Tag: Hezekiah

Working for the fruit that lasts

November 11th 

…And this will be a sign to you, O Hezekiah: This year you will eat what grows on its own, and in the second year what springs from the same. But in the third year you will sow and reap; you will plant vineyards and eat their fruit. And the surviving remnant of the house of Judah will again take root below and bear fruit above. For a remnant will go forth from Jerusalem, and survivors from Mount Zion. The zeal of the LORD of Hosts will accomplish this.

2 Kings 19:29-31 (BSB)

Do you not now see the fruits of your labors, O all you servants of the Lord that have suffered for his truth, and have been faithful witnesses of the same, and the little handful amongst the rest, the least amongst the thousands of Israel? You have not only had a seed time, but many of you have seen the joyful harvest; should you not then rejoice, yes, and again rejoice and say Hallelujah, salvation and glory, and honor, and power, be to the Lord our God; for true and righteous are his judgments.

When by the travel* and diligence of some godly and zealous preachers, and God’s blessing on their labors… many became enlightened by the word of God, and had their ignorance and sins revealed to them, and began by his grace to reform their lives.

from Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation (Ch. 1)

* I honestly have no idea whether ‘travell’ was supposed to be read as ‘travel’ or ‘travail’ so I just picked the one I liked best, even if it’s probably wrong.

The chapter this comes from is an explanation of how the Pilgrims left England for the Low Countries, (this is before they somehow decided that Massachusetts was a good idea), and there’s a lot about how hard life was if you weren’t part of the official church. We also skipped most of the complaining about ‘papists’ here. To be fair though, almost everyone was pretty rotten to each other, and dealing with the religio-political complex of the time had to have been deeply unfun, so I’m going to give them a pass on all the grandiose, post-exilic rhetoric they had going on there. (I wanted to subtitle this post ‘God working through crappy political scenarios and other pointless, frustrating situations caused by human self-will and selfishness,’ but apparently I have some sense of proportion left and it won’t let me.)

Anyway, Happy… Mayflower Compact-Signing Day? (Actually though, I think it was November 11th in the Julian calendar, so we’re ten days early. Oh well, no takebacks.)

Whole Heart

July 13th 

…but Hezekiah had interceded for them, saying, “May the good LORD provide atonement on behalf of whoever sets his whole heart on seeking God, even though not according to the purification rules of the sanctuary.”

2 Chronicles 30:18-19 (HCSB)

Whatever belonging to the region of thought and feeling is uttered in words, is of necessity uttered imperfectly…

Our Lord had no design of constructing a system of truth in intellectual forms. The truth of the moment in its relation to him, The Truth, was what he spoke. He spoke out of a region of realities which he knew could only be suggested—not represented—in the forms of intellect and speech. With vivid flashes of life and truth his words invade our darkness, rousing us with sharp stings of light to will our awaking, to arise from the dead and cry for the light which he can give.

How, then, must the truth fare with those who build intellectual systems upon the words of our Lord, or of his disciples? A little child would better understand Plato than they St. Paul. The meaning in those great hearts who knew our Lord is too great to enter theirs. The sense they find in the words must be a sense small enough to pass through their narrow doors. And if mere words, without the interpreting sympathy, may mean, as they may, almost anything the receiver will or can attribute to them, how shall the man, bent at best on the salvation of his own soul, understand, for instance, the meaning of that apostle who was ready to encounter banishment itself from the presence of Christ, that the beloved brethren of his nation might enter in? To men who are not simple, simple words are the most inexplicable of riddles.

If we are bound to search after what our Lord means —and he speaks that we may understand— we are at least equally bound to refuse any interpretation which seems to us unlike him, unworthy of him.  To accept that as the will of our Lord which to us is inconsistent with what we have learned to worship in him already, is to introduce discord into that harmony whose end is to unite our hearts, and make them whole.

Words for their full meaning depend upon their source, the person who speaks them. An utterance may even seem commonplace, till you are told that thus spoke one whom you know to be always thinking, always feeling, always acting. Recognizing the mind whence the words proceed, you know the scale by which they are to be understood. So the words of God cannot mean just the same as the words of man. “Can we not, then, understand them?” Yes, we can understand them—we can understand them more than the words of men. Whatever a good word means, as used by a good man, it means just infinitely more as used by God. And the feeling or thought expressed by that word takes higher and higher forms in us as we become capable of understanding him,—that is, as we become like him.

from George MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons (Vol. 1, It Shall Not Be Forgiven)

Magnify by We Are Messengers

Keeping the faith

June 19th

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.

2 Timothy 4:7

For years I have made a practice of writing many of my earnest prayers to God in a little book–a book now well worn. I still turn often to the petitions I recorded in that book. I remind God often of what my prayers have been.

One prayer in the book —and God knows it well by this time, for I pray it often— goes like this:

“Oh God, Let me die rather than to go on day by day living wrong. I do not want to become a careless, fleshly old man. I want to be right so that I can die right. Lord, I do not want my life to be extended if it would mean that I should cease to live right and fail in my mission to glorify You all of my days!…”

As you will recall from 2 Kings 20, the Lord gave Hezekiah a 15-year extension of life. Restored to health and vigor, Hezekiah disgraced himself and dishonored God before he died and was buried.

I would not want an extra 15 years in which to backslide and dishonor my Lord. I would rather go home right now than to live on–if living on was to be a waste of God’s time and my own!

from A. W.  Tozer’s Jesus Is Victor! (pp. 141-142)

#include <std disclaimer.h>

(I haven’t had a chance to read the whole book, and so can only vouch for what I’ve posted, etc, etc.)

Posted because I was thinking of Müller’s little notebook, and because this is one of my father’s (to all appearances) favorite  bible verses.

…and, for your listening pleasure, Billy Joel’s Keeping the Faith. Just kidding, here’s Billy and Sarah Gaines’ The Part That No One Sees on Youtube and Spotify.

It was for my welfare…

February 4th
“If God promise riches, the way thereto is poverty. Whom he loveth, him he chasteneth; whom he exalteth, he casteth down: whom he saveth, he damneth first. He bringeth no man to heaven, except he send him to hell first. If he promise life, he slayeth first; when he buildeth, he casteth all down first. He is no patcher; he cannot build on another man’s foundation. He will not work until all be past remedy, and brought unto such a case, that men may see,  how that his hand, his power, his mercy, his goodness and truth, hath wrought altogether. He will let no man be partaker with him of his praise and glory. His works are wonderful, and contrary unto man’s works.”
William Tyndale (The Obedience of a Christian Man)

 

In those days Hezekiah became sick and was at the point of death. And Isaiah the prophet the son of Amoz came to him, and said to him, “Thus says the Lord: Set your house in order, for you shall die, you shall not recover.”
Then Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to the LORD, and said, “Please, O Lord, remember how I have walked before you in faithfulness and with a whole heart, and have done what is good in your sight.” And Hezekiah wept bitterly.
Then the word of the Lord came to Isaiah: “Go and say to Hezekiah, Thus says the Lord, the God of David your father: I have heard your prayer; I have seen your tears. Behold, I will add fifteen years to your life. This shall be the sign to you from the Lord, that the Lord will do this thing that he has promised: Behold, I will make the shadow cast by the declining sun on the dial of Ahaz turn back ten steps.” So the sun turned back on the dial the ten steps by which it had declined.*
A writing of Hezekiah king of Judah, after he had been sick and had recovered from his sickness:

I said, ‘In the middle of my days I must depart; I am consigned to the gates of Sheol
for the rest of my years.’
I said, ‘I shall not see the Lord in the land of the living; I shall look on man no more among the inhabitants of the world. My dwelling is plucked up and removed from me like a shepherd’s tent; like a weaver I have rolled up my life; he cuts me off from the loom; from day to night you bring me to an end; I calmed myself until morning; like a lion he breaks all my bones; from day to night you bring me to an end. Like a swallow or a crane I chirp; I moan like a dove. My eyes are weary with looking upward. O Lord, I am oppressed; be my pledge of safety! What shall I say? For he has spoken to me, and he himself has done it. I walk slowly all my years because of the bitterness of my soul. O Lord, by these things men live, and in all these is the life of my spirit. Oh restore me to health and make me live! Behold, it was for my welfare that I had great bitterness; but in love you have delivered my life from the pit of destruction, for you have cast all my sins behind your back. For Sheol does not thank you; death does not praise you; those who go down to the pit do not hope for your faithfulness. The living, the living, he thanks you, as I do this day; the father makes known to the children your faithfulness. The LORD will save me, and we will play my music on stringed instruments all the days of our lives, at the house of the LORD.

Isaiah 38:1-21 (ESV)

*The Hebrew on that is kind of obscure, apparently.

I haven’t actually read  The Obedience of a Christian Man, but I had the quote floating around, and I love it so much that I posted it anyway. So, oops.

Also – for those that haven’t read Isaiah recently –  the larger context of Isaiah 38 is about Hezekiah doing everything right, and then getting invaded by the Assyrians despite all that. Despite his taking all of the reasonable, rational measures a small country can take whilst being invaded by one much larger (and likely technologically more advanced), things weren’t going very well and everyone was besieged. So Hezekiah basically points to the letter with all of the Assyrian military commander’s taunts/demands, and says “Hey God, this is all basically your fault, so, um, you deal with this.”