Nothing is Inevitable – Except the Fulfillment of God’s Promises A Word of Encouragement for Today’s Church from the Old Testament King Hezekiah

on January 12, 2010

Alan Wisdom
January 12, 2010

 

The following is adapted from a devotional talk delivered by IRD Vice President Alan Wisdom at the meeting of the IRD Board of Directors October 5, 2009.

 

The proudest boast of the left today, secular or religious, is that its triumph is inevitable. Progressives like to believe that “the forces of history” are on their side and resistance is futile. An ever expanding and encroaching national government, guided by ever tighter regulations promulgated by an unelected international bureaucracy, an aversion to conflict with non-democratic states and ideologies, moral relativism and sexual license, the dissolution of Christian faith into atheism or a bland, universalist spirituality—all these will surely come to pass, they assert.

And, sadly, many traditional Christians suspect that the left is correct. They tremble before the boast of inevitability, pitying themselves as the last of a dying faith. They, too, may conclude that resistance to the vaunted “forces of history” is futile.

How quickly we forget the Word of God! Surely Scripture has something to say to discouraged believers in this situation. Indeed, it does—and in some unlikely places. Let me refer you to the story of the Old Testament King Hezekiah and the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem, found in 2 Kings 18:13-19:37 (with a parallel passage in Isaiah 36-37). I think we may find some interesting parallels to our situation today.

 

A Religious Reformer in Crisis

Here’s how it goes: Young King Hezekiah of Judah is a religious reformer. He rediscovers the Law of Moses and rededicates the nation to that law. He tears down the pagan shrines to idols. “He trusted in the LORD the God of Israel,” the text summarizes (18:5). Can we not see here the faces of some of today’s reformers who have endeavored to call our churches back to biblical faithfulness?

Into the life of this pious king comes a massive storm. King Sennacherib of Assyria heads the most powerful empire that the ancient world has yet seen. He has built a massive army with the latest military technology: thousands of horses and chariots. The Assyrians, ruthlessly destroying all who refuse to bow, sweep across the Near East. Sennacherib quickly crushes the northern kingdom of Israel and advances on Hezekiah’s capital of Jerusalem.

Hezekiah tries to buy off the Assyrians. He strips all the gold from the temple, empties his royal treasury, and sends it all to Sennacherib. But the Assyrians are not mollified. They tighten their siege around Jerusalem.

Have we not seen today, in similar fashion, how attempts to appease the left—softening doctrines, relaxing church discipline—simply lead to further demands? The supposed compromises do not hold. Ultimately, the left’s aim is that we surrender the faith that we have received.

Sennacherib’s top commander, the Rabshakeh, goes up to the city walls to deliver an ultimatum to Hezekiah’s officials. Unless Jerusalem surrenders, he warns, all its inhabitants “are doomed with you to eat their own dung and drink their own urine” (18:27) The Rabshakeh invites the Jewish officials, who lack horses or chariots, to compare their military forces with Assyria’s. He boasts that Judah would not be able to “repulse a single captain among the least of my master’s servants” (18:24).

Have we not heard similar counsel today? “Look at the polls,” our opponents say. “Look at the trends in society. Look who holds the positions of social influence. You Christians can’t expect to stand up against these powerful forces. Resistance is futile.”

The Rabshakeh declares with certainty that Hezekiah “will not be able to deliver you out of my hand” (18:29). He offers an alternative: If Jerusalem will just surrender, “every one of you will eat from your own vine and your own fig tree, and drink water from your own cistern, until I come and take you away to a land like your own land, a land of grain and wine, a land of bread and vineyards, a land of olive oil and honey, that you may live and not die” (18:31-32).

Have we not heard similar promises today? “If you just let go of that narrow old Gospel,” we are told, “you will find that the new gospel of inclusion works so much better. The church will be relevant to the culture and it will grow again. Everyone will like us.” Of course, the reality is that liberal churches typically shrink and die—just as the reality of Assyrian rule was far harsher than the Rabshakeh’s seductive vision of abundance.

 

The Powerful Mock God

The Rabshakeh dares to mock God. In reply to Hezekiah’s faith that “the LORD will deliver us,” the Assyrian commander taunts: “Has any of the gods of the nations ever delivered its land out of the hand of the king of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim, Hena, and Ivvah? Have they delivered Samaria out of my hand? Who among all the gods of the countries have delivered their countries out of my hand, that the LORD should deliver Jerusalem out of my hand?” (18:33-35)

Do we not hear similar scoffing today from people who dismiss the idea that a transcendent, loving God could act in history to save his people? “Look at what’s happened to Christianity and society in Western Europe,” they say. “Surely the United States must eventually follow the same secularizing course.”

The Rabshakeh even intimates slyly that God is on his side. “Moreover, is it without the LORD that I have come up against this place to destroy it?” he asks. “The LORD said to me, ‘Go up against this land and destroy it’” (18:25).

Do we not also hear people today claim today that God is “doing a new thing” in raising up all the purported movements of “liberation”? The world is out ahead of the church, they say, and the church needs to catch up with the trends to which God is giving the victory.

Hezekiah’s officials beg the Rabshakeh, “Please speak to your servants in the Aramaic language, for we understand it; do not speak to us in the language of Judah within the hearing of the people who are on the wall.” But the Rabshakeh shouts out his message in Hebrew, so that all the inhabitants of Jerusalem may hear and shudder.

Do we not see today how pastors—even solid evangelical pastors—often try to shield their congregations from knowing about the problems in the larger church? They don’t want to scare people and incite controversy. But sooner or later, church members are going to find out what’s going on. They read it in the newspapers and see it on television. Unless the pastors prepare them to resist the false teaching, they will be defenseless when it enters the congregation.

 

Paradoxical Good News

To this point, the story of Hezekiah is grim. But here’s the first bit of paradoxical good news. Hezekiah orders his officials not to answer the Rabshakeh. He knows that there is no adequate human response to the Assyrian’s boasts of invincible power. If the battle is fought on the Rabshakeh’s terms, Jerusalem is lost. Hezekiah knows that he has to engage on different terms. His answer will be found only in God. Only God can save his holy city, Jerusalem.

So the young king “tore his clothes, covered himself with sackcloth, and went into the house of the LORD” (19:1). He pours out his anguish in prayer. Hezekiah lays before the altar of the Lord the threatening letter from Sennacherib and acknowledges: “O LORD the God of Israel, who are enthroned above the cherubim, you are God, you alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth; you made heaven and earth” (19:15) He begs for God’s intervention to vindicate God’s name: “So now, O LORD our God, save us, I pray you, from his [Sennacherib’s] hand, so that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you, O LORD, are God alone” (19:19).

We Christians today have much to learn from the wisdom of Hezekiah. We, too, need to recognize that we don’t have all the answers to the forces that challenge our faith and cause such grievous harm in the world. Only God has the answers. We need to face the challenges squarely, as Hezekiah did. We should admit our own weakness, in human terms, but we ought not to focus on our weakness.

Instead we turn to God: in prayer, in Scripture, in the community of believers gathered around the sacraments of Jesus Christ. We must approach God with Hezekiah’s confidence that God holds sway over the forces of history. We must trust that God, in his providence, will vindicate his Word and fulfill the promises that he has made to his people.

 

God Has an Answer

Then comes the really good news: God has an answer for Hezekiah. Through the prophet Isaiah, the Lord declares his personal stake in the situation: “Whom have you [Sennacherib] mocked and reviled? Against whom have you raised your voice and haughtily lifted your eyes? Against the Holy One of Israel!” (19:22) God affirms his sovereignty over history—that none of Sennacherib’s victories could have occurred outside God’s plan: “Have you not heard that I determined it long ago? I planned from days of old what now I bring to pass, that you should make fortified cities crash into heaps of ruins …” (19:25).

The Lord asserts his control over Assyria: “But I know your rising and your sitting, your going out and coming in, and your raging against me” (19:27). He will not be mocked by human leaders boasting of their invincibility: “Because you have raged against me and your arrogance has come to my ears, I will put my hook in your nose and my bit in your mouth; I will turn you back on the way by which you came” (19:28). God gives Hezekiah a guarantee of Jerusalem’s safety:

Therefore thus says the LORD concerning the king of Assyria: He shall not come into this city, shoot an arrow there, come before it with a shield, or cast up a siege ramp against it. By the way that he came, by the same he shall return; he shall not come into this city, says the LORD. For I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David. (19:32-34)

Indeed, God is good on his word. Mysteriously, according to the narrative, “[t]hat very night the angel of the LORD set out and struck down 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians” (19:35). King Sennacherib returns to his capital of Nineveh, where he is assassinated by two of his sons.

 

Challenging the Myths of Inevitability

The message for us, I think, is clear: God, in Jesus Christ, takes responsibility for the situation of his church. It is God who is mocked by those who belittle the church and predict its demise. And God will not be mocked.

Do not believe any human movement—of the left or the right—that claims to be invincible. Whatever victories it may have experienced have, paradoxically, been part of God’s providence—not because its leaders have been as wise or as strong as they imagine. God still has the future in his hands, and he has some surprises in store.

The arrogant, boasting that they have chosen “the winning side of history,” do not expect that their so-far-successful strategies could ever fail. But fail they will, at the time and in the manner that God determines. Often their downfall will occur by their own hand, through their own internal contradictions. And it may come with stunning suddenness. Think of Sennacherib’s mysterious defeat at the gates of Jerusalem. Or, in our own time, think of how the pessimism of the late 1970s, when communism was on the march, was followed only a decade later by the fall of the Berlin Wall.

So, friends and fellow Christians, don’t believe the myths of inevitability. Let us put our hope in God. Let us be faithful to his Word, as Hezekiah was. That Word will surely bear its fruit, in the church and in the world.

 

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