Come now, make a bargain with my master, the king of Assyria: I will give you two thousand horses—if you can put riders on them! – Isaiah 36:8

Today’s Scripture Reading (January 27, 2017): Isaiah 36

I recently watched a documentary on the RMS Titanic disaster. There was really nothing new that the documentary had to offer about the catastrophe, but there were some interesting pictures of the Titanic and her sister ship, the Olympic. But once again I was reminded about the senselessness of the tragedy. The Titanic suffered from the same weaknesses that seems to have plagued humanity from the beginning of time. Twice it exchanged safety for something else. First, it sacrificed safety for opulence. But the Titanic also sacrificed safety for economic savings, and both of these sacrifices were made possible because of the supreme arrogance of the ship designers. The idea that the Titanic was unsinkable was never something that the designers of the ship had ever put forward in their advertising for the new ship. The myth of “the unsinkable Titanic” was actually placed into the mind of the public by a newspaper article that called the new line of ships “virtually unsinkable.” The owners of the Titanic never denied the rumor and, apparently, started to believe their own press clippings. And on that fateful night that the Titanic was lost, the crew consistently ignored warnings of the ice field that lay ahead. It was as if such warnings only pertained to lesser ships, not the mighty Titanic. Arrogance in every theater of life seems always to end up ushering us into disaster, and that was exactly what happened to the Titanic – they went full speed ahead into an ice field that they knew was there and, as a result, the ship would also quickly sink to the bottom of the North Atlantic.

The Assyrian army almost 2800 years ago suffered from the same disease. The Assyrians conquered only to find the things that they could take from other civilizations (come and make a bargain with my master), and the success that they had enjoyed at precisely that task had created a great arrogance within them. No one had said that the Assyrian Empire was unsinkable, but the leaders of the empire were starting to believe that they were.

And so the General of the Army surrounding the city of Jerusalem makes an incredible offer. I will give you two thousand horses if you have soldiers to put on them for the final battle. The idea behind the offer is that he believed that the armies of Judah were so pitiful that even if he was to take two thousand of his horses (weakening his military in the process) and gave them to Judah, they are still vastly outmatched. It was a message that Assyria hoped that Hezekiah would hear and understand. The war had already been decided before the first arrow was shot in the battle for Jerusalem. Assyria had won, and Hezekiah had lost – and nothing was going to change that truth.

Except that it was not a truth that God understood. Assyria’s language of arrogance was a language that was foreign to One that Israel served. God hears the voice of humility, and that was a language that Assyria seemed unable to speak. But humility was a language that Hezekiah had mastered. And the result was that God was about to move in a very real and unexpected way. The unsinkable Assyrian Empire was about to sink, and like the unsinkable Titanic, arrogance was the reason that they were going to go down.

Originally Published on December 9, 2013

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Isaiah 37