Lux Lucet

Sennacherib (as crown prince) on a relief from the Khorsabad, now in the Louvre.

Hezekiah had a problem.  And not just any old problem either,  He had a king sized problem.  Literally.  In particular, he had a problem with the king of Assyria, Sennacherib by name.

Hezekiah was a direct descendent of David and reigned as the thirteenth king of Judah from 715 B.C – 686 B.C.  The scriptures paint him in a very positive light, saying of him,

Now it came to pass in the third year of Hoshea the son of Elah, king of Israel, that Hezekiah the son of Ahaz, king of Judah, began to reign.  He was twenty-five years old when he became king, and he reigned twenty-nine years in Jerusalem.  His mother’s name was Abi the daughter of Zechariah.  And he did what was right in the sight of the LORD, according to all that his father David had done (I Kings 18:1-3).

Due to a foreign policy blunder by this father Ahaz, Hezekiah found himself on the receiving end of a blitzkrieg from the Assyrian empire at the zenith of its power.  How he dealt with the attack is a model of faith and courage from which Christians today can draw important lessons.

Hezekiah’s Trusts in the Power Egypt

One of the big takeaways from the Old Testament is this:  If the Lord doesn’t fight your battles, you’re going to lose.  From the time of the fall until the present, man has believed that he knows best.  “Forget what God says; I’m going to do it my way,” is the language of the world.   In the history of God’s covenant people, there are several instances where military defeat was the direct result of this sort of thinking.  The loss suffered by Israel at the hands of the men of Ai (Joshua 7), the Philistines’ victory over Israel recorded in I Samuel 4, and the beat down the Syrians gave the allied armies of Ahab and Jehoshaphat (I Kings 22 and II Chronicles 18) all stand as testament to this principle.

Even a godly man such as Hezekiah was not immune from the temptation of conducting the affairs of state the world’s way.  As the Assyrian threat loomed on the horizon, some in his administration had gone to Egypt to persuade Pharaoh to join in alliance with Judah against the invading Assyrians.  This worldly mindset, the sort of thinking that causes men to look everywhere for help except the one place it can be found, is rebuked by the prophet Isaiah.  He wrote,

“Woe to the rebellious children,” says the LORD, “who take counsel, but not of Me, and who devise plans, but not of My Spirit, that they may add sin to sin; who walk to go down to Egypt, and have not asked My advice, to strengthen themselves in the strength of Pharaoh, and to trust in the shadow of Egypt!  Therefore the strength of Pharaoh shall be your shame, and trust in the shadow of Egypt shall be your humiliation (Isaiah 30:1-3).

Commenting on this passage, Edward J. Young remarked,

To avoid the bondage of this enemy [Assyria], the people now look to another source of human deliverance, namely Egypt.  Indeed, there may have been a pro-Egyptian party in Hezekiah’s court.  The present prophecy, however, relates not so much to one particular act as to an attitude of the mind, which in the face of danger turns to man rather than to God; it is this attitude wherever manifested that the prophet condemns (The Book of Isaiah, A Commentary, Vol.2, 335).

In 701 B.C., Hezekiah was faced with the unfortunate fact that the mighty Assyrian army was on Jerusalem’s doorstep.  From a human standpoint, Judah was a beaten nation.  The Assyrians had overrun Israel 21 years earlier and deported the people.  No help could be expected from the northern tribes.  Further, Sennacherib’s forces had just crushed the Egyptian army sent by Pharaoh to defend Judah at the behest of Hezekiah.

It was at this dark hour for God’s people that Sennacherib sent one of his commanders to threaten Hezekiah at Jerusalem.  The Assyrian commander stood outside the wall of Jerusalem and began what today we might talking trash.  He boasted about the conquests of Assyria, blasphemed the Lord by speaking of him, “as against the gods of the people of the earth – the work of men’s hands” (2 Chronicles 32:19), and even mocked the Egyptians, saying of them, “Now 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”  (2 Kings 18:21).  Tiny Judah was all alone and without hope in the world.  Where would its help come from?

Hezekiah Trusts in the Power of God

The psalmist wrote, “I will lift my eyes to the hills – From whence comes my help?  My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth” (Psalm 121:1,2).  I once had a minister friend say to me that when we as Christians go wrong, we tend to do so on the simple things.  He had a good point.  There is nothing more basic to Christianity than the necessity of trusting in the Lord to supply all our needs.  But how quickly we forget this simple principle.  It is not our own strength that delivers us, but the Lord’s.  Hezekiah for a time forgot this simple lesson, but when all appeared to be lost, Hezekiah came to his senses and turned to the only One who could help him.

When the Assyrian commanders words were reported the Hezekiah, scripture tells us, “he tore his clothes, covered himself with sackcloth, and went into the house of the LORD” (Isaiah, 37:1).  Times of great crisis have a way of bringing out a man’s true colors.  Hezekiah may have stumbled the proverbial seven times, but when push came to shove, this godly king turned to the Lord in contrite repentance.  Comments Edward Young,

Hezekiah knows the right thing to do in time of need.  Rending his cloths and putting on sackcloth represent a true penitence and contriteness of heart, and in this condition, he would go to seek the face of the Lord.  Happy in the nation that has such a ruler (Commentary, Vol.2, 472)

Hezekiah’s behavior contrasts favorably with that of just about any contemporary national leader.  For example, in the aftermath of the 911 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, President Bush told the nation to, “get down to Disney World in Florida.” He also attended an interfaith memorial service at the National Cathedral that featured, among others, a Muslim cleric offering prayers.

When the first call to surrender did not produce the desired result, a short while later Sennacherib sent a second envoy to Hezekiah to again demand his surrender.  When he received the letter demanding his capitulation, Scripture tells us Hezekiah

Hezekiah’s prayer.

read it, went up to the house of the Lord, spread it before him, and prayed,

O LORD of hosts, God of Israel, the One who dwells between the cherubim, Your 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 (Isaiah 37:16-20).

It is remarkable that in this prayer, uttered at a time when the life of Hezekiah and the nation of Judah hung in the balance, the king’s primary concern is not for himself or even for his people, rather it is for God’s honor.  Sennacherib has reproached the living God, blasphemously comparing the Lord to idols of wood and stone, the work of men’s hands.

Scripture records for us what happened next.  An angel of the Lord killed one hundred and eighty five thousand Assyrian soldiers in one night, and Sennacherib returned to his own country.  Assyria never threatened Judah again.

A Picture of the Gospel

There are several lessons that can be taken from this account of Hezekiah.  First, there is such a thing as foreign policy blowback.  Blowback is a term used by the CIA to describe the unintended consequences of foreign policy activities.  In the case of Judah, the Assyrians had first gotten involved in its affairs of Judah at the invitation of Hezekiah’s father, King Ahaz.  Ahaz was eager to enlist the Assyrians to help him in his wars with Israel and Syria.  But what turned out to be an alliance of convenience, quickly turned into an adversarial relationship.  Had Ahaz not sought Assyrian help in the first place, perhaps Sennacherib never would have invaded Judah.  The Bible is full of foreign policy lessons for those who have ears to hear. But most men in high places prefer to conduct foreign policy as if God did not matter.

Second, our God is a gracious God.  Hezekiah was not a perfect man.  Scripture records him making several mistakes.  One was his alliance with Egypt that ended in disaster.  But when he came before the Lord in sackcloth, God did not cast him from before his presence.  Far from it, not only did the Lord hear him, but speaking through the prophet Isaiah he promised that the king of Assyrian would not take Jerusalem.  In fact, Isaiah promised that the Assyrians would not so much as shoot an arrow into the city.

Third, the miraculous deliverance of Judah from the Assyrians is really a picture of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  For just as God delivered Judah from an impossible situation, what from the world’s perspective was certain military defeat, so too does the Gospel of Jesus Christ deliver sinners from their hopeless situation before the bar of God’s justice.  We who were dead in our trespasses and sins and rightfully condemned to the eternal fires of hell, have been delivered, “out of the power of darkness and conveyed into the kingdom of the Son of His love” (Colossians 1:13).  And this we did not accomplish on our own.  Rather, God has made us who once were dead in our trespasses and sins, alive in Christ by his grace alone, through faith alone, in the finished work of Christ alone.

Gracious is our God.  For his people do not receive from him what they deserve, but the blessings he has purposed for them in Christ Jesus.