In this sermon, the speaker discusses the historical context of the reign of King Ahaz and the events that occurred during a 16-year period. He emphasizes the importance of understanding the timeline and the development of events in order to fully grasp the prophecies and visions given by Isaiah. The speaker also highlights the significance of the person behind every book, drawing parallels to his own book and the insights and revelations he gained over the years. Overall, the sermon aims to provide a better understanding of the historical setting and the life behind Isaiah's prophecies.

The following message is provided by Eternal Weight of Glory. For other sermons, teachings, and articles, please visit EternalWeight.com. Okay, praise the Lord. We want to take a look at Isaiah 7 and 8 this morning. But before we get to those chapters, we are going to take a look at 2 Kings 16. But before we get to that chapter, I want you to open up the back of your Bible and take a look at a map of the Middle East. I'm assuming you have one back there. And just as you're looking that up, I want to just say a few words, kind of an introductory nature. Every book has a person behind it. Right? You know, if you were over in... Well, and this happened. Let's say some of these people over in Holland that read Intoxicated with Babylon. And they read this book. Well, that book has a life behind it, right? I mean, there were things that I battled through over the years and convictions I developed over the years and insights and revelations the Lord gave me. All that transpired over many years before I actually put all that down on paper. And it's the case with Isaiah. We are reading these visions and these prophecies he gave, but there's a life behind all of that. You know, that's just like something that happened in maybe a flash. That's usually the way spiritual revelations happen. It's a flash. And it takes some time for it to develop into your mind and your heart and you write it all down and stuff. But we're talking about something that happened momentarily. You know, these little snapshot prophecies and visions that he received, but there was a life of years behind that. So anyway, what we're going to do now is kind of get back into the historical setting again of his life and that is in the reign of King Ahaz. And just kind of to give us a better sense of what's going to unfold in this story. I want to just point out some things. If you have a map of the Middle East, basically above Judah, you have the northern tribes of Israel and above Israel you have Syria and Damascus is the capital of Syria. And then to the northeast and east of that, you have this enormous kingdom developing, which is Assyria. And you know, these countries, Judah, Israel and Syria are just minor petty little nations compared to this mammoth kingdom empire that is growing in strength up in the northeast there. So I just want you to get a sense of that. And just one other thing that we'll run across here in a little bit. If you have your map, you can see on the eastern side of Sinai, there's that Gulf of Aqaba and there's a city there called Eilat. And depending on how strong Judah was at any particular period of their existence, either they controlled it or the Edomites controlled it. Well, you remember King Uzziah was a very strong king and he had recaptured that amongst other towns. And so it had been in the hands of Judah for some time. And well, we'll get to that later. But that is right there at the tip of the Gulf of Aqaba. And today Eilat is a Jewish resort city. And right next to it, just over the border in Jordan, is Aqaba, which is the, you know, the Arab version of that, such as it is. Okay, I just want to mention one other thing. Basically, Assyria had kind of had their own ups and downs. They were strong for a period, then they weakened. And about 750 or so BC, there was a lot of turmoil, chaos, infighting, and so on going on in Assyria. And the man who rose to the top through it all was, well, there's some discrepancy if he was a governor in Assyria or if he was a general, I'm not sure which it was, but his name was Pul, P-U-L. And somehow in the midst of all that infighting, he came out on top. And in 745 BC, he became the king of Assyria and he took on the name Tiglath-Pileser. There was a Tiglath-Pileser I and II sometime before, and so he took on that same name, Tiglath-Pileser, and that became his kind of royal official moniker. All right, so sometimes you'll see him referred to as Pul and other times Tiglath-Pileser, it's the same guy. All right, now I want to just take a look here at a couple of verses before we get into chapter 16, because they kind of set the stage. 2 Kings 15 36, now the rest of the acts of Jotham and all that he did, are they not written in the book of the Chronicles of the kings of Judah? Yeah, they are, as a matter of fact. Verse 37, in those days the Lord began to send Rezin, king of Aram, that's Syria, and Pekah, the son of Remaliah, against Judah. All right, now if you remember, Uzziah was a very powerful Judean king. You know who he reminds me of is Ronald Reagan. He turned the course of events around in Judah, like Ronald Reagan did after all the tumultuous, the 60s, the Vietnam War, the Nixon Watergate thing, Jimmy Carter's reign, you know, that just took the economy down the tubes. And then Ronald Reagan comes in, and just by the force of his personality and so on, he turned this country around and set our country on a prosperous path. And so he was a strong king, and then following him was a weaker king, so to speak, George Bush Sr., who kind of maintained the same flow of things, but didn't have the charisma, the strength, the energy, whatever. He was more of a bureaucrat, George Bush. And that's kind of how Jotham was, you know, it's the same sort of thing. I don't know how else to explain it. So basically the people had been enjoying prosperity, and as usual what happens when a nation becomes prosperous, they start drifting away from the Lord. So the Lord, not because Jotham was an evil king, but because he was a weak king, if anything, and he's allowing idolatry to start popping up all over the place, and he's just not leading the people towards the Lord in a strong way. And so the Lord starts raising up adversaries, and that happens to be these two who are mentioned here, the king of Syria and also the king of Israel. Okay, so let's look at Ahaz's reign. The title of my message is The Folly of Ahaz. And I want to look here at the first couple of verses of 16. In the 17th year of Pekah, the son of Remaliah, Ahaz, the son of Jotham, king of Judah, became king. Ahaz was 20 years old when he became king. And he reigned 16 years in Jerusalem. Think of that 16 years. Again, to make it real to us today, we're reading one chapter here, and we're not even going to read the whole chapter. This chapter is 20 verses, and this man's 16-year reign all occurs within that 20-verse length. But 16 years would be comparable to Bill Clinton's eight years in the White House, and then following him, George Bush Jr., his eight years. Think of all that happened during that time. You know, you had the Oklahoma City bombing, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Y2K non-event. You had the whole George Bush, Al Gore debacle that happened in the 2000 election, then 9-11, and then the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then Katrina, and then at the very end of Bush's presidency, the housing and the banking collapse began. So all of those things happened in that 16 years. So we're looking at these events in this 20-verse little segment. You've got to get your mind wrapped around. Now, wait a minute. This doesn't just happen in a week's time. This is occurring over 16 years. Okay, so get that clear in your mind because that helps to clarify some of the things that are occurring. You know, in other words, they'll just, in one half a verse, they'll make a statement, you know, that something happened. Well, that may have, that particular thing may have occurred five years before the next verse, or the next half of the verse, or something, you know. So it just helps to get your mind thinking in that way. Now, from the rest of this verse 2 through verse 4, I'm going to read these, but this is kind of a parentheses in Ahaz's, you know, story. In fact, I have it kind of marked off, beginning halfway through verse 2, and then wrapped around verse 4. It's just kind of a parentheses. In other words, he starts to tell the story of King Ahaz, and he stops, and he gives a summation of the reign of King Ahaz as God saw it. All right, so let's read this. Verse 2b, And he did not do what was right in the sight of the Lord his God, as his father David had done. Now, that in itself speaks volumes. You know, can I just say that David and all of the kings of Judah or Israel were God's representatives to his people. This was a theocracy. Theocracy means God is the leader. It's not a democracy, and it's not a monarchy. It's a theocracy. God is the leader. The king is his designated regent, if I could put it that way, kind of like a governor or whatever. He's the one that's supposed to dictate the orders, but it's through God. And what God desires for that nation, that's the way it's supposed to be ruled. But he did not submit himself to Jehovah. All right, but let's see what he did. Verse 3, But he walked in the way of the kings of Israel, who had long since apostatized, and even made his son pass through the fire. According to the abominations of the nations, these pagan nations surrounding Judah, according to the abominations of the nations whom the Lord had driven out from before the sons of Israel, he sacrificed and burned incense on the high places and on the hills and under every green tree. In other words, he was completely given over to idolatry. Now, I want to just touch on this thing of child sacrifice real quick before we move on. Because some people have tried to say that, well, that doesn't mean that they actually burned their children alive. You know, what it really means is this idol was heated up and they would just kind of move the child between the hands as some kind of a consecration to that God, that particular God. And, you know, the kids really weren't sacrificed, but that's not true. And I want to tell you why. First of all, in the parallel account of this story, which is in 2 Chronicles 28, this is what it says there about it. He burned his sons in fire. All right. So, you know, even though it says it in Kings, he made his son pass through the fire. It sounds like it almost could be. Well, yeah, he didn't really actually sacrifice them. No, it says in 2 Chronicles, he burned his sons in fire. And also other places, Jeremiah 19 5 says that the Jews built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal. So that is what happened. Also in Ezekiel 16 21, the Lord says you slaughtered my children and offered them up to idols by causing them to pass through the fire. So when you take all of these into account, you can't get away from the fact that these children were actually sacrificed in the most horrible way. Let me just mention that briefly. These are facts that have come from historical sources. There are actual accounts of what would happen. What they would do is they would have this God Molech, a Phoenician God, and he was made out of metal, and they would burn a fire underneath him somehow, and he would become red-hot, and then his hands would be like that, and they would place the baby in his hands, and the baby would roll out trying to get away from it, and then he would fall on his lap, and he would just be burned alive. You know, now this is parents taking their child and sacrificing him this way. Why? And first of all, it's a picture of how evil and how hate-filled the devil is. This is what the devil loves to do to people, to human beings. But the point of it was that you are taking the most precious thing that you have, which is your offspring, and it's usually your oldest son, and you're sacrificing it to the God to curry favor with that God. So that's why they were doing it ostensibly, but really it was, you know, the devil behind it all, of course. The Valley of Hinnom is an area just outside of the walls of Jerusalem, and that's where they would take all the refuse and the garbage, and they would throw it out in this area. That's where they had these shrines to Molech that they would burn their babies in there. Tofeth was a Hebrew word for drum, if I remember right, these big drums, and they would beat these drums to drown out the noise of the screaming babies. That was the whole point of it. Okay, let's move on here. I want to just touch on one verse out of 2 Chronicles 28-19. Let me read that in a couple of other translations. Moffat says, For the Eternal had brought Judah low on account of King Ahaz, who had behaved wantonly in Judah and broken faith badly with the Eternal. The New English Bible says it this way, The Lord had reduced Judah to submission because of Ahaz, king of Judah, for his actions in Judah had been unbridled, and he had been grossly unfaithful to the Lord. I like the way the Living Bible said, For he had destroyed the spiritual fiber of Judah. Man, that is exactly it. The NIV said, For he had promoted wickedness in Judah. And the NAS says, For he had brought about a lack of restraint in Judah. This may be the worst part of his reign. You know, it's bad enough to child sacrifice and all this stuff. But this is really what it's all about, right here, is that he not only allowed idolatry, he not only allowed wicked people to take positions of prominence or whatever in his kingdom, but he advanced it. He pushed it forward. And we can see some of the U.S. presidents and their influence on the direction of this nation, right? You know, without naming any of them, I mean, there are just some presidents who just seem to push things down that road further. And that's what he did. By his leadership into wickedness, he was causing a lack of restraint and undoing the spiritual fabric of the nation. It's just such a powerful phrase that really describes the effects of his leadership on his nation. All right. Now, let's get into the story here. Verse 5. Then Rezin, king of Aram and and Pekah, son of Rumaliah, king of Israel, came up to Jerusalem to wage war and they besieged Ahaz, but could not overcome him. At that time, Rezin, king of Aram, recovered Eilat for Aram. Now, I don't know what your Bible says, if it says Aram or Edom, but I'm going to explain it here in a second. And cleared the Judeans out of Eilat entirely. And the Arameans came to Eilat and have lived there to this day. All right. Now, this is a good example of a copyist error. And they are in the Bible, mostly in the narrative books. You don't see copyist errors in the other books nearly as often. But this is an example of some scribe in the 5th century BC, just mindlessly writing. And he had a, you know, the Syrians, Aram in his mind, and he wrote that down, you know, by mistake. It's definitely Edom and it's the Edomites. In fact, in the Septuagint version, that's how they have it is Edom and the Edomites. Now, I want to just say a word about this because I know how some people's minds work. That you see an error like this, and this is the Holy Bible. How could there be a mistake in it? How could God, if this is really the word of God, how could he allow mistakes? All right. Well, I want to just address that real quick. And this is what I want to say is that the evidence that this book has been sent to us by a divine being who is everything this book says he is, is absolutely overwhelming. Absolutely overwhelming. And I believe, it's my own personal opinion, that the Lord purposely allowed these little things to happen. And, you know, as we received the Bible thousands of years later, that he allowed those things in there to trip people up who don't want to believe and are looking for any possible excuse to discredit his word. You know, that's just my opinion that the Lord allowed that. But however it came about, trust me on this, don't let the enemy exaggerate something like this and blow it all out of proportion and make it into some huge thing in your mind when it's an infinitesimal nothing. You know what I mean? In the grand scheme of things. This book has so much evidence showing the accuracy of it and so on, and this isn't, you know, the time and place to get into that. But I'm just trying to help you with that. If any of you struggle with those kind of feelings. All right. Now, let's, again, let's get back on track with the story. Here's what was happening. You got Tiglath-Pileser, who has been in power in Assyria for 10 years or so, and he is very aggressive. He's a belligerent man, full of ambition. He wants to take over the world. So for a couple of years, he's focused on Babylonia, that kingdom down to the south of him, and he's down there trying to subjugate that kingdom and bring them under his control. Well, during that time, you've got the king of Syria, which is Rezan, and you've got the king of Israel, which is Pekah, and these guys get together and they want to form a confederacy because with Tiglath-Pileser out of the picture, you know, they're trying to strengthen themselves because they know he's going to be back with his armies and he's going to be looking southwestward towards them. And so what they're trying to do is create some kind of a confederacy, and I think Egypt and the pharaoh of Egypt was behind this as well, pushing them to do this because he wants a buffer between Egypt and Assyria. So he's kind of promoting this. And so these guys want to create this new kingdom that will withstand the king of Assyria. And so they send word down to the king Ahaz in Judah and inviting him into this confederacy and he considers his options and he says, no way, you know, I'm not interested in joining you against the king of Assyria. Just keep me out of it. So that's what's going on. And then so they decide with Tiglath-Pileser out of the way, let's go down there and conquer Judah with our combined forces. We'll put our own puppet king in there and that's what they ended up trying to do. And then we will have that confederacy. We'll just kick Pekah out, we'll kill him or whatever and then it will be the three countries and, you know, by combining together, we'll be able to withstand Assyria. So that's what is occurring there. You know, basically you can read about it in 2 Chronicles 28. Rezin goes down and overthrows Eilat, throws the Judeans out of Eilat and hands it over to the Edomites and they are kind of like another kingdom that's joining in this whole confederacy. And then at the same time, the king of Israel is coming down and he's attacking and he actually, they have a great victory over the Judeans and they kill 120,000 Judean warriors and so on. That's all in the other chapter. So I don't want to get into that story, but that's what's happening. But King Ahaz was able to stay behind the fortifications of Jerusalem and withstand that attack and makes it through. Then what he does is right here in verse 7. Let's read these three verses. So Ahaz sent messengers to Tiglath-Pileser, king of Assyria, saying, I am your servant and your son. Come up and deliver me from the hand of the king of Aram and from the hand of the king of Israel who are rising up against me. Ahaz took the silver and gold that was found in the house of the Lord and in the treasuries of the king's house and sent a present to the king of Assyria. So the king of Assyria listened to him and the king of Assyria went up against Damascus and captured it and carried the people of it away into exile to Kerr and put resin to death. All right, that's what happened. And as you'll see here in a minute when we get into Isaiah 7, this is the very thing that Isaiah is endeavoring to prevent. Well, I'm getting ahead of myself. All right, but look at Ahaz's situation. He's a young guy. He's probably no more than 30, not even, you know, he's in his 20s. He's weak. He has no faith in God. To the north of him. He's got Syria and Israel threatening him. The Southwest, the Philippines and the Southeast, the Edomites are overrunning Judea. And then not only that but within Judah, there's a party of politicians who wanted to join Israel and Syria. So he really did have some serious issues to deal with but he went about it the wrong way. You know, humanly speaking, turning to Tiglath-Pileser was the exact right thing to do. But, you know, there's more to it than just the human perspective, isn't there? Ahaz knew that if he made this offer to Tiglath-Pileser, Tiglath-Pileser was going to take it. And the reason why was because it's only going to benefit him to have one of these petty kingdoms make itself subject to him. It just increases his power base, you know, in the whole region. So he knew that that would happen. But I want to read what the pulpit commentary says here. The offer of submission was unmistakable. Servant, in the language of the time, meant slave. Complete subjection, enrollment among a serious feudatories, the entire loss of independence was well understood to be the price that had to be paid for a serious protection. Ahaz and his worldly advisors were prepared to pay it. They surrendered themselves, body and soul, into the hands of the great world power of the period. For all Ahaz paid and bribed out of the sacrilegiously employed treasure of the temple, out of the depreciating and partial dismantling of the house of the king, he bought a master for himself. The temporary relief he obtained from one enemy riveted around his neck the yoke of another and greater. And worse than this, he secured in his own heart the greatest adversary of all, a restless, implacable foe, whichever goaded him on to worse folly and deeper sin. And that is what always happens when we look to man instead of the Lord. All right. Well, what came out of that is Tiglath-Pilaser attacked Syria. He couldn't overcome Damascus because of its fortification. So he left it alone. He went down, conquered Israel. He killed Pekah and he installed Hoshea, another Israelite, to be a vassal king in Israel. He sent some segment of the population into captivity and then he returned up to Damascus and laid siege to it. In fact, we have in his records a statement that Tiglath-Pilaser made. This is what he said. Damascus I besieged and like a caged bird, I enclosed him. And he went on to describe overcoming it. All right, then in verse 10 and 11, let's continue on. Now, King Ahaz went to Damascus to meet Tiglath-Pilaser, king of Assyria. All right, you know, let me just stop there for a second. This was typical of these eastern monarchs. They would come into a region. They would set up court, in a sense, and all these kings of these petty kingdoms would be expected to come there and visit with him and bring him gifts. That's what was going on here. So, you know, this continues on the rest of the chapter describing how he pillaged the Temple of Jehovah to get more gold, silver, brass, whatever, and to be able to bring gifts to Tiglath-Pilaser. So that's what's, you know, going on here. But let's see what else happens. And while he was there, saw the altar which was at Damascus, and King Ahaz sent to Eurasia the priest the pattern of the altar and its model according to all its workmanship. So Eurasia the priest built an altar according to all that King Ahaz had sent from Damascus. Thus, Eurasia the priest made it before the coming of King Ahaz from Damascus. All right, now, what he's describing here is a portable Assyrian altar. You know, the Assyrian kings would, when they would move into a region, they would have their own altar for their gods. It was actually a very simple altar. It wasn't anything great, but it was Assyrian, and it was to the Assyrian gods. And so in Ahaz's mind, you know, these are the gods that are the most powerful, so I'm going to worship them, and I'm going to bring the worship of them into Jerusalem so Judah can become powerful like they are powerful. But when you think about Eurasia, who was the high priest, and compare him to Azariah, who was the high priest during Uzziah's time. Do you remember the story? Uzziah, and he tried to burn incense in the temple, and Azariah and his 80 priests came in and threw him out, and he got leprosy and everything. Well, there was a man who stood up for God, withstood the king. But this guy just totally caves, and sets up demon worship right there in the temple. Let's go ahead and open up to Isaiah 7. While you turn there, I'll just say this. This decision of Ahaz to rely on the arm of the flesh rather than turning to God would affect the politics of the nation for the next 30 years. You know, and that is what always happens when we trust in ourselves and our own thinking, trust in worldly wisdom, worldly methodologies, worldly thinking. We always end up going down a path that brings nothing but trouble to ourselves. All right. Now, Isaiah 7 and 8 are basically bringing the same message. Isaiah 7 is the prophet entreating the king not to turn to the arm of flesh. Isaiah 8 is Isaiah entreating the people, you know, so chapter 7 is aimed towards Ahaz, chapter 8, the message there is aimed towards the Judean people. We're not going to get into 8 and we're only going to look at a few verses in 7 here real briefly. Let's read these first nine verses. Isaiah 7. Now it came about in the days of Ahaz, the son of Jotham, the son of Uzziah, king of Judah, that Rezan the king of Aram and Pekah, the son of Ramalia, king of Israel, went up to Jerusalem to wage war against it, but it could not conquer it. When it was reported to the house of David, that just means Ahaz's family. That's all that means. When it was reported to the house of David saying, the Arameans have camped in Ephraim, his heart and the hearts of his people shook as the trees of the forest shake with the wind. He's just so descriptive, you know, he's just showing what a bunch of cowards they were and how faithless they were and so on. Then the Lord said to Isaiah, go out now to meet Ahaz, you and your son Shear Jeshub, at the end of the conduit of the upper pool on the highway to the Fuller's Field and say to him, take care and be calm. Have no fear and do not be faint-hearted because of these two stubs of smoldering firebrands on account of the fierce anger of Rezan and Aram, the son of Ramalia, because Aram with Ephraim and the son of Ramalia has planned evil against you saying, let us go up against Judah and terrorize it and make for ourselves a breach in its walls and set up the son of Tabeel as king in the midst of it. That's that puppet king I had mentioned earlier that they wanted to bring in a puppet king who would, you know, join Judah in this Confederacy. Thus says the Lord God, it shall not stand nor shall it come to pass for the head of Aram is Damascus and the head of Damascus is Rezan. And then in parentheses it says, now within another 65 years Ephraim will be shattered so that it is no longer a people. And I'll just mention to you, if you want to write it down, Second Chronicles 33 10 and 11 shows the fulfillment of that that occurred during Manasseh's reign. And the head of Ephraim, verse 9, and the head of Ephraim is Samaria and the head of Samaria is the son of Remalia. If you will not believe, you surely shall not last. All right, those are very somber words for sure. What he's saying to Ahaz is if you will just trust the Lord, if you will just put your faith and your trust in Jehovah, he will get you through this. Trust me. He will get you through this. Verse 10. Then the Lord spoke again to Ahaz saying, ask a sign for yourself from the Lord your God. Make it deep as Sheol or high as heaven. You know, in other words, he's saying just ask me to prove what I'm saying is true. I will give you a sign, just kind of like what he said with Hezekiah later and there were other occurrences. The Lord would do this when a certain situation was urgent and the guy, the king was struggling with whether or not he should, you know, do what the prophet is saying or do something else. The Lord would condescend by making this offer. Verse 12, but Ahaz said, I will not ask nor will I test the Lord. All right. Now, this is a reference to Deuteronomy 6.16 where it's an injunction. You shall not tempt the Lord your God and it all sounds real nice, but the reality was, the truth was, he had already sent the messengers up to Tiglath-Pileser. He had already made up his mind. You know, there was no turning back now. He had already made the decision that he was going to turn to the arm of flesh for his help and he wasn't interested in Jehovah's help. Let's read this fascinating prophecy here. Verse 13, then he said, Listen now, O house of David, you know, because Ahaz turned down the offer. So, Isaiah is going to give him a sign of his own. Is it too slight a thing for you to try the patience of men that you will try the patience of my God as well? Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son and she will call his name Emmanuel. He will eat curds and honey at the time he knows enough to refuse evil and choose good. For before the boy will know enough to refuse evil and choose good, the land whose two kings you dread will be forsaken. All right. Now, there's a bunch there. Let me just say a couple of things about it. First of all, here's the law of double reference again that we find throughout the prophetical writings that there's two meanings here. This case, the primary meaning is the immediate. This is a sign for him. Now later, it would also be a messianic prophecy and it would be used in that sense, but it's primarily for this situation. And I'll tell you why I believe that. First of all, the word for virgin here is used seven times in the Old Testament and it's always used in the sense of simply a young unmarried girl. The male counterpart to this term just means a young guy, you know, so it doesn't really have anything to do with virginity. There's a different Hebrew word for that. Okay, so and then also Emmanuel. Yes, we have taken it to be another name for Jesus and rightly so because it does refer to him in a secondary way, but the message here through Isaiah to this King is God is with us. This is God's nation God's people God is with us. That's what Emmanuel means God with us. Now later again, it would be used as a designation and as a prophecy of Jesus himself. Then basically the rest of the chapter, I'm not going to read it, but it's a description of the utter desolation that would come upon this country because of his willful rebellion and so on he is opening the door to the king of Assyria to come into Judah the country would be devastated by that but then ultimately by Babylon. That's where the real devastation is going to come. And I just want to read something the Bible expositor said in regards to Isaiah. Let me read this Isaiah where we now meet him stood on one side believing in one Supreme God Lord of Heaven and Earth and his generation stood on the other side believing that there were many gods Isaiah will infect men with his own utter conviction of it in order that he may strengthen their character and guide them by paths of safety his speech to a has is an exhibition of the moral and rational effects of believing in Providence a has is a sample of the character polytheism produced and I would even go further to say that it's that weak willed nature that looks to self rather than looking to God. So what's the takeaway for us in this story? It's real easy to sit here 2,500 years later, whatever it is and to criticize a has and say, you know, what a wimp, you know, if I would have been there I would have stood for God and I would have done the right thing. Well, we don't know the overwhelming pressure this young man was under and I'm not making excuses for him or certainly not justifying what he did. What I am saying is what areas of our lives do we compromise? Do we look to the arm of flesh? Do we look to worldly wisdom? Do we look away from God and allow our hearts to drift away from the Lord and go after the world and so on what what areas of our lives, you know, because it really is a picture of what every person has to deal with when they're confronted with this God named Jehovah. We all have to make decisions on a daily basis. Maybe we don't have a whole nation that we're going to sway toward or away from the Lord by our decisions, but we do have influence and we do affect other people. And of course our decisions are going to affect our own life as well and a has was dead by the time he was 40 or so. He was dead, you know, so all of the living for now, I want what I can see with my physical eyes. I'm going to make decisions based on the now all those decisions where did it bring him ultimately? He lived in towering fear of this Assyrian monarch. Look at Hezekiah his son who you know later dealt with the same thing with Sennacherib, but did the right thing and look at what God did for him. That's what God would have done for a has if he would have just trusted in him instead of trusting in what he could see with his eyes and and just refusing to submit himself to the Lord. Amen. So I hope that kind of helps you to get a little more of an clear idea of what Isaiah had to deal with 16 years in his young ministry 16 years. He had to deal with this wicked young king and he had to minister. I guess this was his nephew. He had to minister in those courts that were totally given over to the worship of pagan deities. And that's where Isaiah had to minister for all those years until Hezekiah came in later. All right, that's it for today. God bless you all.