2 Kings 18:5 - Exposition

He trusted in the Lord God of Israel. Unlike Hoshea (see homiletics on 2 Kings 17:1-4 ), unlike Ahaz ( 2 Kings 16:7-10 ), Hezekiah discarded trust in man, and—it may be after some hesitation—put his trust wholly in God. This was exactly what God required as the condition on which he would give his aid ( Isaiah 30:1-7 ), and what no previous king since the Assyrian troubles began could bring himself to do. So that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor any that were before him. It has been concluded from this statement that, "when the merits of the kings were summed up after the fall of the monarchy, Hezekiah was, by a deliberate judgment, put at the very top"; but, as exactly the same words are used of Josiah in 2 Kings 23:25 , the true conclusion would seem to be rather that Hezekiah and Josiah were selected from the rest, and placed upon a par, above all the others. At first sight there may seem to be contradiction between the two passages, since absolute pre-eminence over all the other kings is ascribed to Hezekiah in one of them, to Josiah in the other; but the context shows that the pre-eminence is not the same in the two cases. To Hezekiah is ascribed pre-eminence in trust ; to Josiah, pre-eminence in an exact observance of the Law: one excels in faith, the other in works; Josiah's whole life is one of activity, Hezekiah's great merit lies in his being content, in the crisis of his fate, to "stand still, and see the salvation of God."