Then the chief of staff stood and shouted in Hebrew to the people on the wall, “Listen to this message from the great king of Assyria! This is what the king says: Don’t let Hezekiah deceive you. He will never be able to rescue you from my power. Don’t let him fool you into trusting in the LORD by saying, ‘The LORD will surely rescue us. This city will never fall into the hands of the Assyrian king!’ “Don’t listen to Hezekiah!…
2 Kings 18:28-31
Assyria was on a military campaign against the surrounding nations, and Israel had come into its sights. The king of Assyria, Sennacherib, had declared war on Jerusalem and prior to setting up a siege, the commander was declaring its intent to the city.
However, Hezekiah, not being deterred by the king’s arrogance, laid out the demands of the Assyrian king before God in the temple, and prayed for deliverance.
After Hezekiah received the letter from the messengers and read it, he went up to the LORD’s Temple and spread it out before the LORD. And Hezekiah prayed this prayer before the LORD: “O LORD, God of Israel, you are enthroned between the mighty cherubim! You alone are God of all the kingdoms of the earth. You alone created the heavens and the earth. Bend down, O LORD, and listen! Open your eyes, O LORD, and see! Listen to Sennacherib’s words of defiance against the living God. “It is true, LORD, that the kings of Assyria have destroyed all these nations. And they have thrown the gods of these nations into the fire and burned them. But of course the Assyrians could destroy them! They were not gods at all–only idols of wood and stone shaped by human hands. Now, O LORD our God, rescue us from his power; then all the kingdoms of the earth will know that you alone, O LORD, are God.”
2 Kings 19:14-19
He trusted in God to deliver his people. Through this act of humility and trust, God responded through the prophet Isaiah that he would indeed protect Jerusalem and the honor of his Name.
The very next day, almost the entire Assyrian army was dead:
That night the angel of the LORD went out to the Assyrian camp and killed 185,000 Assyrian soldiers. When the surviving Assyrians woke up the next morning, they found corpses everywhere. Then King Sennacherib of Assyria broke camp and returned to his own land. He went home to his capital of Nineveh and stayed there.
2 Kings 19:35-36
It’s one thing to trust God for one’s own private needs or the needs of one’s own family, but consider how much faith Hezekiah was displaying by trusting God for an entire city, and even the nation of Israel!
Think of some of the alternatives: he could have mustered troops to come out in battle against Assyria, trusting in the might of his own army. Or he could have sent word to Egypt trusting in a foreign country as an ally to come and defend the city, but he didn’t do either of these things. He simply laid out the situation before God and prayed humbly and sincerely for deliverance. Through his simple act of faithfulness, the aggression of a military “superpower” was averted.
In like fashion, Yeshua encouraged his hearers to not be anxious for the future by trusting in God. How much more can your trust in God be emboldened to consider that God, through a sincere and humble trust in him, is able to deliver an entire nation from the aggression of another?
The Core of the Bible 