This episode uncovers the mysterious ways of God through the tumultuous reigns of two contrasting kings, Sennacherib and Hezekiah. Join us as we delve into the biblical narrative of Assyria’s siege of Jerusalem, Hezekiah’s heartfelt prayer, and the divine intervention that followed. Learn how one king’s hubris and another’s faith reshaped the course of history, providing timeless lessons on the power of prayer and humility before God.
00:00:02 Introduction to Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
SPEAKER 03 :
There are some strange things about the way God works that I’m not sure I understand. Now, there’s nothing surprising about that. But I know what God does. It just isn’t always clear why he does it the way he does. One thing that came to mind when I was reading through 2 Kings, I came to Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, as a case in point. Isaiah, when he’s prophesying about this period of time, talks about the Assyrian being the rod of God’s anger. In other words, God picks up the king of Assyria as a chastising, as a Cain, to go out and Cain a bad boy. And so consequently, he actually commissions him to go down and chastise Israel and finally Judah. So what Sennacherib will say when he comes down to Jerusalem to take it is true. He said, I didn’t come down here without God sending me down here. He was a rod in God’s hand to chastise Israel. But the lesson that kind of creeps out of this to me is, if God ever gives you a job to do, it’s not a good idea to get on your high horse as you do it. When the king of Assyria besieged Jerusalem, he said, God sent me down here. Now, I’m not sure he had any reason to think that. It may have been no more than a ploy on his part. But whatever the case, he went way over the line, as Isaiah will say in his prophecy. He wrote what I would call a smart aleck letter to Hezekiah that insulted God. He ran by all these cities. Look, this God didn’t keep me from taking his city, and I was able to destroy this God. I cast their gods into the fire. I burned them all. What in the world makes you think Jehovah’s going to be any better than they are? And that was just too much. Hezekiah had the presence of mind to take that letter into the house of God and lay it out before God. He prayed a very short prayer. He acknowledged the greatness of God. He made one request. Now, therefore, O Lord our God, I pray, save us from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you are the Lord God, you alone. The you alone is important because what Sennacherib had done was tell him about all these gods that he had destroyed, all these gods whose cities he had destroyed. Now he says he needs to learn that you really are God and that you are the only one. God seems to have rarely communicated with any of his kings, so what he did was send word through a prophet, a man familiar to us all. His name was Isaiah. But he didn’t even go to see the king. He sent to him. And he said, “‘Thus saith the Lord God of Israel,’ Because you have prayed to me against Sennacherib, king of Assyria, I have heard. And I was so struck by that, that God didn’t say, because of all the stuff he’s done, I’m going to do this and so. He said, because you prayed, which implies that if he hadn’t, history would have been written differently. Because you have prayed to me against the king of Assyria, I have heard. The reply God gives is much rather longer than the prayer that Hezekiah made on this occasion. He said, The virgin, the daughter of Zion, has despised you, laughed you to scorn. The daughter of Jerusalem has shaken her head behind your back. What he’s saying is, our teenage girls are making fun of you. Who have you reproached and blasphemed? Against whom have you raised your voice and lifted up your eyes on high? Against the Holy One of Israel. By your messengers you have reproached the Lord and said, Well, by the multitude of my chariots I have come down to the height of the mountains, to the limits of Lebanon. I will cut down its tall cedars, all of its choice cypress trees. I will enter the extremities of its borders. I will go into its fruitful forest. I have dug and drunk strange water, and with the soles of my feet I have dried up all the brooks of defense. You boasted yourself, said God. Didn’t you hear long ago how I made it? From ancient times that I formed it, now I have brought it to pass that you should be for crushing fortified cities into heaps of ruins. That’s the reason their inhabitants had little power, is because I wrote this, because I brought it to pass. They were dismayed and confounded. They were like the grass of the field and the green herb and the grass on the housetops, grain blighted before it’s grown. But I know where you live. I know you’re going out. I know you’re coming in. And I know your rage against me. Because your rage against me and your tumult have come up to my ears. You’ve made all this noise and I have finally heard it. I’m going to put my hook in your nose, my bridle in your lips, and I will turn you back by the way which you came. This shall be a sign to you. You shall eat this year the stuff that grows of itself in the field. That’s because they had the city under siege and nobody was planting. In the second year, what springs from the same? The third year, we’re going to sow and reap plant vineyards and eat the fruit of them. Why? Well, because the Assyrian will be gone. Therefore, thus saith the Lord concerning the king of Assyria, he shall not come into this city. He shall not shoot an arrow there. He’s not going to come before it with a shield nor build a siege mound against it. By the way he came, by the same shall he return, and he shall not come into this city, says the Lord, for I will defend this city and save it for my own sake and for my servant David’s sake. What an exchange, as I said, this answer that God gave quite a lot longer than the prayer that was made to him about it. And I’ve often thought about this as I’ve, in my own case, have had reason to go before God and spread something out before Him. A letter, a problem, something I was trying to write and having no luck with. To take these things, spread them out before God, and talk to Him about it is a great privilege. And oftentimes gets an answer longer than the prayer itself. It came to pass on a certain night that the angel of the Lord went out and killed in the camp of the Assyrians 185,000 men. Overnight. We don’t know how he did it. Don’t know what situation. Well, you just know when the people rose up early in the morning, there were 185,000 corpses, all dead. So Sennacherib, king of Assyria, departed, went away, returned home, and stayed at Nineveh. It came to pass, as he was worshiping the temple of his god, his sons, Adrammelech and Sharizer, struck him down with a sword, and they escaped into the land of Ararat. And Esarhaddon, his son, reigned in his place. You kind of have to wonder a little bit about this man. What kind of a person brings his own sons to the point that they would kill him? Now there comes in all of this a very important lesson. In those days, Hezekiah was sick to death. And the prophet Isaiah, the son of Amos, came down to him and said to him, Thus saith the Lord, Set your house in order, for you shall die and not live. Wow. You know, coming from a prophet of God, one whom you know tells the truth, one who spoke for God when the Assyrians were sent back into their land to come in and say, get your affairs in order, balance your bank accounts, do whatever it is you’ve got to do because you’re going to die. You’re not going to live. This disease is going to take you. Well, Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to the Lord, saying, Oh, I beseech you, Lord, remember how I have walked before you in truth with a perfect heart. I have done what’s good in your eyes. And he wept sore. I mean, after all, he was a man in his powers. He was not yet 40 years old when this happened. And he wasn’t really through living yet. He came to pass. Before Isaiah even got out of the palace, he was out in the middle court, the word of the Lord came to him. He says, Go back and tell Hezekiah, the captive of my people. Thus saith the Lord, the God of David your father, I have heard your prayer. I’ve seen your tears. Behold, I will heal you. On the third day you shall go up into the house of the Lord, and I will add unto your days fifteen years. And I will deliver you in this city out of the hand of the king of Assyria. I will defend this city for my own sake and for David my servant’s sake. So Isaiah said, Take a lump of figs. And they took it and laid it on the boil. Apparently he had a very bad boil. And he recovered. Now don’t get any bright ideas about the healing powers of figs. If God had not given him life, they could have covered him with figs, and he still would have died. Well, Hezekiah said to Isaiah, How on earth am I going to know that this is going to happen? Now, most of us would have said, Well, thank you. I’m very glad that’s going to happen, and I will be up in the house of the Lord the third day. Thank you very much. But there’s more to this.
SPEAKER 02 :
Stay with me. When I get back, we’ll explain it. Isaiah is the most loved and admired of all the Old Testament prophets. If you would like to receive a free introductory CD from the album Isaiah the Messiah’s Prophet, write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll-free… 1-888-BIBLE-44. That’s 1-888-242-5344. And tell us the call letters of this radio station.
SPEAKER 03 :
So Hezekiah, with a natural bit of uncertainty, wanted to know, well, is there a sign that God will give me that I’ll be able to go up to the house of the Lord the third day? And Isaiah said, well, okay. Let’s give you a sign. Here’s the sign that the Lord will do the thing that he has spoken. Do you want the shadow to go down 10 degrees or back 10 degrees on the sundial? Well, Hezekiah said, well, it normally does go down 10 degrees. No, no. Let the shadow go back 10 degrees. So Isaiah the prophet asked God, and he brought the shadow 10 degrees back, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz. Now, don’t go looking around the Internet for astronomical evidence that this happened sometime in history. God didn’t move the sun. He didn’t back up the rotation of the earth. He is quite capable of the simple refraction of light to make it work. That’s no trick. Probably some magicians could even make something like it work. Well, about that time, Barad-ach Baladon, the son of Baladon, the king of Babylon, sent letters and a present to Hezekiah. He’d heard he’d been sick. So Hezekiah listened to them, showed them all the house of his precious things. They came on a visit. He showed them the silver, the gold, the spices, the precious ointment, all of the house of his armor, everything found in his treasures. There wasn’t a thing in the world he didn’t show them. This man is just a little bit too trusting. Then came Isaiah the prophet to King Hezekiah and said, What did these men say? Where did they come from? And Hezekiah said, Well, they come from a far country, from Babylon, from a long way off. And Isaiah said, Well, what have they seen in your house? And Hezekiah answered, Well, everything. There was nothing I didn’t show them. Show them royal treasures. And Isaiah said to Hezekiah, Hear the word of the Lord. The days are coming when everything in your house, all that your fathers have laid up on the store unto this day, are going to be carried into Babylon. Nothing shall be left, saith the Lord. Of your sons that shall issue from you which you shall beget, they’re going to take them away, and they will be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.” And Hezekiah, hearing all this, said to Isaiah, Well, the word of the Lord is good that you have spoken. And he said, Is it not good if peace and truth be in my days? That’s a curiously self-centered response. Most men that I know of, if they heard their boys were going to be eunuchs in the palace of a foreign king, would be devastated by it. But he’s kind of like Ahab in this regard. He said, okay, fine. It won’t be in my days. Let my sons take care of themselves. The rest of the acts of Hezekiah, all of his might, how he made a pool and a conduit and brought water into the city, and that’s an interesting story, by the way, all by itself. Hezekiah’s tunnel, whereby he made a huge tunnel, brought water all the way down from the spring Gihon into a bigger water inside the walls of the city so they could withstand a siege. You can actually go to Jerusalem. You can actually walk through that tunnel, or at least you could. With the political situation being what it is, I don’t know what the circumstances are now. But I did see… An inscription in, I believe, the Museum of St. Sophia in Istanbul that was taken from the wall of that tunnel. That was an inscription that was written there when the men who were tunneling from both ends of this thing met in the middle of it. It happened. It really was there. There’s a little more to this story, though, than that. These events are also described in 2 Chronicles, and there’s something in this that we all ought to take heed to. 2 Chronicles 32, verse 24. In those days, Hezekiah was sick to the death. Okay, we’re talking about a time we have seen in 2 Kings. He prayed to the Lord, he spoke to him, and he gave him a sign. We know all about that. But, verse 25, Hezekiah rendered not again according to the benefit done to him, for his heart was lifted up. Therefore there was wrath upon him and upon Judah and upon Jerusalem. And right there we have maybe a small explanation for the curiously self-centered response when he heard about what was going to happen to his own boys. When he was healed, when this miracle took place, when he saw the shadow go back in a sundial back up ten degrees, his heart was lifted up. And you know, this is not an uncommon response to people who have had a miracle in their lives. They seem to think that’s God’s approval. That’s kind of the good housekeeping seal of approval. It’s God put his stamp on them and say, oh, I’m in good with God. And they go on living in a way lacking the humility, lacking the service, and they don’t return to God anymore. the glory, the thanksgiving, and the service that’s due to him. It may be it would have been better for Hezekiah to die when his time came. It brought to mind a passage in Ecclesiastes, the ninth chapter. He said, “…I returned and I saw unto the sun that the race is not to the swift.” nor the battle to the strong, nor yet bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, nor favor to men of skill. But time and chance happens to them all. You don’t need to go patting yourself on the back about anything. And then he goes on to say, For man knows not his time. As the fishes are taken in an evil net, as the birds that are caught in a snare, so are the sons of men snared in an evil time when it falls suddenly upon them. And when is that time? Not one of us knows. Isaiah, in his prophecy, made a statement. I don’t know of any connection to Hezekiah in it, but it is interesting that Isaiah is the one that says it. It’s in the 57th chapter, verse 1. The righteous perishes, and no man lays it to heart. Merciful men are taken away, no one considering that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come. What an interesting idea. I think most of us, we read that, we think, well, there’s a lot of bad days ahead of us out here, and a person who dies now won’t have to go through the Great Tribulation or some terrible thing. I’m not sure that’s all there is to this. Because what happens is when a man is righteous, when he is a good man, a merciful man, and God takes him at a time that seems early, God has taken him away from the evil that he might do later in his life as he becomes lifted up in his own eyes, as he becomes old and foolish, or whatever it is that we do. And we know we’re all capable of this, to screw up our lives. When a good man or a good woman dies, we should lay it to heart. They no longer have the chance to go wrong like Hezekiah got with his extra 15 years. Grab a pencil and a piece of paper. I want to give you an address and a phone number, information about a free offer.
SPEAKER 02 :
And then I’ll be right back. For a free copy of this radio program that you can share with friends and others, write or call this week only. And request the program titled, Kings Number 24. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44. And tell us the call letters of this radio station. Second Kings 21.
SPEAKER 03 :
Manasseh, the son of Hezekiah, was 12 years old when he began to reign, and he reigned 55 years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Hephzibah. You know, I think people have actually named their daughters Hephzibah. I would never even think of doing that for two reasons. One is I don’t think any one of us would like to use that as a name, but I also wouldn’t want to use the name of a mother of one of the worst kings in Israelite history. He did what was evil in the sight of the Lord after all the abominations of the heathen whom the Lord had cast out before the children of Israel. He did the stuff that Canaanites were doing before Israel ever entered the land. He was 12 years old when all this started, and you have to lay a lot of this at his mama’s feet. Beyond question. Fifty-five years is a long time to have to put up with a man like this. But Israel did. There were people who died not ever having realized or being aware of any other person being king in all their lives. There’s an irony in this. that this man of all the kings was the longest reigning of all the Judean kings. It just gave him more time to do evil. He built again the high places that Hezekiah, his father, had destroyed. Remember them? Those places of idolatry, and more than idolatry, of temple prostitution, probably the buying and selling of little girls and little boys as temple prostitutes. He made an Asherah pole, worshiping the goddess Astarte, as did Ahab, the king of Israel. He worshiped the host of heaven and served them. He built altars in the house of the Lord, in the temple, of which the Lord said, In Jerusalem I will put my name. He built altars for all the hosts of heaven in the two courts of the house of God. And as if that weren’t enough, he made his son pass through the fire and observed times, used enchantments, dealt with familiar spirits and wizards. He brought much wickedness in the sight of the Lord to provoke him to anger. It’s almost as though this man set out to see what he could do to stick it in God’s face. over and over again. And he set a graven image of the Asherah which he had made in the house of God, the house of which the Lord had said to David and Solomon his son, in this house in Jerusalem that I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel will I put my name forever. And this fool put an Asherah in that house with all that that symbolized. You know, people talk about the old feminine principle that got wiped out when the masculine principle won in Israel. What they’re talking about here is this feminine symbolism, this feminine idol that did more to destroy womanhood than any other force in the course of history. So he just brought it right back. Not only did he bring it back, he didn’t bring it on a hill across from the temple. He put it right in the temple itself. God says, this is the place I said I’d put my name forever. I said I would not make the feet of Israel move anymore out of this land I gave to their fathers if they would just obey me, if they would observe all that I commanded them and all the law that my servant Moses commanded them. But they wouldn’t listen. And Manasseh seduced them to do more evil than did the nations whom the Lord destroyed from before the children of Israel. Now, you may wonder, how in the world is that possible? How could he have done more than they did? Well, the answer is, he did all they did, and then he also brought in the other gods around the nations, and he brought in more of it. And the Lord spoke by his servants the prophet, saying, Because Manasseh king of Judah has done these abominations, and has done wickedly above all that the Amorites did which were before him, and has made Judah sin with his idols. Therefore thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Behold, I am bringing such evil upon Jerusalem and Judah, that whoever hears of it, both his ears shall tingle. I will stretch over Jerusalem the line of Samaria and the plummet of the house of Ahab. What he’s saying is, I’m going to measure Israel. I’m going to measure them according to the measuring instruments I measured Samaria and Ahab. And I will wipe Jerusalem as a man wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down, And I will forsake the remnant of my inheritance and deliver them into the hand of their enemies. They shall become a prey, a spoil to all their enemies, because they have done what was evil in my sight and have provoked me to anger since the day their fathers came out of Egypt unto this day. Moreover, you mean there’s more? Yeah, there’s more. Manasseh shed innocent blood very much until he had filled Jerusalem from one end to the other, on top of his sin that he made Judah to sin, in doing what was evil in the sight of the Lord. And the rest of the acts of Manasseh, all the stuff he did, all his sin he sinned, aren’t they written in the book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah? And Manasseh slept with his fathers and was buried in the garden of his own house. Unfortunately, not soon enough. This evil man took Israel so far down this path. You know, if you really want to understand just how bad they got, you have to look at God’s judgment upon them. Because there is no way that God would have put a people through all of this for nothing more than going up in a grove somewhere and lighting some incense candles and burning incense to some other god. You can only understand how bad they got by how they were treated in the end of their history. Maybe we should ask about this road we’re on.
SPEAKER 02 :
How far do we want to go? The Born to Win radio program with Ronald L. Dart is sponsored by Christian Educational Ministries and made possible by donations from listeners like you. If you can help, please send your donation to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at 1-877-7000. 888-BIBLE44 and visit us online at borntowin.net.
SPEAKER 01 :
Stay in touch with the new Born to Win with Ronald L. Dart app. This app has all of your favorite Ronald L. Dart radio messages, sermons, articles, and it even has a digital Bible. Simply search on the iOS or Android app store to download it for free today.
