Fire in the Hole

“The LORD spake also unto me again, saying, Forasmuch as this people refuseth the waters of Shiloah that go softly, and rejoice in Rezin and Remaliah's son; Now therefore, behold, the Lord bringeth up upon them the waters of the river, strong and many, even the king of Assyria, and all his glory: and he shall come up over all his channels, and go over all his banks:

And he shall pass through Judah; he shall overflow and go over, he shall reach even to the neck; and the stretching out of his wings shall fill the breadth of thy land, O Immanuel.” Isaiah 8:5-8

 

Twenty minutes can be a long time when you are in a time of desperation, but what about when it is going backwards?  That was the sign God gave Hezekiah to show him just how much he could trust in the Lord’s deliverance.

But that deliverance was not given freely.

The kingdom of Israel had already fully given itself over to idolatry and sin.  They used to be the children of God but had set up golden calves to worship and had assimilated all the idolatrous ways of the worldly kingdoms around them.  And now they were going up against the kingdom of Judah to destroy it. 

Remaliah’s son, the king of Israel, had become confederate with Rezin, the king of Syria, and together they constituted a formidable threat to the safety of Judah.  Ahaz, the king of Judah at the time, was scared out of his wits, but instead of trusting in God, decided to gather up all the riches he could to bribe the Assyrians, another heathen kingdom, to protect him. 

God was furious.  Ahaz wasn’t a good king to begin with, and this just made it worse.  He was selling out the people of God in a compromise with heathen kings because he wasn’t righteous enough to turn to God.  He didn’t trust God, so he decided to trust the devil.

Everybody knows that whenever you make a deal with the devil, it won’t last long.  And this one didn’t either.

Because of Ahaz’s unbelief and his desire to become just like the worldly pagan kingdoms around him, the judgment of God began to roll against His people, “even to the neck” – right up to the very gates of Jerusalem.  Assyria, the very kingdom that Ahaz had bribed, decided to invade Judah and carry her away.

But Hezekiah was made of other stuff.

Faced with extinction by the formidable army of the Assyrians outside the gate, Hezekiah did not turn to some other worldly kingdom to save him, but spread his prayers out before the God of Israel in abject humility and repentance, throwing his fate into the hands of God and trusting in His mercy.

It looked bad for the home team.  Assyria was gobbling up all the countries around him like a kid eating candy. They had taken all their cities of Judah except for Jerusalem, and now they were outside the walls licking their lips like hungry wolves.  But God gave Hezekiah a sign.  He would roll back the sun 10 degrees. 

I’m not all that smart, but I figure that anybody that can push the sun backwards is the One I’m going to trust, and Hezekiah believed the same thing.

As I see the paths that modern Christianity has taken in a downward slide to become more like the worldly religions around them, I wonder if they have become like Ahaz.  It’s not just their new types of dazzling entertainment and glitz that bothers me, but more importantly, it is their compromise of the hard edge of the Gospel with inoffensive messages.  While that may give them what they would call “a greater appeal” to sinners, it does not bring repentance – and repentance is what we need.

If we have become more like Ahaz, then can we expect the same judgment?  Even up to the neck?

And when judgment does begin to fall, where will we find leaders like Hezekiah?

It may be that we need to face a specter of extinction with the enemy right outside the gates of Zion to get us to cry out to God for a complete restoration of a church that has forgotten her roots.  

Sometimes that’s what it takes to get our attention.