Jerusalem, Sennacherib, and Us

The story of Jerusalem’s deliverance from Sennacherib’s Assyrian army, told in both 2 Kings and Isaiah, is an exciting account. It’s a story worthy of Byron’s galloping verse, his medieval ballad. But still: So what? What does all this ancient history have to do with me, with my problems, with my world? An exciting story, but let’s move on to something more relevant, something more useful. Why talk about the Rabshakeh and Sennacherib and Hezekiah and the ins and outs of Judah’s eighth-century politics? Can’t we talk about something practical? Something useful? Something relevant?

We can pose the “So what?” question about a lot of things in the Bible, because the Bible gives a lot of space to things that don’t seem very relevant at all. And it doesn’t give nearly the space we’d like to practical concerns and relevant issues.

Scripture doesn’t contain a manual for marriage or child-rearing. It addresses those questions of course, but in sheer volume it devotes as many pages to genealogies as to marriage. So what? we ask. What does this have to do with us? Why can’t we read something more practical, more relevant? We skip the genealogies so we can get to Ephesians 5.

Exodus has a few chapters about civil law – about crimes against property, punishments for violent acts, restitution, slavery. But a dozen detailed chapters in Exodus are about the construction of the tabernacle, and then Leviticus follows with page after page of details rules about how to offer sacrifice, rules of uncleanness, two long chapters on the various forms of skin disease that cause impurity. This is far more comprehensive and systematic than anything we can find on civil order.

The Bible has a lot of history, but the history has many gaps. It leaves out things that we want to know. Scriptures doesn’t tell us where Cain got his wife, or what happened to the dinosaurs, or what Abraham or Sarah felt when God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.

There are dozens of things that we would like to know, but instead the Bible includes this same story of the Assyrian siege, this same ancient history, three times – in Kings, Chronicles, and here in Isaiah. There are many things we’d like to know that the Bible doesn’t tell us, but it does give us two long books on the rise of Israel’s monarchy, 1-2 Samuel, which Pastor Wilson has been preaching on recently.

What’s the point? Why can’t we study something more practical? Why can’t the Bible be more relevant? Why can’t God be more relevant?

One way to answer this question, one way to make the Bible practical and relevant, is by drawing lessons from the genealogies and the rituals and the stories of ancient history. And there are lessons to be learned. But if that is all we do, we miss the ways Scripture works on us. God didn’t give us a set of Aesop’s fables with simple morals attached.

Scripture doesn’t only give us lessons. It gives us lessons, but it does more than give us lessons. God breathed out Scripture to form people, to form individuals and to form a church. God tells us stories to stock our memories, to give us a collective memory, a past that projects us into the future.

God gives us stories to open our eyes and minds. We are like Elisha’s servant who trembled when he saw the size of the Aramean army. He didn’t see everything that was there until Elisha prayed for his eyes to be opened. Then he saw the whole situation, not just the slender slice that appeared to the naked eye. Scripture is breathed out by God to open our eyes. God tells us how to build a tabernacle or sacrifice a goat to open our eyes and expand our imaginations, so that we see more than we could possibly see without His Word and Spirit. He tells us obscure stories of ancient history so that we can see more of reality, see our situation more accurately, to expand our imaginations to see the world as He sees it.

That’s what the deliverance of Jerusalem does to us. We may never be under siege, but when we read the Psalms we learn to see and imagine that we are constantly under siege. David thought he was under siege all the time. Deadly enemies surround him. Pangs of death and the sorrows of Sheol surround us. When David’s enemies pressed down, he felt besieged by raging bulls, lions, dogs. David’s own sins surround and besiege him, his iniquities overtake him. David’s enemies besiege him with hateful words, slanders and verbal assaults. We may never be in a city besieged; but nearly all of us, in some way or other, will find that we are a city besieged.

When that happens, when enemies or slanderers or persecutors or even our own sins surround us and bear down on us, then we need to have our minds stocked with the memory of Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem, we have to have our eyes opened to realize that we are not the only ones hearing those blasphemies, that there is a God who hears. We have to have our imaginations expanded so that we can see that when we are besieged we are Hezekiah in his birdcage. Stocked with all the “impractical” and “irrelevant” details of this story, our little story suddenly becomes a huge story. Our little troubles suddenly take on cosmic dimensions. Our little lives suddenly appear as battlegrounds in a clash of the gods, a site for Yahweh’s war against false prophets and false gods. You have become that battleground. God has committed Himself to you, so what’s at stake in your little life and your petty problems is the future of the universe and the reputation of the God of the universe. There are no little problems.

You and your life have become sites for the triumph of God. When you are besieged, this incident gives hope, hope that you, like Hezekiah will be delivered from your birdcage. When besieged, you will face your enemies with confidence that you will one day sing, with Hezekiah and the Psalmist, “If it had not been the Lord who was on our side when men rose up against us, then they would have swallowed us alive when their wrath was kindled against us. Blessed be the Lord, who has not given us as pretty to their teeth. Our soul is escaped as a birth out of the snare of the fowler. The snare is broken, and we are escaped” (Psalm 124).

Scripture equips us for every good work by stocking our memories, opening our eyes, expanding our imagination, and especially by enabling us to see Jesus in everything. The siege of Jerusalem, like everything in the Bible, it is an episode in the story of Jesus. Like everything in the Old Testament, it’s a preview, a foreshadowing, of Jesus. He is the bearer of the promises to David, and Assyria threatens those promises. Sennacherib has caged up Hezekiah like a bird, confined him to a death-trap, where the only food is going to be human waste. David is about to die, but Yahweh intervenes in the darkness to rescue Him from the pit. Hezekiah and Jerusalem go to the edge of the grave, and Yahweh pulls them back. Knowing this story means knowing the story of another Davidic king, Jesus, who was also shut up and besieged by the empires of the world, and who was raised and vindicated. Like Jerusalem in the days of Hezekiah, Calvary becomes a site of God’s triumph, a monument to His faithfulness and power.

Scripture opens our eyes so that we can see how that history of Jesus is our history. Scripture expands our imaginations so that we can see our own little troubles, our own little lives, the siege of problems that plague us, enfolded into the story of Jesus, an episode in the story of the cross and resurrection, which is the story of the world.