Week 18 2 Kings 20
King Hezekiah was sick in bed…hoping it wasn’t his deathbed. But then Isaiah arrived and said: set your affairs in order, for you are going to die. You will not recover from your illness.
Hezekiah was stunned. Isaiah was an established & reliable prophet and he gave credible forecasts. Even kiss-of-death ones.
But even so Hezekiah didn’t cave-in. He did the only thing left to do. He prayed a kind of neutralizing/negativizing prayer: a please-overturn-Isaiah’s-forecast type of prayer.
I wonder about what was going on in the place where final decisions were made. Isaiah said Hezekiah would die. So his death was genuinely in-the-cards. But Hezekiah resisted that outcome and pleaded for a different one.
One of two things could happen. Either Hezekiah’s fate wouldn’t be changed and he’d die. Or his fate would be altered and he’d live. Isaiah’s forecast would either happen…or else it wouldn’t.
I feel pretty sure that when Isaiah predicted Hezekiah’s death Hezekiah was literally & materially & actually going to die.
But then Hezekiah introduced a brand new component into his own personal stream-of-future-inevitabilities. If he hadn’t injected that element then he would have died. But he did. So he didn’t.
In this instance the predetermination that Hezekiah would die was malleable and responsive to alternate inputs.
I don’t think there’s many things that can recalibrate an already decided future. But in this case praying did.
Note: quote from 2 Kings 20:1 (NLT)