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Updated: June 23, 2025
In the first lesson for this morning's service, you heard of king Hezekiah's fear and perplexity; of the Lord's answer to him by Isaiah, and of the great and wonderful destruction of the Assyrian army, of which my text tells you. Of course you have a right to ask: "This which happened in a foreign country more than two thousand years ago, what has it to do with us?"
Their fearful danger, and wonderful deliverance from the Assyrians of which you heard last Sunday, seem to have done that for them; as God intended it should. During the latter part of Hezekiah's reign they seemed to have turned to God with their hearts, and not with their lips only; and Isaiah can find no words to express the delight which the blessed change gives him.
His short stay in Paris was marked by two incidents trifling in themselves, but too characteristic of the man to be omitted. Lord Hertford, the British Ambassador, had just taken a magnificent hotel in Paris, and Sterne was asked to preach the first sermon in its chapel. The message was brought him, he writes, "when I was playing a sober game of whist with Mr. Thornhill; and whether I was called abruptly from my afternoon amusement to prepare myself for the business on the next day, or from what other cause, I do not pretend to determine; but that unlucky kind of fit seized me which you know I am never able to resist, and a very unlucky text did come into my head." The text referred to was 2 Kings XX. 15 Hezekiah's admission of that ostentatious display of the treasures of his palace to the ambassadors of Babylon for which Isaiah rebuked him by prophesying the Babylonian captivity of Judah. Nothing, indeed, as Sterne protests, could have been more innocent than the discourse which he founded upon the mal-
Behold, I will gather thee to thy fathers, and thou shalt be gathered to thy grave in peace, neither shall thine eyes see all the evil that I will bring upon this place, and upon the inhabitants of the same. So they brought the king word again. 2 CHRON. xxxiv. 14-28. About one hundred years separated Hezekiah's restoration from Josiah's.
That brings us to the most important aspect of Hezekiah's great sacrifice. It sets forth the stages by which men can approach to God. It is symbolic of spiritual facts, and prophetic of Christ's work and of our way of coming to God through Him.
And how very strong to the same point are the words of Hezekiah's prayer, "The grave cannot praise thee, Death cannot celebrate thee; they that go down into the pit cannot hope for thy truth;" words which express completely the feeling that God is not the God of the dead.
Look at Abel Blair, what splendid times he has on Sundays. He never goes to church, but he goes fishing, and has cock-fights, and gets drunk. When I grow up, I'm going to do that on Sundays too, since I won't be going to church. I don't want to go to church, but I'd like to go to Sunday school." Salome listened in agony. Every word of Lionel Hezekiah's stung her conscience unbearably.
Tennyson wrote, in the "Supposed Confessions": "My sin was a thorn among the thorns that girt Thy brow." Of these thirty-four young men nine of them did not understand that quotation. Tennyson wrote: "Like Hezekiah's, backward runs The shadow of my days." Thirty-two of the thirty-four did not know what that meant. The meaning of the line, "For I have flung thee pearls and find thee swine,"
"Ananias" keeps still and winks to "Shimei," and "Shimei" comes out in the paper which they take in your neighbor's kitchen, ten times worse than t'other fellow. If you meddle with "Shimei," he steps out, and next week appears "Rab-shakeh," an unsavory wretch; and now, at any rate, you find out what good sense there was in Hezekiah's "Answer him not." No, no, keep your temper.
In a sentence, Hezekiah's prayer is answered, and then the prophet, in Jehovah's name, bursts into a wonderful song of triumph over the defeated invader. 'I have heard. That is enough. Hezekiah's prayer has, as it were, fired the fuse or pulled the trigger, and the explosion follows, and the shot is sped.
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