And so let's turn back in our Bibles to 2 Kings 20. 2 Kings 20. We're back in the Old Testament again today. We're back in 2 Kings. We're getting toward the end of the book. And we've been going through this chapter by chapter, verse by verse, seeing the inspired history of Israel. exactly accurate, exactly expired, and it tells us what God thinks about things and how God works in the nations, how he works in our lives, and God wants to show us those things. And it starts out with the sickness of Hezekiah. What do you remember of Hezekiah? Well, Hezekiah was a godly king. He was a good king. But he was a man just like all of us, and we're going to see where he got a little bit astray here in chapter 20, a little bit further on. But he was a good king, very good king, and God used him. But like all of us, it says in the first couple words of chapter 20, in those days was Hezekiah sick unto death. And all of us are going to end up there one of these days. We hope it'll be later rather than sooner, but we're all going to end up just right here. And Hezekiah was there and he got healed, but then he ended up there again. We're all mortal. We're all going to die. And God is in control of that. And we have to die once to be born twice and go to heaven. But anyway, it says he was sick unto death. And it looks like he had been sick for a little while. It wasn't really quick there. So Isaiah came to him and gave a message from the Lord. We won't read all these first 11 verses. We read them earlier in the response of reading. But Isaiah came to him and gave a message from the Lord. And the message was, you will die and not live. Of course, we all know we're going to die. But the point was here, he was going to die of this sickness here soon. And so that was the message. But we see in this passage, it was a conditional message. It was actually, even though the condition wasn't stated here, it was conditioned upon God. hearing Hezekiah's prayer after this. So Isaiah gives a message. Hezekiah, he immediately turns his face to the wall and prayed unto the Lord. Why did he turn his face to the wall? Well, it's for the same reason that we close our eyes when we pray. I've known people before, they like to pray with their eyes open, but it's good to close our eyes so that we can concentrate upon that which we can't see. upon God. And so Hezekiah did that here. He turned his face to the wall and prayed unto the Lord. And he prayed and he said, Oh Lord, you know that I've been walking with you for these years. And he wept sore. And so his sickness, you know, sometimes in people's lives, the sickness is very brief when they die. Sometimes it's stretched out over years. Well, Hezekiah's sickness seemed to have stretched out a little bit, at least. But you know, his recovery, his healing from the Lord was very quick here. He wept sore, and it says before Isaiah had gone all the way out of the palace there, there was an answer from the Lord. The answer was immediate, right then. There was an answer. And it was a good answer. Turn again, verse 5, and tell Hezekiah, the captain of my people, I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears, I will heal thee on the third day, thou shalt go up into the house of the Lord. And so here in the Bible, You know, sometimes people talk about God hears our prayers and he hears every prayer. Well, it's true that God hears every prayer that we pray. I mean, he hears it and knows we prayed it. But in the Bible, when it talks about hearing a prayer, it's that God's going to answer it. I have heard thy prayer. He was going to answer it. I have seen your tears. And he was going to have very close to immediate healing. The third day, he was gonna be healed and be able to go up into the temple and walk around and get around well. Well, you know, why didn't God just do that to begin with? Why did God give him the message that he was gonna die and had him pray? Well, number one, he wanted to humble Hezekiah, have him to seek his face, seek God's face. He wanted him to pray unto the Lord. And you know, why is it that God has us pray for salvation? He has us pray for salvation because that's the means that he uses that gets us saved. We pray. And so here are the means for Hezekiah being healed was prayer, prayer. And prayer is the nuclear weapon that we have. It is very, very powerful. And we have the God of the universe will answer our prayers many times. He'll pay attention to what we're praying. And so, here I have heard thy prayer. The third day thou shalt go up into the house of the Lord. Well, it wasn't just a blanket healing, you know, with very indefinite and very broad. It gave exactly how long he was going to have. And verse six, I will add unto thy days 15 years. You know, it's just like recently with president Biden, he gave a pardon to his son and he gave like a sweeping pardon. It wasn't just general. I mean, it was very general that he was pardoned of anything that he ever thought about doing. And it was a little bit much. But here God gives a specific promise, specific thing, 15 years. Well, of course that's good and it's bad to an extent. I mean, Hezekiah I'm sure was overjoyed and we would be overjoyed to get 15 more years when we were told we were gonna die. But of course the 15 years are gonna be over pretty quick. And the title of my message this morning is Passing Pride, Passing Pride. First of all, everything is passing away. Everything's temporary, passing on, passing by. And Hezekiah's life was passing by. He was gonna have 15 years, but those 15 years were gonna be over pretty quick. I remember in my own family, my mother died, and then my dad lived exactly 15 years after my mother died. And of course he passed away back in 2005. And you know, the thing is he had an extra 15 years and that was great. And I'm sure he appreciated that. And I would appreciate that. But you know what? He's been gone for 20 years already. And you know, the time passes by, our life passes by. It's all temporary. And so he had 15 years that he was gonna get. And the Lord additionally promised that the Assyrians would not take the city. The Assyrians were the great enemies of that time. And once again, keep straight, the Assyrians and the Syrians are two different things. Assyria was the big kingdom that was gobbling up the countries, and Syria was the smaller one. And today we got Syria in the news. Syria in the news, they toppled the dictator over there. But you know, it's the same Syria, same area that it talks about in the Bible, but this is us Syria. And so God says that he's going to defend the city for mine own sake, God's own sake, and for David's sake. David was very important. Did you ever think about how much of the Bible is devoted to David? It goes like books of the Bible are devoted to David, back of Samuel and Kings and all those passages telling everything about David. And David is very important. He was a human being. He had his faults. He was guilty of murder and adultery, but he was a man after God's own heart too. And I believe that in the millennium, David is going to be the prince. the prince and the millennium. And it talks about the prince and Ezekiel at the end of the book of Ezekiel. It has the millennial temple and it has the prince coming and going. Well, anyway, here for my servant David's sake, God would defend Jerusalem and he would bless Hezekiah. And the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children and the blessings of the fathers are visited upon the children as well. And so then we have verse seven. And Isaiah said, take a lump of figs, just a regular lump of figs. And they took and laid it on the boil and he recovered. It's interesting that the father-in-law of my daughter there in Delaware, he has a fig tree, even here up here around Delaware. And he gets figs out of it. But anyway, figs is just a plain old fruit, figs, and they were supposed to take a lump of those and put it on the boil. I guess he had a bad abscess, a bad infection, and it was all swollen up and probably broken open with pus and who knows what. But anyway, all they were supposed to do is take a lump of figs and put it on that abscess he had. You know, is that a new discovery for a cure for infections today? I don't think so. I don't think so. The thing is, is many times in the Bible that there's something symbolic done. And this is a symbolic thing. They literally took the figs, but it was a symbol of what God was going to do. Remember in the New Testament when Jesus healed the eyes of the guy, he took spit with the dust and put it on the eyes of the guy. I don't think there was anything really medicinal in that, either that or the figs. But God used it. God showed that he was going to heal. And these people that say that we should do all the same miracles and all the same things that everybody in the Bible used to do, Well, they need to put figs on infections and things like that. But no, that was just a one-time, a one-time miracle and one-time way of doing it there. And then Hezekiah verse eight, he wanted a sign. He wanted a sign. What's a sign that the Lord's gonna give me these 15 years? Well, Hezekiah got a really big sign, a really big sign. not just a wet fleece or a dry fleece. He got a monumental, about as big of a sign as you could possibly get. And that sign was for the sundial, the shadow, to go back 10 degrees. And of course, you know, back in those days they didn't have watches and clocks exactly as we do today. And one of their main ways of keeping time was with a sundial. And of course it only worked when the sun was out, but the sun would put shadows on the sundial and they'd be able to see what time it is. Well, he wanted the shadow to go backward. Of course it always goes forward. It never goes backward. And, uh, You know, I have a friend of mine, his mother used to tell him, never wind clocks backward, always wind them forward. And I've never followed that. I don't think I really amounted to too much, but you know, because she thought it harmed the clock. But the thing is, here the sundial, the shadow goes back. That means the sun is going to move in relation to the earth the opposite way from what it normally moves. And you got the whole earth rotating and the gravity on the earth is dependent on that rotation that we don't go floating off. And so many things are dependent on that rotation of the earth. And that rotation is going to be stopped and put back a little bit. Well, that's a huge miracle, a huge one. And God did it. He did it. And verse 11, and Isaiah the prophet cried unto the Lord and he brought the shadow 10 degrees backward by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz. Do you really believe that God was able to do this? Sure he was. He's in control of everything. You got those billions of stars out there. They say millions of light years away or whatever, you know, God is in control of all that. and he can do this humongous miracle. And so he had to disconnect everything and make it so everybody wouldn't go off floating into space or whatever. They didn't know anything except that the sun moved back according to the earth. Well, let's go on here, verse 12, and let's read. Picking up with verse 12. At that time, Berodach Baladan, the son of Baladan, king of Babylon, sent letters and a present unto Hezekiah, for he had heard that Hezekiah had been sick. And Hezekiah hearkened unto them, and showed them all the house of his precious things, the silver, the gold, the spices, and the precious ointment, and all the house of his armor, and all that was found in his treasures. There was nothing in his house, nor in all his dominion, that Hezekiah showed them not." So here we have, of course, we have Assyria was the great enemy of the time. And Babylon was up and coming, the kingdom of Babylon. And Babylon would conquer Assyria and become the next great power. And of course, Hezekiah didn't know all that. All he knew that was right then, Assyria was the big enemy. Assyria had already been there, had already shut him in Jerusalem. We studied all that in great detail of the siege of Jerusalem with Sennacherib. And so Assyria was the great enemy. And so Hezekiah wanted to be friends with anybody that was an enemy of Assyria. And that was Babylon. And so he wanted to be friends with Babylon and Babylon wanted to be friends with him because he was an enemy of Assyria as well. So we have a bit of an alliance here between Babylon and Israel with Hezekiah. And so these messengers came from Babylon to wish him well and hope that he got well and gave him greetings from the king of Babylon. So what did Hezekiah do then? Well, Hezekiah decided to go and show them everything he had, everything valuable he had. And you could see exactly what things were valuable back then. They had, of course, always the silver and the gold. That's always valuable. That's why that's a good thing for inflation. And then what was also valuable were the spices. They used to get spices way off from India and China and other places. They had the spice road and that was very valuable, those spices and the ointment, the precious ointment. Israel actually produced some of that balm of Gilead. And so these things were valuable and he showed them everything. So why did he show them everything? Why did he take them around and show them this, show them that, show them all his things? Well, Hezekiah was showing off. He was showing off. He wanted to show off and show, he wanted to show the king of Babylon and the representatives that he also was a great king, and he also had great riches, and he also had great power, and he wanted to impress them, and he wanted to show off. Well, that was a mistake there. That was a big mistake there. And what about in our lives? Is it a mistake to show off? I think it is, basically, if we're really just showing off. It's a mistake. And people always have that as a thing of human nature, that we like to show off. And why do we want to show off? Because we're a bit proud. And we want to show off what we have. We want to show off our family even sometimes. We brag on our family. We want to brag on this and brag on that. You know, the thing is, I mean, it's good to tell about things, but at a point it gets to be bragging. And here Hezekiah, he could have told them a little bit about what he had, but he wanted to go in great detail showing off. That was a thing of pride. And as we have in the title of the message this morning, passing pride. Pride is one of the deadly sins, one of the things that God hates. It's the basis of so many other sins. Pride, pride. And that's what Hezekiah had here. He didn't really get humbled enough with his sickness unto death. I guess he got lifted up and then he saw the Lord healed him. And so some people have said his last 15 years were not very good. He really didn't use them very well. This is basically the only detail we have from the last 15 years. And we have this that he was showing off. You know, if you've got a wad of $100 bills in your pocket and you go traveling, is it a good idea to take the wad out and let everybody see all that you have? No, it's not a good idea. And you might wanna show off how much stuff you got, but the trouble is people might take note of that. Robbers might take note of that and go on to rob you. And, you know, the problem was that's exactly how it worked out with Hezekiah. He showed them all these things and the Babylonians, they knew about all these things and they were going to come back later and rob it all. They were going to get it all a few years later. And, you know, with robbers, it's a matter of risk. with the robbers, it's a matter of risk and return on how much risk they wanna take for how much return. You know, if you got an old car or an old house, you're not so likely to get robbed because they think there's not much return there. But here Hezekiah made sure they knew that there was great return in robbing him and in robbing Israel. And that was a mistake. And so Isaiah came back. Here we have verse 14. Then came Isaiah the prophet unto the king Hezekiah, and said unto him, What said these men? And from whence came they unto thee? And Hezekiah said, They came from a far country, even from Babylon. Do you remember earlier with Joshua, the representatives of Gibeon came, and they were supposedly coming from a far country, but they really didn't come from a far country. But these really did come from a far country. from Babylon. And verse 15, and he said, what have they seen in thine house? And Hezekiah answered, all the things that are in mine house have they seen. There is nothing among all my treasures that I have not showed them. And Isaiah said unto Hezekiah, hear the word of the Lord. Behold, the days come that all that is in thine house and that which thy fathers have laid up in store unto this day shall be carried unto Babylon. "'Nothing shall be left,' saith the Lord. "'And of thy sons that shall issue from thee, "'which thou shalt beget, shall they take away? "'And they shall be eunuchs in the palace "'of the king of Babylon?' "'Then said Hezekiah unto Isaiah, "'Good is the word of the Lord which thou hast spoken.' "'And he said, is it not good "'if peace and truth be in my days?' "'Well,' Hezekiah, he was as all of us are. "'We tend to be interested in the here and now, And Hezekiah said, well, you know, if all that's going to happen in the future, it's not too bad. I'm going to have peace and truth in my days. Well, here again, we have the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. And here we have this sin will be visited somewhat on his sons, although that's all in the providence of God as well with the defeat of Israel and the carrying away captive of Israel. But his sons, his descendants would be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon. And then we go on to verse 20. And the rest of the acts of Hezekiah And all his might, and how he made a pool and a conduit, and brought water into the city, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? And Hezekiah slept with his fathers, and Manasseh his son reigned in his stead." And of course as you go through the kings, You see just the progression. Hundreds of years pass. Hundreds of years. The kings come, the kings go. Hezekiah sleeps with his fathers, just like all of us. And his son comes in, and then he reigns in his stead. Well, Hezekiah was a great king. is I've mentioned before that you can still see in Jerusalem this conduit that it talks about here, this amazing conduit that was made under Hezekiah, where they brought water from outside the city of Jerusalem underground up into a pool in the city, within the city walls of Jerusalem. And they had an inscription on that tunnel and said how it was done, and the people started from one end, the people started from the other end, They had a winding path of the tunnel, but they met exactly in the right place down underground. And they had some brains back in the old time days, and these people did. And under Hezekiah here, they made that conduit still till today in that pool. And you can see the inscription, and I did see the inscription from that pool over in Turkey, because the Turks had carried it off to Istanbul, Turkey. Well, he has a great king. He had his might. He did have might, but he didn't need to show it off. He didn't need to show off. Did you know, I don't know if I've mentioned before, what Robert E. Lee said a true gentleman is. A true gentleman, he said, was somebody that didn't have to show off his authority. Didn't have to impress everyone with his authority. That was a gentleman. And Lee was. And a gentleman doesn't show off. And here we have Hezekiah showed off. And of course, that's kind of a natural thing for us. You know, it's true, he did have all those riches. It was truly his. I mean, why not show what God has blessed him with? But we don't wanna be showed off. It lifts us up with pride, pride. So that one thing we see, passing. Everything is temporary, everything. And that's the problem with social work. You know, so many missionaries are all about social work, about doing social work, relieving people's sicknesses, physical sicknesses, or giving them money, or giving them different things, physical things. Well, those things are good, but they're passing. They're not gonna last very long. The great job of a missionary is with eternal things, things that are going to last, that aren't going to pass away. And so pride. Pride has always been a big thing since the beginning of time. The Greeks, as I've mentioned before, I'm sure, the Greeks used to call it hubris. And all the Greek tragedies, they'd like to have stories of the great leader and great guy who's led to ruin by his own hubris, by his own pride. And, well, David. David's a good example of falling into pride. And, you know, David has two big sins in the Bible. One big sin was with Bathsheba and Uriah. And the second big sin that David has in the Bible is numbering the children of Israel. And he wanted all the children of Israel to be numbered and find out exactly how many there were. Well, why did he want to do that? Well, the reason was, and God judged him for it, the reason was he wanted to show off. And he wanted to show off how many millions of people were under his rule. And God was not pleased with that numbering that David did. And so he was lifted up with pride. And that's an example for us. Here's an example for us here from Hezekiah. And you know, pride, as we come to communion this morning, let's see if we have pride in our lives. And pride is an insidious thing. It creeps up on you. Pride. And of course, pride is the opposite of humility. Are we humble or are we proud? Do we look down on other people? Do we think we're better than everybody else? Well, that's not a, you know, a humble way of looking at things. And you know, and of course, with pride, people think they can do everything by themselves. Have it their own way. Burger King always had the slogan, have it your own way. Well, we can't have it our own way. God is in control. And Frank Sinatra used to sing the song, I did it my way. Well, we don't want to be lifted up in pride and think we did everything on our own. And these millionaires and these billionaires today, they think, oh, it's just because I was so skillful and so smart that I got all these things. Well, that's pride. It just happens that they were at the right place at the right time. There's a dozen other people that had just as much smarts, but they were at the right place with the right time. So as we come to communion, let's come with humble hearts before the Lord. And the Bible tells us that pride goes before a fall and a haughty spirit before destruction. Let's bow in prayer. Oh Lord, we pray that thou would just turn us to thee, help us to be the humble Christians that thou would have us to be. Help us not to be lifted up with pride. And oh Lord, Help us to just do what Thou would have us to do and turn our hearts to Thee in communion. In Jesus' name, amen.