5 Go back and say to Hezekiah, the ruler of my people, The Lord, the God of David your father, says, Your prayer has come to my ears, and I have seen your weeping; see, I will make you well: on the third day you will go up to the house of the Lord.
Let my prayer come to your ears, O Lord, and give attention to my cry, make an answer to my weeping: for my time here is short before you, and in a little time I will be gone, like all my fathers.
But truly God's ear has been open; he has give attention to the voice of my prayer. Praise be to God who has not taken away his good faith and his mercy from me.
Tomorrow about this time I will send you a man from the land of Benjamin, and on him you are to put the holy oil, making him ruler over my people Israel, and he will make my people safe from the hands of the Philistines: for I have seen the sorrow of my people, whose cry has come up to me.
Then Samuel took the bottle of oil, and put the oil on his head and gave him a kiss and said, Is not the Lord with the holy oil making you ruler over Israel, his people? and you will have authority over the people of the Lord, and you will make them safe from the hands of their attackers round about them, and this will be the sign for you:
Is anyone among you ill? let him send for the rulers of the church; and let them say prayers over him, putting oil on him in the name of the Lord. And by the prayer of faith the man who is ill will be made well, and he will be lifted up by the Lord, and for any sin which he has done he will have forgiveness.
Those who put in seed with weeping will get in the grain with cries of joy.
Life and not death will be my part, and I will give out the story of the works of the Lord. The hand of Jah has been hard on me; but he has not given me up to death. Let the doors of righteousness be open to me; I will go in and give praise to the Lord.
To you, O hearer of prayer, let the words of all flesh come.
You have seen my wanderings; put the drops from my eyes into your bottle; are they not in your record?
And he said, No; but I have come as captain of the armies of the Lord. Then Joshua, falling down with his face to the earth in worship, said, What has my lord to say to his servant? And the captain of the Lord's army said to Joshua, Take off your shoes from your feet, for the place where you are is holy. And Joshua did so.
I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead but of the living.
Because it was right for him, for whom and through whom all things have being, in guiding his sons to glory, to make the captain of their salvation complete through pain.
But the angel said, Have no fear, Zacharias, for your prayer has come to the ears of God, and your wife Elisabeth will have a son, and his name will be John.
And he said, If with all your heart you will give attention to the voice of the Lord your God, and do what is right in his eyes, giving ear to his orders and keeping his laws, I will not put on you any of the diseases which I put on the Egyptians: for I am the Lord your life-giver.
And Hezekiah said, What is the sign that I will go up to the house of the Lord?
Go to Hezekiah, and say, The Lord, the God of David, your father, says, Your prayer has come to my ears, and I have seen your weeping: see, I will give you fifteen more years of life.
What may I give to the Lord for all the good things which he has done for me? I will take the cup of salvation, and give praise to the name of the Lord. I will make the offering of my oath to the Lord, even before all his people.
I will come into your house with burned offerings, I will make payment of my debt to you, Keeping the word which came from my lips, and which my mouth said, when I was in trouble. I will give you burned offerings of fat beasts, and the smoke of sheep; I will make offerings of oxen and goats. (Selah.)
Pain is sent on him as a punishment, while he is on his bed; there is no end to the trouble in his bones; He has no desire for food, and his soul is turned away from delicate meat; His flesh is so wasted away, that it may not be seen, and his bones. ... And his soul comes near to the underworld, and his life to the angels of death. If now there may be an angel sent to him, one of the thousands which there are to be between him and God, and to make clear to man what is right for him; And if he has mercy on him, and says, Let him not go down to the underworld, I have given the price for his life: Then his flesh becomes young again, and he comes back to the days of his early strength; He makes his prayer to God, and he has mercy on him; he sees God's face with cries of joy; he gives news of his righteousness to men;
In the eighth year of his rule, while he was still young, his heart was first turned to the God of his father David; and in the twelfth year he undertook the clearing away of all the high places and the pillars and the images of wood and metal from Judah and Jerusalem.
And now God is with us at our head, and his priests with their loud horns sounding against you. O children of Israel, do not make war on the Lord, the God of your fathers, for it will not go well for you.
Then Isaiah said, Take a cake of figs. So they took it and put it on his wound, and he got better. And Hezekiah said to Isaiah, What is to be the sign that the Lord will make me well, and that I will go up to the house of the Lord on the third day?
And Nathan said to the king, Go and do whatever is in your heart; for the Lord is with you. Now that night the word of the Lord came to Nathan, saying, Go and say to my servant David, The Lord says, Are you to be the builder of a house, a living-place for me?
Worthy.Bible » Commentaries » Matthew Henry Commentary » Commentary on 2 Kings 20
Commentary on 2 Kings 20 Matthew Henry Commentary
Chapter 20
In this chapter we have,
2Ki 20:1-11
The historian, having shown us blaspheming Sennacherib destroyed in the midst of the prospects of life, here shows us praying Hezekiah delivered in the midst of the prospects of death-the days of the former shortened, of the latter prolonged.
2Ki 20:12-21
Here is,
Lastly, Here is the conclusion of Hezekiah's life and story, v. 20, 21. In 2 Chr. ch. 29-32 much more is recorded of Hezekiah's work of reformation than in this book of Kings; and it seems that in the civil chronicles, not now extant, there were many things recorded of his might and the good offices he did for Jerusalem, particularly his bringing water by pipes into the city. To have water in plenty, without striving for it and without being terrified with the noise of archers in the drawing of it, to have it at hand and convenient for us, is to be reckoned a great mercy; for the want of water would be a great calamity. But here this historian leaves him asleep with his fathers, and a son in his throne that proved very untoward; for parents cannot give grace to their children. Wicked Ahaz was the son of a godly father and the father of a godly son; holy Hezekiah was the son of a wicked father and the father of a wicked son. When the land was not reformed, as it should have been, by a good reign, it was plagued and ripened for ruin by a bad one; yet then tried again with a good one, that it might appear how loth God was to cut off his people.