Today, I am reading and commenting on  Isaiah 36-38.

I have never quite known how to word this thought, but I have long found it interesting that when the Assyrian field commander first tried suggested that Hezekiah and the leaders of Jerusalem should not rely on God to save Jerusalem from the Assyrians he mentioned that Hezekiah had destroyed all of the high places and altars where the people worshiped God (and idols, but he overlooked that) while demanding that the people only sacrifice to God at the temple in Jerusalem.  It was only after Hezekiah’s emissaries asked him to speak in Aramaic rather than Hebrew (Aramaic being the language the Assyrians spoke and Hebrew being the language which the people of Judah spoke) that the field commander said that the gods of no other country was able to save them from Assyria and that God would be no different.  The reason I have not written about this before is because I could not put into words why I thought it mattered.  Today I realized that when the field commander said that God would not be able to protect Jerusalem because the gods of no other people had been able to stop the Assyrians he did not say that was because the Assyrian gods were more powerful than those gods.  And when Sennacherib sent the letter to Hezekiah threatening Jerusalem, he also did not appeal to the might of the Assyrian gods.  Both Sennacherib and his field commander took credit for their successes against other nations and over the gods of those nations for themselves.  When I realized that I realized that they sound a lot like people today who argue against certain doctrines of Christian faith.  They often start out talking as if they have just a problem with that particular doctrine,  but they soon reveal that their real problem is with accepting that God has the power and authority to limit their behavior in any way.  Sennacherib and his field commander began by suggesting that they thought that God would not protect Jerusalem because Hezekiah had diminished His worship, but they quickly revealed that they rejected the idea that there was any power to which they needed to answer.  Do we truly acknowledge that we answer to God’s power?

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