King Hezekiah, Part 2

Two weeks ago, I started a sermon that I didn't finish, and I'd like to finish that today, as we were talking about the story of Hezekiah. You ladies have read this series of books, or began reading a series of books on the chronicles of the kings, fictionalized, based on fact, account of the time of Ahaz and Hezekiah and King Manasseh and the period of the kings of Judah. And as I've said in my writings this week in my letter, that it was a very compelling series of books for me to read. And Debbie and I are in the fifth one right now, and we're fighting over the — we have two different bookmarks in the same book. So that's difficult, you know. You've got to be careful about that with — as your husband and wife are reading the same book at the same time that you keep everything right. But we're about to finish that up. But it's been a very compelling read, and I found it to be very fascinating. And I've said factual in terms of staying close to the Bible. And, you know, you understand all that is added, but it has put me back into a study of Hezekiah in that period of time. And we were going into that last time as we got to a period, and then I had to stop and decide to just go ahead and make a two-parter out of this. But it is, I think, a very important topic. And it's a good study as we prepare for the Passover service, because the central feature of the reign of Hezekiah, at the beginning of his reign, was the Passover service. If you turn over to 2 Chronicles chapter 30, remember that Hezekiah came to the throne when he was 24 years old. I believe it was the exact date. He was 25, and he reigned 29 years. And the year 724 B.C. Not important that you necessarily remember that date, but it isn't good to understand that it was just a few years before the northern nation of Israel went into captivity. Hezekiah was the king of Judah, and the sister nation to the north, the ten-tribe nation of Israel, was just about three or four years away from going into captivity at the hand of the Assyrian Empire. When Hezekiah became king, Hezekiah's father was Ahaz, who was a wicked king. He allowed the nation to set up idols. The worship of God in the Taberna and the temple was abandoned or more or less neglected, and the priesthood left to fend for itself, and they had scattered. They had been demoralized, though the priesthood in a sense remained intact. The rituals of the temple and the sacrifices and all had certainly gone by the wayside. The temple had been stripped of much of its finery and gold, as Ahaz had paid tribute to Assyria to buy them off, to keep them from coming in. And idolatry had taken over the land. Even the heinous god Molech was worshipped and trying to set up in the valley of Hinnom. And Hezekiah, or Ahaz, even offered one of his own sons to the god Molech. Molech was a god that was appeased by child sacrifice, and a particularly odious god in the pantheon of pagan gods of the ancient world.

And that was done. Hezekiah, it seems, survived and lived to then become the king. And when he became king, he instituted a series of reforms. He did it very quickly. When you look in chapter 29 of Hezekiah, of 2 Chronicles, when he became king, he were told he did what was right in verse 2 in the sight of the Lord, according to what his father, and in verse 3, in the first year of his reign, in the first month, he opened the doors of the house of the Lord and repaired them. And the point I was making last time is that Hezekiah reacted and worked immediately within days of becoming king to begin a series of reforms. He didn't wait, didn't do a study. He began to reverse the course of the people and the religious life of the nation, and he reinstituted a worship of God. They cleaned up the temple. They restored the temple worship, and they had discovered that they had missed the Passover, and because of the law in Numbers 9 that allowed for the keeping of a second Passover, they then decided, well, we'll keep a second Passover period, which they did.

Chapter 30 tells the story of that. What's interesting is that Hezekiah sent invitations to the northern nation of Israel to come down to Jerusalem and to keep the Passover service. Here, their cousins, their brothers, were invited to come down, and most of them didn't. They had been so long removed from this that they had every excuse and every theological and practical reason not to come down. You know, they weren't going to go down to Judah and keep the feast, keep those Jewish days. You can well imagine even then they were probably spitting out that epithet of Jewish days that they were not going to keep. They had their own shrines, they had their own priesthood in Samaria, they had their own worship and rituals. They didn't need to go down there. And you find that verse 10 of chapter 30 here in 2 Chronicles, that runners passed from the city to city through the country of Ephraim and Manasseh as far as Zebulun, but they laughed at them and mocked them. They wouldn't come down. Some did from Asher, Manasseh, and Zebulun. Some humbled themselves and came to Jerusalem. One of the themes you always will see, whether it's Israel or the church, the Israel of God, the physical or the spiritual subject of Israel, there's always a remnant. There's always a few who hold to the old ways, as we might say, to the old paths. Not everyone goes off into idolatry, apostasy, heresy. There's always a few. Whenever there's an apostasy that has erupted upon the people of God, the majority buy into it. There's always a remnant. There's always a few who don't. And this is the same story that you see, the pattern in Israel at this particular event. And so some humbled themselves in verse 11 and came to Jerusalem. And the hand of God was on Judah to give them singleness of heart to obey the command of the king and the leaders at the word of the Lord.

A singleness of heart to obey. You know, as we come here in a few weeks to keep the Passover, Days of Unleavened Bread, I hope we have a singleness of heart to obey.

Keep in mind as you go through this, we're reading an Old Testament account, but you find concepts of grace, mercy, forgiveness, heart, humbleness, humility, New Covenant concepts are throughout this story. And that's because we're dealing with spiritual matters. God's holy days, God's law is spiritual. It was spiritual even during Old Testament days. Imagine that. It was a spiritual event. It was a spiritual matter. And because of that, there's always the spiritual dimension. And it takes a right spirit and it takes God's spirit to move upon His people or to move within His people to observe His commands in the right way.

And He goes on and He, down in verse 18, that the multitude of the people, many came from Ephraim and Manasseh, Issachar and Zebulun, they'd not cleanse themselves, yet they ate the Passover contrary to what was written. But Hezekiah prayed for them, saying, may the good Lord provide atonement for everyone. So they weren't ritually cleansed, according to the law, but that was okay. And Hezekiah understood that. He said, may the good Lord provide atonement for everyone, who prepares His heart to seek God, the Lord God of His fathers, though He is not cleansed, according to the purification of the sanctuary. And the Lord listened to Hezekiah and healed the people. There was a spiritual healing that took place. And again, you just see that that was more, it was the spiritual, the intent, the heart that was obvious came through. And this is what surrounded even the keeping of the Passover under this system of the old covenant temple system. Hezekiah, moved by God's Spirit, was able to understand that. But Hezekiah moved very quickly in this whole episode. And because of that, he was able to institute his reforms. There's a lesson there that I think again comes back to each of us as we recognize in our own lives, when we come up against sin, when we come up against an issue that needs our attention and correction, that it's important to move and to move quickly. Don't compromise. Don't rationalize.

Don't think that it doesn't apply to me. Understand God's law. Understand God's teaching. And move quickly in our own personal lives to change, to remedy, to healing, to reconciliation.

Don't put it off. There may not be another opportunity. If you have an opportunity to do a kindness to someone, to say an encouraging word to a coworker, to a fellow member, take the opportunity and take it then. It might not be there again. It just might not be there again. You never know what life will deal for you, for me, for the other person. When you have it within your power to do good, do it. And encourage and help. Work for reconciliation. Work for healing. Give encouragement in that way. Don't put it off. Hezekiah knew that he had his one opportunity to move, and he began to clean up the nation and the temple and prepare the people, and it worked. And that is a major, major lesson that is there. You continue on here in chapter 31, and you see his reforms and what that led to and the feasts that were set in verse 3 of chapter 31.

And the people responded. They began to bring tithes and offerings to the temple. And people, verse 6, it says, they brought the tithe of the holy things which were consecrated to the Lord their God, and they laid in heaps. It got to the point where there were more than could be even taken care of here, and they had to probably make arrangements for that. But these reforms continued to work throughout the nation. Verse 20 tells us, Hezekiah did throughout all Judah, and he did what was good and right and true before the Lord is God. And in every work that he began in the service of the house of God in the law, and in the commandment to seek his God, he did it with all of his heart, and so he prospered. It's not just a morality tale. It is an accounting of a historical event and of a king who was moved to do what was right, but it teaches us to put God first, to put our hearts into every aspect of God's work as it is within our lives, and to do that, and to seek God and to do it as well as we possibly can. Do not compromise. God will bless. He blessed the priesthood. He blessed the people. He blessed Hezekiah as they began to restore and to straighten out the crooked paths that had woven themselves into the fabric of Judah's society. And there were a lot. And again, realize that it didn't change every aspect of life. Many, many major areas were certainly reformed, but again, human nature is always there, always kind of held at bay, kind of like a...you know how when you go camping and you're out on a dark night in the woods in the campground, and you don't have any city street lights, you don't have your back porch light to light up the yard, and you build a fire, and you have kind of a circle of light. And you know, beyond that light, there's the brush, there's the woods that you're camping in, and there's raccoons and possums and maybe coyotes and whatever else are the creatures of the night are out there. Lions and tigers and bears. Oh my! But you've got this circle of light created by the campfire and the warmth of that campfire and everyone's setting around enjoying it. But you know, just beyond the light is the darkness. And that light can diminish, go down as the wood and the fuel is consumed, and you've got to keep it stoked up. But you know, just beyond that perimeter, there's darkness. And it's always there. And you've got to keep the light going. You can apply that, you know, understanding that light to the truth of God, and how you've got to keep that fire going in order to keep the darkness at bay. Hezekiah kept the darkness at bay. He pushed it back beyond the boundaries of the people, and yet it was always lurking around the edges. Remember that Hezekiah's successor after 29 years was his son Manasseh. And Manasseh reverted to what his grandfather Ahaz had done and brought back in the worship of foreign gods. And the people turned on a dime. The light was extinguished, and darkness came back in. Evil returned. It's that close. It's that present. It's that quick to come in. And so you have to understand how it works. And I think Hezekiah did. I think he understood evil. If the story that is told in the fictionalized books that we're reading is true, and I don't know that it is, but it's interesting to imagine that if Hezekiah, as a young boy, saw his older brother thrown into the fires of Molech, it made a lifelong impression.

You have to realize something made a lifelong impression upon him at his early age, for him to, at age 25, take the reins of power as he did, whether it was as portrayed by the novelist or not.

I don't know. I'm not saying that it is or isn't. I'm just saying that it's a pretty interesting imagination, because Hezekiah moved quickly, and he was motivated because he knew what evil was, and he wanted it removed from the land, and he had a love for God and for His truth. These continue on. Now, chapter 32 here of the Second Chronicles tells us of that evil that is always lurking out there in the form of the Assyrian nation, the Assyrian empire.

Verse 1 says, After these deeds of faithfulness, Sennacherib king of Assyria came and entered Judah. He encamped against the fortified cities, thinking to win them over to himself. When Hezekiah saw that Sennacherib had come and that his purpose was to make war against Jerusalem, he consulted with his leaders and commanders to stop the water from the springs which were outside the city, and they helped him. Assyria was the big, big empire on the scene during this time, off to the east and to the north of Judah and Israel and that plot of land. Assyria had become a mighty empire. They were not nice people, as we say. The histories that you can read about Assyria will tell you that they were vicious. They impaled the leaders of their conquered peoples on poles. They had no regard for life. They were, and again, the reliefs, the images that have survived from Nineveh and the Assyrian empire tell that story. The bits and pieces of the chronicles of the kings of Assyria tell us how they gloried in war. That's a matter of history. Now Sennacherib comes on the scene and is pushing against Judah. Hezekiah takes this particular opportunity to fortify his city. And here is where he diverts the flow of water out of what is called the Gihon spring, which is still there in Jerusalem. And they actually build a cut through solid rock, a water shaft to divert the water inside the city at the time so that the city could withstand a siege. Understand that in the ancient world, the water source was the key to the existence and the survival of a city. Any of you ever read James Mishner's book called The Source? How many of you know the book that I'm even talking about? Okay. How many of you know who James Mishner was? Okay. He wrote a number of novels. One of his early novels was a book called The Source. And it was set in Palestine in ancient Israel. And it told the story, The Source was a water supply that fed the city, this small city. It's built around the ancient city of Megiddo. And he just built this whole story that went through generations and centuries around the idea of that water supply of the city, the importance of it. And that's what you see right here in chapter 32. Hezekiah diverts the water through a newly carved tunnel that you can still see. And you can walk through that if you ever go to Jerusalem today. You can walk through water, sometimes gets up to about here, and it's kind of cold. And it's a very narrow channel, but you can walk the length of what they call Hezekiah's tunnel in Jerusalem today from the source that the people every day would have gone to to get their water all the way down to what is today called the Pool of Siloam, which figures in one of the scenes in the Gospels where Jesus performed a healing, I think it's in John 6.

And that's where it empties out. And it's all still there. And the archaeologists are really uncovering and learning even more about the ancient city of Jerusalem, but it's still there. So what he did here in chapter 32 is evidence, again, to prove the story of the Bible. And, you know, back in Peter, we were reading about scoffers. Remember the Bible study I gave, I think it was last year or so, that there are many things that archaeologists have uncovered, especially in Jerusalem, that prove the Bible. And this one about Hezekiah's tunnel here is one of these. And it does blend, again, just credence to the accuracy of the biblical record and the events of the time and what took place. But Hezekiah had to protect the people from Sennacherib. Verse 9 tells us that Sennacherib, king of Assyria, sent his servants to Jerusalem, but he and all the forces with him laid siege against Lachish, which was a city to the south and west of Jerusalem. And they sent up to Hezekiah, king of Judah and to all Judah, who were in Jerusalem, saying, Thus says Sennacherib, king of Assyria, and what do you trust that you remain under siege in Jerusalem? Does not Hezekiah persuade you to give yourselves over to die by famine and by thirst, saying, The Lord our God will deliver us from the hand of the king of Assyria? Has not the same Hezekiah taken away his high places and his altars and commanded Judah and Jerusalem, saying, You shall worship before one altar and burn incense to it? On it? Do you not know that what I and my fathers have done to all the peoples of other lands? Were the gods of the nations of those lands in any way able to deliver their lands out of my hand? Who was there among all the gods of those nations that my fathers utterly destroyed that could deliver his people from my land, that your people should be able to deliver you? Your gods should be able to deliver you from my hand? They had a fixation on overcoming the gods of the various peoples that they came up against. And they were a bit puzzled by this one god idea of Judah, who was even invisible. They had no representation for this god. That was another curiosity for the Assyrians, and they mocked it.

What's a god you can't see? What's a god you can't feel? And a god that you can't sense in some way? And all of this took place here. And we have the account also over in 2 Kings chapter 19 and also in Isaiah chapter 37. Because remember, Isaiah was the contemporary prophet during the time of Isaiah and Ahaz. And his prophecies took place during that particular time. And again, I'll have to say just how much, you know, just reading these novels, I'll give credit to the novelist again, who that you do get a sense of someone like Isaiah being, you know, a real person. You know, you read Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and prophets of God, but to make them into a person is very interesting. And I think it helps to, again, go back and look at the prophecies and read what they said and understand that it did have a historical application for the time and for the moment, as well as an application for the future. But realize that these were real people who lived and had to struggle with faith, had to struggle with doubt, had to struggle with enemies, opposition, and be faithful to what they knew, to what they had been taught. And to take God's message and to proclaim it and to convict people with it and to the leadership all the way up had to be assured of God's hand and God's guidance. If you turn over to Isaiah 36, we'll jump to that point in the story where the representative of Sennacherib here called the Rabshakha comes against Hezekiah, and he stands and he makes this this boast. Verse 13 of Isaiah 36, The Rabshakha stood and called out with a loud voice in Hebrew and said, Hear the words of the great king, the king of Assyria, do not let Hezekiah deceive you, for he will not be able to deliver you. Nor let Hezekiah make you trust in the Lord, saying the Lord will surely deliver us. The city will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria. Do not listen to Hezekiah for thus says the king of Assyria, make peace with me by a present and come out to me and every one of you eat from his own vine and everyone from his own fig tree and drink from the waters of your own sisters. Verse 18, Beware lest Hezekiah persuade you, saying the Lord will deliver us. He goes on again to mention the fact that all the other gods did not respond and that did not protect those people from those other nations.

Chapter 37 and verse 1 of Isaiah, So it was when King Hezekiah heard it that he tore his clothes and covered himself with sackcloth, and he went into the house of the Lord. And he sent Eliakim, who was over the household, shebna the scribe and the elders of the priests, covered with sackcloth, to Isaiah the prophet, the son of Amos. And they said to him, Thus says Hezekiah, This day is a day of trouble and rebuke and blasphemy, for the children have come to birth, but there is no strength to bring it out. And so they make their appeal. And the story goes on.

The Rabshakat, verse 8, returns to the king of Assyria, but then he comes back up to Jerusalem with a letter from the king of Assyria. And in verse 14 of Isaiah 37, Hezekiah received the letter from the hand of the messengers and he read it. This was a letter, again, demanding their surrender and complete ultimatum. And what Hezekiah did is important to understand, it's instructive to us. Hezekiah went up to the house of the Lord and spread it before the Lord. And he prayed to the Lord, saying, O Lord of hosts, God of Israel, the one who dwells between the carobim, you are God, you alone of all the kingdoms of the earth, you have made heaven and earth. This is a prayer. One of many prayers you will find in the Bible made by various people of God. Daniel had his, Paul, Peter, and Christ. Many different prayers you could kind of lift out of Scripture. They're always interesting to study in and of themselves, these individual prayers. What I find interesting about this one is, in a sense, the manner by which Hezekiah did it.

He took the letter into the house of God. At what point he stopped on the steps just before the great door going in, perhaps. And he kneels down and he spreads this letter out, as it were, probably on some type of a scroll, and he spreads them out in front of him.

As if he's giving them up to God, and he kneels and he prays.

Now, I think I find that as a pretty humbling lesson for us. You know, there are times when we have great issues before us in our lives. And, you know, it may be, maybe even to the fact that it's some type of a message that comes or something that strikes you, something that you may read in the Scriptures, maybe something that you read in some other source that moves you. Maybe it's a letter that comes from a friend, a family member, a son, a daughter, a husband, a father, that is dealing with something that's very, very deep and emotional in your life. And maybe it's negative, maybe it's positive.

And if you're moved by it, that might be a time in your life where you take that into your place of prayer, and you spread it before you on your bed or on your chair or your table, and you kneel and you pray to God about that situation, positive or negative. And you lay it out there, and you are you pausing your work and you're moved to you're about to do something, you're about to make a decision or whatever, and you pause and you kneel and you pray and you literally or figuratively spread it before God, just as Hezekiah did. God honors that. God honors that humbleness in that heart. Again, we don't have a temple to go and walk into, and you don't have a church altar to do that. You don't have to have that. You have a place where you pray and you lay your petition and you can even do it literally. But if you don't, if it's not to that point, you'd certainly do it spiritually or in a figurative way and lay it before God and use this prayer. Maybe it's some other prayer. Maybe it's another psalm that is dealing with that particular episode and you lay it before God. And you're doing so to, in a sense, come to some finality about it. And in your mind, you're truly wanting God. This is a moment where God has to act in your life, in this situation. You need to know the will of God.

You need to know it and you need to know it now. This is not a sleepy time prayer. This is not a prayer that you just dash off on your way to, you know, before you go off to work. This is a prayer that you have to have a decision and you have to have and know God's mind on it. And you pray in the spirit of Hezekiah where you put your focus on God. You are God, you alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth. You are the God of the true God. Please hear me, incline your ear and hear. Open your eyes. Hear the words of Sennacherib who has sent to reproach the living God. Truly, Lord, the kings of Assyria have laid waste all the nations and their lands and have cast their gods into the fire for they were not gods, but the work of men's hands, wood and stone. Therefore, they destroyed them. There was nothing there to fight and to come against them. Now therefore, O Lord, our God, save us from his hand that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you are the Lord, you alone. Now, we don't have an enemy parked outside on our lawn, 180,000 strong. You don't need that. Whatever the issue is in your life, that's pretty big. That's pretty looming. It can be frightening or it can be motivating. And again, you need an answer and you're asking God to intervene and you're asking God to act, to reveal, to encourage. It may be. You know those times. And I'm not saying this is every prayer necessarily, just as it wasn't that, you know, Hezekiah didn't take everything up to the steps of the temple and lay it out before God. But this was the life of the nation that stake and there had to be a decision. And so God honored that. We just carry on the account here. Isaiah sent to Hezekiah saying, thus says the God of Israel, because you prayed to me against Sennacherib, this is the word which the Lord has spoken concerning him. And he goes on to a very long answer from God and jump down to verse 33. And here's the, we'll cut to the chase on this one.

Therefore, thus says the Lord concerning the king of Syria, he shall not come into this city, nor shoot an arrow there, nor come before it with shield, nor build a siege mount against it by the way that he came. By the same shall he return, and he shall not come into this city. For I will defend the city to save it for my sake and for my servant David's sake.

And so the answer did come through the prophet that he was not going to come in. He did get an immediate answer. And this is where God performed the miracle that he did in verse 36. The angel of the Lord went out and killed in the camp of the Assyrians a 185,000. And when people arose early in the morning, there were the corpses, all dead. Now, this series of books, they present this as kind of a plague that came through with rats. Just an imaginative way to figure out how it happened.

Maybe that's the way God did it. I don't know. We are told from the scriptures that it happened in one night. It came to a conclusion within a very short period of time, because when they arose in the morning, they were all dead. Now, Sennacherib departed, went away, and returned home, and he remained at Nineveh. It was likely that Sennacherib wasn't there. It was why he could depart. He went home, and as the story goes on, he was later killed and assassinated by his own sons, as he was in the temple of his God.

And this was a major defeat that took place at this time. And there are evidences in the annals of Assyria that indeed there was a disruption within the nation and the reign of Sennacherib at this time, though they would not put something like this on their great relief columns and emblazon this in their stone reliefs for posterity.

This is what the scriptures say. The Jews have a tradition. The scriptures don't tell us this, but the Jews have a tradition that this took place at the Passover time and reminiscent of the death angel that came through Egypt at the time. Again, the scriptures don't say that, so we don't know that for sure. It's an interesting aspect of it.

But God moved very quickly and decisively, and the nation was spared. And it again shows God's hand is not shortened and to save his people and to intervene in their lives. Hezekiah went on. There is an account since we're here in Isaiah where he did enter into some other relationships.

He had the Babylonians come in, verse 1 of chapter 39. The Meridok balladon, the son of balladon, king of Babylon sent letters and a present to Hezekiah because he learned that he had been sick. Hezekiah, I've skipped over the story, where he did become sick and thought he was going to die and his life is spared for another 15 years by the hand of God. Hezekiah has a bit of a lapse, perhaps pride, perhaps bad advice, however the story went.

But he made a diplomatic blunder here by allowing the Babylonians to come in and he had a relationship with them and he showed them all the wealth of his nation, the treasures in verse 2 here and all that was in the house of God. And Isaiah rebukes him for it and again something is added to the course of the nation and destruction. It won't come during Hezekiah's lifetime but it will come upon his descendants. In verse 8 Hezekiah said to Isaiah, the Word of the Lord, which you have spoken is good, for he said, at least there will be peace and truth in my days.

And Hezekiah lived out his life. And if we go back to 2 Chronicles 32, verse 27 tells us that Hezekiah had very great riches and honor and he made himself treasuries for silver and for gold, for spices and for shields, for all kinds of desirable items and for storehouses for the harvest of grain, wine and oil and stalls for all kinds of livestock and folds for flocks. So it was a time of plenty. Good crops, prices were right, people prospered. He provided cities for himself, possessions of flocks and herds in abundance for God had given him very much property.

The same Hezekiah also stopped the water outlet to the upper Gihon and brought the water by tunnel to the west side of the city of David and he prospered in all of his works. So here in the Chronicles he makes one brief reference to what he did there. And again, it's not necessarily in chronological order here, but however, regarding the ambassadors, the princes of Babylon whom they sent to him to inquire about the wonder that was done in the land of God, withdrew from him in order to test him that he might know God withdrew from him in order to test him that he might know all that was in his heart.

So even Hezekiah had a moment where he lapsed and pride and bad advice led him to do something that again, he didn't exactly pass with flying colors. Not every one of us is perfect and Hezekiah wasn't and even the great servants of God had their moments when they made certain mistakes.

God did not punish him completely for it. When you look at Hezekiah's life, the lessons and the encouragement, I think, fit the message of this time of year as we prepare ourselves for the Passover service through an examination of our minds and of our heart through these stories of cleaning the temple, restoring the worship of the holy days, putting out invitations, bringing people in, looking at the heart of people, understanding that even if they don't fulfill all the technicalities of worship, that God looks on the heart and God protects His people. But even after those times there's trials.

A second lesson that I could give you from His life, the first being that whenever we have an opportunity to act and to move and to do good, to do it and do it quickly. But the second one, I think, is obvious here that Just as Hezekiah lered the nation in repentance and strengthened himself and the people, there were still trials because the Assyrians came in. There's still conflict in life. Life has its conflicts, doesn't it? Keep that in mind. Life has its conflicts.

You know, every good story that you get caught up in, every good movie, every good novel, has to have a conflict. You ever notice that? You start watching a movie and a nice young couple in a suburban house, car, three kids, good job, or whatever the story is, but somewhere 15 minutes into the movie, maybe shorter, conflict, bad guy comes in, you know, something happens to set up a conflict. There's always got to be conflict in every good story. Such is it in our life. Our life is a story. It's a good story, but it has conflict. It will have conflict. There will be trials. There will be things we have to surmount and overcome. Even after we repent, even after we're baptized, come into God's church, God gives His Spirit, we start off as a child of God, there will still be trials. God let the Assyrians come in and test the people, and they passed. And then, has a guy aflunked when it came to the Babylonians. You and I might pass one trial and turn right around and funk another one. That just happens. It doesn't mean God abandons us or anything like that. It just is a lesson. And in the meantime, in the middle, when like Hezekiah, our storehouses are building up, when our bank accounts are rising, then the cupboards are full, that's the time to be strengthened and to, again, keep going to God. Recognize that God gives us all of these things. Just as the choir sung the song and the quotes from Deuteronomy 6, God said, you know, don't forget that I gave you these lands, wells that you did not dig.

It's during the fat times, the good times, when we don't have a health crisis, when we don't have some other trial, that's when we are to be strengthened so that we can enjoy our life, but also be ready for whatever might come. And the third lesson to learn from this study of Hezekiah's life is that when we turn to God, He will pardon. He will pardon.

God is very, very merciful. We go back to 2 Chronicles 30 and verse 19.

Verse 18, Hezekiah prayed for them, saying, may the good Lord provide atonement for everyone, who prepares his heart to seek God, the Lord of his fathers, though he's not cleansed according to the purification of the sanctuary. And the Lord listened to Hezekiah and healed the people. When we turn to God and our hearts are right, and we acknowledge our sin, He will pardon. He will be gracious if we turn to Him. So, there's a lot more we can learn from this. And again, I encourage you ladies and men, and as I said in my letter this week, I think it is a wonderful teaching opportunity for our families to take those stories and even for the young people to read and to form the basis for a family discussion. It puts you right into the Bible. There's a great deal to learn there. And there's a ready-made series of lessons and discussions that are right there for all of us to learn from. But it helps us to set the stage for our own observance of the Passover in Days of Unleavened Bread this year. And I encourage the study and read through these scriptures yourself and make your own notes on them. And don't ever forget to take it and lay it all before God and ask for His guidance and direction and His blessing as we prepare ourselves.