We do not serve your gods, nor will we worship the gold image which you have set up. And all the people were going, whoo! And of course, he is enraged by this defiance. And in that case, they prevailed magnificently. Not even the smell of smoke was on them when they were put in the furnace.
But that's not always the case. We see him, man and woman, gone to the stake to be burned alive for Jesus Christ. Today on Cross-Reference Radio, Pastor Rick will be teaching in the book of Isaiah chapter 36. He was probably actually reached maximum terminal velocity. He probably passed out before he hit the ground. But my point is, fire threatens somebody and we're going to burn you alive. It's serious. Oh Nebuchadnezzar, said these men, we have no need to answer you in this matter. You can see them.
I don't know, I don't think their hands were on their hips, but I would like it to be. That just, you know, carnal flair. Anyway, Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter. If that be the case, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace and he will deliver us from your hand, O king.
But if not, let it be known to you, O king, that we do not serve your gods, nor will we worship the gold image which you have set up. And all the people were going, whoo, because he is enraged by this defiance. And in that case, they prevailed magnificently.
Not even the smell of smoke was on them when they were put in the furnace. But that's not always the case. Many, man and woman, gone to the stake to be burned alive for Jesus Christ. Oh, people have gone to stakes for other reasons too, burned alive.
But it doesn't count. So believers, as believers, you can take out Jerusalem. We get a new one. You can take our life.
We get an eternal one. None of these things should move us. As Paul said, none of these things move me, nor do I count my life dear to myself.
That I may finish my ministry with joy. Verse 6, look, Rabshakeh is still talking, you are trusting in the staff of this broken reed Egypt on which if a man leans it will go into his hand and pierce it. So is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who trust in him.
Oh, Pharaoh gets to be called king, just not Hezekiah. Well, here's the part I said, he's first going to target the apostates because he's looking to break morale wherever he can. They don't want to cross swords. They want the Jews to surrender. And if they don't, then they hope to starve them to death. And where they're going to get the city anyway is their thinking. Satan has got this persistent determination also. So he singles out those trusting in Egypt's military.
So you're going to get hurt doing that. Isaiah had already published, made public, his prophecies on this whole thing. And Isaiah 30 and 31 for example, he just slams this idea of going to Egypt for help.
So Rabshakeh is not bringing anything new to the table. But that doesn't mean it's not causing fear. It continues, he does, he says, on which if a man leads it will go through his hand harmed by trusting Egypt. And he says, so is Pharaoh, king of Egypt, to all who trust him. Many of Satan's speeches have an element of truth in them. And that's what we have to learn.
They have truth, which means they're not true. And it's very helpful for him in deceiving human beings. So Paul writes, lest Satan should take advantage of us, for we're not ignorant of his devices.
We know what he does. Yes, Egypt was unable to rescue Jerusalem. Well, Isaiah already said it. So Rabshakeh, Satan, you're not helping, you're not hurting us with that. Yes, we'll get this in verse 7, the Lord has called the Assyrians to be an instrument against the apostates in Israel.
But he also has drawn a line. You will come to the neck, but you won't get to the head, and that is Jerusalem. Satan factored out the prayers of the righteous king, Hezekiah, and the ministry of Isaiah. And Isaiah's wife, for example, we talk about the remnant. Isaiah's wife was called a prophetess, and you know she had friends, and you know they prayed. Satan didn't factor that out, and he left out the fullness of the prophet's prophecies when he begins to throw into the face of these envoys what was going on.
We'll come to more. Anyway, verse 7, but if you say to me, we trust in Yahweh, our God, is it not he whose high places and whose altars Hezekiah has taken away, and said to Judah and Jerusalem, you shall worship before this altar? He's trying to portray Hezekiah as a tyrant when Hezekiah is a faithful servant, purging the land. So it's pathetic when unbelievers attempt Bible teaching. It doesn't stop them. There are universities that order courses on the Bible, and I like to say, you know, I don't teach, you know, physics from the pulpit. I don't think they should teach the Bible from the universities, leave it to the churches.
No, but they're invasive. They want to claim everything. You're nobody until they say you're somebody.
That's how they think. We say you're doomed until you repent. Matthew 27, this is what they said of Christ. Remember, He says, but if you say to me, we trust Yahweh, our God, well, they said this of Christ while He was on the cross. He trusted in God. These were religious people. These were the Bible teachers of Israel. He trusted in God. Let Him deliver Him now if He will have Him, for He said, I am the Son of God. Well, what if He was right?
That's Matthew 27, verse 43. So the question is, what does one who rejects the God of the Bible know about the words of the Bible of God? They're disqualified. Unfortunately, many people requalify them. Follow them. Listen to them. Repeat what they have to say.
Become their disciples in churches and out of churches. 2 Corinthians 11, but what I do, I will also continue to do. You just got to love when Paul stands up to his opponents. He says that I may cut off the opportunity from those who desire an opportunity to be regarded just as we are in the things of which they boast. So they were those frauds. And Paul said, I'm not going to back down from them.
They want to steal our thunder, and they're not going to get it. He continues, he says, for such a false apostles, deceitful workers transforming themselves into apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light.
Man, you could tell when Paul was right now, he was hot, spiritually. He called it, he continued in that same chapter, he says, do I not burn with indignation? What Satan gets away with, of what the curse has done to humanity. So here the enemy, confused and lying, a combination thereof, which doesn't bother him because he has no shame.
He's not accountable to anything, except results, his results. Here he is, you know, bad mouthing the reformers, Hezekiah and Isaiah and the righteous remnant, who are trying to get Israel back on course by purging the land of these false centers of worship. You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve, Jesus said to Satan, Jesus quoting scripture. Well, Hezekiah and Isaiah are doing that to the apostates in the land. You're to worship in Jerusalem, the God of heaven, and nobody else, and nowhere else, with the blood sacrifices. So again, consistent with Satan, who is always lying, and when he's telling the truth, it is only to set up a lie.
And you better learn that early. Hezekiah doing right and being accused of doing wrong. Well, that's typical Satan, verse 8. And therefore I urge you, give a pledge to my master, the king of Assyria, and I will give you two thousand horses if you are able, on your part, to put riders on them. Oh yeah, of course.
Of course you urge us. Bow down, is what he is saying. Give a pledge to my master. Jesus, again to Satan, and he said to him all these things, Satan speaking, I will give you if you fall down and worship me.
Early I read from Luke, this one's Matthew. And he continues here in verse 8, and I will give you two thousand horses if you are able, on your part, to put riders on them. So he's voicing his contempt. He can't help himself. This is who he is. He doesn't respect anybody, except his people.
I'll give you a thousand tanks if you can find people smart enough to drive them, kind of a thing. Verse 9, and then will you repel one captain of the least of my master's servants and put your trust in Egypt for chariots and horsemen? The Jebusites hurled similar insults at David. They did not live to regret it.
They died before they got that far. 2 Samuel, and the king and his men went to Jerusalem against the Jebusites, the inhabitants of the land. So here's the story of how Jerusalem became the city of David and how God anointed Jerusalem. He continues, the inhabitants of the land who spoke to David saying, you shall not come in here, but the blind and the lame will repel you, thinking David cannot come in here. Nevertheless, David took the stronghold of Zion, that is, the city of David. So the historian says, yeah, yeah, let's leave out the details. Here's the fact.
It's David's city now. And so they were saying, you're blind and not lame, and so here's Reb Shachar saying, you know, the least of our military commanders can just take you, and yeah, 185,000 men later. Incidentally, when the 185,000 are slain, we don't read about Reb Shachar. He probably did not survive.
He probably was one of them. Anyway, verse 10, have I now come up without the Lord, without Yahweh, against this land to destroy it? Yahweh said to me, go up against the land and destroy it. So he's lying through his teeth. We don't care.
You know, we have politicians. They don't care if you catch them in a lie. They have just no shame. You cannot appeal to their sense of honor or dignity because with the wicked, as Zephaniah says, there is no shame. Well, it was already public knowledge that God would use the Assyrians as his instrument, as I mentioned before, to punish his people. It's in Isaiah 8. It's in Isaiah 10. It's in Isaiah 30 and 31.
It's just many times. We were reading this, you know, the judgments against Assyria, you're going, oh, this is so boring. Well, for the Jews, it was everything when it comes to this point. You either trusted the prophet Isaiah and his prophecies on Assyria or you sided with the apostates.
So this statement is partially true. God did in one sense use the Assyrians as an instrument of judgment, but they were not free to be as malicious and vicious as they wanted and do anything that they wanted. They could not take Jerusalem. Isaiah 8, 8, here's part of the prophecy. He will pass through Judah, and he did when he took the fortified cities. He will overthrow and pass over.
He will reach up to the neck, and that's as far as he goes. And that's what's happening here at the gates of Jerusalem. God disowned the apostates but rescued the remnant amongst the apostates from this Assyrian onslaught. It says here in verse 10 at the bottom, the Lord said to me, go up against the land and destroy it.
So he's lying again. Isaiah already called us. Isaiah 10, verses 5 and 6, for example, is one of many places. Assyria had their spies out. They knew what was happening. They knew what Isaiah was preaching, as it will be in the days of Nebuchadnezzar. They knew what Jeremiah was doing, what he was saying. That's why when they finally capture, when they come into the land, they're so nice to Jeremiah because they knew Jeremiah was telling the kings, submit to Nebuchadnezzar.
So we have no reason to doubt the Assyrians knew what was happening there. But here this Rabsheka, he is an arrogant, foul-mouthed, blasphemous liar with a defective theology. And it goes beyond that. His facts are fragmented. But he doesn't care.
He does now. It's too late. And Satan, he loves twisting the meanings of God's words, and why do so many churchgoers not get that? Ephesians 5, 6, let no one deceive you with empty words. You who will be going into the workplace and into the universities, let no one deceive you.
No one means no one with empty words. For because of these things, the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Paul says they're going to pay for this. You are either going to side with those apostates in Jerusalem and hope the Egyptians would rescue them, or you're going to side with those who trusted God no matter what. You're either going to stand up to the fiery furnace and say, God can save us from this. We're not bowing down to you. And even if he doesn't save us, we're not bowing down to you.
We bow down to him. Verse 11, then Eliakim Shebna Joah said to Rabsheka, please speak to your servants in Aramaic, for we understand it, and do not speak to us in Hebrew in the hearing of the people who are on the wall. Well, there were those that were manning the wall. They were protecting their envoys as best they could. And they were listening or trying to listen.
They were in earshot or arrow shot at least. And the Aramaic seems to have been the language of treaty and trade in the ancient world. It was like a pig Latin in African mines or in airports. All the airports all around the world use English.
So it was a standard language. What the Hebrews are saying to Rabsheka is, can you tone it down? We don't want our troops to hear, this is a diplomatic exchange.
It's not for them. Well, that backfired. You can't reason with Satan and expect to have success.
It's hard enough reasoning with good people sometimes. Then you imagine with Satan, well, verse 12, here's where it backfires. Rabsheka said, has my master sent me to your master and to you to speak to these words and not to the men who sit on the wall who will eat and drink their own waste with you? So we've got a lot to say about this. Satan expands his filthy speech by warning the Jews of an inevitable slow and awful death, starvation and death from thirst if they refuse to surrender.
Chronicles rings in on this. Here's what it says about Hezekiah. Does Hezekiah persuade you to give yourselves over to die by famine and thirst? Saying Yahweh our God will deliver us from the hand of the king of Assyria. That's the voice of Satan. Your pastor's trying to convince you to trust God? Are you going to die of starvation and thirst?
You're going to miss out. Romans again, who shall separate us from the love of Christ? So persecution or distress? Well, tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril or sword.
Paul rules out all the big dogs. He says those things are going to break our faith. But there's more to it here. He's insisting that the men on the wall have a right to hear what Hezekiah is going to get them into. They have a right to hear that Hezekiah is going to get them killed in an awful way.
That's what Rabshakah is saying. Has not my master sent me to speak to you and to those on the wall who are going to die because of Hezekiah? Talking about the famine, he uses foul language, Satan's terror tactics.
I don't think we should miss the head games Satan is employing here because he does it to this day, of course. The New Testament, the New King James softens the language. The Old King James is closer to the literal Hebrew and I'm not going to even read it. Maybe if you have the Old King James, you can read it yourself. By our standards, the New King James is vulgar language. It's not when it was written. And we shouldn't consider it vulgar, but standards of today would. So I'll use the English standard translation as an alternate because it's an accurate translation also. He says, doomed with you, the men on the wall, doomed with you to eat their own dung and drink their own urine. You see the vulgar language Mr. Pottymouth is using? He's trying to terrorize them into submission.
He's showing who he really is. The righteous would pick up on it instantly. The unrighteous, however, would be in turmoil. These are not endorsements the way that the Bible words these things. The younger Christians must learn to recognize when Satan speaks, how he conducts business. You must be able to identify the genuine from the counterfeit. And the only way you're going to do that is by handling the genuine enough so that on touch, you can instantly discern, say, this is not right.
Something is wrong with it. So he said the Jerusalemites would be forced to consume their own body waste to counter the famine that's coming. This is the devil's speech.
And the devil dangles suffering before our eyes to get us to cave in in our faith. You sure you want to stand up for Christ? You're going to be laughed at. You're going to be fired. You're going to be this. You're going to be that.
How about I be faithful? I wonder if Eve had said, wait right here one second, and went and got a big rock and clunked them upside. Well, violence wasn't around then. She wouldn't have thought of that.
But again, she should not have been in the vicinity. And that alone is a lesson. It's like Samson. Samson was a Nazarite. What's he doing in a vineyard where the lion met him? He's snacking on grapes.
You can't tell me. He's just, you know, oh, I just take them to the vineyard. It's a shortcut. He was where he wasn't supposed to be, if nothing else. Well, verse 13, then Rabshakah stood and called out with a loud voice in Hebrew and said, hear the words of the great king, the king of Assyria. See, there's the backfire. They asked him to tone it down. He's going to shout it out with a loud voice now. So potty mouth gets louder. He gets a microphone, demonstrating again the futility of reasoning with the devil.
You don't have to reason with him. We stand firm. We deliver a message.
We're not discussing a situation when we preach the gospel to people. We are delivering a message. Here's a telegram for you from God. It says, unless you repent, Luke 13, you will likewise perish. That's the message.
Have a nice day. Well, of course, we don't leave it at that. There's so much more. We hope the door is open. Well, we continue to verse 14. Thus says the king, do not let Hezekiah, he's shouting this out, deceive you, for he will not be able to deliver you. Very Satan-esque, is it not?
God can't save you. That's what he's saying. Well, what was the response of the men in Daniel chapter 3? So, that was their response.
Very simple. Even if he doesn't know king, we're not bowing down to you. It ain't happening. Verse 15, nor let Hezekiah make you trust in Yahweh, saying Yahweh will surely deliver us. This city will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria. Still refusing to address king Hezekiah as king. Don't let Hezekiah.
He's demoting him and he's humiliating him. He is insisting that their faith is useless in the face of real trouble. We have whole pastors like that.
We have whole churches. They reduced a pastor to a moral traffic cop. Don't go this way, go that way.
This is righteousness, this is sin. But when you've got a real problem, go to the psychologist. Go to the psychiatrist. But don't come to the Bible.
We'll even pay them to help you out. Because after all, what could a pastor possibly say about your life? You can't see the hair on my neck at the moment. But it is standing up. You know, Lord, may I not have a plank in my eye on this. I don't mean to sound, I mean to treat them like the shaman that they are. And I make no apology. And I'm going to come back to that in a minute because I think it is that important. It is a sacred cow now in this country. Well, you know, they're so caring and people have problems. Nobody denies that they have problems and no one denies that we're caring.
Do. But it is to the word of God, as Jeremiah said, and if they do not speak according to this word, what wisdom could they possibly have? Little ad lib there. Verse 16, do not listen to Hezekiah. Again, not calling him king. For thus says king of Assyria, there's a sharp contrast, make peace with me by a present and come out to me. And every one of you eat from his own vine and every one of you from his own fig and every one of you drink the waters of his own cistern.
You'll have your own wells to drink from. What he's going to get to in a moment is, and then I'm going to take you away as I did the northern kingdoms. You're going to say that to them because he knows they're too stupid to figure it out.
They just want to save their skin, according to him. 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.
