Episode Transcript
Good morning.
Whether you're in Kentucky or Texas, it's 10 o'clock, so it's time for Sunday school, isn't it?
Last week we left off in 2nd Kings chapter 19 and verse 8, so you can turn there if you like. 2nd Kings 19 8.
And I'll reread that.
I mentioned to you that last week it occurred to me as I studied this passage that Assyria was still actively at war, but Judah was not.
We'll look at that a little more in just a moment.
I'm going to read verse 8.
It said, "So Rabshakuh returned and found the king of Assyria warring against Libna, for he had heard that he was departed from Lachish."
So the king of Assyria is still warring.
He's actively fighting, but Judah was not.
Judah was not going about threatening other nations or trying to conquer them.
And one of the things we realize about this is that Assyria is relying on their own strength.
Their success in war depends on their own strength and being able to maintain that.
But Judah wasn't fighting against anyone.
They weren't relying on their own strength.
They'd been promised great pleasures by Assyria.
They'd also been threatened by Assyria.
And we learned that when God's people submit themselves to him, rather than relying on their own strength, there is peace, not fighting.
There was a judge named Othniel in the book of Judges who submitted himself to the Lord.
And during his time, there were 40 years of peace.
The same with Gideon.
The same with Solomon.
Each of them enjoyed 40-year reigns of peace.
And here in our text, Judah is facing a terrible enemy.
But they have peace in the midst of all of it because the Lord is with them.
And their king, as we read about this time in history, their king is in the house of the Lord.
Isaiah is praying for the remnant of Judah.
And all of these passages teach us a truth about our own spiritual walk.
They teach us a lot of truths about our own spiritual walk.
But one of them is that we can have peace in the midst of a strife.
We also have an enemy who walks about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.
And that's the devil.
And all of his representatives.
And I left you last week with a question that many Christians ask themselves.
If I cast my cares upon the Lord and I resist my enemy steadfast in the faith, then why don't I have peace?
The better question might be, why don't you feel peace?
Why don't you feel like you have peace?
And that's where the error is, is in trusting a feeling.
And we all have done that.
I'll read John 16 verses 32 through 33.
I read this last week, but I'll do it again so we can keep moving along In studying this beautiful truth in those verses, Jesus said to his disciples, Behold the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered.
Every man to his own and shall leave me alone.
And yet I am not alone because the Father is with me.
These things have I spoken unto you that in me you might have peace in the world.
You shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer.
I have overcome the world.
Now, did you notice that Jesus had peace even though he was persecuted?
He had peace even though, as the human eye would see, he was alone when his disciples scattered.
But he reminded them I'm not alone because the Father is with me.
And because he had that peace in the midst of persecution, in the midst of being forsaken even by his own disciples, because he had that peace he can rightly tell his disciples, which include you and me if you're a Christian, that even in the tribulation the world brings, they could have peace and be of good cheer.
And Jesus was not a travel agent who sent people where he's never been.
He was more like a tour guide having experienced what they would experience, suffer what they would suffer, and being tempted as they were tempted.
He'd been there.
He knew the way, he walked the way, and he showed them the way.
He said, "I'm the way, the truth, and the life."
And when he said they could have peace in the midst of tribulation, his words carried weight.
Jesus' peace did not depend on a feeling, did it?
It depended on truth.
And this is where so many Christians go wrong.
They base their peace, if you will, upon a feeling rather than upon truth.
And so if you've done that, which you probably have, all of us have, then hopefully this will help you.
And I can promise you that knowing his disciples would scatter from him did not bring Jesus a warm feeling.
He didn't say, "Oh, that's good, good, that makes me feel better."
That act alone would not cheer him up.
He wouldn't say, "Well, isn't that wonderful that my friends, my disciples, have abandoned me in this garden?"
So his peace never did come from being surrounded by his friends in the first place.
He loved them.
He loves us.
But we're not the ones who bring him peace.
The Father is with him.
And that is where his peace came from.
He was never alone, even though the world would say that he was.
And Christian, you're never alone.
That is your peace right there.
It's the same as Jesus.
He said, "In me, you'd have peace.
In the world, you'll have tribulation."
So if you are in him, you have peace for the same reason he does.
The Father is with you.
He said, "You are in him, and he is in the Father, and he and the Father are one."
So when being alone makes you feel lonely, and sometimes people get lonely, just remember that you're not alone.
Your Father is with you.
His Son died for you.
His Spirit lives in you.
So have peace and be of good cheer, even in the midst of trying times.
And by the way, only a Christian can do that.
Now Judah, in this trying time in history, could also have peace and good cheer.
Because the Lord was their God.
That was all the reason they needed.
The Lord is our God, and he is with us.
He is for us.
He's not against us.
And Judah had not obeyed the Lord.
And we're reading about some of that in the book of Hosea, who was a prophet prophesied at this time in history.
But when they turned to him in prayer and repentance, God heard their cries, and he had mercy on them.
That's all he's ever wanted his people to do when they were away from him.
And he heard their cries.
And friend, if you use the truths we've covered today and last week, and if you weren't here or you didn't watch last week, you've got to go back and do that if you want to stay caught up.
But what you'll see, the conclusion you'll come to, is that you need to keep your eyes off of the Assyrians and on the Lord.
See it?
There was an awful lot in front of Judah that could have caught their attention.
That could have, on which they could have fixed their gaze and been entrapped.
Oh, look at that.
Well, look at that.
And look at this over here.
We have a lot to be worried about.
But all of these things teach us, keep our eyes off of the Assyrian.
Yes, he's in front of us.
Yes, the devil is walking about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.
But that's not who we need to fix our eyes on.
And don't be afraid of the words of the Assyrians, but do have great respect to the words of the Lord.
You know, you need these words of encouragement.
So do I.
Because just like the Assyrians were always at war, this world is at war against God's people, this world system.
And that's not paranoia.
If somebody tells you, well, you're just paranoid.
You Christians think everybody's against you.
Well, what we know is that the world system is against us.
We didn't come up with that.
Jesus told us it was that way.
He said, "Ye are not of the world."
If you were of the world, the world would love its own.
But ye are not of the world.
I've called you out of the world.
Therefore, the world hateth you.
Can it get any more plain than that?
The world hates you.
That is not an unreasonable saying.
That is truth from the mouth of the Lord himself.
And we don't like to be hated.
Nobody likes to be hated.
It doesn't feel good.
We don't like when people say hateful things about us, negative things about our Lord.
But we've been called out of this world, and we're to be a holy people.
We're to be a peculiar people.
Not try to act strange, but be a peculiar people.
When you look at us, you ought to see little Christ.
That's what a Christian is.
Little Christ.
We're in him, and we're to be models of his behavior.
And boy, we fall short of that before we even get out of bed.
We fall short, don't we?
We complain.
Say, oh, I don't want to get up.
Well, there you go.
Jesus didn't complain about getting up out of bed.
And not only does this world hate the people of light, but you know it cannot get along with you.
It cannot get along with people of light.
Oh, we can be civil to one another and so forth.
But light and darkness just do not coexist, do they?
You can't have them at the same time in the same place.
You can have darkness or you can have light.
And that is the difference between God's people and those who are unbelievers.
There's darkness and light, and they don't complement one another.
You don't have darkness.
It's a friend with light.
In fact, the Bible tells us that the light dispels the darkness, doesn't it?
It gets rid of it.
And so another thing we learn is that not only does the world hate the people of light, but it also hates other people who are in darkness.
The world doesn't get along with each other.
If you ever thought there was a unified front against us, that's only in the mind of its author.
But the world doesn't get along with the world either.
And don't think for a moment that the world against us is united in friendship with each other.
Take Islam, for example.
The Shiite Muslims are against the Sunni Muslims.
Both are against Christians.
The communist Chinese are against their brethren, the Taiwanese.
The North Koreans are against the South Koreans.
The Democrats are against the Republicans.
And in churches you have Baptists against each other, and Methodists against each other, and so on.
There's constant conflict, and there always will be until the Lord redeems His creation and makes all things new.
So if you're looking for peace in the world, it's not going to come until the Lord Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, comes and makes all things new.
And because of that promise, we are to have peace even though the Assyrians are at war.
Look back in our text there in verse 8.
In the middle it says that the king of Assyria was warring against Libna, for he had heard that he was departed from Lachish.
Now, Libna and Lachish were both cities that Joshua conquered in his day.
And they belonged to Judah.
If you read chapters 15, 16 in that area of Joshua, you see, as we've done before, the lot of land that was given to the particular tribes, they all had their own geographical area, and they were divided by rivers or brooks or certain boundary lines.
And so these cities both belonged to Judah, formally.
But as we've seen time and time again, sin caused Judah to lose what they once possessed.
That's what it does to us, too.
It causes us to lose what we once possessed.
And they failed to drive out all their enemies.
And so when that happened, they yielded not only physical geography, physical land, but they also yielded spiritual geography to their enemies.
They took their sons and daughters in marriage.
They worshiped their false gods.
And now an Assyrian nation is trying to conquer those very cities that had belonged to Judah before.
And in every case, when the children of Israel, before the nation was divided or after, in every case where they mingled with the Gentile nations that were mixed in with them, when they worshiped their gods and they married their sons and daughters, in every case Israel came out the loser.
They never came out the winner.
And you will always lose when you mingle with sin.
You always will.
I'd like to use this place in our study to address some of you who may be feeling an awful lot like Judah right now.
As you know or can imagine, the pastor and I talked to a lot of people during the week, during the month, people that are online members, people who you don't even know, who are Christians who are struggling with things, sometimes people from here.
But if you're a Christian and you've lost your way in some area of your Christian walk, the enemy's been banging at your door, robbing you of your joy.
I've had that happen.
I know what that feels like.
It's terrible.
Maybe you've forfeited some blessings because of disobedience, and the Assyrian is at your gate.
And he's telling you, just surrender.
Just go to Assyria.
Things will be better over there.
You won't have to worry about all this.
It'll be much easier.
Don't you dare listen to the Assyrian.
Don't you do it.
Listen, Judah had sinned against the Lord, and most of the people there had been worshiping idols and committing all kinds of abominations against the Lord, even the priests themselves, and certainly the kings before Hezekiah.
But after all that wickedness, what did the king do?
Did he say, "Well, man, we're too far gone.
The Assyrians are at our gate."
Listen, they promised us that they also have good things in Assyria, and they let us enjoy some of our liberties here.
So let's just go with whatever they say.
That would have been so easy to do.
But the king took the case to the Lord.
The Lord was always faithful, and you need to know this.
The Lord was always faithful to take His people who had turned their backs on Him and to restore them when they repented of their sin.
He's always been faithful to do that.
He still is.
Perhaps you've stopped coming to church.
Now, if somebody's not in church today and not watching online, they won't hear this, but they can if they want, if they want to play it back and listen to it.
Perhaps you've stopped coming to church, or maybe you just show up every once in a while.
The Assyrian at the gate is telling you, "Just forget about it.
They're not going to miss you.
It's not going to hurt.
You don't have to go to church to go to heaven."
And all of these things the Assyrian will tell you.
And that Assyrian just telling you to forget about it.
Don't you do it.
Commit yourself to the Lord's house again.
He's waiting on you to do that.
Or perhaps you've fallen on hard financial times.
I counseled with a couple of Christians, fairly young Christians here a while back, and they were on some hard financial times.
And I said, "Are you willing to do what God says with your finances?"
And they did.
And I check in with them from time to time, and I'm so pleased.
It was hard on them.
It really was.
But I'm so pleased with their progress.
I really am.
I'm proud of them.
Not in a prideful way, but I just...
I love that they took God's word and God's principles and said, "You know what?
We made this mess, and we're not going to get ourselves out of it unless we go by what God's word says."
And it's going to take a while.
But they turned the corner.
And you know it's easy to just give up and say, "Well, I'll never catch up."
The Assyrian says, "You don't need to do all that tithing and giving and serving and all those things you do for your church.
You don't need to do that."
But you know it's biblical, and it's how the Lord finances his work.
So just commit yourself to begin tithing, giving, starting right now.
Maybe you've begun to stray into pornography, and the Assyrian says, "Oh, it's not real.
It's just a make-believe.
It's just on a screen.
It's just on your phone.
You're not hurting anyone.
Don't listen to the Assyrian.
Shut him off.
Shut that pornography off.
Shut that device off.
If you have to throw it in the trash, then do that.
Put God's word in your mind and push that filth out.
That's how you do that.
Because one of the big problems with pornography, and there are many, is that people who watch that, those images go right here.
And it's hard to get them out.
That's what happens when the devil takes spiritual jurisdiction from you.
And the only way to get those out is not to say, "Well, I'll just try not to think about it."
You've got to put something in there to push that stuff out.
You've got to occupy your mind with things that are holy to push that unholy stuff out.
And because you're flesh, those images, those thoughts, are going to come up from time to time.
Take God's word and push them out.
That's the only way you can do this.
Say, "Lord, help me.
I know what I did was wrong, and I know these thoughts are going to keep coming up because I live in a corrupt body, but I commit myself to your word.
Would you help me?"
He's not going to turn his back and say, "Nope, too bad."
Throw it out.
Maybe you've become so busy and burdened with the stresses of life, you've stopped reading and studying your Bible.
You haven't prayed as you ought to.
The Assyrian says, "Hey, that's such a long read.
Just put that book down.
You don't need all that."
Unbow that head.
Who are you praying to really?
What has God done for you lately?
That's what the Assyrian is saying.
In Assyria, we won't make you read your Bible and pray to your God.
You ignore that Assyrian.
Let him stand at the gate and howl and holler and promise and threaten.
I'm going to close this thought with a Psalm.
Psalm 37, verses 3 through 5.
Psalm 37, verses 3 through 5.
"Trust in the Lord and do good.
So shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed.
Delight thyself also in the Lord, and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.
Commit thy way unto the Lord.
Trust also in him, and he shall bring it to pass."
Now we've got a bunch of people in Judah who are surrounded by the enemy.
And the psalmist is telling them, "Just trust in the Lord and do good.
And you shall dwell in the land and be fed there."
Not by the Assyrian and not because the Assyrian gave you permission to do that, but because God said it and he'll bring it to pass.
So you can't go back and fix every wrong thing that you've done.
In fact, most of them you probably can't fix, and you certainly can't undo them.
But you can stop doing wrong right now and begin doing what God says.
Don't give up and know this, we love you, and sometimes you may feel like, "Well, he's preaching at me again."
That's not the case.
We're preaching to you what God has preached to us.
Listen, we first endured this preaching.
When I study for my lessons, I'm getting this from the Lord.
This is His Word telling me, and before you get convicted about it, I do.
Unless you're reading the exact same thing I am ahead of time, I'll see it and go.
"Boy, that's you, Andy.
What does the Lord say to do about that?"
There it is.
That's what I want to do.
May God always help us to do that preaching in love and never for the purpose of embarrassing somebody or making them feel bad.
We don't do it for that.
We do it because we love you.
God did it because He loves us.
He gave us His Word because He loves us.
Now let's move on to verse 9 back in your text, 2 Kings 19, verse 9.
"And when he heard say of Tihr-Haka king of Ethiopia, behold, he has come out to fight against thee, he sent messengers again unto Hezekiah, saying..."
And then that's verse 10.
Now let's look at this phrase, "And when he heard say of Tihr-Haka king of Ethiopia..."
How do we know whether the word "he" is referring to Rabshaykah or to Sennacherib, the king of Assyria?
Well, this is a good place to teach you how to use the Scriptures or how to search them by using context clues.
First of all, if you read the entire verse, what does it sound like?
I'm going to reread it.
"And when he heard say..."
Now there's your key, "heard say."
"When he heard say of Tihr-Haka king of Ethiopia, behold, he has come out to fight against thee, he sent messengers again unto Hezekiah, saying..."
What this verse sounds like is a rumor, a blast.
Remember, we learned what a blast was last week.
It's a rumor.
That's what the word means.
And so this is a rumor.
Now, who was going to hear this rumor?
Well, if you'll back up in the same chapter to verses 6 through 7, let's look at it.
"And Isaiah said unto them, Thus shall you say to your master, thus saith the Lord, Be not afraid of the words which thou has heard, with which the servants of the king of Assyria have blasphemed me.
Behold, I will send a blast upon him."
That's a rumor.
"And he shall..."
What does it say?
"Hear a rumor and shall return to his own land."
He will hear a rumor.
And so what we're seeing here is that that king of Assyria that blasphemed God, who will hear the rumor, is the same person here who hears the rumor.
So there's you one piece of internal evidence that's contained within this chapter that tells you who is referred to by the word "he."
Now, the second piece of evidence here, if you look at the second part of this verse in verse 9, it says, "He sent messengers again unto Hezekiah."
So after he heard this rumor, he sent messengers again to Hezekiah.
Now, who is it with authority to send messengers to the king of another nation?
It's certainly not Rabshikah.
He was a messenger.
It's the king of Assyria.
The king of Assyria would be the one who has the authority to send a messenger to another nation.
And back in chapter 18 verse 17, it said, "And the king of Assyria sent Tartan and Rabsaris and Rabshikah from Lachish to King Hezekiah."
So who sent Rabshikah to Hezekiah?
It was the king of Assyria.
So now we have some strong evidence that the pronoun "he" in verse 9 was the king of Assyria rather than the Rabshikah or someone else.
Wasn't that fun?
That's how you learn your Bible, little things like that.
I hope those will help you.
Don't just give up and say, "Well, I'm so lost with all these pronouns.
I don't know who the "he" is and the "she" is."
Just stop, slow down a little bit, and rewrite the verse on a piece of paper and an over each pronoun.
Or maybe in your Bible if you like writing in your Bible.
I don't like writing in my Bible.
I like writing on notes.
But some people love to write in their Bible and either way is fine.
My Lauren wrote in my Bible for me when she was about three.
I'm never going to get rid of those pages.
I think it's in this one right here, or maybe one I have at home.
She found a passage in Isaiah.
I don't know if she didn't like what it said.
She just did that with a blue pen.
She was little, so she may have just been coloring on Daddy's Bible.
At first I thought, "Why are you little?"
And then I got a kick out of it later on.
I thought it was cute.
So whether you write in your Bible or you take notes, take a passage like that and above the word, he put the king of Assyria.
That would be a good way to do this, not only in this passage.
And here is the rumor, "Behold, he is come out to fight against thee," back there in verse 9.
This is the rumor the king of Assyria heard about the king of Ethiopia, about Terhaka, king of Ethiopia.
Now, what was Sennacherib to make of this rumor?
After all, he was certain that he could prevail over Judah.
But Ethiopia was another matter.
It's not clear here whether Sennacherib believed that Ethiopia was going to take Judah's side and help them, or whether there were just going to be another enemy Assyria would have to face.
Certainly Ethiopia heard about all the conquests Assyria was making, and they may have thought, "Well, you know what?
We better do like Barney Fy said and nip this in the bud and go out and face these people on a foreign field."
I don't really know which is the case.
But in either case, fighting a war on two fronts or against two enemies is complicated at best.
And it says back in verse 9 about this king, "He sent messengers again unto Hezekiah, saying, 'Now that God has put this rumor or this blast in Sennacherib's head, it appears that Sennacherib is under the assumption that Ethiopia is going to help Judah.'"
And here's why I say that.
Why else, after hearing this rumor, would Sennacherib's first action be to send a messenger to Judah rather than Ethiopia?
If he thought Ethiopia was just going to be another enemy who came to fight against him, then he wouldn't really consider Judah as being a part of that.
But here this tells me that in his mind, he believed that Ethiopia was going to help Judah.
And so in response to this rumor about the king of Ethiopia coming out against him, he sent a messenger to Judah, to King Hezekiah.
Now let's look at what this messenger was to say there in verse 10.
"Thus shall ye speak to Hezekiah, king of Judah, saying, 'Let not thy God in whom thou trustest deceive thee, saying Jerusalem shall not be delivered into the hand of the king of Assyria.'"
That's pretty familiar, isn't it?
We looked at that in the prior chapter and we studied that at great length.
And I'll continue down.
Well, let me just stop and comment real quickly.
If you put a note out there, you can write 2 Kings 18 verses 29 through 30, because those are the same type of words that Rabbi Sheikah said before.
We studied those words at length when we were in that passage, so we're not going to repeat those observations here.
But it's worth noting that Sennacherib stayed consistent with his message, didn't he?
In the face of a rumor from the Lord, what could Sennacherib have done?
He could have repented.
He could have said, "Whoa, Ethiopia is coming out against me?"
Or at least he thought so.
Maybe I better have second thoughts about this.
Maybe I should repent.
He didn't do that.
He stayed on message, didn't he?
He was consistent.
In fact, his response suggests that perhaps he was aware this was a rumor from the Lord, because he told Judah, "Don't let the Lord deceive you."
You getting that?
Now, if Sennacherib knew this rumor was from the Lord, then he was certainly hard-hearted and stiff-necked.
What God spoke back in verse 7 there, where it says, "Behold, I'll send a blast upon him, and he'll hear a rumor and return to his own land, and I'll cause him to fall by the sword in his own land."
In other words, God told you, "Here's how he's going to die, and here's where he's going to die in his own land."
That tells us right there Sennacherib is not going to repent, because God has perfect foreknowledge about what a person would and would not do if things were changed.
So if God said Sennacherib would return to his own land and be killed by the sword there, then we might conclude that Sennacherib has crossed the deadline with God, the long-suffering God whom he's offended.
You know, God did this with Pharaoh also in Moses' day.
Exodus 7, verses 2-5, where God told Moses, "Thou shalt speak all that I command thee, and ere and thy brothers shall speak unto Pharaoh, that he send the children of Israel out of his land, and I will harden Pharaoh's heart and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt.
But Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you, that I may lay my hand upon Egypt and bring forth mine armies and my people the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt by great judgments, and the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord, when I stretch forth my hand upon Egypt and bring out the children of Israel from among them."
We've studied the word "harden" before.
We'll look at it just briefly again.
The word "harden" is to render like stone, to make the current state of his heart, of the Pharaoh's heart, endure just like it is to harden it.
That's what a potter does whenever the potter has fashioned something out of clay and puts it in the kiln to harden it.
He wants it to be hardened just like it is.
If he puts it in the kiln, it was round, and then after he gets it out of the kiln, it was square.
It didn't harden, did it, like it was.
It hardened into something else.
It didn't withstand that heat.
So this is what God is doing.
He's simply taking the desires that the Pharaoh already had in his heart and the actions he wanted to commit that were against God, and he's simply hardening Pharaoh's heart to go ahead and do those things that he wanted to do in the first place.
Pharaoh wasn't this wonderful leader, not this one, whom God said, "You know, he's been good to my people.
I'm going to turn his heart against him."
That wasn't the case.
Why Pharaoh didn't...he was paranoid.
Now, he really was.
He didn't trust Israel to go three Sabbath days in the journey and worship the Lord.
That was all the original request was for.
He didn't trust them even to do that.
And so he caused all these problems, and God simply made his heart stay just like it was.
He didn't do it to be cruel.
In fact, he tells us why he did it.
He did it so that he could multiply his signs and wonders and show the Egyptians that he was the Lord God who would deliver his children from bondage.
And in our text, Sennacherib's heart is hardened.
He had the opportunity to repent long before he ever attacked Samaria and before he threatened Judah, but he did not repent.
Now, verses 11 through 13, I'm just going to read all these because, again, here are the words that Rabbi Sheikah said in chapter 18, verses 33 through 35.
It says, "Behold, thou hast heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all lands by destroying them utterly, and shalt thou be delivered?
Have the gods of the nations delivered them which my fathers have destroyed?
As Gozhan and Haran and Rizaf and the children of Eden which were in Delisar, where is the king of Hamath and the king of Arpad and the king of the city of Sephravaem of Hina and Iva?"
And what we might take away from all this is that all the king of Assyria could do to God's people.
He'd just repeat his threats against them.
That's all he could do.
He sent his messenger, Rabbi Sheikah, to do that at first in chapter 18, and now he sends another messenger or messengers to do the same thing, to say the same thing.
And Assyria's hope was that Judah would be weak enough to fold and that Assyria would be strong enough to win.
So in earthly terms, Assyria was a heavy favorite in this battle, and Judah was definitely the underdog.
But you know, Assyria had to remain strong.
I said that a moment ago, and we saw it, that Assyria depended upon their own strength to win all these battles.
And just like any other civilization, any other group of people or nation or empire that rose to power, what did that mean?
They didn't used to have power.
They rose to power, and what always happens when they rise to power?
They fall again, every nation, ours included.
Ours is really not a very old nation when you compare it to some of the previous empires in this world.
But Assyria had to remain strong, but you know what Judah had to do?
They just needed to remain in their weakness because it wasn't their might in the first place that would gain them a victory.
It was the Lord's power as he fought for them.
Verse 14, "And Hezekiah received the letter of the hand of the messengers and read it.
And Hezekiah went up into the house of the Lord and spread it before the Lord."
Boy, I'm going to hate to cut this off here.
We've got a few minutes, but I don't know that we'll get through this part.
The word "letter."
What that means is that these messengers, Sennacherib sent back in verse 9, all of those things they were told to say must have been written down in a letter.
So I can see these messengers going and opening up the letters and reading exactly what the decree was from Sennacherib, what his words were.
And because a letter was mentioned here, we can conclude that the messengers did read those words in the prior verses from that letter.
And they did it aloud in the ears of the men of Judah, but now Hezekiah is going to read the letter.
That letter was given to them, given to the messengers, and now given to Hezekiah.
And it says, "Hezekiah went up into the house of the Lord."
Now, I should have probably said this the last time we saw him go in the house of the Lord.
This doesn't mean he went into the holy place or the most holy place.
You know, you've got that outer courtyard where the brass, the brazen altar and the laver are, and then you have the holy place and then the most holy place inside.
So it doesn't mean he went inside there.
He was not a Levite.
He was from the tribe of Judah.
Because had he gone into the holy place or the most holy place, he wouldn't have made it out, would he?
If he had gone into the holy of holies, he would have died before his foot ever crossed that threshold.
Even a high priest would have if he went in on any day other than that one day of atonement each year.
So what did Hezekiah do with the letter he read?
Boy, this is good stuff right here.
He said he spread it before the Lord.
And if you look at the first use of the Hebrew word translated, spread, it's found in Exodus chapter 9, during the plague of hail the Lord sent on Egypt.
And during that time Pharaoh had pleaded with Moses to make the hail stop.
And he said, if you'll do that, I'll let your people go.
And here was Moses answered to that in verse 29.
Now this is found in Exodus 9 verse 29.
And Moses said unto him, as soon as I am gone out of the city, I will spread abroad my hands unto the Lord, and the thunder shall cease, neither shall there be any more hail, that thou mayest know how the earth is the Lord's.
So the words spread abroad are from the same Hebrew word as the word spread in our text where he spread it before the Lord.
And then in verse 33 of Exodus chapter 9, that very thing happened.
Moses went out, he spread his hands before the Lord, and the Lord shut off all the hail and the rain and the thunders, all of that.
Now what do we learn here in this Exodus passage?
We learn that the hail and the thunder did not stop just because Moses spread his hands abroad, just because he went out and did that.
That's not what caused the hail to stop.
It was because he spread his hands abroad unto the Lord.
That's the key, unto the Lord.
You see, hail was a judgment upon the sin of Egypt and on their lying, hard-hearted Pharaoh.
And Egypt deserved every hail stone that fell.
And for that judgment to be turned away, that matter had to be spread before the Lord.
You see, Moses was powerless to stop the hail on his own.
And so what he did because he was powerless to stop that hail, he spread that matter before the Lord.
He presented it to the Lord who did stop the hail completely.
Now Judah in our text was in sin just like Egypt.
And Assyria was trying to bring Judah into captivity, just like Pharaoh sought to keep the children of Israel in captivity.
And Hezekiah was powerless to free Judah from this impending captivity.
So what did he do?
He spread the matter before the Lord.
Just like Moses was powerless to stop the hail, so he spread his hands abroad unto the Lord.
And we have a great lesson before us in those two passages.
And we'll talk about it next week.
Had to do that.
Let's pray.
Father, we're so grateful for the people who love Your Word.
And Lord, whether it's one or two or one or two thousand, it's just such a privilege to be able to teach them.
And Father, Your Word means so much to us in this church.
We're willing to do without a lot of things in favor of hearing Your Word taught.
And now I pray for our pastor and for those who are meeting with him in person, that Lord, You would give us victory over any technical troubles that might happen and give us a clear view and a clear audio of what's going on in Kentucky of this precious assembly of the saints.
Give our pastor the liberty to speak, the clarity of his thoughts and the strength of voice that we may once again learn and be built up in the most holy faith.
And we pray this in Jesus' name.
Amen.
