Day 208. Isaiah 38-40

In 2 Kings we already heard the story of King Hezekiah's illness—it was apparently an abscess or an inflected boil (38:21). The story tells us something about the power of prayer and also about the fluid nature of prophecy. Isaiah relays to the gravely ill king God's decision—he will die. But the king prays for life, and it appears that his prognosis is not set in stone after all. There is room in our relationship to the LORD for negotiation, and in God's decisions there is space for mercy. Even after the sentence has been passed and announced, he is prepared to change his mind in response to prayer. Isaiah announces to Hezekiah the LORD's change of mind and Hezekiah recovers.
The king's "writing" (38:9-20), a psalm of lament and thanksgiving which is not found in 2 Kings, not only acknowledges the desperate condition of his body and soul before his healing and the despair into which he had fallen, it also concedes that his brush with death he has been for his own good. "Surely it was for my welfare that I had great bitterness," Hezekiah admits. "But you have held back my life from the pit of destruction, for you have cast all my sins behind your back" (38:17). And acutely aware of the greatness of God's mercy, he is overcome with praise and thanksgiving. "Death cannot praise you," the king says but "the living, the living, they thank you, as I do today. . . " (38:19).
But having recovered, Hezekiah makes a fatal error in judgment. When the king of Babylon sends envoys with congratulations on his recovery, Hezekiah entertains his foreign visitors by showing them the contents of his treasury and his armory. This will spell trouble soon enough. The prophet Isaiah tells the king that the "days are coming when all that is in your house . . . shall be carried to Babylon" (39:6). Even some of his sons will "be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon" (39:7). The king, however, welcomes this news and comforts himself that at least the disaster this will not happen in his own lifetime.
But it does happen. In 587 B.C. Jerusalem falls to the armies of Babylon, and a large portion of the population of Judah, together with their leaders, are carried off into exile in Mesopotamia. Now another prophet, whom we call Second Isaiah or Isaiah of Babylon, is sent to the exile community with a word of good news. (He is responsible for chapters 40 through 55 of the Book of Isaiah.)
The sins of Jerusalem have caused this terrible disaster—idol worship, indifference to the poor, depending on foreign alliances rather than the God of the covenant-- but now the prophet announces that Jerusalem "has served her term" and "her penalty is paid" (40:2). She is about to be released. A highway is being prepared through the wilderness for the coming of the LORD, who is both incomparably strong and gentle. "He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep" (40:11), the prophet says.
Even though he is great beyond all representation, beyond all likening, he is not, for all that, indifferent to human beings and their suffering. Though he himself "does not faint or grow weary," he gives "power to the faint and strengthens the powerless" (40:29). Those who wait upon him "mount up on wings like eagles" (40:31), the prophet tells the weary exiles, and this matchless LORD is coming to take them home.