Week 28 Isaiah 36-39
I compared the forecast Isaiah gave to king Hezekiah here in Isaiah 37:22-29 with the same prediction I read in 2 Kings 19:21-28 a couple of months ago. There’s at least 95% overlap.
It’s a pretty sober comment to a powerful empire-building state that had conquered half the world.
From Assyria’s point-of-view they were the Big Dog in the pack – Big Dog of the Whole World. And when they got around to asking How Did I Get to Be Big Dog? Well…they congratulated themselves. Isaiah quotes the Assyrians giving themselves credit:
I have conquered
I have cut down
I have reached & explored
I have dug wells
I have stopped up rivers.
It’s understandable. The Assyrians were big. Strong. Ruthless. Intimidating. Cunning. For-all-the-world it looked like they were the architects of their own global exploitation.
So Isaiah’s comment might have caught them flat-footed: have you not heard? It was the Lord who decided this long ago.
How the mechanism for this process works is hard to say. Sounds like some kind of interactive-deciding. Maybe not exactly symbiotic. But there seems to be overlapping decision-making in play. The Assyrians clearly made decisions they wanted to make. But (almost freakishly) their decisions corresponded exactly with the Lord’s decisions. And looking down the road the good outcomes they planned on looked less-and-less happy for them.
Note: quotes from Isaiah 37:24-25 26 (NLT). Hezekiah’s story is also in 2 Kings 18:13 – 20:20. The one big difference is that Hezekiah’s ‘psalm’ in Isaiah 38:10-20 is missing from the 2 Kings story.