The God Who Finishes the Story Text: Isaiah 37:36-38
Introduction: The Silent Checkmate
We live in an age of noise. We are accustomed to loud threats, noisy politics, and blustering bravado. Men make their plans, they issue their ultimatums, they shake their fists at heaven, and they expect a response on their own terms. The world believes that the one who shouts the loudest is the one who is winning. This was certainly the operating principle of Sennacherib, king of Assyria. He was the undisputed superpower of his day. He had laid waste to forty-six fortified cities in Judah. He had penned up King Hezekiah in Jerusalem "like a bird in a cage," to use his own boastful phrase. His mouthpiece, the Rabshakeh, had stood before the walls of Jerusalem and blasphemed the living God, mocking His inability to deliver, comparing Yahweh to the cheap, manufactured gods of the other nations he had crushed.
Sennacherib had written his script for the end of the story. It involved the surrender of Jerusalem, the humiliation of Hezekiah, and the utter discrediting of Israel's God. He had shouted his threats, and now he was waiting for the terrified reply. But God's replies are not always noisy. Sometimes the most devastating display of divine power is utterly silent. Sometimes God doesn't debate with blasphemers. He simply deletes them.
This passage is the stunning conclusion to one of the most dramatic confrontations in the Old Testament. It is the final paragraph in a chapter filled with arrogant threats and faithful prayers. And in these three short verses, we see the absolute sovereignty of God demonstrated in three ways: a silent execution, a pathetic retreat, and an ironic end. God is not a character in our story. We are all characters in His. And He is the one who writes the final scene.
The Text
Then the angel of Yahweh went out and struck 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians. And the men arose early in the morning, and behold, all of them were dead bodies.
So Sennacherib king of Assyria set out and returned home and lived at Nineveh.
Now it happened that as he was worshiping in the house of Nisroch his god, Adrammelech and Sharezer his sons struck him down with the sword; and they escaped into the land of Ararat. And Esarhaddon his son became king in his place.
(Isaiah 37:36-38 LSB)
The Silent Execution (v. 36)
The first thing we must notice is the sheer, quiet efficiency of God's judgment.
"Then the angel of Yahweh went out and struck 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians. And the men arose early in the morning, and behold, all of them were dead bodies." (Isaiah 37:36)
There was no battle. There were no trumpets, no clashing of swords, no cries of the wounded. The Assyrian army, the most feared military machine on the planet, went to sleep full of pride and woke up full of corpses. The deliverance of Jerusalem happened while the people of Jerusalem were sleeping. God fought for them in the dark, without their help. This is a fundamental principle of salvation. God saves His people. His people do not save themselves.
And who is the agent of this destruction? It is "the angel of Yahweh." We must be very clear about who this is. Throughout the Old Testament, the Angel of the Lord is no mere created angel. This is a theophany, a pre-incarnate appearance of the second person of the Trinity, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. This is the same Angel who met with Abraham, who wrestled with Jacob, who stood before Joshua with a drawn sword as the Captain of the Lord's hosts. When the Rabshakeh blasphemed Yahweh, he was blaspheming the Son of God. And here, the Son of God Himself goes out to answer the blasphemy.
He did not bring an army with Him. He went alone. One hundred and eighty-five thousand soldiers, the elite of the Assyrian war machine, were simply turned off. God had said through Isaiah, "I will defend this city to save it for My own sake and for My servant David's sake" (v. 35). This was not about Hezekiah's righteousness. It was about God's name and God's promises. The world had challenged God's honor, and God answered. The verb "struck" is the same one used for the final plague in Egypt, when the Lord struck down the firstborn. This is a covenantal judgment. It is a divine act of war against those who set themselves against His people and His name.
The scene in the morning is stark. "Behold, all of them were dead bodies." The survivors, a terrified remnant, woke up not to the sounds of a military camp preparing for its final assault, but to a vast, silent graveyard. The pride of Assyria was broken in a single night, by a single Person, without a single human hand being raised. This is how God deals with the proud. He lets them boast, He lets them threaten, and then, when He is ready, He quietly removes them from the board.
The Pathetic Retreat (v. 37)
The consequence for the king is a humiliating and anticlimactic retreat.
"So Sennacherib king of Assyria set out and returned home and lived at Nineveh." (Isaiah 37:37)
This is stated with deliberate, almost contemptuous simplicity. The great conqueror, the man who made the world tremble, just packs up and goes home. He had come with fire and fury, with threats of total annihilation. He leaves in shame and silence. He doesn't issue a statement. He doesn't try to spin the defeat. He just slinks away. His own historical records, of course, try to put a brave face on it. The Taylor Prism, an Assyrian account of this campaign, boasts of all the cities he conquered and how he shut Hezekiah up in Jerusalem. But there is a glaring omission. He never claims to have captured the city. The record just... stops. The Bible tells us why. His army was gone.
Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. Sennacherib was the embodiment of a haughty spirit. He believed his own press. He thought he was the master of history. But God had already told him, through Isaiah, what he actually was. "Do you not know? Or have you not heard?... I planted you, yes, I laid your foundation... Shall the axe boast against him who chops with it? Or shall the saw magnify itself against him who wields it?" (Isaiah 37:26-27, 10:15). Sennacherib was nothing but an axe in God's hand, and when God was done chopping, He set the axe aside.
Sennacherib "lived at Nineveh." He went back to his capital and tried to resume a normal life. But you cannot blaspheme the living God and then just go on with your life. You cannot challenge the Creator of the universe and expect the story to just end there. God is not finished with him. The judgment that began in the fields outside Jerusalem will follow him all the way home.
The Ironic End (v. 38)
The final verse is a masterpiece of divine, poetic justice.
"Now it happened that as he was worshiping in the house of Nisroch his god, Adrammelech and Sharezer his sons struck him down with the sword; and they escaped into the land of Ararat. And Esarhaddon his son became king in his place." (Isaiah 37:38)
Think about the setting. Sennacherib is in the temple of his god, Nisroch. This is the very place where he should feel most secure. He is appealing to his source of power. The Rabshakeh had taunted Hezekiah, asking, "Has any of the gods of the nations delivered his land from the hand of the king of Assyria?" (Isaiah 36:18). The implicit answer was no, and the clear assumption was that Nisroch was stronger than Yahweh. Now, the question is turned back on Sennacherib. Can your god deliver you? Can he deliver you from your own sons, in his own house?
The answer is a bloody negative. His god is deaf, dumb, and blind. It is a block of wood or stone. As the psalmist says, "Those who make them become like them" (Psalm 115:8). Sennacherib had trusted in a blind idol, and so he became blind to the conspiracy in his own family. He trusted in a deaf idol, and so he did not hear the footsteps of his assassins. He trusted in a powerless idol, and so that idol could do nothing as his own sons cut him down.
The irony is suffocating. The man who blasphemed the living God, who is a consuming fire, is killed by his own flesh and blood while bowing to a dead god. He is killed in the one place his worldview told him he was safe. And who kills him? Not a foreign enemy, but his own sons. The chaos and violence that defined his empire turned inward and consumed him. He who lived by the sword, died by the sword. This is not an accident of history. This is the calculated judgment of God. God had promised, "I will cause him to fall by the sword in his own land" (Isaiah 37:7). And so it happened, precisely as God had decreed.
Conclusion: The Unblinking Sovereignty of God
This story is not in the Bible simply to give us a bit of historical trivia about the Assyrian empire. It is here to teach us something fundamental about the nature of God and the nature of reality. God is absolutely, meticulously sovereign over all the affairs of men. The proudest kings and the mightiest empires are nothing more than tools in His hands, to be used for His purposes and discarded at His pleasure.
The blasphemies of men do not threaten God; they simply seal their own doom. The plans of the wicked do not frustrate God; they fulfill His eternal decree. Sennacherib thought he was writing his own story of conquest, but he was merely playing a part in God's great story of redemption. His pride, his blasphemy, and his downfall all served to magnify the name of Yahweh and to preserve the line of David, through whom the true King, the Lord Jesus, would come.
And the deliverance here is a type, a foreshadowing, of a much greater deliverance. We, like Jerusalem, were besieged by an enemy we could not defeat. We were trapped by sin, death, and the devil. We were helpless. But God sent a deliverer, the Angel of the Lord, Jesus Christ. And on a dark night outside the city, on a hill called Golgotha, He fought for us. He absorbed the wrath of God that we deserved. He died, and in His resurrection, He broke the power of our great enemy. He did this for His own name's sake, and for the sake of His promises.
Our salvation, like Jerusalem's, was accomplished for us while we were sleeping, while we were dead in our trespasses and sins. It was a unilateral act of sovereign grace. Therefore, we must never trust in the loud boasts of the world's Sennacheribs. We must never fear their threats. They are temporary. Their gods are fake. Their end is destruction. Our God is the living God. He is the one who finishes the story. And in the end, every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.