Hezekiah: Isaiah 36-39 (5)

Pray Psalm 90.13-15.
Return, O LORD!
How long?
And have compassion on Your servants.
Oh, satisfy us early with Your mercy,
That we may rejoice and be glad all our days!
Make us glad according to the days in which You have afflicted us,
The years in which we have seen evil.

Read Isaiah 38.

Reflect.
1. This chapter is about time, and what governs it. How do you see that?

2. How would you compare Hezekiah’s writing to what we’ve seen of Sennacherib’s?

Meditate.
This is an extremely important chapter in the book of Isaiah. Everything Isaiah has been preaching and writing about has to do with events that happen in time. God speaks, and what happens in time obeys His Word and will. 

We’ve already seen that to be the case with Israel, Syria, and especially with Sennacherib. God spoke through Isaiah to warn and comfort the people of Jerusalem, telling them the Assyrians would not come into their city. Then God acted – in a “glance” – to defeat Sennacherib and all his forces. He ordered and ruled the events in time just as He had said.

But Isaiah has spoken much more about what God will do in time to come, especially through the Babylonians, and what will become of His people and the remnant of the faithful. Beyond that, Isaiah will have much more to say about what God will do in time to fulfill His promises and purpose.

So in this chapter, God shows Isaiah, Hezekiah, and readers from every age that He is Lord not only of what happens in time, but of time itself! 

What, after all, is time? It is the succession of moments in which we live. Every moment of time comes immediately from God. Each moment comes from Him, pristine and pure, though as it enters the realm of sinful creation, and comes into the hands of sinful men, it becomes tainted with that sinful condition, and thus needs to be redeemed (Eph. 5.15-17). We redeem time by making good use of it for the glory of God. Each moment of time, as we use it, returns to God as an offering and gift from our hands. Our desire must be to ensure that all our time is lived in the wisdom and for the glory of God.

And that, in essence, is what Hezekiah prays in verses 10-20. God grants Him 15 additional years of life. He is sovereign over time and everything in it, including life-threatening illnesses. Like Sennacherib, Hezekiah knows to write in his chronicles, events of importance in his life and reign. Unlike Sennacherib, he writes humbly, and in a prayer, to commit himself to making the most of the remaining time of his life. He celebrates the Lord, the Giver of time, and commits his remaining time afresh to the worship and service of the Lord.

Imagine how great the work of God in verses 7 and 8 must have been! Everything in time, and everything by which we measure time, was not only stopped, but rolled back, so that God could demonstrate conclusively that whatever He spoke of time or for time or in time would surely come to pass. God did a ten-degrees rewind on the whole vast cosmos, just to give His people confidence in His Word.

And that Word is just as true for us today as it was for Hezekiah.

Prepare.
1. Meditate on Ephesians 5.15-17. What does it mean to “make the most of” or “redeem” the time God gives us?

2. Hezekiah wrote his prayer to make sure he would remember it and everyone else would, too. Can writing or journaling be an aid to growing in the Lord? Explain. 

3. God healed Hezekiah, but mediately, not immediately. God does not always heal through miracles, but all healing is from the Lord. Explain. 

At no time should one freely praise God more than when one has passed through afflictions. Nor again should one at any time give thanks more than when he finds rest from toil and temptations. As Hezekiah, when the Assyrians perished, praised the Lord and gave thanks, saying, “The Lord is my salvation, and I will not cease to bless you with harp all the days of my life, before the house of the Lord.” Athanasius (295-373 AD), Festal Letter 10.3

Thank You, Lord, for all the time of my life! Help me to make the most of that time today by…

Pray Psalm 90.
Thank God for the time of your life. Repent of any ways you have failed to honor God with your time, and seek His presence and power to help you make the most of all your time (Eph. 5.15-17).

Sing to the Lord.
Psalm 90 (Landas: My Faith Has Found a Resting Place)
Lord, You have been our dwelling place from generations gone.
Before the mountains came to be, before the earth was born,
Before the worlds, and long before men on the earth first trod,
From everlasting long ago, O God, You are our God!

You turn men back to dust and say, “Return from whence you came!”
A thousand years are in Your sight like yesterday the same.
You sweep away our lives with ease, like grass that sprouts and dies.
Your wrath consumes us and we live dismayed amid our sighs.

You set our sins before Your face; our secret sins You know.
Our days decline in fury as we sigh to see them go.
And though we live for eighty years, yet hard and sad the time,
For soon it goes when Your great wrath consumes us in our prime.

Lord, teach us all our days to note that wisdom may be ours.
Return, O Lord, have pity on those servants who are Yours.
Each morning let Your love appear that we for joy may sing.
And make us glad for every day You us affliction bring.

Now let Your work to us appear; our children show Your might.
And let Your favor rest on us; show mercy in Your sight.
The work that You have given us, confirm, and to us show,
That we Your chosen path may walk and in Your precepts go.

T. M. Moore

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