Sennacherib and the Siege of Jerusalem #5: Resurrection

I. Introduction
A. Easter is a celebration of the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. And typically an Easter sermon is about the resurrection of Jesus. And so is this one. But I have to beg your patience because today we’re going to follow a very different route to get there. Journey with me; it will be worth the trip.
II. We begin with a story we’ve been talking about for the last six weeks, the OT story of King Sennacherib of Assyria and his siege of Jerusalem around 701BC.
A. You remember how God delivered His people from slavery in Egypt through Moses and then through Joshua led them into the promised land.
B. After a while God gave them kings, beginning with Saul and David and Solomon.
C. But after Solomon there was conflict and disagreement and the kingdom was split between Israel in the north and Judah in the south.
D. Later the neighboring nation of Assyria (modern-day Iraq) rose up, and began to expand its empire by conquering its neighbors. As a part of this process, Assyria destroyed the northern kingdom (Israel), and then later attacked Judah (the southern kingdom).
E. After crushing the other cities of Judah, Assyria began to lay siege to Jerusalem.
F. There they began a campaign of intimidation, threats, and saber-rattling, stoking the fear of God’s people inside the city.
G. But God did not leave His people alone. He gave His people assurances through the prophet Isaiah, promising deliverance, in passages like this one:
1. Isaiah 37:30–37 “And this shall be the sign for you: this year you shall eat what grows of itself, and in the second year what springs from that. Then in the third year sow and reap, and plant vineyards, and eat their fruit. 31 And the surviving remnant of the house of Judah shall again take root downward and bear fruit upward. 32 For out of Jerusalem shall go a remnant, and out of Mount Zion a band of survivors. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this. 33 “Therefore thus says the LORD concerning the king of Assyria: He shall not come into this city or shoot an arrow there or come before it with a shield or cast up a siege mound against it. 34 By the way that he came, by the same he shall return, and he shall not come into this city, declares the LORD. 35 For I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David.” 36 And the angel of the LORD went out and struck down 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians. And when people arose early in the morning, behold, these were all dead bodies. 37 Then Sennacherib king of Assyria departed and returned home and lived at Nineveh.
2. I wasn’t looking for it. I promise! But when I was studying this passage in preparation for my sermons over March and April, I found it nonetheless. I found the resurrection of Jesus in this story, in this passage! Today I want to show you.
3. Let’s begin by looking at two chunks of this passage. First...
III. Is.37:31-32 “The surviving remnant of the house of Judah shall again take root downward and bear fruit upward. 32 For out of Jerusalem shall go a remnant, and out of Mount Zion a band of survivors. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.”
A. The meaning of this promise is that Jerusalem will not be wiped out, its people will not be massacred, there will be a surviving remnant after this Assyrian assault is over. There will be a band of survivors.
1. The image used here is of a tree, a fruit tree. It may have fallen over or been severely damaged, but it will not be killed. It will survive to take root and bear fruit another day.
2. And this miraculous deliverance is going to happen because of the zeal of the Lord.
B. There’s something strange going on here, at least in 21st century American ears.
1. We think about saving individuals. We think about disasters in terms of death tolls.
2. But here God’s seems content with saving a mere remnant.
3. There’s all this glory and celebration about God’s deliverance of the people in Jerusalem, but the fact is that the majority of the people were dead.
4. Think about what happened on 9-11-01. There were many stories of heroism which made things better than they could have been. But the big story of that day, the headline, it seems to me, wasn’t the survival but the destruction.
5. But here in Isaiah 37:31-32 God seems to be headlining the survival, to the point that the destruction seems almost insignificant. What about all the loss of life and property in those “46 fortified cities and countless villages throughout Judah” (according to Sennacherib’s annals)? What about all those loved ones lost: mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, grandparents? Where was the zeal of the Lord of hosts when that happened?
6. He preserves “a band of survivors.” And strangely that’s what God was zealous about.
7. This an intriguing question. And it has a very powerful answer.
C. But before we get to that, let me spice up the intrigue a little more.
1. When God says He’s going to preserve a remnant of His people, He says in v.32, “The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.”
2. Well, the expression “the zeal of the Lord” only occurs three times in the Bible. And two of them are right here in this story. One in Is.37:32 and the other in the parallel telling of this same story in 2Kings 19:31.
3. There’s only one more. And I think it will blow your mind. We’ll get to that later as well.
4. To begin to move toward the answers to these questions, let’s move on to the next verses in Is.37.
IV. Is.37:33-35 “Therefore thus says the LORD concerning the king of Assyria: He shall not come into this city or shoot an arrow there or come before it with a shield or cast up a siege mound against it. 34 By the way that he came, by the same he shall return, and he shall not come into this city, declares the LORD. 35 For I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David.”
A. There’s something strange in these verses as well. Look carefully at v.35: “I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David.”
1. God will defend the city for the sake of David? David had been dead for over 250 years. But God’s promise to David lived on. You see, the Lord swore an oath to David, a sure oath that He promised never to revoke (Ps.132:11).
2. Here it is in 2Samuel 7:12-14: “When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son.” (Cf. Ps.89:3-4; 110; Ezek.37:24-25.)
3. In this remarkable promise to David, God says He’s going to raise up a son of David to sit on the throne of Israel forever.
4. Now v.35 begins to make sense. God will protect Jerusalem for the sake of fulfilling His oath to David that his promised descendant would sit on the throne forever.
B. A generation before the attack of Sennacherib on Jerusalem, during the dark days of the reign of Hezekiah’s father, Ahaz, Isaiah had prophesied about this promised son of David:
1. Isaiah 9:6-7 “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.”
2. There it is! The other time that phrase is used in the Bible! And it’s talking about the same thing! It’s talking about God’s zeal to fulfill that same promise — the one about the son of David and his kingdom!
3. “The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.”
4. I would suggest that this phrase — and the reference to doing this for the sake of David — are given to us in our story in order to draw our attention back to this promise in Isaiah 9:6-7 of a child to be born, one who would be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace, who would rule on the throne of David and over his kingdom, in peace and justice and righteousness forevermore.
5. This is why God was so concerned about saving the remnant! It was because of who the remnant was. Or, it was because of who was in that remnant.
6. You see, the son of David was in that city! Jesus was in that city! — in the loins of his ancestor King Hezekiah and his wife Hephzibah.
7. Kids, you might not understand what I’m saying here. Think about it this way, if your father or mother had never been born or had died as children, you wouldn’t be here, would you? And if their parents — your grandparents — hadn’t been born or had died early on, your parents wouldn’t be here, so you wouldn’t be here either. And if your grandparents’ parents — your great grandparents — weren’t there, your grandparents wouldn’t have been born, nor your parents, nor you. And it’s the same with Jesus. Hezekiah and Hephzibah were Jesus’ great-great-great-great-great-great-great....grandparents.
8. You see, Hezekiah was about 39 years old and apparently childless at the time of the Sennacherib attack. His only son, Manasseh, was born a few years later.
9. So, Jesus was in that city! Our Jesus!
a. That means you and I were in that city! Our salvation was in that city. Our Savior was in that city. Our hope was in that city! Our destiny was wrapped up in that city!
b. No wonder God said, “I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David.”
c. Nothing less than Jesus is at stake in this story, nothing less than our salvation through Him.
10. And this story isn’t the only resurrection-of-Jesus in the OT. E.g.
a. Isaac, whose father, Abraham was commanded by God to sacrifice him, and who was placed on an altar and the knife raised to the sky before God told Abraham to stand down and spare his son. All the Jews, including Jesus, came from Isaac, so if Isaac is dead, there is no Jesus. (Hebrews even makes the point that this was a picture of resurrection in 11:19 “He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.”) — Gen.22:1-14
b. Little baby Joash, whose wicked grandmother Athaliah killed all of her grandchildren — the heirs to the throne of Judah — in order to usurp the throne for herself. Or so she thought. The fact is that God preserved the little baby Joash through a courageous nurse, and his aunt Jehosheba and uncle Jehoiada raised the boy secretly inside the temple until he was old enough to become king, wherein Athaliah was executed. It looked like this ancestor of Jesus was eliminated with all the others, but God had a king up His sovereign sleeve. (2Kings 11:1-16)
c. Esther, who won the king’s Miss Persia beauty contest and thereby became the queen. As such, she heroically intervened with the king to protect the Jews, who were slated to be slaughtered. A few of those Jews were to become the ancestors of Jesus. If the Jews had been wiped out in the days of Esther, there would have been no Jesus. The knife was in the air, the city was surrounded, but God intervened to protect the One destined to be our savior. (Esther 2-8)
11. And then there’s the story of King Herod, when he found out from the magi about the birth of Jesus, set out to murder him by having all the male babies of Bethlehem slaughtered. But God sent an angel in the night to inform Joseph, who whisked Jesus and Mary away to Egypt once again to protect our savior and our salvation. The swords were drawn, but the savior was gone. (Matthew 2:13-16)
12. And now we can add the story of Sennacherib in Jerusalem to this list. The last remnant of Judah — including the ancestors of Jesus — is trapped in the city of Jerusalem, with Assyrian hands around their necks. But before they breathe their last breath, God sends His angel to break the hands of the stranglers and preserves the city and, more importantly, preserves the savior, our savior. (Isaiah 36-37; 2Kings 18-19; 2Chron.32)
a. These are five stories of the resurrection of Jesus: they each contain a person who either is Jesus or has Jesus in his loins. They each contain a near-certain death. The sword is in the air ready to plunge into the victim and cut off our hope of salvation. But in each case, God intervenes: Don’t kill him!
C. None of these resurrections of Jesus are the same as THE resurrection of Jesus.
1. For one, none of them include an actually dead Jesus who comes back to life.
2. For two, none of them inaugurated a new age and a new creation.
D. But what they ALL show is that God is not going to let the story of His Son end with a grave. He’s not going to allow Him to be snuffed out. Why?
1. Because the zeal of the Lord of hosts will accomplish the salvation He sent His Son to accomplish. Not one of those He has set out to save will be lost.
E. He may allow the situation to grow so dark that all hope looks lost. (And we experience deaths frequently — 2Cor.1:8-10.)
1. But in the end He will bare His mighty arm and accomplish victory for Himself, for His people, and for the promised Son of David. And He will put Him on that throne where He will rule with peace, justice and righteousness.
F. You see, there’s something God cares more about than saving human lives. God is more concerned with saving salvation.
1. All men are going to die once. But God is concerned about saving the One who prevents us from dying twice. For the second death is much worse than the first. The Bible speaks of the second death as being thrown into the lake of fire (Rev 2:11; 20:6, 14; 21:8).
2. Heroic measures to save a human life are all well and good. But it’s not the end-all.
a. Whether a person dies at 4 or 94 isn’t as important as whether, when that person dies, he is cast into the lake of fire or ushered into the glorious presence of the Lord — for all eternity.
b. That’s the really important issue!
3. And God saved Isaac from his father’s knife, and He saved Jerusalem from the attack of Sennacherib, and He saved Joash from his murderous grandmother, and He saved the Jews from ethnic cleansing in the days of Esther, and He saved baby Jesus from Herod’s soldiers, and He saved Jesus from the tomb of death all because He was determined and committed to rescue His chosen people from the second death!