Praying With Good King Hezekiah

In Luke 11:9 Jesus says these words to us, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” Simple commands, yet astonishing. For his words reveal the great privilege that we have when we pray. This is the heavenly power that we access whenever we call on the Father’s Name in Christ, “Ask, and it will be given to you.”

Our text centres on the prayer of one of God’s children, so it’s worth reflecting a moment on your own life of prayer: How is this going? Looking back on the last month or two months, do you feel like you’ve been praying more, or is it less? Is this a practice that has been strengthened with you, or perhaps has it struggled? Has the seeking become less diligent, or the knocking not so confident? Have you been forgetting to ask? Genuine, God-focused prayer is essential to our walk with Christ. A praying Christian is a living Christian!

All the same, the practice of prayer can raise a lot of questions. Have you ever wondered, “Why does God seem to answer some of my prayers, and not others?” What about the Christian who prays and prays, but still ends up disappointed? Was the asking still worthwhile? Did it do anything? We have more questions: Is prayer by itself enough? Do we ‘let go, and let God,’ as they say? What’s our duty in combining prayer with action?

We can’t fully answer all these questions. But the Word of God provides us with insight and wisdom. In particular, our text reveals some truths about prayer, and about God’s grace in answering our petitions. I preach the gospel to you under this theme,

The LORD graciously extends the life of King Hezekiah:

1) an illness and its prognosis

2) a prayer and its answer

3) a healing and its sign

1) an illness and its prognosis: Two Kings, the book we open today, is a book of church history. And like so much of church history, it’s a story that is disturbing and promising at the very same time. Disturbing, because we often see the church wandering from the good path of God’s Word. Yet promising, because in spite of our sin, God remains faithful.

Which brings us to Hezekiah. This Hezekiah was in the chosen line of David; he was a king in Judah. By the time of his reign, the northern tribes had already been dragged into exile by the Assyrians. The LORD had enough of their idolatry, and brought his judgment against them.

After seeing hundreds of thousands of their countrymen slaughtered or banished, you’d think Judah would get the hint—they’d see what is at stake when you know the LORD, and they would renew their commitment to Him. But if anything, they became complacent. They prided themselves on their longevity as a nation, and they found security in the temple, even while worshiping false gods. So Judah too, was threatened with destruction—they too, hear the rattling of the chains of exile.

But this period is not without hope. Hezekiah was a bright light in a time of darkness. If we go back a couple of chapters, to chapter 18, we can read of his reforms, “He removed the high places and broke the sacred pillars, cut down the wooden images and broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made; for until those days the children of Israel burned incense to it… He trusted in the LORD God of Israel, so that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor who were before him” (vv 4-5). This was a good king.

In the same chapter (18) and the following one, we see his faith in action when the Assyrians invade Judah. With a massive army laying siege to Jerusalem, many thought it was time to negotiate a surrender, or to call on the surrounding nations for help. But Hezekiah’s trust in the LORD is unbroken. He humbly prays, he goes to God’s house and seeks the LORD’s will—and God delivers the city by killing 180,000 Assyrians. Even in a time of great testing, his character is shown to be steadfast. Such is the man we meet in our text.

The passage begins by saying, “In those days…” (v 1). A quick word about that: our passage comes after 2 Kings has told us about that siege of Jerusalem, and the sudden destruction of the Assyrians. You would naturally conclude then, that today’s text takes place after those events. But it doesn’t, it happens before. We know when King Hezekiah dies—the year 697 BC. If you count backwards from there the fifteen years that God gave him after his illness, you can figure that the event in our text probably took place in 713 or 714 BC. We also know that that Assyrian invasion was in 701—which is years after our text! So these events aren’t in perfect order. Some commentators suggest that this story was borrowed from the book of Isaiah, and then inserted here with a few changes.