Hezekiah had been a good king. It might not have been so. His father had been the evil king, Ahaz, and Hezekiah might easily have continued in that troubled man’s ways. He didn’t, though, and this is what made those evil words on that horrible day even more astonishing and vile.
It had all begun well. Hezekiah became king when he was twenty-five. He immediately got to the business of righteous reform. He abolished idolatry, destroying the high places of pagan religion and restoring righteous worship to the temple in Jerusalem. Then, he reinstated the celebration of the Passover and even graciously urged distant tribes of the faithful to join in. He also defeated the ever-contentious Philistines, ending their reign, we are told, “as far as Gaza and its territory” (2 Kgs. 18:8).
Hezekiah might have ranked among the greatest of Israel’s kings. But then he committed an act of sheer stupidity. He entertained emissaries from a foreign king, naively showing them all his treasures, all the great riches of the kingdom. He did not realize what he had done. Isaiah the prophet did, though, and pronounced a devastating prophecy, among the worst any king had ever received. Isaiah said that everything Hezekiah ruled over would be carried away to the land of his enemies. Nothing would be left. The king’s sons would become eunuchs in the palaces of a pagan king; his daughters would become playthings of foreign men. So complete would the destruction of God’s people be.
We might wish that Hezekiah had collapsed in grief upon hearing Isaiah’s words, wailing out his anguish and crying out to God for mercy. We might wish that he had declared a fast throughout the land to turn the hand of God from this horrific fate.
It didn’t happen that way.
Instead, Hezekiah told Isaiah, “The word of the Lord you have spoken is good…For he thought, ‘Why not, if there will be peace and security in my days?’” (2 Kgs. 20:19)
Think of it. Everything entrusted to Hezekiah would be destroyed. Even his own children would become slaves in the palaces of foreign kings. But Hezekiah seems unfazed. He will have “peace and security” in his own lifetime, he thinks.
These are the most unmanly words in all of scripture.
Men, by their God-given nature and calling, are meant to be the builders and the guardians of a legacy they leave after they are gone.
Why? It is because men, by their God-given nature and calling, are meant to be the builders and the guardians of a legacy they leave after they are gone. They are not meant to focus on their lifetimes alone, but on how they propel future generations forward in the purposes of God, toward their great destiny.
So important is this aspect of manhood in the purposes of God that an entire Psalm is devoted to celebrating how men prepare their children for their ordained future. In Psalm 127, we are told that children are a heritage from the Lord, a reward from him. These children are like arrows in the hands of a mighty warrior. A man should hope that his quiver will be full of them. This is because men are meant to be mighty warriors who prepare their children to contend with their enemies in the gates.
Even male psychology confirms this. When aptitude tests are done with both men and women, women are found to be superior to men in all areas (sorry, men!)—except for two. Those two are abstract thought and aggression. Christians might call this dominion. Men are gifted to envision a future and passionately pursue it. Yet this doesn’t mean only a future during their own lifetimes, but rather the future of generations beyond their own. This is simply how God has designed the male soul.
Since our generation is often walking in the ways of Hezekiah rather than the ways of God, most men live for their own pleasure and the comforts of their time, taking little thought for what will come after them. Only late in life do many of these men begin to realize that nothing they have done will survive them. Nothing they have built will live on to the glory of God in an age not their own. They die with regrets, then, and with a haunting sense that they have missed much of their God-ordained purpose on earth.
Men, we must break the spirit of Hezekiah from our lives. We must be men. We must be mighty warriors, preparing the next generation to rise to their best in God.
This obligation to a people yet to come, this vision of legacy, is a vital part of noble manhood. No man is complete without it, and because men have largely abandoned this calling, many of the ills of our times have become torturous strongholds. Think of it. Abortion is the result of one generation refusing to preserve the life of the next. Massive debt is one generation enjoying itself at the expense of the next. Even foolish politics is a generation refusing to be wise caretakers of the well-being of the next. Men abandoning their calling to leave a righteous legacy is a curse in our time and a blight on times to come.
Men, we must break the spirit of Hezekiah from our lives. We must be men. We must be mighty warriors, preparing the next generation to rise to their best in God. This is what we were made for. Our society is waiting for men like this. So are the children—the arrows of God—we are meant to propel into the battles of their day.
God grant us men like this.
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