Week 24 Isaiah
Isaiah 36-39 is a block of narrative text I’m familiar with. I’ve already read it twice this year – Week 17 in II Kings and Week 19 in II Chronicles 32.
It’s the story of King Hezekiah’s dilemma: the Assyrian army has arrived.
Hezekiah has 0% chance of beating Assyria. But he believed in the Lord so he prayed a desperation prayer. It was Isaiah who relayed the Lord’s answer to the king.
I read the Lord’s reply a couple of times. It was mostly addressed to the Assyrian king. All along Sennacherib had been doing his empire-building for whatever personal reasons and reasons-of-state he had for doing them. Then the Lord asked Sennacherib: but have you not heard? It was I, the Lord, who decided this long ago. Long ago I planned what I am now causing to happen, that you should crush fortified cities into heaps of rubble.
That would have surprised Sennacherib. He figured he himself was doing what he was doing, doing what he wanted to do (that seems pretty clear in verses 24 & 25). He wasn’t doing what he was doing because he figured the Lord wanted him to do it. And yet Isaiah says there’s a correspondence, a tie-in between the Lord’s big-plan and Sennacherib’s small one.
Sennacherib: working in the small envelope of the world he knew; operating in the bigger envelope of a world he didn’t.
Note: quote from Isaiah 37:26 (NLT version). Isaiah’s full reply is 37:22-29.