Last week, God’s people were challenged to depend on God in the national crisis. This week in Isaiah, we see the crisis behind the crisis. Hezekiah, king of God’s people, is told he will die. Yet, he sees his terminal illness as a benefit from God (Isaiah 38:17)… what a strange thing to think?!
This reminds me of a quote from Abraham Kuyper (1908), which was quoted by Nancy Guthrie who has a lot of helpful things to say about grief (https://www.crossway.org/blog/2010/02/learning-to-understand-the-real-god/), about the real God we meet in suffering, death, and grief:
‘At first what our heart feels is that we cannot square this with our God as we imagined Him, as we had dreamed Him to be. The God we had, we lose, and then it costs so much bitter conflict of soul, before refined and purified in our knowledge of God, we grasp another, and now the only true God in the place thereof . . .
We fancy ourselves the main object at stake; it is our happiness, our honor, our future and God added in. According to our idea we are the center of things, and God is there to make us happy. The Father is for the sake of the child. And God’s confessed Almightiness is solely and alone to serve our interest. This is an idea of God which is false through and through, which turns the order around and, taken in its real sense, makes self God, and God our servant . . .
Cast down by your sorrow and grief, you become suddenly aware that this great God does not measure nor direct the course of things according to your desire; that in His plan there are other motives that operate entirely outside of your preferences. Then you must submit, you must bend . . .
This is the discovery of God’s reality, of His Majesty which utterly overwhelms you, of an Almightiness which absorbs within itself you and everything you call yours. And for the first time you feel what it is to confront the living God. And then begins the new endeavor of the soul, to learn to understand this real God.’
Isaiah’s relentless message to us – week after week – is whatever you trust in – apart from the LORD – will turn to destroy you. In his terminal illness, Hezekiah came to meet the real God he needed to trust in.
Let’s pray for each other that we come to know the real God through his Word and can depend on Him, alone.
In Christ, Tory.
Barwon District Anglican Churches 