The Real Meaning of Life

The power of prayer…never underestimate it. The compassion of God, pray for it.

We read yesterday where King Hezekiah did good in the site of the Lord, trying to return Israel to what it was when David was King. But Hezekiah has now fallen Ill and is near death. Isaiah the prophet visited and told him to get his affairs in order, as God said he would die.

What God threatening Hezekiah with death? No, but God knows all, he could see into the future and see Hezekiah’s death coming, and had the decency, because Hezekiah was good, to forewarn him of this so he could prepare for death.

Naturally, Hezekiah didn’t want to die, so he prayed to God to save him. And scripture says that before Isaiah had left the courtyard, God spoke to him, telling him to return to Hezekiah and tell him he had 15 more years of life.

Isaiah hadn’t left the courtyard yet when God answered Hezekiah’s prayers! Talk about a loving and responsive God! Praise Him!

Then God showed His compassionate side. Even though the children of Israel had distanced themselves from God, even though they had chose to worship false Gods, even though they went up against the Assyrians without praying first and ended up losing the battle, compassion fell on God, and He swore to free the Israelites from their captivity.

But wait! They were sinning! Surely a wrathful God would send fire down from Heaven to consume them for their sins! Oh, that’s right; that’s the teachings of man, not the word of God. God saved them from themselves because of His compassion and His love for David.

What compassion! What mercy!

Passages like these are often overlooked because it doesn’t fit the narrative of the church. There, I said it, and I stand by it. “If I don’t preach hell fire, I can’t fill the pews.” Those words still resonate in my head every time I hear a pastor talk about the wrath of God. They can’t teach the “love” of God because that doesn’t scare people into going to church. In fact, there have been pastors fired and church members excommunicated for talking about the love of God. What does that tell me, that Satan is hard at work inside the church. He has infiltrated the church like a foreign agent infiltrates the country. There was recently a Chinese foreign agent that had slipped in so quietly and undetected, that Californian’s had elected her Mayor of a City, and an illegal alien, not only residing hear illegally, had been elected Mayor of a small Kansas town. The latter wasn’t a foreign agent, but it goes to show you how easy it is for the people to be fooled, and Satan is the master fooler.

And speaking of fools, no one is perfect, and no matter how good Hezekiah was, he was a fool. Now, you can argue that he was just naive, while others can say he was completely foolish. But an entourage from Babylon came to visit, and Hezekiah got a bit too prideful, showing them all of the riches he had. He was unsuspecting of them, but they were actually agents that had came to spy out the land, and Hezekiah had just showed them the goods. It would be like inviting a career criminal into your house and showing them your brand new big screen TV and told them the hours you were away from home at work.

And in future readings, we’ll see how this prideful act of Hezekiah will eventually lead to something extremely bad.