Isaiah 36
SENNACHERIB INVADES JUDAH
The former U.S. Secretary of State, Dr. Henry Kissinger, once told the New York Times, “There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.”
Crises come, whether schedules permit it or not; and sometimes crises seem to pile up. How do we handle them? What life does to us depends on what life finds in us. A crisis does not make a person; it shows what a person is made of.
King Hezekiah of Judah faced three crises in a short time: an internationalcrisis (the invasion of the Assyrian army), a personal crisis (sickness and near death), and a nationalcrisis (the visit of the Babylonian envoys). He came through the first two victoriously, but the third one tripped him up. Hezekiah was a great and godly man, but he was still a man; and that meant he had all the frailties of human flesh. However, before we find fault with him, we had better examine our own lives to see how successfully we have handled our own tests.
The Invasion Crisis is covered in Isaiah 36:1–37:38. We also find accounts of this story in 2 Kings 18–19 and 2 Chronicles 32.We’ll focus only on the passages in Isaiah. The other references are for your personal study.
Isaiah 36:1-22 NAS:
1 Now in the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah, Sennacherib king of Assyria came up against all the fortified cities of Judah and seized them.
2 And the king of Assyria sent Rabshakeh from Lachish to Jerusalem to King Hezekiah with a large army. And he stood by the conduit of the upper pool on the highway of the fuller’s field.
3 Then Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, who was over the household, and Shebna the scribe, and Joah the son of Asaph, the recorder, came out to him.
4 Then Rabshakeh said to them, “Say now to Hezekiah, ‘Thus says the great king, the king of Assyria, “What is this confidence that you have?
5 “I say, ‘Your counsel and strength for the war are only empty words.’ Now on whom do you rely, that you have rebelled against me?
6 “Behold, you rely on the staff of this crushed reed, even on Egypt, on which if a man leans, it will go into his hand and pierce it. So is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who rely on him.
7 “But if you say to me, ‘We trust in the Lord our God,’ is it not He whose high places and whose altars Hezekiah has taken away and has said to Judah and to Jerusalem, ‘You shall worship before this altar’?
8 “Now therefore, come make a bargain with my master the king of Assyria, and I will give you two thousand horses, if you are able on your part to set riders on them.
9 “How then can you repulse one official of the least of my master’s servants and rely on Egypt for chariots and for horsemen?[fn]
10 “Have I now come up without the Lord’s approval against this land to destroy it? The Lord said to me, ‘Go up against this land and destroy it.’
11 Then Eliakim and Shebna and Joah said to Rabshakeh, “Speak now to your servants in Aramaic, for we understand it; and do not speak with us in Judean in the hearing of the people who are on the wall.”
12 But Rabshakeh said, “Has my master sent me only to your master and to you to speak these words, and not to the men who sit on the wall, doomed to eat their own dung and drink their own urine with you?”
13 Then Rabshakeh stood and cried with a loud voice in Judean and said, “Hear the words of the great king, the king of Assyria.
14 “Thus says the king, ‘Do not let Hezekiah deceive you, for he will not be able to deliver you;
15 nor let Hezekiah make you trust in the Lord, saying, “The Lord will surely deliver us, this city will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria.”
16 ‘Do not listen to Hezekiah,’ for thus says the king of Assyria, ‘Make your peace with me and come out to me, and eat each of his vine and each of his fig tree and drink each of the waters of his own cistern,
17 until I come and take you away to a land like your own land, a land of grain and new wine, a land of bread and vineyards.
18 ‘Beware that Hezekiah does not mislead you, saying, “The Lord will deliver us.” Has any one of the gods of the nations delivered his land from the hand of the king of Assyria?
19 ‘Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? And when have they delivered Samaria from my hand?
20 ‘Who among all the gods of these lands have delivered their land from my hand, that the Lord would deliver Jerusalem from my hand?’ ”
21 But they were silent and answered him not a word; for the king’s commandment was, “Do not answer him.”
22 Then Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, who was over the household, and Shebna the scribe and Joah the son of Asaph, the recorder, came to Hezekiah with their clothes torn and told him the words of Rabshakeh.
Crises often come when things seem to be going well. Hezekiah had led the nation in a great reformation, and the people were united in the fear of the Lord. They had put away their idols, restored the temple services, and sought the blessing of God. But instead of receiving blessing, they found themselves facing battles. After all that Hezekiah had so faithfully done, Sennacherib king of Assyria came and invaded Judah (2 Chronicles 32:1).
Had God ignored all that Hezekiah and his people had done? No. The Assyrian invasion was a part of God’s discipline to teach His people to trust Him alone. Even Hezekiah had at first put his trust in treaties and treasures (2 Kings 18:13–16), only to learn that the enemy will keep the wealth but not keep their word. Judah had negotiated to get help from Egypt, which reflected their lack of trust in God and Isaiah severely criticized them for that (Isaiah. 30:1–7; 31:1–3).God wants us to be faithful so that He can change us and then reflect His glory through us to the rest of the world. Hezekiah and his people needed to learn that faith means living without making secret plans behind God‘s back (which of course is impossible).
You also have to keep in mind that this was not just an earthly skirmish. It was also a spiritual battle. Whenever a person begins to make changes in their life and tries to live in obedience to God, tests and attacks come along. Satan does not like to see people turning their lives around and walking God’s way. So as soon as they do, he moves in to tempt them, to mock them, to persecute them in any way he can. Here he was trying to say that God is not powerful and He is not able to deliver His people from Assyria’s mighty army. Satan, through the Assyrian army captains, was telling the people not to listen to Hezekiah’s encouragement to trust God. And what is the best way to deal with such verbal attacks? Look at verse 21.
Silence is often the weapon of choice. Yes, there are times to speak out, but in this case the enemy’s hearts were hardened. Any verbal response would only have given them fuel to jeer even more loudly. So the wise move here was not to say a word, just as Christ did not say a word when He stood before the tribunal that was mocking Him (Matthew 26:643; Mark 14:61). We will see in chapter 37 that God Himself had the last word regarding the Assyrian army.
The Assyrians had overrun Judah and were now at Lachish, about thirty miles southwest of Jerusalem. According to 2 Kings 18:17, Sennacherib sent three of his most important officers to arrange for Hezekiah’s surrender of the city: Tartan (“Supreme Commander”), Rabsaris (“Chief Officer”), and Rabshakeh (“Field Commander”). These are military titles, not personal names. The three men were met by three of Judah’s leading officials: Eliakim, Shebna (see Isaiah. 22:15–25), and Joah.
Where they met is important, for it’s the very place where Isaiah confronted Ahaz, Hezekiah’s father, some thirty years before (Isaiah 7:3). Ahaz had refused to trust the Lord but had instead made a treaty with Assyria (2 Kings 16:5–9), and now the Assyrians were ready to take Jerusalem. Isaiah had warned Ahaz about what Assyria would do (Isaiah 7:17–25), and his words were now about to come true.
Rabshakeh’s speech is one of the most arrogant, profane, and sacrilegious found anywhere in Scripture, for he ridiculed the God of Israel. He emphasized the “greatness” of the king of Assyria because he knew the common people were listening and he wanted to frighten them. The field commander’s speech is a brilliant piece of psychological warfare in which he discredits everything that the Jews held dear. The key word is trust, used seven times in verses 4–7, 9, 15. “What is it that you place your confidence in?” asked the field commander. “You can’t have any confidence, for all the things you‘ve trusted in have failed.”
He began with their strategy. They had turned to Egypt for help, but Egypt was only a broken reed (Isaiah had said the same thing; Isaiah 30:1–7 and 31:1–3). As for trusting the Lord, he told them that was sure to fail. He thought that Hezekiah had incurred the Lord’s displeasure by removing the high places and altars and requiring everybody to worship at Jerusalem. So, according to the field commander, Judah had no help on earth (Egypt) or in Heaven (the Lord). They were already as good as defeated.
What about their military resources? Hezekiah had fortified Jerusalem (2 Chronicles 32:2–8), but the field commander laughed at Judah’s military might. Judah had neither the men, the horses, nor the chariots to attack the Assyrians. Even if Assyria provided the equipment, the Jewish soldiers were too weak to defeat the least of the enemy’s officers. All the chariots and horsemen of Egypt could never defeat Sennacherib’s great army (Isaiah would agree with him again; see Isaiah 30:15–17). Kind of reminds you of Humpty Dumpty, does it not? “All the kings horses and all the kings men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”
The field commander’s coup de grace (death blow) was that everything Assyria had done was according to the will of the Lord (Isaiah 36:10). How could Judah fight against its own God? In one sense, this statement was true; for God is in charge of the nations of the world. But no nation can do what it pleases and use God for the excuse, as Sennacherib and his army would soon find out.
According to the field commander, Judah could not trust in its strategy, its military resources, or in its God. Nor could its people trust in their king. The king of Assyria was a “great king,” but Hezekiah was a nobody who was deceiving the people. Instead of trusting Hezekiah’s promise of help from the Lord, the commander said that the people should trust Sennacherib’s promise of a comfortable home in Assyria. The people knew that their farms, orchards, and vineyards had been ruined by the Assyrian army, and that Judah was facing a bleak future. If they stayed in Jerusalem, they might starve to death. Perhaps they should surrender and keep themselves and their families alive.
Hezekiah and Isaiah had told the people to trust the Lord, but the field commander reminded the people that the gods of the other nations had not succeeded in protecting or delivering them. Even Samaria, the Northern Kingdom of Israel, was defeated, and they worshiped the same God as Judah. To the field commander, Jehovah was just another god; and Sennacherib did not need to worry about Him.
God summons us to walk by faith and not by sight (2 Corinthians. 5:7). To those Jews in Jerusalem who were living in unbelief, the field commander’s arguments must have seemed reasonable, and his evidence compelling. But God had promised to deliver His people from the Assyrian army, and His Promise would be kept.[fn]
The test for God’s people was then, and is now, are you going to truly listen to God, to hear His Word and trust it? Are we as God’s people going to be obedient? Paul Tillich, an existential theologian, has said, “The first duty of love is to listen.” Whether or not we can agree with all of Tillich’s theology, we can certainly agree with that statement. Christ put it this way:
John 14:15, NAS:
"If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.
John 15:10, NAS:
"If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father's commandments, and abide in His love.
We cannot keep the commandments of God unless we have first listened to them and know what they are. So how strong is your love of God today? Strong enough to trust Him in whatever He allows into your life?
[fn] See Deuteronomy 17:15,16.
[fn] Wiersbe, W. W. 1996, c1992. Be comforted. An Old Testament study. Victor Books: Wheaton, Ill.
