God is Amazing

 

READ 2 Kings 18–21

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to turn on the news and discover that God replaced the leaders of our land with godly people who obeyed Him and brought great and good changes to our nation? Would we think we were dreaming? In the OT, the divided nation had many evil leaders, but a few were not. When Israel was falling apart, God gave Judah an outstanding king who ruled well for nearly thirty years.

Hezekiah “did what was right in the eyes of the Lord . . . . removed the high places and broke the pillars and cut down the Asherah.” The people had been making offerings to the bronze serpent that Moses had made so he broke it in pieces. “He trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel, so that there was none like him among all the kings of Judah after him, nor among those who were before him. For he held fast to the Lord. He did not depart from following him, but kept the commandments that the Lord commanded Moses. And the Lord was with him; wherever he went out, he prospered. He rebelled against the king of Assyria and would not serve him.” (2 Kings 18:1–7)

However, the Assyrian threat against Israel was extended to Judah and Hezekiah turned to God in prayer:

“O Lord, the God of Israel, enthroned above the cherubim, you are the God, you alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth; you have made heaven and earth. Incline your ear, O Lord, and hear; open your eyes, O Lord, and see; and hear the words of Sennacherib, which he has sent to mock the living God. Truly, O Lord, the kings of Assyria have laid waste the nations and their lands and have cast their gods into the fire, for they were not gods, but the work of men’s hands, wood and stone. Therefore they were destroyed. So now, O Lord our God, save us, please, from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you, O Lord, are God alone.” (19:15–19)

God answered and part of what He said was this promise: “The surviving remnant of the house of Judah shall again take root downward and bear fruit upward. For out of Jerusalem shall go a remnant, and out of Mount Zion a band of survivors. The zeal of the Lord will do this . . . . Concerning the king of Assyria: He shall not come into this city or shoot an arrow there, or come before it with a shield or cast up a siege mound against it. By the way that he came, by the same he shall return, and he shall not come into this city, declares the Lord. For I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David.” (19:30–34)

That very night, the angel of the Lord struck down 185,000 in the Assyrian camp. Their king, who had boasted of destroying Judah, departed and went home. While he worshiped his god, his sons killed him. (19:35–37)

Later, Hezekiah became ill and asked that God would heal him. God did, affirming His answer with a promise to defend Jerusalem “for my own sake and for my servant David’s sake.” He also gave this king a sign through Isaiah the prophet by turning back the shadow on the steps. (20:3–11)

His son Manasseh didn’t follow his father’s godly attitude. He reigned fifty-five years but “did what was evil in the sight of the Lord” and led the people astray “to do more evil than the nations had done whom the Lord destroyed before the people of Israel.” (21:1–9) Because of that, God said:

Behold, I am bringing upon Jerusalem and Judah such disaster that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle. And I will stretch over Jerusalem the measuring line of Samaria, and the plumb line of the house of Ahab, and I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down. And I will forsake the remnant of my heritage and give them into the hand of their enemies, and they shall become a prey and a spoil to all their enemies, because they have done what is evil in my sight and have provoked me to anger, since the day their fathers came out of Egypt, even to this day.

Like all before him, Manasseh eventually died and his son Amon carried on his evil practices. But his servants conspired to put him to death. Then the people struck down those conspirators and made Josiah his son king in his place. (21:19–24)

The nations today are not the OT people of God. That status belongs to those who have the faith of Abraham — genuine Christians. Yet God still uses the activities of the world to bring glory to Himself. We attended a dinner last night that featured Ukrainian food and the stories from several who told how God protected them and did amazing things enabling them to escape the horrors in their homeland. Again, my faith in God’s sovereignty increases. My life is ordinary compared to those stories but trusting God is never without wonder nor His surprising answers to prayer.