I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on 2 Kings 19-21.

    The story of the Assyrian invasion of Judah and King hezekiah’s response to it tells us a lot about how God controls history. The Assyrians were sure that nothing could stop them from conquering Jerusalem. Certainly, Hezekiah’s military could not do so. The Assyrians had been successful in conquering the peoples and powers of the Middle East. Some of those peoples had been sure that their gods would defend them against the Assyrians, but each had fallen. Now, once again, the Assyrians marched into a land whose people thought that their god could protect them. King Hezekiah knew that he could not stand against the might of the Assyrian army. He may have even been considering surrender. However, when the Assyrians told him that God could not stop them, surrender came off the table. By warning Hezekiah that God could not stop them, the Assyrians had made surrendering a sign that Hezekiah did not have faith in God. In response, God told Hezekiah, through a prophet, that the Assyrians would not only fail to take Jerusalem, but would never even besiege it.

    The Assyrians had gone too far. They challenged God. God’s response was that not only would the Assyrian army not attack Jerusalem, it would return to Assyria the way it had come. It would not turn aside from Jerusalem to attack some other land. Before their withdrawal, the Assyrian army fought and defeated the army which the Egyptian Pharaoh had raised to relieve the siege of Jerusalem. Sennacherib returned to Nineveh and never marched against Jerusalem again. His death at the hands of his sons marked the beginning of the end of the Assyrian Empire. Some historians look at the records kept in Assyria and suggest that Hezekiah submitted to the Assyrians. However, it is worth noting that those same historians recognize that the Assyrians believed that they had a divine mandate to conquer the world, but the expansion of the Assyrian Empire ended with the withdrawal of their army from Judah. In fact, the prophet Isaiah acknowledges that the Assyrians had a Divine mandate for their conquests. A mandate which God withdrew because they had defied Him.