Conundrum
In chapter
20 Hezekiah falls prey to an illness, and God sees it fit to send in Isaiah to
put the proverbial nail in the coffin.
Isaiah delivers the message to Hezekiah that he will not recover. Unfortunately this opens up a huge “chicken
and the egg” problem for me because we know Hezekiah does indeed recover. But before I get to the problem let me make a
confession: I understand that my issue is because of my humanity and my
inability to completely understand the mind of God. So it’s my issue, not the Lord’s issue.
But here’s
the issue. If God is omniscient (and I
believe that He is) then does He not know Hezekiah will repent? So if God knows that Hezekiah will repent,
why send Isaiah the message that Hezekiah will die from this illness when God knows
that in the end Hezekiah will actually not die from this illness? But had God not sent the message of
Hezekiah’s imminent death, would Hezekiah have repented as he did?
The
problem for me is that it feels like God is painting an intentionally dark
picture to evoke a response from Hezekiah that wouldn’t be evoked if God
actually told Hezekiah what was actually going to happen. So does God “creatively tell the future” in
order to bring about the reaction that He actually knows is going to happen anyway? {In other words, does God lie in order to
bring about truth?} Certainly not!
So now
that I have opened this little conundrum, let me attempt to close it a bit –
keeping in mind that I have already confessed that it is the lack of my own
understanding that has brought about this conundrum. One could claim that before Hezekiah’s
repentance, he was in a state of being guilty should judgment come upon
him. Quite literally, without repentance
Hezekiah was guilty and deserved death.
Thus, God gives the legitimate verdict to Hezekiah while Hezekiah is
guilty even though He knows that the verdict will benefit from a stay of
execution. Hezekiah hears the verdict,
repents, and God grants Hezekiah the stay of execution. Thus God doesn’t “lie” as much as God speaks
truth in the moment. In Hezekiah’s sin,
he deserved condemnation. In Hezekiah’s
repentance, he was granted mercy. In the
end, this is where I must come down on this little conundrum I have opened.
Isaiah
Before
moving to the second half of this chapter, let’s lift up the character of
Isaiah for a second. Imagine being a
prophet of God and being told to go to some important figure and deliver a hard
message. After mustering up the courage
to do so, you barely leave and God tells you to go back and deliver a message
that seemingly contradicts what you just said.
Is not the human reaction to be confused – or worried that people might
start to think that we don’t actually know what we are doing? Yet Isaiah delivers the messages without
complaint. Isaiah delivers the messages
without an issue. Isaiah does the will
of God. When his human nature might have
lifted up a reason to balk at God’s command, Isaiah proves that he is a
follower of God and suppresses his humanity in favor of the character that God
has given to him as His follower.
Peace With Babylon
The rest
of this chapter shows Hezekiah making a peace pact with Babylon. Hezekiah’s thought is for peace during his
reign. I’ll admit that it is a bit
short-sighted. It throws the door wide
open for the people of Judah to look at Babylon as an ally rather than as the
threat to their faith in God that they truly are. I can’t fault Hezekiah for thinking that
peace is a good thing; but I can fault him for receiving the Babylonian envoys
and exposing the wealth of the nation without consulting God first. It seems as though Hezekiah received grace
form God and then went out and proved his fallen nature as a human. And he did.
Yet, let
me confirm that although Hezekiah may have made a slight stumble with the
Babylonian envoys we know that the additional 15 years that God grants to
Hezekiah were extremely fruitful. Quite
literally, the words at the beginning of this chapter that read “set your house
in order” literally mean “arrange everything for your successor.” And Hezekiah does just this. Had Hezekiah died when God decreed judgment,
Hezekiah would have not had an heir. All
of his children were born to him after Hezekiah recovered. So clearly Hezekiah took seriously his part
of God’s promise to ensure that an heir to David would be on the throne. {Although,
Manasseh is cited as one of the most evil kings Judah ever had before he
himself repents to God as described in 2 Chronicles 33:1-20.}
Furthermore,
we know from many of our copies Hebrew manuscripts that Hezekiah spent these
last 15 years of his life paying for the law to be restored, copied, and
distributed where appropriate. We know
this because at the end of many of the manuscripts we find the letters HZK in
Hebrew, which stands for Hezekiah.
In the
end, Hezekiah falters a bit with the envoys from Babylon. But he does great things with respect to
restoring the faith in God in Judah and the people’s access to the Word of
God. Like all of us, he is a mixed bag
of mistakes and successes. But through
it all we see the true thing that God desires: repentance and contrition.
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