Today’s Passage: Isaiah 39
The healing is behind him and the sun has been turned back on the stairway, and now, in the warm afterglow of a life given fifteen more years, King Hezekiah receives a delegation from far away. Envoys come from Babylon bearing letters and a gift, congratulating him on his recovery, and Hezekiah, flattered by the attention of a rising power, throws open every door of his house. He shows them the silver and the gold, the spices and the fine oil, the whole armory, holding nothing back. Then Isaiah comes with a question, and behind the question a word from the LORD, and the chapter closes the long first half of this book on a sober note that points straight ahead to Babylon. Chapter 39 is the hinge. Everything before it has wrestled with Assyria and the near threats of Isaiah’s own day; everything after it will lift its eyes to a farther exile and a greater comfort, and the very next chapter will open its arms with, “Comfort, comfort My people.”
As you read, hold this: Pride and complacency after blessing quietly sow tomorrow’s ruin, yet even the exile Hezekiah could not see was not the end, for God’s plan runs on through judgment to comfort and redemption.
Context The world of Isaiah 39
Merodach-baladan of Babylon was no idle well-wisher. In these years Babylon was a restless vassal chafing under Assyria’s heavy hand, and its king was forever looking for allies to join a coalition against Nineveh. A congratulatory embassy to a Judean king who had just survived both a deadly illness and, in the chapters just behind us, the siege of Sennacherib, was diplomacy dressed as courtesy. Hezekiah, small king of a small land, was being courted by a great one, and the flattery found the soft place in him.
What he did in response tells the story. To show visiting envoys your entire treasury and armory was to advertise your worth as a partner, but it was also to hand a future empire a full inventory of the prize. The bitter irony the chapter turns on is that the Babylon Hezekiah welcomed so gladly, the distant land he was so pleased to have impressed, would one day be the very power that carried Judah away. The prophet who had counseled trust in the LORD alone now watches a delivered king lean toward the arm of flesh, and names the price.
Isaiah 39:1–2 (BSB)
¹ At that time Merodach-baladan son of Baladan king of Babylon sent letters and a gift to Hezekiah, for he had heard about Hezekiah’s illness and recovery.
² And Hezekiah welcomed the envoys gladly and showed them what was in his treasure house—the silver, the gold, the spices, and the precious oil, as well as his entire armory—all that was found in his storehouses. There was nothing in his palace or in all his dominion that Hezekiah did not show them.
Notice the small word that carries the weight: he welcomed them gladly, and there was nothing he did not show them. This is the same king who, when Assyria’s letters came threatening him, spread them out before the LORD in the temple and prayed. Now other letters come, flattering instead of threatening, and he spreads out his otsar, pronounced oh-TSAR. Strong's H214, treasure, treasury, storehouse. It is the same root that runs through Scripture wherever a king counts his gold or a barn is filled against the winter, and it carries a quiet warning of its own. Hezekiah opens his otsar to be admired, and the LORD’s word is that this very otsar will be carried off, empty at last. The thing we store up and lean on has no power to secure our tomorrow; it can be shown and it can be taken. Elsewhere the same word is turned heavenward, and the fear of the LORD is called a man’s treasure, an otsar that no Babylon can plunder. Where our storehouse is, there our trust will finally be found, and only one storehouse is safe. before men. Prosperity had done to him what the siege never could. It is a gentle, almost invisible turning, the kind that happens to good people in the ease that follows a rescue, when the guard we kept in the hard days quietly comes down and we begin to display before others what was only ever a gift from God. Nothing is refused these strangers, because nothing in him is yet asking what they are really here for.
Isaiah 39:3–4 (BSB)
³ Then the prophet Isaiah went to King Hezekiah and asked, “Where did those men come from, and what did they say to you?” “They came to me from a distant land,” Hezekiah replied, “from Babylon.”
⁴ “What have they seen in your palace?” Isaiah asked. “They have seen everything in my palace,” answered Hezekiah. “There is nothing among my treasures that I did not show them.”
The prophet does not scold; he asks, and the asking is itself a mercy, giving the king room to hear his own answer. “From a distant land,” Hezekiah says, and there is a note of pride in the distance, as if to be noticed from so far away were an honor. But Isaiah’s second question goes to the heart of it: what have they seen? And out of his own mouth the king says the true and damning thing twice over, they have seen everything, there is nothing I did not show them. He does not yet understand what he has done. He hears only the compliment; the prophet hears the inventory being taken for a later reckoning. It is a kindness of God that His word comes to us this way, letting us say plainly what we have done before He tells us what it means.
Isaiah 39:5–7 (BSB)
⁵ Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, “Hear the word of the LORD of Hosts:
⁶ The time will surely come when everything in your palace and all that your fathers have stored up until this day will be carried off to Babylon. Nothing will be left, says the LORD.
⁷ And some of your descendants, your own flesh and blood, will be taken away to be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.”
The word, when it comes, is measured and terrible in its plainness. Everything shown will be carried off, and to the very place he showed it, Babylon. The treasures his fathers stored will empty out; his own sons will be taken. This is judgment, and it is not gloating. It is the LORD of Hosts, the God of all the armies of heaven, letting a king see the far end of the road he has stepped onto, so that he and his people might reckon honestly with where trust in wealth and worldly alliance finally leads. There is no delight in it, only truth. What Hezekiah offered up for admiration will be offered up to Babylon, and the very household he was so proud to show will be marched into that distant land in chains. The lesson beneath it is old and quiet: what we display to be admired, we do not thereby keep, and the arm of flesh we lean on will one day close its hand around us.
Isaiah 39:8 (BSB)
⁸ But Hezekiah said to Isaiah, “The word of the LORD that you have spoken is good.” For he thought, “At least there will be peace and security in my lifetime.”
Here is the saddest verse in the chapter, and one of the most searching in the book. On its surface Hezekiah submits: the word of the LORD is good. But the narrator lifts the curtain and shows us the thought underneath, and it is a small, self-sheltered thing, at least there will be shalom in my own days. He hears that ruin is coming to his children and to his people, and he is quieted only because it will not fall on him. A man can bow to God’s word with his lips and still receive it with a heart that has shrunk to the size of his own lifetime. This is complacency, the sleep that settles on us after blessing, when we are content that the peace holds for now and stop caring what our ease is storing up for those who come after. It is the last note of the first half of Isaiah, and it needs an answer larger than any king can give.
Study notes Going deeper
Read this chapter and let it do its two-fold work. There is a sober lesson here, and we must not soften it: the ease that follows a great blessing is its own kind of danger, and pride and complacency, the quiet welcoming of flattery, the leaning toward the arm of flesh, the contentment to have peace only “in our own days,” are seeds that sow tomorrow’s ruin even while the sun is warm. Hezekiah is not a monster; he is a good man dozing after deliverance, and that is exactly why the chapter searches us. But the chapter is a hinge, not a grave. It closes the long wrestling of chapters 1 through 39 by naming the exile plainly, and then it hands us over to the greatest turn in the book, for the very next words are, “Comfort, comfort My people, says your God.” God’s plan is not defeated by Judah’s failure or Hezekiah’s small heart; it runs on straight through judgment to redemption, and the exile that looked like the end becomes the road to a comfort no king could purchase. So the LORD would have us boast in nothing we can show and lose, but in Him alone.
"...let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the LORD, who exercises loving devotion, justice and righteousness on the earth" Jeremiah 9:24 (BSB)
Let the treasures be shown for what they are, gifts that pass, and let your heart’s boast run past them to the God who does not pass, the Holy One of Israel who carries His people through judgment to comfort. Learn the Word, hold it against the day of ease, and give thanks.