2 KINGS 20
Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, “Hear the word of the Lord”
(2 Kings 20:16).
As Assyria marched throughout the ancient Near East, conquering one little country after another, Ahaz king of Judah sought to spare his country by making an alliance with Assyria. He sent gold and silver from God’s temple as a gift to Assyria. His political strategy worked, and later when Assyria destroyed northern Israel, the southern kingdom was spared.
However, Ahaz’s actions violated God’s ways. He should have trusted solely in the Lord for Judah’s defense. Instead, he subjected himself and his nation to the idolatry of Assyria, and when his son Hezekiah came to the throne, Judah was a vassal of Assyria. Hezekiah’s first action as king was to restore the temple and eliminate the idolatrous worship introduced by Ahaz. He held a great Passover and invited the remnant in the northern kingdom to come to it. Many moved to Judah, and thus were spared when Assyria destroyed northern Israel in Hezekiah’s sixth year.
In the fourteenth year of Hezekiah’s reign, the Philistine city of Ashdod formed an alliance to try and shake off the yoke of Assyria. Isaiah the prophet warned Hezekiah to have no part in it (Isaiah 20). He told Hezekiah that when God was ready, He would deliver Judah. Hezekiah listened to Isaiah (2 Kings 18:13–16). At this time, people in Judah were willing to hearken to the prophets because they had just seen the destruction of the north, which the prophets had predicted.
Later in his reign, however, Hezekiah came under the sway of the political aristocracy in Judah. Learning that Babylon was growing strong, Hezekiah formed an alliance with Babylon and other nations in preparation for shaking off the Assyrian yoke. Isaiah criticized him severely for this, but Hezekiah only paid slight attention (2 Kings 20). Like Saul, David, Solomon, Jeroboam, and Joash, Hezekiah fell into sin and almost lost the kingdom.
Toward the end of Hezekiah’s reign, Assyria went on the march again to put down the new revolt. The Assyrians laid waste to most of Judah, and besieged Jerusalem. Hezekiah turned to the Lord in repentance, and the city was spared (2 Kings 18:17–19:27).
CORAM DEO
Proverbs 23–24
2 Corinthians 5
WEEKEND
Proverbs 25–29
2 Corinthians 6–7
Like David, Hezekiah sinned and exposed the nation to destruction, but also like David he repented and God heard his prayer. We have a King now who will never fall, even though we often do. Let us learn from the stories of the kings what we are to do when God chastises us for our sins.
For further study: 1 Samuel 30:1–5 • Proverbs 3 • Isaiah 38:10–22
WEEKEND
Psalm 103: “Compassionate And Gracious”
by Derek Kidner
Personal Praise (vv. 1–5)
Sometimes we need to talk ourselves awake—rousing our mind and will to look again at what we too easily take for granted. David helps us at once to do this, not only in the first two verses (“O my soul …”) but throughout the first five, where he continues to talk to his inmost being. His words my and me in vv. 3–5 are literally thy and thee, still addressing his soul just as we do in the hymn based closely on this psalm: “Praise, my soul, the King of heaven, … Who like thee His praise should sing?” He is saying, in effect. “Count your blessings, David! Think what you owe to Him in the realm of forgiveness, healing, rescuing from disaster! Remember how satisfying are His gifts, and how He invigorates you as you wait on Him!” (See Isaiah 40:28–31.)
What David does here in an exalted mood, another psalmist teaches us to do when our spirits are low. “Why are you downcast, O my soul? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise Him …” (Psalm 42:5, 11). Jesus Himself, like that singer, could face frankly His troubled soul and then steady Himself in the will of God (John 12:27–28). At another time, like David in our present psalm, He could turn a joyous moment (after the mission of the seventy) into a chance to think out the far-reaching implications of what God had just done, and crystallize them in perceptive praise (Luke 10:21–22). The moment would pass; its meaning would remain.
Grace Abounding (vv. 6–18)
Now David sees the intimate dealing of God with him as a miniature of His grace toward the human family. But what a family! The oppressed come into view at once (v. 6), for their plight reveals the glaring contrast between God’s heaven and the “dark places of the earth … full of the habitations of cruelty” (Psalm 74:20 kjv). Yet the classic case of divine rescue—the story of Moses and Israel (v. 7)—became the classic case of man’s ingratitude; so the psalm moves on to glory in the Lord’s undeserved compassion.
His steadfast love is warm and tender (as the emotional word for compassionate implies), but it is also realistic. There is room for anger in it (vv. 8b, 9b), yet while human wrath is quick to rise and slow to fade, His is quite the opposite. He has much to rebuke, but not to harp on (v. 9); He sees much to punish, but all the more to forgive (v. 10); and this, not for our deserving. In passing, we who rightly stress our total unworthiness must never forget His unforced love for us, as not only the physician but the friend of sinners, whose company our Savior clearly enjoyed, without compromise but without pretense. Unlovable we may be, by rights; yet not unloved!
So David, who has dwelt on God’s forbearance in the four great negatives of vv. 9–10, now turns to all that is positive in this mercy, drawing three superb analogies in vv. 11–13, which have brought assurance to three thousand years of human seekers:
As high as the heavens … His love;
As far as east from west … so far our sins removed;
As a father has compassion … so the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him.
And that last analogy, “as a father,” moving from the infinite to the intimate, is the climax of the three. It is especially striking here by its comparative rarity at this stage of revelation, at least in relation to the individual; therefore David can help us all the more to appreciate the wonder of it. For it is amazing, for all its simplicity and, by now, its familiarity. Notice the emphasis (in the original) on the word He at the beginning of v. 14: “for He knows how we are formed”—knows us even better than we know ourselves—and “He remembers” the mortality which we too easily forget. His remembering carries with it the resolve that “dust” shall never be the last word for those who are in covenant with Him. The great phrase “from everlasting to everlasting” (v. 17), which spoke of His being in Psalm 90:2, speaks now of His relationship with His own. Whether or not David himself could see clearly what his words implied, Jesus left no doubt that for God such a relationship is quite literally forever, to be perfected through nothing less than resurrection (Matthew 22:31–32). So, in the light of that certainty, we can join in the psalm’s final chorus of praise:
Praise Him in The Height (vv. 19–22)
Because this doxology grows out of what the whole psalm has been saying, it will be celebrating above all “the glory of His grace.” Even angels. Peter tells us, are eager to explore this inexhaustible theme, this bright secret now made open in the Gospel (1 Peter 1:12; cf. Ephesians 3:10). And in John’s vision the sight of the redeemed multitude from earth was enough to set the whole of heaven singing (Revelation 7:9–12).
Yet in our psalm, fittingly enough, heaven’s doxology is not allowed to drown the single voice which set the psalm in motion—since grace is all about the time and room God has for the lowest and the least. The last word is given to the quietly fervent voice of one forgiven sinner (joined, perhaps, by the reader of his words): Bless the Lord, O my soul! ■
Derek Kidner, a leading Old Testament scholar and former warden of Tyndale House in Cambridge, England, has written three volumes for The Bible Speaks Today series.
monday
september