Hezekiah: When Good Kings Happen to Bad People

 “Hezekiah: When Good Kings Happen to Bad People”

 Message @ Jericho Ridge Community Church – Sunday, July 28, 2019

Text: 2 Kings 18&19 // Series: 2 Kings: Faith in Faithlessness  

Good morning.  Welcome here, friends.  My name is Brad Sumner, I’m part of the teaching and leadership team here at Jericho Ridge and it is our privilege and pleasure to have you here with us today.   

As a pastor, I get to visit a lot of people in the hospital.  And beside most every bed, there’s a screen that looks something like this.  And it’s hooked up to all kinds of machines and monitors and often because I have a hospital badge, people think I know what the beeps and the numbers mean.  Well, it’s complicated but let me demystify the bedside monitor for you this morning.  The top line is your heart rate and normal is usually 60-110 beats per minute, depending on the person. 

The second set of numbers, the red ones – that’s blood pressure.  The third one down, the purple one, is intercranial pressure.  This is for patients who have suffered a stroke or head injury and values up to 20 mm Hg are usually considered acceptable. The last number, the blue wavy line is oxygen saturation.  So that’s your handy-dandy guide to a bedside monitor reading from the hospital volunteer level.  Medical professionals, feel free to argue with me later!  Taken all together these readings give you a snap shot of the current health of the patient.  But how do you know if you are spiritually healthy? 

We’re in a teaching series at Jericho Ridge this summer in the Old Testament book of 2 Kings.  And one of the things that the book does well for us is that it hooks the spiritual health assessment equipment up to each king or leader in the ancient nation-state of Judah and Israel and gives us a health read out.  So let me catch us up to speed with the spiritual vital signs of the kings that followed David and Solomon. 

Let me tell you how to read this chart.  The line across the top which is hard to see is the year.  King David, for example, comes to power before 1000 BC.  At the bottom of the chart are listed the names of the prophets who did their best to try and bring spiritual healing to the nations of Israel in the north and Judah in the south.  In the boxes are the names of the kings of Israel.  Last week we learned that the northern kingdom, Israel came to the end of the line.  The king of Assyria overthrew the capital Samaria and sent all of the people into exile.  And so this patient chart focuses on the southern Kingdom of Judah because it continues to exists for several hundred more years beyond the Assyrian exile of the northern kingdom. 

The blue line is the overall spiritual health of the nation.  And you can again see that under David and Solomon, it is at its high point.  But then you see that the patient’s health takes quite a turn for the worse under kings Rehoboam, Abijah and Asa.  But then there is a good king, Jehoshaphat, who leads the people back toward worshiping God so the nation’s spiritual health improves and stabilizes.  But that doesn’t’ last long before things tank quickly under Jehoram and Ahaziah.  Then under King Joash, which Pastor Wally preached about three weeks ago, things are great. We see a resurgence in health and vitality.  Looking good, right? But quickly things take a turn for the bad under Amaziah and then just as quickly a turn for the good under Uzziah.  Jotham and Ahaz, which Pastor Mike preached on two weeks ago, lead the people far, far astray from God, however. So when our chapter opens today, in the book of 2 Kings things are at a new low for people.  Worship of God has been largely forsaken.  The temple is in disrepair, the people are oppressed by foreign armies. It’s really, really bad. 

But we are about to get a good king.  One of only a couple in this whole series.  King Hezekiah. His story is so significant that it is recorded in three places in the Hebrew scriptures.  In 2 Chronicles, 3 chapters in the book of Isaiah the prophet and also here in 2 Kings 18-19.  Because he takes up so much real estate, we’ll be splitting his story up into two parts, Pastor Mike will be preaching the second part in August but if you have your bibles or your devices, turn with me to 2 Kings 18 and we are going to see this morning 5 lessons from the life of Hezekiah that apply to our lives today that will help us assess out own spiritual health & vitality.   

I’m reading from the New Living Translation of 2 Kings 18:1-3. 

Right away we see a stark and marked contrast with his father, King Ahaz.  Ahaz was one of the worst kings Israel had known to that point.  He was a horrible king because of how far away from God he led the people.  He replaced God’s altar in the temple, he sacrificed his son in the fire to pagan deities.  He was NOT a good example of leadership of discipleship.  And yet, his own son, grows up in this kind of a house that is not following God and makes a radically different set of choices.  He does what is right. 

So I want to say right up front that one of the lessons we can learn from Hezekiah’s life is that

• Your Spiritual Parentage is not always a predictor of Your Spiritual Heritage

In other words, the legacy you inherit from your parent or parents is NOT automatically the legacy that you have to pass on.  Your parentage is not a predictor of your heritage.  You can make different choices. 

Some of you come from very broken homes and backgrounds and yet you have managed to parent well and to break some of the cycles that have existed in your family for generations.  This is incredibly hard work that sometimes goes underappreciated and so I want to applaud those of you who saw something in your parents that you didn’t love and said “I want to change that in my life.  I want a different outcome.”  This is hard work! But

• It doesn’t matter where you start out, it matters when you end up!
• Hezekiah had a bad education and bad example BUT he didn’t make excuses; he made changes

It is always easier to sit around and say “woe is me.  I got dealt a bad hand in life.  I just couldn’t do anything about it.”  And Hezekiah would have been a candidate for this – he grew up under a horrible, wicked, evil and generally not very nice king.  And yet he changed the trajectory of his family and indeed of the nation itself, as we will see.  So your spiritual parentage is not always a predictor of your spiritual heritage. 

What kinds of things did Hezekiah do that were different?  Let’s keep reading in 2 Kings 18:4-5

So right away we bump into a weird part of. Israel’s history.  After the Exodus from Egypt, when they are wandering in the wilderness, the people experience a plague where they get bit by poisonous snakes and they die.  And so God instructs Moses in Numbers 21 to make a replica of the poisonous snakes out of bronze and to lift it up on a pole and when people look toward the bronze serpent, they will be healed from their sickness. 

Photo: Nehushtan

So Moses does this and it works.  And that’s the last thing we hear about this bronze snake. Until now.  So it turns out that they liked this bronze snake thing so much that they brought it with them into the land God gave them.  And then they liked it so much that they started to worship it and offer sacrifices to it.  They give it a name: Nehushtan, which you might have a footnote in your Bible that says that this word sounds like the Hebrew terms that mean “snake,” “bronze,” and “unclean thing.” 

This becomes emblematic or the problem of the worship of other pagan idols or deities in Judah at this time in history.  The people of God were given clear instructions on how to worship God and yet they wanted to hedge their bets.  To make sure that just in case this whole worship of the one true God thing wasn’t working out, maybe we can have a back-up plan.  I mean, the snake did heal people at one time, right?  So they set it up and they worship it.  The problem with this, of course, is that when we

• Turning Good Things into Ultimate Things makes us guilty of idolatry

As we said a couple of weeks ago, “anything we turn to for our primary source of meaning and validation apart from God is an idol.”  Judah had taken this once good thing that God had given them for healing and turned it into something beyond what God intended for it to be.  They were now looking for it to provide a source and sense of ultimate meaning for them.  And we think as sophisticated, modern western post-Enlightenment people that we are not idolaters.  But we can do the same thing. Not with bronze snakes but with good things that we turn into ultimate sources of meaning and purpose in our lives.   

Even things God gives us for our good and protection can become objects of our worship

• Our Marital Status or Family
• Our Identity or Sexuality
• Our Education or Achievements

Our possessions…. The human heart is wired for worship.  We desire to make sense of our life and to find a sense of ultimate purpose and meaning.  And when we attempt to find that in places other than God, we ultimately come up empty and unsatisfied.  So I want to say to you if you are here today and you feel hollow or like you still haven’t found what you are looking for, then you might be putting the emphasis on the wrong things.  You might be trying to find meaning and purpose in your career or your net worth. But none of these things will ultimately satisfy. Only a life-changing relationship with the living God who loves you and created you will do that. So today might be the day that you stop your searching in those places and you come home to God. You would do that by praying and saying “God, I need you.  I reject the lie that I can find ultimate and eternal purpose and meaning apart from you.  Today, I surrender.  I want to be part of your family.  I turn my focus and life over to you”.  If you want to do that, come and talk to me or to someone who you came with today.  It’s the most important decision you will ever make in your life and we are here to help you walk that out. 

So back to Hezekiah.  He gets super serious about busting up these places and ways of false worship.  He cleans house!  Listen to the spiritual health assessment that is given to his leadership in 2 Kings 18:5-7

Here we come across the third lesson from Hezekiah’s life and leadership.  And that is that he trusted in God AND he also did lots of good stuff.  Why do I bring this up?  Well, sometimes when I hear people praying they pray things like “God, I pray you would help people drive by this building and just sense God’s presence and come in” – which is not impossible that God would draw people like that. BUT, it is more likely that God is listening to that prayer and thinking “Um, if you want them to come, why don’t you take an invitation to the Block Party next week and invite them?”    Sometimes I hear people use the phrase well, I’m just letting go and letting God” (by which I think they mean they are expressing a trust and confidence in God). But sometimes, God invites us to be the answer to our own prayers by taking action.  So sometimes, the better prayer might be “let go (meaning trust God” AND ALSO “get going”.  Do something! 

3) There is a delicate balance between             
    ‘let go & let God’ and ‘let go & get going!’

• Hezekiah’s trust in God does not mean inaction on his part

Hezekiah dose not sit around praying and asking God “please deal with idolatry in Judah.  Help people turn back and worship you”.  No, he gets going on that and other practical projects to help his people.  Here’s a list:

What Did Hezekiah Do?

• Got rid of the pagan shrines on the high places
• Reopened & repaired the Temple for worship
• Re-instituted the Passover celebration
• Properly secured the city’s water supply

One of the things Hezekiah understood was that he needed renewal not only spiritually but also, he understood that his city was vulnerable to attack.  Jerusalem is well fortified because it’s on the top of a hill BUT the one weakness was that its primary water supply was outside the city wall.  And so if a foreign army came and attacked, which we will see in a minute, they were vulnerable.  So Hezekiah re-routed the Gihon spring and built a tunnel, a fortified aqueduct, that redirected that fresh water inside the city walls into the pool of Siloam.  And today, if you visit Jerusalem, you can go and see Photo: Hezekiah’s tunnels.  They guy was industrious.  His trust in God meant action on his part.  Some of you struggle in this area of getting going. You struggle to make friends at Jericho because you don’t’ initiate.  Or you initiate once and then when someone doesn’t’ reciprocate you think “well, that’s it. I’m done here”.  Or you’ve been praying for a family member or neighbour for some time and you think “well, ‘ve given it to God. I don’t’ need to do anything else.” But God might want you to keep persistent in prayer for them.  Sometimes you need to keep after something for a long period of time. 

Trust in God sometimes also involved continued action on our part.   

But Hezekiah’s troubles were not over.  Remember, the King of Assyria from last week who attacked and destroyed Samaria?  That same king wanted to overthrow the resistance in Jerusalem.  So he mounted a massive military campaign against Judah.  Let’s keep reading in

2 Kings 18:13-16 [two slides]

Poor Hezekiah.  When other kings paid their tribute to Assyria, it made them go away.  But for some reason, when Hezekiah pays it, they still come and take up position around the city to attack and conquer it. 

Assyria still surrounds Jerusalem.

So here’s the fourth thing I want us to observe in Hezekiah’s life.  Sometimes we think that following God is going to make our life easy.  That with God helping us, things will turn out great.  But we need to analyze this narrative a bit more closely.  Yes, verse 7 says that Hezekiah was successful in everything he did, but he still had a hard go of things.   I’m not quite sure how to express this so I’ll simply suggest that

4) Be Warry of Over-Simplistic Narratives about Life with God

We would be wise to ask “what kind of story am I telling myself about what it means to do life with God?”  Sometimes we have a narrative that says like that inaccurate and unhelpful old hymn “every day with Jesus, is sweeter than the day before… Every day with Jesus, I love Him more and more”. This kind of up and to the right thinking becomes very confusing when we encounter difficulties because we think but I have God in my life, why am I still struggling with addiction to pornography? Or why is my job so hard, I prayed about it?” Why is parenting at this stage such a challenge?”

• Just because God was with Hezekiah does not mean he didn’t have troubles
• Things can go from BAD to GOOD to NOT AS BAD pretty quickly
• Hezekiah’s incredible reforms don’t “save” everyone – they postpone the inevitable

We need to be cautious about over simplistic narratives.  In Hezekiah’s cause, just because God was with him didn’t mean that everything easy.  In fact, he has a very real and present danger that faces him that we’ll look at briefly.   2 Kings 18:19-25 [3 slides]

The King of Assyria sends his staff to threaten Hezekiah.  And they get some things right but some things wrong (for example, Hezekiah didn’t’ tear down God’s altars on the high places).  They also make the claim that God told them to come and attack Hezekiah, which is hard to challenge. 

 But Hezekiah’s staff asks the Assyrian staff “um, can you speak to us in Aramaic, which is the trade language of the day and NOT in Hebrew which is the language all of the people in the city understand.” The reason they want this is that the people on the wall are listening in and if the message gets delivered in a language that

Let’s play a Language game – who speaks another language here?  Does anyone else speak that language?  Say something to that other person in that language that the rest of us will try and guess what you said.    

This is what happens to Hezekiah’s leaders – the king of Assyria sends messengers to the wall and he shouts out loud in the language that they all understand: “Don’t listen to Hezekiah when he tries to mislead you by saying, ‘The Lord will rescue us!’ 33 Have the gods of any other nations ever saved their people from the king of Assyria?... What god of any nation has ever been able to save its people from my power? So what makes you think that the Lord can rescue Jerusalem from me?”

Hezekiah does the right thing at this moment.  He goes to prayer.  He sends word to Isaiah the prophet to seek for an answer from the Lord.  Meanwhile the King of Assyria receives word that the King of Ethiopia is coming to attack him.  So before leaving, he sends a letter to Hezekiah saying “Don’t be fooled… I’ll be back”).  And again, Hezekiah does the right thing.  Look with me at 2 Kings 19:14-16

Picture: Hezekiah taking letter to the temple of the Lord

Here’s the fifth and final lesson we see from Hezekiah’s life for us today:

5) How we respond when trouble comes into our lives exposes our true selves  

Where do you turn when difficulty comes?

Often, when I am faced with challenges, my first thought is “what can I do?”  For example, when we were waiting for our building permit, I was thinking “who do I know at City Hall?  What kind of actions do I need to take?” And my sense as I prayed was “Brad, be still and know that I am at work”.  Or when Meg and I were struggling with infertility, my thinking was “OK, we got this.  We are going to do everything we can to push through this difficulty” And God gave us a Scripture verse to remember to trust in God’s timing.  Where do you turn with difficulties come into your life?  That action says a lot about where you put your trust. 

Hezekiah places his trust and confidence fully in the Lord.  And God responded with powerful and miraculous deliverance. 

We see in 2 Kings 19:35-36. God wiped out the Assyrian army overnight.

Painting: Angel of the Lord.

Judah didn’t even fight in the battle because God did it all. 

As Ann Marie and the worship team come, I want to ask you to reflect….

Think of a situation in your life you need God to intervene in power.  Maybe for you it’s in the realm of finances.  Maybe you need a new job.  Maybe you need to see God do a miracle in the life of your family.  Maybe you are asking God for intervention in the realm of your health.  Maybe you need to pray about something much more mundane – we would welcome that!  Going for prayer is not an admission of weakness or that something is massively wrong in your life – it’s simply an act of dependence on God. 

We want to join God and join you in that process. That’s why we have our prayer team available at the back.  To stand with you in prayer and faith and ask God to do what only God can do and sometimes that means also sorting out if there is something God is inviting you to do.  Ali Nicolle, Katy Kwon, Meg and myself are at the back with nametags and would love to pray with and for you today.      

I invite you to stand as the team lead us in song. We’ll sing two 2 songs that invite us to consider where we place our focus when fear surrounds us then I will come up and close us with a benediction.  Let’s worship together because you and I are not smart enough to solve these challenges and wo as we worship, one thing we are saying is that the battle belongs to the Lord and it is in God that we place our confidence and our trust. 

BENEDICTION:

“May Almighty God make you faithful to his calling

joyful in his service, and fruitful for his kingdom.

And the blessing of God Almighty

— the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit —

be upon you and through you with all those to whom He sends you,

now and always. Amen.”