Dennis Tuuri

# Isaiah 37: The Prayer of Hezekiah

We’ll be focusing on the prayer of Hezekiah, which is found dead center in the middle of the book of Isaiah. To give it a little bit of context, I want to read just a little more than the actual prayer itself. So we’ll begin reading in verse 8, and we’re picking up a historical narrative here. Rabshakeh is the representative of Sennacherib, who’s the king of Assyria. They’ve surrounded Jerusalem by the time in which we’ll read this and are threatening the destruction of the southern kingdom the same way they destroyed Samaria during Hezekiah’s actual reign as well.

So please stand with the reading of God’s word. We’ll begin reading at verse 8 of Isaiah 37.

The Rabshakeh returned and found the king of Assyria fighting against Libnah. For he had heard that the king had left Lachish. Now the king had heard concerning Tirhakah, king of Cush, he has set out to fight against you. And when he heard it, he sent messengers to Hezekiah, saying, Thus shall you speak to Hezekiah, king of Judah. Do not let your God in whom you trust deceive you, by promising that Jerusalem will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria. Behold, you have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all lands, devoting them to destruction. And shall you be delivered? Have the gods of the nations delivered them?

The nations that my fathers destroyed, Gozan, Haran, Rezeph, and the people of Eden who are in Telassar. Where is the king of Hamath, the king of Arpad, the king of the city of Sepharvaim, the king of Hena, or the king of Ivvah?

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, “Oh Lord of hosts, God of Israel, enthroned above the cherubim, you are the 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 mock the living God. Truly, O 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 no gods, but the work of man’s hands, wood and stone. Therefore, they were destroyed. So now, oh Lord our God, save us from his hand that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you alone are the Lord.”

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. She despised you. She scorns you, the virgin daughter of Zion. She wags her head behind you, the daughter of Jerusalem. Whom have you mocked and reviled? Against whom have you raised your voice and lifted your eyes to the heights against the holy God of Israel?”

And I’m going to skip down to verse 33. “Now therefore, thus says the Lord concerning the king of Assyria: He shall not come into this city or shoot an arrow there or come before it with a shield or cast up a siege mount against it. By the way that he came, by the same he shall return, and he shall not come into this city, declares the Lord, for I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake, and for the sake of my servant David. And the angel of the Lord went out and struck down 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians. And when people arose early in the morning, behold, these were all dead bodies. Then Sennacherib, king of Assyria, departed, and returned home and lived at Nineveh.

And as he was worshiping in the house of Nisroch his god, Adrammelech and Sharezer his sons struck him down with the sword. And after they escaped into the land of Ararat, Esarhaddon his son reigned in his place.

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for your scriptures. We thank you for this center, the beating heart of the book of Isaiah, the wonderful book quoted so often in your New Testament. Lord God, bless us now as we consider the very center, the heart, the message of the book of Isaiah as it reflects to us truth about the King of all kings and the Lord of all lords, the God of gods. Bless us, Father, as we seek Jesus in this text. In his name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

You know, there are these books of prayers that are published and prayer accounts are given in various historical books we might read, and written prayers we can read about. We have one here in front of us today. Suppose you’re looking at a prayer like this or hearing somebody pray and suppose you hear this: “Incline your ear, O Lord, and hear. Open your eyes, O Lord, and see.” Now what would you assume the one praying is praying about? What’s he going to say next?

Well, we would normally think that probably next he’d say, “Please help me or I need this or that or the other thing.” We’d say that his prayer begins as so many of our prayers do by asking God to hear us, and then we bring the petitions about our concerns and cares. In Hezekiah’s case, we may expect him to move on and say, “Well, incline your ear, hear us. Save us.” But that’s not what he says. That’s not what he is asking God to hear. When he does this, what is he actually asking God to attend to?

The verse goes on to read: “Hear all the words of Sennacherib, which he has sent to mock the living God.”

Notice how personal Hezekiah’s prayer to God is. He takes these letters, this message of Sennacherib delivered through the Rabshakeh, this representative of the king of Assyria, and he spreads these letters out. Your coloring page today, kids, shows Hezekiah. He’s got those prayers on the ground there in the temple. He spreads them out and he asks God to look at them and read them and see them. Hezekiah was praying to a real God. He wasn’t involved in some kind of abstract meditation. His prayer is very personal, and his prayer is right at the heart of this text.

Now, one of the ways to understand a text of scripture is to look at its arc. I’m going to be doing my “How to Study the Bible” Sunday school class beginning two weeks from today, and as you read the Bible, you want to look at the arc of a story—kind of what’s beginning at the beginning and where it moves to at the end. Frequently there are chiastic structures involved, but there’s an arc to this thing, and I tried to read it with some degree of emphasis to show the arc of this particular story.

This is the center. Let me make that point again. This is the center. The historical narrative contained in chapters 36-39, which include the events leading up to this and then includes Hezekiah’s prayer for his own illness in the next chapter, and then him showing Jerusalem and the temple to the Babylonians, who come along and replace the Assyrians. This is the center of the book, and you’ll remember that I said in Isaiah 40:1 we have the obvious beginning of the gospel section—”Comfort ye my people.” But this is the turning point here in the big narrative of the book of Isaiah as we move from God’s wrath to comfort, encouragement, and strength, and the spread of the gospel.

As we look at that arc, you see it pivots on this middle section happening right here in chapters 36-39. And the very center of 36-39 is Hezekiah’s prayer explicitly. So at the heart of the matter in the gospel of Isaiah—which of course speaks to Jesus Christ, and you know, very often we see this repeated throughout the Old Testament, but Isaiah particularly—the beating heart is this prayer.

This prayer accomplishes something. It has its own arc. It’s the middle of another small arc of verses around it. On your handouts I’ve given you that small arc. It begins with Hezekiah going into the house of his God. And it ends after God’s defeated the Assyrians. They’ve gone home. Sennacherib goes to worship in the house of his god. We’ve got two houses. We’ve got two kings. We’ve got two gods. You see, this is how you’ve got to read your Bibles. What’s going on here? This is given to us as an obvious example of the arc of this story.

What the prayer affects, and what it affects of course, is that by the end of this text, by the end of the arc, Sennacherib’s god is worthless—absolutely worthless. He cannot protect the king of Assyria who worships this god. That god cannot protect him from two of his own sons. They can’t protect him from his own sons in the house of his God. He’s assassinated. He’s killed. The house of Hezekiah’s God is the place of deliverance with worldwide implications. It’s a tremendous, beautiful picture.

The contrast between two gods, two houses, two kings—one alive at the end and one dead. You can’t miss it. And it tells us that this text is about that kind of movement. This prayer is about that kind of movement. The very thing that moves this along in that way, that moves this arc, is this beating heart—this prayer of Hezekiah. And we need to understand it.

You know, we’ve had sermons on how to pray because we don’t know how to pray. The disciples were smarter than us—many of us, anyway. They at least asked the Savior, “Teach us how to pray.” And we think we just sort of know it, you know, because it’s sort of what we think. But they knew that God’s prayers are not like our prayers. They understood that they needed to be taught how to pray. And Jesus taught them how to pray, and in a very real sense, he told them to pray like Hezekiah—pray that the kingdom of God might come. Meaning the destruction of Sennacherib, that God might be manifested, and the destruction of all other gods would happen.

So this prayer is this important picture that moves history from the worship of false gods, their destruction, and then the exaltation of the God of gods.

Now, look at your handout, please. We’ll look at this prayer in more detail in a minute, but just to reinforce this point: what’s going on here? Not what I think is going on. You know, it’s very difficult for people to study the Bible. We’re going to stress this over and over again in my twelve-week class. We read things and we just sort of see what we’re thinking about. You know, it’s called eisegesis—reading things into a text instead of exegesis, pulling things out. You have to look at how God has written a piece of text. And usually there’s lots of stuff that he wants you to focus on and see what’s happening.

The arc is one thing, but look at the very outline here I’ve provided you and see if you don’t see where it’s kind of obvious that they have these words that match up. I’ve bolded the words that kind of match up at the beginning and end of these sections. Yeah, another chiastic set of structures that can confuse me. Well, you know, the point is when you read a piece of text like this prayer, you can study it linearly, that’s okay. But if God has given a mirror sequence to it, it’s to help us understand what’s moving, what’s at the center of the center of the center of the book, right?

And the center of the center of the center is this F statement: “Truly, O Lord, the kings of Assyria have laid waste all the nations and their lands.”

What an odd center. The very center of Isaiah, in his prayer, affirms that Sennacherib has done just what he’s boasted about. He’s done it all. But what’s the purpose? Look at the things around it. The E sections:

“Incline your ear, O Lord, and hear. Open your eyes, O Lord, and see. Hear all the words of Sennacherib, which he has said to mock the living God.”

A successful man has come to mock the living God. And then the other side, the matching E section, talks about gods too: “They have cast their gods… So he destroyed these other nations and he took their gods and he cast their gods into the fire. They were no gods but the work of man’s hands, wood and stone. Therefore, they were destroyed. So now, oh Lord, our God, the true God, you see, save us from his hand.”

And then there’s a reason. We’ll get to that in a couple of minutes. The D sections match up. The phrase is “all the kingdoms of the earth.” So at the very heart of this outline, what it helps us to see is the same thing that the book’s ends help us to see: house of one God, house of false gods, life, death.

So Sennacherib has been used by God. And Isaiah says this explicitly. He’s been used by God to destroy idolatry. He’s gone through all these other kings. He really has. He’s not bragging. He did it all so that God would see and show everybody that those gods are worthless. And then at the end of that process he does the same thing to Sennacherib himself.

Don’t trust in gods other than the living God of the scriptures. That’s the point of the text. And the whole judgment sequences of Isaiah come against the nation of Judah the way he came against Israel because they were involved in idolatry. They were trusting in their own abilities. They were trusting in their special privileges or mostly what they were trusting in were foreign alliances with Egypt or this or that other nation. They were just like the other nations of the world. They were not really worshiping Yahweh, our God, anymore. They were like these other nations. They had gods of compromise. They had foreign alliances. They had treaties and contracts that they were trusting in rather than the living God.

At the beating heart of the center of the center of the center of the book of Isaiah, we have a tremendous warning against idolatry. All kinds of idolatry, all kinds of false gods. Anything that you’re planning on to keep you safe in the storm other than the Lord our God, it will fail you. It will fail you. And that’s the message of Sennacherib. That’s the message of this prayer.

God declares himself to do these things that he’s God, not these other gods. All right. Now, let’s look at some specifics of this prayer, and let’s do it humbly. Let’s say, “Jesus, teach us how to pray today. We’re your disciples. We want to understand this. This isn’t just like any other prayer. This is the heart of Isaiah. Help us to understand this prayer. And may our prayers be informed by this prayer.”

And I think that there are three distinctives we can look at here. There are more, but for now, let’s look at three distinctives of prayer. The first is going to be imprecation. The second is going to be the absolute sovereignty of God. And the third is going to be worldwide evangelism.

So I believe this prayer is imprecatory. It is absolutely declaring the sovereignty of God, and it is toward the end of the conversion of the whole world. Now those are the things going on here, and as we look at Hezekiah praying, we should look at a picture of the greater Hezekiah, right? He’s a picture of the King of Kings, Jesus, who ever lives to make intercession for us at the right hand of the Father.

We should look at this as how Jesus prays, and we should look at this in terms of informing our prayers corporately and also our individual prayers.

So first, Hezekiah’s prayer is one of imprecation. He’s asking not just for deliverance, but rather for God to pour out his judgments on God’s enemy, Sennacherib. That’s what he does. He lays these papers in front of God in the temple and he says, “Look, he’s mocking you. He’s mocking you.” Sennacherib was not first and foremost an enemy of Hezekiah or Israel. He was a mocker of God. And that’s what Hezekiah’s prayer focuses on—Sennacherib’s mocking of God.

He spreads out these letters before the Lord of Hosts. He calls him “the Lord of armies,” in other words. And this God will strike down Sennacherib and his armies. And of course, we read the answer to the prayer: that God did just that. They get up in the morning, 185,000 dead Assyrians, not because they had such great strong power themselves, but because Hezekiah as their corporate head relied on the power and sovereignty of God.

Now, Isaiah himself—and again, I tried to stress this when I read Isaiah’s response—God says through Isaiah, “I’m answering your prayer. I’m going to save the city.” But notice specifically the details. In our “How to Study the Bible” section, we stress: attend to details when you read your Bible. And listen to this detail of Isaiah’s answer to Hezekiah:

“Thus says the Lord God of Israel: You ask, I’m going to answer. And here’s why I answered it. Because you have prayed to me against Sennacherib, king of Assyria, this is the word which the Lord has spoken concerning him.”

So we’ve got the example at the heart of this book: an imprecatory prayer against a mocker of God. And we don’t just have the example; Isaiah the prophet is a second witness to us that this is exactly why God answers this prayer. This is exactly why salvation comes to Hezekiah and the repentant people of Judah. Yes, it is exactly why salvation happens—because he prayed imprecatorily. “Because you prayed against the king of Assyria, Sennacherib.”

Now, that’s hard words for us to hear, and it’s hard words to tell this culture out here. We’re all about being pro-everything. We’re not anti-anything anymore, right? We’re not anti-abortion. We’re pro-life. We don’t want to be against anything. But see, the central message in your prayers: one of the ways we’re supposed to pray is against the mockers of God.

And now we don’t got a lot of them in our country yet, but there’s a lot of them around the world. There’s Christian missionaries being killed. There’s Muslim people that mock God repeatedly, the God of the scriptures. Conversions are made illegal. We should be praying that God destroy those things, those people. Now, we hope he brings them to repentance and salvation, but we’re supposed to be praying against Islam, against any form of idolatry. And that’s why God brings salvation to Hezekiah—because Isaiah says, “You prayed to me against Sennacherib, king of Assyria.”

Hezekiah didn’t plead his own needs nor the needs of the people of Jerusalem as the primary request. He did ask for God to save us. That’s in the prayer. But the context is not Sennacherib’s attacks on Jerusalem. He doesn’t say, “Well, look, he’s killing us now. Attack him.” He says, “No, he’s mocking you. Take him out.”

So he doesn’t plead because Jerusalem is being attacked, but rather Sennacherib’s attacks on God himself are the motivating factor for godly Hezekiah. And the Lord Jesus Christ is concerned about the glory of the Father. And when people mock the Father, the God of the scriptures, Jesus in like way ever lives to make intercession for us—not just praying for our salvation, but for the destruction of the mockers and opposers of God.

Imprecation—God’s glory must be our priority in prayer. Hezekiah was primarily concerned about the glory of God who is being mocked by this man. God’s glory is advanced at times by the destruction of his enemies. That’s what Hezekiah prayed for. That’s what God did. That’s what advanced God’s glory.

Hezekiah’s prayer, like Psalm 83, which we’re going to sing at the end of the service, and many other prayers in the Psalter, was one of imprecation—asking for God to pour out physical judgments upon God’s enemies. It pleases God for us to pray this way. In the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray, as I mentioned earlier, he wants us to pray, “Thy kingdom come.” And as Martin Luther and many others have said, when we pray that, we’re praying for the destruction of all kingdoms that rise up against the kingdom of Jesus Christ.

In 2 Timothy 4:14, Paul asked God to reward a man named Alexander according to his deeds, noting the great harm that Alexander had done to Paul’s ministry. So Paul said, “You got this Alexander. He’s a tormentor of the ministry. Lord God, deal with him according to his works.” He prayed imprecation—judgments, physical judgments against Alexander.

Why do I bring it up? Because I want to make sure you don’t think there’s some kind of division, that God somehow matured into a God of love in the New Testament but was a God of wrath in the Old. No, God is a God of love. And because of his love—the Son’s love for the Father, the Father’s love for the Spirit, the Spirit’s love for the Son—because of that love, it involves the hatred of people who are enemies to the object of the love of the persons of the Trinity. And so in the New Testament, it’s the same thing.

Paul asked God to deal with Alexander just as, you know, in like manner, he asked God to deal with Alexander. And Alexander is to be judged according to his own works, which again is significant. This is the normal pattern for imprecatory prayer: asking for God to deal with people the way they have sinned themselves.

So when Isaiah answers Hezekiah and says, “Yeah, God, because you’ve prayed imprecatorily, I’m going to save Jerusalem. I’m going to do these things,” he also says this:

“This is the word which the Lord has spoken concerning him: The virgin daughter of Zion has despised you, laughed at you, scorned you. The daughter of Jerusalem is shaking her head behind your back. He says, ‘My people are now mocking you. They’re going to mock you. 185,000 will be dead in the morning. They’re going to laugh you to scorn and you’re going to go off to the house of your god and get killed. They’re going to mock you.’”

Why do they mock him? Because that’s just what he was doing to God. According to his deeds. And that’s what this text goes on to say. The next verse says, “Whom have you mocked?” The living God of all the world. And because of that, my judgments will be passed on you and my people will appropriately mock you because you mock God.

Revelation 5:10—another New Testament example of a Hezekiah-type imprecatory prayer. The martyred saints in heaven cry out to God to avenge their deaths. This is not just a guy, Paul, maybe, you know, he wasn’t sanctified fully. I don’t know what he’s saying. No, now we’re not dealing with somebody like that. Now we’re dealing with somebody that’s been killed, martyred for the faith, in the throne room of heaven, sanctified, right? I mean, they’re certainly living examples of the way we’re supposed to live our lives. And what do they do? They cry out, “How long, O Lord, before you avenge the blood of your servants?” Imprecation in the very state of heaven itself, on the part of saints who were murdered for God.

So imprecation is the first detail of this text that is important for us to recognize.

The second detail of Hezekiah’s prayer—and I’ve alluded to it already a couple of times—is his statements of the absolute sovereignty of God, the absolute sovereignty of God over all things.

Hezekiah prayed this: “You are God. You alone of all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and earth. You’re the God of all the kingdoms of the earth. You’re the God of your people. No, you’re the God of all the kingdoms of the earth. You control everything that happens.”

He’s declaring the sovereignty of God. Only God is sovereign over all the kingdoms of the earth. And this sovereignty is alluded to in this model prayer at the center of the book of Isaiah.

Yahweh’s response through Isaiah makes this very clear. After reciting Sennacherib’s defeat of various nations, Yahweh says this through Isaiah in verse 26:

“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 ruin. Therefore their inhabitants had little power. They were dismayed and confounded.”

So God addresses Sennacherib and he says, “Now wait just a second. You’re mocking me. Don’t you know?” And the implication is he does. Everybody knows. “Don’t you know that I’m the one who have formed you to take my judgment out against false gods and their worshippers around the world? I made this plan.” He says, “I have brought this to pass from ancient times that you Sennacherib should be for crushing fortified cities. I made it. I formed this plan. I brought it to pass. And therefore, their inhabitants had little power and were dismayed.”

Even their mental state, God says, is subject to his absolute sovereignty.

Now, in theological terms, what God is saying through Isaiah refers to his decree and providence. As the Westminster Confession or Catechism says, “God has decreed whatsoever comes to pass.” His decree is his plan, formed before the creation of the world. He’s got a decree that he’s working out in absolute sovereignty: “I formed it. I made the plan.” And then in my providence—my interaction with history—”you see, I brought it to pass. I brought you to pass. I created you. I raised you up. And you think you were so good. You think you rolled over these cities because you were so powerful or you were so…” No, forget it. “I did it. For my purposes.”

God’s absolute sovereignty is declared in this prayer. God’s the king over all the nations. And then very explicitly, in the words of Isaiah in response to this, even the hard attitudes of dismay, the mental state of confusion, the resultant weakness of Sennacherib’s enemies was not due to Sennacherib, but due to the sovereign God.

So this model prayer is imprecatory. This model prayer relies on the absolute sovereignty of God. And the particular goal of it, of course, is the glory of God. But the third aspect of this prayer that I think is very important is that it’s postmillennial.

Its goal is the conversion of all the kingdoms of the earth. The human purpose—beyond the human purpose, we reach toward the ultimate goal of God’s glory. And that human purpose in the providence of God is worldwide evangelism.

As he reaches the climax of his prayer, Hezekiah does indeed ask for salvation. But he doesn’t want it for himself. Listen to what he says:

“Now therefore, oh Lord our God, save us from the hand… from the hand of Sennacherib. But then the reason is given: save us from his hand that to the end of, toward the goal of, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you are the Lord, you alone.”

Hezekiah doesn’t like the gross idolatry that’s going on everywhere. He doesn’t like these false gods, whether they’re actual things you carve or they’re foreign alliances, whether it’s your own American self-individualism that you’re exceptional somehow apart from God. Forget it. Those are all idols.

Hezekiah doesn’t like it. And he wants to see that day come when the Great Commission is fulfilled, when all the nations of the earth are discipled, baptized, brought into the army of Jesus Christ, and taught his ways. That’s the purpose of prayer. And that’s the goal of every prayer we pray: God’s glory. And God’s glory is manifest when all the nations of the earth see that he alone is the true God. He is the Lord. He has brought all these things to pass. He is sovereign.

And we want salvation. We pray, “Help me in my marriage. Help my son get work. Help my daughter not doubt the faith. Help me in this. Help me in that.” Those are all good prayers if they’re followed by another sentence or two: “that your glory may be manifest, that this person or individual may be effective for the gospel of Jesus Christ in converting the nations.”

That has to be at least the unsaid premise, and frequently it should fill our lips. That has to be the goal of our prayers: the glory of God by the whole world becoming Christian.

What a beautiful light Christianity shed on this world for the last 2,000 years from Western civilization. And how foolish now that Western civilization wants to think that it was its own power, it was its own might, it made all this happen. Yeah, we had that Jesus thing, but we could do it without him. And what does God say? “Foolish people. Western civilization will absolutely crumble when it’s idolatrous in that way. But I’ll rebuild something else there. I’ll rebuild something else there.”

Hezekiah was not content with a small regional local victory in abstraction away from what God’s overall plans were. He wanted his prayer to be answered so that God would be glorified in all of the earth. All those that pray like Hezekiah, pray toward this particular goal: that God would be glorified and that all the nations of the world would be brought to saving faith and joy and happiness in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Our prayers must move toward those same goals. They have to involve praying against enemies of God as well as praying for the manifestation of his kingdom. They have to, in our prayers, recognize the absolute sovereignty of God. And they have to be yes, for particular petitions, but toward the goal of postmillennialism—that all the world might be discipled by the Lord Jesus Christ.

Jesus—this is the picture of Jesus, right? We’ve got the humble king, the middle, the fourth slot of a sevenfold structure of Isaiah. The new creation is a humble king imploring the Father, ever making intercession for his people, that his kingdom might be manifest in all the earth. That we might be brought to humility through his judgments. That we might come to affirm his decree and his providence in the movements of history. And that we might seek the glory of the Father through the conversion of the nations to come to saving faith and discipleship in the Lord Jesus Christ.

That’s Hezekiah. The center, the praying king, is really a wonderful picture of the Lord Jesus Christ and his work, and it should be a picture of us.

We’ve said this over and over again in this church: we must be a praying people. At the middle of Isaiah, the way victories are accomplished is not through the hand of power or strength. That was our idol for so often. Yeah, we got power. We got strength. We’re supposed to be doing things. But so often in America, that’s our reliance. Everything that we’re doing.

And Isaiah is this wonderful picture that at the very center of the godly Christian man, the little anointed one, the one who is the arm of the Lord in this world, in a very real sense, being united to Christ—Christ, the picture of us. If we want to be rulers in the earth like Hezekiah, we got to be on our knees before the true ruler of all rulers, the Lord Jesus Christ. We’ve got to be praying to him for all the details of our lives, that they might bring glory to him and that he may be using providentially, even Islamists, to destroy the gods of the world.

I’m okay with Islam conquering Europe. How about you? You know, and under certain conditions, I’m okay with that. When Europe has become idolatrous, as it has, when it’s become filled with humanism, when the Christian faith has almost disappeared there, I expect God to raise up people like he raised up Sennacherib, to raise up godless people to be used as his instrument to bring humility to a church. The way God brought humility to Israel and then to Judah through a foreign power who worshiped a god no real God of the scriptures.

I expect God to do that again. The problem is not Islam. The problem is our idolatry. And our idolatry is cured when we go to pray before God, the true test. Do we believe he’s absolutely sovereign? If we do, we’re on our knees. We’re on our knees before him, asking him to move not for our good, not for our glory, but for his glory in the earth.

Then and only then will God deal with whatever he’s raised up—Islam in this case. But in the meantime, God uses his providential acts to bring humility.

Now, one last thing. Hezekiah was given a sign by Isaiah—very interesting sign—later in the text. And this is what it says in verse 30:

“This shall be a sign to you. You shall eat this year such as grows of itself, and the second year what springs forth 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.”

That’s wonderful. You could probably preach a whole sermon right there. You know, the remnant will take root downward and fruit out upward. But notice what this sign is. This is what’s going to happen.

He says, double Sabbath. Double Sabbath year. You eat what grows from itself. And the language goes back to Leviticus. That means it’s a sabbatical year. That’s the sort of language that referred to the year of Jubilee, which was a double Sabbath as well. And I don’t know the timing on the thing. I don’t know if this was the forty-ninth and fiftieth year. But what I do know is that the sign that Isaiah gave to Hezekiah and the people of Judah was a sign that for two years they would enjoy Sabbath rest. And then the third year, ordinary life would return. They’d have deep roots in Yahweh as a result of that two years of Sabbath, and they would fruit upward.

Now, I don’t know, as I say, the timing, but I do know that this was an idolatrous people. You read the book of Isaiah, that’s what they’re always doing—heading off to Egypt or making this alliance or trying to figure out a way other than relying upon God and praying prostrate in his temple, trying to find some other way to get out of the mess that they’re in. They were an idolatrous people.

And now he says, “I’ve delivered you supernaturally, and I’m going to sustain you for two years of rest. Give it up—your reliance upon your own hand. Two years, I’m going to train you to just stop that nonsense. Rest.”

I heard a wonderful story yesterday. This woman who was held captive by FARC down in Colombia for six and a half years. She was running for president of Colombia. She was kind of a leftist and thought they were kind of romantic revolutionaries. And she soon found out that wasn’t the case. They took her, they held her captive in a jungle prison with other people and horrific circumstances.

And I heard her on NPR yesterday. She’s got a new book out called, I think, “Even Peace Has” or “Even Silence Has an End.” She was sitting there and she said that she had three books that she could read: Harry Potter, a dictionary, and the Bible. And she wasn’t a Christian, and she thought the Bible was dull and boring and didn’t want to read it. But over that six and a half years she read that whole Bible and she converted. She became a Christian. She said, “By the time she was finished reading that scriptures, there was no way that the resurrection of Jesus couldn’t be true.” God had given her faith in the midst of the most horrific of circumstances.

I thought about that verse. You know what? If you gain the whole world and lose your soul. Here’s a woman who lost the whole world. She was at times chained for days to a tree by her neck, made to pee in public, who had to fight for private toilet spaces with all the other prisoners. I mean, this is a woman who lost the whole world, but gained her soul. Praise God.

Now she’s got a book out. And the other thing she said that relates to what we’re talking about here is she said, “You know, she’s made some statements. So I’m going to wear perfume every day, because I couldn’t wear it for six and a half years. I’m not going to turn down ice cream anymore when it’s offered,” you know. But she said the biggest change is her priorities have completely changed. And what she said was: “You know, when you go through the wild wilderness, when you go through the desert, and you go through a very hard time, and then you’re delivered, you know, the reward at the end of that difficult time isn’t power. It’s not fame. It’s not money. It’s not glory. She said the reward at the end, when you hit the oasis in the middle of the desert, the reward is rest. Rest.”

She has different priorities now. We should have that understanding ourselves. They went through this horrible time. They saw the northern kingdom destroyed and taken into captivity. They saw their own land attacked, and now Sennacherib is around them. They had horrible times. Siege built against them. God being mocked at the gates. They went through all that. And then God says, “Here’s the sign to you. Two years of Sabbath. The oasis is rest.”

And we need it. We need to every Lord’s day take our hands off of our lives and put them over there. Attend back to them on Monday through Saturday because we need rest. And that rest is corrective to us. That rest is a reminder to us not to make the work of our hands, the money we’re getting, the time constraints that we feel we’re pressured by, our personal desires to go work at this or that fast food store—we got problems in this area. And I’m telling you, we need the Sabbath as a people: the Christian Sabbath, the Lord’s day. A day of taking hands off of our lives. We need it to correct our idolatries.

That’s what he was doing with them. Odd sign, isn’t it? Because they’d have to wait three years to see it come to pass. Some sign. But see, it’s the sort of sign that only makes sense when you go back to ordinary life at the end of the second year and into the third year, and God blesses your fruitfulness, and you’re taking root in him again, and you’re being fruitful, and your crops are growing. Now the sign makes sense.

The sign is “Trust in me, not the false gods of the nations. Not the false gods of your own ability. Not the false god of American exceptionalism, whatever it is. Take root in me, and your life, your ordinary life, will be blessed by me.”

What a wonderful sign. The reward is rest, and that rest becomes a sign to us that our ordinary lives are lives where God blesses us incredibly.

May the Lord God cause us to be a praying people. May our prayers be modeled in some ways after this prayer at the very center, the beating heart, the heart of the matter, of Isaiah’s text—which is this wonderful picture of the gospel of Jesus Christ. May we see in it the tremendous relevance for our lives, for our day, in which there are new Sennacheribs on the march that we’re frightened of.

May we see that what we need to do is root out idolatry. What we need to do is put God first. And we do that by spending a lot of time on our knees.

Let’s pray.

Lord God, make us a praying people. Make us a people who pray the way the disciples were taught to pray by our Savior. Help us to know the prayers of your Bible and hear this, Lord God—this prayer right at the center of this wonderful book. Help us to know it. Help us to understand its emphasis: a removal of idolatry, your absolute sovereignty, your judgment and wrath against those that practice idolatry, all to the end that the kingdoms of the world might know you, might glorify you, and might rejoice in Sabbath rest and productive ordinary life. Make us that people as well. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen.