"Hit the Wall... Again!"

Isaiah 37.32 NIV

“For out of Jerusalem will come a remnant, and out of Mount Zion a band of survivors. The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this.”

For several years, Judah and its capital city Jerusalem were under attack by Sennacherib king of Assyria. The siege occurred about twenty years after Judah’s northern neighbor, Israel, was wiped out by Assyrian forces. Hezekiah, the king of Judah, sought prophetic help from God’s spokesman, Isaiah. Many Judeans were already killed or deported to Assyria. 

Sennacherib’s general, Rabshakeh, taunted the soldiers defending Jerusalem at the city wall. He claimed they were “doomed to eat their own dung and drink their own urine” (Isaiah 36.12). Rabshakeh was a military bully with the armed might to back up his threats. Morale was way down and Judah’s end seemed very near. Isaiah’s words offered promise and hope to the frightened Judeans:

“For out of Jerusalem will come a remnant, and out of Mount Zion
a band of survivors. The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this.”

Not every Jew would survive the siege. But a “remnant” would. A “band of survivors” would eventually break free from Sennacherib’s strangle hold. They would bust through the wall and liberate themselves. Survivors would go forth from Jerusalem, regain their land, and again establish control of the middle east.

The great Protestant Reformer of the sixteenth century, John Calvin, described the prophetic promise in his commentary on the book of Isaiah…

“He [the prophet Isaiah] alludes to the siege by which a small number of people, who had been left in the city, were shut up as in a prison and reduced to very great straits; he says that they shall now go out, and that the whole country shall be open to them, and that they shall be at liberty to move wherever they please without fear. The going forth is thus contrasted with the narrow limits within which the trembling Jews had been forced by the dread of enemies to confine themselves.”[1]

Are you “shut up in a prison and reduced to very great straits,” “forced by the dread of enemies to confine” yourself to very “narrow limits?” Break through your prison walls! Isaiah’s prophetic word is alive and still carries depth and meaning twenty-seven hundred years after they were first uttered to Hezekiah. 

Have you ‘hit the wall’ more than once? Hit it again and break through to achieve Jesus’ plan for your life. Trust His word... “The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this.”
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[1] Isaiah 37.32, Calvin’s Commentaries, 22 Volume set originally printed by the Calvin Translational Society, Edinburgh, Scotland, May 1753.

The sculpture above is mounted on a wall in Montmarte district in the north of Paris, France. It represents Monsieur Dutilleul, the main character from the short story Le Passe-Muraille (The Passer through Walls) Marcel Aymé.