In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah's reign, Sennacherib king of Assyria attacked all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them. – Isaiah 36:1

Today's Scripture Reading (May 30, 2026): Isaiah 36

In the Steven Spielberg movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark," the central premise was that the Hebrew Ark of the Covenant was a physical force capable of overcoming any opposing army. Indiana Jones actually states at one point that an army that carried the Ark with it couldn't be defeated. (Indiana probably should have read 1 Samuel, because the sons of the High Priest Eli thought the same thing, but they got routed and lost the Ark to the opposing Philistines.) But, according to the fictional Professor Jones, lightning would flash from the Ark destroying any force that opposed the army that possessed the Ark. It was because of this 'fiction' that the movie proposes a race that develops between the Nazi scientists of 1940's Germany and Indiana Jones to see who would be the first to find the Ark. If Hitler could find it first, well, maybe the Second World War would have turned out differently. (There is something of a mystery about the probability that Hitler would want to use a Jewish artifact to win the war and exterminate the Jews, but then again, "The Raiders of the Lost Ark" is only a fictional story.) The movie stretches the story of the Ark well beyond the truth.

But the story's central theme fits a central idea about God in our current culture. The idea is this: being a Christian or a God-fearer means that the evil things of the world (in this case, translate evil as anything that opposes your personal purposes) will never be able to touch you. When we carry God into the battle of our lives, things will always go our way. We may not overtly believe that truth, but even in circles that would traditionally look down on what we might call "prosperity theology," when things go wrong, we still wonder what we have done to anger God because we don't feel protected.

The story of Hezekiah illustrates one of the issues we seem to have with religion: sometimes bad things happen even when we are faithful. When bad things happen in life, the appropriate response is to trust God more, not less. Bad circumstances have never been promised not to touch us. The presence of negative circumstances in our lives doesn't mean that God has left the building. God still has a plan, and even during our worst moments, we, like Hezekiah, still have a part to play in his story.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Isaiah 37