The King of Our Circumstances

Please turn with me in your Bibles.  If you don’t have a Bible, there’s some in the pew in front of you.  We’re going to be looking at the prophet Isaiah, chapter 37, verses 1 through 20.  That’s Isaiah 37, 1 through 20.

Here the word of the Lord.

“As soon as King Hezekiah heard it, he tore his clothes and covered himself with sackcloth and went into the house of the Lord.  And he sent Eliakim, who was over the household, and Shebna the secretary, and the senior priests, covered with sackcloth, to the prophet Isaiah the son of Amoz.  They said to him, “Thus says Hezekiah, ‘This day is a day of distress, of rebuke, and of disgrace; children have come to the point of birth, and there is no strength to bring them forth.  It may be that the Lord your God will hear the words of the Rabshakeh, whom his master the king of Assyria has sent to mock the living God, and will rebuke the words that the Lord your God has heard; therefore lift up your prayer for the remnant that is left.’””

“When the servants of King Hezekiah came to Isaiah, Isaiah said to them, “Say to your master, ‘Thus says the Lord:  Do not be afraid because of the words that you have heard, with which the young men of the king of Assyria have reviled me.  Behold, I will put a spirit in him, so that he shall hear a rumor and return to his own land, and I will make him fall by the sword in his own land.’””

“The Rabshakeh returned, and found the king of Assyria fighting against Libnah, for he had heard that the king had left Lachish.  Now the king heard concerning Tirhakah king of Cush, “He has set out to fight against you.”  And when he heard it, he sent messengers to Hezekiah, saying, “Thus shall you speak to Hezekiah king of Judah:  ‘Do not let your God in whom you trust deceive you by promising that Jerusalem will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria.  Behold, you have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all lands, devoting them to destruction.  And shall you be delivered?  Have the gods of the nations delivered them, the nations that my fathers destroyed, Gozan, Haran, Rezeph, and the people of Eden who were in Telassar?  Where is the king of Hamath, the king of Arpad, the king of the city of Sepharvaim, the king of Hena, or the king of Ivvah?’””

“Hezekiah received the letter from the hand of the messengers, and read it; and Hezekiah went up to the house of the Lord, and spread it before the Lord.  And Hezekiah prayed to the Lord:  “O Lord of hosts, God of Israel, enthroned above the cherubim, You are the God, You alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth; You have made heaven and earth.  Incline Your ear, O Lord, and hear; open Your eyes, O Lord, and see; and hear all the words of Sennacherib, which he has sent to mock the living God.  Truly, O Lord, the kings of Assyria have laid waste all the nations and their lands, and have cast their gods into the fire.  For they were not gods, but the work of men’s hands, wood and stone.  Therefore they were destroyed.  So now, O Lord our God, save us from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that You alone are the Lord.””

This is the word of the Lord.  Please join me in prayer.

Our heavenly Father, we thank you for this word and we do pray that You would open it to our hearts by Your Holy Spirit, Your Spirit preaching a better sermon than I am about to preach.  May You make our hearts receptive to this word to be received, to be trusted, and to be followed, that Christ might be glorified in our lives and throughout the world.  We pray in His name.  Amen. 

Who can you trust?  Who can you trust?

This was the great question from Pastor Tom’s sermon last week in Isaiah 36.  Will you trust political powers?  Compelling personalities?  Expedient technologies of this world?  Or will we trust the King?

Now by king, I don’t mean here yet Hezekiah.  Yes, he’s the king presented to us in this series, this series that we’re going through of Isaiah 36, 37, 38, and 39.  This section here in Isaiah is a historical interlude about one of the good guys, about one of the good kings of God’s people, Hezekiah.  Hezekiah is, all things considered, a good king.  Flawed, yes, but a good king, along with Josiah, the best to reign since David.

And yet these chapters as well as the whole book of Isaiah, are really about a greater King, about God as King.  God is the unrivaled King of this great book of Isaiah, indeed, of all the books of Scripture.

As we read this section in Isaiah, we might think the issue here is a horizontal one.  It’s one about competing heads of state.  Will Sennacherib, an Assyrian might, or Hezekiah and the might of Judah, win out?  But to see this as international tug of war is to fail to consider the vertical.

Pastor Tom laid out for us last week that Sennacherib’s mouthpiece is the Rabshakeh and he would have Hezekiah and Judah convinced it’s foolish, it’s foolish to trust anyone but Sennacherib and Assyrian power.  They were the great power of the day.  In Hezekiah’s day, the mighty nation of Assyria with Sennacherib at its head had swept west and was coming southward.  They had conquered the northern kingdom of Israel.  They had sent them into exile and they were threatening to do the same to Judah in Jerusalem.  The drums of war, they had rippled out.  The barbarians were at the gate.  The Rabshakeh, the enemy’s messenger, was saying don’t be stupid now, Hezekiah, you and your people, they don’t stand a chance.  Bow the knee, kiss the ring, you will know deliverance.  What’s more, you will flourish, you will prosper, the road that’s out before you in your life, it will be smoothed out.  You’ll drink from the vine.  You’ll eat of the fat of the earth.

But here’s the problem.  This isn’t just a pragmatic decision for Hezekiah.  It’s not as if he looks out at his lake and all its fish and it’s dried up while his friend over here invites him to come over and fish out of his well-stocked lake.  If that’s all that’s going on here, of course, for your good and for the good of your people, have at it.  Go fish out of the waters leaping with trout and bass and have all your needs met.

But no.  Sennacherib, Rabshakeh, they’re blasphemers.  They’re not just inviting Hezekiah to come over and share in the plenty of Assyria.  They demand allegiance and they demand forsaking the true king, the king of all, Yahweh Himself.  So the real battle presented to us in these chapters, and we see this especially in our passage this morning, it’s not between Sennacherib and Hezekiah, it’s between Sennacherib and all the enemies of God and God.

Hezekiah and God’s covenantal people are in fraught, precarious circumstances here.  Sennacherib is promising that if he becomes their king then everything in their circumstances will work out.  They’ll be delivered.  They will know abundant life within the bounds of Assyria.

But God is pressing in.  He’s pressing in on good King Hezekiah.  The good king knows this is not the way.

Our circumstances, of course, are very different from the ones facing Hezekiah in the 8th century B.C.  To learn about Assyria today, you have to go to the great British museum located in London.  God’s covenantal ways with His people, they’re now tied to King Jesus, not to a king in Jerusalem.  Yet, we have circumstances that test our allegiances.  Don’t we?

Our circumstances present us with a myriad of challenges every day.  Some are great, some are long-lasting, others comparatively small and momentary.  Each challenge in our circumstances, though, is an opportunity.  Will we tune in to the King’s word?  Will we tune out the noise that would draw us and our allegiances away from the King?  And will we tune up our hearts to the King?

So as we turn to our passage, these are our three points.

Number one – tune in.  It encompasses verses 1 through 7.

Second point is tune out.  It looks at verses 8 to 13.

And our third – tune up.  Covering verses 14 to 20.

Tune in to the Word, tune out the noise, tune up to King, to the true King, to God.

So verse 1 of our passage is remarkable for the contrast it presents.  You don’t see this right away, but if you consider the previous kings, or even Hezekiah himself a little earlier, you clearly see the contrast.  Consider, for example, Hezekiah’s father.  Hezekiah’s father was King Ahaz.  We read about King Ahaz in 2 Kings 16.  There’s a little summary of his reign and this is what it says:  “Ahaz was twenty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem.  And he did not do what was right in the eyes of the Lord his God, as his father David had done, but he walked in the way of the kings of Israel.  He even burned his son as an offering, according to the despicable practices of the nations whom the Lord drove out before the people of Israel.  And he sacrificed and made offerings on the high places and on the hills and under every green tree.”

Later, a little later in that passage in 2 Kings, we’re told that when Ahaz hits a tight spot with the surrounding nations, instead of seeking out the Lord and humbling himself before Him, he humbles himself before Assyria.  He subjugates Judah in return for Assyrian help and power.  What’s worse, he brings the pagan religions of the other nations and he has them installed in Jerusalem.  His policy is a religious syncretism for political gain and political security.   

Ahaz is so worried to not offend the king of Assyria he desecrates the furnishings of the temple of the Lord.  He exchanges the glory of the Lord for the lie of the scraps from the Assyrian table.  It’s an expedient move, it works, but it’s truly pathetic conformity on Ahaz’s part. 

Yet God is kind to His people.  Ahaz’s son is not like him.  Hezekiah is a good king.  Consider this summary of Hezekiah’s reign that comes from 2 Kings 18:  “Hezekiah was 25 years old when he began to reign and he reigned 29 years in Jerusalem.  He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord according to all that David his father had done.  He removed the high places and broke the pillars and cut down the Asherah.  He trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel, so that there was none like him among all the kings of Judah after him nor among those who were before him for he held fast to the Lord.  He did not depart from following Him but kept the commandments that the Lord commanded Moses and the Lord was with him.  Wherever he went out, he prospered.  He rebelled against the king of Assyria and would not serve him.”

So while Hezekiah did not follow in the footsteps of his father Ahaz, he did follow in the greater footsteps of his greater father David.  Here’s the thing about David and Hezekiah – neither of these men are perfect.  David’s faults are well-known if you know his life, but so is his repentance for his faults.

Verse 1 here stands out not just in contrast to Ahaz but also to Hezekiah just a little bit earlier.  When he previously was in a tight spot, Hezekiah instead of turning to the Lord, he turned to the power and arm of Egypt.  Behold, you are trusting in Egypt, the Rabshakeh said to him in Isaiah 36.

Of course, the Rabshakeh is trying to convince him to trust in Sennacherib, an Assyrian power, not Egyptian power, certainly not the Lord, but in doing so the Rabshakeh highlights Hezekiah’s failings.  Is he perhaps just like his father Ahaz?  No, verse 1 here highlights the difference between a bad king and a good one – humility, repentance, humility, repentance.  The difference isn’t between unrighteousness and perfection, there’s no human perfection outside the human perfection of Jesus Christ.  The fundamental difference between Hezekiah and his father and every other bad king is found in the conviction of sin, a repentance, and a seeking out of God, a seeking of His will, a seeking of His direction.  A tuning in, a tuning in.

Hezekiah’s posture here is depicted for us in that he tore his clothes, he covered himself with sackcloth.  Even his assistants covered themselves in sackcloth.  Furthermore, he didn’t stay in his own royal house but he went over and into the truly house of the Lord.  In all of this he expresses humility, repentance, dependence on God.  He’s previously relied upon Egypt but in going to the prophet Isaiah he’s not repenting of that reliance.

What Hezekiah realizes is he and his people have been, they’ve been brought to the end of themselves.  It’s as he says here, a day of distress, a day of rebuke, a day of disgrace.

He uses an apt metaphor here to depict their powerless situation.  They’re like a woman giving birth where the baby’s right there, ready to come out, but there’s no strength, there’s no strength to deliver the baby.  It’s a striking image because it communicates there’s no going back, there’s no going back.  There’s two ways it can go from here, only two ways – the baby is delivered, there’s a birth, or either death, death for mother, death for child.

Imagine the temptation here to simply do the easy thing, to acquiesce to the power and protection that’s on offer from the Assyrians, to conform just like the other nations had conformed.  But what makes Hezekiah a good king is he knows in his soul that’s a greater death, that’s a greater death than any physical pain or death that can come upon him and His people.  That would be a kind of spiritual death.  It would require the selling of his soul.

How do we know Hezekiah realizes this?  Well, because what is most upsetting to him, what drives him to this place of humility and this posture of repentance, is not only his sense of genuine need and reliance, but that the living God, his God, our God, has been blasphemed.  At issue is not just an assault on Hezekiah or Judah, it’s an assault on the living God.  Hezekiah here, his heart’s breaking for all the right reasons.  It’s not that he might be defeated, he might be canceled, he might be humiliated, it’s that God should not be mocked.  He’s been awakened in his soul.

In chapter 36 he’s trusting God and Egypt.  He’s in self-preservation mode, but being brought to the end of himself, he’s been shut up to God and he’s trusting God alone and what does this mean?  It means this posture of conviction and humility, yes, but it also means crucially tuning in to God and His Word.

You have here the right heart response.  Hezekiah’s repulsed at the pride and blasphemy.  It gets him in his gut.  But what goes hand in hand with that is a seeking of God, and seeking God starts with tuning in to His Word.

How do we see that here?  We see it through his reaching out to the mouthpiece of God’s Word, who here is the prophet Isaiah.  Now this whole grand book, of course, is named after this prophet Isaiah.  He’s a proven ambassador of the Lord.  He carries the Lord’s words in his mouth.  Here the king is desperate for him because he’s that mouthpiece.  And a word from the Lord is what Isaiah has. 

He gives in verse 6,  “Thus says the Lord.”  The word Isaiah has here from the Lord is filled with contempt, contempt for these blasphemers, these, as the ESV translation puts it, these young men, and it’s actually soft-pedalling what is meant here a little bit.  God’s really calling them young lads, underlings, these who would dare to revile the living God with these words.  And the Lord’s message to Hezekiah is a clear one, is it not?  Do not fear.  Do not fear.

Why?  What reason for that?  Circumstances would communicate otherwise, wouldn’t they?  Hezekiah and His people, they had much to fear.  But Isaiah gives them the true King’s word, the true King’s words, in the midst of their circumstances, treacherous circumstances – Do not fear.

This is what tuning in to God’s Word will communicate, communicate to you and to me in our circumstances, too.  Do not fear.

Why?  Because even though those circumstances may be menacing, like we see here with Assyria, there’s a greater power.  What’s more, that greater power, God the Almighty, eternal King, He’s made promises.  He’s not arbitrary.  He has a character and He has a word of promise and He holds to the words that He gives of promise.  Here he reiterates that word of promise to King Hezekiah – do not fear, I am in control, I will not be mocked.  I am so somber and so in control I can enter into the very thoughts of man and disorient through a disorienting rumor.  That’s what’s said here.  The downfall of Assyrian threat under Sennacherib will be because God is Lord and Creator and can enter into the very psychology of man and undo him from the inside, leading him to his defeat.

What challenges are presently in your circumstances?  Perhaps you or a loved one have a lingering health issue.  We’ve prayed for many, heard from many already this morning.  Who’s going to help?  Doctors?  Medicine?  Perhaps you have a circumstance of financial shortage.  Who’s going to help?  The banks?  Resourceful family members?  Perhaps your challenge is a strained relationship or marriage or a wayward child.  What is going to help?  A book?  That counselor everyone’s talking about?  Perhaps you just need a job or a better one.  Who’s going to help?  Who’s going to come to your aid?  Your friends, your business networks?

Some of us in our circumstances are scared to death of being bored.  What’s going to deliver you?  Your next travel adventure, that 4-inch x 2-1/3 inch computer that we all have in our pockets?  You’ll notice each of the proposed solutions I’ve mentioned to our challenging circumstances, they’re on a horizontal level. 

Don’t hear what I’m not saying, don’t hear what I’m not saying.  Yes, we need to be wise, we need to be resourceful about how God might meet us in our circumstances.  He does use means to accomplish His purposes, such as good medical care, such as resourceful family members.  But we must not turn means into ends.  We must not turn means into ends.  God is the only end for ultimately He is the King of our circumstances.

The message of Hezekiah is the powers of this earth, no matter how mighty, ultimately serve the Lord.  Thus when facing trials, when brought to the end of ourselves, we go to Him first, we go to Him last.  Which means we tune in.  We tune in to His Word which reveals His character and which directs us as to His plans and His purposes.

One way of viewing what is going on here in chapters 36 and 37 is about trust, yes, but trust in words, trust in words.  Will it be the puffed up, haughty words of the Rabshakeh and Sennacherib or will it be the true Word, the Word of the Lord?

As God’s people as we seek the King in our circumstances, let us always tune in to the King’s Word.

Tuning in, though, means also tuning out, and that’s our second briefer point.  The mark of a remarkably focused person is not just his or her ability to tune in what’s before them, but also to tune out the distractions and the noise surrounding them.  Later this week the summer Olympics will begin in France.  The Olympics always serve up remarkable examples of this, don’t they?  Athletes who are not only able to focus in on a very tense moment in competition but we know going into that tense moment of competition are years, maybe decades, of focus where they tuned out, they tuned out noise that would draw them away from their purpose.  It might be the noise of destructive habits, of bad diet, unhelpful friends, undisciplined training, whatever it might be to be an olympian you have to learn to say no.  To tune out just as much as to say yes and to tune in to your specific sport.

So what Hezekiah shows us here is that right after he tunes in to God’s Word through the great prophet Isaiah, he again gets some noise.  The Assyrian King Sennacherib, he’s drawn away from Jerusalem because of another threat, but he doesn’t let Hezekiah alone.  He carries forward his pompous noise that he brought in the previous chapter.  In fact, here he intensifies the blasphemy.  Look again at what he says – do not let your God in whom you trust deceive you.

He goes on bragging of Assyria’s record in devoting other lands to their destruction, all those lands had gods, too, and they couldn’t deliver them.  Why would Judah and Hezekiah be any different?

If Hezekiah here is tuned in to this word instead of God’s Word through Isaiah, it’s a pretty compelling argument.  The noise I submit to you is pretty compelling often.  Well, doesn’t Sennacherib have a point?  I mean, it looks like he’s been right.  He’s successful, he’s on top of the world.  He’s telling Hezekiah don’t listen to your God, He’s deceitful.  You’re going to end up just like the other nations who also had gods.  Look at where those gods got those nations.

You hear the pagan logic?  The pagan logic here.  The reality and worth of gods is tied to the success of their people.  Assyria here uses religious language and is co-opting it to serve its own ends, and pagan empire only has one end – the success and glory of the empire.

Hezekiah had to discipline his ears to tune this out, no matter how much sense it might have made in the immediate on that horizontal level.  For one, and most egregiously, this is rank blasphemy.  He’s called the holy God a liar.  But furthermore, he’s said Jerusalem’s God is impotent.

Because Hezekiah has tuned in to God’s Word, he knows the words of Sennacherib aren’t true.  Consider Numbers 23:19 – God is not a man that He should lie or a Son of Man that He should change His mind.  Has He said and will He not do it, or has He spoken and will He not fulfill it?  To the prophet He says, Lord God, it is You who have made the heavens and the earth by Your great power and Your outstretched arm.  Nothing is too hard for You.

God does not lie.  He is the truth.  Nothing is too hard for Him.  He is all powerful.

To tune in to God’s Word is to know His character, His promises, and it enables us to tune out these compelling, competing empty words that depict reality other than what it truly is.

Can you imagine the noise Hezekiah might receive today?  Well, I don’t know, Hezekiah.  Sennacherib presents a pretty compelling argument.  Assyria is the most successful economy in the world.  His country has the greatest military strength.  No one’s invading his country; he’s invading other countries.  I think you better go along with him if you want to make it in this world.  Serve Sennacherib as long it works for you and you can always readjust later when you need to.

Or, hey, Hezekiah, Sennacherib, formidable, sure.  But have you heard of this new technology?  It’s designed to thwart exactly the kinds of weapons Assyrians use.  Just partner with our corporation, pay us, we’ll help you defeat this nasty foe.

Or, Hezekiah, what you really need are sharpened negotiation skills.  You are rhetorically outmatched by his Rabshakeh fellow.  Let’s get you signed up for this three-step course on how to outmaneuver ancient Near Eastern arguments.  

Again, this would be to see reality only in light of the horizontal, of competing powers and wits on the worldly level.

What Hezekiah has woken up to, though, is not just human kings and their assistants.  For us it’s not just the competing details of our circumstances that run through our minds and cause us to doubt and to fear.  No, there’s a king who is king over all.  To see reality rightly is to know this, to learn to tune out the noise that would suck us into alternative, false views of reality.  To know the true king in our circumstances we must tune out of that and tune in to the reality as it is, as it’s revealed to us in God’s Word.  We must tune out the noise of this world with its competing insidious false presentations of reality and see through the Scriptures what is true.

We must tune up to God.  That’s our third and final point.  In verses 14 to 20 we see Hezekiah tune up his heart to God in this wonderful prayer.  King Hezekiah receives the blasphemous letter and his action here is immediate.  There is no question, there is no interaction with the messenger, what does this truly mean, no consideration.  No, it’s immediate action.  He takes it, he goes into the house of the Lord, and he literally brings the letter and spreads it out before the Lord in prayer.

We’re called to bring our cares, cast our burdens, upon God and that’s exactly what Hezekiah does.  But he does it as king, interceding on behalf of his people in the house of God.  He’s a priestly king here who knows God’s covenantal call that has been placed upon him.

What we see here in verse 14 is an act of profound courage, profound courage.  We often associate courage with bold acts, climbing a mountain, speaking truth to power, or as we’ve seen in recent days in our own country, getting wounded by a bullet and getting right back up again on one’s own feet.  We don’t, but we should, we don’t often associate courage with prayer. 

But this is a profoundly courageous move by Hezekiah.  Think about it.  Every impulse in his body and mind is likely pushing him toward self-preservation.  That’s why he previously partnered with Egypt.  Self-preservation here would be just to get on with it, submit to Sennacherib.  But self-preservation kills courage.  Self-preservation kills courage.

What takes courage here for Hezekiah is to do something that flies in the face of what his ears are hearing and his eyeballs are seeing.  It’s to forsake self-preservation and to trust, to trust in God alone.  His move to prayer demonstrates his courageous faith, his God-centeredness.  After tuning in to God’s Word, tuning out the blasphemous noise, he’s tuning up, he’s tuning up to God in prayer.

Now this prayer has a clear threefold structure.  There’s an invocation, you see that in verse 16; a complaint; you see that in verses 17 to 19; and then there’s supplication or petition in verse 20.

The invocation of verse 16 immediately invokes, or invites, God into these treacherous circumstances.  But notice the precise way in which Hezekiah here invokes God.  It’s the vastness, it’s the might of God.  He rehearses God’s majesty.  He does so in a particular way that applies to his circumstances.  He’s God not just to Jerusalem, He’s not God just of Assyria, He’s the God of all the kingdoms of the earth.

Why?  Well, for starters, He made them.  He is Creator of heaven and earth.  He’s the sovereign one, the sovereign Creator.

So Hezekiah here he’s rehearsing God’s majesty in order to encourage, in order to bolster himself in the midst of his circumstances.

One commentator said this.  He said speaking truth about God to God may stir up assurance in God.  Speaking truth about God to God may stir up assurance in God.

That’s something to apply to our own prayer lives, isn’t it?  It’s a reason to join Bible reading about God with prayer, because in the Bible we learn about God, we learn about the majestic God, and then we are able to speak truth about God in our prayers to Him in order that we might be stirred up in our assurance in God.  When we remember God is the majestic Creator of all things that exist, we are assured He is King of our circumstances and He’s powerful enough to do something in them. 

Well, after this invocation in verse 16, Hezekiah voices his complaint to God in the next three verses.  He’s essentially saying, “Listen, God, look, God.  Assyria is a mighty yet blasphemous conqueror, but Assyria has only faced idols, the work of mens hands, wood and stone.”  Hezekiah recognizes they are nothing.  They are nothing divine, there’s nothing divine or powerful in them.  In contrast to God, the God to whom Hezekiah prays, He is the living God, the living God.  These gods are nothing, they don’t even exist; the true God is the living God.

So Hezekiah closes his prayer in verse 20 with a supplication, with two requests to this God, this living God.  There is a request here for deliverance.  Remember the Rabshakeh had promised deliverance would come by the hand of the Assyrians and certainly that appeared to be the only obvious hope for God’s people, for Judah.  And Hezekiah courageously turns away from that promise to the greater promises of God.  As he turns away from the promises of Hezekiah [sic] and Assyria to the greater promises of God, he pleads with God, “Save us, save us.”       

But this isn’t his ultimate request, interestingly.  His greatest, most telling request, it comes last.  It’s a petition and this petition is an indication of where Hezekiah, the good king’s heart is.  Save us, yes, but he prays to do so that God’s name might be magnified, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that You, O Lord, are God alone.

This order that Hezekiah has in his prayer is a model for us, as we seek the King in our circumstances.  Deliver us, Lord, deliver my mother from this cancer.  Deliver my family from financial challenges.  Deliver my child from destructive choices.  Deliver me from loneliness, we pray.  All of these are legitimate prayers.

But may they be followed with, “Do it, Lord, in a way where Your name is known and Your name is magnified.” 

All true prayer is preoccupied with God.

Our prayers often, even most of the time, they have petitions.  After all, we just prayed a little earlier at the close of Pastor Mike’s pastoral prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Lord’s Prayer instructs us to petition God.  But the heart of prayer is not our petitions, the heart of prayer is God Himself.

Rehearsing His majesty and praying that it would not be according to our will but that His will would be done for His is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.

So this world, it’s filled with many kings and presidents and CEOs and human powers.  They may hold some measure of sway over nations and peoples, but they’re not sovereign.  They’re not sovereign even over their own power.  Just as ultimately here Sennacherib wasn’t sovereign over his power, as we’ll see with greater clarity next week as we see how this prayer is answered.

These chapters leave no question who is ultimately in charge, even of kings and nations.  It’s God.

As we live now in light of a new covenant, we especially look to Christ as our King, Christ as King of our circumstances.  He is, in the words of the Apostle Paul in Colossians 1, the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for by Him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created by Him, through Him, for Him.  He is the beginning, the firstborn of the dead, that in everything, including in our prayers, He might be preeminent.

So we lift up our circumstances through Christ.  In doing so there’s nothing magical in prayer in and of itself, but prayer lays hold of Christ, and Christ changes things.  He is mighty, He is King in our circumstances.  So we pray in the midst of those circumstances that He would deliver us but that in all things He might be preeminent.

So as we seek the King of our circumstances, let us tune in to God’s Word, let us tune out the noise, and let us tune up to God in prayer.   

Please join me.  Our heavenly Father, we do thank You for this wonderful Word in Isaiah 37 and how it directs our eyes away from the pressing circumstances of our world, the press that is always before us to conform to what seems to be wise, to see what seems to be that everyone else is doing, but to tune that out, that we might look to You.  You are the mighty King.  You are the high King of heaven.  You are the One that is able to meet us and able to do something in the midst of our circumstances.  We pray through Jesus Christ, our Lord.  Amen.