VICTORY THROUGH REPENTANCE 

Dr. W. A. Criswell 

2 Kings 18-19

2-24-91    10:50 a.m.

On radio and on television you are now part of our dear and precious First Baptist Church in Dallas.  This is the pastor bringing the message.  It is different from the one that has been announced and is published.  Last night late, I learned of the ground attack that is now launched against Iraq, and my spirit was restless in me.  I could not find quiet in my heart.  So at midnight I prepared this sermon from 2 Kings chapters 18 and19.

The first avowal—and as I read, I am going to change the name of the country from its ancient delineation to its modern nomenclature.  In ancient times it was called Assyria; today it is called Iraq.  And I am going to read the Bible and use the name of the country as it is called today.  The first avowal: that war is a judgment of Almighty God, 2 Kings 18:9:

And it came to pass in the fourth year of King Hezekiah, which was the seventh year of Hoshea the son of Elah king of Israel, that Shalmaneser king of Iraq came up against Samaria, and besieged it.

And at the end of three years they took it: even in the sixth year of Hezekiah, the ninth year of Hoshea king of Israel, Samaria was taken.

And the king of Iraq did carry away Israel unto Iraq. . .

Because they obeyed not the voice of the Lord their God, but transgressed His covenant, and all that Moses the servant of the Lord commanded, and would not hear them, nor do them.

[2 Kings 18:9-12]

And the kingdom of Samaria was destroyed forever by the king of Iraq, Shalmaneser.  War is a judgment of Almighty God [2 Kings 1:9].  There is a sovereignty that guides in the destinies of men and of nations, above all of the legislative processes and all of the preparations militarily that we make in national life.  War is a judgment of Almighty God.

I stood in Berlin after the Second World War, looked at the vast illimitable desolation, stood at the bunker where Hitler had committed suicide; a judgment of Almighty God.  And through the centuries of human history, that sovereign power and might of the Almighty God is evident in human life, in human destiny, and in human affairs.

One of the heaviest hearts I ever felt in all of my life: I was in Istanbul and watched them as they prepared for the five hundredth anniversary of the destruction of that city and the taking of that metropolis by the Mohammedan Turks.  And as I walked through the area of the Golden Horn and through the most famous church in Christendom, St. Sophia, which is now a Mohammedan mosque, I relived the day of the destruction of that great bastion of the Christian faith.  When the Turks stormed the gate of the city, the Roman emperor, rather than see it, flung himself into the battle and perished.

And the same scene, you who have visited the seven churches of Asia, Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea [Revelation 2:1-3:22], the same loss to the Christian faith is evident.  Having found themselves untrue to the call of God, they fell prey to the judgment of the Almighty.

War is a judgment of God.  I flew over Vietnam during our conflict and confrontation there and looked down on it from the sky.  For the first time in American history, we felt the sting and the shame of defeat and failure.  How could such a  providence ever overcome and overwhelm our beloved America?

They will say in Washington, in the White House, “Let us pray.”  They will say in the Congress of the United States, “Let us pray.”  They will say in our state legislatures and in our corporate life, “Let us pray.”  But if they prayed in the schools of America, if our children prayed, it would be against the law.  War is a judgment of Almighty God.  And our own nation does not find refuge from that same mighty and omnipotent hand.  We live under the aegis of God.

The second avowal: victory is a gift from heaven.  Victory comes from the same almighty hand of God; 2 Kings 19:

It came to pass, when King Hezekiah heard it, the words of Rabshakeh, the spokesman for Sennacherib the king of Iraq, that he rent his clothes, covered himself with sackcloth, went into the house of the Lord.

And he sent Eliakim, which was over the household, and Shebna the scribe, and the elders of the priests, covered with sackcloth, to the prophet Isaiah the son of Amoz.

And they said unto him, Thus saith Hezekiah, This day is a day of trouble, and of rebuke, and blasphemy: for the children have come to the birth, and there is not strength to bring forth.

It may be the Lord thy God will hear all the words of Rabshakeh, whom the king of Iraq his master has sent to reproach the living God; and will reprove the words which the Lord thy God hath heard: wherefore lift up thy prayer for the remnant that are left.

So the servants of the king Hezekiah came to Isaiah.

And the prophet Isaiah said unto them, Thus shall you say to your master, Thus saith the Lord, Be not afraid of the words which thou hast heard, with which the servants of the king of Iraq have blasphemed Me.

Behold, I will send a blast upon him, he shall hear a rumor, shall return to his own land; and I will cause him to fall by the sword in his own land.

[2 Kings 19:1-7]

Victory is an intervention of heaven; it is a gift from God.  Isn’t that an unusual thing?  “I will send a blast upon him” [2 Kings 19:7], the imponderables of war.  The Spanish Armada came to the English Channel to destroy the country from whence my forefathers came to America.  And God looked down upon that impregnable fleet from the mighty kingdom of Spain, and the Lord God sent a wind and a tempest and a hurricane and blew it away and spared and saved England, my country of my forefathers.  God did it!

In the days of Napoleon Bonaparte in Waterloo—and I walked over that battlefield and looked at it.  Unknown to Napoleon and to his army, there was a deep, deep, wide road; and when Napoleon’s forces attacked, unknown to them, they faced the depth of that road, and his armies poured into it.  And Marshal Ney, the leader of his forces, was drunk with wine.  And Waterloo that day was lost to the victorious leader of our English forces; the intervention of God!

General Rommel of Hitler’s army, taking all of North Africa and marching close and inside of the great city of Alexandria, found his water supply turned to salt and the army perished in defeat; the intervention of God!

That occasion, the famous poem by Rudyard Kipling, England celebrating the Diamond Jubilee of Victoria, queen for sixty years.  At that time the British Empire embraced the entire globe.  The sun never set upon the strength and might and power of the British.  And after the glory of that solid year of celebrating the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, when it was done and all of those representatives of the nations of the world turned homeward, he wrote his poem:

God of our fathers, known of old,

Lord of our far-flung battle-line,

Beneath whose awful Hand we hold

Dominion over palm and pine—

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies;

The Captains and the Kings depart:

Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,

An humble and a contrite heart.

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Far-call’d our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Lord God, Judge of the Nations, be with us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose

Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,

Such boastings as the Iraqi use,

Or lesser breeds without the Law—

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

[adapted from “Recessional,” by Rudyard Kipling, June 22, 1897]

Our destiny lies in the hands of the omnipotent God.

A third avowal: our victory comes in sackcloth and in ashes.  It comes in repentance and in devotion to God.  The king of Iraq sent Hezekiah a letter, 2 Kings 19:14:

Hezekiah received the letter at the hand of the messengers, and he took it: and went up in the house of the Lord, and spread it before God.

And Hezekiah prayed before the Lord, and said, O Lord God of Israel, who dwellest between the cherubim, Thou art God, even Thou alone. . .

Lord, bow down Thine ear, and hear: open, Lord, Thine eyes, and see: hear the words of Sennacherib, the king of Iraq, sent to reproach the living God.

O God, of a truth, the kings of Iraq have destroyed the nations and their lands.

[2 Kings 19:14-17]

Isn’t that the Lord’s truth?  I feel so sorry for those people of Kuwait.  I don’t know how to voice it.  They have cast their gods into the fire, but they weren’t any gods; they were the gods of men.

Therefore, O Lord our God, I beseech Thee, save Thou us out of his hand, that all of the kingdoms of the earth may know that Thou art the Lord God, even Thou only.

[2 Kings 19:19]

And then God’s answer: Hezekiah rent his clothes, covered himself with sackcloth, went into the house of the Lord, sent Eliakim and Shebna and the elders covered with sackcloth [2 Kings 19:1-2].

Then Isaiah—

verse 20:

the son of Amoz sent to Hezekiah, saying, Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, That which thou hast prayed for Me against Sennacherib the king of Iraq I have heard.

And this is the word that the Lord [hath spoken concerning him: The virgin], the daughter of Zion [hath] despised him. . .

[2 Kings 19:20-21]

And there follows after, down to this twenty-eighth verse:

Because thy rage against Me and thy tumult is come unto Mine ears, therefore I will put My hook in his nose, and My bridle in his lips, and I will turn him back by the way by which he came.

[2 Kings 19:28]

Verse 32:

Thus saith the Lord concerning the king of Iraq, He shall not come into this city, not even shoot an arrow. . .

By the way that he came, by the same shall he return, He will not come into this city. . .

For I will defend it to save it. . .

And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord went out, and smote in the camp of the Iraqi a hundred fourscore and five thousand, one hundred eighty-five thousand soldiers: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.

So Sennacherib the king of Iraq departed and went and returned to his capital in Nineveh, in Baghdad.

And it came to pass, as he was worshiping in the house of his god, that his two sons smote him with a sword:  and he died.

[2 Kings 19: 32-37]

Victory through sackcloth and repentance.

Why are we involved in this war?  And why would I be so much in prayer in behalf of the armed forces of our wonderful country?  Here’s one reason: as you know, I am pro-Israel.

Day and night, beginning and ending, I am pro-Jewish.  That’s where I got this Book.  It came from them.  That’s where I was introduced to my Savior, He came from them.  We could never repay our debt to Israel.  And if this Iraqi, Saddam Hussein, wins any war in the Middle East, Israel will be destroyed.  There will be no more Israel.  The first thing that Hussein will do will be to drive Israel into the sea.  Millions of those Jews, as under Hitler, six million of them were slain, so under this king of Iraq, there will be millions of Jews, every Jew in Palestine will be slain.  There will be no more Israel.

They speak of the Palestinian question.  Why is there a Palestinian question? Sweet people, right after the Second World War, I was all over Western Europe.  And in Munich, where the bombs had destroyed the Baptist church of that great city, I preached Sunday night in the basement, covered over temporarily with sheets of wood and metal, whatever they could find.  Four languages, it had to be interpreted in.  A ten-minute sermon, forty minutes long—four languages, as I preached to those people, those refugees.  Those refugees were in Western Europe by the hundreds and the hundreds of thousands!  And what did Western Europe do?  Western Europe opened their factories to them, opened their cities to them, opened their country to them, opened their villages to them, assimilated them, there was never a problem with the refugees from the Second World War.

Why do you have a problem with the Palestinian refugees?  In those days after the War of 1948, when Israel was created, I saw those Palestinian refugees living in the deserts, between rocks.  And from one rock to the other, there would be a black goat-haired cloth and the family live between.

What is the matter with the Arab nations?  They cover that part of creation.  All they had to do was to open their arms to their fellow Arabs and receive them:  “Come, here’s a place to live here.  Come, there’s a place to work here.  Come, there is a place to be cared for here.”  Instead, the Arabs have kept them out there.  And the United Nations and the United States have fed them for the decades since.  That’s why you have a Palestinian problem.  I cannot believe the hardness of heart that would look upon their brothers and let them die in the desert.  There’s a Palestinian problem.  That’s it.

And all of the things that concern this Middle East problem; great God in heaven, how we need Thy loving presence and Thy loving care and Thy precious remembrance. And God will be with us, and the Lord will stand by us, if we turn to Him for that ultimate and final answer.

And the Lord God said to me,

“These things shall be, these things shall be.

Nor help shall come from the scarlet skies

Till My people rise!

Till My people rise, My hand is weak;

I cannot speak, till My people speak;

When men are dumb, My voice is dumb—

I cannot come, until My people come.

 …

Far over the flaming earth and sea …

The cry of My people must come to Me.

Not till their spirit break the curse,

May I claim My own in the universe …

But if My people rise, if My people rise,

I will answer them from the swarming skies.”

[excerpts from “God Prays” by Angela Morgan, 1918]

Our ultimate answer and hope lies in a prayer-answering God who looks down upon His people who cry unto Him.

General Marshall spoke of the army, so many years the chief of staff: “It is spiritual morale,” he says, “that wins the victory.  That type of spiritual morale that can only come out of the religious nature of the soldier who knows God and has the spirit of religious fervor in his soul.  I count on that type of man and on that kind of an army, one that believes in the Lord and one that looks to God for our victory.”

So let’s ask the Lord for His intervention and the baring of His strong arm to save; let’s ask Him.  You men up here on the platform, would you kneel?  And you deacons there, would you kneel?  Choir, I don’t know whether you can or not, but try, can you kneel?  All the members of the choir, orchestra, you have your instruments, see if you can kneel with your instruments.  And dear people who fill this sanctuary, wherever you are, let’s kneel.  Let’s kneel.  Let’s kneel.

Dear Lord God in heaven, at this very moment, our men and our women in the Middle East are facing death, all because of this insane madman who seeks to destroy Israel and who curses our beloved America.

O God, spare the lives of those men and women over there.  They face such terrible confrontations: land mines, artillery, the savagery of personal combat.  O God, intervene; make this battle short, please God.  And may the day soon come and the hour quickly arrive when the announcement is made to the people of America and to the whole world, “The battle is won, the day of war is over and we can go home.”  And bless the future in Thy gracious hands, both for Israel, for the Arab nations, and above us, dear God, for us here in our beloved homeland.  Humbly we pray, in Thy saving and intervening name, amen.