Heeding Signs

Isaiah’s Promise of Deliverance and the Sign Against Assyria

Seated. Please turn in your Bibles to Isaiah 37. Isaiah 37, we'll begin in verse 5. Excuse me, I said please be seated, but you may, but please stand for the reading of God's word. Isaiah 37, beginning in verse 5.

When the servants of King Hezekiah came to Isaiah, Isaiah said to them, say to your master, thus says the Lord, do not be afraid because the words that you have heard, with which the young men of the king of Assyria have reviled me.

Behold, I will put a spirit in him so that he shall hear a rumor and return to his own land, and I will make him fall by the sword of his own land. The Rabshakeh returned and found the king of Assyria fighting against Libna, for he had heard that the king had left Lachish.

Now the king heard concerning Terhaka the king of Cush. He has set out to fight against you, and when he heard it, he sent messengers to Hezekiah, saying, thus shall you speak to Hezekiah, king of Judah.

Do not let your God, in whom you trust, deceive you by promising that Jerusalem will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria. Behold, you have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all lands, devoting them to destruction.

And shall you be delivered? Have the gods of the nations delivered them, the nations that my fathers destroyed, Gozan, Haran, Rezeph, and the people of Eden who are in Telsar? Where is the king of Hamath, the king of Arpad, the king of the city of Shefer-Vayim, the king of Hinnah, or the king of Ivah?

These are the words of the Lord. Amen. You may be seated. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this great prophet you've given us, Isaiah, his book. We pray that you would open it up to us. We know that these things that you gave in the Old Testament, even the prophets that wrote did not understand all the things that they were themselves saying because it was revealed to them that these things were not for them but they were primarily for us.

So we thank you for giving them to us. We thank you for opening the seal of the scroll that we may understand it. We thank you for Jesus Christ, the one through whom we understand these things. In his name we pray.

Amen. Let me start off by giving a little bit of background here. Judah is being attacked by Assyria. All the cities around Jerusalem have fallen, and Sennacherib, Assyria, has only Jerusalem left to take, Sennacherib being the king of Assyria.

Now there's a particular passage I didn't spend a whole lot of time explaining last week, and I'd like to go ahead and to show you the stress that they're under, explain what some of these words mean.

In verse 3 where Hezekiah says, this day is a day of distress, rebuke, and of disgrace. Children have come to the point of birth, and there is no strength to bring them forth. There's a few things that are harder than childbirth, and this is a picture that's often used in Scripture to describe something that is a lot of work, and then afterward there's great joy.

A lot of times really hard work, really difficult things have a big reward afterward, but what's described here is that it's at the point of birth, but there's not enough strength to bring it forth. You know, childbirth is worth it for the child that comes afterward, but if you don't have enough strength to finish the job, and there's no child afterward, childbirth is not worth it.

War is very difficult. People go to war in order to achieve some kind of victory, but if they don't have enough strength to finish the war, then there's no joy because there is no victory. And so this is what's being described here.

It is like the pain of childbirth, but without any of the joy that one would hope for from childbirth. And so people are weak. We are a weak people who need confirmation from God, encouragement from God, reassurances to follow after Him.

A lot of people feel like they are strong, and all they need is just a simple promise from God, and they can follow that, but the reality is that God made us, and because of our sin, so God made us one without, you know, the kind of omnipotence that He has, and then on top of that, because of our sin, we are prone to doubt.

And so He, in His condescension to us, in lowering and accommodating us in ways that we do not deserve, He has given us signs in order to encourage us, in order to give us the courage necessary in order to follow Him faithfully, and that is the case here in this passage.

People face this great distress. They have already received the promise of the Lord. They will receive a sign as well. So God in His providence gives signs, but there are two ways of interpreting signs.

You can interpret them faithfully as ones who recognize these things as gifts from God, or you can interpret them faithlessly as ones who do not recognize them as signs from God, who recognize them as coming from somewhere else, and not giving any kind of confirmation of the promise that God has made.

So God gives signs, and you can either interpret them faithfully or faithlessly. So consider the main promise that's given here. On verse 5, it says, when the servants of King Hezekiah came to Isaiah, Isaiah said to them, say to your master, thus says the Lord, do not be afraid because of the words that you have heard, with which the young men of the king of Assyria have reviled me.

So this speaks of the Rabshakeh. This speaks also of other messengers that He has sent, and they have spoken words essentially blaspheming God, saying that God is not powerful enough to save against the king of Assyria because He is strong, and He comes from a legacy of mighty kings who have conquered every nation, conquered every other god.

What could Yahweh do to stand against Sennacherib? Of course, God has already promised them that He will defeat Assyria, and He promises them again here, that these words that you have heard, when they reviled me, I have heard them.

This is what this is what Hezekiah's hope was, and what his prayer will be after this passage, is God, hear the words of Sennacherib, hear the blasphemy, and bring judgment on him. We do not have any grounds of our own in order to ask for your help.

There's no merit of our own by which we could ask our help, but I can point to the demerit of our enemy and ask for you to judge our enemy, and God has answered, and He says that He will respond to these things.

And so He says, Behold, I will put a spirit in him so that he shall hear a rumor and return to his own land, and I will make him fall by the sword in his own land. And so this is, this is a sign that God is going to give to show the people that everything is going to come about as He has said.

He's told them the end, Assyria will be defeated. He's not said yet exactly how. He has given some details in Isaiah 10. He did say that they would come all the way up to the city of Jerusalem and march and get closer and closer, and so we've seen that, but we have not seen exactly how Assyria will be defeated.

And now God says a little detail. He gives the detail what's going to happen in the middle. Not only will they be defeated, but they'll be defeated by being afraid from something they've heard and running away to their own land.

This is something that will give you a confirmation. Now, we see this here in the next passage, that bit of confirmation. All right, so some of these details. First of all, you have this king, Terhaka of Cush, who has come out from the southwest, and he is headed towards the situation where, towards this place where Assyria's troops are situated.

And he is now, at least there's rumors of it, that he is going to assault Sennacherib and his forces. Now, not only that, but he has left Lachish and gone to Libna. Before, the last time we saw, he was at Lachish.

This was a city of Judah, the last one to be defeated, and now just Jerusalem stands. But now he's left Lachish and he's gone to Libna. 2 Kings explains to us that Libna, though it's in Judah, is not under Judean control at this point.

So it's actually kind of like a foreign city within Judah. And so what's happening here is that they've moved from Lachish to Libna, a few, 6 to 12 miles north. No one's quite sure where exactly, what exactly the distance is here, but something like 6 to 12 miles north, they've moved up there to fight this foreign city within Judah.

And so they've got this foreign city, they've also got Jerusalem, and now they've got from a third point, they have people from Cush who are rumored to be coming at them. So they're surrounded all around.

It appears that things look fairly grim for Assyria, even though things still look grim for Jerusalem, things also look worse than they did before for Assyria. So this is coming to pass. We do see that there is this rumor, and he's going to hear this rumor, he's going to have this spirit of fear.

What's being said is not just that that rumor will produce the spirit of fear, but God's going to put a spirit of fear in him, and then by the rumor, stir it up. So you can't see the spirit of fear being put in a Sennacherib, but you can trust that.

And then we hear this rumor, this rumor is taking place, and then it's because of that rumor, out of desperation, that a messenger is sent back to Hezekiah. And so here everything looks like it's playing out exactly as God has said, right?

A spirit of fear has been put in him. He seems to be acting out of desperation, saying again, go ahead and surrender. You just want to surrender. Don't try to resist. You know, this looks more and more like desperation.

And so God's sign is coming to pass. It seems like a very simple way to interpret this, is God has given a sign. It shows that his word is going to come to pass. There seems to be fear. The rumor has taken place.

Whether or not it's true, that rumor does exist. There is another force. That seems like the very obvious way to interpret it. However, though that is the faithful way of interpreting it, there's also a faithless way of interpreting it.

Consider here where this King Terhaka is coming from. And I'll mention also, some people, if you ever study the history of this, Terhaka, according to extra biblical sources, is not a king yet at this point.

And so Isaiah is anachronistically calling him a king. That's not a problem. Isaiah is allowed to use the labels that he sees fit, talking to a later audience about what has happened. But you have Terhaka, who's in charge of these forces, who's coming from Cush.

And where is Cush? Cush is right next to Egypt. It's pretty much an ally of Egypt. And what was the thing that the people were supposed to not do? What is God telling them, definitely don't do this. Just trust Egypt for defense.

And so what they could look at is, oh, Egypt is coming to our defense. One of their allies is coming up. Even though Egypt was defeated by Assyria at Alteca, now Cush is coming and they're going to save us.

There is a faithless way of interpreting this. There's a faithless way that says, wait, maybe we don't need God. Maybe we will have enough help here. There are two options to interpret this, and this is the case routinely.

Facts are not brute facts. They have meaning. But even though that meaning of those facts is given by God, because we are sinners, because we out of our sin suppress the truth and our unrighteousness, as it describes in Romans 1, we are inclined to interpret things faithlessly.

Even signs that God has given for confirmation of His promises, for confirmation of those truths, we are prone in our sin to interpret those things faithlessly. I'll give you one example that I think of pretty often.

Back in 2004, there was some discovery of a dinosaur fossil or skeleton, something like that, that had soft tissue attached to it, you know, blood vessels, things like that. And this was very surprising because if dinosaurs are supposed to be millions of years old, this doesn't really seem possible.

Now, for the Christian, you interpret this faithfully, right? It looks like, oh yeah, very plainly, dinosaurs, no part of creation, could be so old that you have to worry about the effect of millions of years.

But the world doesn't see it that way, right? This is a sign that things aren't that old. How does the world see it? Well, maybe soft tissue can last millions of years, right? This is the interpretation.

Almost everything can be interpreted faithlessly. God is a good communicator, and He communicates truth, but if your sin is active enough, if your rebellion is high enough against Him, you can take any truth of His and reject it and suppress it until that final day when He makes it completely evident because you have no no defense.

That will come, but in this time, in between, uh, or prior to Christ's second coming, there are ways that people have of rejecting these very apparent truths. And so we ought to interpret the signs given by God to us faithfully, not faithlessly.

What do I mean by signs? God gives us signs all the time. Sometimes these signs are like we are talking about, you know, a prophetic sign like this or something. You see, this one's not even miraculous in a way.

Sometimes the Bible talks about miraculous signs, and sometimes it just talks about God's faithfulness and that we're supposed to take His history of faithfulness as evidence that He will continue to be faithful.

So look at one of those, the resurrection, right? The resurrection is a sign that it is by this that it says in Romans 1 -4 that Jesus has been declared the Son of God, right? This is a sign that He is ruler over everything, but people interpret this different ways.

Many people say that it just never happened, so reports of a resurrection really mean nothing at all. It just means that the disciples of Christ had overactive imaginations, but you could imagine someone even believing the resurrection and then saying, well, this doesn't prove that Jesus is God.

This doesn't prove that He's the Son of God. There's no reason someone couldn't just say that. Even they just say it's very uncommon, but it appears to have happened here, and then there's tons and tons of people who claim to be some kind of follower of Christ, claim that the resurrection, you know, means something, but then practically in their own lives it does not mean that He has lordship over them.

It does not mean that He is the Son of God in any kind of meaningful sense, and so even though this sign is supposed to mean something, there are countless ways that people have rejected that sign to mean something entirely different, right?

Oh, this is just, you know, a reminder of life that we can think about in the spring when, you know, the lilies come up and things like that. No, this is a statement about Christ's lordship. Consider also another kind of sign that the Bible gives.

It talks about wars and rumors of wars being things that lead up to the second coming of Christ. Now, you can look at those wars and rumors of wars, and you can interpret those different ways. You can interpret them, one, at the way that has an over-realized eschatology, or maybe that's not the right term, but just a not realizing this is something that characterizes the entire period, but something that's only right at the end, and because you don't understand what God has spoken in His Word, you think, oh, the end must be right around the corner.

It must be in the next few years, because you are, though you're trying to do it with faith, or you're trying to do it in a way that honors God, you haven't necessarily submitted yourself to the Word of God in a way that recognizes this is something characterizing all the years, not just a couple of particular years.

Or you could interpret it this way. You could say that this actually shows that there is no God, right? How many people look at all the wars and rumors of wars in the worlds, and they say this shows that there is no God, but how could a real God be active when God gave it as a sign that Christ is returning again?

And consider other examples of signs that God gives, simply just His history of faithfulness. So many people, when faced with some kind of temptation, wondering whether or not God would bear them up, God would hold them up, they discount all the past instances where He has, where their obedience was met with God's kindness.

Not that He always rewards obedience in the way that people imagine with all kinds of earthly prosperity or anything, but He upholds His servants. And so many people, when they're faced with some kind of temptation, faced with some kind of trial, they fail to recognize the reality of those signs, and for a moment they start thinking, well, maybe that was all just chance.

Maybe that's not what they're explicitly thinking, but that's what they're practically saying as they face temptation faithlessly, right? Is maybe none of that, maybe all of that is just chance. Well, there are remedies for this.

There are ways that you can interpret signs faithfully. The first one is to know God's Word, is to know what it says. If you do not know God's Word, you're not going to be able to interpret the things around you correctly.

Not because they aren't already evident, they really are, but because of our sin, we are going to have so many tendencies to reject the truth that is evident to us. And it is really only through going to God's Word that a lot of that folly will be rooted out of us in order for us to interpret these things correctly.

You know, I gave the example about eschatological signs and things like that. These are things where we need to go to God's Word, try to understand it fully, not just understand it in a way that is either entertaining for us or just barely touch it.

These are things worthy of serious study, serious prayer, going before God and asking Him to reveal His truth to you. One, and I know I've probably mentioned this before to almost all of you here, but God is working in the world.

Romans 8, 28 says He works all things together for His good, for the good of those who love Him. He's working all things together for good. Our confession summarizes these various statements in Scripture to say that while God's providence is working in all things and His care is over all creation, there's a particular way that He's concerned for His church.

Okay, and that's just summarizing up something that's evident as you read Scripture and you see that His special concern and His providence around everything, the way He's organizing everything, is particularly for His people and the glory that He's bringing about through building up His people.

Okay, so if you believe that and you see things like in the Old Testament, whenever God shut down the temple, whenever God desecrated the temple or destroyed the temple or kept the people from being able to worship Him rightly, it was some kind of act of judgment or some kind of act of discipline in order to wake them up from their false worship.

He was not satisfied with their worship, and so He would shut their worship down. You look at what happened during COVID where churches were disproportionately affected and churches, many churches, shut down for various periods of time.

You know, we ourselves did not meet here for a few weeks, and there were different ways of interpreting this. A lot of people will say, oh, well, you can't say this was because of sin. You can't say this was because of anything, you know, just different things happen in the world.

God has given us enough keys to interpret His providence. We should be able to see that as some kind of sign. We should be able to see God's providence is particularly concerned for His church. This providence seems to have a particular effect on His church.

Not only that, but the Old Testament has a pattern of God shutting His worship down when He is not displeased with it. Would we not be right in assessing the state of worship in our country and recognizing that there is a great lack and there is a need for serious reformation?

Yes, this is the right way of interpreting these things, but if we are divorced from His Word, we're not going to be able to see that. That's not going to be your instinct when you see these things. Either you'll say it's meaningless or you will attribute it bizarrely to, you know, whatever thing you don't like in the world, and you'll say, oh, that's why that came about.

No, but if you're being led by God's Word, you can make measured, reasonable, cautious, but reasonable judgments on these things to understand His signs in the world. So, not only should you be looking to God's Word, but you should also be more and more giving yourself over in submission to Him.

You know, not just studying this with putting Him under your microscope, but rather recognizing that you're under His microscope, right, and your whole life is judged by Him, not Him being judged by you.

And the more you are, the more you submit to Him, the more you follow Him in obedience, the more you recognize things like this, the more you are eager to see what He is doing. It's also the case that we should be thankful.

These people here in Isaiah, you know, this is good news. This is good news that this rumor, whether real or not, seems to be concerning Sennacherib. It seems to be putting fear in him. This is very good news.

This is something to be thankful to God for. If you're not thankful for these signs, these signs of God's faithfulness, these signs that God is upholding His servants and taking care of you, but rather you say to yourself, because there's a temptation to say, well, maybe I can do it on my own.

Maybe I don't need God. You will not, yeah, if you do not respond to Him in thankfulness, you will implicitly think that this is coming from somewhere else. Thankfulness, what is thankfulness? It's just the recognition that this is a gift from God, right?

Lack of thankfulness is a lack of recognition that this is a gift from God. If you do not recognize it, your providence, your situation as a gift from God, you will recognize it as coming from somewhere else and having something other than the meaning that He gives to it.

And lastly, and I would say this not tentatively, but I'm just not going to be able to develop this in a way that's going to be helpful for you, or sorry, in a way that's going to answer all your questions about it.

But I think there are times when it is right, when facing a large trial like this, to make vows. You see this frequently in the Old Testament when the people are faced with something difficult. You know, they vow to God that they will respond in a certain way if He takes them out of this.

You know, I do think that it is right on occasion for Christians to solemnly before God commit themselves to that answer, to that response to the answer to prayer, so that when the answer to prayer comes, there is way less temptation in the way to neglect it, right?

Because that's the difficulty, is that you get the answer to prayer, you get the thing you wanted, and now you don't need God anymore, right? But what making a vow does, what committing yourself in that way does, is saying, even after I get it, I will still need you.

I'll still be on the hook in that way. And so I think it is right in serious, solemn circumstances to go ahead and commit yourself to God in that way so that you are not tempted to walk away from His good providence to you.

I hope that is helpful. Like I said, there could be a lot of case studies of when that's appropriate or what that would look like exactly, but just take for a moment. That is an appropriate way of committing yourself to responding in thankfulness to God's answers to prayer so that you do not interpret His answers to prayer or any of His signs faithlessly, but rather faithfully.

Interpreting God’s Signs Faithfully

And so then, after all this, Sennacherib sends out messengers. He says this, he sent messengers to Hezekiah saying, thus shall you speak to Hezekiah king of Judah. Do not let your God in whom you trust deceive you by promising that Jerusalem will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria.

Behold, you have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all lands, devoting them to destruction. And shall you be delivered? Have the gods of the nations delivered them? The nations that my fathers destroyed, Gozan, Haran, Rezeph, and the people of Eden who are in Telsar?

Where is the king of Hamath, the king of Arpad, the king of the city of Sefer Vayim, the king of Hinnah, the king of Eva? Where are these things? So, Sennacherib sends his messengers to Hezekiah to threaten him once again.

Now, if you remember before, the people were told, do not let Hezekiah deceive you into believing that you can defeat Sennacherib. Now, what does he say? He says, do not let God deceive you. So, he's upping the ante a little.

He's saying, don't even let God deceive you of these things. You cannot face these. God is not powerful enough. We've destroyed all the other gods. We can destroy your God, your God as well. Now, just one quick thing.

Eden here, there are several Edens listed in Scripture. This is not the Garden of Eden, Eden. This is probably the same Eden that's mentioned in Ezekiel. And these are people from a place who are now in Telsar.

So, you have the statement about all these victories that have been won by not just the king of Assyria, but all his fathers. And so, he is challenging. The day we face the same challenge, whenever we face temptation, whenever we face some kind of trial, is whether or not we are going to, we are going to trust God.

If we're going to interpret his signs of faithfulness, his history throughout, the sign that he has given us just in the cross of Jesus Christ, the resurrection, Jesus is raised from the dead, that the enemy is defeated.

The enemy is going to face us constantly with these threats, with these empty boasts of his own strength that will feel very threatening if you are not anchored in an understanding of who God is and what he has promised, and in the special accommodations he has made in giving us signs, things to confirm his goodness to us, including simply his faithfulness throughout your life, those things which you should be giving thanks to God for.

So, do not go about your life without thankfulness to him. Do not go about interpreting signs faithlessly, not understanding who he is, but interpret them faithfully, looking to Jesus Christ, the one who has already established victory, who has risen from the dead and a sign that death is defeated.

And though we face it in this life, it is defeated, we will all be raised from the dead, both the just and the unjust, the just to an eternal life, eternal life, and the unjust to an everlasting punishment.

And this is something that will take place regardless of what people think, regardless of whether or not they recognize the sign in a faithful way. Even if they faithlessly reject that sign, this will come to pass.

But those who look to that sign in faith, those who look to God with faith, will be preserved all the way to the end. Amen. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for these comforts and promises.

We pray that we would faithfully interpret your signs to us. In Jesus' name, amen.