Divine Deliverance

Divine Deliverance in Isaiah 38:1–6

Isaiah 38, verses 1 through 6. 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 and said, Please, O Lord, 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. Then the word of the Lord came to Isaiah, Go and say to Hezekiah, Thus says the Lord, the God of David your father, I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears, behold, I will add fifteen years to your life.

I will deliver you and this city out of the hand of the king of Assyria and will defend this city.

Amen.

Hezekiah’s Illness, the Threat of Assyria, and God’s Reversal

You may be seated. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this passage of your mercy to King Hezekiah. We pray that as we study this passage, as we consider your word and the prayer of your servant Hezekiah, that we would understand how we ought to pray before you.

In Jesus' name, amen. So we have had several opportunities as we've looked through this trial that Hezekiah has gone through with the assault of Assyria, to see how he has sought the Lord and how he has prayed and has been instructive to our own prayers.

And each time we've picked out a few things that are fairly apparent in the prayer, not exhausted, but today what we see in Hezekiah's prayers, how he turns to the wall and prays before the Lord, how he weeps bitterly, how he appeals to the Lord, promises, I'd like to break this down into three different aspects for you to consider in your prayers, just to make these easy to memorize.

With some alliteration, that would be privacy, passion, and promises, okay, privacy, passion, and promises. We'll see that Hezekiah prays privately, prays with passion, and he prays according to the promises of God, okay, privacy, passion, and promises.

So just considering this first verse here, in those days Hezekiah became sick and was at the point of death. What are those days? Now, you can remember back when I introduced chapter 36, talked about the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah.

I mentioned at that point how if that is describing the assault of Assyria, then there is a lot that doesn't line up. There is a lot that doesn't line up with the death of Hezekiah and this well-known event of Assyria's assault.

And so what this is talking about, the fourteenth year, is not introducing the events that you see in chapter 36 and chapter 37, but it is introducing the whole of 36 through 39, all of that being that which begins in Hezekiah's fourteenth year.

And so what it says in those days, it is not talking about an event that comes immediately after the previous chapter, it is talking about an event that happens in this whole arc of events which began in Hezekiah's fourteenth year.

And since we see in this passage that there is some threat of Assyria coming, in verse 6, I will deliver you and the city out of the hand of the king of Assyria and will defend the city, then what we know is that chapter 37 hasn't happened yet because Assyria was defeated in chapter 37.

So what this is describing happens before. And then interestingly, when we get to chapter 39, that will also come before chapter 38. Now, there are a few clever books that you may have read or movies that you have seen where the story is told backward and each chapter comes before in time the previous chapter.

Now, there are different reasons that people do this. People do this in order to have some kind of mystery where you're slowly discovering what originally happened. That's not the point here. The reason, it appears, that Isaiah has constructed this story so that each chapter comes before the chapter that preceded it is so that we can get the themes in the correct order.

We can see God's faithfulness in chapters 37 and 38, and then we see in chapters 38 and 39 the question of whether or not His people will be holy in order that He might be faithful to honor their holiness.

As He is holy, will His people be holy? And so it ends all, by the time you get to the end of chapter 39, it ends with this question of will His people be a holy people since He is a holy God? And then the whole rest of the book of Isaiah, Isaiah 39 marking the final chapter of the first half of Isaiah, the whole rest of the book addresses that question of will His people be holy as they go and they face Babylon.

So this is the question and concern and the importance of the timing. Now it says here also in Isaiah, the prophet, the son of Amos came to Him and said to Him, thus says the Lord, set your house in order for you shall die, you shall not recover.

So, Hezekiah is facing some severe kind of illness. We don't know exactly what kind of illness it is. We do know that it requires some sort of ritual cleansing since it tells him that he will have to go to the temple.

We also know that it involves some kind of boil in verse 21. It describes it as boil, so maybe we're to see him as Job under a very great affliction like Job was. But we do know that it is something that has threatened his life.

Thus says the Lord, set your house in order for you shall die, you shall not recover. So this is something that has completely threatened his life. This phrase of setting your house in order is probably apparent to you.

It's a phrase that was used for Ahithophel before he commits suicide. He sets his house in order and then he goes and he commits suicide. It is to finish any of your unfinished business, set in order your last will and testament to make sure that your children have whatever inheritance that they are going to have, to do all these things in order that you might be able to die knowing that you have accomplished whatever it is that you need to accomplish in the limited time that you have.

So he is facing death itself, but it's not merely himself that's facing death, his own people are facing death. There is this looming threat of Assyria, and so it's not just his life that is in the balance, it is the entire life of all the people of Judah that are in the balance.

The question is, will Hezekiah turn to the Lord and secure His blessing or will he continue obstinately and receive the Lord's hand of judgment, thus ending himself and his whole people? And so he turns to the Lord and he prays, and we'll look at some of the features of the prayer in a moment, but I want to skip ahead to the answer.

The answer is, then the word of the Lord came to Isaiah, go and say to Hezekiah, thus says the Lord, the God of David your father, I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears. Behold, I will add fifteen years to your life.

I will deliver you and the city out of the hand of the king of Assyria. So God answers mercifully, He answers graciously and abundantly. He adds fifteen years to Hezekiah's life. That is enough time for him to raise up a son in order that that son can come after him.

Manasseh, his son, becomes king when he is twelve years old. Hezekiah has fifteen more years. That means that there will be three more years he'll have a son and be able to raise him up until twelve years old, and then he'll die.

Having raised that child to be a twelve-year-old, twelve being the age at which Jesus goes in the temple and is about his father's business, you know, this is a, it's very young, but it is an appropriate age for him to take over.

So God is very merciful in giving him exactly the amount of time needed here for him to have a son that would take over the throne. And this is salvation not just for himself, but this is salvation for the whole people, in fact, this is said twice that he delivers the city out of the hand of the king of Syria.

I will deliver you and the city out of the hand of the king of Syria, and I will defend the city. It's said twice for emphasis, God's measurable kindness to Hezekiah here. Now not only all this, but this answer that Hezekiah has received is one that comes very quickly.

This is not that obvious here in Isaiah, in fact, it's not really said at all, but if you go and you look at 2 Kings chapter 20 and you see the same narrative, we learn that Isaiah has not even exited the palace by the time he receives this response and has to turn around and go give Hezekiah this response.

Okay, so a lot of times God requires us to labor for long periods of time in prayer before we get a response. This one, God's response came before Isaiah had even left the building. Now is this right for God to even give this answer to prayer?

This is a question a lot of people have. I mean, consider the statement that God had made through Isaiah a minute ago. Thus says the Lord, set your house in order for you shall die, you shall not recover.

Okay, God has said He will not recover. How then is it okay for God to say, I changed my mind, you will recover? Okay, how is that appropriate? It is always the case that God, in having already told us of His character, that He always honors repentance.

There is an understanding that all of His judgments are reversible to the one who repents. This is simply an understood premise that frames any additional statement that God made. God has been perfectly clear about His character.

None of the statements He makes to the effect of certain judgment are ever meant to reject that foundational premise that He has already made clear in His Word. And this is, you see this frequently throughout Scripture, right?

Nineveh, there's a promise that God will come and destroy the people, and the people repent and God relents. This is not a rejection of His character, this is a confirmation of His character that He always honors repentance.

You see this also with Sarah and Abimelech, you know, a statement of judgment made against Abimelech, God relents from Abimelech, frequent throughout Scripture. And why is it that God even gives these pronouncements of judgments?

Why would He even tell Nineveh that He's going to destroy them? Why not just destroy them? Why would He even tell Hezekiah that He's going to destroy them, destroy him? Why not just destroy him? The answer is so that it would prompt him to repentance.

If you recall from chapter 22, what was the sin in chapter 22? In that passage, Shebna, who was over the whole household, had been given a promise that He would be destroyed, and He goes and He makes a big tomb for Himself.

This was not the response that God wanted. He wanted repentance and He would have been kind to Shebna, but instead when other people turn to the Lord and He is saved, He is removed from His position and removed down from, instead of being head of the house, to being secretary.

So God's statements of judgment are not for us to seize with fatalism and say, well, this is just how it's going to be. His statements are given in the context, in the framework of His character, which always honors repentance.

Privacy in Prayer

All right, so let's consider Hezekiah's prayer. First, then Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to the Lord. Okay, this guy turns his face to the wall and he prays to the Lord. Now why is it that he does this?

When you first read this, you know, before comparing it to the parallel passages, etc., it may appear that he's turning towards the temple, right? This is something you see several times in Scripture.

I mean, you even see Daniel turn towards the temple, even after the temple's not in use, because there is something special about turning towards the temple in prayer for this people prior to 70 AD. You know, Solomon talks about God honoring prayers when they face toward the temple.

But this is not what is in mind here. What Isaiah is recording is the fact that Hezekiah goes and he makes his prayers privately before the Lord. He faces the wall. He goes to his prayer closet, his prayer corner, whatever you want to call it, and he prays before the Lord.

Matthew 5, excuse me, Matthew 6, 5 says,. And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and in the street corners. They may be seen by others.

Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. So it's important that you go before the Lord in prayer privately. Now this does not mean that there is no occasion for public prayer. There are plenty of occasions for public prayer.

It's right for us to pray together. But none of these should ever be to the exclusion or neglect of private prayer. I've read a number of books on prayer by a number, I mean like three, you know, it's not a crazy number or anything, but I've noticed that every single older work I end up using that talks about prayer, whether it be a full-length book or something shorter, always mentions, they always make the observation, and I appeal to this because I don't know it personally from that much experience, but what they appeal to in their experiences anecdotally is the first thing that always goes in an apostate's life is private prayer.

It's the secret thing that nobody else knows about that goes first is private prayer. You look at your own life, and you look, when are you praying? Is it only when you're around other people, or is it by yourself when you're alone and there's no one to see?

Are you praying before the Lord privately? This is the kind of prayer that God rewards, not that He wouldn't reward right public prayer, but He especially demands, there is a special place for private prayer, for private worship before Him.

Passion in Prayer

You also see here in Isaiah 38, so He turns His face to the wall and prays to the Lord, and then at the end of that paragraph it says, and Hezekiah wept bitterly. He wept bitterly. And God responds to this, that's not just an arbitrary detail, He says, I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears.

God regards the tears of Hezekiah, the tears are meaningful to Him. Prayer should not just be private, it should be passionate. We should be passionate in our prayers. This recalls the beginning of Exodus where God has heard the cries of His people.

Hezekiah is a person of God, he has cried to the Lord, God hears him. And it is right for us to have the right kind of emotion in prayer. You know, the Bible talks a lot about having the right kind of emotion.

This is something that people know naturally that they are to cultivate emotions rightly. Why do people feast, right? You know, when you go and you go to Thanksgiving, you eat your Thanksgiving dinner or lunch, as it were, you know, and people feast and they drink wine and they eat a lot of food.

Why do they do that? It is to make their joy complete, right? They are joyful, they know they should be joyful, they eat the feast, they drink wine to make their joy complete. Okay, if someone is sad, someone is mourning the loss of someone, why do they consider some keepsakes of that person while they are mourning them?

Why do they, you know, read sad stories, watch sad movies, do sad things? Why do they do that? You would think, okay, you are sad, you do not want to be sad, why would you do these things that make you more sad?

It is to make their grief complete. You know, there is something significant about catharsis, you know, it is a, it is, yeah, I do not know if that word has more baggage associated than I am aware, but, you know, the idea of making your grief complete is a good thing when grief is a right to have.

When joy is a right to have, it is a right to make your joy complete. Well, this is true in prayer, and prayer is, prayer is designed to make the emotions more complete. Why is it that when you go to God, you are to go to Him with imprecatory psalms?

You are to develop righteous anger in your prayers. Why is it that you should go to Him in repentance with sorrow? Because you should be cultivating in your prayers godly sorrow, even more repentance, even more sorrow.

And then you should pray, and you should ask for boldness.

Why?

So that you can go before the Lord with even greater confidence. Okay, you should be cultivating in your prayers emotion, and then on top of that, those emotions, I think this is okay for me to say, your emotions make those prayers more effective.

Not because God is manipulated by your emotions. Okay, there is no amount of crying that you can do that will manipulate God. He is not flattered by any kind of statement that you can make. He is not deceived by anything you do.

He's not, yeah, you're not, I forget the way the phrase goes, wrapped around your finger. You know, it's not, God is not, you're not that spoiled little child that can get whatever you want from God just by showing the right emotions.

But He has given us prayer not because He needs to be told anything. He already knows everything. He knows what is right and wise. He knows what we need, etc. He gives prayer for our sake, and one of the purposes of prayer is for us to cultivate the right emotions.

And so as you are cultivating the right emotions in prayer, that prayer is accomplishing its purpose so that it is not needed anymore, right, so that it is not as needed anymore anyway. So if you go about prayer in a way that's not cultivating right emotions, that's not developing righteous anger where you should be developing righteous anger, that's not developing godly sorrow where you should be developing godly sorrow, why would God hear those prayers if the purpose of prayer is not having the effect it is supposed to have in your soul?

You still need to pray more, okay? So right prayer is passionate prayer. Now this does not mean that every kind of passion is a good kind of passion, right? The Bible says be anxious for nothing. You shouldn't be getting more and more anxious in your prayer.

Your anxiety should be relieved in prayer, okay? So not every kind of emotion is right in prayer. Anger towards God, it's not appropriate.

He is all wise.

He knows what He's doing. So not every prayer is right, not every emotion is right, but we should be pouring out our hearts to the Lord, as it describes in the Psalms, that's a phrase that's used, pouring out your heart to the Lord.

Promises in Prayer

Now I mentioned privacy, passion, now promises. And He said this, verse 3, "'Please, O Lord, remember how I've walked before you in faithfulness with the whole heart and have done what is good in your sight.'".

Why should God remember these particular things? You see a hint later when God responds, "'The word of the Lord came to Isaiah, go and say to Hezekiah, thus says the Lord, the God of David your father,' that's significant, "'I've heard your prayer, I've seen your tears, behold, I will add 15 years to your life, I'll deliver you,' et cetera.".

He is the God of David, and He answers all this for the sake of His servant David, even as it said in the previous chapter that He answers Hezekiah's prayers for the sake of His servant David. Now these statements about Him walking uprightly, et cetera, these are alluding to a promise that was made to His father David.

Verse Kings 2 verse 4 said, "'That the Lord may establish His word as He spoke concerning me,' this is David speaking, "'if your sons pay close attention to their ways and walk before me in faithfulness with all their hearts and with all their soul, you shall not lack a man on the throne of Israel.'".

So what is required in order for childless Hezekiah to continue living and his line to continue? He needs to walk before God in faithfulness with all his heart, and then he won't lack a man on the throne of Israel.

In the next chapter, verse Kings 3, Solomon says, "'You have shown great and steadfast love to your servant David, my father, because he walked before you in faithfulness and righteousness and uprightness of heart toward you, and you have kept for him this great and steadfast love and have given him a son to sit on the throne this day.

So it is necessary that those who sit on the throne of David must walk in uprightness and faithfulness in order that there will continue to be one sitting on the throne of David.". So what Hezekiah is appealing to here are the promises of God, and God, in mentioning the name of David, is confirming that it is right for him to appeal to those promises.

Now you can appeal to the promises of God as well. There are all kinds of promises in Scripture that He has given, and it is not wrong for you to appeal even to faithfulness. Now, this is something that is particular to David in that there is a particular promise around his faithfulness, but God has made very clear promises about those who seek Him.

Hebrews 11, 6 says, "'Without faith it is impossible to please God, because the one who comes to Him must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.'". He has promised that He rewards those who seek Him.

So you can appeal to your own faithfulness, not as merit that makes you right before God, but as, not as something that is worthy in and of itself, but as something that has an overlap with the promises of God, the promises of God having included the promise that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.

So appeal to the promise of God, appeal to His kindness, don't, not to your own goodness as being something that He owes you anything for, but to the fact that He has bound Himself and made Him obligated His own self to His people and His children through His promises as the only way that you can get God's, you know, secure an obligation to you.

God owes no one anything by nature. He is God, He is the Creator, we are the creature, but He has, out of His own condescension, made promises to us most graciously so that we would be able to lay hold on those and say that there is something owed from Him to us.

It's incredible to be able to say that, it's a very great kindness of God that God would ever bind Himself to us so that we would, so that He would need to be faithful in that.

Way.

So consider all these things, consider the importance of private prayer, passionate prayer, appealing to the promises of God. All this is very important. If you see these things failing, especially private prayer, you know, that's the canary in the coal mine that indicates there's something serious going on.

And God brings about serious things in our lives to drive us to prayer, to make us realize our sin, our need for Him. You know, it's likely that, it's not said explicitly, but it seems to be the case that this judgment has been brought on Hezekiah because of his sin, because he has trusted in Egypt, because he has trusted in foreign nations and has not trusted in the Lord as.

He ought.

And so that's why James 5, 14 says, "'Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up.

And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.'". You know, sin can bring on great judgments. Even in this life, if you are faced with a great affliction, a very serious kind of sickness, we're not talking about, you know, the regular kinds of colds that everyone gets, but you should ask yourself, is it some great sin of mine that has brought this on?

And call the elders to pray with you. We've done this many times for people who have had illnesses that fit this category. But how do you make sure that your prayer is heard? In at least these ways, with privacy, with passion, and with the promises of God.

Christ’s Prayer, His Suffering, and Our Deliverance

Now, you can ask yourself at this point, well, how is it that I can know that I have enough private prayer? How is it that I can be passionate enough? How is it that I can, you know, lay on to enough promises, appeal to them rightly, etc.?

You will never, you will never be perfect in this. But our hope is not in our own prayers and our own abilities, it is in the prayers of Christ. You see, the people, and everyone's life hangs in the balance here, all of Judah, all their lives hang in the balance of Hezekiah and his prayer.

Okay, so they all die if Hezekiah does not go to the Lord in prayer rightly, but Hezekiah goes to the Lord rightly. All the people are afflicted by Hezekiah's sickness, even if they don't have boils on them, his sickness is a blight on all of them because they will all die on behalf of that sickness.

Later on in Isaiah, he even talks about the afflictions that the Messiah would bear. Matthew 8, 17, citing that says, This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah, He took our illnesses and bore our diseases.

All of this, this king of Judah praying for his people who are all going to die if he dies. Okay, this is supposed to point us forward to the great king of Judah, the final king of Judah, the king of the Jews himself, Jesus Christ.

All his people would die if he was not saved from death. They would all die. He was bearing the sickness of every single one of us, and he prayed as he ought. He prayed privately, very often, going and spending time with the Father, even in the garden, all of the other disciples can't bother to stay with him, and he prays, and he prays passionately, praying with sweat like drops of blood, not meaning, I don't believe this means literal blood, I think it's talking about the viscosity of blood, making larger droplets.

He is sweating so profusely that they're drops that would be something that you would expect for a more viscous liquid. He prays passionately before the Lord, and of course, he naturally appeals to the promises of God, the promise that God has given to save his soul from death.

And you see this even when he's tempted by Satan, he's appealing to the promises of God one after the other. And the people are saved not by their own appeals, they are saved ultimately by the appeal of the great king of the Jews, the great king of Judah, Jesus himself.

Hebrews 5, 7 says, in the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence.

Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what was suffered. Okay, so in the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, loud cries and tears to him who was able to save him from death.

Do you think this was talking about a prayer, any particular prayer in particular? Why not? Why not the prayer in the garden? Why not the prayer where he is praying for the Father to deliver him from death?

And he is answered. Now, I hear a lot of people talk about this as though he requests, please spare me, and the request is rejected, and that this is some kind of evidence of faithfulness because Jesus is praying even though he knows the prayer is not going to be answered.

Wrong. That is not what Hebrews 5 says. He prayed to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. He was delivered from death on the third day. Okay, yes, he died on the cross, but he was delivered from death, and all his people delivered from death with him, raised to new life, given the promise of their bodies coming back from the grave on that final day as well.

This is the greatness of Christ's prayer. It's not a prayer that he offered and then was slammed down as not good enough. No, it was a prayer that he was offered and was heard so that he was raised from the dead.

And all his people with him.

When Hezekiah is healed from his illness and allowed to continue living for 15 years so that after, if you remember the promise that he was given in the previous chapter, that three years would go by where there's more grain and more grain until finally the crops would take root and grow upward.

After that three years, interestingly enough, same time period when Manasseh is born, and the root goes down and bears fruit upward, and he is given a son that leads to this Messiah, and then 12 years later, finally, he dies in accordance with the promises of God, but that line continues onward and his people live.

This is all pointing forward to that great Messiah who prays on behalf of his people, raised his people to new life with him. Him praying for himself, raising himself up to new life. Him praying for his people, raising them up to new life.

Our prayers are ultimately not in our own ability but in His. So when you pray, pray privately, pray passionately, pray appealing to the promises of God, and trust in Jesus Christ knowing that He is our great High Priest who is praying even greater prayers.

He is the great King of Judah who is praying on our own behalf and has already prayed on our own behalf and even prayed for himself, delivering him from death as well as us.

Amen.

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for the great prayers of Jesus Christ. We ask that as we go to you in prayer today that we would be trusting in Him and His mediation of our prayers. Amen.