So far in our Bible studies we have had many weary wanderings among bad
men. The fear was that, to some extent, familiarity with them might
blunt our own moral sensibility.
Man after man has passed before us out of whose very countenance
the image of God had faded. How pleasant it is, and how spiritually
exhilarating, to come upon a case in which we read of a different pattern
of man! Of Hezekiah it is recorded in the eighteenth chapter of the
second Book of Kings:
“And he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord, according to
all that David, his father, did.”
After a long journey underground we seem to have come suddenly upon a
sweet garden, and the sight of it is as Heaven. The charm is always in
the contrast. If things are not quite so good as we supposed them to
be, they are all the better by reason of circumstances through which we
have passed, which have made us ill at ease and have impoverished or
disheartened us; then very little of the other kind goes a long way.
A man comes up out of the underground railway and says, when he emerges
into the light:
“How fresh the air is here! What a healthy locality! How well to live in
this neighborhood!”
Why does he speak so kindly of his surroundings? Not because of those
surroundings intrinsically, but because of the contrast which they
present to the circumstances through which he has just passed.
Hezekiah was no perfect man.
We shall see how noble he was, and how rich in many high qualities, yet
how now and again we see the crutch of the cripple under the purple of
the king.
It is well for us that he was occasionally and temporarily weak, or he
would have been like a star which we can not touch, and at which we can
not light our own torch.
Even Hezekiah was a man like ourselves in many particulars, and therefore
what was good and sound in him is all the more attractive and is all the
more possible to us.
Who can mistake an honest man?
If all men were upright, where would be the peculiarity of any individual
man’s integrity? But, given a corrupt state of society, when the
honest man appears we say: “The wind has changed. It blows balmily and
healthfully. It comes from a fine origin, and brings with it many a
blessing.”
Who can mistake the atmosphere of the sea? How it blows away all the city
dullness! How it quickens the blood! How it throws off increasing years,
and makes the voyager feel almost young again!
It is so with honesty, nobleness, charity and goodness of character when
the surrounding air is charged with some kind of poison or pestilence.
So it is that we come upon Hezekiah.
Perhaps it is well for him that we approach his case after such an
experience. He thus gets advantages that otherwise might not have been
accorded to him. He looks the higher for the dwarfs that are round about
him, the whiter because of the black population amid which he stands--at
once a contrast and a rebuke.
But from Hezekiah’s point of view the case was different. Behind him
were traditions of the most corrupt sort. He was as a speckled bird
in the line of his own family. It is hard to be good amid so much
that is really bad. All attempts at goodness are accounted examples of
affectation, conceit, vanity and pharisaism; and under such circumstances
sometimes a man’s foes may be the people of his own household. They wish
he was more pliable, less sabbatarian, less devoted to his Bible, less
constant in his attendance at church. He might go once a day, and give
himself one end of the rope not tethered to the altar; but he will not.
Has that man an easy time of it?
No hard word may be spoken to him--certainly no bitter word--and yet
all the while he may be made to feel that perhaps, after all, he may be
affecting somewhat of piety and purity, and that those who are looking on
may be better critics of him than he is of himself.
At all events, there come to him periods of trial, and sometimes he says
within himself:
“Shall I today be as constant as I have been, or may I not break away
now? Have I not built up a character, and may I not retire upon my moral
competence, and live henceforth the life of a latitudinarian? After a
long spell of many years, surely I might intermit just a little.”
Who shall say that the temptation is not subtle and strong? Some men
have to force their way to church through innumerable and unnamable
difficulties. This ought to be reckoned. Some credit must be due to
men who are thus constant to their sense of public duty and religious
obligation. Men are not always at church with the entire consent of those
who are round about them.
What, then, must be done?
One of two things. Either yield to the temptation or resist it. You can
not trifle with it. You can not compromise, and then recur to firmness,
and again connive, and again balance, consider and hesitate. Virtue is
not an intermittent grace. We must stand, or we must fall.
Hezekiah had a wicked father. How will that wickedness come out in the
son? Not, perhaps, as wickedness, but as infirmity, weakness, and want of
constancy in some directions, though there may be no want of firmness in
others.
Can a man wholly escape the bad blood inherited of his father?
We must not forget that Hezekiah’s mother’s name was Abi, the daughter of
Zachariah. How she came to marry a wicked husband must remain a mystery.
But the mother will come up in the son.
She was the daughter of Zachariah, and Zachariah was a prophet, or
seer--a man with double sight--one of those strange men who can see
beyond the merely visible and palpable, and can read things that lie
behind.
Zachariah came up again in his daughter, and the mother came up again in
the son, and so there was a mysterious play of inheritance, transfer,
transition, reappearance, somewhat of resurrection--a great tragic
mystery of transformation and representation.
We speak about a man as if he were self-contained--just standing upon
so much ground, without relation behind or before, on the right hand or
on the left. But no man is thus insularly placed; no man is an absolute
solitary.
Every man has in him the blood of the past and the life of the future.
Can a son of a good mother be altogether bad? Most surely not. You must
have mistaken the case if you thought so. Your very thinking so may
constitute an element of hopefulness in your case. Take comfort from that
suggestion.
So long as you can think of yourself seriously and of the past and of
your advantages, and can compare what you are with what you might have
been, there is hope of you.
But can there be in all history such an irony as this, that a man should
have had a praying mother and himself be a prayerless man?
No! It can not be. Somewhere--at some time and in some way--the better
nature will assert itself, and out of a good seed surely there will come
a good harvest.
But the lesson does not lie upon one side only. Here is encouragement to
the praying fathers and to praying mothers.
Zachariah, read on; read between the lines of things; interpret events
symbolically; read the apocalyptic sense of what is happening--and out of
all this mental elevation and spiritual conduct there will come results
in your daughter or your son.
Abi, pray on. Be just to your father’s memory, and say: “He was a holy
man. I must prove it by being a holy woman. He can not live upon a
written character; he must live in my life. I will prove that such a
child must have had a good father.”
So the vital lessons fall--on the right hand, on the left, and
around about us. Shame be to us if, amid this shower of monition and
encouragement and stimulus, we be deaf and dumb and blind, unfeeling,
unresponsive.
Hezekiah will now go to work and prove himself to be an energetic
reformer.
“He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the
groves, and brake in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made; for
unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it; and he
called it Nehustan.”
He must have been a strong man. He had no colleague, no ally; no one to
say to him: “Be brave, be true.” He went straight against the hardest
wall that ever was built by the stubbornness and perversity of man.
It is not easy to begin life by a destructive process of reformation.
Who would not rather plant a tree than throw down a wall? Who would not
rather plant flowers and enjoy their beauty and fragrance than give
himself the severe toil and the incessant trouble of destroying corrupt
and evil institutions?
Whoever attempts this kind of destructive work, or even a constructive
work which involves preliminary destructiveness, will have a hard time of
it. Criticism will be very sharp, and selfishness will be developed in an
extraordinary degree.
If a man be more than politician--if he be a real born statesman, looking
at whole empires at once and not at mere parishes, and if in his thought
and purpose he should base his whole policy upon fundamental right--he
will not have an easy life of it, even in a Christian country. In
proportion as he bases his whole policy on righteousness, temperance and
judgment to come, he will be pelted with hard names and struck at with
unfriendly hands.
This holds good in all departments of life, in all great reformations, in
all assaults made upon ignorance, selfishness, tyranny and wrong of every
name.
The children of Israel always seemed to live a foolish life. They were
the veriest children--so, at least, we would say but for fear of branding
sweet children with an evil stigma.
They were infantile, weak, treacherous to themselves, uncertain at every
point--and so, having kept the brazen serpent, they burned incense to
it. They liked a visible God. When the calf appealed to their religious
feelings they danced around it as if at last they had found a deity.
But who can worship a spirit--invisible, impalpable, far away, near at
hand, without a name, without a shape which we can verify and say: “It
comes to thus much, and this is the weight and this is the value of it?”
It requires a mind of some mental strength to stand up, take hold of the
brazen serpent and call it “Nehushtan”--a contemptuous term, meaning a
piece of brass; dead brass, useless and worthless brass, a relic but not
a God.
Let us give credit to the men who have been bold--religiously
intrepid--in the midst of circumstances of a most discouraging and
overbearing kind. They are the men to whom we owe our present privileges.
We have the Bible in our mother tongue because they were valiant. Not a
church would have been built today in which men could assemble with a
sense of freedom--sweet, joyous liberty--but for the Hezekiahs and others
who went forth and, at great cost and great peril, destroyed things evil
and black, by the power of God’s almightiness--overthrew them, and set up
a better kingdom.
What was the root of Hezekiah’s character? At present we have seen
phenomena of a gracious kind; we like what we have seen of this man.
“He trusted in the Lord God of Israel; so that after him was none like
him among all the kings of Judah nor any that were before him. For he
clave to the Lord, and departed not from following Him, but kept His
commandments, which the Lord commanded Moses.”
At length a man arose who said: “I will do God’s will, God helping me. I
will not only read the commandments, but I will incarnate them. I will
not only speak religious words, but live a religious life.”
Tender and yet emphatic are the words: “He trusted,” “he clave,” “he
kept.”
He “trusted”--that is to say, he had no other trust. His religion was
not a convenience, one thing among many things, an occasional exercise
in piety; but it was a perpetual confidence, the one trust, the
all-centralizing and all-ruling fact.
Then he “clave”--he kept close to. He would not allow any thing to come
between his hand and the God he seized. The hand could do nothing except
cleave to God and what was possible through that cleaving; and much is
possible of a helpful and beneficent kind.
He “kept the commandments”--counted them one by one; examined himself
in them; took himself daily to task about the whole ten. We live an
off-hand life.
Religion is now as easy as a wave of the hand, a salutation across a
thoroughfare; it is something that can be taken up, laid down, forgotten
and resumed.
What wonder if the Rab-shakehs of the age come and taunt us, mock our
piety and blow back our prayers before they get to the skies?
We want more trust, more cleaving piety, more keeping of the
commandments, living in them and having no other life that is not
consonant with them.
Now came, as we have often seen, the inevitable temptation. We pass
instantly to the visit of Rab-shakeh. This Rab-shakeh was an eloquent
man. He had the gift of mockery; he could gibe well. He was not without a
certain logical qualification.
He made a long and offensive speech to the people under Hezekiah’s rule,
and he thought he had them at both ends of the argument.
Having mocked their piety, laughed it down, challenged it, spat upon it,
he said:
“Perhaps you will say: ‘We trust in the Lord, our God,’ but you forget
that this very man, Hezekiah, has thrown down His altars, has taken away
His groves, has rooted up the house of your God by the foundations.”
Rab-shakeh did not understand the destructive reformation wrought out by
Hezekiah. He heard of the groves being cut down and the holy places being
removed, and he said:
“This is so much to our advantage. The king of Assyria shall hear of
this, and we shall make good commerce of it.”
Rab-shakeh did not distinguish between idolatry and piety--between a
reform essential to health and a mere accident in history. That which was
good in Hezekiah seemed to be wickedness to Rab-shakeh.
Rab-shakeh assaulted the people, trampled on them, leaped over their
bodies, mocked their refuges and their trust, and thrust his fist into
the face of Egypt and said:
“Come away from Hezekiah. Trust him not; he is blind; he is incapable.
Leave him, and I will tell you what the king of Assyria will do for you.”
And he held this out to them:
“I will come and take you away to a land like your own land--a land of
corn and wine, a land of bread and vineyards, a land of olive oil and of
honey--that ye may live, and not die; and hearken not unto Hezekiah, when
he persuadeth you, saying: ‘The Lord will deliver us.’”
It is but an empty saying: “Come, and I will give you a great Canaan!”
Sometimes it does seem as if the enemy had the best of it. Every thing
lies so handily to him. He says:
“I will get you through this difficulty. I know a lie that would deceive
a king. I can instruct you in a policy that would blind a judge. I could
get the money for you; you need have no difficulty about that. Why, I
say, in confidence, I can let you have it now!”
What can the preacher do in the presence of such a Rab-shakeh?
Or, he may not offer temptation in that direction, but in another. He may
say:
“All these arguments I could answer, if I cared to do so. Who wrote
the Bible? Who has seen the original manuscripts? Who has ever seen
God? It is utterly impossible to know the infinite. Come, and I will
make you rich at once in real, solid, practical things. I can give you
work instantly, and wages immediately the work is begun. I can give you
something in advance. Leave the preacher, the altar, the Bible and the
church. Come and work in the open streets, and be doing something that
you can handle and about which there is no manner of doubt.”
People begin then to wonder.
They should adopt the policy which was imposed on the children of
Hezekiah:
“But the people held their peace, and answered him not a word, for the
king’s commandment was: ‘Answer him not.’”
Nothing is to be got out of wordy controversy. Live the Christian life;
grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. While the
controversialist is contemning you, taunting you and smiting you, show
to him that you are growing broader, more massive in character, more
tender in disposition, more benevolent in every aspiration and desire and
purpose, and thus by well-doing “Put to silence the ignorance of foolish
men.”
Defend your Christianity by the eloquence of your life.
The servants of Hezekiah said to him: “What Rab-shakeh has said may come
to pass. Let us go to Isaiah and tell him all.”
Hezekiah himself thought that perhaps there might be something in it,
after all. There he and his servants fell into a state of incertitude.
“So the servants of King Hezekiah came to Isaiah.” They came to the right
man. Standing up like a king, he said:
“Thus shall ye say to your master: Thus saith the Lord: ‘Be not afraid of
the words which thou hast heard, with which the servants of the king of
Assyria have blasphemed Me. Behold, I will send a blast upon him, and he
shall hear a rumor, and shall return to his own land; and I will cause
him to fall by the sword in his own land.’”
He would make no violent attack on the men. He would summon no legion of
angels to overwhelm this great Oriental potentate. He would simply “send
a blast.” He would change the wind; he would scatter something upon it
and bid it blow across the brain of the king of Assyria, and the king
would not know his right hand from his left, nor the morning from the
night; he would be calling everybody by the wrong name, and be asking for
things that he did not wish to possess, and be, generally, thrown into a
state of unbalanced and wandering mind.
“I will send a whisperer to him. He shall simply go to the ear of the
king of Assyria and say something, and the king will take fright and fly
away in a panic. O Hezekiah, continue thy prayer, repeat thy morning
sacrifice and thine evening oblation; and, as for the king of Assyria, I
will send a blast and a rumor. I will answer Rab-shakeh.”
Let the contempt of the enemy be answered by the contempt of Heaven.
Rab-shakeh, having found that the king of Assyria was warring against
Libnah, returned; and when he heard that Tirhakah, king of Ethiopia, was
come up to war, he once more addressed Hezekiah in terms of exultation
and contempt.
Rab-shakeh was pretendedly anxious that Hezekiah should not be deceived
by the Lord, his God, and then he taunts him with many a history in which
Assyria had been conqueror over opposing nations. He completes his taunt
by asking:
“Where is the king of Hamath, and the king of Arpad, and the king of the
city of Sepharvaim, of Hena, and Ivah?”
This message came to Hezekiah in the form of a letter, or letters, and he
instantly “went up into the house of the Lord, and spread it before the
Lord.”
There is no need to regard this as in any sense involving a heathenish
custom. The meaning simply is that Hezekiah consulted the Lord on the
whole matter, and declined to take any thing into his own counsel or
power. He acknowledges the dignity of God by the expression: “O Lord God
of Israel, which dwellest between the cherubims.”
Then he pointed to the letter which more immediately concerned himself,
thus showing his consciousness that the majesty of the Lord did not
separate Him from taking an interest in earthly things. We are not to
stop at the point of majesty, but are to reason that, because God is so
majestic and august, He will pay attention to the prayers and desires of
the beings whom He has created in His own image and likeness. The divine
majesty is not a rebuke to human approach, but is an encouragement to
human prayer. When Hezekiah says “Thou art the God,” the emphasis is to
be laid on the pronoun. Thou art the true God, and Thou alone. When he
desires God to bow down His ear, and hear, the reference is not so much
to listen to Hezekiah’s prayer as to the words of Sennacherib.
The meaning of the whole petition may be:
“Interpose immediately and energetically between me and mine enemy. Let
Thine ears hear, let Thine eyes see, and let Thine arm be extended.”
Hezekiah acknowledges that the kings of Assyria had destroyed the nations
and their lands, and had cast the gods of the nations into the fire. By
so much he gives the Assyrians credit for having spoken the truth, and
for having thus founded their project against Israel upon the success
which they had already attained.
Hezekiah acknowledges, indeed, that the gods of the nations were no gods.
At the same time he feels that to the minds of the Assyrians they may
have been as real deities, and their overthrow may have encouraged the
Assyrians to believe that Jehovah was like unto them.
Thus the prayer of Hezekiah was argued and ordered in logical and
historical form, and was intended to excite, as it were, the very
jealousy of the Lord God of Israel.
We now turn to the reply which was made to Hezekiah through the lips of
Isaiah, the son of Amos. The reply was manifestly given in a contemptuous
tone:
“The virgin the daughter of Zion hath despised thee, and laughed thee to
scorn; the daughter of Jerusalem hath shaken her head at thee.”
This is a poetic personification of place, Zion being regarded as mother
of the people dwelling there. While the term “virgin” may denote the
inviolable security of the citadel of Jehovah, it may also intimate that
a woman--even a solitary woman--was enough, when under the inspiration
and protection of God, to repel the assault of the most boastful and
audacious king.
The expression, “hath shaken her head at thee,” has been literally
rendered: “Hath nodded behind thee.” It signifies an act of security--as,
for example, in the Twenty-second Psalm: “All they that see me laugh
me to scorn; they shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying: ‘He
trusted on the Lord that He would deliver him. Let Him deliver him,
seeing He delighted him.’”
The people of Jerusalem are represented by this expression as nodding
their heads in contempt at the retiring envoys of Sennacherib.
The answer of Isaiah to Hezekiah was a religious revelation to the king
of Assyria.
The twenty-second verse puts into interrogative form a reproach against
the ignorance of the king:
“Whom hast thou reproached and blasphemed? And against whom hast thou
exalted thy voice and lifted up thine eyes on high?”
The meaning evidently is that the king did not know the real nature of
the God of Israel and Judah, and that he was making an infinite mistake
in confounding that nature with what he had already seen of the idols of
the nations.
Humiliation is promised to the king of Assyria. A hook is to be thrust
into his nose, a bridle is to be put on his lips, and he is to be turned
back by the way which he came.
While the king of Assyria is humiliated, the remnant that escaped of the
house of Judah is promised again to take root downward and bear fruit
upward--literally, shall add root to root, shall take firmer root than
ever, as a tree often does after a storm; the ravaged land was to be
newly stocked by the remnant that was to be saved out of Jerusalem.
All these statements are supported by the declaration: “The zeal of the
Lord of Hosts shall do this.”
Thus the promise is not made in any human name or guaranteed by the
conquests of human history. It is immediately connected with the very
purpose and power of the Most High. Nor is this the only instance in
which divine strength is promised on behalf of Judah and of Israel. We
read: “For I will defend this city, to save it, for mine own sake, and
for my servant David’s sake.”
We must always be careful to notice that the race is not to the swift,
nor the battle to the strong, and that no occasion is ever given
for man to glory in man, but that everywhere from the beginning of
religious history, as given in the Bible, it is God who is King, Ruler
and Protector, and to Him all the glory of deliverance and conquest
undividedly belongs.
And that night “the angel of the Lord went out and smote in the camp of
the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand; and when they arose
early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.”
Again and again we say: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of
the living God.”
Let Rab-shakeh talk--let him deliver his burning messages--and when he
has ceased his mockery it is not necessary for us to answer. God will
defend His own cause.
Here we stand. We think all history is on the Christian side. But let
us not forget that the finest argument in favor of Christianity is a
Christian life.