Isaiah's influence is that Judah did not fall as Samaria did and that's big because here you have this duo. You have a king who cooperated with this prophet. You have a prophet that loved his king. And the two of them, in spite of all of the apostates that were still in Jerusalem, they prevailed. Jeremiah, again, as I've been mentioning throughout, he will not have this satisfaction of seeing Jerusalem prevail.
He will see it be completely destroyed. That's the name of this message. It could have been the devil talks, the voice of the devil, the voice of Satan. I chose Satan because that means adversary and the Assyrian army that show up, of course, is the adversary of the devil.
Very fitting to go with that. Just to give a little coming attraction to what we're going to look at in chapter 36, look at verses 4 and 5. You tell me if this isn't the voice of the devil. Then Reb Sheka said to them, Say now to Hezekiah, Thus says the great king, the king of Assyria, What confidence is this in which you trust? I say, You speak of having plans and power for war, but they are mere words.
Now in whom do you trust that you rebel against me? Satan speaks. He's speaking through Reb Sheka. Everything he said to the Jewish people in this section is what he has been saying to believers ever since. But first some background on what's going on here because this is Isaiah's interlude between his prophecies to the Jewish people and the surrounding nations during the rule of Assyria. This begins his presentation of the fall of Assyria, which you will not see in his lifetime, but he got to prophesy of it in his lifetime. How this all ends in the next chapter for Assyria is astounding.
After chapter 39, we then go into the Messianic prophecy that has a whole different feel to it than the first 35 chapters. But these four chapters, 36 to 39, are about this time in history when the Assyrians had for the last time come into Judah, come up, and they had now come up to the gates of Jerusalem, and they will be defeated by God. The significance of King Hezekiah's reign with Isaiah's influence is that Judah did not fall as Samaria did, and that's big because here you have this duo. You have a king who cooperated with his prophet. You have a prophet that loved his king.
And the two of them, in spite of all of the apostates that were still in Jerusalem, they prevailed. Jeremiah, again, as I've been mentioning throughout, he will not have this satisfaction of seeing Jerusalem prevail. He will see it be completely destroyed, and he will lament over it in the lamentation of Jeremiah. Now, Assyria's conquest of Judah, again, makes it up right to the walls of the city, but God drew a line there. And as the Bible says of the sea, when God put the sea, the oceans of the world, he said, you may come this far and no further.
The boundaries were set because God is sovereign. Now, added to Hezekiah's problem during this invasion is that he becomes terminally ill. He cries out to God. We'll get that in chapter 38. He cries out to God, and he will be delivered from the Assyrian threat and the illness.
He will get 15 years added to his life. Now, in Isaiah 38, we get a little glimpse of all this. He said, And the word of the Lord came to Isaiah, saying, Go tell Hezekiah. Thus says, Yahweh, God of David, your father, I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears.
Surely I will add to your days 15 years. I will deliver you and this city from the hand of the king of Assyria, and I will defend this city. How that must have just been such an encouragement to this man on his deathbed for God to say, All right, I'm going to heal you from this one, and I'm going to beat back the Assyrian threat. And so this interlude of Isaiah, spelling out the beginning of the end of Assyria, which in their lifetime would have seemed impossible. They were invincible until God again intervened.
Years earlier, Hezekiah had paid tribute to Assyria to keep them out of Jerusalem. He caved in. Now, you can't blame him. There's an army coming, and he's standing up to them, and then all of a sudden he realizes how grave this threat is, and he buys them off.
And it doesn't work. He appeases them, and they, a few years later, they will come back. And I'm going to go over this, the chronology of how things appear to have taken place. Three sections of scripture and one historical document of the Assyrian king, Sennacherib, talk about this event. And if the Bible gives three sections of scripture in 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, and Isaiah, there are lessons that must abound for us. And one of them is learning to identify the speech of the devil.
Because if you don't, it will be worse for you and those around you. The opportunities alone that would be lost by not having that spiritual discernment. Well, the sequence of events recorded in scripture about this event is not in chronological order.
You have a lot of work to get it. It spans about 20 years. Just the Assyrians besieging and defeating the northern kingdom. And then, of course, taking them all away and assimilating them into different lands. And that was the end of Samaria in the northern kingdom, but had Judah remained. Hezekiah stopped paying Assyria. Assyria responds with an army. Hezekiah caves. Hezekiah gets very sick.
He, of course, recovers. The threat of the Assyrians was just all over the place. Babylonians come and visit him. That really raises the ire of Assyria. And then they really come into Jerusalem or into Judah and ultimately Jerusalem. And then God will destroy that army, that Assyrian army.
So that's an overview of what's going to happen. This story is in other places I mentioned except for when you get to chapter 38. Hezekiah writes a psalm to celebrate the healing that God put on his life. And it is the only place in the Bible that it shows up. We are about, this chapter, about 700 years before the virgin birth of Christ. And here this righteous king facing the invasion of the savages. And they were savages when it came to war.
They were quite civilized otherwise it seems. This great king has many lessons for us and so we go right now to verse 1. Now it came to pass in the 14th year of King Hezekiah that Sennacherib, king of Assyria, came up to Jerusalem, all the fortified cities of Judah, and took them.
It's a summary, really the first chapter of Isaiah summarizing what's going on. He is the 13th king of Judah after Solomon. And a great man of God.
So much for the silly superstition that 13 is somehow an evil omen. Because here he is the 13th and he was a great man of God and we see that in so much of what he did. In fact he even gives us Proverbs that seemingly were lost. We have them show up in the book of Proverbs that Hezekiah preserved for us.
Anyway Sennacherib, it says king of Assyria. Now Sennacherib wanted to make everyone in his reach subject to him, as does Satan. He even tried, Satan did, to get the son of God to subject himself to him. And of course we read that and we'll just take it in Luke, it's also in Matthew. Therefore, Satan speaking to Jesus, if you will worship before me, all will be yours. I will enrich you, you'll be better off if you just bow down to me. Satan wants it so much he can't have it.
Remember that the next time you're under attack, that he tries to get you to submit to him. Satan is irreparably brazen and harmful and doomed. He will not be saved. He's a spiritual being, he's not a human being. He's a created being, he's not a self-created God.
When the Bible refers to him as the god of this world, as sort of a smirk that belongs to that, he's the one who pulls the strings of the puppets of the earth who refuse the lordship of the only true God. Well, looking again at verse 1, he says, they came up against all the fortified cities of Judah and took them. Wait a minute, the invader is succeeding in the promised land.
These cities were fortified against invaders and it wasn't working. Their readiness to defend themselves failed because they rejected God. They were apostates.
No, there was always a remnant, but these were those who turned from God and never really acknowledged it. Isaiah's ministry, he invested himself in outreach to idolaters. Those first 35 chapters are about him reaching out saying, don't go to Egypt. Judgment will come, even to Assyria. This nation is going to be judged. The first chapter of Isaiah lays it all out, what was happening with the people. Donkeys know to whom they belong, but my people, they can't figure this out.
It's a powerful first chapter and it's been appropriate in every age of mankind. In verse 2, he continues, he says, then the king of Assyria sent Rabshakah with a great army from Lakish to King Hezekiah at Jerusalem and he stood by the aqueduct, the upper pool on the highway to the fuller's field, the very fuller's field where 30 years ago about, Isaiah spoke to Hezekiah's wicked father Ahaz. He said, God wants to bless, don't give in to these Assyrians. Well, Ahaz refused the Lord and instead he made a treaty with Assyria.
Look at the good that's doing right now as they're invading the land. The Assyrians are ready to take Jerusalem and Isaiah was trying to help Ahaz to stand in the faith and Ahaz wanted no part of it. Now, according to 2 Kings that also tells this story, Sennacherib sends three high-ranking officials to accept and arrange the surrender of Jerusalem. He sent the tartan who was the supreme commander. These are not proper names, personal names.
These are titles. Rabsharas, who is another chief officer of King Sennacherib, because he had a tremendous army, even when he loses 185,000 troops, he still has an incredible army left, just not in Israel. And then there's Rabshakah, who likely is a field commander. He may be some other political figure also, but we're going to approach it as though he's the commander in the field. Elakish is about 30 miles southwest of Jerusalem, so that's where they're coming from, verse 3.
We haven't even really heated this up yet. Verse 3, and Eliakim, the son of Hekiah, who was over the household of Shebna, the scribe, and Joah, the son of Asaph, the recorder came out to him. So these are the envoys sent by Hezekiah.
Eliakim was very faithful. He is promoted over Shebna, who was demoted by God because of Shebna's self-serving pride. There's a lesson there to watch your pride, because God is watching. Verse 4, the Rabshakah said to him, Say now to Hezekiah, thus says the great king, the king of Assyria, what confidence is this in which you trust? He opens with an insult. It is an insult of omission, rudely omitting the title of king to Hezekiah. And he will not call him king throughout the exchange.
Or he'll call Sennacherib king of Assyria, but he will not give the satisfaction to the Jews of recognizing Hezekiah as king. This is the voice of the devil, and you'll see it as we pass through it. He says, what confidence is this in which you trust? Now Hezekiah commanded these men, we find out in verse 21, Don't say anything to him. Listen to what he has to say and bring it back to me. It was wise advice, and one time that they say something, it backfired.
But they didn't say any more after that. We'll come to it too. Spiritually, however, we are to be ready for this question when someone says, what confidence is this in which you trust? 1 Peter, we know this one, Sanctify, set aside as holy the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you the word that is in you. That's the Greek. We translated a reason for your hope. That word translated reason is logos.
So, to everyone, a word for the hope that is in you with meekness and respect. See, the apostles viewed the word as, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He became flesh and dwelt among us. They never separated that metaphor from that reality.
It was concrete and it was abstract at the same time because it was divine. In this beginning of this, his rude opening words, an omission of word, Rabshakah is a type of Satan. We are hearing Satan speak. The devil is talking to them. Now, of course, the envoys, they just see him as an obnoxious ruler, but the Holy Spirit says, hmm, who does this remind you of when you start listening to what his words and observing Rabshakah's behavior attempting to undermine faith right from the beginning? That's a signature move of the devil. It's what he did to Eve, and it worked.
This is the voice to all believers through the ages who have set themselves to serve Jesus. He sometimes speaks in a tone of a reasonable devil. He's going to pull that stunt. He's going to give them statistics, and they're supposed to go, ooh, ooh. Well, never mind God.
You got the stats. They're not going to fall for it. Human reason grants no permission to God to be God on God's terms.
He can be God on their terms, which is the meaning of idolatry. Human reason furiously opposes the Bible as God's word to man, and we furiously counter that with we don't agree with you. In fact, there's a consequence for you not agreeing with us. What do you got?
What you got? What is the consequence of me not believing the world? Well, persecution, but you can get that even if you're not a Christian. Anyway, everything Reb Shachar says and the way he says it proves that Satan speaks and that Satan is the author of destroying faith by using words because that's what Reb Shachar is using.
He's got this big army in back of him too. All mankind gets to hear the devil's words. All mankind gets to see the devil's works. Every time you drive by a cemetery, you are seeing the works of the devil. It goes all the way back to Eden. Surely if you eat of this tree, you're not going to die.
Well, a cemetery disagrees with that. Verse 5, I say, you speak of having plans and power for war, but they are mere words. Now in whom do you trust that you rebel against me? Now he knows they trust Yahweh. He also knows there's an element in Judah that is trusting Egypt.
He's going to deal with both of them, Reb Shachar is. He's going to use a little bit of the truth to force along his lie, the tour of destruction that he is on. So we come to Christ. We begin our walk with great ambition to serve the Lord, to be obedient to him. Peter had this ambition. Peter answered and said to him, even if all are made to stumble because of you, I will never be made to stumble. And of course, Peter stumbled. Peter was told, right, but at that moment, the Lord didn't give that a pass.
He dealt with it right on the spot. Before the roost of crows three times, Peter, you're going to deny me. And here, what we're looking at, when Reb Shachar, or you could say Satan, says to us, you speak of plans for war and power. You talk about serving Christ. You talk about never caving in.
You talk about not stumbling. And then we encounter that violent spiritual war, whether it is the enemy inside or the enemy outside, whether it's external or internal. The flesh, the world, the Satan, we got to deal with all of them. This is what makes the cross of Christ so amazing, that yeah, we can have our plans of war and powerful war and fail and yet still be on the winning side, still be useful to Christ in spite of our shortcomings. I like, again, Romans, I think I quoted it Sunday, Romans 835. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Or tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Yet in all these things we're more than conquerors. And so there's the devil's lie. You talk about fighting a war, you can't fight a war, and yet we're whooping him when we remain in the faith and we preach Christ in spite of our fallings. But how did Judah say, he who is able to, Judah, Judah means Gentile form of Judah, he who is able to keep you from falling and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy? To God our Savior, who alone is wise, be glory, dominion, power, and majesty forever. So we come back to Isaiah 36 verse 5, and he says, I say you speak of having plans for war and power, but they're just words, mere words, talk is cheap.
Well, we know that. This is what Satan said about Job, and Job was the winner. Where is Job now, and where will Satan be later?
So Satan answered Yahweh and said, skin for skin, yes, all that a man has, he will give for his life, but stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will surely curse you to your face, you can hear it. And Job never did. He came up close to it though, but he backed away.
He did not do it. They were not just words. When Job said, though he slay me, I will trust him. When he said, you know, the Lord gives, the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord. He backed up his pledge of faith. He told God, he said, I'm not going to pretend. I'm not giving up my integrity. I'm telling you, God, I don't like what's happening to me. And you have to just admire him for that.
Anyway, he continues, Reb Shachar does, now in whom do you trust that you rebel against me? This is, his speech is Satan's speech. It is a masterpiece of propaganda. From a serious point of view, psychological warfare. Discrediting the faith of believers. Sowing seeds of doubt in the minds of believer and would be believer as well.
Unbelievers. The key word that he uses here, and he uses it seven times in this chapter, is trust. But he's using it as a, he's militarizing the word against trusting God. He wants them to trust in nobody, just save their skin.
That's all they got to do. He's going to come out and say that. Because Satan is brazen enough to say, you're too stupid to not get what I'm saying to you. So I'm going to come out and tell you.
There's nothing you can do about it. We'll come to that. Well, anyway, coming back to this, the Reb Shachar targeting Judah's believers and the apostates. In verse 6, he's going to go at those who are looking for Egypt to come help save them, send military aid from Egypt to help save them from Assyria.
Of course, that never happens. So Reb Shachar's going to bring that up. And then in verse 7, he's going to go at those who trust in Yahweh. Satan treats believers as runaway slaves. He is determined to re-enslave us. And if he cannot re-enslave us, he'll be satisfied with just making us miserable in our freedom in Christ.
That's what he does. And if you don't learn that, you can diminish your witness. You can hurt your prayer life. Faith in rhythm with God has a defiant response to this kind of stuff. It is always ready to defy back.
It is looking for that shot. It is determined to side with God no matter what. No matter how you feel, no matter how the outlook may look, you're still looking to serve the Lord. And Satan can't stand it, but we see it happening even in Israel. Actually in Babylon, Azariah, Mishael, and Hananiah, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. In Daniel chapter 3, when the king said, you're going to either bow down to me or you're going to cook.
I'm going to cook you alive. Thanks for tuning in to Cross Reference Radio today. Cross Reference Radio is a ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia. If you'd like to learn more about this ministry, we invite you to visit our website, crossreferenceradio.com.
You'll find a number of teachings from Pastor Rick available there. We also encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. When you subscribe, you'll be notified of new editions of Cross Reference Radio. Just search for Cross Reference Radio on your favorite podcast app. You can also follow the links at crossreferenceradio.com. We're glad we were able to spend time with you today. Tune in next time to continue learning from the book of Isaiah with Pastor Rick, right here on Cross Reference Radio.
