A Prayer of Desperation

2 Kings 19:15-19

Introduction

I see three primary motivations for a person praying.  There is tradition, there is desire and there is desperation.  All three are appropriate.  Praying because of tradition means that there is a certain time or situation in which you always pray.  An example could be church but also praying before taking a trip or starting your day with prayer.  One of my favorite times of the day is in the evening when I read to the boys and then pray with them.  Even if they pass out before the story is done, I still pray because I believe it is important.  A prayer because of desire is when you know you want something, you know there is something that would make your life easier.  I am not ashamed to say that there are times that I pray for a parking spot, especially if I am visiting in a big city.  It is not a major crisis, but I would really like a parking spot in the same time zone as where I want to be.  There are times, however, that my prayer motivation goes beyond mere tradition or desire.  The first time I recollect an answer to prayer was one of these prayers.  It was just over a year before I became a Christian.  A friend and I went to Mexico for a vacation.  My first night there, I drank way too much, had my wallet stolen, was kicked out of the bar and ended up lost and alone on the streets of Puerto Vallarta.  Through a few more bad decisions, I ended up in a Mexican jail with a couple of dozen other guys.  In the morning I was told to pay 50,000 pesos to get out of jail.  While that is only $15, without a wallet it might as well have been $50,000.  I was denied a phone call and was quite afraid.  Looking up and seeing a picture of Jesus, I decided it was a good time to pray.  Why did I want to pray?  It was not tradition.  I did not have a tradition about praying when in jail, never having been in jail before, but it will be a strong consideration if it ever happens again.  It was not exactly desire, although I really did desire to be out of jail.  But it was not as simple as having some preference for the hotel I paid for as opposed to the jail.  No, I was desperate.  Not having money and not being allowed to contact my friend, I felt extreme anxiety about the situation and was driven to prayer.  Thankfully God answered my prayer, despite all my stupid decisions leading up to the situation, and I was released soon after.  Long before my misadventures and long after, people will pray to God out of the desperation of their circumstances.  The example we are going to look at today is that of Hezekiah.  Hezekiah was the king of Judah.  Jerusalem had been surrounded by the aggressive Assyrians.  The Assyrians were pretty cocky about the whole thing as they had enjoyed a long string of victories.  They even offered to supply a couple of thousand horses to Hezekiah if he could find soldiers to ride them, which they knew he could not.  They purposely communicated with the king in Hebrew so that the people of the city could hear how desperate things were and would begin to panic.  The Assyrians warned the Judeans not to rely on their God.  Every people they had conquered had their own gods and all had fallen before the Assyrian juggernaut.  The God of the Hebrews would only join them in the trash of failed deities.  If ever there was a time for Hezekiah to panic, it was now.  After one final letter from the Assyrians, mocking God, Hezekiah did the only thing that he knew to do and he prayed.

Nature of God

Hezekiah starts his prayer with a very specific address toward God.  Why?  This is very natural, especially for someone in great need.  If you are just in need of directions to the nearest coffee shop, it does not really matter who you seek help from.  But if you need brain surgery, you are going to seek very specific help.  Hezekiah, as he sees his nation on the verge of destruction, also needs assistance from someone very specific.  Whereas David in his need for confession sought God in his role of love and compassion, Hezekiah is looking for another side of God.  He calls upon the LORD, the God of Israel.  LORD or Yahweh is God’s covenant name, that is his name he revealed when he promised to be the Hebrew’s deliverer and protector to Moses.  He is the God of Israel, the national God of Israel.  But Hezekiah goes beyond that.  Every nation has their national god and that did not seem to help them against the Assyrians.  Something greater was needed.  Hezekiah called upon God, not just as the God of Israel but the God over all the kingdoms of the earth.  Israel’s God was creator of everything.  Even the wood for spears and metal for swords in the Assyrian army were around only because of God.  Those two thousand horses the Assyrians sarcastically offered Hezekiah?  They were God’s careful design.  There is something encouraging in knowing that the God we pray to, as the Creator of the universe, has the power to back up his willingness to help.  This is the reason that the Psalmist wrote: “I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth.” (Psalms 121:1–2 ESV)  When we feel powerless in our prayers, perhaps it is time remember the power of the one we are praying to.

Needing a Response

Hezekiah does not stop with just a lofty address to God.  Hezekiah makes clear in a powerful way that he needs God’s help.  “Give ear, O LORD, and hear; open your eyes, O LORD, and see.” (2 Kings 19:16 NIV)  Yes, there is a time to adore and confess and give thanks in prayer.  But when desperate times come, you have to, you just have to go to God with your need.  There is no playing around with words, you have to express your need and require God to take action.  If God did not intervene, the Assyrians would have broken down Jerusalem’s walls, killed thousands, taken prisoners, exiled many and emptied the land.  When Assyria conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, the Israelites disappeared forever, never to be heard of from again.  There are some great stories in the Bible of people who were desperate for help. I love the story of the men who brought their paralyzed friend to Jesus.  They arrived at the house where Jesus was only to find it full and impossible to enter.  They could have said to their friend “sorry about your luck” and just taken him home.  But they had a desperation when it came to their friend and his health.  They took the radical step of climbing on the house, digging a hole in the roof and lowering their friend in front of Jesus.  How many of us would do such a thing?  It is hard enough to remember to pray for our friends.  Or there was the woman who had the issue of blood for twelve years.  Jesus was passing through on his way to heal a child who deathly ill.  It was literally a matter of life and death.  If ever there was a time that Jesus was busy and focused and needing to move on, it was now.  The sick woman never even considered trying to stop Jesus or explain her situation.  But she was still desperate enough to do something.  So when Jesus passed by, she reached out to touch the hem of his cloak and thus receive some of his power.  That sounds fine but where did she get such an idea?  I doubt Jesus went around inviting people to touch his clothes to receive healing.  It was a very strange idea.  But desperation breeds strange ideas and when God is involved, sometimes those strange ideas work.  This is the kind of desperation that drove Hezekiah as he looked out at all of the Assyrian troops eager to destroy his city.  How did God respond to this desperation?  “That night the angel of the LORD went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand men in the Assyrian camp. When the people got up the next morning—there were all the dead bodies! So Sennacherib king of Assyria broke camp and withdrew. He returned to Nineveh and stayed there.” (2 Kings 19:35–36 NIV)

God’s Glory

Our natural inclination would be for us to pray only for the relief of our desperate situation.  If you are skydiving and your parachute does not open, you have some very specific things that you want to pray for.  That is very understandable.  But there is another desire we should have when we pray, even when we pray desperate prayers.  Listen to how Hezekiah concludes his prayer.  “Now, O LORD our God, deliver us from his hand, so that all kingdoms on earth may know that you alone, O LORD, are God.”

(2 Kings 19:19 NIV)  That is very interesting.  He does not say deliver us because we are scared and it will be a terrible situation that we really want to avoid.  What Hezekiah really wants is for people, through the answered prayer, to see God for who he really is.  We think of miracles as being typically biblical.  However, very few prophets actually performed miracles.  One of the few who did perform miracles was Elijah.  What is very interesting is that Elijah was not about showing how spiritually powerful he was or impressing other people.  The focus of Elijah’s ministry was completely about demonstrating that the LORD, the God of Israel, was the one true God.  Every miracle was meant to glorify God and bring him honor.  This is what Hezekiah was looking for.  Yes, he wanted to be delivered from his crisis, but he also very much wanted God glorified in the process.  Hezekiah wanted people to look on this and say, not what a great king Judah had, but what a great God the king had.  When we pray, how often is the glory of God central to our thoughts?  We want to be healed.  To help ourselves of course, but also to glorify God.  We want financial provision.  It will make our life easier, but it should also glorify God.  You might be thinking that your situation is too desperate for you to be worrying about God’s glory.  Imagine the situation of Hezekiah.  Enemy army everywhere.  Swords clanging against shields.  Fires lit, ready to burn down the city.  Knowledge that the king’s head will be the first on the chopping block.  Hezekiah was very desperate.  Still, God’s glory was exactly where he ended his prayer for emphasis.

Conclusion

You either have, are or will be in a time of desperation.  All available resources have run out or have failed.  We must pray.  We pray not to just anyone, but to the God of the universe, the maker of all there is.  We come to our need, not ashamed of our fear, anxiety or despair.  He is our God and he is our only hope.  If God does not come through we are sunk.  We trust that God will be there in some way.  We do not have all the answers of how the answer will come.  But we trust, we need him to come through.  But even in our need, we want God to be glorified.  We want our friends and family to see that our God is real, that he is loving and that he is powerful.  Times of desperation will come.  But we have a God who will walk through the very valley of the shadow of death and get us to the other side.

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