God’s Word for You
2 Chronicles 32:9-15 Faith in adversity
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Tuesday, June 3, 2025
9 Later, when Sennacherib king of Assyria was laying siege to Lachish with all his forces, he sent his officers to Jerusalem with this message for Hezekiah king of Judah and for all the people of Judah who were in Jerusalem. He said: 10 “This is what Sennacherib king of Assyria says: What are you relying on, that you remain in Jerusalem under siege? 11 Isn’t Hezekiah misleading you, handing you over to die of hunger and thirst when he says, ‘The LORD our God will save us from the hand of the king of Assyria’? 12 Did not this same Hezekiah remove the high places and altars, saying to Judah and Jerusalem, ‘You must worship before one altar and burn sacrifices on it’? 13 Do you not know what I and my fathers have done to all the peoples of the other lands? Were the gods of those nations ever able to deliver their land from my hand? 14 Who among all the gods of these nations that my fathers destroyed was able to save his people from me? How then can your god deliver you from my hand? 15 Now do not let Hezekiah deceive you and mislead you like this. Do not believe him, for no god of any nation or kingdom has been able to deliver his people from my hand or the hand of my fathers. How much less will your god deliver you from my hand!”
Sennacherib the Assyrian king was about thirty miles southwest of Jerusalem at the fortress-city of Lachish. His siege there took more time than he anticipated, and so he sent men ahead to bring a message to the people of Jerusalem. In his own records, Sennacherib named 46 fortified cities in all that he attacked; he was a busy man.
His envoys had a lot of swagger. The minions of a tyrant often have. They learn from what their tyrant says, and then they attempt to out-Herod Herod, because they tend to think that they could do a better job of being the tyrant than their boss. This has always been the case, and we can see this acted out throughout history when we see the behavior of the officials of the Persian kings, Alexander’s generals, the lieutenants of the Roman Caesars, and the underlings of Bonaparte, of the Czars, of Hitler, and more recent dictators and pretenders. Such men and women think that bullying and brutality are the best means of using their authority, and they never really accomplish anything. Sennacherib’s officials tried their hand at blasphemy. It’s no wonder that after all of Hezekiah’s reforms and good work among the people that the Assyrian words fell flat.
Our author records five main points of the Assyrian threat, and as he does so he exposes the flaw in the Assyrians’ logic. First, they asked whether Hezekiah hadn’t deceived them into a terrible death of hunger and thirst. The natural question is, as opposed to what? The Israelites that were taken to Assyria in the last campaign were never heard from again. Were they better off in their new lives in the steppes of northwestern Russia? In Siberia?
Next, Hezekiah is “accused” of removing all the high places. Here the Assyrians had done a little homework. This was true, Hezekiah had indeed done exactly that. And he had truly reminded the people that “You must worship before one altar and burn sacrifices only on it.” To the Assyrians, this sounded foolish, because they couldn’t imagine a god who was supreme over all other gods and was not confined to a local place.
This accusation fell flat, too. The people of Judah were not angry with their king for his reforms, they were proud of him; they were proud to serve God under his leadership. They were delighted to serve God with a clean heart and a clear conscience. So Sennacherib’s minions took other things that their king had said here and there and tossed those up to the people listening on the walls of the city. They began with, “Don’t you know what our king and his fathers did?” This was a reference to the destruction of other lands. On this point the tyrant’s errand-boys doubled down: “Did the gods of those countries help them?” And yet again: “No gods ever helped anybody when they went up against our king and his dad.”
The argument that false gods don’t help against huge armies is not wrong. False gods, the Bible reminds us, aren’t even able to stand up to a stiff breeze without toppling over. That’s why men have to nail them to the table top (Isaiah 41:7; Jeremiah 10:7). But the God of Israel is no false god. He is the only true God. That’s why getting rid of the high places and the other places of false worship was a fantastic thing to do. That’s why Israel doesn’t need to worry about you, Sennacherib, or your dad. In plain school playground language: Our Dad can beat up your dad, Sennacherib. You’re dad’s gonna need spare ribs, Sennacherib, when God our Father punches him in the gut.
You ask, O imps of Assyria, whether our God will be of any help? “Our help is in the name of the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth” (Psalm 124:8). What other help do we need?
This exchange is condensed in Chronicles from a much longer series of speeches in 2 Kings and in Isaiah 36. What we have before us is enough to understand what was at stake, and how Hezekiah was now really showing his faith when it counted. This is the message we can take to heart. It’s good to say, “I believe.” But God wants us to truly trust in him when things seem to fall apart. Human reason—whether the reason of an Assyrian idolater or a modern sceptic—does not understand that God counts his people as righteous in his sight on account of their faith. The pagan and the unbeliever think that God only looks at deeds, Therefore he might hope that some bare minimum of lip service to God, perhaps on his deathbed, might help. He knows nothing at all of trust, of faith, and of relying on Christ at all times. Praise God that he has given us the incomparable gift of faith through the message of the Gospel. This is the foundation of our faith, Isaiah says: “Open the gates that the righteous nation may enter, the nation that keeps faith” (or literally, “the nation that guards the truth” Isaiah 26:2). And St. Anselm, Augustine’s teacher, said: “I do not seek to understand so that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this I also believe—that unless I believed, I should not understand.”
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.