40 Minutes In The Old Testament - 2 Kings 19:20-37 (Episode 345)

Episode Date: January 18, 2023

Isaiah tells Hezekiah what is going to happen to Sennacherib, the king of Assyria. God will save Jerusalem for the sake of His name and for the sake of David (which it turns out are the same thing). And the true King of Kings shows up and kills 185,000 men. Chad and Daniel discuss all of this. Have a listen! HWSS Regional Conference 1517 Podcast Network 1517 YouTube Donate

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. While you're over there, make sure you check out the Here We Still Stand regional conference in Bentonville, Arkansas. As you know, the national conference has been sold out for a long time, and this is your opportunity to come to a 1517 conference if you wanted to come to one. Which, if you don't want to come to one, obviously you've not been to one if you don't want to come to one, because if you ever had been, you'd want to come. So come hang out with Chad and myself and a whole bunch of other people for two days in the Ozarks.

That is May 5th and 6th. It's $99 to come. There's a link in the show notes. That is going to sell out. It is getting closer and closer to selling out. That will happen, so don't delay. Go ahead and get those tickets. Chad, last episode, we had some hair-raising speeches given, not just to a king, not just to his messengers, but to everybody to hear about all the horrible things that were going to happen if Judah doesn't cooperate. And we had Hezekiah tell his people, hey, don't listen to these people, don't worry about what they say.

But then Hezekiah goes and he decides to go and pray. He's got the sackcloth going on, he's got all the brought low stuff that you need to have. And in this prayer, you understand that he's trying to present himself to the people as someone that's calm, it's going to be okay don't listen to anything they have to say but you listen to his prayer and you're like this guy's got nothing i mean this guy's got god and that's it then he goes isaiah and isaiah says hey that's just the sort of stuff that god can work with and uh and we're going to get to this episode we get to start out with isaiah talking about what this god which is all hezekiah has kind of what how he's going to uh how he's going to intervene in this whole

situation. Yeah, well, I guess eventually we'll cover this same material. I don't know when that's going to be. It's going to be a few years down the road. But a lot of this material that we're covering now, it's paralleled, of course, in Isaiah's own writings. But Isaiah here is going to give us a little taste of the kinds, or the writer of Kings is going to give us a taste of the kind of material that we're going to find all over Isaiah. So it's poetry, for one. So if you're actually looking in your Bible while you're listening along, you'll see that it's even set up differently on the page. So you can tell that it's not prose, but poetry, typical prophetic kind of preaching that's going to happen here. So 2 Kings 19, verse 20, after Hezekiah's prayer,

we're going to have now Isaiah's message as to exactly what God has in store for this guy who is this Assyrian guy who's so full of himself. So Isaiah, the son of Amoz, sent to Hezekiah saying, thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, your prayer to me about Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, I have heard. That's always a great, that'd be a great word to hear. You know, your prayer, Chad, that you offered concerning blank, I have heard. That's a pretty good promise coming from God. I was listening.

It's a good way to start. It's a good way to start. Because at that moment, you're like, well, at least he heard it. Now, I don't know what the response is. So this is a good starting point. So I heard it, and you want to know, great. How'd you feel about it? What's your opinion?

Yeah, yeah. What'd you really think about the prayer? I mean, you heard it. That's good, that's good. Glad that you did. Now, what do you have to say? And, of course, that's what follows. Verse 21, this is the word that the Lord has spoken concerning him.

And the him here, of course, is Sennacherib, the one who sent his envoys to speak all these boastful, provocative, and even blasphemous words as they were standing outside the walls of Jerusalem. So here is what the Lord has to say. She despises you. She scorns you, the virgin daughter of Zion. She wags her head behind you, the daughter of Jerusalem. Let's stop there for a second. So this despising, this scorning, of course, is exactly what the Assyrians are doing to to god's people to to the israelites and i think some of the language here is also uh indicative of the threat that that is faced by by jerusalem so she's called the virgin daughter of zion now you read the commentaries on on kings and several of them will make the comment that

kind of what is alluded here is that what what the city faces is basically uh is it is a syrian rapist i mean that's the kind of language commentaries will use they're there to molest jerusalem they're there to enter into her gates and to just do with the city and its inhabitants whatever they want to do and what god is saying is that's not going to happen the virgin daughter of zion is going to be safe with me he's going to protect her from this assyrian this assyrian onslaught and then he goes on to say she wags her head behind you that's typical hebrew language for what happens when somebody's scorning or mocking somebody else so i don't know what the i don't know what the because we don't talk about wagging the head in english i'm not sure what head movement

we would use in an english idiom to capture this but we don't talk about oh yeah this how was it the store this day and i got no i got arguing with this guy and he was wagging his head at me no that that's just not something that we we speak about the wagging of the head is a pretty common thing in the bible like this is not uh it's not a rare phrase that comes up i mean it's in the new testament it talks about it's psalm yeah psalm 22 the the crucifixion psalm says all who see me mock me they make they make mouths of me they they wag their heads so yeah it's this this it's it's it's a it's a head motion it's a non-verbal expression that you use when you're scorning someone so like i said i don't know what that would correspond to an english idiom but

that's what that's what it means i don't know if it's like making faces you know it would it be someone that's that's mocking you with uh there is uh okay so maybe this is this is what comes to my mind when i think about wagging the head uh so i was watching a basketball game and there was a technical foul so a guy got to shoot free throws all by himself there's no one you He's on the court. Everyone else has to go back. And it's a road game, and he's shooting these free throws. And so the crowd is freaking out.

They're trying to distract him, make him miss. He makes them both. And then he takes his hands and does this boo-hoo thing over his eyes. Has his hands near his eyes, and he's moving them back and forth. the boo-hoo thing. My guess is it's something like that. It's a bodily thing that you do with your head

because it's always associated with mocking. Yeah. I mean, this is very childish and juvenile. Yes, this is childish and juvenile, but it'd be like sticking your tongue out at somebody. Yeah.

It's that kind of thing. So, yeah. however you want to envision it that's what's going on when you hear that phrase wagging wagging the head we don't even use the word wag unless we're talking about a dog's tail yeah we don't talk about heads wagging but anyway so uh that's what they're doing to design and then he goes on whom have you mocked and reviled against whom have you raised your voice and lifted your eyes to the heights now it would seem like the one who's been mocked and reviled is jerusalem but that's not his answer so who have you mocked reviled against whom have you raised your voice

and lifted your eyes to the heights here's the answer against the holy one of israel so they may think that they have been wagging their head and mocking jerusalem but no they've been actually mocking god himself the holy one of israel then he goes on by your messengers you have mocked the lord and here's what you've said with my many chariots i have gone up to the heights of the mountains to the far recesses of lebanon i felled its tallest cedars its choice of cypresses i entered its farthest lodging place its most fruitful forest i dug wells and drank foreign waters and i dried up with the sole of my foot all the streams of egypt so this is this is putting words into the mouth of the assyrians especially their king where he's boasting about all these

great accomplishments uh that are on his resume you know he's he's gone up to the the very tops of the mountains with his axe and he's chopped down those tall cedars of lebanon and their cypresses and he went all the way into foreign countries and he bet he as it were drank up all the water of their ground he dug he dug some wells there and he just sucked all the water out of egypt or sucked all the water of syria or whatever it might be and then he walks around everywhere the soil of his foot plants, he dries up the streams of Egypt. So this is hyperbolic language, of course, which is typical of a poetry. Hyperbolic language put in the mouth of the king of Assyria basically to show how full of himself that he is. He thinks he's a god, more or less,

is kind of what the implication is of all this language. Yeah, and we talked a little bit about this. I mean, you're not talking about guys that simply think king is the most powerful person, the most important person, or anything like that. There's a king, and a king isn't only set in place by God, whatever God that is. You have ascended to Godhood, right? So it's you and God. This is why it's funny because king of kings is a phrase that we as Christians hear. This is This is in the scripture, right? The king of kings. And we would associate that.

Yeah, we use that all the time with preference to Jesus. Yeah, and we would never associate that with just somebody. We wouldn't say David is the king of kings or Solomon. That's exactly the title that all these kings used for themselves. That's who they were. And what does that mean? It's like, well, I'm not just a king. I'm the king.

I'm over all the kings of the earth. In other words, I'm God. I'm the guy, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Humility is not a an Assyrian virtue, especially when it especially when it comes to their kings. I mean, this one and this was pretty common in the ancient world, which I think maybe a couple episodes we talked about that, that this idea that kings were either godlike or actually gods or kind of apotheosis or an incarnation of a god, as it were, in Egypt. That was pretty common in the ancient world. You know, so we complain today about politicians being full of themselves and arrogant, which, you know, is a legitimate complaint and criticism, but I mean, they really got nothing

compared to these ancient Kings. I mean, these guys, they were it and they thought they were it anyway. Yeah. So, uh, and, and that, and that kind of, that kind of a hubris is what you see reflected here in the language that Isaiah puts into the mouth of the, the Assyrians. And they've gone as, as far up as you can possibly go to the heights of the mountains. They've gone far down as you can possibly go they've dug these wells and foreign soil and basically they're saying we're masters we're the king of kings we are we may appear to be human but we're actually divine so this is and they've not taken a lot of losses up to this point there's not been a lot of at this point there's no evidence to the contrary you know i mean right i mean yeah you got you

you're doing a lot of winning yeah which i mean from their perspective is great uh in the bigger in the bigger perspective is like that one of the worst things that can happen to someone who's arrogant in front of themselves is when they have a string of victories because of course what does that do but strengthen their own hubris yeah it makes them make secure in their uh over-inflated view of of who they are so after having said all this after the lord through isaiah having put these words in the mouth of the assyrians which are as it were a summary of their own self-evaluation their own self-importance he then shifts to say this verse 25 haven't you heard which i love i love that it starts out did you not get the memo haven't you heard that i so this is god speaking

that i determined it long ago i planned from days of old what now i bring to pass that you should turn fortified cities into heaps of ruins while their inhabitants shorn of strength are dismayed and confounded, and have become like plants of the field and like tender grass, like grass on the housetops, blighted before it's grown. But I know, well, let me stop there. So that's verses 25 through 26. So God's basically saying, wait, wait,

you think that all of these judgments that you have inflicted upon other peoples is because of your own prowess in battle or your own divine status or your own whatever, you think belongs to you? No. I mean, are you so stupid that you don't realize that long ago, like before you were even king, in fact, before you were even born, long before that, I already decided this is the way things were going to go down. Because as it turns out, I'm God and you're not. I'm omniscient and you're not. I planned all this. In fact, I've been even announcing it

through my prophets that these things were going to come to pass. So you get zero credit for all these things that you think are occurring to to your favor and making you look so strong and mighty and and divine yeah and you can see that if you actually go read the prophets you know we're in that kind of weird place where we're reading a historical narrative but then we're going to get into books where there's prophets writing about the things that are going on and these uh historical narratives maybe if you were to pick up some kind of a you can't do this like a chronological Bible, and it would have this stuff sort of interwoven. You would get to feel for it, but you see in the prophets

that the prophets will say things, well, God will say things to the prophets. Behold, I am going to raise up blank, whatever it is. It'll be some, you know, some power, some people, some king, and I'm going to use that king to accomplish what it is that I want to accomplish. And a lot of times that whether that's I'm going to have them defeat these people or I'm going to have them take you away into captivity for being a bunch of idolatrous children. And so, yeah, if you it isn't it isn't like the first time that God is like saying something like this. I mean, the prophets, Isaiah says, is saying all this kind of stuff all the time. yeah yeah so they the the acts that god wields to you know chop down the israelite tree of rebellion

or whatever yeah this this stuff happens uh with some frequency and it's almost always followed been by a rebuke yeah so god will say okay i raised you up to do this thing but at the same time you are responsible for your own guilt because even though i raised you up to bring about this judgment against my idolatrous people what you've turned around and done is basically say that this was done all independently, all because of your own skill and because of your divine status, blah, blah, blah. So God can take the axe by which he punishes his people and burn that axe in the fire, which he does with

great frequency in the Old Testament. Yeah, my favorite example of that I think I brought up before is Habakkuk, when God says, hey, write this down. It's going to be awesome. I'm raising up this people group, and they're just going to devastate everything. And Habakkuk's like, that's not good. It's not good. It's not good at all. God's like, oh, it's happening. I'm going to raise up

these kingdoms, and then they're going to cart you off, and they're going to punish you. And then, like, a chapter later, God is telling them, the hubris on these people to persecute my people is unbelievable.

It's pretty jarring, because Because at one moment, God's saying, I'm the one raising them up, and I'm the one that's going to do it. And at the next minute, he's angry with the people that are doing this because he holds them entirely responsible. Yeah. We don't use the word sovereignty a lot, but it does apply there. I mean, this is the all-powerful sovereign God. He's the one who's—which I think is important, because a lot of people in the ancient world thought that their gods were just, you know, they were active in their area.

There's a god of this region doing this thing. But it wasn't like the God of the Ammonites was down in Egypt manipulating events, or it wasn't like the God of Egypt was in Assyria manipulating events. I mean, they had a very kind of circumscribed view of the area over which the God had control. And then along comes Yahweh, and he's like, oh, no, no, I'm the God of heaven and earth. So it doesn't matter where you're at, Israel, Egypt, Assyria, America, it doesn't matter. i am the lord overall and so yeah i'm gonna be kind of moving i'm gonna be shuffling pieces around on this this international chessboard and it's it's all my doing yeah the way that israel views their god is very different i mean this seems like the like peak amount of gods

and uh in the history of like the you know kind of middle east area and every every little people groups got their own god and what what the assyrians would do is they would go in there and they would just take your god from you because they all had like a statue or something and they'd just take him and then you don't have one and there was this rubbing your face and they're like yeah we've got your god

captive and you couldn't do this with Judah you couldn't do the same kind of thing for example they literally took Marduk they had this big gold statue that weighed like a thousand pounds

or something crazy and to go to war you had to go and grab its hands and make a covenant or basically with it and then you could go to war well they just had a real simple solution to that they just went, took it, melted it down

you don't have a god anymore and there's no hand to grab and you'd be like well that's ridiculous that wouldn't work, it did work these people couldn't go to war these people actually believe this well Judah's different, they don't have that sort of thing going on and their god is not just consigned to this region

They don't have—you know what? If you want to know one of the practical reasons God doesn't want you to have a bunch of images of old calves and stuff, well, this is a good reason not to do that. Yeah, you can't steal an imageless god. Yeah, you can't take your god into captivity. And they were taking everyone's god into captivity. Like I said, these are true believers of these people groups. And what's the biggest insult that someone like the Assyrians could do to you?

Well, it's probably, your god is weak. We got your god. We got your god. We captured your god. This is devastating to your whole people when your God is captured. Yeah, the only time that this was attempted in Israel, we covered that back in Samuel, early chapters of Samuel, is when the Philistines took the Ark of the Covenant. That didn't turn out very well for the Philistines, if you remember, or their gods. In fact, it didn't take very long before they're like, hey, you can have the Ark back.

In fact, we're going to send some sacrifices to atone for our wrongdoing, along with returning your ark to you. So, yeah, messing with Israel's God was never going to end up being a positive move for you. Yeah. Actually, in some of the historical writings, too, when some of the people groups that decide to combine forces and end up kind of having rebellions and stuff, a big impetus for this is somebody will go to somebody else and they'll say hey did they take your god and they're like oh yeah they have our god they melted our god down this would be a way for them to join forces and you know so if you go to someone and be like why do you hate them like well they took my god and they threw it in the ocean fair enough i guess that that'd make

you hate somebody yeah we do it we do it it's a good reminder too i mean we tend to think in little cubicles today you know we have our politics over here we have religion over here we have whatever over here all of those little cubicles would have been laughably non-existent in the ancient world your politics and your theology were not distinct categories

I mean politics were theological and your theology was political it was all woven together because every aspect of your life was understood to be religious unlike our understanding you didn't go to war and not talk to your god about it

oh yeah but unthinkable unthinkable. You've got to go find a seer have them examine some liver and be like, hmm that'd be something, right? Throw some bones on the ground, I don't know, you've got to do something to figure out if this is what you're supposed to do or not Yeah, I don't simply take a vote

and then decide what you're going to do immediately So, all the beliefs about God, or gods, or a god or whatever's part of the culture those are woven into every aspect of that society from top down so god says hey i planned this a long time ago you don't know what you're talking about

and then he goes on verse 27 and 28 which would be the last two verses of the section from isaiah i know you're sitting down you gotta you gotta kind of feel how this leads to to to to the end so i know you're sitting down and you're going out and you're coming in that might sound like good so far like i know it's kind of psalm 139 right if i send to heaven you are there if i go to Sheol, you are there. You know my sitting down, my rising, you know all this. But no, listen to the way the verse ends. I know you're sitting down. I know you're going out and you're coming in and you're raging against me. None of this escapes God's notice. I know every single action you perform every day. If you're sitting on the throne or if you're sitting on the toilet,

if you're going out of your house, if you're coming back home, I know all that. And I know especially the way that you rage against me and because you have raged against me and your complacency has come into my ears i think that's an allusion back to hezekiah's prayer right i've heard about this hezekiah's told me about it that's that your complacency has come into my ears so because of all that here's what i'm going to do to you you got to love this image too i'm gonna put my hook in your nose i'm gonna put my bit in your mouth and i will turn you back on the way by which you came there's a mic drop moment yeah yeah i mean so basically he begins by talking about how the assyrian king thinks is he's just you know he's this godlike human he's done

all these fantastic things you know he's the big guy he's the king of kings when you get to the end God says, oh yeah, I'm going to treat you like just a regular beast of burden. Just like you'd put a bit into a horse's mouth to make him go where you want him to go. Or you put a hook into the nose of some animal and drag it the way you want it to go. That's what I'm going to do to you. So he, he takes this guy who's elevated himself to the level of a God and says, no, I'm going to treat you like a beast to remind you. It's kind of a Nebuchadnezzar kind of thing to remind you of really who god is and then who you are yeah that imagery is is is pretty good you get this idea this guy that thinks he is uh not just a king but a god

uh having a hook in his nose and god's got his finger in it and he's just pulling him along yeah it's a slap in the face big time uh when you get to get to the end you gotta love the prophetic preaching talk about the spines of steel these guys uh these guys uh spoke the truth uh pretty uh pretty forcefully okay um so that's the end of the poetry now we have more that's gonna be said this first 29 and this should be the sign for you now the you here is shifted so he's been talking through isaiah about uh the assyrian king and now he's going to switch and is going to talk about uh king hezekiah as well as the israelites so this can be a sign for all you all you folks here's the way this is going to happen this year eat what grows of itself and

in the second year what springs of the same and then in the third year sow and reap and plant vineyards and eat of their fruit and the surviving remnant 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 the mount and out of mount zion a band of survivors the zeal of the lord will will do this this this language about this year eating basically just what grows naturally and then the next year eating what grows naturally you know without any sowing and reaping and all that kind of stuff and then in the third year you're gonna you're gonna sow and reap and plant vineyards has led some people to suggest that actually all this is happening during a jubilee season. So remember during the

jubilee season, you had a couple of years where the land was allowed to lie fallow. You didn't go out there and work it like the farmers would. Instead, you just ate what grew of itself. So every 50th year. So a lot of people suggest that, or some people suggest that that might be what is being alluded to here, because this is the exact language of the jubilee, where you have a couple years where the land lies foul you just eat what grows what grows naturally so whether that's the case or whether it's you know the land has been devastated by all these assyrians coming in but the land is still going to be be fruitful that might be another meaning here but either way this is what god is telling them that the crops are going to grow naturally for two years in a row

and then third year you can go out and you can sow and reap and plant vineyards yeah one of my One of my favorite lines in the Old Testament, whenever I see it, is that the zeal of the Lord will do this. So this is a good closing sort of statement. It wraps up whatever that thought was. So here's all this stuff that's going to happen. And the reason it's going to happen is not because anything that you got going on, anything that you did, it's not because of your faithfulness or it's not because i'm not gonna uh i'm not partnering up with you to do this uh this is gonna be done out of my own zeal that is out of my own passion right

the passion of the lord is why this will come to pass yeah you have that accident several times i think in crucial parts of scripture too because you can get the impression that you know we talk about how hezekiah was it was just you know nobody was he was he was the best you know he was just a great king. And so you can get the impression that because of that, God is going to look with favor upon Israel. So for the sake of Hezekiah, he's going to do all this, but no, that's not the case at all. He's wanting, he's wanting to make sure that, yeah, it's great that you have a righteous king and he's doing some good things, but it's not because of him, but all this is going to happen. No, it's going to be me, my zeal, my passion. Like you said, my, my, uh, my holy

jealousy on behalf of my people that's why all of this is going to is going to happen that's why you're going to have crops that's why you're going to take root downward and bear fruit upward which is another kind of gripping image that you have here of the the fruitfulness of his people because there's going to be a remnant that's going to go out of jerusalem that uh in hebrew that that word for him that is pretty significant uh throughout the rest of the prophets because many of them we'll talk about a remnant being saved and it's the idea of the seed in the stump or various other metaphors that are used for god always preserving this this core of his people he's not going into the world it's going to decimate everybody there's always going to be a remnant and this remnant of

course will continue all the way until till the coming of christ and this this is the remnant that god will use to keep his promises alive to keep his word alive throughout these intervening centuries yeah if you're sort of wondering what's the difference between god doing something because god's sovereign uh and god doing something with zeal and i i think the the answer is well there's things that god does or god is is over uh but whenever you read sort of this the zeal of the lord will do this this is a this is the difference between me doing something and me being all in on something like i'm i'm fully committed to this thing and what is that thing well in this case it's talking about preserving a remnant right

and god said and it's basically god saying uh i'm passionate about this this is not just like yes i'm sovereign but this isn't just like another thing that i'm doing uh i'm all in on this remnant thing yeah and the verb itself i mean the word itself about like the zeal or or the passion i mean that that's also sometimes translated as as jealousy so it's it's and jealousy is it we tend to think of that as a negative emotion or negative uh inclination that's not the way it's presented with regard to god i mean he's jealous in the sense of he wants his people to be all his because he is all theirs so it's a it's just another way of expressing his intense ferocious love toward them so that's why he's doing it you know it's not it's kind of a uh kind of a bland sovereign

power that motivates him to do these things he does this because the god of passion and love for his bride israel and so that's why he that's why he does all of these things on on her behalf yeah it seems that in scripture if the zeal of the lord is invoked uh look out yeah yeah that means things are gonna go great for his people and not for whoever stands against against his people and then he's not done so verse 32 says uh says more about what's going to happen to the king of syria so therefore thus says the lord concerning this this king of syria he shall not come into this city or shoot an arrow here or come before it with a shield or cast a siege mount against it so he he ain't gonna do none of that none of this stuff none of this warfare things

he's not he's not going to show up he's not even going to draw his bow back and shoot a single arrow here or stand before it and you know shake his shield certainly not going to cast up some siege mound in a in a long prolonged siege nope 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 you could just take those words alone and it's kind of a great summary of this when god says i'm going to defend the city to save it well then end of story you know you're good and he why is he going to do it this is kind of uh building on what we've already been talking about i will defend it i will save it for my own sake and for the sake of my servant david

now for my own sake is obvious uh he's not doing it you know for because the people have been so great or something like that now when you hear for the sake of my servant david hear that and connection with all the stuff that we've talked about in connection with david in the past he's talking about the promise he made to david to establish a dynasty of his sons to eventually raise up one of those sons the messiah to sit on the throne over an everlasting kingdom so don't hear for the sake of my servant for the sake of my pious holy good wonderful faithful david i'm doing all this no this is talking about his promise that he's made to david so basically for my own sake and for the sake of my servant david is god's way of saying i'm going to defend this

city i'm going to save it because i have promised to do so and i'm a god who keeps his promises yeah it's awesome that he says that i'm going to do this for my namesake and for the sake of my servant david when david has one of the best namesake things ever in the most probably the most famous psalm of all time you know psalm 23 david's david says he the lord leads me in paths of righteousness for his namesake yeah god here says i'm gonna save my people for my namesake and for the sake of my servant david who also knows that i do these things because i'm a promise keeping god this is actually the best this is the best when this happens like what you you want god to intervene in your life for his own, for his namesake, more than for anything else.

Because if it's dependent on you, like, I don't know, you probably don't deserve it. I mean, you don't, it's way better if he does it because of him. And whenever you hear this, it's like, what is this? Does this just mean like I'm going to do it for my own glory? Well, certainly you have passages like that. But mostly what he's doing here is he's saying, I made a promise to David that I intend on keeping. It's the same stuff that we went over when Moses gets into arguments with God about why he can't destroy his own people and stuff. Why can't you do it?

Because the nations will call you a liar. And God's like, well, I'm not a liar. And so why is God going to do this? He's going to do it because he's like, it's not going to be said that I'm a liar. it's almost like the one people can say all kinds of things about God and I don't know if God's

too concerned about it it doesn't seem like he's concerned if they think he's mean or whatever but it does seem that God is very concerned with not being called a liar yeah you're right and you say that over

and over sometimes in explicit sorts of ways sometimes it's kind of woven into the story where if God has, if God has, as it were, written out what he's going to do and signed his name to it, then whatever he said he's going to do and signed his name to, then you can bet the farm on the fact that that is what's going to happen. He's never going to, he's never going to lie. He's never going to, you know, add footnotes at the bottom in the fine print, give him a way out of it he's always going to stick by what he what he says what he promises and so for him to act for

his own sake for his own namesake is basically to say that he is a god who when he makes a promise when he says i'm the lord your god then he will be the lord your god when he says i love you then he will love you when he says i'm going to do this for for david then he will do that for david now that might not happen when we want it to happen it might not even happen the way that we want it to happen. But it will happen, because there is no other option for God. He will always tell the truth, and He will always stand by the truth for the sake of His name. And it's not just a matter of honor, it's a matter of Him being true to His own nature as a God who cannot lie and the God who is love. So because of that, He's going to always do what He's promised. Well, it's a very good

thing because of this. You might be tempted to believe that, oh, so God just keeps His promises because he doesn't like being called a liar. No, he keeps his promises because he doesn't want to be a liar because he wants you to be able to believe him. Yeah, right. That way that we know our faith is certain. It's not a maybe sort of faith. Well, maybe, yeah, I hope, possibly, God might do this.

If God has said that he will, then he will. Now, to wrap up this chapter, we just have three or four verses left. so and as a great uh as a great segue to to explaining exactly how god keeps his promises well that's basically the way the chapter ends he says uh he writes that night the messenger of the lord uh usually translated angel lord this is malik yahweh so we've talked about the messenger lord over and over and over and over uh so this is the the second person of the trinity this is the lord's messenger what does he do out what does he do he went out and he struck down 185 000 in the camp of the assyrians and everybody got up in the morning behold a great use of behold here

behold look these were all dead bodies then sennacherib king of assyria departed and went home and lived at nineveh and now this is this is presented as if it happens like running or i when he got home. We know this was many years later, but when he was home, as he was worshiping quite appropriately, I think, in the house of his god, Nisroch, then two of his sons, Adrammelech and Sherezer, struck him down with a sword, and they escaped into the land of Ararat. And Asarhaddon, his son, reigned in his place. It didn't have to wait very long for God to keep that promise did you no this was not one of those down the road like as in centuries no this is this is very quickly in that night this is a pretty quick and it's great because god makes all these

promises he invokes david yeah he says i'm gonna do this for my own namesake what does he do that night he sends jesus it's pretty great not the usual image we have of jesus wielding a sword killing all these assyrians but uh it's it's a revelation kind of uh kind of image for sure and i mean the whole purpose of course was to save his people uh to keep the promise that he made and then also at the same time you you see what's happening to the assyrian king uh kind of a fitting judgment in the sense that he who had defied the true and living god where is he killed Where is he assassinated? And by whom? By his own family, by two of his own sons, and while he's in the very temple of his God. So a fitting judgment for the one who spoke these arrogant words against

the true Lord. So that is a hugely important episode in the life of Hezekiah. Now next episode, chapter 20, we're going to hear about something else that happened to Hezekiah, which is more kind of personal in nature when he becomes sick and has another little discussion with Isaiah. So we'll get to that in the next episode. All right. Sounds good, man. Well,

we will be back next week to talk more about Hezekiah. We still got a good king making a run here. So we got another episode of a good king. So that's been a nice change. Nice change for sure. Yeah. So we'll be back

with more from Hezekiah next week. I'll see you then, Chad. All right, see you then.