Scripture Daily

Context No. 1370 of 4322 · Isaiah

Context · Reflection

Isaiah 38:9-22: in context

9The writing of Hezekiah king of Judah, when he had been sick, and had recovered of his sickness: 10I said, “In the middle of my life I go into the gates of Sheol. I am deprived of the residue of my years.” 11I said, “I won’t see the LORD, the LORD in the land of the living. I will see man no more with the inhabitants of the world. 12My dwelling is removed, and is carried away from me like a shepherd’s tent. I have rolled up my life like a weaver. He will cut me off from the loom. From day even to night you will make an end of me. 13I waited patiently until morning. He breaks all my bones like a lion. From day even to night you will make an end of me. 14I chattered like a swallow or a crane. I moaned like a dove. My eyes weaken looking upward. Lord, I am oppressed. Be my security.” 15What will I say? He has both spoken to me, and himself has done it. I will walk carefully all my years because of the anguish of my soul. 16Lord, men live by these things; and my spirit finds life in all of them. You restore me, and cause me to live. 17Behold, for peace I had great anguish, but you have in love for my soul delivered it from the pit of corruption; for you have cast all my sins behind your back. 18For Sheol can’t praise you. Death can’t celebrate you. Those who go down into the pit can’t hope for your truth. 19The living, the living, he shall praise you, as I do today. The father shall make known your truth to the children. 20The LORD will save me. Therefore we will sing my songs with stringed instruments all the days of our life in the LORD’s house. 21Now Isaiah had said, “Let them take a cake of figs, and lay it for a poultice on the boil, and he shall recover.” 22Hezekiah also had said, “What is the sign that I will go up to the LORD’s house?”

This is Hezekiah's own writing after he recovered from a sickness that had brought him to the point of death. He records the anguish of it: in the middle of my life I go into the gates of Sheol; my dwelling is pulled up and carried off like a shepherd's tent; I moaned like a dove, my eyes grew weak looking upward. And then the turn to thanksgiving: you have delivered my soul from the pit, you have cast all my sins behind your back. Sheol cannot praise you, he says; the dead cannot celebrate you; the living, the living, he shall praise you, as I do this day, the father making known your truth to the children.

What Hezekiah's brush with death gave him was a new clarity about what life is for. Staring into the gates of Sheol, cut off, as he thought, in the middle of his years, he came to see that the living have something the dead do not: the ability to praise God, to know him, to make his truth known to their children. The living, the living, he shall praise you, he says, as if the very purpose of the life he had nearly lost was suddenly plain, that these days, these years granted him, are the time to praise God, and death would have ended that. It often takes a close encounter with death to see the value of life this clearly, to stop taking the ordinary days for granted and to recognize them as the irreplaceable window in which we can know and praise God. And there is the deeper mercy Hezekiah names: you have cast all my sins behind your back. His restored life was not merely a reprieve from dying but came with the assurance that his sins were dealt with, put out of God's sight. So he resolves to walk carefully the rest of his years, the days he had thought were gone now received back as pure gift. There is a question in that for those of us not staring into Sheol today. If Hezekiah, facing death, saw that life is the time to praise God, are we using the days we still have for that, or squandering as ordinary what he learned to treasure as gift?

Do I treat my days as an ordinary given, or, like Hezekiah restored from the edge of death, as the irreplaceable gift of time in which the living can praise God, and am I using them for what he saw life was for?

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