Isaiah 36:4-9 - Homiletics

Wise and foolish trust.

Rabshakeh laughed to scorn equally all the grounds of trust which he regarded Hezekiah as entertaining. His ridicule was just with respect to two of them, wholly unjust and misplaced, with respect to the third.

I. IT IS A FOOLISH TRUST TO PUT CONFIDENCE IN WISE COUNSELLORS . Princes, no doubt, do well to seek advice from the wisest among their subjects, and, speaking generally, cannot do better than follow such advice when it has been deliberately given. But to place absolute confidence in the wisest of human counsellors is sheer folly. "The wisdom of the wise is foolishness with God" ( 1 Corinthians 3:19 ); "God casteth out the counsel of princes." The wisest of men are liable to err, to misinterpret the past, to misconceive the future. The best of counsellors are "blind guides," and are liable to "fall into the pit" with those who are guided by them. It is the truest wisdom to mistrust all human advisers, and to look elsewhere for an infallible guidance.

II. IT IS A FOOLISH TRUST TO PUT CONFIDENCE IN AN ARMED FORCE , however strong it may seem to be. "It is nothing to the Lord to help, whether with ninny, or with them that have no power" ( 2 Chronicles 14:11 ). "It is no hard matter" with him "for many to be shut up in the hands of a few; and with Heaven it is all one, to deliver with a great multitude, or a small company: for the victory of battle standeth not in the multitude of an host; but strength cometh from heaven" (1 Macc. 3:18, 19). Even a heathen could remark that "ofttimes a mighty host is discomfited by a few men, when God in his anger sends fear or storm from heaven, and they perish in a way unworthy of them" (Herod; Isaiah 7:10 , § 6). The children of this world put their trust in "big battalions;" but the entire course of history testifies to the frequent triumph of the weak over the strong, of small over large armies—Plataea, Cunaxa, Issus, Arbela, Magnesia, in the ancient; Soissons, Mortgarten, Cressy, Poitiers, Waterloo, Inkerman, in the modern world, are cases in point. "The race is not to the swift, neither the battle to the strong." At any rate, it is foolish to trust implicitly in "strength for the war" ( Isaiah 36:5 ), since such trust is often the forerunner of a dire calamity.

III. BUT IT IS A WISE TRUST TO HAVE CONFIDENCE IN THE LORD GOD . Rabshakeh ridicules this trust no less than the others ( Isaiah 36:7 , Isaiah 36:15-20 ); but wholly without reason. He imagines, indeed, that Jehovah is only a god—one of many. He has no conception of one Supreme God, "Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things, visible and invisible." For want of this fundamental idea his whole reasoning is confused and mistaken. Theists know that, while all other trust is vain, absolute reliance may be placed on God