Hezekiah: Faith and Folly

Isaiah 36–39 (with Romans 8:31–37; 1 Peter 5:6–11)

Before this session, read Isaiah 36 through 39. They read like a story, so read them as one. Watch Hezekiah’s faith under the Assyrian siege, especially his prayer in chapter 37; then watch his folly before the Babylonian envoys in chapter 39. Ask how the same man could show both, and notice how these chapters turn the book from Assyria toward Babylon.

Hezekiah took the letter from the messengers and read it. Then Hezekiah went up to the LORD’s temple and spread it out before the LORD.

Isaiah 37:14

The Voice at the Wall

For thirty-five chapters Isaiah has spoken in poetry and oracle, in vision and woe. Now, for four chapters, the book stops to tell a story: plain narrative, the same events recorded in Second Kings, set down here at the very hinge of the book. The year is around 701 before Christ. The Assyrian war machine, which Isaiah has been warning about for decades, has finally rolled up to the gates of Jerusalem. Sennacherib, king of Assyria, has taken the fortified cities of Judah one by one, and now he sends his field commander, the Rabshakeh (the NET calls him the king’s “chief adviser”), to stand before the wall of Jerusalem and demand its surrender. And the weapon the Rabshakeh brings is not a battering ram. It is a speech.

It is worth pausing over this shift, because it asks something a little different of us as readers. These four chapters are not poetry to be unfolded image by image, nor prophecy to be matched against its fulfillment; they are history, an account of things that actually happened outside the walls of a real city in a real year. We honor them by reading them as what they are, and not by hunting for hidden allegories in every detail, or by pretending the Assyrian army stands for something other than the Assyrian army. And yet history is not one bit less rich in Christ than prophecy is; it is simply rich in Him differently. Here we meet the Lord not by name but by pattern: in the way God saves the helpless, in the promise He keeps to David, in the flawed king who makes us ache for a faithful one. We read the story straight, and the gospel rises up out of it of its own accord.

The Rabshakeh’s speech is a small masterpiece of intimidation, and its target is exactly the thing these last chapters have been about: trust. What is your source of confidence? he sneers. In whom are you trusting, that you would dare to rebel against me? (36:4–5). And then he goes methodically down the list of everything Judah might be leaning on, knocking each prop away in turn. Trusting in Egypt? Egypt is that splintered reed staff that punctures the hand of anyone who leans on it for support (36:6), which is much what Isaiah himself had been preaching for years (30:1–7; 31:1–3). Trusting in the LORD? The Rabshakeh twists even that, claiming that Hezekiah has offended the LORD by tearing down the high places, and (most blasphemous of all) that the LORD Himself has sent Assyria to destroy the land (36:7, 10).

And he saves his worst for last. Switching deliberately into Hebrew, the “Judahite dialect,” so the common people up on the wall can understand him and lose heart (36:11–13), he warns them not to let Hezekiah talk them into trusting the LORD, for no god of any nation has ever yet rescued his people from the power of Assyria. Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? … Indeed, did any gods rescue Samaria from my power? (36:19). And then the line that names the whole sin: Who among all the gods of these lands have rescued their lands from my power? So how can the LORD rescue Jerusalem from my power? (36:20). There it is: the living God lumped in with the carved idols of the conquered nations, just one more local deity who will prove no more use than the rest. It is the supreme blasphemy: to treat the LORD of Heaven’s Armies as though He were nothing at all.

What makes the Rabshakeh so dangerous is that he is not simply lying. Some of what he says is perfectly true. Egypt is a splintered reed; Judah’s armies are no match for his; the gods of Hamath and Arpad did not in fact save them. He has woven his blasphemy out of real facts, and that is exactly what gives it its bite. A lie made of pure falsehood is easy enough to dismiss; it is the lie braided through with truth that gets under the skin and lodges there. So it is with the accusations that come against the believer: the most painful ones are very often partly true. We are weak; we have sinned; the case against us has real evidence in it. The enemy’s craft is not to invent charges out of nothing but to take true ones and twist them toward a false conclusion: that therefore God cannot, or will not, save us. The facts may be granted. It is the conclusion that is the lie.

Listen carefully to that voice at the wall, because it is a voice every believer comes to know. It is the voice of the assault on faith itself, and it nearly always sounds the same. It is plausible; the Rabshakeh’s points are not stupid. Egypt really is a splintered reed, and the odds really are hopeless. It puts its finger on real weakness. It mocks the unseen God as powerless. And it urges the only sensible-sounding course: give up, come down, surrender, trust what you can see. It is, at the bottom, the voice the Scriptures will later describe as a roaring lion on the prowl looking for someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8): the accuser, who whispers that your God cannot or will not save you, that your faith is a delusion, that resistance is folly. Every Christian hears this voice, sooner or later, shouting up at the walls. The whole question of these chapters is what to do when you do.

He Spread It Out Before the LORD

Hezekiah’s answer to the voice at the wall is the first thing to learn from him, and it is striking for what he does not do. He does not send his own orator out to debate the Rabshakeh point for point. He does not negotiate terms. And (this is the great thing, after everything the last chapters have warned about) this time he does not send down to Egypt for help. Instead, he tore his clothes, put on sackcloth, and went to the LORD’s temple (37:1). He took the threat straight to God. And he sent to Isaiah for a word, and the word came: Don’t be afraid because of the things you have heard (37:6). The first thing God says to the besieged is the thing He always says to His frightened people: do not be afraid.

But the pressure was not over. Sennacherib, hearing that Tirhakah, the Cushite king who then ruled Egypt, was marching out to fight him, sent Hezekiah a letter: a written threat, putting the blasphemy down in black and white, daring the king to keep on trusting a God who could not save him (37:9–13). And here comes the scene that gives this session its very heart. Hezekiah took the letter from the messengers and read it. Then Hezekiah went up to the LORD’s temple and spread it out before the LORD (37:14). Picture it for a moment. The king takes the letter full of threats and blasphemies, carries it up to the temple, unrolls it, and lays it open on the floor before God, as if to say, Lord, read this. See what he has written. This is far too big for me; it is Yours now.

There is a quiet genius in the gesture, and a deep relief hidden inside it. Hezekiah does not pretend the letter does not exist; he does not tear it up in bravado, nor hide it away and try not to think about it. He looks the threat full in the face, reads every word of it, and then, instead of shouldering it, he sets it down in the one place where it can do no harm. To spread a thing out before the LORD is to stop pretending you can handle it and to stop pretending it is not there; it is to take the actual weight of the actual trouble and lay it down at the feet of the only One strong enough to carry it. Most of our sleepless nights are spent doing the very opposite: clutching the letter, reading it over and over in the dark, drafting replies we will never send. Hezekiah shows the better way: read it once, carry it to God, and lay it down.

There may be no more practical picture of faith in all of Scripture than that one. Hezekiah does not try to answer the letter himself; he does not sit up all night composing a clever reply or working out some military counter-move. He spreads it out before the LORD. And this is exactly what the New Testament will tell every believer to do with the threatening letters that come to us: the diagnosis from the doctor, the unpayable bill, the accusation we cannot refute, the fear we cannot reason away. Peter speaks of casting all your cares on him because he cares for you (1 Peter 5:7). Do not be anxious about anything, says Paul. Instead, in every situation, through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, tell your requests to God (Philippians 4:6). We are not meant to carry the letter, nor to answer it, nor to lie awake beneath it. We are meant to spread it open before the Lord, and leave it there.

And the prayer Hezekiah prays over that letter is itself a model worth learning by heart, for the very order of it preaches. He does not begin with the crisis; he begins with God. O LORD of Heaven’s Armies, O God of Israel, who is enthroned on the cherubim! You alone are God over all the kingdoms of the earth. You made the sky and the earth (37:16). Before he says a single word about Sennacherib, he reminds himself who it is he is speaking to: the only God, the Maker of sky and earth, enthroned on the cherubim. The threat that loomed so enormous at the wall begins to shrink the very moment it is set beside the majesty of God. Then he lays the insult before Him plainly: Sennacherib taunts the living God (37:17). And then he asks, and notice what he asks for. Not merely his own skin, but God’s glory: Now, O LORD our God, rescue us from his power, so all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you alone are the LORD (37:20). Deliver us, he prays, so that the God this man has mocked will be known for who He truly is. That is how a believer prays under threat: God first, the trouble spread open before Him, and deliverance asked for the sake of His name.

That last note, so all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you alone are the LORD, lifts the whole prayer above mere self-interest, and it is worth dwelling on. Most of our praying, if we are honest, stops at our own relief: get me out of this, fix this, spare me. There is nothing wrong with asking God for rescue; Hezekiah does. But he asks for it with his eye on something larger than himself: on the vindication of the God whose name has been dragged through the mud. The deepest prayers are the ones that want God’s glory even more than our comfort, that long for Him to be known and honored more than they long for us to be delivered. It is a striking thing to hold in mind, all the more because we are about to watch this very same king, a chapter or two later, sink to caring only that the trouble stay clear of his own lifetime. The prayer of chapter 37 reaches for God’s glory; the shrug of chapter 39 reaches only for his own peace. The same man prayed both.

For the Sake of My Reputation

The answer came back through Isaiah, and it was withering: a taunt-song flung in the teeth of the proud Assyrian. All Sennacherib’s boasting of conquest, the LORD says, was empty, because he never once understood whose hand he was really in. The Assyrian thought himself a self-made conqueror; in truth he had been, the whole time, only a tool in the hand of the God he was now mocking. He was an axe swung by Another, as Isaiah had said back in chapter 10, and an axe does not get to boast against the one who swings it. I will put my hook in your nose, the LORD says, … and I will lead you back the way you came (37:29). The great king of the earth will be led home like a beast on a leash.

And then comes the promise of deliverance, and the ground of it is everything. He will not enter this city … I will shield this city and rescue it for the sake of my reputation and because of my promise to David my servant (37:33–35). Notice carefully on what the rescue rests. Not on Jerusalem’s strength; she had next to none against Assyria. Not on her righteousness; these are the very people Isaiah has spent thirty-five chapters indicting. God saves the city for the sake of my reputation and because of my promise to David my servant: for the honor of His own mocked name, and for the sake of the promise He had made to David. The deliverance is pure grace, resting entirely on God’s own reasons and not on a thing in the people being saved. And this is the gospel logic exactly: we are never saved because we are worth the saving, but for the sake of God’s own name and God’s own promise.

And there is more comfort in that than first appears. If God had saved Jerusalem because the city deserved it, every believer would have cause to tremble, for our deserving runs thin and then runs out altogether. A salvation that rested on our worth would be only as secure as our worth, which is to say, not secure at all. But because God saves for His own sake, the security of the saved rests on something that never fails: the honor of God’s name and the faithfulness of God’s promise. Our standing does not rise and fall with our performance, because it was never built on our performance in the first place. It is built on His commitment to His own glory and His own word, and those do not waver. The very thing that humbles us, that the rescue owes nothing whatever to our merit, is the very thing that makes it sure.

And that phrase, my promise to David my servant, reaches far further than Hezekiah could have known. God had promised David a son whose throne would stand forever (Second Samuel 7), and that promise was not yet kept; the great Son of David had not yet come. So when God spares Jerusalem for David’s sake, He is guarding the line and the city out of which the Messiah must one day be born. The rescue of Jerusalem in 701 is, in the deepest sense, a rescue for the sake of Christ: the preservation of the royal house so that, centuries later, a child of David’s line could be born in David’s town. Every time God kept His ancient promise to David, He was keeping the road open for the Lord Jesus.

There is something quietly moving in tracing that road. The line of David ran through kings good and bad, faithful and faithless, and through this very Hezekiah, faith and folly and all. When the New Testament opens with the long genealogy of the Lord Jesus, Hezekiah’s name is in it (Matthew 1:9–10), tucked among a list of fathers and sons that holds saints and scoundrels alike. God did not preserve a spotless royal house to bring forth His Son; He preserved a deeply flawed one, guarding His promise through the failures of the very men who carried it. The Messiah came of a line that plainly needed a Messiah. And that is its own kind of gospel: the grace that would one day save sinners had already, for centuries, been patiently keeping a road open through sinners, refusing to let even their folly derail the promise He had made.

And then it simply happened, in a single night, without a battle, without Egypt, without Judah lifting so much as a sword. The angel of the LORD went out and killed 185,000 troops in the Assyrian camp. When they got up early the next morning, there were all the corpses! (37:36). A hundred and eighty-five thousand men, the terror of the ancient world, dead before the dawn, and not one Judean had drawn a blade. God saved His people single-handedly, exactly as He had told them He would, so that no one could ever claim the victory but Him. Sennacherib broke camp and went home to Nineveh in disgrace, and years later he was murdered by his own sons as he worshiped in the temple of his god (37:37–38). It was the final irony: a god who could not so much as protect his own worshiper, while the living God whom that worshiper had mocked had felled an entire army between dusk and dawn.

Faith and Folly

If the story ended at chapter 37, Hezekiah would stand among Scripture’s great heroes of faith, and we could simply admire him and move on. But the story does not end there, and the two chapters that follow show us the very same man from a very different angle. First, in chapter 38, Hezekiah falls deathly ill, and Isaiah tells him to give instructions to his household, for he will not recover. Hezekiah weeps and prays, and God in mercy grants him fifteen more years, sealing it with a sign: the shadow going back ten steps on the stairs of Ahaz (38:5–8). Out of that brush with death came one of the tender psalms of Scripture, in which the king looks back on the terror of dying and then marvels at his rescue: You delivered me from the Pit of oblivion. For you removed all my sins from your sight (38:17). There is the gospel in a dying king’s own mouth: sins not merely overlooked but removed from God’s sight, put out of view forever.

Stay with that image a moment, for it is one of the loveliest pictures of forgiveness in the whole Old Testament. The Hebrew behind the NET’s “removed … from your sight” is more vivid still: literally, God has thrown them behind His back. To throw a thing behind your back is to put it where you will not see it again: not off to the side, where it might still catch your eye, but behind you, out of the field of vision entirely. Hezekiah does not say that God excused his sins, or weighed them and found them light, or decided to look past them just this once. He says God removed them from His sight, dealt with them so thoroughly that they are simply no longer there to be seen. This is what forgiveness actually is, and it is what every troubled conscience most needs to hear: not that God grades us generously, but that He puts our sins where even He no longer looks at them. The dying king, granted a few more years, reached for that picture; and it is ours, more surely than it was ever his, on this side of the cross where those sins were actually carried away.

But then comes chapter 39, and it is painful to read after chapter 37. Word of Hezekiah’s recovery reaches Babylon, at this point a rising power, not yet the empire it would become, and its king sends envoys with letters and a gift. And Hezekiah, the man who had spread Sennacherib’s letter out before the LORD, is quite undone by a little flattery. He welcomes the Babylonians and shows them everything: his storehouse with its silver, gold, spices, and high-quality olive oil, as well as his whole armory and everything in his treasuries. Hezekiah showed them everything in his palace and in his whole kingdom (39:2). The treasures, the armory, the whole kingdom thrown open to impress a foreign power. It is pride, plain and simple: the very pride Isaiah has condemned in nation after nation through this book, now found in the good king himself.

It is worth noticing exactly when the folly came. Hezekiah did not stumble in the siege, when the enemy was at the gate and his need was desperate; he stumbled afterward, when the danger had passed and the pressure was gone. This is a pattern as old as the human heart. We are often safest in the storm and most vulnerable in the calm. Crisis drives us to our knees; it was the Assyrian threat that had sent Hezekiah running to the temple with his letter. But prosperity and relief have a quiet way of loosening the grip of faith: the prayers grow shorter, the heart grows comfortable, the treasures get shown off to admiring visitors. Many a believer who stood firm under real affliction has been undone, almost without noticing, by a long season of ease. The Babylonian envoys were, in their way, a far more dangerous test than the Assyrian army had been, precisely because they came bearing gifts and flattery instead of threats.

Isaiah confronts him and delivers the sentence: a time is coming when everything those Babylonian eyes have admired will be carried away to Babylon, and some of Hezekiah’s own descendants with it (39:5–7). And then comes Hezekiah’s reply, perhaps the most quietly chilling verse in all four chapters. The LORD’s message that you have announced is appropriate, he says, and we might take that for humility, until we read what he was thinking: For there will be peace and stability during my lifetime (39:8). So long as the disaster falls after I am safely gone, he thinks, it is good news enough. The king who once prayed for God’s glory before all the kingdoms of the earth now cares chiefly that the bill will not come due in his own lifetime. The same man, only a few chapters apart, prays magnificently and then shrugs selfishly.

And this is the truth the title of this session means to press. Hezekiah was, at one and the very same time, a man of real faith and a man of real folly. We are forever tempted to want our Bible figures to be all of one piece, either polished examples to copy or cautionary villains to avoid, but Scripture flatly refuses to hand us either. It gives us Hezekiah: genuinely faithful in the siege, genuinely foolish with the envoys, and both within a few pages of each other. The reformers had a phrase for this, drawn from the whole tenor of Scripture: the believer is simul justus et peccator, at the same time righteous and a sinner. Righteous, because God has removed his sins from His sight and reckons him so; a sinner still, because the old pride keeps breaking out even in the best of God’s people. Hezekiah is not the exception to this rule; he is a portrait of it. And it is a great mercy that the Bible tells us the truth about its saints, for in doing so it tells us the truth about ourselves: that our worst folly does not cancel God’s grace, and our best faith never earned it.

Held rightly, this truth guards us on two sides at once. It guards against despair: when we have played the fool, as Hezekiah did, when the old pride has broken out and shamed us, we are not therefore cast off, for God did not abandon Hezekiah over chapter 39, and He does not abandon us over ours, because our place with Him never rested on our consistency to begin with. And it guards just as firmly against complacency: the faith that stood so well in the last crisis is no guarantee at all against the next folly, so that the believer who thinks he is standing had better, as Paul warns, be careful that he does not fall (1 Corinthians 10:12). We are righteous and sinners at once, all the way home: never so holy that we may stop watching, and never so fallen that we may stop hoping. That is the honest middle the gospel keeps us in: thoroughly humble about ourselves, and thoroughly confident in God.

Gathering the Threads

So what are we finally to do with Hezekiah? We do not make him our model in all things, for he would surely fail us; and we do not write him off for his folly, for God did not. We let him do what every figure in the Old Testament finally does: point beyond himself. Hezekiah was a son of David, a king in David’s own line, and at his best he showed us something of what that king was meant to be: a man who trusted the LORD when the enemy roared, who spread his troubles open before God and prayed for God’s glory above his own safety. But at his worst he showed us precisely why we needed a better king than Hezekiah, one who would not be undone by flattery, who would not sow the seeds of an exile, who would care more for His Father’s glory than for His own comfort, all the way to the bitter end. The faith of Hezekiah makes us admire the son of David; the folly of Hezekiah makes us long for the Son of David who would never fail.

And He came, in the very line that this rescue preserved. Where Hezekiah was spared death for fifteen years, the true Son of David went down into death itself and rose, and lives to make intercession for His people forever. Where Hezekiah spread one letter before the LORD, the Lord Jesus carries the whole indictment against us up to the Father and answers it with His own blood, so that, as Paul says, when anyone would bring a charge against God’s people, Christ is the one who died (and more than that, he was raised), who is at the right hand of God, and who also is interceding for us (Romans 8:34). The accuser still roars up at the wall, as the Rabshakeh did, and his charges against us are often true; but our King has spread the letter before the Father and settled it once for all. We do not answer the accuser ourselves. We point him to the One who already has.

And these four chapters turn the whole book on its hinge. Hezekiah’s folly with Babylon plants a seed, and Isaiah names the harvest: an exile, about a century off, when the city would fall and the people be carried away to Babylon. The threat that has hung over the first half of the book shifts now from Assyria to Babylon, from a siege survived to a captivity coming. And yet (this is the wonder of it) the very next words in the book, on the far side of that grim prophecy, are these: “Comfort, comfort my people,” says your God. God lets the exile be foretold, and then, before it has even come, begins to pour out comfort over it. The folly of the king cannot outrun the grace of God; the exile that human sin would sow becomes the very soil in which the gospel of the suffering Servant will grow. From here on, the book is comfort.

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

1. The Rabshakeh’s speech attacks the one thing these chapters are about, trust, and it is plausible, points to real weakness, mocks the unseen God, and urges surrender (36:4–20). How is this like the voice the New Testament calls a roaring lion (1 Peter 5:8)? Why is it significant that some of the Rabshakeh’s points were partly true?

2. Hezekiah took the threatening letter, carried it to the temple, and spread it out before the LORD (37:14) rather than trying to answer it himself. Why is this such a practical picture of faith? What sort of “letters” do we tend to answer on our own instead of spreading them open before God (1 Peter 5:7; Philippians 4:6)?

3. Hezekiah’s prayer begins not with the crisis but with who God is: the only God, the Maker of the sky and the earth (37:16). It asks for deliverance for the sake of God’s glory (37:20). Why does it matter that he starts with God and not with the threat? How does a threat look different once it is set beside the majesty of God?

4. God saves the city not for its strength or its righteousness, but for the sake of my reputation and because of my promise to David my servant (37:35). How is this the gospel logic, that we are saved for the sake of God’s name and promise, and not because we are worth saving? How does “for David’s sake” point ahead to Christ?

5. The same Hezekiah who prayed so magnificently in chapter 37 fell into pride and self-centered folly in chapter 39. What does it mean that the believer is simul justus et peccator, at once righteous and sinner? Why is it a mercy that Scripture tells the truth about its saints rather than making them spotless heroes?

6. Hezekiah’s folly sows the seeds of the Babylonian exile (39:6–7), and yet the very next chapter opens, “Comfort, comfort my people” (40:1). What does it tell us about God that He pours out comfort over a disaster human sin has caused? How does this give hope when we have sown trouble by our own folly?

Looking Ahead

With chapter 39 the long shadow of exile falls across the book, and with chapter 40 the sun comes up. The next session brings us to one of the towering chapters in all of Scripture, the overture to the entire second half of Isaiah, where the tone changes completely and God begins to speak tenderness over His people. “Comfort, comfort my people,” says your God. “Speak kindly to Jerusalem and tell her that her time of warfare is over, that her punishment is completed” (40:1–2). We will hear the voice that cries out, In the wilderness clear a way for the LORD (40:3), the voice that, the Gospels tell us, was John the Baptist’s, sent on ahead before the face of the Lord Jesus. We will hear the herald’s cry, Here is your God! (40:9), and see the Lord who, like a shepherd, tends his flock (40:11), gathering the lambs with His arm. And we will meet the incomparable God who measures the waters in the hollow of His hand and weighs the mountains in a balance, and who yet stoops to give strength to the tired, so that those who wait for the LORD’s help find renewed strength; they rise up as if they had eagles’ wings (40:31). It is a great deal of comfort, and we will need more than one session even to begin to take it in.

Before the next session, read Isaiah 40 slowly, for it is the turning of the whole book. Hear God say, “Comfort, comfort my people” (40:1); find the voice that cries out to clear a way in the wilderness (40:3) and the herald’s cry, Here is your God! (40:9); watch the Shepherd gather His lambs (40:11); and let the incomparable God of the chapter’s close give strength to your own weariness (40:28–31).

Closing Prayer

Almighty God, our refuge and our defense, we thank You for the example of Your servant Hezekiah: for the faith that took the enemy’s letter and spread it open before You, and trusted You to answer what he could not. Teach us to do the same: to bring our threats and our terrors and our accusations to You, and to lay them down before You rather than carry them ourselves; to begin our prayers not with our fears but with Your majesty; and to ask for our deliverance for the glory of Your great name.

We confess that we are, like him, faithful and foolish at once, able to trust You greatly in one hour and to grieve You shamefully in the next. We thank You that our folly cannot outrun Your grace, and that You have removed the sins of all who trust You from Your sight, out of view forever, for the sake of the true Son of David, our Lord Jesus Christ. When the accuser roars against us, let us point to Him who died, and rose, and ever lives to plead our cause; and keep us in Your hand until the day when every threat is past; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.