The Grammar of Time Text: Isaiah 38:7-8
Introduction: A Universe with a King
We live in an age that is terrified of miracles. Our modern, secular mind has built for itself a neat, tidy, and utterly sterile little box called "the laws of nature." Within this box, everything is predictable, measurable, and, most importantly, manageable. The sun rises and sets with mathematical precision. The planets follow their prescribed courses. The shadow moves across the sundial, and no one may turn it back. This is the universe as our materialist friends imagine it to be: a closed system, a great cosmic machine humming along, with no room for a divine foot in the door. They have constructed a worldview that has successfully evicted the landlord, and they are quite pleased with themselves for it.
But the problem with this little box is that it is a fiction. It is a story men tell themselves to keep the fear of God at bay. They have mistaken the regularities of God's sovereign rule for the rule itself. They have mistaken the sheet music for the composer. They observe God's consistent governance of His world, day in and day out, and they call these patterns "laws." Then, in an act of breathtaking rebellion, they declare that the Composer is now bound by His own sheet music. He who wrote the laws is now subject to them.
Into this tidy, godless box, a passage like Isaiah 38 comes like a wrecking ball. Here, the God who established the celestial mechanics for His own glory reaches down and turns the clock back. He does not ask permission from the astronomers. He does not consult the physicists. He is not constrained by the very regularities He Himself put in place for our benefit. This is a story about a king, Hezekiah, who is granted a sign. But it is more than that. It is a story about the King, Yahweh, who is Lord of time, space, and matter. It is a direct assault on the flimsy pretensions of naturalism. It is a reminder that the universe is not a closed system; it is an open book, and God is its author. He can write whatever He pleases.
This miracle is not a random display of divine muscle. It is a sign, which means it points to something. It is a word from God, spoken not in Hebrew, but in the language of physics and astronomy. It is a promise attached to a physical event, designed to anchor a man's wavering faith to the bedrock of God's absolute sovereignty. And for us, it is a reminder that the God who can rewind the sun is the same God who can rewind a life, who can reverse the sentence of death, and who has given us the ultimate sign in the resurrection of His Son.
The Text
"Now this shall be the sign to you from Yahweh, that Yahweh will do this word that He has spoken: Behold, I will cause the shadow on the stairway, which has gone down with the sun on the stairway of Ahaz, to go back ten steps." So the sun’s shadow went back ten steps on the stairway on which it had gone down.
(Isaiah 38:7-8 LSB)
The Necessity of a Sign (v. 7)
We begin with the Lord's declaration in verse 7:
"Now this shall be the sign to you from Yahweh, that Yahweh will do this word that He has spoken:" (Isaiah 38:7)
Hezekiah has been at death's door. He has wept bitterly, prayed fervently, and God has heard him. God has promised to add fifteen years to his life and to deliver him from the king of Assyria. But faith, while it is a gift from God, is also a muscle that grows through exercise. God knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust. And so, in His grace, He condescends to give Hezekiah a tangible anchor for his faith. He offers a sign.
A sign in Scripture is a miracle that serves as a credential. It is a visible, physical attestation to the truth of an invisible, spiritual promise. God is essentially saying, "You can trust My word about the future, and to prove it, I will now do something in the present that only I can do." This is the pattern throughout the Bible. Moses' signs before Pharaoh, Elijah's fire on Mount Carmel, and, supremely, the signs and wonders performed by Jesus all served to authenticate the word being spoken. They were God's signature on His own promises.
Notice the source: "the sign to you from Yahweh." This is not a pagan omen to be interpreted by soothsayers. This is not a coincidence that a clever priest can spin. This is a direct, personal, and intentional act from the covenant God of Israel. The sign is not the point; the sign points to the trustworthiness of the one who gives it. Our faith is not in signs and wonders; our faith is in the God who performs them. The sign is the scaffolding; the promise is the building.
This is a profound rebuke to the kind of flimsy faith that is so common today, a faith that wants to spiritualize everything and detach God's promises from the real, physical world. The God of the Bible is not a God of abstract principles. He is the God of dirt, and stars, and sundials, and sickbeds. He anchors His promises in history, in space, and in time. He is not afraid to put His reputation on the line in the material world He made and governs.
The Unthinkable Reversal (v. 8)
The nature of the sign is then specified in verse 8, and it is a marvel of divine audacity.
"Behold, I will cause the shadow on the stairway, which has gone down with the sun on the stairway of Ahaz, to go back ten steps." So the sun’s shadow went back ten steps on the stairway on which it had gone down." (Isaiah 38:8)
The sundial, or stairway of Ahaz, was likely an external structure with steps that allowed the time to be measured by the progression of a shadow. It was a symbol of order, predictability, and the relentless forward march of time. Every day, without fail, the shadow would creep down the steps, marking the passing hours. It was as reliable as anything in the natural world. And this is precisely what God chooses to disrupt.
He says, "I will cause the shadow...to go back ten steps." Think about what this means. This is not a parlor trick. For the shadow to reverse course, either the earth's rotation must be reversed, or the sun itself must be moved, or the light from the sun must be miraculously refracted in a way that defies all known optical principles. The text simply says, "So the sun's shadow went back." The biblical author is not interested in giving us a scientific lecture on the mechanics of the miracle. He is interested in the Theologian behind the mechanics. The how is irrelevant; the Who is everything.
This is a direct, polemical strike against the sun worship that was rampant in the ancient world, and which has its modern counterpart in the worship of "nature" and its inviolable laws. God is demonstrating that the sun is His creature. It is His lamp. He hung it in the sky, and He can make it do as He pleases. The sun does not have a vote. The laws of physics are not a constitution that binds the Almighty; they are a description of how He normally chooses to run His universe. But He is the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary of reality. He can issue a stay, grant a pardon, or, as in this case, turn back the clock at His good pleasure.
There is also a beautiful irony here. This sign is performed on the sundial of Ahaz. Ahaz was Hezekiah's wicked father, a man who had trusted in foreign alliances and pagan gods rather than in Yahweh. He was the very picture of faithlessness. Now, on the very instrument that bore his name, a monument to the predictable, godless world he tried to build, God performs a sign of His covenant faithfulness to Ahaz's son. God redeems the time, quite literally, on the instrument of the faithless. It is a picture of grace, where the failures of one generation become the backdrop for the display of God's miraculous power in the next.
The Shadow of the Cross
Every sign in the Old Testament is a signpost pointing down the road of redemptive history. They are all whispers and echoes of the ultimate sign that was to come. They are all shadows, and the substance is Christ. What, then, does this strange miracle of the reversed shadow signify for us?
First, it signifies that with God, the irreversible is reversible. Hezekiah was a dead man walking. The shadow of death was moving steadily down the steps of his life. The diagnosis was terminal; the prognosis was settled. By all the laws of nature and medicine, his time was up. But God intervened and turned back the shadow. This is the Gospel. We were all dead in our trespasses and sins. The sentence had been passed. The shadow of eternal death was upon us, and the clock was ticking down. But on the cross, God did the unthinkable. He reversed the irreversible. Jesus Christ, by His death, took the full, crushing weight of that forward-marching judgment. And in His resurrection, He turned back the shadow of death forever.
The ultimate sign given to us is not a shadow on a stairway, but an empty tomb. When the religious leaders asked Jesus for a sign, He told them that no sign would be given to that wicked generation except the sign of the prophet Jonah. "For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40). The resurrection is God's final, unanswerable sign. It is the credential that authenticates all of Jesus' claims. It is God the Father turning back the shadow of death from His Son, and in Him, from all who believe.
Second, this miracle demonstrates that God's kingdom operates on a different timeline than the world's. The world says you are born, you live, you decline, you die. It is a one-way street. The sundial of Ahaz always moves down. But the kingdom of God breaks into that timeline with the power of resurrection life. In Christ, the old has gone, the new has come. He does not just patch up the old life; He gives a new one. He doesn't just pause the process of decay; He reverses it. He is making all things new.
The God who made the sun's shadow retreat is the God who promises to restore our wasted years. He is the God who takes the wreckage of our sinful past, the legacy of our own faithless fathers like Ahaz, and makes it the stage for His grace. He is the sovereign Lord of time. He holds our days in His hands. He is not a prisoner of the past, and neither are we, if we are in Christ. He can turn back the shadow. He has turned it back, at Calvary. And because He has, we can face the future not with the dread of an unstoppable clock, but with the joyful confidence that our times are in His hand.