Sermons

After Assyria is driven back, Hezekiah is healed even of a mortal illness; fifteen years are added to his life, and his nation is delivered as well. Yet when envoys arrive from Babylon, at the very moment he ought to bear witness to God, he shows them all his wealth as if to boast of it. Isaiah then brings him a word of judgment: everything in the palace will be carried off to Babylon.

Pride is not a particular act but a condition of the heart that leans on something other than God. The moment just after a blessing, when vigilance slackens, is the most dangerous time in the life of faith. Even after hearing the word of judgment, Hezekiah let it pass, content that his own generation would have peace; this was not repentance before God but a selfishness concerned only with being safe himself.

The place of blessing is not where faith ends. Hezekiah was granted a longer life, yet in those years he fathered Manasseh, the most wicked king in the history of Judah. The true blessing lies not in living long but in living in dependence on God alone, and only when we humbly hold fast to his grace can we overcome Satan.

As Mark watches Peter die a martyr’s death, he resolves that the ministry of Jesus must be written down. The Gospel he left behind is the story of the Son of God, who came in the form of a servant, served, and gave his own life as a ransom. John the Baptist proclaims a baptism of repentance at the Jordan River, and even among those who came out to be baptized were Pharisees who said they had nothing to repent of.

The phrase “the beginning of the Good News” means that all the law and sacrifices of the Old Testament came to an end at the cross of Jesus, and a new age began. Water baptism is confessing one’s faith within the church community. Baptism with the Holy Spirit is meeting God personally through grace that he gives on his own initiative. If a person’s words and actions do not change even after baptism, that person cannot be said to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

Mark records that on the night Jesus was arrested, someone ran away in fear, though Scripture does not say for certain that this person was Mark. Mark later grew in faith, falling and getting up again and again, and he preached the gospel, filling the place Peter and Paul had left. Faith takes a different amount of time to grow in each person, so the church must wait in love for a brother who is weak.

Sennacherib, king of Assyria, has surrounded Jerusalem, and though he has already received an enormous tribute, he sends yet another threatening letter. Hezekiah has stripped even the gold from the temple to pay him, yet nothing is resolved, and at last he takes the letter up to the temple and stands before God.

Clinging to human means is like having the power line cut. Only when Hezekiah confessed his helplessness and turned to seek God’s glory was that line connected again. He did not ask for his own restoration; he asked only that God’s name be exalted.

That night the angel of the Lord struck down a hundred and eighty-five thousand men of the Assyrian army, and Sennacherib returned to his own land, where he died at the hands of his own sons. Hezekiah’s prayer did not bring about the deliverance; it simply opened the channel through which God’s zeal could flow. God is the one who accomplishes to the end what he has spoken, so one must lay aside human methods and come to the place of prayer.

Hezekiah becomes king amid a temple defiled by Ahaz and a faith mixed with other worship. As soon as he took the throne, the first thing he did was cleanse the temple. He tore down the high places that had taken root deep in the people’s lives, and he even broke in pieces the bronze serpent of Moses that the people had been worshiping, calling it Nehushtan.

The high places were not places where God had been abandoned but places where God was set alongside other things. The bronze serpent was originally God’s grace, but it became an idol when people came to worship the thing itself instead of God, its true reality. Even something God has given, if it comes before God in the heart, becomes a bronze serpent that must be broken.

The starting point of faith is whether one is upright by God’s standard. Hezekiah relied on God alone and kept his commands, and as a result he could stand boldly even before Assyria. Treating God as God: that is the essence of faith.

The disciples ask Jesus how they ought to pray, and he answers them with the Lord’s Prayer. His instruction to ask for the forgiveness of sins is more than a call to repent of moral wrongs; it is a call to restore a relationship with God that has been broken.

Adam’s sin in eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil lay not in the fruit itself but in setting himself up as the judge of good and evil, and so overturning the order God had made. Jesus healed this rift by shedding his blood on the cross. When he died, the curtain of the sanctuary was torn, and a way was opened for anyone to come directly to God. As Lord of the Sabbath, Jesus visits his disciples on the day of his resurrection, that is, every Lord’s Day, and says to them, “Peace be with you.”

The Lord’s Day is not time to be filled out of habit. It is time in which each person’s relationship with God is restored, one to one. When the whole heart is given to praise and to the Word, the wounded spirit is healed and strength is found for the six days ahead. God’s people must therefore be those who enjoy peace and freedom with the risen Lord.

Crowds wave palm branches to welcome Jesus. They spread their cloaks on the road and cheer him on, yet at the end of that road stands the cross. When some Greeks come looking for Jesus, he does not agree to see them. Instead he says, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”

The glory Jesus speaks of is not success. It is his death on the cross and his resurrection. A grain of wheat must fall into the ground and die before it can bear much fruit, and in the same way Jesus had to die so that the nations might live. As a man, Jesus too knew anguish and fear, yet he did not run from what lay ahead; he resolved to obey.

The Kingdom of God is a kingdom where life comes only through death. To follow Jesus is to deny oneself and take up one’s own cross. This does not begin with some grand decision but with a small response: when trouble comes, turning first to God and asking for his help, rather than meeting it with irritation and a sigh. As we lay ourselves down in this way, we become people who die with Jesus and live with him.

When Assyria rose to become a great power, King Hoshea withheld his tribute and allied himself with Egypt. Egypt gave him no real help, and after a three-year siege Assyria took Samaria and scattered the people of northern Israel across many lands.

The cause of the fall was not a political misjudgment but a heart that had betrayed God. A small turning aside, begun with the golden calf, became a road no one thought to question; as hearts hardened, it set in motion a vicious cycle of unbelief that led to wrath and judgment. That cycle is broken only when a heart that loves and fears God is set at the center.

The fall did not mean that God had given up on his people; it was part of the way toward restoration. The Samaritans, a people born out of that scattering, were the very ones Jesus went in person to meet, and to the end he never abandoned his purpose of saving them. So long as we are still in the flesh, it is never too late in the sight of God.

His brothers’ jealousy sold Joseph into slavery, and his refusal of Potiphar’s wife’s advances landed him in prison. There he met Pharaoh’s chief cupbearer, who later brought him before the king. After interpreting the dream, Joseph became governor over Egypt.

The hardships Joseph endured were no accident. Through them God was carrying out his plan to fulfill the promise he had made to Abraham. Joseph neither complained nor sought revenge. Instead, he comforted the very brothers who had sold him and told them not to be distressed. Such obedience and self-sacrifice point ahead to Christ, who gave himself up for us.

Laying aside worldly desires and stubbornness to obey God’s will may look like suffering, yet at the end of that road God has prepared protection and blessing. Christ’s sacrifice now lets the faithful stand without blemish, and they must hold that grace dear, as one guards every drop of water in the desert.

The combined forces of Aram and the northern kingdom of Israel attack Jerusalem, and Judah suffers a heavy defeat. Ahaz, however, was a king sunk in idolatry, who went so far as to make his children pass through the fire as human sacrifices. Even in the face of crisis he refuses the word bidding him ask God for a sign, and turns to Assyria for help instead.

The human sacrifice of Molech worship looks outwardly like devotion carried to its extreme, but in truth it is an utter self-centeredness that will give up even what is most precious to protect its own prosperity. When Ahaz said he would not put God to the test, that too was not humility; it was disobedience, a way of escaping God’s clear answer and holding to the course he had set for himself. God had foretold that the invaders would come to ruin, yet Ahaz would not believe his word and entrusted his own fate and that of his nation to the power of the world.

However strong the powers of this world may appear, they are in the end only instruments God makes use of for a time, and judgment and destruction await them. No worldly power, by contrast, can lightly lay a hand on one who stands rightly before God. Just as Noah, Moses, Job and David received their names from God, to stand before him under a name that is wise in what is good and simple in what is evil: this is the conclusion of the message.

In the church, the false teachers seemed outwardly to be preaching the truth, yet in reality they were servants of Satan. When two servants went to draw water, one idled along with a small pail while the other labored to fill a large one. The master did not need to watch them: the water standing in the jar told him the difference.

The difference between those who have the Spirit and those who do not is the difference between those who overcome their nature and those who live according to it. Salvation rests on faith in Christ, but what follows is a good conscience and an earnest effort to live by the Word, and God judges by the whole of that life. Since he does not weigh sins as great or small, even a single evil choice is already a turning away from his good law.

A brother who doubts is not to be judged but shown mercy and embraced. Where faith has become hypocrisy, one must rise resolutely from that place and cast sin aside; only then does one come under Christ’s protection. The faithful need to build themselves up on their most holy faith and pray in the Holy Spirit, making the love of God known.

In the years when the northern kingdom of Israel was falling apart, its royal house overthrown four times in thirty years, Jotham of Judah in the south quietly kept his nation safe, repairing the gate of the temple and strengthening the city wall. Scripture gives him only a few verses, and the people still would not leave the high places.

Jotham himself was upright before God, yet he could not change his people. But because he walked the right path to the end, Judah did not crumble overnight as the northern kingdom had, even under the wicked king who followed him, and the covenant with David and the line of faith passed on to Hezekiah and Josiah. Timothy, too, who stood in Paul’s shadow, was timid and frail in body, with no miracles or revivals to his name, yet through his obedience Paul’s faith has been handed down even to us today.

The world remembers only heroes and winners, but God treasures not only those who open a new age but also those who endure their age and carry it on to the next generation. Even without any achievement that catches the eye, a life that steadily and honestly holds its place is one God never takes lightly.

Jude warns that false teachers are leading the faithful astray by denying the humanity of Christ. He then reminds his readers that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, had long ago prophesied the return of Christ and the judgment of the ungodly.

Enoch walked with God for three hundred years and was taken up into heaven alive, without seeing death. Only when this is believed can what he proclaimed about Jesus also be believed: the atonement, the resurrection, the ascension and the second coming. Enoch’s faith, received from Adam, was handed down to Methuselah and to Noah, and it laid the foundation for Noah’s immediate obedience when the judgment of the flood was at hand.

Every word the ungodly have spoken and every deed they have done is recorded in full, to be brought before the judgment seat on the last day. But just as every prophecy written in Scripture has come to pass exactly as foretold, so the return of Christ and the judgment of the world will certainly come. Christians must therefore live with a pure and upright faith, boldly proclaiming that day.