WWUTT 559 Hezekiah's Adulation?

Hezekiah brought great reforms to Judah and Jerusalem, reinstituting proper worship in the

Temple. But he was still a very prideful king, and his pride would eventually be as undoing when we understand the text.

This is When We Understand The Text, a daily Bible commentary to help encourage your time in the

Word. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday we feature New Testament Study, an Old Testament book on Thursday, and our

Q &A on Friday. Now here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky. It's been a little while since we've been in our

Old Testament study. Long enough that I actually had to go to Podbean and go through the track listing to figure out where I left off.

Chapter 19 is what we looked at last, so we're up to Chapter 20 today. I had put the regular schedule on hold last week so we could go through the five solas of the

Protestant Reformation, but we're back to our Old Testament study on Thursday. So here's a recap of where we are in the story.

The Israelites have been conquered. The Assyrians came in, took them over, exiled them out of the region of Samaria, and the king of Assyria put his own group of people up there.

So he didn't leave the land unoccupied, but the group that occupies that territory now worships a hodgepodge of different gods, including the

God of Israel, but they've also got their idols that they worship. God's favor remains with the kingdom of Judah, the southern kingdom, but they've had their share of wicked kings as well.

Ahaz was probably the most wicked king that Judah ever had, but then when his son Hezekiah assumed the throne, he brought reform into Judah.

He reinstituted temple worship the way that the law of Moses said it was supposed to be conducted. He tore down all of the high places, but the king of Assyria, empowered by his conquests, made threats against Judah, and he sent his mouthpiece, the

Rabshakeh, to issue more of these threats, and even promised the people of Judah these great lands and vineyards if they would just follow him, and the king of the

Assyrians would give them a land like the one that they had. But of course, he can't really do that. It's not the promised land.

He just wants to take over the kingdom and turn everybody against King Hezekiah. But the people did not respond at all to the

Rabshakeh. They were loyal to the king that God had given to them. So Hezekiah consulted the prophet

Isaiah as to what he should do. The Rabshakeh showed up again, the mouthpiece of Sennacherib, and he issued more threats and said, the king of Assyria is mighty.

He is great. He's even better than your God. Has your God ever delivered you from the king of Assyria?

Did your God deliver your brothers, the Israelites? So don't trust him. Trust the king of Assyria, and you will be delivered.

Of course, the king of Assyria fancied himself as a God. Well, Hezekiah came before God in the temple and said,

Lord, are you going to let the king of the Assyrians blaspheme you in this way?

Would you let the Jews be conquered by this king, and so his name would be proclaimed in all of the nations instead of yours?

Save your people, O God, for your namesake. So a message was sent from the prophet

Isaiah to the king of Assyria, and it's one of the greatest proclamations of God in His sovereignty in the scriptures.

He says in verse 25, chapter 19, verse 25, have you not heard that I determined it long ago?

I planned from days of old what now I bring to pass that you should turn fortified cities into heaps of ruins.

But I know you're sitting down and you're going out and coming in and you're raging against me.

And I think because you have raged against me and your complacency has come into my ears, I will put my hook in your nose and my bit in your mouth, and I will turn you back on the way by which you came.

And that night, the angel of the Lord came into the camp of the Assyrians and struck down 185 ,000 men overnight.

Meanwhile, the king of the Assyrians was struck down in his own house by his own sons.

God wouldn't even give him the dignity of being struck down by the angel of the Lord. Instead, it was his own sons.

While the king of the Assyrians was trying to turn the people of Judah against their own king, instead, it was the king of the

Assyrians who was turned against by his own sons who struck him down in the temple of the false god where he worshipped.

And so that's where we finished off with the death of the king of the Assyrians at the end of chapter 19.

So here we are in second Kings chapter 20. And this is actually out of sequence here, like this isn't in chronological order.

For whatever reason, we're leaving the chronology of the story that we're reading in second Kings and we're going back to something that happened to Hezekiah prior to these events with the king of Assyria.

So it says at the start of chapter 20, in those days, Hezekiah became sick and was at the point of death.

And Isaiah the prophet, the son of Amoz came to him and said to him, thus says the

Lord set your house in order for you shall die. You shall not recover. Then Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to the

Lord saying, now, oh Lord, please remember how I have walked before you in faithfulness and with a whole heart and have done what is good in your sight.

And Hezekiah wept bitterly. And before Isaiah had gone out to the middle court, the word of the

Lord came to him, turn back and say to Hezekiah, the leader of my people, thus says the

Lord, the God of David, your father. I have heard your prayer. I have seen your tears.

Behold, I will heal you on the third day. You shall go up to the house of the Lord and I will add 15 years to your life.

I will deliver you and this city out of the hand of the king of Assyria. And I will defend this city for my own sake and for my servant

David's sake. And Isaiah said, bring a cake of figs and let them take and lay it on the boil that he may recover.

So you see how quickly the Lord has responded in his grace and mercy.

Isaiah came to Hezekiah, said that he was going to die. Hezekiah wept bitterly over his sin.

He was actually a very prideful king. We'll look at that here some more a little bit later on. And so he wept before the

Lord and he begged for God's forgiveness. And before Isaiah had even left the palace, God came to Isaiah again and said, you know what, my my servant

Hezekiah, he's repentant. So go back and tell him that he is going to recover and tell him that on the third day he's going to go up to the house of the

Lord and he will be given 15 more years to his life. So Isaiah has this this healthy cake of figs that's made for Hezekiah.

And and by eating this cake, he would recover from his illness. So then verse eight, Hezekiah said to Isaiah, what shall be the sign that the

Lord will heal me and that I shall go up to the house of the Lord on the third day? And Isaiah said, this shall be the sign to you from the

Lord that the Lord will do the thing that he has promised. Shall the shadow go forward 10 steps or go back 10 steps?

And Hezekiah answered, it is an easy thing for the shadow to lengthen 10 steps. Rather, let the shadow go back 10 steps.

And Isaiah, the prophet, called to the Lord and he brought the shadow back 10 steps by which it had gone down on the steps of Ahaz.

So this was kind of like a sundial sort of a thing where time of day was measured by the length of the shadow across what are called the steps of Ahaz.

And it was named after Ahaz, maybe because he built him. I don't know. Covered him with gold, reconstructed them, but they were called the steps of Ahaz.

And so as the shadow would lengthen across the steps, that's how you knew what time of day it was. So with the sun going backward in the sky, the shadow would retract across the steps.

So Hezekiah is saying, well, if the shadow were to just lengthen across the steps, well, that's an easy thing to do because the shadow is already moving that direction anyway.

So let it come back. That's an impossible thing that God would move the sun back in the sky or turn the earth back the other direction.

So let that be the sign that God is going to heal me. Now, why did Hezekiah need a sign that God was going to heal him?

I mean, wasn't it enough that God was going to heal him of his disease? Why did he need a sign? Because remember, Isaiah told him that he was to go up to the temple on the third day and God would heal him.

If Hezekiah was sick, if he had been stricken with a kind of illness, he was unclean and impure.

He could not go into the temple or he would be struck dead because of the illness that he had.

So he was given this sign to show that when he went into the temple, he wouldn't be struck dead, but God would, in fact, heal him.

And when Hezekiah saw the shadow come back on the steps, then he knew that this was the word of the

Lord that Isaiah had spoken and he could safely go into the temple without losing his life, that God would indeed do the thing that was promised him.

Have you ever heard the myth of NASA's missing day? This is an old story, goes back decades.

It's even older than I am. Or there was this story about NASA calculating solar and lunar cycles.

They know every solar and lunar eclipse that's going to happen for the next thousand years. So this was just one of those times where they got their computer set up and it's going back and forth through the centuries, calculating where the sun and where the moon is going to be on any given day or year.

And over the course of going back into the past, this computer came across this missing day.

There's like this alert that sounded and and hey, we found a missing day. And the NASA scientists were perplexed by this.

How could there be a day missing in the past? Well, someone in the office spoke up and said, hey,

I remember in Sunday school, this story about the sun standing still in the sky. And so they grabbed a

Bible and they opened it up. And sure enough, there's a story there in Joshua about how God made the sun stand still in the sky.

But that would only have been 23 hours and 20 minutes long. That doesn't account for this full missing day, according to NASA's computer.

Well, then there was another story in Second Kings Chapter 20 about Hezekiah making the sun move backwards in the sky.

Well, God made the sun move backwards at Hezekiah's request. But that movement of 10 degrees would account for the other 40 minutes.

Therefore, we can use the Old Testament and find this missing day that NASA's computers claim that there was.

And in case you didn't pick it up by my introduction to the story, this is all a myth. None of this ever actually happened.

This was started by a guy named Harold Hill, who was the president of a company called the Curtis Engine Company.

And they had a contract with NASA. And Mr. Hill liked to make up stories.

And he said that in his contract with NASA, he heard some things that came from NASA's offices. And this was one of those stories that that he was told.

And he wrote about it in a 1974 book called How to Live Like a

King's Kid, devoted an entire chapter to this. Well, back when I was in high school, I remember this being becoming an email forward.

This was actually posted in several church bulletins over the years, back in the 80s and 90s.

And then with the advent of the Internet, well, it just kind of circulated online. I remember a friend of mine handing me a printout, an email forward printout.

You know, it have the little carrots on there indicating that this was a forward. And I remember reading the story. And even as a teenager looking at this going,

I don't think that's I don't think that's how measuring time works.

I don't think NASA's computer can go back in the past and suddenly be missing a day. And so anyway,

I was I was skeptical about it from the very beginning. And then along comes Snopes dot com and has totally debunked this myth.

And and even since it's been debunked, that hasn't stopped it from circulating.

I still will come across this every once in a while. Some sort of a myth website or something that gets posted on social media.

Facebook has something that that keeps getting reposted to everybody's Facebook pages. And the myth just continues to circulate that NASA had this missing day that the

Old Testament was able to account for. Once again, the Old Testament wins or the Bible wins over science.

There are other ways that the Bible wins over science. This just isn't one of them. It's total myth, complete fabrication never happened.

That's that's not the way NASA's computers work. It never found a missing day. It's just a great story showing about the power of God working supernaturally to affirm his deity to his faithful servants, which he did through the prophet

Isaiah to the king Hezekiah. And so we read about this story tested, tried and true.

There's no reason to doubt its authenticity. God did indeed turn the sun back in the sky, turn the earth on its axis so that the shadow would move back 10 steps and affirm to Hezekiah that God would indeed do the thing that he promised

Hezekiah he would do. Let's continue on now. Verse 12. At that time,

Merodach Baladon, the son of Baladon, king of Babylon, which is great.

It's kind of like a tongue twister. Merodach Baladon, the son of Baladon, king of Babylon, sent envoys with letters and a present to Hezekiah for he heard that Hezekiah had been sick and Hezekiah welcomed them and he showed them all his treasure house, the silver, the gold, the spices, the precious oil, his armory, all that was found in his storehouses.

There was nothing in his house or in all his realm that Hezekiah did not show them.

By the way, we're we're seeing Hezekiah's pride here. Like what like I mentioned a little bit ago,

Hezekiah was actually a very prideful king. And here he's so prideful. He's showing the

Babylonians all that belongs to him. He's boasting in his wealth. That's what he's doing. The same thing that the king of Assyria was boasting in Hezekiah is boasting in as though he had done something great.

And it's very careless of him to show all of his storehouse to somebody from Babylon, this pagan nation, which eventually is going to be the kingdom that conquers

Judah. I remember seeing a video. I think this is a clip from a sitcom, but it was either on YouTube or Facebook or something like that.

But it shows this this gal getting on an elevator and she's a good looking young woman with a purse and she's talking on a cell phone.

And there's some shady guys standing around the back of the elevator as she's talking on her cell phone. And she's talking about how she's got all this money in her purse and she's got all of these wonderful gadgets and beautiful technology around her apartment and very expensive doodads and baubles.

And she's talking about how she's home alone this weekend. And asking the person on her phone, hey, could you could you pick up my paper for me when it's delivered and just drop it on the inside of the door?

My alarm code or my security code is four six six two or something like that. And she says, oh, don't worry about the security cameras on the inside.

They're all fake. And it shows the guys that are standing around behind her and they're kind of looking at each other, you know, and you can tell what's going on in their minds.

Hey, we can break into this gal's apartment. We just heard her alarm code. How careless it was of this gal to get on the elevator and be talking about such personal things like that.

Well, that's the same kind of thing that's going on here with Hezekiah. He sees no threat with these guys from Babylon whatsoever.

In fact, he wants to look good in front of these guys. So I'm going to show you all the stuff that I've got.

In the meantime, these Babylonians are probably like spies. They're probably looking around going, yeah, it looks like some good stuff that we can march in here and take.

And so, verse 14, that Isaiah, the prophet, came to King Hezekiah and said to him, what did these men say and where did they come to you from?

And Hezekiah said they have come from a far country, from Babylon. And Isaiah said, what have they seen in your house?

Hezekiah answered, they've seen all that is in my house. There is nothing in my storehouses that I did not show them.

Just absolutely no shame here, total carelessness. And Hezekiah is even fully admitting it, like I didn't do anything wrong.

I showed them everything that we have. How beautiful are all these treasures that have been given to the king of Judah?

And then verse 16, then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, hear the word of the Lord. Behold, the days are coming when all that is in your house and that which your fathers have stored up till this day shall be carried to Babylon.

Nothing shall be left, says the Lord. And some of your own sons who shall be born to you shall be taken away and they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.

Then Hezekiah said to Isaiah, the word of the Lord that you have spoken is good.

For he thought, why not if there will be peace and security in my days? Further revealing to us the arrogance of Hezekiah's heart and how self -centered he was, not even considering future posterity, not even his own son.

He's just thinking, hey, my days are going to be peaceful. So what does it matter to me if Babylon is going to march in here and, and take my children or grandchildren or great grandchildren away,

I'm going to see peace all my days, so it doesn't matter to me. And just the self -centeredness that Hezekiah had no consideration for future generations.

So while he was indeed a righteous king before the Lord, in the sense that he obeyed the law of Moses and he issued reform in the temple and in worship in Jerusalem and tore down the high places, he was still a very arrogant man.

He did these things to benefit himself or to benefit Jerusalem in his days, but not really with a considerate heart in the sense that he wanted generations that would follow to continue worshiping the

Lord the same way that worship had been instituted in the days of Moses or in the days of Hezekiah.

Verse 20, the rest of the deeds of Hezekiah and all of his might and how he made the pool and the conduit and brought water into the city.

Are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah and Hezekiah slept with his fathers and Manasseh, his son, reigned in his place.

And Manasseh is going to end up being a wicked king, too. So Ahaz, Hezekiah's father, was wicked. And then

Manasseh, Hezekiah's son, is wicked. Because remember, Hezekiah is a very self -centered individual.

And so Manasseh, who comes after him, was not led by his father the way that his father should have guided his son.

And so Hezekiah or Manasseh, rather, is going to come to be a very wicked king. In fact, he was 12 years old when he began to reign, as we read there at the start of 21, chapter 21, and that's where we'll pick up next week.

So this was a pretty good follow up to last week's lessons as we were going through the

Protestant Reformation and talking about the five solas of the Reformation. Hezekiah was a king that brought

Reformation to Judah, Reformation in the temple, tearing down the high places, reinstituting proper worship in Jerusalem, which his father did not do.

And of course, we see that his son didn't do. But yet, Hezekiah's heart was not right with the

Lord. It should have had such a passion for the things of God that he would desire even future generations to worship the

Lord in a right way. And so here we are, generations into the Protestant Reformation, and there are still yet many churches that need reform, that have forgotten the gospel, and that are following along in works that have hearts that are far from God rather than seeking after God and desiring his word to be proclaimed.

They're only considering themselves in the here and now, not considering future generations that need to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ.

So may we have such a love for the gospel that we teach it to our children and they teach it to their children and on and on it goes, that we would be doing this for not just our generation, but for future generations.

Let's pray. Lord God, we thank you for the love for the gospel that you have put into our hearts.

And may we have such a passion for this, that we would teach it to our children and teach them to teach their children so that many generations to come would know the

Lord, our God, who has rescued us out of our slavery to sin and the wages of sin, which is death.

And instead, we've been given your righteousness and made fellow heirs of an eternal kingdom.

Let us continue to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, which has the power to save.

In Jesus name we pray. Amen. Gabriel Hughes is the pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Junction City, Kansas.