Hezekiah’s Prayers

Please turn in your copy of the Word of God to Isaiah chapter 37. If you're using the pew Bible that can be found on page 597. Isaiah 37 we're going to begin with verse 14. Please stand when you have that for the reading of God's Word.

Isaiah 37 beginning in verse 14. Hezekiah received the letter from the hand of the messengers and read it. And Hezekiah went up to the house of the Lord and spread it before the Lord. And Hezekiah prayed to the Lord.

O Lord of hosts, God of Israel, enthroned above the cherubim, you are the God, you alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and earth. Incline your ear, O God, O Lord, and hear. Open your eyes, O Lord, and see, and hear all the words of Sennacherib, which he has sent to mock the living God.

Truly, O Lord, the kings of Assyria have laid waste all the nations in their lands. They have cast their gods into the fire, for they were no gods, but the work of men's hands, wood and stone. Therefore, they were destroyed.

So now, O Lord, our God, save us from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you alone are the Lord. Amen. You may be seated. Dear Heavenly Father, we ask that today at this prayer meeting that you would teach us to pray.

We ask that as we look at Hezekiah's prayer, that we would learn from it, that we would see in him what it speaks of the later son of David, Jesus Christ. And I pray that by him, our great king, you would lead us in prayer.

In Jesus' name, amen. So this is a prayer meeting. This is a passage about prayer. Maybe you pray on your own and you wonder whether or not your prayers are powerful. You would like your prayers to be more powerful.

Maybe this is why you struggle in prayer and you don't spend very long in prayer, because your prayers don't feel powerful, and you don't know whether or not it's even worth it to spend time in prayer if your prayers are not powerful.

Maybe that's something that resonates with you, this struggle to pray because it doesn't feel like prayers are powerful. In fact, that's kind of the point of prayers in a lot of ways, is to acknowledge your weakness before God, your lack of power before God, and trust in His power.

But how do you know that your prayers are powerful? God does not hear every prayer. There are plenty of passages in Scripture where it talks about God refusing to hear people. He doesn't honor prayer that is not according to His will.

Prayer must be according to His will. It must be by our mediator, Jesus Christ. It must be by the power of the Spirit. And so how do you discern these things? How do you know specifically whether or not you're praying as you ought for the will of God?

Well, here in this passage we see that a right prayer, a good prayer, this prayer of Hezekiah, it's a prayer for God's holiness. It's a prayer that recognizes the supremacy of His honor and appeals to Him on that basis.

And if we are wise in the way we pray, all of our prayers are going to be taking hold of the honor of God, recognizing that that is the basis on which our prayers must be laid before Him. Not for our own honor, not for our own glory, but for God's glory.

And if we do this, we can have great confidence that our prayers are powerful. You look here at Hezekiah in the assault against him, if you've been following along the past few weeks, you at this point should be pretty familiar with the idea that Assyria has taken every other city in Judea and the only city that remains in the land is Jerusalem.

And so the kind of salvation that we're talking about here, though it is a physical salvation and not specifically the spiritual kind of salvation we see in the New Testament, it is a great salvation.

It is one that saves an entire nation. And so when we're looking at our trials, our struggles, though they may be greater in some kind of spiritual sense, God has given us this passage, this display of physically great salvation in order to communicate to us how powerful prayer can be if it is prayed rightly, if it is prayed according to the honor of God.

Now when you go before God, you have options on the basis on which you pray to Him. So what do a lot of people pray? A lot of people pray things like, or maybe they don't say this out loud, but what their thought is, you know, I've been a good servant for you.

Give me this thing in return, as though our service to God is worth anything in return, as though He needs it. We end up treating God like Santa Claus. I've been a very good boy this year. Don't give me coal.

Give me this thing that I want instead. God is not Santa Claus. Okay, He is not manipulated by our behavior and our own righteousness. Our own righteousness is filthy rags before Him. Now He accepts our righteousness when it is Christ's righteousness imputed to us, and He accepts our good works as they are mediated by Christ, but we of ourselves have nothing.

And so if we come to God and we present ourselves before Him as the thing that He is supposed to honor as being worth some kind of answer to prayer, you are going to come up short. You are going to discover very quickly that this is not how the exchange rate works in God's economy, in His kingdom, that your righteousness is worth nothing in that economy.

You look at inflated money, our own money becomes worth less and less. You look at a country like Venezuela where they carry it around in wheelbarrows, right, and that might get you a bag of bread. At this point, it's just trash that lays in the street, right?

That is what your righteousness is before God. You cannot exchange that for something in return. You have to appeal to Him not on the basis of yourself, your own righteousness, your own honor, your own holiness.

You have to appeal to Him on the basis of His honor, His holiness. And so what does He present before the Lord? It says, Hezekiah received the letter from the hand of the messengers and read it. And Hezekiah went up to the house of the Lord and spread it before the Lord.

So he's been told these words by the Rabshakeh. He's been told these words by messengers from Sennacherib that he should not trust in the Lord, that the Lord is just like other idols, right? The Lord is just like other gods.

He will be defeated quickly by Sennacherib. And so Hezekiah should not trust in the Lord. Hezekiah should instead abandon ship and surrender. He should go with Sennacherib to Assyria, surrendering, because the Lord is not powerful, because the Lord is just like any other god.

Now Hezekiah comes to the Lord, once again not on his own righteousness. He has no righteousness. Hezekiah is guilty of having compromised, of having given tribute to the king of Assyria in order to try to placate him.

And that has failed. His father is guilty of going to Assyria for help against his enemies. And that failed. Repeatedly, we see that this nation has rebelled against God. They have no reason that they could come to Him and expect some kind of reward for their own righteousness.

And we have to realize the same. We have to realize that we have no reason that we should be able to come to God on the basis of our own righteousness. We can only appeal to His honor. And so what does he lay before God?

Does he lay before Him something good that God will like? He lays before Him something awful. He lays before Him this blasphemous letter from Sennacherib saying that the Lord is just like every other idol.

This is what he lays before Him. This is the evidence. Look at this horrendous thing. Be angry, Lord. Be angry at the evil that is coming about that is going to tarnish your name. You know, if you want to win in a court of law, you need to have some kind of evidence.

You need to have some kind of evidence against your enemy. Let me tell you a little about when I visit my parents in Greenville. I usually try to, once or twice, stop by what's known as the Greenville Women's Center.

This is like our Planned Parenthood here. There are three abortion clinics in all of South Carolina. Two of them are Planned Parenthoods. One is private. This is the only private one. And because it's private, it tends to be a little more disorderly because they encourage and provide resources to counter protesters there to make sure that people who are trying to hand out tracts, people who are trying to pray, are as disturbed as possible.

So they do the worst stuff that you can think of. You know, when I've gone there and tried to pray for people, tried to hand out tracts, I've been sprayed with fart spray. People have had all kinds of awful things done to them.

One elderly man there, someone in his seventies, someone stood behind him and then had someone else come up to him so that he would step backwards and then trip and then fall on someone and they got him up on assault.

And because he was arrested for assault, because he tripped over someone who had made him trip, they plaster his face and name everywhere. They say, watch out for this person who was arrested for assault.

And they make him look like a creep so that people don't want to talk to him when they come by. There's all kinds of awful stuff they've done, but there's no evidence against the enemy. And so for many months they've been trying to find some evidence of, or record some evidence of what these counter-protesters, for lack of a better word, I've heard them called death squirts before, are doing.

And so finally, about a month ago, they got video of one of these women attacking somebody and so that woman is not allowed on the premises anymore to disturb people trying to pray and hand out tracts.

So finally they got evidence against the enemy and this is what they were willing to hear. The stories, etc., weren't good enough. They needed hard evidence. And so what Hezekiah presents here is hard evidence against his enemy and how blasphemous he is being.

This is what you should present to God. You should think in terms of spiritual warfare. You should think in terms of what your enemy is doing and present the hard evidence of his blasphemy against God so that God would respond to it.

And so you see different ways that God is, that God's holiness, His distinctness, His greatness is being challenged. One is in Him as Creator. It says, O Lord of hosts, God of Israel, enthroned above the cherubim, you are the God, you alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth, and you have made heaven and earth.

It talks about Him having made heaven and earth while the idols, on the other hand, are made by men's hands. God is the Creator of heaven and earth. He's made everything by His hands, but the idols are made by humans' hands.

And so God as Creator is being threatened. Not that God Himself can be threatened, but His reputation among men is being challenged. And so you can appeal to God on this basis. You can see all the ways that the enemy challenges God as the Creator, the one who has designed things, the one who has His purposes.

A couple of messages ago in the morning, Pastor Tim talked about how God as Creator really indicates the design of things, and so really every sin is working against that design in some way. You can appeal to God about His status as Creator and how that is blasphemed and challenged by the enemy in whatever trial you're facing.

If you truly are praying for something that you ought to pray for, there's a way to frame it in that light. He also talks about God's power here. It says that He is the Lord of hosts. If you don't know what that means, that means that He commands armies.

Translations that try to be a little more modern end up just saying Lord of armies. He commands armies of angels. There are angels that He sends around. We see this a couple of times in Scripture. You know Elijah is aware of the angel armies around him.

When you sing, like we sang earlier, hymn number 81, Mighty Fortress, if you've never known what Lord Sabaoth is, and that sounds really weird or maybe it means that Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath, it doesn't.

It's Hebrew. Sabaoth is Hebrew for host. So that's talking about Lord of hosts. Lord Sabaoth is Lord of hosts. That whole hymn is about the context of the enemy, spiritual warfare, etc. He's attacking, but we have Lord Sabaoth.

We have the Lord of hosts. That's what Martin Luther is talking about in that hymn. We have the Lord of hosts. He is strong and mighty, not weak like Sennacherib is saying, not weak and able to be defeated.

He has dominion over all the kingdoms of the earth. He is the living God. They are dead gods. They are dead because they can't accomplish anything. They're not dead in the sense of there not being any spiritual reality to them.

Let me take a step back and make that clear to you. 1 Corinthians 8 appeals to this truth that you see here in this passage about them being no real gods. It says in 1 Corinthians 8, therefore, as to the one eating of food offered to idols, we know that an idol has no real existence and that there is no God but one.

These are in quote marks because the idea is the Corinthians are writing this stuff to them. There are no other gods, so it's okay. It's okay to eat this food sacrificed to idols because idols aren't real.

They don't mean anything. For although there may be so-called gods in heaven and on earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords, yet for us there is one God, the Father from whom all things are and for whom we exist and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.

So, Paul acknowledges that. Paul acknowledges, okay, he's the only true God. He really is the only God. Yet, what does he say later? In chapter 10, verse 19, and he does this a lot in Corinthians, and I think a lot of people get confused by Paul's pattern of conceding arguments, right?

He concedes a lot of things the Corinthians say to correct them later, and a lot of people take the concession, perhaps not recognizing that some of it's rhetorical in the way he's conceding it to make his argument because then he rejects what they have said about it being nothing, right?

Yeah, there are no gods, but they're not nothing. He says in chapter 10, in chapter 10, verse 19, what do I imply then? That food offered to idols is anything or denial is anything? No, I imply that what pagan sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God.

I do not want you to be participants with demons. Okay, so he says there's demonic activity involved. You know, they're not gods. They're not like our Lord, our God, who's alone the Creator, but there's demonic activity involved here.

There's a real spiritual warfare. This is not God against nothing, okay? This is God against demonic power, but they are dead in that they have no power to save because they don't have the power of life.

Only God has the power of life. He is capable of saving. He is most powerful, and so we see that with those phrases, with Lord of hosts, with Him being the living God, with Him having dominion over the whole earth, with Him being enthroned above the cherubim.

That refers to God's presence being particularly over the Ark of the Covenant with the cherubim and the outstretched wings, you know, towards each other. Now, his point is not just that they're over these statues of cherubim, but that truly that represents something real, the fact that God Himself rides upon angels.

It says this in the Ezekiel 1 that He rides on the angels. You see it in Ezekiel 1 that this chariot that Ezekiel sees that God is riding on, what is it composed of? It's composed of many angels. This is how strong God is.

Not only is He commanding armies of angels, but even His mode of transportation is powerful, powerful angels. He is excessively powerful. These gods are nothing in terms of their power, but God's power is at...its recognition among men is at stake when Sennacherib is able to mock God in this way, saying that He is not powerful.

When it will look like any attack on Jerusalem will vindicate Sennacherib's words, saying that Sennacherib really was more powerful than God. The Lord really wasn't that capable. And so, all of these can be summed up as God's holiness, His holiness.

He is above all things. He is greater than all things. He is stronger than all things. He is the Creator. We are creatures. There's not...you know, even statements like in our catechism, it says God is spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, etc.

The idea that God is spirit does not mean that He's made of the same sort of substance that angels are made of, right? Okay, God is not made of anything. God is not made. Okay, He is spirit in that He is not physical.

He is spirit in that He is personal, right? But He is not spirit in that He's composed of some kind of substance that angels are composed of. Okay, God is not composed. God is not made. He is holy. He is unlike anything in creation.

And so, to compare Him to other things in that way, to make Him like those things, is blasphemous and needs correction. So, this is what Hezekiah points out to him. Hezekiah points out that God's name is bound to the people, right?

He calls Him the God of Israel. If this is the God of Israel, right? And Sennacherib, who we see later on praying to his God, Nisroch, right? Sennacherib's got his own God. Assyria's got its own God. Israel's got its God.

If one defeats the other, it looks like the God is more powerful, right? And so, he is saying, speaking of the God of Israel, that, O Lord, our God, later on, they need to be vindicated because God Himself needs to be vindicated.

He has attached His name to the people. He has attached His name to His temple. He has attached His name to the country and to the land, to all those things, such that any kind of assault, spiritual assault, that is successful against any of those things will be a blight against Him, will be something against His own name.

And so, Hezekiah prays on the basis of God's name. He says, Your name is great. You are powerful. Do not let Your name be recognized as anything other than this. This is what He prays to Him. And you think about how people respond when their name is at stake, especially with children, right?

A lot of parents will just blindly defend their children when their name is at stake, especially in schools. A lot of times, it will turn out that the child has done something wrong. The parent just goes in and blindly defends the child for everything they did and says, My kid would never do that, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And there is no reality to any of this. The parent just is concerned about their own name. Or even, you see it in politics, right? Politicians trying to hide anything that their children have done because that reflects poorly on their name.

Okay? This is how people care about their name. Now, you might wonder, okay, if those instances were corrupt, what makes God's action of protecting His name with His unholy people who rightly brought this judgment against themselves, why would that be okay?

This is the conundrum that goes throughout Isaiah and is wrapped up most cleanly in the last few chapters. But what God says throughout Isaiah, He says, He is holy, therefore His people cannot continue in unholiness.

They will be judged for their lack of holiness. But then He also says because He is holy, He will not allow His people to be destroyed because that would tarnish His name. How do you hold those together?

He transforms His people into being a holy people so that they are defensible, so that He can defend His own name. This is what God does. He doesn't just, like the parent at the, you know, parent-teacher conference, defend His children blindly.

He transforms His children to being holy so that He, in defending His holy name, can do so rightly and justly. And God has put His name on His temple here in Israel, but He has also put His name on us.

That temple was destroyed. It is no more. God has a new temple. His temple is His people, and His name has been attached to us. It says in Acts 15, 14, Simeon has related—this is at the Jerusalem Council—Simeon has related how God first visited the Gentiles to take from them a people for His name.

So not just the people of Israel having God's name attached to them, but even those among the Gentiles whom He has saved having His name attached to them. Realize if you have God's name attached to you, that means that any assault on you is an assault against Him, right?

Just like Jesus says that those who reject His messengers are rejecting Him. This is the hope that you have, not yourself, not your honor, but God's honor, which has been stamped upon you. If you have trusted in the Lord Jesus Christ, you have His name upon you, and so you are able to appeal to God on the basis of His name because you bear His name.

A lot of people think about salvation as being the end of their life, right? This is the main purpose of their life, is salvation. This main purpose of everything is, you know, salvation, and God is the means by which they accomplish this salvation, right?

What you see here is just the exact opposite. God is the end of all things. His glory is the end of all things. Salvation is the means by which He accomplishes that end, and if you mix those two backwards, your prayers will not be powerful.

You have to understand that God is accomplishing salvation in order for His own glory. Now, this is not God in some human way being self-aggrandizing, being selfish, self-exalting in some kind of arrogant manner.

Why is that? Because, first of all, God truly is greater than all, so one, it's appropriate. Two, He is goodness itself. There is no good in the world apart from Him, and so if you were to receive some gift that did not point you to Him, that did not point you to His glory so that you were enjoying His glory, that gift would not be good, just definitionally so it would not, right?

You see all these people who get, you know, good gifts that ends up making them worse, like the people who win the lottery and then end up worse for it at the end because they don't have the self-control, they don't have the, you know, the right attitude to be able to handle it, and so they end up wrecked by the debt that they end up accumulating after they win the lottery, right?

This is what it looks like to receive a, quote, unquote, good gift from God apart from His glory, right? If you receive salvation apart from it glorifying God, you're receiving a bad gift. That is not a good gift, and so if you're praying to God for good gifts and you're praying for those things directly apart from His glory, you're not praying for a good gift.

You're praying for an evil gift. You're praying for a bad gift. God is a good Father. He only gives good gifts to His children. Pray along these lines. Pray for His holiness. Pray for His honor so that when you are praying, you recognize it's not God being the means and salvation being the end, but salvation being the means to the end of God's glory.

So what are some bad ways people pray? People pray, they say, God give me this thing because I've been very good. God give me this thing because I want it, because I need it. They'll have all kinds of reasons.

It just seems right, you know, according to their own personal sense of rightness. But if you pray and you look through the Psalms and see how David prays, you say, God, I have nothing. I come to you with no merit at all.

I have nothing to offer you except I request that you look at the hideousness of the enemy, which is so much worse than my hideousness, right? Look at Sagnacarib's letter. Do not look at my record. I have your name on me.

I have the righteousness of Jesus Christ. I have all the good things that you have given me so that I'm asking you to turn your eyes away from any sin of mine since you instead see Jesus Christ and look instead at the evil of the enemy.

If you point God to the enemy, not that God is manipulated, not that he needs information, but that because he is one to give good gifts, you are preparing yourself to receive good gifts by recognizing his glory, by recognizing that he is worthy of praise.

And he is, I don't want to say able as though God is not able, but it's just simply impossible for him to give you something good apart from a recognition of his glory, right? And so he is not manipulated, but he has chosen prayer to be the means, the very common means by which you would recognize his glory in the gift that you are given.

And so if you're praying in a way that does not accomplish that, you're not really praying. You're doing something else, right? Not praying the way that God would have you to pray. And so pray like that.

Pray appealing to the blasphemy of the enemy. Pray appealing to the holiness of God. And pray powerful prayers. Pray prayers that destroy kingdoms and build up the kingdom of God. Pray prayers that accomplish great, great victories, because the victory has already been won in Jesus Christ, and he has provided everything he's needed.

He's provided his own righteousness. He has provided his Holy Spirit by which you can pray, praying the right thing. And he has provided the name of God, so that in him we have God's name, and we are able to appeal to that, to God's honor, in order that we might be protected and continue on until the advancement of his kingdom reaches its final end and Christ returns.

Amen. Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for the great privilege we have of prayer. We ask that you would lead us today in our prayers to you, and they would be prayers according to your honor and not according to our own, but ones that recognize you as above all things.

In Jesus' name, amen.