p. 517In Chapters xxxvi.-xxxix. we come upon a historical section in Isaiah’s prophecy. The work of the prophets sometimes included the writing of history, of which there are many illustrations throughout the scriptures. The history of Hezekiah is (considering the brevity of the scriptures) very fully recorded. When we put together the accounts of Kings, Chronicles and Isaiah, we see quite a large picture of his life and work; and the important crises with which he was contemporary and in which he figured so prominently.
In 2 Chron. xxxii. 32 we are told that “the rest of the acts of Hezekiah and his goodness . . . are written in the vision of Isaiah the prophet, the son of Amoz, and in the book of the Kings of Judah and Israel.” This quotation is made to show that in Ezra’s time there was no hint of that alleged composite authorship of Isaiah of which so much is heard in the circles of the “higher critics” of our days. But it is with reference to Chs. xl. and onwards that the critics affirm a “second Isaiah,” so we can defer a passing word on the subject.
Acting on the principle that divine history is “written for our instruction,” and is often, like that of the Israelites, directly typical and hortative in its character, we direct our minds to the things written of Hezekiah.
Taking the accounts of Kings and Chronicles in conjunction with Isaiah’s we learn the following:—Hezekiah began to reign at the age of 25 years and reigned 29 years in Jerusalem. Consequently his “fourteenth year” was, as it were, the half-way house of his days, when God gave him a new lease of life. It is said that he did right in the sight of the Lord, and his right doing is the subject of considerable definition in detail— p. 518 particularly in the book of Chronicles. He ruthlessly destroyed idolatry, even to the extent of breaking up the brazen serpent, because Israel had made a god of it (2 Kings xviii. 4). He cleansed, sanctified, and restored the temple, and reinstituted the worship of Yahweh and the service of the Levites. He even sent messengers through the northern kingdom inviting the people to return to the God of their fathers, but with some exceptions they were despised and ridiculed. This was in the first year of his reign, and his friendly and righteous action formed, as it were, a last warning and invitation from God to the kingdom of Israel. In another five years it was overthrown; i.e., in the sixth year of Hezekiah.
Hezekiah rebelled against Assyria, and smote the Philistines, both of which powers had prevailed over Judah because of his father Ahaz’ wickedness. But in the fourteenth year of Hezekiah we see Sennacherib coming to reassert and enforce his claims, and succeeding to a certain extent; for we are told in 2 Kings xviii. 13-16 that he took all the fenced cities of Judah and put Hezekiah under tribute, which he raised by spoiling the temple and his palace of the silver and gold. But when Sennacherib undertook to take Jerusalem also, in spite of the best efforts of “the God of Jerusalem,” in whose service Hezekiah was faithful, a new situation was created, in which it pleased God to make His power known in the vindication of His Name and honour, and the delivery of His King and people and chosen city.
This is the pith and marrow of this historical section of Isaiah: Yahweh, challenged by Sennacherib, and intreated by Hezekiah and Isaiah, vindicates His Name and honour, and delivers His people and city; and the record is written for the latter days, when a still greater Assyrian crisis is to come, and a still greater deliverance to be wrought. Add to this the lessons derived from the prayers and praises of Hezekiah, his new lease of life and how he “occupied” therein, and we realize how deeply instructive is this portion of the word.
Chapter xxxvi.—The opening of this chapter takes us back to the days of Ahaz, when, in the same spot, “the conduit of p. 519 the upper pool, in the highway of the fuller’s field” (vii. 3, with xxxvi. 2), Isaiah and his son Shear-Jashub had gone forth by God’s commandment to calm Ahaz concerning the invasion of Rezin and Pekah, and instruct him concerning the final advent of Immanuel and the “return of a remnant.” This would be, perhaps, about twenty years before Hezekiah’s fourteenth year; and now the prophet was an old man.
And now “Rabshakeh” (the name is an Assyrian title), with his host, stood on this historic spot, and Eliakim, Shebna and Joah, went forth to negotiate. What dealings Isaiah had had with Eliakim and Shebna, and their allegorical significance concerning Christ and the future, we have already seen, when speaking of Isa. xxii., and “the burden of the valley of vision.” Eliakim was to be exalted and Shebna deposed as Isaiah by the Spirit had decreed. But both were as yet in their respective offices, dealing with Sennacherib’s captain.
Rabshakeh ridicules Egypt as an ally for Hezekiah, and goes on to challenge Yahweh by comparison with the gods he had overthrown. What might almost be called a prophetic summary of this challenge had been given by the prophet long before (Ch. x. 5-11), and now the very words were uttered by the Assyrian before the walls of Jerusalem. Rabshakeh’s endeavour also to turn the populace against the king by representing his reforms as a destruction of the national religion, was an especially cruel and crafty bit of serpent wisdom. But it came to nought.
Eliakim, Shebna and Joah returned mourning to Hezekiah, and he in turn went mourning into the temple, sending them with the elders to the aged prophet, with the request that he would “lift up his prayer for the remnant that was left.” Isaiah did so; and the answer of God was quick and comforting:—“Be not afraid of the words that thou hast heard, wherewith the servants of the King of Assyria have blasphemed ME. Behold, I will send a blast upon him, and he shall hear a rumour, and return to his own land; and I will cause him to fall by the sword in his own land.”
Not a word of an agreement was made with Rabshakeh, who returned and found his master warring against Libnah, having p. 520 broken up his camp at Lachish, and being moreover distressed by the rumour of the advance of the King of Ethiopia. Drawn off thus from Jerusalem, and mortified by the resistance of the city, he sent a letter to Hezekiah repeating his blasphemous challenge against God and the King.
Chapter xxxvii.—On receiving this letter, Hezekiah went into the temple and spread it before the Lord and prayed in these brief but pregnant terms:—
“O Lord of Hosts, God of Israel, inhabiting the cherubim, thou art the God (ha Elohim), thou alone of all the Kingdoms of the earth, thou hast made heaven and earth. Incline thine ears, O Lord, and hear; open thine eyes, O Lord, and see; and hear all the words of Sennacherib, which hath sent to reproach the living God. Of a truth, Lord, the kings of Assyria have laid waste all the nations and their countries, and have cast their gods into the fire; for they were no gods, but the work of men’s hands, wood and stone: therefore they have destroyed them. Now therefore O Lord our God, save us from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that thou art the Lord, even thou only.”
The closing words of this prayer are but the reflex of God’s own words spoken in connection with the overthrow of an earlier tyrant—Pharaoh, in the days of the Exodus from Egypt: “I will multiply my signs . . . and the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord” (Ex. vi. 3-5). This principle runs through all the “signs.” (Compare Ex. vii. 17; viii. 10, 19, 22; ix. 13-16, 29, &c.). Hezekiah’s prayer is thus conceived in the spirit of knowledge and faith. He had respect to the law of Moses and the records of the mighty deliverance of the Exodus.
With such enlightened faith God is well pleased, and hence another and this time more ample answer was given by the mouth of Isaiah. It is recorded in ch. xxxvii. 21-35. The virgin daughter of Zion is represented as despising and laughing at Sennacherib; and it is declared that his power to destroy was expressly given by the Lord God of Israel, whom now he despised. Therefore God would put a hook in his nose and a bridle in his lips, and lead him captive far from Jerusalem, the “remnant” of which should at last again “take root downward and bear fruit p. 521 upward.” And God would defend Jerusalem for His own sake, and for David’s sake.
The allusion to the hook in the nose is illustrated from Assyrian sculptures of captives thus dishonoured. The fulfilment of the prophecy is notorious. An angel destroyed the Assyrian army in a night, and Sennacherib returned to Nineveh, where his own sons slew him in the presence of his god. Rationalising critics exhaust their ingenuity in the attempt to explain the military disaster on natural principles; but it is a failure. A candid confession of unbelief and refraining from meddling, would be infinitely more dignified and respectable than perverting the record of a miracle into that of an “old wives’ fable.”
Chapter xxxviii.—“In those days” (that is, in his fourteenth year) “was Hezekiah sick unto death.” And Isaiah was sent from God to say: “Set thine house in order, for thou shalt die, and not live.” And Hezekiah did not want to die. He turned his face to the wall and wept and prayed. He was a righteous king, and according to clerical theology, would have gone to heaven at death. But God said nothing about going to heaven, and Hezekiah was loth “to depart.” The Bible does not fit clerical theology.
Hezekiah’s prayer on this occasion is on record—brief, simple and touching. “Remember now, O Lord, I beseech thee, how I have walked before thee in truth and with a perfect heart, and have done good in thy sight.” That is all. But that is much in few words; for as an apostle afterwards said: “God is not unrighteous, to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have showed towards his name” (Heb. vi. 10). God “remembered” Hezekiah’s “work and labour of love,” and by Isaiah the prophet said, “I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears, behold I will add unto thy days fifteen years.” And, it was added, God would deliver Jerusalem, and give Hezekiah the sign of the returning shadow on the sun-dial of Ahaz.
This was a unique case of a literal and formal “new lease of life.” It was granted to the King on his appeal to the divine memory of his righteousness. How suggestive is this. Where would he have been if he had had no such righteousness to p. 522 remember? Ahaz his father could not have prayed so, nor Manasseh his son, though he did pray and obtain some favour of the Lord. It was a matter of personal “works.” “I will give every man,” says Jesus, “according as his work shall be.” Hezekiah is a type of the accepted in the day of his coming. His case is a great incentive to those who come after to “walk before the Lord in truth and with a perfect heart.”
And it is a type, as it were, of that lengthening of the days of Messiah himself which is the subject of the prophetic psalm. “He asked life of thee and thou gavest it him, even length of days for ever and ever.” Why? Because “the King” did always “the things that pleased the Father”—“walked before Him in truth and with a perfect heart,” doing good. But this was life eternal, reached through death and resurrection.
Hezekiah, on recovery, wrote the beautiful psalm of praise recorded in ch. xxxviii. 10-20. It is out of harmony with the ideas of clerical theology, but in harmony with “the word” in its doctrine of life and death. Clerical theology sends the righteous to heaven at death. Hezekiah said, “I shall go to the gates of sheol, the grave.” Hezekiah contemplated death as being “made an end of” (verses 12-13). Clerical theology says this is a mere sentiment of infidelity, and that no “immortal soul” can possibly be “made an end of.” Clerical theology says that the “souls” of the righteous are not related to “the pit of corruption,” and that none of the righteous “go down into the pit;” it is only their bodies that so go down as “a worn-out fetter that the soul has broken and cast away”! Hezekiah says just the opposite of all this. Clerical theology says that the grave and death can and do praise the Lord—yea, “When my voice is lost in death, praise shall my nobler powers employ.”—Dr. Watts. Hezekiah, however, restricts praise to “the living,” in harmony with scripture and common sense. But it is a profanation of his beautiful psalm to compare it with the fables of the apostacy. Yahweh as good as resurrected him, and he rejoiced before Him accordingly, saying, “Yahweh was ready to save me; therefore we will sing my songs to the stringed instruments, all the days of our life in the house of Yahweh.”
p. 523 Chapter xxxix.—And so the Assyrians were smitten, Sennacherib slain, Jerusalem delivered, and Hezekiah raised up to praise God. What is the sequel? If ever a man should have “redeemed the time” it was Hezekiah; but here he failed. It is so written, and “written for our instruction.” We have a lease of life. How are we using it? Glorying in the shadows of the present, or preparing for the substance of the future? Hezekiah, in the last fifteen years of his life, manifestly to some considerable extent did the former. Merodach Baladan sent letters of congratulation on Hezekiah’s recovery, and a present. “And Hezekiah was glad of them, and showed them the house of his precious things,” and all his estate. It would appear that he ought to have known the mind of God with regard to Babylon from Isaiah’s ministrations.
At any rate, the comment in 2 Chron. xxxii. 25 is quite severe: “But Hezekiah rendered not again according to the benefit done unto him; for his heart was lifted up; therefore there was wrath upon him, and upon Judah and Jerusalem.” And again, verse 31: “Howbeit in the business of the ambassadors of the princes of Babylon, who sent unto him to enquire of the wonder that was done in the land, God left him to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart.” Isaiah’s last recorded message to Hezekiah was to say that all that he had showed the Babylonians should be carried away to Babylon; even his own sons also should be eunuchs in the palace of the King of Babylon, which was fulfilled as recorded in Dan. i.
So then, from this concluding episode in the reign of Hezekiah it is evident that if people do not wisely use the life they have, it would be no guarantee that they would do otherwise should God grant them another “fifteen years.” It was a prayer of Moses which said, “So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom” (Ps. xc. 12). We may well appropriate it.
---
And here, at the end of ch. xxxix., modern criticism, or a certain school of it, would have us believe that we part company with Isaiah the prophet, the son of Amoz, and enter upon a varied p. 524 compilation of uncertain date and authorship. With the alleged reasons for this we do not propose to concern ourselves, but here set down a few facts from the scriptures that support the contrary and traditional view of the unity of the book.
They are in the form of references to the book by the name “Isaiah” in the New Testament writings.
First Jesus himself mentions “Esaias” when quoting from ch. xxix., in Matt. xv. 7-9. That, of course, is in what the critics themselves call “Isaiah.” Next, we are told in Luke iv. 17, that in the synagogue at Nazareth there was delivered to Jesus “the book of the prophet Esaias;” and that he read therefrom a portion of chapter lxi. This is from the portion which the critics call “II. Isaiah,” without any good reason in the world. Then, again, we have the following quotations, made by Matthew, Luke, and John, all of whom name “Isaiah,” the portion quoted being ch. xl. 3: “The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness” (see Matt. iii. 3; Luke iii. 4: Jno. i. 23). This, to an unsophisticated mind, appears fatal to the learned speculations current.
Chapter xlii. 1, “Behold my servant,” is expressly attributed to “Esaias the prophet” in Matt. xii. 17, 18.
Chapter liii., “Himself took our infirmities,” is said to have been “spoken by Esaias the prophet” (Matt. viii. 17). And “Who hath believed our report?” (liii. 1) is likewise, both by John and Paul (John xii. 38; Rom. x. 16), described as “the saying of Esaias.” And Luke, in Acts viii. 32, records how the Ethiopian eunuch read this same ch. liii. in “the prophet Esaias.”
Chapter lxv. 1, “I am sought of them that asked not for me,” is, by Paul, in Rom x. 20, described as a “very bold” utterance of “Esaias.”
Thus, the words of these inspired men of God convince us that the later part of the prophet is as much “Esaias” as the former, all that the “higher critics” can say to the contrary notwithstanding.