Hope From the Word

Announcer: Submitting yourself to God is how we should live. Few actually do, but next on Hope From the Word, we'll meet a king who did and be encouraged to do so ourselves.

Bill Luebkemann: What this guy did, King Hezekiah, the first thing he did was the most important thing here. He wanted to consult with the Lord. He tore his clothes and put on sackcloth, which is kind of like burlap. It's what you made sacks out of. And the idea was we're in mourning, so we're going to put on this uncomfortable garment. Maybe it'll make us more prayerful that the Lord will do something for us.

It was a way of expressing how upset you were and how bad things were going. And he put on sackcloth, and he went into the temple of the Lord. We see the guy was presenting himself to the Lord, and he wasn't taking any credit for anything. He wasn't planning a way that he was going to survive this. He went to the King of Kings.

Announcer: Hello and welcome to Hope From the Word. This is the radio ministry of Calvary Chapel of Marlton with Pastor Bill Luebkemann. We're working our way through the book of Second Kings, and today we'll continue to study the reign of King Hezekiah. He was a very good and godly king, and really, there was no other king quite like him in the land of Judah. Unlike many before him, he submitted everything to God, and the Lord worked greatly through his life and kingdom. Let's get into his story now by turning to Second Kings. Here's Pastor Bill to lead the way.

Bill Luebkemann: Well, yes, we looked at Chapter 18 and we saw that the king was Hezekiah, and he was 25 years old when he became king, and he reigned for 29 years, so he lasted until he was 54 or thereabouts. And we saw that he was one king that trusted in the Lord and that there was no one like him among all the kings of Judah. That is, since the kingdom of Israel was divided after the time of David and then Solomon during the reign of Rehoboam.

The kingdom was divided into Judah, the southern kingdom, and Israel, the northern kingdom. In that southern kingdom of Judah, they had a few decent kings, but this guy was the best. No one was like him before or since. And we saw last week that the biggest part of the chapter was the threat that was coming from the king of Assyria. His name was Sennacherib, and he sent his top dogs down there. He sent an envoy, if you will, his UN advisor and related Secretary of State and what have you.

And they went to Jerusalem to deliver an ultimatum basically to King Hezekiah. And King Hezekiah didn't talk to them directly. He sent out his envoys to talk with the king of Assyria's envoys. And basically, the people from Assyria said, "We're going to take over and run down your city here unless you surrender." And all kinds of threats. "Don't trust in your God. He can't help you. There's no way he can help you.

Furthermore, you ticked him off because you took down all his altars, so he wouldn't want to help you even if he could. And we're the big, bad, mean Assyrians and we can do whatever we want." And then they proceeded to continue to call out these threats out loud so that the people who lived in Jerusalem, who were standing on the wall watching this whole event, so that they would hopefully be scared also, using fear, intimidation, and doubt, the old FUD principle there, the same way that our government does things now.

And trying to scare the people into surrendering. They didn't answer back, though, because Hezekiah had told them not to answer him. In verse 36, it says, "But the people remained silent and said nothing in reply because the king had commanded, 'Do not answer him.'" Look, they probably could have said a lot of things, but they didn't, and they seemed to still be trusting in Hezekiah and trusting in the Lord even though the king of Assyria was trying to scare them.

And we saw that at the end of Chapter 18, the envoys of Hezekiah, Eliakim son of Hilkiah the palace administrator, Shebna the secretary, and Joah son of Asaph the recorder, went to Hezekiah with their clothes torn, and they told him what the field commander had said. Tearing their clothes was a sign that they were upset, in mourning if you will, prayerfully wondering what God was going to do, that they were at the end of their wits, if you would. And they went to Hezekiah and delivered this message, all these threats that were coming from the king of Assyria.

Now, the response of Hezekiah is good. We see why he was the best king that there was in all the time of Judah. You're going to see why here and how he handled this situation. "When King Hezekiah heard this, he tore his clothes and put on sackcloth and went into the temple of the Lord. He sent Eliakim the palace administrator, Shebna the secretary, and the leading priests, all wearing sackcloth, to the prophet Isaiah son of Amoz.

They told him, 'This is what Hezekiah says: This day is a day of distress and rebuke and disgrace, as when children come to the point of birth and there is no strength to deliver them. It may be that the Lord your God will hear all the words of the field commander, whom his master, the king of Assyria, has sent to ridicule the living God, and that he will rebuke him for the words the Lord your God has heard. Therefore pray for the remnant that still survives.'"

What this guy did, King Hezekiah, the first thing he did was the most important thing here. He wanted to consult with the Lord and he wanted to get a word from the Lord. And there was a prophet living in the land at that time, and his name was Isaiah, and so he sent a delegation to see him. But even before he did that, he tore his clothes and put on sackcloth, which is kind of like burlap. It's what you made sacks out of. And the idea was we're in mourning.

So we're going to put on this uncomfortable garment to remind us that we're in mourning and that maybe it'll make us more prayerful that the Lord will do something for us. It was a way of expressing how upset you were and how bad things were going and how terrible things were going. And he tore his clothes, which was also a symbol of the same kind of thing, and he put on sackcloth and he went into the temple of the Lord. So we see the guy was presenting himself to the Lord and he wasn't taking any credit for anything.

He wasn't looking to himself, he wasn't planning a way that he was going to survive this. He wasn't telegraphing the kings in other lands saying, "Come and rescue me." He went to the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. He went into the temple to see the ultimate King. And while at the same time he did that, he sent these guys down to see Isaiah, who was a prophet, and he gave them a message to give to Isaiah the prophet. And this was the message.

"This day is a day of distress and rebuke and disgrace." Well, we're all in distress here. The king of Assyria says he's going to come in and put a siege around the city. And he said in the previous chapter that everybody in this city was going to be drinking their own urine and eating their own dung, that there was going to be nothing left back in verse 27 of the previous chapter. We're going to just block you in there so nothing comes in, nothing goes out. You're going to be starving to death.

There were times in the Bible when cities under siege where people ate their own offspring, they were so desperate. So it is a day of distress and it's a day of rebuke, if you will. In a way, they're being rebuked by this guy, this king of Assyria. And they'd really like to rebuke him. He has the bigger army, but he doesn't have the Lord on his side like the Jews do. And it's a day of disgrace. Well, how much more can you say than that?

As when children come to the point of birth and there is no strength left, no strength to deliver them. It's as if a woman coming to the point of birth just completely expires and she doesn't have left in her any strength to deliver the baby. And what happens then? The mother and child both would die in childbirth. And that's what he's saying. It's coming to a point here where we're just out of strength. We have nothing left. We're on empty. We're disgraced, we're under distress, we're in the corner. We don't know what to do.

There's nowhere else to turn but God. What an amazing idea. The only thing we can do is go to the one who created everything and who has the power to do anything. You know, we should go to him first more often than last. It seems like our tendency today is to do everything we can under our own power. Oh, that's simple enough, I can fix it myself. And we only ask God if the cases are really serious.

And even then, if they're too serious, we don't ask God. I heard Chuck Smith talking about healing and he said how people judge their prayers for healing based on how possible things are. He said how it's not uncommon you might get a bad headache and you pray for God to get rid of your headache. Maybe you ask a friend, "Would you pray with me? I've got a really bad headache, I'd like to get rid of it." And your friend says, "Certainly, I'll pray for you. And by the way, I have some Excedrin in my drawer here too and let me give you some of those."

And maybe the prayer will work, maybe the Excedrin will work, but one way or another, we'll see what the Lord does here. The Lord worked through the Excedrin or the Lord worked some supernatural way. And Chuck Smith said then there's the time when someone gets cancer and they come to you and say, "Brother, would you pray for me? I've got cancer." And you say, "Whoa, cancer, whoa. That's big time, big time bad news. No Excedrin for that. That's going to only get healed if it's got to be a work of God. No other way around that."

And we treat it more seriously as if to say it's harder for God to heal the cancer than it is to heal the headache. And then Chuck said, "Well, suppose someone comes to you and says, 'Hey, you know, I'm a Vietnam vet and I lost my arm in Vietnam. Would you pray for the Lord to give me a new arm?' You'd say, 'Get out of here. God doesn't give people new arms.'" But how we judge what God will do based on what we think is possible.

God heals headaches every day, cancer sometimes, new arms, oh no, he doesn't do that. He's not in the business. No one ever got a new arm when their arm was lost in an accident. It never happened. Well, why not? Maybe because nobody ever asked him for one. And God is able to do any kind of a miracle, whether it's a new arm or curing cancer or getting rid of a headache. It's all the same to him. And here's Hezekiah here. He could have made his plans, could have done all different things, but what he did do, I think the thing that we should see here real clearly is he went to God.

He went to the temple and he sent his messengers to Isaiah and they delivered this message here. And what did they tell Isaiah? In verse 4, "It may be that the Lord your God will hear all the words of the field commander, whom his master, the king of Assyria, has sent to ridicule the living God, and that he will rebuke him for the words the Lord your God has heard." In other words, he says, "Hey, it's possible maybe God heard these threats that this guy said."

"Maybe God heard all the nasty things he said and the way he blasphemed God. And maybe God will pay him back for those things. Maybe he'll rebuke him. Therefore pray for the remnant that still survives." Remember that the Assyrians had conquered many cities in Judah. There was not a whole lot left. And they deserved it too because they hadn't been following the Lord for a long time. But the remnant that was left, they were standing out for truth. Hezekiah here was seeking God and he was asking God to deal with this.

Verse 5, "When King Hezekiah's officials came to Isaiah, Isaiah said to them, 'Tell your master, this is what the Lord says: Do not be afraid of what you have heard, those words with which the underlings of the king of Assyria have blasphemed me. Listen! I am going to put such a spirit in him that when he hears a certain report, he will return to his own country, and there I will have him cut down with the sword.'" Look, Hezekiah's officials go to Isaiah and Isaiah speaks to them and it's interesting, it doesn't even record that they said anything to Isaiah first.

Hezekiah told them what to say when they got there, but it doesn't really say that they said that. The way the sentence is worded, it's possible Isaiah might have started talking as soon as he saw them because he didn't need to hear what they had to say. The Lord had perhaps already showed it to him. And Isaiah said, "Go back to Hezekiah and tell him this what God says." He's speaking for the Lord here. He was a prophet. And the words he said, "This is what the Lord says."

You know the penalty in the Old Testament for saying you're a prophet and you're not a prophet was that you'd get stoned at the city gate. So when you say "this is what the Lord says," in this case here, the answer to whether this was legitimately from the Lord or not is going to come forth very quickly. He's putting himself out on the line here. He knew this was what God said. And God said, "Don't be afraid of what you heard. These words with which the underlings..." That's kind of a derogatory word for speaking of the guys that came to speak on the behalf of the king of Assyria.

"These words with which the underlings of the king of Assyria have blasphemed me. Don't be concerned about that. Yes, they have blasphemed." Back in verse 4, the part of the message to Isaiah was, "It may be that the Lord your God will hear these words." Well, turns out the Lord did hear the words and he says, "Don't be concerned about them." He knew that it was blasphemy, but he said, "Listen, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to send that guy away. He's going to get a report and he's going to interpret that report and return to his own country because something else he has to do there. And when he's back in his own country, I'm going to have him cut down with the sword."

"When the field commander heard that the king of Assyria had left Lachish, he withdrew and found the king fighting against Libnah." Now this is the bad guy again, the guy that works for the king of Assyria, and he went off to find the king fighting against Libnah. Now Sennacherib received a report that Tirhakah, the Cushite king of Egypt, was marching out to fight against him. So he again sent messengers to Hezekiah with this word. "Say to Hezekiah king of Judah: Do not let the god you depend on deceive you when he says, 'Jerusalem will not be handed over to the king of Assyria.'

Surely you have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all the countries, destroying them completely. And you will be delivered? Did the gods of the nations that were destroyed by my forefathers deliver them, the gods of Gozan, Harran, Rezeph and the people of Eden who were in Tel Assar? Where is the king of Hamath, the king of Arpad, the king of the city of Sepharvaim, or of Hena or Ivvah?" By the way, I make no claims as to knowing how to pronounce these things. Some of those pronunciations may have been right, some of them may have been wrong, but you get the point.

Look, the king Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, received this report that he was being attacked by this guy out of Egypt. But before he went off to deal with that, he sent another message to Hezekiah. He talked to his field commander and he said, "Go back to Jerusalem and tell this to Hezekiah. Don't depend on that God. Do not let the god you depend on deceive you when he says Jerusalem will not be handed over to the king of Assyria. Don't let this God you follow deceive you when he says he can rescue you."

"Don't believe it because look at all these other people. Look at all their gods. Surely you've heard what the gods what the kings of Assyria have done to all these other countries, destroying them completely. We've been everywhere," he said. "Nobody else's gods have been able to save them. Why would you believe that your God can save you? You're crazy. Did the gods of these other nations, did they help?" And he lists all the nations here. Where are they? Where's their kings? Where are their cities? Where are their gods? Where are their people? They're all gone now.

Their gods were useless. And your God's going to be just as useless. Don't be deceived. Don't be fooled into trusting that God of yours. We can be told that nowadays when we're believing in God for something and somebody else tells us, "Well, that's a foolish thing to believe in God for and God's not going to do that." Nowadays, a very popular line is "God only helps those who help themselves." It's not in the Bible, of course, but it's popular to say that nowadays.

And you tell someone, especially that's unsaved, that you're trusting in God to provide whatever it is you need, a job or a house or deliverance from a sickness or whatever it is that's going on in your life, and it's not uncommon for your unsaved friends to suggest that that's foolishness. Even sometimes for your saved friends to suggest that. And here that's exactly what they're saying here. "Don't trust in that God when he said that. He's not going to keep his promise. He's not going to be able to do it because he's not powerful enough."

Hezekiah received the letter from the messengers and read it. So this obviously was some kind of a letter that went back to him. And I guess their postal service was better than ours probably. They actually got the letters that people sent them. So Hezekiah received the letter from the messengers and read it. Then he went up to the temple of the Lord and spread it out before the Lord. He took the letter right on up to the temple and he just spread that letter out there.

He wanted to just offer it up to God. "What are you going to do here, Lord? How are you going to redeem the situation, rescue me from it, rescue us from it?" I think Hezekiah was submitting himself to God here and submitting himself to God's will and whatever the Lord would have going on there. And he spread that letter out before God. You know when you get bad news and people talk about submitting it to the Lord, well, that's what this guy was doing.

When you get a bad diagnosis from the doctor, when things when you get a pink slip in your paycheck or whatever, maybe just take that pink slip and put it right before God. Say, "What are you going to do with this, Lord? How are you going to work in this situation? How are you going to redeem it, use it for your glory?" And Hezekiah took this letter and spread it right on out before the Lord in the temple. And he prayed, verse 15, "And Hezekiah prayed to the Lord: 'O Lord, God of Israel, enthroned between the cherubim, you alone are God over all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and earth.'"

Not a bad way to start any kind of prayer. "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name." This guy begins here by offering his praise to God. "O Lord God of Israel, enthroned between the cherubim," mighty and powerful, awesome indeed beyond anything we can imagine. "You alone are God," he says, "over all the kingdoms of the earth. You're not just God over Israel. He's God over all the kingdoms of the earth. And there's no other God. You alone are God."

The Bible doesn't teach that there's more than one God. There's only one God. That's why "alone" is in the singular there. "You have made heaven and earth." That certainly beats any other God. No other God made heaven and earth. You're the one God, the true God, the only God. You alone are God. You're over all the kingdoms of the earth. Are you getting the picture here? And look, "You have made heaven and earth." In other words, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. You're the greatest thing there is.

And "Give ear, O Lord, and hear; open your eyes, O Lord, and see; listen to the words Sennacherib has sent to insult the living God." He's just now submitting this to God. "Look at what the king of Assyria, Sennacherib, sent to me. Look what he did. Listen, see, Lord. Listen to the words that he sent. He's insulting, he's blaspheming the living God. It is true, O Lord, that the Assyrian kings have laid waste these nations and their lands. They have thrown their gods into the fire and destroyed them, for they were not gods but only wood and stone, fashioned by men's hands.

Now, O Lord our God, deliver us from his hand, so that all kingdoms on earth may know that you alone, O Lord, are God." He says here, "You're worthy, you're the God. You have made heaven and earth. Listen please to what he's saying here, to what the king of Assyria is saying. And you know, what he's saying has an element of truth in it. He says, 'I conquered all these nations. I deported all these people. I burned down and laid waste all these cities.'" Well, that's true. He did all that. "It's true, O Lord."

The Assyrian kings have laid waste these nations and their lands. It's true. Nothing inaccurate about that. "They have thrown their gods into the fire and destroyed them, for they were not gods but only wood and stone, fashioned by men's hands." He shows here that he understood the situation. Hezekiah understood that the Lord God was God alone and there was no other God, and the gods of these other places were just made out of wood and stone and whatever, made by men's hands.

It was easy for the Assyrians to come in and throw them into the burning fire. They were inanimate objects. They've done all that. They've thrown all those all their gods in the fire. They've overrun all those cities. "Now, O Lord our God, deliver us from his hand, so that all kingdoms on earth may know that you alone, O Lord, are God." He doesn't say "deliver us so we can live forever." He doesn't say "deliver us so I can be famous so everybody can say, 'Oh, look at King Hezeky, isn't he a great guy, he beat back the Assyrians.'" He says, "Deliver us so that you'll get the glory."

Announcer: You've been listening to Hope From the Word. We're currently in a study of Second Kings. You can hear this message and more Hope From the Word with Pastor Bill Luebkemann by going to ccmarlton.org. Pastor Bill's messages can also be found by downloading the Hope FM app on your smartphone or tablet. Or if you prefer to listen via podcast, you can find Hope From the Word wherever you find your podcasts.

We'd love to have you join us at Calvary Chapel of Marlton either in person or online. Our Sunday service begins at 10 a.m. and there's a Wednesday evening service at 7 p.m. To catch us online, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel at Calvary Chapel of Marlton or just go to our website for the link at ccmarlton.org.

And if you'd take a moment to write to Pastor Bill, it would be such a blessing to us. We're thankful each and every time we hear what God is doing in our listeners' lives, and we want to pray for you too. Either email us through the website at ccmarlton.org or call 856-983-1662. We'll continue our study in Second Kings next time on Hope From the Word with Pastor Bill Luebkemann, a presentation of Calvary Chapel of Marlton.