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38:1  In those days Hezekiah became gravely ill. And the prophet Isaiah the son of Amoz come to him and said, Thus says the Lord: Put your house in order. You will die; you will not recover.

This chapter ties in, just as much as thirty-six and thirty-seven do, to the Assyrian invasion, even though it has to do with Hezekiah’s illness. Verses five and six, for example have everything to do with protection from the Assyrians.

The Lord’s emissary said…Actually he does recover. He lives another fifteen years. So does that mean that the Lord’s words were not true? Well, Hezekiah should still put his house in order. He’s still going to die, anyway, after the fifteen years are up. So it just means that the prophecy’s been delayed, for a time. That’s classic with the Lord’s prophecies. Sometimes, as in the case of Jonah prophesying the destruction of Nineveh, it didn’t happen at the time, but it happened years later, in fulfillment of Jonah’s prophecy, according to the book of Tobit that makes a direct connection to Jonah’s prophecy. It just didn’t happen precisely at the time Jonah said it would.

38:2  At this Hezekiah turned his face toward the wall and prayed to the Lord:

The “wall,” there, is very symbolic, because it’s like he’s come to a dead-end. There’s nothing left for him.

38:3  I beseech thee to remember, O Lord, how I have walked before thee faithfully and with full purpose of heart and have done what is good in thine eyes . . . And Hezekiah wept disconsolately.

Now, in chapter seven it talks about the “son Immanuel,” choosing good; he learns to do the good and reject the evil, accept the good and reject the evil. Good and evil are technical terms, in covenant language, that denote covenant keeping and covenant breaking, covenant blessing and covenant curses—the results of covenant keeping and covenant breaking. So, here, he says “I have kept covenant with you, Lord,” virtually all his life. “I’ve walked faithfully before thee with full purpose of heart and have done what is good in thine eyes.” Why, then, should he suddenly die? That was his particular test. He’s now under threat of death. Just as the whole nation is under threat of death from the Assyrians. He’s going through, individually, what they’re going through, collectively. And we saw that, also, in chapters seven and eight, the ones that are juxtaposed with these chapters. The king was afraid of the Assyrians. He shook and trembled. The people also shook and trembled, in their own way. There are many connections between king and people. What he goes through, they go through. But for him it must have been an especially paradoxical situation, because, for some people, a test from God can be a major thing, and to another person that same test may not be major, at all; it may just be something that doesn’t phase them. In Hezekiah’s case there was something about his life being cut short at the height of his strength, at the height of his righteousness, at the height of everything good—there was something peculiar about that was particularly difficult for him to deal with. And yet, he passed the test. To another person it may not have been the same. And we see that with every test that the Lord individualizes for a person, that’s particularly hard for that individual. The Lord always seems to choose things that are the most difficult for that particular individual, the very thing that he would least want to happen. Hezekiah doesn’t object to what happens to him. He accepts God’s will in the matter, that’s clear.

38:4–5  Then the word of the Lord came to Isaiah: Go and tell Hezekiah, Thus says the Lord, the God of your father David: I have heard your prayer and seen your tears. I will add fifteen years to your life.

So, in response to his prayer to the Lord, the Lord sends word to Hezekiah, through his prophet, again. And all of this is establishing the proper protocol that the word comes to the king and to his people through his prophet. “Go and tell Hezekiah, Thus says the Lord, the God of your father David--” Now, the fact that he says that shows it is a really good omen because it implies that Hezekiah is in line with the Lord, as his father, David, was. Just like it says in verse thirty-five: “for my own sake and for the sake of my servant, David.” Hezekiah is a loyal heir of king David. “I have heard your prayer and seen your tears. I will add fifteen years to your life.

38:6  And I will deliver you and this city out of the hand of the king of Assyria; I will protect this city.

What does the Lord’s protection against the Assyrians have to do with Hezekiah’s recovering from his illness? Because the two ideas here, are linked together, directly. His illness has everything to do with it, because Hezekiah has been praying for deliverance by the Lord from the Assyrians, both directly and the assenting to the prophet, asking Isaiah to intercede for this city’s deliverance, as well. And here, he’s praying, and he recovers and also the city will be protected. He escapes death and the people escape death. So it’s another link between king and people—that what he goes through, they go through. Only, the test that he has to pass is much more difficult than that of the people, because he, himself, is in mortal agony, as we’ll read later on in this chapter. He goes through a tremendous, physical, ordeal. He has horrible, nighttime agonies, and yet he humbly submits his life to the Lord, and does according to the Lord’s will. The account of his illness, here, in verses ten through twenty, actually precedes, chronologically, what we’ve been reading. He’s already gone through this horrible illness.

And now the Lord sends word that he’s going to be delivered and his people will also be delivered. And that verse, verse six, is very similar to chapter thirty-seven, verse five: “ I will protect this city. I will save it for my own sake and for the sake of my servant, David.” And here, it says, “I will deliver you and this city out of the hand of the king of Assyria. I will protect this city.” “I will protect this city” appears twice. It appears in chapter thirty-eight, verse six, and in chapter thirty-seven, verse thirty-five. But in Second Kings, where this account of the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem also appears, those two verses that are separated here, in Isaiah—namely thirty-eight, verse six, and chapter thirty-seven, verse thirty-five—appear as one verse in Second Kings. So Isaiah has taken something that is really one account and divided it into two parts. One part applies to the deliverance of the people, and the other part applies to the deliverance of the king. And in that way he is linking the deliverance of the king with that of his people, indissolubly, as it were. He borrows from Second Kings, and he divides the verse into two, applying one half to thirty-eight, and one half to thirty-seven, thus, connecting the two incidents. There’s an integral connection between the two. In fact, the common phrase, “I will protect the city,” also implies that. Also, “for the sake of my servant, David,” in verse thirty-five of chapter thirty-seven, and “thus says the Lord the God of your father, David,” in chapter thirty-eight, verse five, David is mentioned twice, too.

What does all that mean? Why is he doing all that? It implies that Hezekiah’s intercession has had power with God, to bring about his own deliverance and that of his people, because his intercession is backed up with the horrendous affliction of Hezekiah, of which he offers, or submits, his life, willingly, to God, for that of his people. His prayer of intercession is substantiated with all of this grievous affliction that he has to endure. In response to that suffering, the Lord promises to protect the city. He didn’t just say, “Oh yea, I’ll protect the city.” No; he links it to Hezekiah’s suffering, to the praying in the midst of his agony, and in his yielding his life to God. That’s why it says, in chapter fifty-two, verse eleven: “He shall see the toil of his soul and be satisfied.” In chapter fifty-two, verse twelve: “ He poured out his soul unto death.” Hezekiah does all of that, as we’ll see in the next few verses, that pouring out of his soul, unto death; he pays the price of his peoples’ deliverance, and so Hezekiah passes the test in that way. And that is how we see that a Deliverer is born. Here is where the Deliverer is born; he passes the test of God. And when the Deliverer is born, then the people may be delivered. He delivers the people.

Verse twenty-one and twenty-two don’t appear chronologically in chapter thirty-eight. They appear at the end of the chapter. But they’re out of context, there. Remember how we discussed how these scriptures were transmitted from scribe to scribe? And how sometimes in Israel when there were emergencies when the scriptures were destroyed by the enemy. Nevertheless, the scriptures were in peoples’ heads. The scribes remembered them all; they had memorized them. That was their job. But when they got to a safe place and started transcribing them from memory, sometimes they would forget a word or a verse, and then they would remember, later, that they had forgotten to write it down. But, by then, the scroll was already full. They couldn’t cut and paste, like we can with the computer, today, so they wrote it down when they remembered it. And there are numerous instances of that throughout the book of Isaiah, where words, verses, or phrases don’t appear in context, but they do if you look further back in the chapter, even sometimes earlier than the chapter. You’ll see that there is a context in which they fit, as they fit here, after verse six, where we have verses twenty-one and twenty-two:

38:21  And Isaiah gave instructions to take fig packs and apply them to the swelling so that he could recover.

Because the Lord is adding fifteen years to his life. That’s the context, in verse five. And he’s going to recover. Also, he uses fig packs. We probably wouldn’t do that today. We’d send him to the M.D., to get some antibiotics or something. But having Hezekiah use fig packs was the Lord’s way of doing things.

38:22  But Hezekiah said, What of a sign that I shall again go up to the house of the Lord?

That verse is full of meaning, because going up to the house of the Lord doesn’t just mean that he’s going to get better and be able to walk again and go back to the temple and pray before the Lord. We see, in verse eleven, what he’s really asking here, in verse twenty-two. He wants to go up to the house of the Lord to see the Lord. And that’s also what Isaiah gave as a purpose for temple-going, in chapter one, remember? In verse eleven of chapter one he asks, what is the purpose for your coming to sacrifice at the temple. He answers the question in verse twelve: “When you come to see me...” You go to see the Lord. We discussed that. And Hezekiah hasn’t seen the Lord yet. Because he knows you can, because Isaiah did. Isaiah’s his teacher and mentor, so Hezekiah wants to see the Lord, and in verse eleven he bewails the fact that he’s been living righteously but he hasn’t yet seen the Lord, “in the land of the living.” He doesn’t just want to see him in the land of the dead; Hezekiah doesn’t want to go there, then, to see him. He wants to see him now, while he’s still alive, because then that means that he has ascended the spiritual ladder and is worthy of that. He wants to accomplish that in his lifetime. That was another great test for him, the fact that he hadn’t done that.

In the Ascension of Isaiah, an apocalyptic book, it describes how during Hezekiah’s illness he did see the Lord. And that is what Hezekiah meant, when he said, “What of a sign that I shall again go up to the house of the Lord?” Now, is he bad, for asking for a sign? He’s not. He’s obviously a very righteous man. But he’s asking for something, a confirmation, some kind of assurance. And he gets it; the Lord gives it to him. In chapter seven, Isaiah, or the Lord, offers king Ahaz a sign. He says, “Ask a sign for yourself from the Lord God, whether in the heaven above or on the earth beneath.” But he said, “I won’t. I won’t put the Lord to the test.” And that’s pious hypocrisy. If the Lord offers you a sign, take it! But he wouldn’t because he didn’t want the sign. He wanted to do his own will, because he was in a state of rebellion. And he didn’t want the sign that he could receive God’s protection. He wanted to do what he wanted to do, in that situation. We see the juxtaposition between Hezekiah, and king Ahaz, here, in this structure, where the one actually asks for a sign and gets it, and the other one rejects the sign.

38:7–8  And Isaiah replied, This shall be a sign to you from the Lord, that the Lord will do the thing he has promised: See, I make the shadow cast by the afternoon sun on the dial of Ahaz recede the ten degrees it has gone down. So the sun reversed its descent by ten degrees on the dial.

“This shall be sign to you from the Lord.” See how this fits with the context of verse twenty-two, here, the context before verse seven, because they’re talking about a sign from the Lord. “This shall be a sign to you from the Lord, that the Lord will do the thing that he has promised. See, I make the shadow cast by the afternoon sun on the dial of Ahaz,” his father, “recede the ten degrees it has gone down. So the sun reversed its descent by ten degrees on the dial.” So the Lord performed a miracle for him, and the sun actually reversed its descent. Now how can you do that? Well, to the Lord it’s no big deal. There’s all kinds of different time zones involved in his creations. There’s Celestial time. There’s Terrestrial time. So he can do things. But what does that mean, though—that the sun reversed its descent? In ancient Near-eastern culture, and tradition, a king represented the sun. Pharaoh, king of Egypt, was a sun to his people, and the sun disc rising up over the primeval mound, is the ascent of the king, up to God. Or the institution of the king’s reign, his benevolent, righteous rule of his people is like a new dawn. Kings were the suns of their people, and they shone upon the people and they brought about a good time, fertility and all of that. This is a sign that king Hezekiah’s life is being extended. It was, at the end of his life, as if the sun had gone down, now it reverses its descent so gives a new lease of life—in fact—fifteen years.

In those days, Hezekiah became gravely ill. That’s in the days of the Assyrian siege. In chapter thirty-six, verse one, it says: “In the fourteenth year of king Hezekiah’s reign, the Assyrians marched against Jerusalem.” “In the fourteenth year” means he has ruled thirteen years, already, and this is now the fourteenth year that the Assyrians attack Jerusalem. Now Hezekiah’s been given another fifteen years to his life. So thirteen plus fifteen makes twenty-eight. Twenty-eight is twice fourteen. Fourteen is the numerical value of the name, David. So what this is doing is confirming the fact that Hezekiah is a descendant of David, a righteous and loyal descendant of David.

Now, when Matthew, I think it is, gives the genealogy of Jesus, what does he do there? Matthew gives thirteen times fourteen generations of the lineage of Jesus, implying that Jesus is a descendant of David, a legitimate heir of king David. It’s similar to what’s going on, here, an affirmation that we have a legitimate descendant of David, and he’s using numerology to convey that idea. There are many other uses of the number fourteen in the Old Testament, as in the Passover lamb on the fourteenth day of the first month. Why the fourteenth day of the first month? Because it links the Passover lamb with a descendant of David.

38:9  Hezekiah king of Judah’s account of his illness, written upon his recovery:

So when after it was all over, and he recovered, then he wrote what actually happened during his illness.

38:10  I said, in the prime of life must I depart through Sheol’s gates, deprived of the balance of my years?

Sheol is the underworld, or spirit prison, death, or hell-- “deprived of the balance of my years?” For some reason, that keeps being a great test for Hezekiah, that right in the prime of life he’s cut off. He had a hard time with that. He couldn’t understand that because he’d been loyal, expecting God’s blessings, because all the kings of Israel ruled forty years. A righteous king ruled that long. They had long reigns. And his was unfair. It seemed so contradictory of the ways of God, and he had a hard time dealing with that paradox. But he did.

38:11  I thought, I shall not see the Lord in the land of the living; I shall not now behold Man among those dwelling in mortality.

He parallels the Lord, there, with Man. This is the poetry that we’ve been talking about, the parallelisms. He parallels the Lord with Man. And why would he do that? It’s the name of God. God is an exalted man. He knows and understands that. “Man,” here, is an exalted being, God.

38:12  My tabernacle is being uprooted, carried away from me like a shepherd’s tent. My life is cut off like woven fabric; he is severing me from the loom.

We talked about the fabric of life a minute ago. Have you ever spent time weaving? And when you finally get it finished, what do you do? You get a sharp knife and cut the threads connecting the weaving to the loom. And he’s likening his life being cut off like that, cruelly, suddenly.

38:13  Can I contain myself until morning, while like a lion he racks my whole frame? Surely, as night has followed day, thou art bringing on my end!

And usually, it’s the other way around, day follows night. This is all back-to-front. He’s trying to deal with the situation. He’s a little pessimistic here. Night has followed the day. He was just in the flower of life, accomplishing so much, and he had cleaned up his peoples’ spiritual condition, throughout the land. He was just beginning to prosper, and now, he’s cut off, because the dawn follows the night. In Hebrews, evening to morning is one day. It’s not from morning to evening like it is here, in our culture. Our day begins with morning time. In Hebrew culture the day begins in the evening. There’s always the night before the day, the dark before the light. And that’s the proper way, because in Isaiah’s theology, the bad time always comes before the good times. Before the Millennium comes there is tribulation. There’s a cleansing. There’s always suffering before salvation, humiliation before exaltation, chaos before creation, dark before light.

38:14  Like a mounting lark I twitter, like a dove I murmur. My eyes are drawn looking heavenward; [I am utterly sleepless from bitterness of soul . . . ] O Lord, I am in straits; be my surety!

Now, when a person is in straits, all that he has left, really, is the Lord, his God. And Hezekiah’s been brought to that point. But he’s looking up, not down.

38:15  But what shall I say when he has already spoken for me, when he himself has brought it about?

In other words, his sentence has been pronounced upon him: set your life in order, you’re going to die and not recover. Can Hezekiah change God’s word? Can he plead with God and ask him not to do that, now?

38:16  O my Lord, by means of such trials comes a newness of life, and throughout them all the renewal of my spirit.

So, now he’s beginning to progress through his ordeal and see that this has meaning in his life, that his suffering and even his death has a purpose. The purpose is the renewal of his spiritual life, the renewal of his spirit. It’s cleansing; it has a sanctifying effect on him.

38:17  Surely, for my own good I am in such dire distress; by its means thou drawest my soul out of the Pit of dissolution. For thou hast cast all my sins behind thee, [restoring and reviving me].

Good, meaning covenant blessing, that good can come out of his evil. So he’s seeing things in a proper perspective, now, God’s perspective. It’s coming to him. So he’s in the process, now, of passing the test. “By its means thou drawest my soul out of the Pit of dissolution.” That is, after death, the second death. “For thou has cast all my sins behind thee, [restoring and reviving me].” His suffering and afflictions purified him of his sins. He receives a remission of his sins, just like Isaiah did in chapter six when he saw the Lord and talks about having received a remission of his sins, there. It gives him a newness of life.

38:18  For Sheol cannot praise thee, nor Death glorify thee; those who go down into the Pit have no further hope of thy faithfulness.

Death and Sheol are in parallel, so they’re kind of synonymous ideas. He doesn’t want to go down into Sheol, because he can’t do there what he’s doing here. Here, he’s able to praise God and do much more than he can do down there in the underworld, or in the spirit prison. “Those who go down into the Pit have no further hope of thy faithfulness.” The “going down” implies regression. Going “up” implies spiritual progress. Those who go down, are those who regress, like his father, King Ahaz, perhaps. If you die, and you have also died the spiritual death, then what’s left? There’s no further hope. Down there, there’s nothing that you can do, he’s saying. God’s faithfulness is to be taken advantage of, now, in this life. When you end up down there it’s all over.

38:19  But the living, only they bring thee praise, as I do this day; from father to sons they pass on the knowledge of thy faithfulness.

38:20  O Lord, may it please thee to save me, and we will perform music all the days of our lives in the house of the Lord.

He obviously loved the Lord and the House of the Lord. And, no doubt, it was after this prayer that he saw the Lord, as it says, in The Ascension of Isaiah.”