Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for The Bible Recap. If you're reading a print Bible, it may have been challenging to flip backwards so far today from where we were in Isaiah. We've been reading Isaiah's prophecies about Israel being taken captive by Babylon, but that hasn't happened yet. He was foretelling it, but we're still about 100 years off from when it actually happens, which means we have a few final kings to meet.
Today we read the story of King Hezekiah's downfall. And if this all feels familiar to you, it should, because we read it about a week ago in Isaiah 38 on day 206. As a refresher, Hezekiah starts out as a 10 on the following God scale, but plummets down to like a 2 in his final years.
During the early years of his reign, he was reestablishing worship and feasts, tearing down high places, and generally not missing a step. But then at one point, he gets sick, and God sends Isaiah to tell him it's time to die. He's torn up about it. He begs God to let him live, and God says, Okay, you can have another 15 years. Just put some smashed up figs on your boil so you can recover.
Before we move on in his story, let's investigate this a little bit, because it seems like God said something would happen and it didn't happen. So there are a couple of things that could be going on here. A. God changes his mind. Or B. God's plan all along was to let Hezekiah live another 15 years, and Isaiah's words of warning and Hezekiah's prayer were both working in tandem to accomplish God's plan. Option A. God changes his mind.
Does that happen? Numbers 23, 19 is one of the many places in scripture that seem to rule that out as an option. It says, God is not man that he should lie or a son of man that he should change his mind. Option B makes a lot more sense to me with everything we know about God so far. First of all, we know that God often sends prophets to give a call to repentance adjacent to a promise of consequence, just like with Jonah and Nineveh. So this isn't unusual.
But what I find so compelling in this story is the role Hezekiah's prayer plays in this process. I heard a pastor describe it like this, prayer is God's appointed means of achieving God's appointed plans. In other words, our prayers are a tool in God's hand to accomplish what he has planned for us. By talking to him, by confessing our sins and sharing our fears and asking him for what we want, we are playing a vital role in his will being made manifest.
It may seem discouraging that we can't change God's mind, and that might make you not want to pray at all. If that's what's happening in your head right now, I want to encourage you to view prayer not as a means to get what you want from God, but to get God. And as an added bonus, if our prayers are tools in his hands to accomplish his will, then this is actually all the more reason to pray, because he will use it.
For Hezekiah, he lives another 15 years just as God promised. But for the most part, he wastes the blessing God generously gave him. He's foolish and selfish and prideful. He either disbelieves Isaiah's prophecy about his downfall, or he doesn't really care since most of it pertains to what will happen after he dies.
After he dies, his son Manasseh becomes king and he's terrible. He rebuilds the high places after it took us centuries to get rid of them. He consults with mediums and fortune tellers. He sets up an idol of Asherah in the temple for crying out loud. Oh, and he burns his sons as a sacrifice. And here come his people following suit. As goes the leader, so go the people. And God promises them all that judgment is coming.
Next up is King Amon, Manasseh's son and Hezekiah's grandson. He's also horrible. And eventually, a bunch of his servants kill him. Then the people of the land are like, two can play at this game. So they kill all the people who killed him and put his son Josiah on the throne. Today, my God shot came when I was thinking about God's immense kindness to Hezekiah. God knows how this will all play out over the next 15 years, but he's still kind to Hezekiah despite it all.
He hears the prayers of this selfish, arrogant man, and he answers them with a yes. This also made me think about Hezekiah and how I tend to be like him sometimes. For instance, one of the things I find most interesting about humanity is that we spend so much time trying to avoid pain. But pain is often where we draw near to God. Pain is what prompted Hezekiah to pray and to listen to the prophet Isaiah. But when life is good and easy and we aren't desperately seeking God anymore...
We begin to feel a sense of distance. We begin to grow complacent. And before we know it, we remember what intimacy with God was like, but we can't quite access it. So we start to do our own thing. We stop listening. That's what Hezekiah did when he had all kinds of treasures and blessings and suddenly felt like he didn't need to listen to God or his prophet anymore.
You know how people joke around by saying things like, not today, Satan, or talk about the enemy attacking them? We almost always associate Satan with negative things, flat tires and traffic jams and bounce checks. We imagine him bringing all kinds of trials our way. But what if he knows human nature better than we do? What if his tactic is a more cunning one? What if, instead of trials, he brought abundance in a way that enables our hearts to get calloused and distracted, just like Hezekiah's?
What if the thing he wants to steal, kill, and destroy has less to do with our bank accounts and more to do with our peace and our intimacy with God? Satan certainly knows what's more valuable. I want to learn from King Hezekiah's rise and fall that nothing is worth putting my hope in besides God. He's where the joy is.
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