Let us now turn to 2 Kings chapter 20, where we'll read the first 11 verses, beginning to read with verse 1. In those days Hezekiah was sick and near death. And Isaiah the prophet, the son of Amoz, went to him and said to him, Thus says the Lord, set your house in order, for you shall die and not live. Then he turned his face toward the wall and prayed to the Lord, saying, Remember now, O Lord, I pray, how I have walked before you in truth and with a loyal heart, and have done what was good in your sight. And Hezekiah wept bitterly. And it happened before Isaiah had gone out into the middle court that the word of the Lord came to him, saying, Return, and tell Hezekiah the leader of his people. Thus says the Lord, the God of David, Your father, I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears, surely I will heal you. On the third day you shall go up to your house of the Lord, and I will add to your days fifteen years. I will deliver you on this day from the hand of the king of Assyria. I will defend this city for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David." Then Isaiah said, take a lump of figs, so they took and laid it on the boil, and he recovered. And Hezekiah said to Isaiah, what is the sign that the Lord will heal me and that I shall go up to the house of the Lord the third day? And then Isaiah said, this is the sign, this is the sign to you from the Lord, that the Lord will do the thing which he has spoken. And shall the shadow go forward ten degrees, or go backward ten degrees? And Hezekiah answered, It is an easy thing for the shadow to go down ten degrees. No, but let the shadow go backward ten degrees. So Isaiah the prophet cried out to the Lord, and he brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down on the sundial of Ahaz. May the Lord bless this reading to our good understanding. In some ways, this is a strange little text, because it's as if God takes a break from the great historical events that are swirling around Judah and Samaria at that time. It's as if God takes a break for theological reflection. Now, we Reformed peoples, we Calvinists, we RPCNAers, whatever other Reformed denomination, we're great at this. We love to reflect on these theological issues. And there's no, in 11 verses, there is an amazing amount of reflection here, and so I'd like to call that to your attention and encourage you with it. Now the first issue that is brought forward here is the issue of prayer, questions about prayer. We know that the Lord exhorts us to prayer. He tells us, pray about all things. Pray always. Make prayer something that is an energetic thing in your life. But Calvinists like to reflect on things, and the questions I've heard in the past, we say, well, if God knows everything, and if God has decreed everything in our lives, then Why do we need to pray about? Why does God have us pray about these things which are certain from Him? And so, in this sense, the sovereignty of God, the sovereignty of the divine nature, clashes, at least in our feeble minds, it clashes with the idea of praying for these things to come to pass, because we say to ourselves, well, if God is truly sovereign, if God has decreed everything that's going to come to pass, well then, He knows it and he's going to do it. What is this business about prayer? Well, have we seen this kind of question or this kind of problem arise with Hezekiah? Because in this case, the prophet Isaiah goes to him with this pronouncement of a prophecy. We'll deal with that next. But he goes to him with this prophecy of a prophecy that he is going to die soon and he's already sick and his life is going downhill. It's not hard for him to understand that he's sick. The prophet, as it were, comes to him and says, this is not a sickness, a momentary sickness, or a casual sickness, but this is a terminal sickness. You are going to die. So, what should we do in those situations? Well, if we follow our Lord's advice, we pray about these things, even though it has come from the mouth of a prophet. And so I don't think that Hezekiah had that much sense about him, that he prayed because he knew that that was his debt. I think he prayed because he was somewhat frantic. We don't know all the issues of his life. We know some of them, though. We know that his country, his beloved country, for which he had lived his life, made many sacrifices, his life was not his own. He served as a king of Judah. And he was devoted to that. He was devoted to his children and his children's children. And so the idea of leaving them bereft, he was somewhat aware of his gifts and his abilities. He was very aware that so many of the kings before him had been failures in terms of spiritual things. He could see where God had lifted him up and given him a spiritual strength. And so the idea of him dying very quickly and being lost to the present kingdom overwhelmed him. And so we see in the matter of a verse, we see in verse two, it says that he turned his face toward the wall and prayed to the Lord. this is instructive that this was his instinct. Won't be it to us when prayer is not the instinct of our lives when we are faced with news like this and we have not the matter, the habit of going to the Lord in prayer, but this was Hezekiah's habit. So he turned his face toward the wall and he prayed to the Lord saying, remember now, oh Lord, I pray. I have walked before you in truth and with a loyal heart, and have done what was good in your sight." And he wept bitterly. Now we'll see next week where he makes kind of a foolish decision before the Babylonian envoys that came to the land. So Hezekiah was not perfect, but in the wisdom of his life and then the spirituality of his life, he was a cut above the average king of those days. And so He goes and he prays to the Lord despite the fact that he has had this prophecy uttered over his head. He prays. He prays to God. Now what benefit can prayer be to us? when something as certain as a prophetic utterance has been made over our heads? What use would there be to prayer? He might be cited, I would think, by some passers-by, some pedestrians. He might be cited for daring to pray about something that had already been decreed over his head. Is this not a great encouragement to us? Is this not a great encouragement to us to try not to figure out God's decrees ahead of time? but simply to take the means of grace that He has given us and pray about them or do them. You know, if you have cancer and you think you're going to die, is that a time to leave off attending communion or the Lord's Supper, like we have scheduled next week? Or do we go through our paces waiting and seeing what the Lord will do? This text is a very good encouragement to us, Seek the Lord's face, whatever our circumstances are. Is it not? It's a wonderful exhortation to it. So Hezekiah goes, and he doesn't even pay attention to Isaiah, evidently, as Isaiah leaves. He's so much focused on praying to the Lord about this utterance that he's had over his head. As far as we know, This is the only time in Isaiah's life where he has made a prophecy over somebody. He goes to leave, and he's halfway out of the house. He's halfway out of the castle, in a sense, or out of the king's residence. When God speaks to him again, he says, Isaiah, do your turn, go back, and talk to the king again. And so Isaiah goes back. I love verse 4, and it happened. Before Isaiah had gone out into the middle court, that the word of the Lord came to him, saying, Return and tell Hezekiah, the leader of my people, thus says the Lord, the God of Jacob your father, I have heard your prayer. I have heard your prayer. Does God hear our prayers? Yes, he does. I've heard your prayer. I've seen your tears. He had seen a correspondence between the words of Isaiah, I mean the words of Hezekiah, and the emotions of his heart. He says, I will surely heal you. On the third day you shall go up to the house of the Lord and I will add you to your life 15 years. If one of the modern American corporations could come up with a pill, an automatic pill that would give you 15 years on the spot, they would make a lot of money. Because 15 years may not sound like a lot of time, unless you think you're going to die next week or tomorrow. And so God utters this prophecy again over Hezekiah's head. What does this teach us about prayer? Does it not teach us that whatever we know about God, whatever we know about his sovereignty, whatever respect we have for him, whatever intelligence we have about the sovereignty of God, is it ever foolish to pray? I think not. I think it's always full of virtue to go and pray. And so this little story about Hezekiah teaches us so much about prayer in a few verses, just a few verses. God gives us an illustration of these things. He doesn't just tell it to us prosaically via some didactic passage. He has Isaiah, the prophet, go and utter a prophecy over Hezekiah's head. and then reverse course and come back and change the prophecy over him. Is this not an amazing little passage of scripture? Not an encouragement to prayer. Okay, secondly then, we have questions about prophecy. A person could say, a person could look at this text and say, well, if this isn't a case of false prophecy, I don't know what is. Isaiah should be stolen. He prophesied that Hezekiah was going to die, and then in the next turn he says he's going to live 15 more years, longer. What kind of a prophet is this? Is this acceptable? Is it biblical or not? As we interpret scripture, it's good for us to have some illustrations like this in our minds so that it can temper our ardor sometimes when we apply the scriptures to our lives. Because not all things are as they appear in our lives. And sometimes we'll speak to a friend and we're so sure that they need to hear this or that word. But the problem is we don't know the whole story. We don't know every circumstance of their lives. We don't know what God is really doing with them. And this is a case where Isaiah didn't really know what God was doing with Hezekiah. Hezekiah didn't know what God was doing with his life. The Lord is deep. The Lord is high and lifted up. We cannot search the wisdom of the Lord. And this is one such case. What we need to realize is that God's Word to us is sure at every single moment. Now, in Hezekiah's life, if Hezekiah had not prayed and prostrated himself before the Lord, would he have received 15 more years? No. You see, our secondary causes, the motions of our life, are significant. They're so significant that in this case, the story presents itself in such a way that God changes his mind. Now we know that the Lord does not change his mind, but he's dealing with people like us who do change our minds. And so as he reveals these things to us, he reveals them in a way that are true both to his divine nature and also our human nature. It's a wonderful thing, and it's so amazing. So when Isaiah uttered this prophecy over Hezekiah's head, if he had not prayed, that prophecy would have come true. But when he cast himself upon the Lord, the Lord tells us to pray. He gives us a parable about a poor woman who had nothing, had no money, comes before a judge, And she simply comes back and repeats her plea again and again and again, until the judge is bothered. And he says, okay, I'm going to bless you with the request of your heart. Now that's a human kind of illustration to show not how the weakness of God or the foibles of the Lord, it's to show how our actions are important as feeble as they are. And when you look at your life, have you cast up your hands and say, there's nothing I can do? Some people, they look at it in terms of a job. They just look at themselves and they say, oh, I can't do this. I'm so feeble. I'm so dumb. I don't understand this. I don't understand that. There's been no educated person in my family for four generations. What hope have I had? What hope have I? That's the wrong way to think. We ought to take every opportunity we have in our lives to apply ourselves, to stretch ourselves, to see what God will do. You know, if you don't think that, if you have a desire to make a business in your life, go for it. You may fail three or four times, but the fourth or the fifth, you may succeed by the power of God. And so it is here with these, those are the kind of illustrations that come out of this prophetic change that Isaiah has. This must have been, I mean, for Isaiah the prophet, this must have been an educational event for him too. to see the Lord's determination to utter these initial words over Hezekiah's head, and then so quickly to go back. But Isaiah is a wise enough prophet that he knows, he understands the sovereignty of God on one hand, and he knows the foibles of men and how our actions can have an effect upon the Lord's decree. When God decrees, and God's decrees, God's sovereignty over our lives, always incorporate our actions. So that the knowledge of God is so infinite that he knows our thoughts, or he knows what we will do before we do them. And so he'll speak to us on one level, knowing that our mind is at one level, and then he'll speak to us on another level, knowing that our minds have changed. And then he changes his word for us in terms of hope and that sort of thing. Outside of the covenant, what hope does any pagan have? But if they change their minds, if they surrender to the Lord, if they come, if they join the covenant, if they come within the covenant community, it's like the whole world opens up before them. All things become possible. And has God changed his mind? No. God's mind has always been where it is. But you don't know that in your life. And so you can trust that the divine mind will bless you the more good things that you do in your life, the more you call upon His name. It's as if the prophecy for your life has changed. That's an amazing thing. Some people say, well, these Calvinists, if you believe in the sovereignty of God, you might as well lay down and die. There's nothing you can do. That is to totally misunderstand how God's sovereignty operates. It's to totally misunderstand how the divine mind operates. God is not a man, and his ways are not our ways. And when he comes to us and he says in 2 Corinthians, if any man is in Christ, he's a new creation. All things have become new. You see how this clashes with the order of fatalism that we think we are caught up in. So another really big kind of a new thing or a lesson that we have here in this little text. The third thing are questions about lifespan. There are not many issues or subjects about which people are more interested than how long they will live. Because we're pretty dependent upon living. We want to live. And even though we have hope in the future, hope in Christ, hope in the heavenly places, until we're there, it's hard for our faith to grasp that kind of thing. So we're pretty dependent upon the breath that we draw each day. But what we see from this text is that those things that we hold most dear, The breath that we breathe, the strength that we have, the energy of our days. What we see from this text is this is nothing to God. This is such a small thing. Death for Hosea, I mean Hezekiah, or 15 more years. It's like the wave of God's hand. It's nothing. So this is a lesson for us, a great lesson to get to leave off our worrying so much about ourselves and to give ourselves more over to prayer to the Lord over our lives. That prayer that you pray about your life Pray for the future, pray for the next 10 years, the next 20 years. I'm 76 now. I have no idea whether God will bring me down five minutes later here in the pulpit or whether I'll live into my 90s. Most of my relatives on my father's side have lived to 95 or 96. The way I feel today, I don't think I'm gonna make it that far, but who knows? but we can cast our lives upon the Lord. He is the one who holds our lives in his hand. And we have an illustration of that here for Hezekiah. A wonderful illustration where Hezekiah was at death's door and Isaiah made a, a poultice out of figs and applied it to, the one thing that was obvious of his illness was this boil, evidently, on the outside of his body. Isaiah made a poultice and applied that to the boil. The boil went away, and the boil was an indication of the sickness or a symptom of the sickness. That went away, and Isaiah went from being on death's door, being probably in bed every day at this point in his life, he went from that to being a king with energy again. ruling Israel for blessing. What an amazing story. The fourth thing I mapped out here was questions about why God blesses us. And we see that in the sixth verse of this passage. God explains it. He says, and I will add to your days 15 years. I will deliver you and the city from the hand of the king of Assyria. And I will defend the city for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David. So he has two reasons. for his own sake and for the sake of his servant, David. These are said so easily, these are stated so easily, and yet they are both profound, that God does things for his own name's sake. Why does God give us the mind that he gives us? Why does he deal with us the way he deals with us? Why is one man raised up and one man put down? You know, why is America, why is one president elevated and one president brought down? I never would have believed, if you had told me when I was a boy that we could have had a president as feeble as the one that we've just had, I would have said it was impossible. Because they would have invoked the 17th Amendment, or the cabinet would have invoked it, and then he would have been displaced from his wife's presence. That's the way it's supposed to work. But the way God works, sovereignly, is not according to the way we think the things should be done or can be done. But he does them nonetheless. Why does he do these things? For his own, we know first of all, in everything, he does all of these things for his own glory. He has a plan, and when we get to heaven, we will see the amazing divine plan that has guided all of history, and we will be reduced to tears as we look upon it, and we see how God's determinations worked like a clock. these little things we have on our hand, a wristwatch, you know, these gears inside the turn that all mesh together so well that they continue to tell the time, minute after minute, day after day, month after month, for as long as that clock works. Except with the Lord, there's no weary. And so it's just his expertise, his precision, works forever. And he does these things for his own glory, the glory of God. What creature is like this? None. For God is not a creature. He's a creator. What being is like this that does things for his own sake? And all things are good and all things are lovely. So that's a sermon in itself. And then the fact that he mentions David. Oh, we think of David. We think of all of the Foibles of David, we think of David's sexual weakness with Bathsheba. It just is almost undoing. We think of some of his fears, but we also think of the zeal for the Lord that coursed through his veins, that he heard in Goliath. tempting Israel and blaspheming the Lord out there in the field. And this young David, I mean, in terms of his strength, he could have been like one of us, even like one of our youngest men, like Charlie here. But it wasn't his physical strength that energized him, it was the zeal for the Lord. And so David was a man full of the divine zeal. He had King Saul who was after him for his life. He had King Saul in the cave, remember? And Saul was sitting there going to the bathroom. And David could have killed him so easily. It was like he was right in his hands. But David refused to lay his hands on Saul because he was, despite all of his failures, despite all of his sins, David knew that he had been anointed by Samuel. He was anointed to be the king of Israel. And he thought to himself, won't be it for me to lift up my hand against God's anointed. So David is an amazing person and God named a whole covenant over him, the Davidic or the Messianic covenant. The Davidic covenant promised to bless David and his family until the end, until all the generations. One of his children was going to be Jesus Christ in terms of grandchildren. And so out of David came the gospel and the prophecies of that. And this was the other reason that he gave on this occasion. So both of those are very humbling. Both of those are very humbling. The last thing I wanted to make mention was this question about truthfulness. Hezekiah was interested in having some sign that these things would truly come to pass. It says something about Hezekiah's lack of faith, even as it says something about his faith. We've already talked about his faith, but evidently he wasn't sure of these things, so he asked Isaiah for a sign, and Isaiah says, well, would you like the shadow of the sundial to go backwards or forwards? Because, of course, this would mean if the shadow, a shadow is formed by the sun, The only way a shadow can go back and forth is if the sun, as if the celestial, the heavenly lights that make that shadow are affected. I mean, that's an impossible thing. You and I could go outside and we could stamp our feet and rant and rave and have flashlights and great lanterns and lights and do all kinds of things to try to affect the way the cosmos, the sun, was affecting the earth. It would do nothing. But again, from the Lord, these things are nothing. And so the Lord indulges Hezekiah's weakness and makes the light of the, so this is the way the sun and the earth were configured. He makes them, he alters them just like that for some half hour, hour, whatever it would take to do this. And Hezekiah sees it. Hezekiah's faith is strengthened. God often indulges us with our foolish fears, our lack of knowledge. He often indulges us and encourages us when we should just wait and see what the Lord does, but he blesses us on this. And it's interesting in this case that we know that all of these things happened on the third day. We see that in verse five. And then in terms of the sign, that Hezekiah would be sick for two plus part of a third day, and then God was going to raise him up. And of course, this reminds us, does anybody read through that or listen to that without thinking of the Lord Jesus and his resurrection? I think not. Because this story is, representative of the power of God. And we know the power of God is manifested to its greatest degree in the life, the death, the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. So here was Hezekiah sick on his sickbed. He didn't know that the Lord was going to give him all of these lessons, some of the greatest lessons in history while he was sick in his bed. But as Isaiah entered the room and uttered his first prophesy, all of these lessons came to pass because God is good and he loves his covenant people. Let us pray. Our Father and our God, we pray that thou would be with us as Isaiah was with Hezekiah. Be our friend. Be our minister. Love us, O Lord, in our weaknesses and our frailties. You see us, O Lord, as we are. We are so in need of thy help. But we know that you have sent a great minister unto us, even Jesus the Christ. Has he not given us the balm of Gilead? Not a poultice of figs, but a wonderful healing balm from eternity past. called the gospel. And are we not healed by this gospel? We pray, oh Lord, that we would see it, that we would enjoy it, and that we would give thee thanks and praise. We pray, oh Lord, because we know that thou hast done these things, all of these things in our lives, thou hast done these things for thine own sake, for thine own name. Oh, bless the Lord, oh my soul. And all that is within me, Thou art high and lifted up. Thou art altogether blessed. Praise be to Thee, O Lord. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.