Isaiah 36:4 The field commander said to them, “Tell Hezekiah: “ ‘This is what the great king, the king of Assyria, says: On what are you basing this confidence of yours?
Have you ever thought you were reading the same thing again, only you don’t remember reading it the first time? The story seems familiar, but you can’t put your finger on where you have heard it before. And then it bugs you until you solve the mystery.
Sometimes we think that the individual books of the Scriptures are chronological, that the one before it in the sequence came before it in time. That is how most Western literature is written. We think Genesis happens before Malachi, and it does. But in the middle it gets messier. That is because the Hebrew Bible is divided differently than our English Bible.
I don’t want to go into it in too much detail other than to say that the Hebrew Bible is broken into three sections, the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. You can go here and learn more if you want to.
One of those interesting points is that some books overlap each other. They go over the same timeframe as other books, just from a little bit different perspective. The books of Kings and Chronicles cover much of the same timeframe. Many of the prophets fit into the timeframe of these two books. And some of the prophets overlap with each other.
We run into one of these overlaps with today’s text. If you have been reading through the Scriptures following The Bible Project’s reading plan, then you have read 2 Kings already. So when you come across this passage in Isaiah you probably said, “I have read this somewhere before.” And you would be correct. This passage is almost identical to 2 Kings 18 and following.
The king of Assyria is taunting the King of Judah. But that isn’t all. He is challenging the LORD! Never a good place to be. The LORD always wins.
But knowing that Isaiah overlaps Kings helps us understand when Isaiah spoke, during the reigns of the kings of Judah and Israel before the Exile. Isaiah spoke during these crucial years when repentance was still an option. If the people had responded to the LORD’s call to repentance, then the Exile would not have happened. But they refused to listen.
Repeatedly they were warned, and repeatedly they didn’t heed the warning.
So as we read the Scriptures, remember that these books and letters were written at specific times to specific people dealing with specific historical contexts. Just like our lives are a complicated mix of times, people and contexts, so the Scriptures are the same.
In twenty years, those of us who lived through COVID-19 will be able to make references to these particular moments in a way that others who didn’t live through it just can’t. Just like my parent’s generation talked about WWII and the baby boom that followed, the suburbanization of the country and the rise of the automobile, so we will talk about toilet paper shortages and masks!
So what is the LORD speaking to you about this moment in history. Can you imagine how the LORD will use this time and these people and this set of circumstances? Most likely we don’t really know for certain. We can guess, but even our best guesses will be nothing compared to what He actually wants to accomplish through His yielded and obedient people. (I hope that is us!)
The Arnold Journey 