Sennacherib Attacks Hezekiah & What God Did

II Kings 18:13-19:37
II Chronicles 32:1-23
Isaiah 37:1-38

These three books all tell the story of how, even after all the good that Hezekiah did in trying to lead his people back to worshiping the Lord instead of all the idols of the peoples who lived there before them, King Sennacherib of Assyria came to attack Judah and capture Jerusalem. He wanted to deport them to foreign lands to remove their identity as Jews and Israelites, as he and his forebears did to many other nations. Sennacherib's mistake was that he considered the Lord God to be no different from all the idols, the false gods of the other nations he conquered. He did not recognize that the Lord God is God, and all the other gods are nothing.

Hezekiah's response to this situation was to do what he could to cut off the water supply to the enemy and fortify his own defenses, and, most importantly, he turned to the Lord. He sent his emissaries to God's prophet Isaiah, as he spread out the letter from Sennacherib before the Lord. His prayer admitted the truth of how this king had in fact conquered all these other peoples, and burned their idols in the fire, because they were not gods, but merely the work of men's hands, and the Lord God is God over all because He is the maker of all the heavens and the earth.

Isaiah's reply to Hezekiah said how God had planned long ago that Sennacherib would destroy all those other nations, and has carried out His plans. But now that this king is attacking God's people, God would lead him back to his own country and destroy him there. 

Then God's Angelic Army destroyed Sennacherib's whole army that was laying siege against Jerusalem, and when the people woke up in the morning there were all the dead bodies. So they broke camp and left.

God told Isaiah that He would put His hook in his nose and His bit in his mouth and lead him back home. And while he was peacefully worshiping his god in his local temple, his own sons came in and murdered him.

So God took good care of His people, as He said He would, and punished the arrogant ruler who refused to admit that God was the One Who used him to carry out His own plans.

God always carries out His promises, no matter what the circumstances may look like. If we see only with our own eyes, at what is going on in this world, we may be discouraged and dismayed. But when we see with His eyes, in the power of His Spirit Who lives in us, then we will discern how God uses even the ungodly and arrogant and selfish and cruel to carry out His plans, then will also deal with these evil people, too. He always has and He always will.

Even so, come, Lord Jesus!