.
I suggest to you, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, that we strike a powerful blow against the devil every time we stop—in the midst of his threats against us—and turn to God, to remember His sovereignty and to seek perspective from Him in the place of humble worship. We should never bother to speak a single word to our enemy. But instead, we should go to meet with God and pour our heart out to Him. The apostle Peter said that
“God resists the proud,
But gives grace to the humble.”
Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time, casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you (1 Peter 5b-7).
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Now; Hezekiah rose up from the temple and sent his representatives—themselves dressed in sackcloth—to God’s spokesman, the prophet Isaiah. Hezekiah had them tell Isaiah;
“Thus says Hezekiah: ‘This day is a day of trouble and rebuke and blasphemy; for the children have come to birth, but there is no strength to bring them forth. It may be that the LORD your God will hear the words of the Rabshakeh, whom his master the king of Assyria has sent to reproach the living God, and will rebuke the words which the LORD your God has heard. Therefore lift up your prayer for the remnant that is left’” (vv. 3-4).
And God gave Isaiah a word to give to Hezekiah in response. What an encouragement it must have been! Isaiah told the representatives;
“Thus you shall say to your master, ‘Thus says the LORD: “Do not be afraid of the words which you have heard, with which the servants of the king of Assyria have blasphemed Me. Surely I will send a spirit upon him, and he shall hear a rumor and return to his own land; and I will cause him to fall by the sword in his own land”’” (vv. 6-7).
And so, here’s another lesson we learn from Hezekiah’s story. We step into the safety of God’s sovereign purposes . . .
2. WHEN WE EMBRACE THE PROMISES OF HIS WORD.
It’s good that we pour our hearts out to God in a time of trial. But that’s not enough. We also need to hear—and fully believe—what God Himself says concerning our trial.
In the case of Hezekiah’s people, God had an established purpose. It was a purpose that He expressed throughout the writings of His prophet Isaiah. His chosen people in Judah would never be destroyed; and the King that He promised—King Jesus—would one day come from the body of David to rule forever, sitting upon His throne in Jerusalem. No force on earth would every be able to prevent what God had purposed to do. No threat of the enemy would ever prevail against it.
In a time of trial, you and I find safety in the purpose of God when we fully embrace and believe what God promises in His word that He will do concerning that purpose. As it says in Romans 8:28-30;
And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom He predestined, these He also called; whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified (Romans 8:28-30).
That’s a promise from God. And there’s nothing that the enemy of our souls will every be able to do to thwart His purpose. When we hear the threats of the enemy, let’s counteract them by whole-heartedly embracing the promises of God in His word.
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Now; the very thing that God promised would happen did happened. New threats arose against the king of Assyria. He heard the rumors of them, and he had to leave to tend to them. But he sent a letter to Hezekiah through the Rabshakeh; and it said,
“Thus you shall speak to Hezekiah king of Judah, saying: ‘Do not let your God in whom you trust deceive you, saying, “Jerusalem shall not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria.” Look! You have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all lands by utterly destroying them; and shall you be delivered? Have the gods of the nations delivered those whom my fathers have destroyed, Gozan and Haran and Rezeph, and the people of Eden who were in Telassar? Where is the king of Hamath, the king of Arpad, and the king of the city of Sepharvaim, Hena, and Ivah?’” (vv. 10-13).
More threats came from the arrogant lips of the Rabshakeh. And he went to a new level of blasphemy in issuing them—”Don’t let your God in whom you trust deceive you, saying ‘Jerusalem shall not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria’!”
But we can know for sure that the promise of God strengthened Hezekiah against these new threats, and that he had gained fresh perspective on the matter; because he responded to the threats by simply handing them over to the sovereign God.
And 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. Then Hezekiah prayed to the LORD, saying: “O LORD of hosts, God of Israel, the One who dwells between the cherubim, You are God, You alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and earth. Incline Your ear, O LORD, and hear; open Your eyes, O LORD, and see; and hear all the words of Sennacherib, which he has sent to reproach the living God. Truly, LORD, the kings of Assyria have laid waste all the nations and their lands, and have cast their gods into the fire; for they were not gods, but the work of men’s hands—wood and stone. Therefore they destroyed them. Now therefore, O LORD our God, save us from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that You are the LORD, You alone” (vv. 14-20).
And this leads us to a third lesson we learn from Hezekiah; that we rest safe in the purposes of our sovereign God in a time of trial . . .
3. WHEN WE LAY THE TRIAL BEFORE HIM IN PRAYER.
God makes a wonderful promise to us in Psalm 50:15. He says, “Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me.” If I may speak reverently of it, it’s almost like he offers to make a ‘deal’ with us concerning our trials. If we do our part, He will do His. We call upon Him in the midst of them; He delivers us out of them; and we, in response, praise Him for what He did in them.
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Hezekiah called out to God. And God blessed him for it. Isaiah sent word to Hezekiah after his prayer; and he said,
“Thus says the LORD God of Israel, ‘Because you have prayed to Me against Sennacherib king of Assyria, this is the word which the LORD has spoken concerning him . . .” (vv. 21b-22a).
And here’s were we see another lesson we can learn from the experience of Hezekiah. We rest safely in the purpose of the sovereign God . . .
4. WHEN WE DRAW ASSURANCE FROM HIS SOVEREIGNTY.
Just think of the ways that God affirmed to Hezekiah His own sovereignty over the trial he was facing. The first thing that God had to say was directed, as it were, to the king of Assyria. God said;
“The virgin, the daughter of Zion,
Has despised you, laughed you to scorn;
The daughter of Jerusalem
Has shaken her head behind your back!“Whom have you reproached and blasphemed?
Against whom have you raised your voice,
And lifted up your eyes on high?
Against the Holy One of Israel.
By your servants you have reproached the Lord,
And said, ‘By the multitude of my chariots
I have come up to the height of the mountains,
To the limits of Lebanon;
I will cut down its tall cedars
And its choice cypress trees;
I will enter its farthest height,
To its fruitful forest.
I have dug and drunk water,
And with the soles of my feet I have dried up
All the brooks of defense.’
“Did you not hear long ago
How I made it,
From ancient times that I formed it?
Now I have brought it to pass,
That you should be
For crushing fortified cities into heaps of ruins.
Therefore their inhabitants had little power;
They were dismayed and confounded;
They were as the grass of the field
And the green herb,
As the grass on the housetops
And grain blighted before it is grown.
“But I know your dwelling place,
Your going out and your coming in,
And your rage against Me.
Because your rage against Me and your tumult
Have come up to My ears,
Therefore I will put My hook in your nose
And My bridle in your lips,
And I will turn you back
By the way which you came”’ (vv. 22b-29).
The next thing that God had to say concerned His own future for His people. He said,
“This shall be a sign to you:
You shall eat this year such as grows of itself,
And the second year what springs from the same;
Also in the third year sow and reap,
Plant vineyards and eat the fruit of them.
And the remnant who have escaped of the house of Judah
Shall again take root downward,
And bear fruit upward.
For out of Jerusalem shall go a remnant,
And those who escape from Mount Zion.
The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this (vv. 30-32).
And finally, He speaks this final word to Hezekiah about the king of Assyria himself;
“Therefore thus says the LORD concerning the king of Assyria:
‘He shall not come into this city,
Nor shoot an arrow there,
Nor build a siege mound against it.
By the way that he came,
By the same shall he return;
And he shall not come into this city,’
Says the LORD.
‘For I will defend this city, to save it
For My own sake and for My servant David’s sake'” (vv. 33-35).
Take careful note, by the way, of those last words in verse 35. God doesn’t promise to defend the city simply because He loved its people. He did love them; but they were not worthy of that love or of His defense. Instead, He promised to defend the city as a matter of His own honor—”For My own sake and for My servant David’s sake”. It was His sovereign purpose to do as He had promised. And King Hezekiah and his people were safe so long as they rested in that sovereign purpose.
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Now; this leads us to one final lesson we learn from this experience in the life of Hezekiah. We truly rest safely in the sovereign purposes of God in a time of trial—after we’ve sought Him in it, believed His word concerning it, laid it out before Him in prayer, and trusted in His sovereignty over it . . .
5. WHEN WE WAIT PATIENTLY FOR HIS DECREED OUTCOME.
What an outcome it was. Everything that God promised would happen did! And it was stunning! Isaiah goes on to tell us;
Then the angel of the LORD went out, and killed in the camp of the Assyrians one hundred and eighty-five thousand; and when people arose early in the morning, there were the corpses—all dead (v. 36).
What a thorough work God did! What other kind of corpses are there than dead ones? But the Bible goes out of its way to stress the deadness of the vast Assyrian army that surrounded and threatened God’s people; “. . . there were the corpses—all dead.”
So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed and went away, returned home, and remained at Nineveh. Now it came to pass, as he was worshiping in the house of Nisroch his god, that his sons Adrammelech and Sharezer struck him down with the sword; and they escaped into the land of Ararat. Then Esarhaddon his son reigned in his place (vv. 37-38).
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Sennacherib trusted in his false god, and died while worshiping it. Hezekiah rested in the purposes of the sovereign God—the one who alone is God over all the kingdoms of the earth—and was safe.
May we—like him—learn that the safest place in the universe for us to be is resting in the purpose of the sovereign God.
1The location at which the Rabshekah stood is significant. It’s the same place where, some years earlier, God commanded the prophet Isaiah to go and meet Hezekiah’s father Ahaz; and to warn him not to fear the kings of Syria and Israel—both of whom were about to be destroyed by God’s appointed instrument: the Assyrians (see (Isaiah 7:3ff).
2The Assyrians were, in the past, a people upon whom God had great mercy; and who had turned to God in a great revival. This revival is described in Jonah 3. By about a century later, however, the Assyrians had forgotten God; and He sent the prophet Nahum to warn them of His judgment upon them.
3See 2 Kings 16:7-9.
4See 2 Kings 18:7.