The Word for Wednesday, July 15 Edition

Continuing with the prophet Isaiah, this time in chapter 37. A little context: the Assyrians have been taking the fortified cities of Judah, because God enabled them and "stirred them up" to do it, because of Judah's misdeeds against Him. The Assyrians, under Sennacherib, have become His tool in punishing the Judeans. The tool, however, has blasphemed its user, having assured the Judeans in general, and King Hezekiah in particular, that their God will be completely unable to stop the Assyrians from overwhelming Jerusalem. (Had they prophesied that God would be unwilling to stop them, perhaps they would have been correct; but, as it was, they claimed instead to be so bad that God couldn't stop them.) So, He talks to Hezekiah, through Isaiah, verses 21 through 29 of chapter 37:

Then Isiaiah the son of Amoz sent word to Hezekiah, saying, "Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, 'Because you have prayed to Me about Sennacherib king of Assyria, this is the word that the Lord has spoken against him:

She has despised you and mocked you,
The virgin daughter of Zion;
She has shaken her head behind you,
The daughter of Jerusalem!
Whom have you reproached and blasphemed?
And against whom have you raised your voice,
And haughtily lifted up your eyes?
Against the Holy One of Israel!
Through your servants you have reproached the Lord,
And you have said, "With my many chariots I came up to the mountains,
To the remotest parts of Lebanon;
And I cut down its tall cedars and its choice cypresses.
And I will go to its highest peak, its thickest forest.
I dug wells and drank waters,
And with the sole of my feet I dried up
All the rivers of Egypt."
Have you not heard?
Long ago I did it,
From ancient times I planned it.
Now I have brought it to pass,
That you should turn fortified cities into ruinous heaps.
Therefore their inhabitants were short of strength,
They were dismayed and put to shame;
They were as the vegetation of the field and as the green herb,
As grass on the housetops is scorched before it is grown up.
But I know your sitting down,
And your going out and your coming in,
And your raging against Me.
Because of your raging against Me,
And because your arrogance has come up to My ears,
Therefore I will put My hook in your nose,
And My bridle in your lips,
And I will turn you back by the way which you came."

The sons are disciplined; the strangers, and the tools, are apt to be destroyed once they become disobedient or arrogant. Family is everything.

The originator of the Word for Wednesday will have links to others' WFW posts, as well as her own.