For those who may wish to ‘study’ this chapter, the following simple resources are provided for you. Each passage has a four-Part approach to help you take in and think further about what you have read.

Passage: Isaiah 36:1-7     

1 In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah’s reign, Sennacherib king of Assyria attacked all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them. 2 Then the king of Assyria sent his field commander with a large army from Lachish to King Hezekiah at Jerusalem. When the commander stopped at the aqueduct of the Upper Pool, on the road to the Launderer’s Field, 3 Eliakim son of Hilkiah the palace administrator, Shebna the secretary, and Joah son of Asaph the recorder went out to him.

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? 5 You say you have counsel and might for war – but you speak only empty words. On whom are you depending, that you rebel against me? 6 Look, I know you are depending on Egypt, that splintered reed of a staff, which pierces the hand of anyone who leans on it! Such is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who depend on him. 7 But if you say to me, ‘We are depending on the Lord our God’– isn’t he the one whose high places and altars Hezekiah removed, saying to Judah and Jerusalem, ‘You must worship before this altar’?

A. Find Out

1. Who arrived when and did what? v.1
2. Who did he send to do what? v.2
3. Who met him? v.3
4. What challenge did the commander make? v.4,5
5. What poor example did he put forward? v.6
6. Who next does he seek to demean? v.7

B. Think:

1. How successful, initially, was the king of Assyria?
2. Why do you think he now adopts this current strategy?
3. What do you think he is trying to do?

C. Comment:

We now step aside from prophecies and have an historical account, the only one in the book. Hezekiah is reigning in Jerusalem and has been for fourteen years (v.1a). Then at that time the king of Assyria, Sennacherib, comes and attacks the southern kingdom and takes the fortified cities in the land (v.1b). His army is obviously powerful in that he takes all the ‘fortified’ cities he comes across, until he thinks about Jerusalem. He himself is camped at Lachish, which is some 25 to 30 miles south west of Jerusalem. He then sends his army commander with a large part of his army to take Jerusalem (v.2).

Arriving outside Jerusalem, the army commander stops outside the city and three of Hezekiah’s officials go out to speak with him (v.3) and he presents them with a challenge.

Note how he refers to his own king as “the great king” (v.4a). Jerusalem is presumably shut up and defended and the three officials don’t give any indication of capitulation. So, he challenges, (sounding like a modern crusading atheist) on what do you base this confidence of yours? (v.4b) So you have apparent military might, but what is it in reality; it relies on others? (v.5). Don’t rely on Egypt, they have no strength. (v.6) Don’t rely on your God because Hezekiah rejected him (v.7) – a misunderstanding for Hezekiah had cleared the high places but they were nothing to do with worshipping the Lord. Distortion!

D. Application: 

1. Don’t listen to the enemy; he seeks to demean God. 
2. Don’t listen to the enemy, he lies and distorts the truth.

Passage: Isaiah 36:8-12

8 ‘“Come now, make a bargain with my master, the king of Assyria: I will give you two thousand horses – if you can put riders on them! 9 How then can you repulse one officer of the least of my master’s officials, even though you are depending on Egypt for chariots and horsemen? 10 Furthermore, have I come to attack and destroy this land without the Lord? The Lord himself told me to march against this country and destroy it.”’

11 Then Eliakim, Shebna and Joah said to the field commander, ‘Please speak to your servants in Aramaic, since we understand it. Don’t speak to us in Hebrew in the hearing of the people on the wall.’

12 But the commander replied, ‘Was it only to your master and you that my master sent me to say these things, and not to the people sitting on the wall – who, like you, will have to eat their own excrement and drink their own urine?’

A. Find Out

1. What does the commander offer? v.8
2. What does he conclude? v.9
3. Of what does he boast? v.10
4. What did the three officials request? v.11
5. But what was the commander’s reply? v.12

B. Think:

1. What is the commander seeking to do in what he says?
2. What, at this stage, do the three officials fear?
3. Yet what is the commander’s bigger objective?

C. Comment:

We have seen previously that the Assyrian commander is unclear about the Lord and worship in Israel (v.7). He is going to come back and make a further claim about the Lord but first he continues to seek to make the three officials from Hezekiah feel weak and unable to withstand this great army. In modern parlance we would call this psychological warfare. Come on, he says, appearing reasonable, to balance things up perhaps, I’ll offer you two thousand horses if you have the warriors to ride them (v.8). That will make the three feel even worse for it says the Assyrian army is so great that it has two thousand horses spare, and also that they are so small because they don’t have that number of men to ride them.

They make no response to this offer and so the commander concludes they are absolute losers. You won’t be able to repulse even one of my men, is what he says (v.9), and as for waiting around for Egypt’s help, don’t bother!

Then he plays his master card of logic. Look, he says, you rely on the Lord (implied) but we don’t and look what we’ve achieved without Him (v.10), and then he pulls a fast and nasty one: actually I’m here at God’s bidding, He told us to come and do this.

The three ask the commander not to speak in common Hebrew for they fear the onlookers on the wall will hear and their hearts fail (v.11) but that’s exactly what the commander wants (v.12)

D. Application:

1. The enemy seeks to demoralise and make us feel inferior. Resist!
2. The enemy makes false claims. Resist.

Passage: Isaiah 36:13-22      

13 Then the commander stood and called out in Hebrew, ‘Hear the words of the great king, the king of Assyria! 14 This is what the king says: do not let Hezekiah deceive you. He cannot deliver you! 15 Do not let Hezekiah persuade you to trust in the Lord when he says, “The Lord will surely deliver us; this city will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria.”

16 ‘Do not listen to Hezekiah. This is what the king of Assyria says: make peace with me and come out to me. Then each of you will eat fruit from your own vine and fig-tree and drink water from your own cistern, 17 until I come and take you to a land like your own – a land of corn and new wine, a land of bread and vineyards.

18 ‘Do not let Hezekiah mislead you when he says, “The Lord will deliver us.” Have the gods of any nations ever delivered their lands from the hand of the king of Assyria? 19 Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? Have they rescued Samaria from my hand? 20 Who of all the gods of these countries have been able to save their lands from me? How then can the Lord deliver Jerusalem from my hand?’

21 But the people remained silent and said nothing in reply, because the king had commanded, ‘Do not answer him.’

22 Then Eliakim son of Hilkiah the palace administrator, Shebna the secretary and Joah son of Asaph the recorder went to Hezekiah, with their clothes torn, and told him what the field commander had said.

A. Find Out

1. To whom does the commander next speak? v.13
2. What does he call them to do and why? v.14,15
3. What alternative does he put before them? v.16
4. Yet what sting in the tail is there? v.17
5. How does he show the strength of his argument? v.18-20
6. How did the people respond, and why? v.21
7. What did the three officials do? v.22

B. Think:

1. What does the commander know about Hezekiah and God?
2. How does he seek to counter that?
3. Yet why is that a bad argument?

C. Comment:

The commander hasn’t made the three officials capitulate and so he raises his voice as he continues so that he is effectively speaking to the people of Jerusalem on the walls (v.13).

His appeal to them is twofold. First he attacks Hezekiah’s reliance upon the Lord and says this is deception (v.14,15). The reason this reliance on God is false, he says, is because what has already happened. Look at all the gods of the other nations, he says, they haven’t been able to stop us (v.18-20) so, implied, why should your God be able to stop us?

The failure of this argument, of course, is that the gods of the other nations are mere figments of their imagination; they are not real, whereas the Lord is THE Lord of all – and very real!

His second argument is basically, surrender to us and make peace with us and all will go well with you (v.16). Initially this sounds a good argument but he goes on to reveal that they will, as happens to all captured peoples, be taken to another land to live (v.17). Captivity and exile is all he can offer. The people remain silent (v.21) and the three officials go in anguish to tell Hezekiah what has transpired.

Don’t rely on Egypt, don’t rely on Hezekiah’s faith and don’t rely on God; these are the arguments put forward.

D. Application:

1. Don’t compare the Lord with other ‘gods’. He is the Lord!
2. Don’t let others deceive you by their false thinking.