Our Daily Bread for Today 2 Kings 18 ++

Scripture selections are taken from the Rock Church Daily Bread Reading schedule for each month. “Lena’s Journalin’” are Lena’s comments on the specific passages from her Daily Journal.

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2 Kings 18:1-37
Hezekiah Rules in Judah
1Hezekiah son of Ahaz began to rule over Judah in the third year of King Hoshea's reign in Israel. 2He was twenty-five years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem twenty-nine years. His mother was Abijah, F54 the daughter of Zechariah. 3He did what was pleasing in the LORD's sight, just as his ancestor David had done. 4He removed the pagan shrines, smashed the sacred pillars, and knocked down the Asherah poles. He broke up the bronze serpent that Moses had made, because the people of Israel had begun to worship it by burning incense to it. The bronze serpent was called Nehushtan. F55
5Hezekiah trusted in the LORD, the God of Israel. There was never another king like him in the land of Judah, either before or after his time. 6He remained faithful to the LORD in everything, and he carefully obeyed all the commands the LORD had given Moses. 7So the LORD was with him, and Hezekiah was successful in everything he did. He revolted against the king of Assyria and refused to pay him tribute. 8He also conquered the Philistines as far distant as Gaza and its territory, from their smallest outpost to their largest walled city.
9During the fourth year of Hezekiah's reign, which was the seventh year of King Hoshea's reign in Israel, King Shalmaneser of Assyria attacked Israel and began a siege on the city of Samaria. 10Three years later, during the sixth year of King Hezekiah's reign and the ninth year of King Hoshea's reign in Israel, Samaria fell. 11At that time the king of Assyria deported the Israelites to Assyria and put them in colonies in Halah, along the banks of the Habor River in Gozan, and among the cities of the Medes. 12For they had refused to listen to the LORD their God. Instead, they had violated his covenant—all the laws the LORD had given through his servant Moses.
Assyria Invades Judah
13In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah's reign, King Sennacherib of Assyria came to attack the fortified cities of Judah and conquered them. 14King Hezekiah sent this message to the king of Assyria at Lachish: "I have done wrong. I will pay whatever tribute money you demand if you will only go away." The king of Assyria then demanded a settlement of more than eleven tons of silver and about one ton of gold. F56 15To gather this amount, King Hezekiah used all the silver stored in the Temple of the LORD and in the palace treasury. 16Hezekiah even stripped the gold from the doors of the LORD's Temple and from the doorposts he had overlaid with gold, and he gave it all to the Assyrian king.
17Nevertheless the king of Assyria sent his commander in chief, his field commander, and his personal representative from Lachish with a huge army to confront King Hezekiah in Jerusalem. The Assyrians stopped beside the aqueduct that feeds water into the upper pool, near the road leading to the field where cloth is bleached. 18They summoned King Hezekiah, but the king sent these officials to meet with them: Eliakim son of Hilkiah, the palace administrator, Shebna the court secretary, and Joah son of Asaph, the royal historian.
Sennacherib Threatens Jerusalem
19Then the Assyrian king's personal representative sent this message to King Hezekiah:
"This is what the great king of Assyria says: What are you trusting in that makes you so confident? 20Do you think that mere words can substitute for military skill and strength? Which of your allies will give you any military backing against Assyria? 21Will Egypt? If you lean on Egypt, you will find it to be a stick that breaks beneath your weight and pierces your hand. The pharaoh of Egypt is completely unreliable!
22"But perhaps you will say, 'We are trusting in the LORD our God!' But isn't he the one who was insulted by King Hezekiah? Didn't Hezekiah tear down his shrines and altars and make everyone in Judah worship only at the altar here in Jerusalem?
23"I'll tell you what! My master, the king of Assyria, will strike a bargain with you. If you can find two thousand horsemen in your entire army, he will give you two thousand horses for them to ride on! 24With your tiny army, how can you think of challenging even the weakest contingent of my master's troops, even with the help of Egypt's chariots and horsemen F57 ? 25What's more, do you think we have invaded your land without the LORD's direction? The LORD himself told us, 'Go and destroy it!'"
26Then Eliakim son of Hilkiah, Shebna, and Joah said to the king's representative, "Please speak to us in Aramaic, for we understand it well. Don't speak in Hebrew, for the people on the wall will hear."
27But Sennacherib's representative replied, "My master wants everyone in Jerusalem to hear this, not just you. He wants them to know that if you do not surrender, this city will be put under siege. The people will become so hungry and thirsty that they will eat their own dung and drink their own urine."
28Then he stood and shouted in Hebrew to the people on the wall, "Listen to this message from the great king of Assyria! 29This is what the king says: Don't let King Hezekiah deceive you. He will never be able to rescue you from my power. 30Don't let him fool you into trusting in the LORD by saying, 'The LORD will rescue us! This city will never be handed over to the Assyrian king.'
31"Don't listen to Hezekiah! These are the terms the king of Assyria is offering: Make peace with me—open the gates and come out. Then I will allow each of you to continue eating from your own garden and drinking from your own well. 32Then I will arrange to take you to another land like this one—a country with bountiful harvests of grain and wine, bread and vineyards, olive trees and honey—a land of plenty. Choose life instead of death! "Don't listen to Hezekiah when he tries to mislead you by saying, 'The LORD will rescue us!' 33Have the gods of any other nations ever saved their people from the king of Assyria? 34What happened to the gods of Hamath and Arpad? And what about the gods of Sepharvaim, Hena, and Ivvah? Did they rescue Samaria from my power? 35What god of any nation has ever been able to save its people from my power? Name just one! So what makes you think that the LORD can rescue Jerusalem?"
36But the people were silent and did not answer because Hezekiah had told them not to speak. 37Then Eliakim son of Hilkiah, the palace administrator, Shebna the court secretary, and Joah son of Asaph, the royal historian, went back to Hezekiah. They tore their clothes in despair, and they went in to see the king and told him what the Assyrian representative had said.
FOOTNOTES:F54: As in parallel text at 2 Chr 29:1; Hebrew reads Abi, a variant name for Abijah. F55: Nehushtan sounds like the Hebrew terms that mean "snake," "bronze," and "unclean thing." F56: Hebrew 300 talents [10 metric tons] of silver and 30 talents [1 metric ton] of gold. F57: Or and charioteers.

Copyright Statement: Holy Bible, The New Living TranslationCopyright © 1996 by Tyndale Charitable Trust. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers. All rights reserved.

~ Lena’s Journalin’~
When we read God’s word we should not try to figure out what is being said by natural words puzzles that somehow connect in our brains. They won’t connect. The word of God has to be searched out, unlocked and unveiled from the natural eye. Jesus had told His disciples that disciples are ones who dig deeper, seek Him diligently, search for the treasure in the words. He also noted that there would be casual hearers who would not go deeper, they’d come listen to Him and their hearts would feel good to listen to Him, but they’d go home later on , while the disciples would sit with Jesus, till they got it!
Why did Hezekiah’s life shine as one which pleased God? God loves everyone, both good and bad, but why would it be pointed out that one here and one there are pleasing God? I’d say a quick answer would be that they do His will. In doing His will one would be desirous of finding out His will, and then seeing what it would take to accomplish it. Jesus did that, found out what the father’s will was and then set out purposely to do that will. It was not an easy task to accomplish, even for Jesus. One thing we all battle and Jesus Himself as a man battled, was the comfort of the soul. The soul wants a whole lot of temporary comfort. It likes to be at peace, but be careful there is deception in “a feeling of peace” sometime, we should see that word as “relief”, and not “peace”. True peace is eternal and even if it is not comfortable it can be at peace. It would be a grave mistake to trade temporary comfort for eternal peace. Temporary could be one’s whole lifetime while on earth, in comparison to eternal life the trade of is a blink!
The word tells us why Hezekiah’s life was one of pleasure for God. He was not only willing, but he acted on the words of God he had heard. 1-He reigned, 2- He did what was pleasing in the LORD's sight, 3- He removed the pagan shrines, 4 -smashed the sacred pillars, 5- knocked down the Asherah poles. 6- He broke up the bronze serpent (that Moses had made!)
I’m going to stay on these few verses today-they are enough to chew on for the week.
Are we willing to do as Hezekiah did before the Lord? Remember Hezekiah means Jehovah is my strength! How would he stay strong in the Lord? By obeying God. Jesus said, IF you love Me obey Me.
Let’s look at #1 He reigned. What does that mean to you? It means to be the king over something and someone, really people and things. Who did he rule for ? God, right? Right. Do we take leadership and ruler ship over ourselves and then others, plural? A king is not a king of one and only one. Jesus made us all to be kings and priests unto God. The Genesis command was to rule over all the earth and everything in the earth. That means rule, take the lead. That leads to the hard question to our circumstantial living. Are we ruling things and peoples (with the love of God of course, towards the advancement of the assembly of the army of God! Encouraging others in the growth of their faith walk) or are they ruling us? Then do we rule over things or do they dictate the actions of our life actually taking us far away from the created purposes of God and of our part we play in the increase of God’s eternal kingdom?
#2 Did what was pleasing to the Lord. That seems easy enough, right? It says in the Lord’s sight. How would we know what He sees? That will be found in the unveiling of the word of God. It is NOT on the surface and cannot be seen by just anyone. A huge contradiction is when we do what is right to us, when we decide for ourselves what we will and will not do, when we exercise our free wills to pretty much tell God what we’ll do or not do, when we tell God our limits, rather than seeking His strength.
#3 one right things in God’s eyes was to take down pagan shrines. Pagan is a word that shows that a lot of attention has been paid to something that has no eternal value, the value of whatever we are involved with is nice for now, or will get us by here, but it is being done of our own effort, and not for God. It’s behaviors that we’ve lived before the world, it’s the thinking of, I’ve always done it this way and so have my parents and their parents before them and even my kids were raised to live this way”. Well if we ever find out that someone did something that was ok for then, but isn’t working so well now, wouldn’t it be good to change it? God is saying here- please do.
I am thinking of the driving of the first cars, they were good, but wow aren’t we glad they have changed and improved? Then the first car seats, some of those old ways or old things actually endangered people’s lives and without change they were in danger of losing theirs! BING! Just hit the nail on the head. IF God says change and we don’t or won’t and we tell Him we are fine like we are and He and everyone else should just love us this way etc. we are in disobedience and we are endangering our own souls. If an enemy is coming and we don’t see it, but God does and says MOVE- why would we not move? Stuborness, rebellion, religion, etc. Those will kill us! The truth is He does love us however we are, but He’s good enough to us to not leave us in that state of being. Even life on earth shows us that there is to be a progression of growth and change, look at the cycles and seasons.
KJV says about this passage, he removed the High places. 1 Cor 10:5-6 speaks of these very same places- read it (later on). These high places are where thoughts fly by us for us to consider and ponder, we can accept or reject the thoughts. If they are not God and kingdom thoughts, they need to be rejected, boldly.
#4 He smashed the sacred pillars. Sacred pillars are a lot the same as what we see in #3, but they are set in stone, they are ideas and thought patterns passed down to us through generations. They are what we weigh every decision by, past experiences, etc. They are why we do what we do and think how we thing. One deception is people just need to understand how I think! No, we need to get the understanding of how God thinks and change! Proverbs says, with all that is in you with all the strength you have to search it out go get understanding of God and His will, not have Him understand ours. He knows us in and out, do we know Him like that? Pillars need to be hewn out and taken down. They hold up the roofs of our past, they bring our buildings together, top to bottom, If we allow God to mess that up we’ll be well on our way to knowing Him. Notice God did not come with a breath of wind and take the pillars down, who did he use and require to take them down? People, One’s who say their strength is in God! Those who please Him will do this very, very hard thing, will press through the pain and labor of love to break through min sets of old. Men and women of God.
#5 he broke up the Asherah poles. Asherah means goddesses. Pretty, ok, fine, not bad “gods”. They may look ok, they may not seem too bad to your natural comfortable eyes, but they need to be brought down! You shall have no other god before ME. Not even one. Not even the one your great grandfather has passed down to your mother as a momento of his life on earth! None! What has been erected in front of the place of worship? What has kept us from diving into worship of the Most High true and living God? What stands between us and whole hearted giving over of our lives to His will? Is it a trust issue? Is it a love issue, is it a grudge about disappointments? What is it? It does not matter, take it down!
#6 This one is huge, HUGE! Take down the bronze serpant on the pole! It is about everything we’ve ever learned in our faith walk. It’s about spiritual experiences and teachings we’ve had, in the church! It’s about our ideas about religion. Good things that were done for us before in God. God told Hezekiah, in order to please Him, today, take that down, the people have stayed there too long, long enough to make it another god! WOW, huh? Even the “good things” can become gods to us. The key is movement and obedience to move from place to place in God, if he says move, move, If He says go Go, If he says take it down, than do. If He says grow, then grow, anything else is as idol worship, because it is not a living relational faith with a living master, it is as though we do a rote worship duty before a statue who doesn’t really care anyway, and what has he done for me anyway, I’ll pay my dues, feel great that I did my Christian duty and go on and live like I feel (before God) that I’m to live, anyway, I stand before God, and no one else can tell me what to do except God Himself.
I wonder how they felt that day when God has told Hezekiah FOR them to take down their comfy cozy places of idol worship, which they thought were ok, I wonder how that felt that day to be told what to do before God? I bet he had a mighty following of friendsJ. God didn’t say make comfy cozy friends, He said stand before me and obey Me. He said to rule. Hezekiah did love these people or he would not have done this. He would have let them live in their won ways and do things the way they wanted to and leave them alone to their comfort zones and be killed by enemies and the curse of God upon their disobedience, they would have gotten sicker and sicker and never fulfilled their commission as kings and priest unto God Himself. He had to go there.
It says further down that there were camps of peoples who were under siege (sickness, strife, poverty, etc) because they REFUSED to listen to the voice of the Lord. They may have said something like, No one can tell me what to do, I can ably hear God’s voice for myself. Now they are under siege and do not know why. Oh my God!
The sower principle is found throughout the entire Bible. One such principle is when there’s victory the enemy comes immediately to take the victory away. Hezekiah pressed through the hardships and tore down all of these things and guess who was waiting at his back door? The enemy, the accuser, the taunter. When you decide to rule, when you decide to obey god, when you decide to do what your leaders say, you can be sure it will all, every bit be challenged to see if you mean it, and how much do you mean it? Enough to give everything up for it’s words of truth? So you’ve gone on a Rock Church Encounter weekend, you’ve heard the voice of God, you’ve taken down a few idols, the enemy is waiting, to taunt you, to challenge you, to steal all God did for you!
DO NOT allow Him to!

Proverbs 27:17-19
17 You use steel to sharpen steel, and one friend sharpens another. 18 If you care for your orchard, you'll enjoy its fruit; if you honor your boss, you'll be honored. 19 Just as water mirrors your face, so your face mirrors your heart.
Psalm 122:1
1 When they said, "Let's go to the house of God," my heart leaped for joy.