The great interest about the Bible is that it is the inspired utterance of Spirit, as well as the book of truth about human nature and human experience. The people in the Bible lived hundreds and thousands of years ago; perhaps they never lived under the familiar names by which we know them to-day, but their physical identity is immaterial, for what really is of value is their characteristics and the sort of lives they led and the kind of thoughts they had, and above all the experiences they passed through. Human need was the same then as now. There was never a moment then, as there has never been a moment in the intervening centuries, when men did not find their only real comfort and existence in some realization of the fact that man is the beloved child of God.
In the twentieth chapter of II Kings we read of an occasion when King Hezekiah felt "sick unto death," and in his extremity the prophet Isaiah, the son of Amoz, comes to him. When we remember what a very great and holy man Isaiah was that he was profoundly concerned with the history of Israel and Judah and that he exerted the greatest spiritual influence of his time in leading the nation back to the worship of God, we may conclude that Hezekiah had renounced the medical help of the period and was calling upon Isaiah's knowledge of Truth and Life to help him. Isaiah represented the very highest source of spiritual strength on which he thought he could rely. And what did this friend and guide say to him? "Set thine house in order; for thou shalt die and not live." These words must have sounded most desperately hard to Hezekiah. He must have felt that the man he expected to receive comfort and hope from, had failed him most miserably. There was no reminder of God's loving presence, no mention of His power to heal and to save, no assurance of the Father's perpetual goodness and mercy. Isaiah, the great prophet, the inspired teacher, the sublime poet, was at that particular moment of no more comfort than any ordinary worldling who had never heard of God at all. Moreover, he was pronouncing an awful doom and asserting the necessity and reality of death in a way which must have made poor Hezekiah feel a hundred times more sick than he did before. Small wonder that he "turned his face to the wall," that he turned away from the human person, and clung, in his extremity to God alone.
The story is a very old one but the circumstances are repeated afresh in modern life, alas, very often. To many of us perhaps, have come times of stress and difficulty which were rendered a thousand times more unendurable by one we relied on for spiritual light and encouragement suddenly failing us completely and throwing us still more deeply into the dark mists of erroneous belief. We can understand every throb of Hezekiah's heart as he lay there with his face to the wall, struggling alone for victory over grief and the grave, protesting with his whole being that he had always loved good and truth, that he had always tried to do right, that now, surely, goodness and truth would not desert him, that because God is good, God would save him.
