Hezekiah Spreads Out the Letter

A king walks into the temple holding a letter. It is full of threats. He does not hide it. He does not tear it up. He opens it out before the Lord, and he prays.

Hezekiah is king of Judah, and Second Kings says he trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel. He cleared away the idols. He even broke up the old bronze snake from the days of Moses, because people had started burning incense to it. But a superpower is on the march. Assyria. In Hezekiah’s fourteenth year, King Sennacherib of Assyria invades Judah and captures its walled towns, one after another. Hezekiah tries to buy peace. He empties the silver from the treasury and strips the gold from the temple doors. It is not enough.

Assyrian commanders arrive outside Jerusalem with a great army. They stand by the channel of the upper pool, and the chief spokesman shouts up at the walls in Hebrew, so that everyone listening can understand. “What are you trusting in? Egypt? Egypt is a cracked reed that will pierce the hand of anyone who leans on it. Don’t let Hezekiah tell you that the Lord will rescue you. Has any god of any nation saved its land from the king of Assyria?” Hezekiah’s officials beg him, “Please, speak to us in Aramaic. Not in Hebrew, where the people on the wall can hear.” He only shouts louder. And the people on the wall say nothing. Not a word. The king had commanded, “Do not answer him.”

When Hezekiah hears the report, he tears his clothes, puts on rough sackcloth, and goes into the house of the Lord. He sends his officials to the prophet Isaiah. “This is a day of trouble,” the message says. “We have no strength left.” Isaiah sends back an answer from God. “Do not be afraid of the words you have heard.” But soon a letter arrives from Sennacherib himself, with the same message. Your God cannot stop me. No god has.

Hezekiah reads the letter. Then he climbs up to the temple, spreads it out before the Lord, and prays.

“Lord, God of Israel, enthroned above the cherubim, you alone are God over all the kingdoms of the earth. You made heaven and earth. Listen, Lord, and hear. Open your eyes, Lord, and see. It is true that the kings of Assyria have destroyed nations and thrown their gods into the fire, for they were no gods, only wood and stone shaped by human hands. Now, Lord our God, save us from his hand, so that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you alone are the Lord.”

Isaiah sends word to the king. God has heard. The king of Assyria has mocked the Holy One of Israel, and he will not get away with it. “He shall not come into this city, nor shoot an arrow there.” That night, the angel of the Lord went out into the Assyrian camp. When morning came, Second Kings says that a hundred and eighty-five thousand of the soldiers lay dead. Sennacherib broke camp and went home to Nineveh. And Jerusalem was still standing.

We have Sennacherib’s side of this story too. His royal annals, written on clay prisms that survive today, boast that he captured forty-six of Hezekiah’s walled cities, and that he shut Hezekiah up in Jerusalem like a bird in a cage. They list the heavy tribute Hezekiah sent. But for all their bragging, the annals never claim that Sennacherib took Jerusalem. Carved stone panels from his palace at Nineveh, now in the British Museum, celebrate his siege of a different Judean city, Lachish.

Hezekiah’s story is told in Second Kings, chapters eighteen and nineteen. He was surrounded, outnumbered and mocked. So he did the bravest thing he knew. He took the threat and laid it out before God. Here is something to think about. What is the letter you are carrying right now, the worry or the fear, and what would it look like to spread it out before the Lord?