delivered from it, he said, " I will declare thy name unto my brethren ; in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee. Ye that fear the Lord praise him; all ye, the seed of Jacob, glorify him ; and fear him all ye the seed of Israel : for he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted ; neither hath he hid his face from him, but when he cried unto him, he heard : my praise shall be of thee in the great congregation ; I will pay my vows before them that fear him*." Now such should be the desire of our hearts to glorify God for the king's recovery: not contented with offering up our praises in secret, we should say with him in the text, " the Lord was ready to save ; therefore we will sing our songs in the house of the Lord."
In discoursing upon these words, we will consider, I. The import of the words —
This will partly appear from the occasion on which
they were uttered —
[This chapter begins with a very affecting account of King Hezekiah's sickness : a message was sent to him from the Lord, to tell him that he should die of his disorder. These melancholy tidings no sooner reached his ears than he turned his face towards the wall and wept very sore. In the ninth and following verses we have a copy of what he himself wrote con- cerning the workings of his own mind under that affliction : " The writing of Hezekiah king of Judah, when he had been sick, and was recovered of his sickness : I said in the cutting off of my days, I shall go to the gates of the grave ; I am deprived of the residue of my years : I said, I shall not see the Lord, even the Lord in the land of the living ; I shall behold man no more with the inhabitants of the world : mine age is departed and is removed from me as a shepherd's tent ; I have cut off, like a weaver, my life; he will cut me off with pining sickness, from day even to night will he make an end of me : I reckoned till morning that as a lion so will he break all my hones, from day even to night will he make an end of me : like a crane, or a swallow, so did I chatter ; I did mourn as a clove ; mine eyes failed with looking upwards ; O Lord, I am op- pressed, undertake for me."
Now it is possible enough that he was, in a considerable degree, under bondage to the fear of death : but yet we cannot
b Ps. xxii. 22—25.
919.1 IIEZEKIAH'S THANKSGIVING. Ill
suppose that all this grief originated from that one cause : no, he doubtless felt much for the glory of God and the pros- perity of his people, both of which, as far as he could judge, would be very materially affected by his removal at that parti- cular crisis. He was one of the best kings that ever governed the Jewish nation. No sooner did he come to the throne than he began to reform the abuses which had been introduced in preceding reigns. He threw down the altars that had been built ; he opened and repaired the temple which had been shut up and left to decay ; he restored the sacrifices which had been long neglected ; he stirred up the people throughout all the kingdom to reform their lives ; and he ardently longed to see these beginnings of reformation carried further into effect. He had very lately beheld the whole country overrun by Senna- cherib's army, and Jerusalem itself reduced to the utmost dis- tress and clanger ; and though he had seen a great part of the Assyrian army destroyed by the hand of God, yet he knew that the Assyrians were still a powerful enemy, and that if the Jewish nation should relapse into their former wickedness, they could not expect another miraculous interposition from God. He was aware also that having no son to succeed him, there would probably be intestine divisions about a successor ; so that if he were taken away at this time, the cause of religion would be neglected, and the whole Jewish nation be given over to suffer the consequences of their apostasy from God. That these reflections greatly contributed to his grief, seems plainly intimated in the answer which God gave to his prayer, as it is recorded both in 2 Kings xx. 6, and in the chapter before us ; in both of which places God not only promises to prolong his life, but to deliver the city out of the hands of the king of Assyria, and to defend it for his own name's sake. Afflicted with these gloomy prospects, he betook himself to the best of all remedies, prayer : and as we are expressly told that Isaiah joined with him in crying to heaven on a former occasion, it is reasonable to suppose that, when he saw the king so over- whelmed with the news which he had brought him, he did not neglect this opportunity of joining with him in prayer for his recovery. Behold, their prayer prevailed ; yea, so speedily did it prevail, that before Isaiah was gone out into the middle court, the word of the Lord came to him, saying, " Tell Hezekiah, thus saith the Lord ; I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears, behold, I will heal thee." God moreover commanded the prophet to make a plaster of figs, and to put it upon the boil, and to assure the king that in three days he should be well enough to go up to the house of the Lord. This was done to shew that we ought to use means, while at the same time we look not to the means, but to God, for the desired success. Being restored to health he comes into the