Can God be Trusted in the Darkest Situation?

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Isaiah 36

In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah’s reign, King Sennacherib of Assyria marched up against all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them.
The king of Assyria sent his chief adviser from Lachish to King Hezekiah in Jerusalem, along with a large army.

So when they came, it was really a battle between their god, an evil spirit, and the true God.
- The Assyrian god Nisroch was depicted as an eagle-headed deity with wings and exaggerated muscles.
- In this sculptured relief from Nineveh he is sprinkling the sacred tree with water. He is holding a water vessel in his left hand and a fir cone (sponge) in his right.
Do you ever feel that it is not fair that you worship the true God, yet bad things happen to you?
- Imagine how Hezekiah felt?
- The horror and terror
- Was God really going to come through for him?
- How come the Assyrians did so well, even though they served an evil spirit?
Do you ever ask “Does God care about me?”
- Is he a father I can trust?
- This is how he must have felt
- If God didn’t answer, then he would certainly face the most excruciating death they could dream up for him
Can you feel the pressure on him?

This beautifully preserved six-sided hexagonal prism of baked clay, commonly known as the Taylor Prism, was discovered among the ruins of Nineveh, the ancient capital of the Assyrian Empire.
It contains the victories of Sennacherib himself, the Assyrian king who had besieged Jerusalem in 701 BC during the reign of king Hezekiah, it never mentions any defeats.
On the prism Sennacherib boasts that he shut up “Hezekiah the Judahite” within Jerusalem his own royal city “like a caged bird.”
- But he doesn’t explain why he failed with his huge army to take a little city
- Or why he never ever attacked again
Later God utterly destroyed the empire
- So complete was the destruction of the Assyrian capital that two centuries later Xenophon and his Greek mercenary army of 10,000 men passed by the ruins of Nineveh unaware of what they were passing. Not a single vestige of Assyrian power remained. A people who had lived on the Tigris for more than 2,000 years had literally disappeared from the face of the earth (ibid p.137)
- That’s what their god did for them!
Do you have any challenges in your life today?
They don’t have to be as bad as Hezekiah’s !
- But they may seem as bad
Do you feel that the Devil is mocking you?
- Is God a good father?
- I want to challenge you to lay it before the Lord the way he did
Do you want this God on your side, or are you happy to stand before the dark forces of the universe alone?
- They are real forces!
If anyone wants prayer...