The Divine Solution: Prayer Changes
Things. 2 Kings 19:14-19
In this chapter the emphasis
is on how the prayer of Hezekiah changed the historical circumstances. Prayer
is not just a psychological exercise that somehow makes us feel better because we
have taken some time to meditate or to formulate some thoughts and therefore it
helps us merely on the psychological basis to think differently about things.
Prayer is communication with God based upon the principles that God has given
us in His Word for how we are to come into His presence and how we are to
communicate with Him. He has not only given us specific direct statements in
Scripture to teach us how we should pray as we ought but He has also given us
many examples in Scripture of prayers made by Old Testament saints and New
testament saints that give us a pattern for prayer. There are many different
kinds of prayers that we find in Scripture: prayers of confession, prayers
simply of praise expressing adoration and awe for God and all that he has done,
prayers of gratitude, prayers of intercessory petition where we are praying for
others as well as prayers for one’s own life and situations—supplication.
Prayer can be long or rather short.
What we see again and again
as we look at the prayers in the Scriptures is that they are well organized and
well articulated. They are not necessarily prayers that are just on the spur of
the moment, prayers that are just random ideas that come into the mind of the
individual, but they are well thought out and well structured. That doesn’t
mean that every time we pray we have to spend fifteen or twenty minutes sitting
down writing out a prayer and structuring it and organizing it, but on the
other hand it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do that more often than we probably
do do that. What we see in these prayers is that they
have a consistent pattern of being grounded on certain promises, certain
covenants that God has made with man in Scripture, and it is on the basis of
those promises and covenants that the people of God in both Old and New
Testaments go to God and outline an argument—like a legal argument, not an
argument in the sense of a disputation but an argument in the sense of
presenting a case for why God should act on their behalf, why God should intervene
in the normal flow of history in order to change things. These prayers are
crafted on the basis of prior revelation of God, so if we do not know the Word
of God then we cannot pray effectively in this manner. It is interesting in the
book of Acts how the apostles would take different elements from different
psalms, put them together to form an appeal to God, to His grace, to His power,
to His faithfulness and to act on their behalf.
Again and again what we see
in the Scriptures is that the prayers focus on the character and attributes of
God—praying for God to be faithful, praying on the basis of His omnipotence,
His veracity, etc. This is exemplified in the prayer by Hezekiah in 2 Kings 19.
One element of his prayer that we see is that it is effective and God
intervenes in a miraculous way to solve the problem that is facing the southern
kingdom of Judah and Jerusalem—specifically in this case that they have been
surrounded by the armies of Sennacherib. They had been under siege for a
lengthy period of time. Isaiah indicates that it had an impact on the economy
of the southern kingdom for three years. The siege did not last that long but
it lasted for some time, and this had laid waste to the economy. God answers
Hezekiah’s prayer and intervenes in history, changing what would normally
happen.
A lot of times people, even though
they may not be of a strong Calvinistic mindset, get influenced by a certain
degree of fatalism: well God is in control, why should I pray for this and
that? I don’t know what God’s plan is, I’m just not going to pray for things;
and we somehow abuse the doctrine of the sovereignty of God and use that as an
excuse not to pray, not to plead with God to change circumstances. James 4:2 NASB
“…You do not have because you do not ask.” He goes on to say that
they ask for certain things but they ask wrongly, and because they were asking
maybe for right things but in a wrong way from a wrong motivation; but he also
condemns them because there are things they should have asked for that God
would have granted and would have intervened in history to change things. Prayer
really does change things, and we have a tendency to lose confidence in prayer.
Many people end up taking prayer for granted.
Sometimes in a prayer meeting situation
people don’t feel comfortable praying out loud. People should not feel they are
under compulsion to pray out loud when they go to a prayer meeting, they can
just sit there quietly and pray to the Lord and that’s fine, the Lord hears one
way or the other. We have the promise in Scripture, too, that we don’t always
know how we are to pray for things or precisely what we ought to pray for, but
we are to pray. We are also told that we are to pray for specific things, but God
the Holy Spirit is the one who superintends our prayer life so that even when
we pray for things and it is not quite right or we don’t really understand the
way things should be God the Holy Spirit somehow transmits those prayers in a
way that makes them acceptable.
Hezekiah’s second prayer in 2 Kings
19. The first prayer isn’t really stated in
the first verse, we are just told that he went into the house of the Lord and prayed.
But then there is another circumstance. The Rabshakeh
had come and had a meeting with Hezekiah’s representatives and had emphasized
that the Jews just couldn’t trust God. They blasphemed and belittled God in
their confrontation but Hezekiah’s representatives were wise in that they said
nothing. That was the immediate cause of Hezekiah’s going into the temple for
the first prayer covered in the first seven verses.
But now there will be a
second confrontation. Again the Rabshakeh’s attack is
formulated in theological terms. We have drawn the parallel between certain threats
that the
This is the same kind of
thing that Hezekiah faced as he saw the rise of
Hezekiah now
receives a letter from the hands of the messengers and we see his response. 2 Kings 19:14 NASB “Then
Hezekiah took the letter from the hand of the messengers and read it, and he
went up to the house of the LORD and
spread it out before the LORD.” He
is not doubting God’s ability to know what the
circumstance is but he is emphasizing the seriousness of the circumstances. He
wants God to be sure to understand that this is a serious situation in the life
of Israel and what we see from the way Hezekiah is addressing God, he
understands and wants God to understand that this is a threat to every promise
that God has made to Israel through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in terms of the Abrahamic covenant, to Moses through the Mosaic covenant,
and to David through the Davidic covenant. The foundation for understanding his
prayer is to realize that Hezekiah is going to God as the God who has made
these unconditional promises.
2 Kings
19:15 NASB “Hezekiah prayed before the LORD and said, ‘O LORD, the God of Israel, who are enthroned
{above} the cherubim, You are the God, You alone, of
all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and earth.” We can learn a
lot from this. It is not that we repeat exactly the way Hezekiah said this but
it show us how he is crafting his thought and it reveals that there is a lot
more going on in Hezekiah’s mind than simply what he says. This is a very short
prayer. [16] ‘Incline
Your ear, O LORD, and
hear; open Your eyes, O LORD, and see; and listen to the words of Sennacherib, which he has
sent to reproach the living God. [17] Truly, O LORD, the kings of Assyria have devastated the
nations and their lands [18] and have cast their gods into the fire, for they
were not gods but the work of men’s hands, wood and stone. So they have
destroyed them. [19] Now, O LORD our God, I pray, deliver us from his hand that all the kingdoms
of the earth may know that You alone, O
LORD, are God.’” The prayer
probably took about 30 seconds.
What we see
here is that there is an initial address to God, v. 15. Then there is an appeal
to God, v. 16. In v. 17 he reminds God or restates the past history of the
Assyrian army and how they had been victorious, and then he comes to his
conclusion in v. 19 expressing his petition to God.
First of
all, his address to God focuses on the reality of this prayer. It is not some
subjective prayer that is just some psychological or emotional exercise on the
part of Hezekiah—which is how modern psychologists and psychologized
religion wants to interpret prayer: something which has just subjective value. He
addresses God as the Lord God of
In poetry in
the Old Testament cherubs are often used as a symbolical
representations of the winds of heaven. So there are passages such as 2
Samuel 22:11 NASB “And He rode on a cherub and flew; And He appeared
on the wings of the wind.” We often see this relationship, this connection to
the wind and to God coming in judgment. In Ezekiel 10:2, 7 there is mention
also of the cherubs pouring out judgment upon a city, and this indicates part
of their role as associated with judgment. Cf. Psalm 18:10. So when Hezekiah
begins by emphasizing that He is the one who dwells between the cherubim this
is tying it again to
“You are
God, you alone.” This is another very important aspect that we see in the Old Testament,
the emphasis that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is
the unique God. The word translated “alone” could easily be understood as “unique”
or “one of a kind.” He is the true God and what distinguishes Him from all of
the other gods is that He is the one who made the heavens and the earth. He is
distinct from the creation. What we see here is something that is unique and
distinct and integral to the very person of God that we worship: He must be
understood as the creator God in the way that he describes His creation in the
Scripture. This is why creation is such a battlefield today, because in the
Scripture this is one of the ways that God is distinguished from all of the
other gods and this is what makes Him unique. Isaiah 45:18 NASB “For thus says the LORD, who created the heavens (He is the God
who formed the earth and made it, He established it {and} did not create it a
waste place, {but} formed it to be inhabited), “I am the LORD, and there is none else.” Cf. Isaiah
40:18ff.
Three observations:
1.
The
uniqueness of the God of Israel cannot be separated from His identification
with the Abrahamic covenant, the Mosaic covenant and
the Davidic covenant. The reason of bringing in the Davidic covenant is 2 Kings
19:34 NASB “For I will defend this city to save it for My own sake and for My servant David’s sake.”
2.
The
uniqueness of the God of Israel cannot be distinguished or separated from His
role as the creator God who therefore has the right to rule in human history. Exodus
3.
Prayer
presumes that God has the right to intervene in our lives and to change things.
That is why Hezekiah is praying.
Conclusion:
Prayer to the sovereign God of Israel is based on the literal reality of the Genesis
account of creation. Hezekiah’s verbiage comes right out of those passages in
Exodus and Genesis chapter one.
The starting point of an effective prayer is understanding who you are praying to, and truly believing who He is as the God who can intervene in the affairs of history and human history, and truly provide solutions to the problems that we face.