Hezekiah Opened the Ark and Pointed at the Tablets

The envoys came up the road from the east with their gifts wrapped in cloth, and the gatekeepers of Jerusalem watched them climb. Word had run ahead. The king of Babylon had sent men to the city, and the men of the city wanted to know why. Sickness had nearly taken Hezekiah a little while before. He had turned his face to the wall and wept and prayed, and his life had been lengthened by fifteen years (Isaiah 38:5). Now a far empire had heard of it and sent a delegation to acknowledge the power that had done such a thing.

The power they meant was God. The honor belonged to God. Hezekiah, standing in his hall while the envoys bowed and laid out their letters, did not feel it that way. He felt the bowing as bowing to him. He felt the long journey of these men as a journey made to see him. Something swelled in his chest, a warmth that had nothing of prayer in it, and he decided the visitors should see what kind of king they had come to flatter.

The King Spread Out His Treasures

He called for a meal and seated the foreigners at his table. He sat his wife among them, which a man of his fathers' faith would not have done lightly with men from a heathen court. The wine went around. The talk warmed. And when the eating was finished, Hezekiah rose and led them through his house.

He showed them the silver and the gold. He showed them the storehouses heavy with spices and oil. He showed them the armory and the shields stacked along the walls. He brought out the trophies he had stripped from the camp of Sennacherib, the Assyrian who had besieged the city and lost a hundred and eighty-five thousand men in a single night to the angel of the Lord (2 Kings 19:35). These were not his victories to display. He displayed them.

He did not stop. He showed them a stone of magnetic iron that pulled metal toward itself as if alive. He showed them a strange pale ivory, rare and costly, fetched from far off. There was nothing in his house and nothing in all his rule that he did not open and set before their eyes (Isaiah 39:2). The envoys looked, and nodded, and remembered. Men who measure empires were measuring this one room by room.

He Opened the Holy Ark

Then he led them to the thing no foreigner had reason to see. He brought them to the Aron Kodesh, the holy Ark, the gold-covered chest that had gone before his people through the wilderness and carried within it the two stone Tablets of the Law given at the mountain. The room would have gone quiet around it. This was the seat of the covenant, the most guarded object in the kingdom, and a man did not open it to satisfy the curiosity of strangers.

Hezekiah opened it.

He let the heathen emissaries lean in and look on the tablets, the writing cut into stone by the finger of God. And then he raised his hand toward them and spoke, and the words turned the holiest thing in the world into a charm hung on a wall. "With the help of these," he told them, "we undertake wars and win victories." He pointed at the covenant and called it his weapon. He took the sign of God's faithfulness and offered it to outsiders as the secret of his army.

The Prophet Came to the Door

The envoys went home with everything they had seen folded into memory. And into the hall came Isaiah, who had never been gentle with kings and had no softness to spare now.

He asked plain questions, the way a man does when he already knows the answers and wants the other to hear himself say them. What did these men say. Where did these men come from. Hezekiah answered that they had come from a far country, from Babylon. Isaiah asked what they had seen in the house. And the king, who had hidden nothing from them, could hide nothing from the prophet either. They had seen everything, he said. There was nothing in his stores he had not shown them.

The prophet did not soften it. The day was coming, he said, when all of it, every treasure the king had paraded and every thing his fathers had laid up, would be carried off to Babylon. Nothing would be left (Isaiah 39:6). The very men who had bowed in the doorway would send their sons to empty the house. And the king's own sons, born of his own body, would be taken to that far court to serve (Isaiah 39:7).

The King Was Glad of His Own Days

Hezekiah heard the sentence handed down on his children and his city, and what he answered was not a plea. He said the word of the Lord was good. He thought to himself that there would be peace and safety in his own days (Isaiah 39:8). The disaster was set for later, for sons not yet grown, for a generation he would not live to see. He had wept for his own life when it was threatened. He did not weep now for theirs.

The man who had purged the false altars and kept the commandments with rare care, the king even a hard prophet had called righteous, undid a piece of himself in one warm afternoon of vanity. He had been honored as the keeper of the covenant. He treated the covenant as a thing to show off. The honor had come for God, and he had taken it for himself, and the price was named to his face while he was still glad to be alive.