'And Hezekiah received the letter from the hand of the messengers, and
read it: and Hezekiah went up unto the house of the Lord, and spread it
before the Lord. 15. And Hezekiah prayed unto the Lord, saying, 16. O
Lord of hosts, God of Israel, that dwellest between the cherubims, Thou
art the God, even Thou alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth: Thou
hast made heaven and earth. 17. Incline Thine ear, O Lord, and hear;
open Thine eyes, O Lord, and see: and hear all the words of
Sennacherib, which hath sent to reproach the living God. 18. Of a
truth, Lord, the kings of Assyria have laid waste all the nations, and
their countries, 19. And have cast their gods into the fire: for they
were no gods, but the work of men's hands, wood and stone: therefore
they have destroyed them. 20. Now therefore, O Lord our God, save us
from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that Thou
art the Lord, even Thou only. 21. Then Isaiah the son of Amoz sent unto
Hezekiah, saying. Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Whereas thou hast
prayed to Me against Sennacherib king of Assyria.... 33. Therefore thus
saith the Lord concerning the king of Assyria, He shall not come into
this city, nor shoot an arrow there, nor come before it with shields,
nor cast a bank against it. 34. By the way that he came, by the same
shall he return, and shall not come into this city, saith the Lord. 35.
For I will defend this city to save it for mine own sake, and for my
servant David's sake. 36. Then the angel of the Lord went forth, and
smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred and fourscore and five
thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were
all dead corpses. 37. So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed, and went
and returned, and dwelt at Nineveh. 38. And it came to pass, as he was
worshipping in the house of Nisroch his god, that Adrammelech and
Sharezer his sons smote him with the sword; and they escaped into the
land of Armenia: and Esarhaddon his you reigned in his stead.'--ISAIAH
xxxvii. 14-21, 33-38.
Is trust in Jehovah folly or wisdom? That was the question raised by
Sennacherib's invasion. A glance at the preceding chapters will show
how the high military official, 'the rabshakeh,' or chief of the
officers, shaped all his insolent and yet skilful mixture of threats
and promises so as to demonstrate the vanity of trust in Egypt or in
Jehovah, or in any but 'the great king.' Isaiah had been labouring to
lift his countrymen to the height of reliance on Jehovah alone, and now
the crucial test of the truth of his contention had come. On the one
hand were Sennacherib and his host, flushed with victory, and sure of
crushing this puny kinglet Hezekiah and his obstinate little city,
perched on its rock. On the other was nothing but a prophet's word.
Where is the stronger force? And does political prudence dictate
reliance on the Unseen or on the visible? The moment is the crisis of
Isaiah's work, and this narrative has been placed, with true insight
into its importance, at the close of the first half of this book.
To grasp the significance of the text the preceding events have to be
remembered. Hezekiah's kingdom had been overrun, and tribute exacted
from him. The rabshakeh had been sent from the main body of the
Assyrian army, which was down at Lachish in the Philistine low country
on the road to Egypt, in order to try to secure Jerusalem by promises
and threats, since it was too important a post to leave in the rear, if
Egypt was to be invaded. That attempt having failed, and the Egyptian
forces being in motion, this new effort was made to induce Hezekiah to
surrender. A letter was sent, whether accompanied by any considerable
armed force or no does not appear. At this point the narrative begins.
It may be best studied as an illustration of the trial of faith, its
refuge, its pleading, and its deliverance.
I. Note the trial of faith. Rabshakeh had derided the obstinate
confidence in Jehovah, which kept these starving men on the walls
grimly silent in spite of his coaxing. The letter of Sennacherib harps
on the same string. It is written in a tone of assumed friendly
remonstrance, and lays out with speciousness the apparent grounds for
calling trust in Jehovah absurdity. There are no threats in it. It is
all an appeal to common sense and political prudence. It marshals
undeniable facts. Experience has shown the irresistible power of
Assyria. There have been plenty of other little nations which have
trusted in their local deities, and what has become of them? Barbarous
names are flourished in Hezekiah's face, and their wasted dominions are
pointed to as warnings against his committing a parallel folly. There
is nothing in the letter which might not have been said by a friend,
and nothing which was not said by the Jews who had lost their faith in
their God. It was but the putting into plain words of what
'common-sense' and faint faith had often whispered to Hezekiah. The
very absence of temper or demand in the letter gives it an aspect of
that 'sweet reasonableness' so dear to sense-bound souls.
_Mutatis mutandis_, the letter may stand for a specimen of the
arguments which worldly prudence brings to shake faith, in all ages.
We, too, are assailed by much that sounds most forcible from the point
of view of mere earthly calculation. Sennacherib does not lie in
boasting of his victories. He and his shoals of soldiers are very real
and potent. It does seem madness for one little kingdom to stand out,
and all the more so because its king is cooped up in his city, as the
cuneiform inscription proudly tells, 'like a bird in a cage,' and all
the rest of his land is in the conqueror's grip. They who look only at
the things seen cannot but think the men of faith mad. They who look at
the things unseen cannot but know that the men of sense are fools. The
latter elaborately prove that the former are impotent, but they have
left out one factor in their calculations, and that is God. One man and
God at his back are stronger than Sennacherib and all his mercenaries.
II. Note the refuge of tempted faith. What was Hezekiah to do with the
crafty missive? It was hoped that he would listen to reason, and come
down from his perch. But he neither yielded nor took counsel with his
servants, but, like a devout man, went into the house of the Lord, and
spread the letter before the Lord. It would have gone hard with him if
he had not been to the house of the Lord many a time before. It is not
easy to find our way thither for the first time, when our eyes are
blinded by tears or our way darkened by calamities. But faith
instinctively turns to God when anything goes wrong, because it has
been accustomed to turn to Him when all was right, according to the
world's estimate of right and wrong. Whither should the burdened heart
betake itself but to Him who daily bears our burdens? The impulse to
tell God all troubles is as truly a mark of the faithful soul as the
impulse to tell everything to the beloved is the life-breath of love.
The act of spreading the letter before the Lord is an eloquent symbol,
which some prosaic and learned commentators have been dull enough to
call gross, and to compare to Buddhist praying-mills! Its meaning is
expressed in the prayer which follows. It is faith's appeal to His
knowledge. It is faith's casting of its burden on the Lord. Our faith
is of little power to bless, unless it impels us to take God into
confidence in regard to everything which troubles us. If the letter is
not grave enough to be spread before _Him_, it is too small to annoy
_us_. If we truly live in fellowship with God, we shall find ourselves
in His house, with the cause of our trouble in our hands, before we
have time to think. Instinct acts more quickly than reason, and, if our
faith be vital, it will not need to be argued into speaking to God of
all that weighs upon us.
III. Note the pleading of faith. Hezekiah's address to God is no mere
formal recapitulation of divine names, but is the effort of faith to
grasp firmly the truths which the enemy denies, and on which it builds.
So considered, the accumulation of titles in verse 16 is very
instructive, and shows how a trustful soul puts forth the energy of its
faith in summoning to mind the great aspects of the divine name as
bulwarks against suggested fears, and bases of supplication. Hezekiah
appeals to 'the God of Hosts,' the Ruler of all the embattled forces of
the universe, as well as of the armies of angels. What is Sennacherib's
array compared with these? He appeals to the 'God of Israel,' as
pleading the ancient relationship, which binds the unchangeable
Guardian of the people to be still what He has been, and casts the
responsibility of Israel's preservation upon Him. He appeals to Him
'who sits between the cherubim,' as thence defending and filling the
threatened city. He grasps the thought that Jehovah is 'God alone' with
a vividness which is partly due no doubt to Isaiah's teaching, but is
also the indignant recoil of faith from the assumption of the letter,
that Jehovah was but as the beaten deities of Gozan and the rest. Faith
clings the more tenaciously to truths denied, as a dog will hold on to
the stick that one tries to pull from it.
Thus, having heartened himself and pled with God by all these names,
Hezekiah comes to his petition. It is but translating into words the
symbol of spreading the letter before God. He asks God to behold and to
hear the defiant words. Prayer tells God what it knows that He knows
already, for it relieves the burdened heart to tell Him. It asks Him to
see and hear what it knows that He does see and hear. But the prayer is
not for mere observance followed by no divine act, but for taking
knowledge as the precursor of the appropriate help. Of such seeing and
hearing by God, believing prayer is the appointed condition. 'Your
Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask Him'; but
that is not a reason for silence, but for supplication.
Hezekiah rightly regarded Sennacherib's words as meant to reproach the
living God, for the point of the letter was to dissuade from trust in
Him, as no more powerful than the petty deities of already conquered
cities. The prayer, therefore, pleads that God would take care of His
own honour, and by delivering Jerusalem, show His sole sovereignty. It
is a high and wonderful level for faith to reach, when it regards
personal deliverance mainly in its aspect as vindicating God and
warranting faith. We may too easily conclude that God's honour is
involved in our deliverance, and it is well to be on our guard against
that.
But it is possible to die to self so fully as to feel that our cause is
His, because His is so entirely ours; and then we may come to that
heroic faith which seeks even personal good more for God's sake than
for our own. It was noble that this man should have no word to say
about self but 'Save us, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know
that Thou art God alone.' Like him, we may each feel that our defence
is more God's affair than ours, in proportion as we feel we are His
rather than our own. That siege of Jerusalem was indeed as a duel
between faith and unbelief on the one hand, and between Jehovah and the
gods who were 'no gods' on the other. Sennacherib's letter was a
defiant challenge to Jehovah to do His best for this people, and when
faith repeated in prayer the insolence of unbelief only one result was
possible. It came.
IV. Note the deliverance of faith. Isaiah's grand prophecy tempts us to
linger over its many beauties and magnificent roll of triumphant scorn,
but it falls outside our purpose. As for the catastrophe, it should be
noted that its place and time are not definitely stated, and that
probably the notion that the Assyrian army was annihilated before
Jerusalem is a mistake. Sennacherib and his troops were at Libnah, on
their way to meet the Egyptian forces. If there were any of them before
Jerusalem, they would at most be a small detachment, sufficient to
invest it. Probably the course of events was that, at some time not
specified, soon after the dismissal of the messengers who brought the
letter, the awful destruction fell, and that, when the news of the
disaster reached the detachment at Jerusalem, as the psalm which throbs
with the echoes of the triumph says, 'They were troubled, and hasted
away.'
How complete was the crushing blow the lame record of this campaign in
the inscriptions shows, in which the failure of the attempt to capture
the city is covered up by vapouring about tribute and the like. If it
had not failed, however, the success would certainly have been told, as
all similar cases are told, with abundant boasting. The other fact is
also to be remembered, that Sennacherib tried no more conclusions with
Jerusalem and Jehovah, and though he lived for some twenty years
afterwards, never again ventured on to the soil where that mighty God
fought for His people.
The appended notice of Sennacherib's death has been added by some
narrator, since it probably occurred after Isaiah's martyrdom. 'All
they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.' Such a career as
his could not but give taste for violence and bloodshed, and dimmish
regard for human life. Retribution comes slowly, for twenty years
intervened between the catastrophe to the army and the murder of the
king. Its penalties increase as its fall delays; for first came the
blotting out of the army, and then, when that had no effect, at last
the sword in his own heart. 'He that being often reproved hardeneth his
neck shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy.'
But the great lesson of that death is the same as that of the other
king's deliverance. Hezekiah 'went unto the house of the Lord,' and
found Him a very present help in trouble. Sennacherib was slain in the
house of his god. The two pictures of the worshippers and their fates
are symbolic of the meaning of the whole story. Sennacherib had dared
Jehovah to try His strength against him and his deities. The challenge
was accepted, and that bloody corpse before the idol that could not
help preaches a ghastly sermon on the text, 'They that make them are
like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them. O Israel, trust
thou in the Lord: He is their help and their shield.'