In Isaiah 36,
kingdom of Judah was confronted with an invasion by the Assyrians, who did
their best to demoralize them with statements about how there was no way their
God could save them, since no other gods saved the other nations the Assyrians
destroyed.
In Isaiah 37,
when King Hezekiah of Judah heard it, he took the national troubles to the Lord
and prayed that the Lord would save Judah so that the Assyrians would know
Judah’s God really was God.
Then, Isaiah came to tell King Hezekiah that the Lord would
answer his prayer and he was to send a message back to the Assyrians with the
following sense: 1) You’ve
blasphemed against God, and we scorn you, 2) Our God got you where you are
today, so of course the other nations were not strong enough to stand up to
you, 3) God knows where you live and everything about you. (Implication: You’re
in for it now!)
Then without warning, Isaiah shifts into a message for King
Hezekiah, and this caught my attention:
And this shall
be a sign unto thee, Ye shall eat this
year such as groweth of itself; and the second year that which springeth of the
same: and in the third year sow ye, and reap, and plant vineyards, and eat the
fruit thereof. (Isaiah 37:30)
What is this?
It is nothing less than a promise from the Lord that He will
feed the people of Judah for 2 years with whatever crops grow all by themselves
with no cultivation. It is
essentially a proclamation of a Sabbath year and a Jubilee year, one right
after the other.
If you remember, the Sabbath year was every seventh year
when the land was to rest, and the Jubilee year was the 50th year,
or after 7 Sabbath years had happened, and it was meant to be a time of
deliverance from debt. So to have
these two years was a message of rest and deliverance to the whole nation in a
way that would could be appreciated for days and weeks and months… It was a also a tender mercy; after all,
one can’t be planting and cultivating when one’s land is under siege from
invaders. But it would also require their faith
for them to experience the rest.
They had to believe that it would be all right.
What a great blessing!
The Lord through the prophet didn’t just speak assurance to the king, He
also gave assurance to the common man who would be very worried about how their
livelihood was being disrupted by the invasion of the Assyrians. In an environment of tension and
worries about captivity, death, and famine, God gave a promise of sustained
rest and deliverance and providence.
I think the lesson from this is that if we turn to the Lord
in our troubles, He will have mercy on us and help us in miraculous ways. Sometimes through tender mercies,
sometimes through great miracles, always in ways that we need. No trouble is to great or too
small. No station is too high or
too low to be blessed, whether king or commoner.
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