Chapter 36 we have heard read this evening, about Rabshakeh and Sennacherib with his boasting, flaunting, high-faluting utterances, challenging not just Hezekiah and the Jews, but their God.
Vaunting himself against Jehovah, saying that there has been no god of any of the peoples of the earth who has been able to stand before his master, and certainly the God of the Jews will not be able to stand; and there they are outside the gates of Jerusalem with all this.
Why did the Lord allow it? The Lord saw the first movement in far away Assyria, toward Jerusalem; why didn’t He stop them, intervene for the sake of His own, and circumvent?
Why did He not raise up circumstances that would hinder? Why did He allow them actually to encamp round and lay siege to Jerusalem, and then allow them to say these things?
It is all in the sovereignty of God. God has allowed this. God has permitted this thing to come right up to this present point.
Hezekiah received the letter and rent his clothes, put on sackcloth, and went and spread the letter before the Lord. They were surely in straits.
The Lord has allowed, we might even say drawn out, Sennacherib and the mighty hosts of the Assyrians, drawn them out literally, drawn them out materially, drawn them out mentally, drawn them out verbally, extended them, allowed them to inflate themselves to bursting point: they are exalted to the very heavens in their own eyes.
All right, the Lord has drawn them out.
A remnant comes into view and the remnant shall take root.
When the Assyrian and Sennacherib have gone just as far as it is possible for them to go, have become as inflated as it is possible for them to be, when they have swelled to the very heavens, the Lord for His remnant’s sake sent one angel!
Surely, the Lord wants a mighty host to deal with this situation – “And the angel of the Lord went forth.”
Do you see, beloved, a New Testament factor in this?
The adversary would impress the weak saints of the Lord with his importance, with his greatness.
There is one thing the enemy is always trying to do as a strategic thing and that is to put fear in the heart of a child of God.
Fear. There is nothing so weakening, so devastating as fear. If the enemy can get fear into our hearts he has got the city and he will make a great display and vaunt himself and try to impress upon us how mighty he is.
It is never for us to under-estimate the power of the enemy, but we have always got to keep the balance of comparison between our God and the enemy.
The Lord’s weakness is more than a match for all the power of Satan.
And it comes to this, the remnant puts its faith in the Lord over against all the fury of the oppressor, all the vaunting of the oppressor, and then the Lord proves He only allowed the oppressor to come out in that extreme way to show that the remnant cannot be destroyed, for the remnant takes root in the presence of Sennacherib, in the presence of the Assyrians.
And the remnant… shall again take root.You see that is the ultimate issue.
This was looking on to a coming day, it is true, but it is remarkable that these two things come together, that the Assyrians come into view with all their power and they are only allowed eventually to destroy that which is not counting for God, but God gets, in spite of everything, a remnant with roots.
~T. Austin Sparks~
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