Before going on, I want to make one or two remarks upon the three accounts of the life of Hezekiah contained in the Word (2 Kings 18-20; 2 Chron. 29-32; Isa. 36-39). Only our account in Kings begins with Hezekiah’s revolt against Sennacherib, followed by the invasion of Judah and the humiliation of the king upon his lack of trust. This is because this account presents to us the careers of kings placed under responsibility. God’s discipline toward Hezekiah on this occasion shows him that only trust in the Lord is able to sustain him. This same account insists above all upon the character of the true testimony at the time of the end; this consists of forsaking any mixture with the idolatry of the world. Next we find Sennacherib’s attack against Jerusalem, where Hezekiah’s absolute confidence in the Lord is put to the proof and comes forth victorious.
In the account in Chronicles, we find the king according to the counsels of God. Judah is nothing more than a little insignificant remnant, confined to Jerusalem. From the first day on, the king appears as prepared by God for his work of grace. The temple of the Lord remains with the remnant who look after it. Hezekiah cleanses it, restores the worship of God in its integrity, and the worship of the false gods is uprooted and abolished. The remnant of the people thus acquire the right to be the bearers of the testimony of God. But the city of God must still be secured against the enemy, by cutting off the resources that supply the city; he is left with nothing at all in common with the testimony. The picture is complete within the measure and the limits of this little, humbled people. The history of Sennacherib’s attack against Jerusalem is much briefer here than in the other two accounts.
In Isaiah we have the history of Hezekiah from the prophetic point of view. Three facts only are set forth in detail there: Sennacherib’s attack and Hezekiah’s grievous illness, followed by the visit of the ambassadors, which sets forth prophetically Babylon’s rise and fall in relation to Judah. In this account Hezekiah is in some respects a type of the Messiah, in many other respects a type of the remnant. This latter, condemned to death, recovers life in resurrection, as it were. Hezekiah’s illness, also mentioned in the two other accounts, acquires in Isaiah a very special prophetic importance through the mention of the “the writing of Hezekiah,” the prophetic lamentation of the remnant who desire to celebrate the Lord “in the land of the living” (Isa. 38:9,11).
Let us now resume the course of our account.
After the Assyrian’s threats against him, Hezekiah goes up to the house of the Lord a first time. As it appeared, little was left to this poor king. All Judah sacked, the Assyrian army besieging the only city still remaining standing, Jehovah’s servant of the Lord despised, treated as an evildoer by the nations, the name of the Lord trampled underfoot, circumstances such that all must be borne in silence, and this humiliation accepted as the righteous retribution of the sin and disobedience of the people. Did they have any resource, this weak “remnant that is left” (2 Kings 19:4)? Yes, indeed! They still had Jehovah’s temple, His beloved city, Mount Zion, the son of David and his throne, the prophet — bearer of the word of God; they still had much more than David himself had in the cave of Adullam! The flesh might become discouraged; faith could not in any wise, for amid this indescribable disaster faith possessed everything that gave it firm assurance, everything that consoled it, and that caused it to rejoice in the affliction: Immanuel, the presence of God with His people. Is it not the same today? Seek the testimony of God in the midst of a world ripe for apostasy. Faith alone can discover it, “the remnant that is left”; but faith does discover it; it prefers the house of God to all the tents of wickedness, the poor and afflicted people to all the prosperity of the Assyrian; it hearkens to the voice of the prophet, and closes its ear to the blaspheming voice of the enemy’s servants. It gathers around the Lord’s Anointed, and how shall it fear, since God sees and beholds the face of His Anointed?
Not that this confidence excluded anguish, and that the extreme danger did not press upon the heart, nor that they do not wear sackcloth and rend their garments in token of affliction, of humiliation, and of mourning. But the danger drives Hezekiah and his people towards the house of God and towards the oracles of God to receive counsel, strength, and consolation. “This day is a day of trouble and of rebuke and of reviling; for the children are come to the birth, and there is not strength to bring forth” (2 Kings 19:3). In such times as well as in our own it must be felt that these are days “of trouble and of rebuke,” that our part is deep humiliation, that like this little remnant we have to take upon ourselves the reproach of a great people, and that we have to express it by our tears and sighing over the state of Christendom which has so dreadfully dishonored the Lord. But one thing suffices the afflicted remnant and ought to suffice us: the Lord is there; it is He, not ourselves, that has been defied. Therefore, let us say like Hezekiah: Perhaps the Lord will hear the words of him who reproaches the living God, and punish the words which He has heard (2 Kings 19:4), and the Lord will answer us.
“Be not afraid,” said Isaiah, “of the words that thou hast heard, wherewith the servants of the king of Assyria have blasphemed me. Behold, I will put a spirit into him and he shall hear tidings, and shall return to his own land; and I will cause him to fall by the sword in his own land” (2 Kings 19:6-7). The word of the Lord is fulfilled to the letter. The news that Tirhakah, king of Ethiopia, who had seized Egypt, was advancing against him when his own objective was precisely the conquest of Egypt, caused him to depart suddenly to meet him.
But before his departure Sennacherib sends a written message to Hezekiah. He had previously sent his spokesmen with this message to the people: “Let not Hezekiah deceive you... neither let Hezekiah make you rely upon Jehovah” (2 Kings 18:29-30). Now he says to Hezekiah, “Let not thy God, upon whom thou reliest, deceive thee” (2 Kings 19:10), likening Him to the false gods that he, the Assyrian, had destroyed. It was a direct “reproach” against the “living God.” The rage that filled the Assyrian monarch, hindered in his project and wounded in his pride, now shows itself in its true character. It is the God of Israel whom he opposes.
Hezekiah goes up to the house of the Lord a second time. It is no more a question of humiliation like the first time, but one of a direct attack upon the name of the Lord whom Hezekiah honors. God must take account of this letter. The king places God’s cause into God’s own hands, but he knows that to honor His name, the Lord will save His humbled people. “And now, Jehovah our God, I beseech Thee, save us out of his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that Thou, Jehovah, art God, Thou only” (2 Kings 19:19).
Then Isaiah causes the king to know the word of the Lord pronounced against the Assyrian. If Hezekiah bears upon his heart the interests of his God when it is a question of the enemy, Jehovah answers him that He will not allow the world to reproach “the virgin-daughter of Zion;” since she is bride of the Great king. “The virgin-daughter of Zion despiseth thee, laugheth thee to scorn; The daughter of Jerusalem shaketh her head at thee” (2 Kings 19:21). Thus God justifies the character and honor of His beloved ones, guilty but humbled, when these justify His personal honor and character. The Assyrian in his foolishness had lifted up his eyes against the Holy One of Israel. He had been the rod of the wrath of God, who had given him this power from long before, but he had become proud of his success and had not feared to lift himself up against God. He had said: “I have come up... I will cut down... and I will enter... I have digged... I have dried up...”( 2 Kings 19:23-24), whereas it was the Lord who had decreed the ruin of the nations and of His people by this means (2 Kings 19:25-26). “But I know,” said the Lord, “thine abode, and they going out, and thy coming in, and thy raging against Me. Because thy raging against Me and thine arrogance is come up into Mine ears, I will put My ring in thy nose, and My bridle in thy lips, and I will make thee go back by the way by which thou camest” (2 Kings 19:27-28).
The Lord then gives Hezekiah a sign of His deliverance: The first year they should eat that which would grow from the fallen grain, a poor harvest, but which would keep them from dying of hunger. It is, prophetically, the history of the preservation of the remnant at Jerusalem. The second year there would be a strength of growth; in the third year the harvest and the fruit of the vine should come. The Lord explains this parable to the king: “And the remnant that is escaped of the house of Judah shall again take root downward, and bear fruit upward; for out of Jerusalem shall go forth a remnant, and out of mount Zion they that escape: The zeal of Jehovah of hosts shall do this” (2 Kings 19:30-31). The remnant of Judah should be established anew by the Lord, and filled with His blessings.
If it be so with Jerusalem, how much more so with the Assembly, the Bride of Christ—weak remnant in the midst of ruins, lacking the power to bring to birth, and so abased that the enemy can say, “Let not thy God, upon whom thou reliest, deceive thee”; but precious to Christ who will make her to sit with Him upon His throne, and shall plant her forever in the courts of God like a tree laden with blossoms and fruit.
The Assyrian should not enter the city, nor shoot arrows into it, nor cast a bank against it; nevertheless the enemy army was surrounding it at that very moment. But God intervened because of His name, and because of David His servant toward whom He would neither revoke His covenant nor His promises (2 Kings 19:32-34).
The very night of this prophecy the camp of the Assyrians was smitten. In the morning they were all dead bodies. “The stout-hearted are made a spoil, they have slept their sleep; and none of the men of might have found their hands. At Thy rebuke, O God of Jacob, both chariot and horse are cast into a dead sleep... When God rose up to judgment, to save all the meek of the earth” (Psa. 76:5, 6, 9). It will be thus also that the Assyrian of the end time, the king of the North, shall meet his judgment: “But tidings out of the east and out of the north shall trouble him; and he shall go forth with great fury to exterminate, and utterly to destroy many. And he shall plant the tents of his palace between the sea and the mountain of holy beauty; and he shall come to his end, and there shall be none to help him” (Dan. 11:44-45). He himself, the head of his army, suffers the sentence pronounced against him by the prophet (2 Kings 19:37). His sons smite him with the sword as he was bowed down in the house of Nisroch his god. He had said to Hezekiah: The Lord will not deliver you; and behold, his god Nisroch was incapable of delivering him when he worshipped before him.
In all this we follow the progress of the man of God, and the reward which his trust in the Lord receives. At the beginning he rebels against the Assyrian when perhaps, lacking knowledge of his own heart, he could have mistaken for confidence in God alone that confidence to which self was not a stranger. Then he loses his confidence before the enemy, but God uses the discipline to remove from him all his self-confidence. In this trial Hezekiah, humbled by the state of his people, seeking no support within his own heart, commits all to God. His confidence increases in the measure that the trial grows. He no longer thinks of himself nor of his people, except to judge them; he seeks only the glory of the Lord; linking the salvation of Israel to this glory, however. God answers him by showing him that Jerusalem, the son of David, and the beloved remnant occupy His thoughts exclusively. He delivers His people by judgment, answering the humble prayer “the remnant that is left” addresses to Him by the mouth of the prophet (2 Kings 19:4).