Scripture Daily

Context No. 492 of 4322 · 2 Kings

Context · Reflection

2 Kings 19:20-28: in context

20Then Isaiah the son of Amoz sent to Hezekiah, saying, “The LORD, the God of Israel, says ‘You have prayed to me against Sennacherib king of Assyria, and I have heard you. 21This is the word that the LORD has spoken concerning him: ‘The virgin daughter of Zion has despised you and ridiculed you. The daughter of Jerusalem has shaken her head at you. 22Whom have you defied and blasphemed? Against whom have you exalted your voice and lifted up your eyes on high? Against the Holy One of Israel! 23By your messengers, you have defied the Lord, and have said, “With the multitude of my chariots, I have come up to the height of the mountains, to the innermost parts of Lebanon, and I will cut down its tall cedars and its choice cypress trees; and I will enter into his farthest lodging place, the forest of his fruitful field. 24I have dug and drunk strange waters, and I will dry up all the rivers of Egypt with the sole of my feet.” 25Haven’t you heard how I have done it long ago, and formed it of ancient times? Now I have brought it to pass, that it should be yours to lay waste fortified cities into ruinous heaps. 26Therefore their inhabitants had little power. They were dismayed and confounded. They were like the grass of the field and like the green herb, like the grass on the housetops and like grain blasted before it has grown up. 27But I know your sitting down, your going out, your coming in, and your raging against me. 28Because of your raging against me, and because your arrogance has come up into my ears, therefore I will put my hook in your nose, and my bridle in your lips, and I will turn you back by the way by which you came.’

The Assyrian king Sennacherib has surrounded Jerusalem and sent word mocking its God, and King Hezekiah has laid the threatening letter before the LORD in prayer. Now Isaiah sends Hezekiah God's answer, and much of it is addressed directly to Sennacherib, quoting the conqueror's own boasts back at him. With my many chariots, Sennacherib had said, I have climbed the highest mountains, cut down the tallest cedars of Lebanon, dug wells and drunk foreign waters, dried up rivers under the soles of my feet. It is the swagger of a man utterly convinced that his conquests are his own achievement, the fruit of his own might, with no one above him to answer to.

God's reply dismantles that from the ground up. Have you not heard, he says, that I planned this long ago? I formed it in ancient times, and now I have brought it to pass, that you should be the one to lay fortified cities in ruins. In other words, every victory Sennacherib was strutting over had been assigned to him. He was never the author of his conquests; he was a tool in the hand of the God he was mocking, carrying out a purpose set long before he was born. And because he took the credit and raged against the One who actually held the reins, God says, I know your sitting down and your going out and your raging against me, and I will put my hook in your nose and my bridle in your lips, and turn you back the way you came, led home like a beast.

The temptation Sennacherib fell into is the most natural one in the world when things go well. I look at what I have built, the successes I have strung together, and I narrate them as my own achievement, my own competence, my own strength, forgetting entirely that the breath and the ability and the opening were all given to me. Sennacherib is what that self-congratulation looks like taken to its end. When my life is going well, do I strut over my accomplishments as if I authored them, or do I remember that I am an instrument in a hand far larger than my own, and has any of my raging or my arrogance come up into God's ears?

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