In Second Kings, chapter twenty, verse seventeen, the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prediction of Judah’s exile unto Babylon was about one hundred and fifteen years later, when Nebuchadnezzar King of Babylon, destroyed Jerusalem, stripped the land and temple of all their riches and took the people of Judah away as captives to his nation, as in chapter twenty-four, verses ten through thirteen, Second Chronicles thirty-three, verse eleven, and Daniel one, verses one to three, respectively.
Isaiah announced to him the word of the Lord that all his treasures would one day be going to Babel, and some even of his sons would serve as chamberlains in the palace of the king of Babel. The sin of vanity was to be punished by the carrying away of that of which his heart was proud. Isaiah did not go to Hezekiah by his impulse but by the direction of God. His inquiries: “What have these men said, and whence do they come to thee?” They intended to lead the king to give expression to the thoughts of his heart. In the answer, “From a distant land have they come, from Babel,” his vanity at the great honor that he received payment comes clearly to light.
It is there said that Divine wrath fell upon Hezekiah because of the conceit of his heart. The Babylonian embassy was an occasion in which God made proof of his inward tendencies. The awakening of self-confidence and vanity in Hezekiah’s heart as he displayed all his resources to the envoys and heard their political, and perhaps hyperbolical, expressions of wonder and delight, and himself, it may be, realized for the first time the full extent of his prosperity. But it was not only the king’s vanity that displeased a prophet who had always consistently denounced foreign alliances as betokening deviation from absolute trust in Jehovah. And a more terrible irony than that which animates the oracle before us. Thy friends, he cries, will prove robbers, and thine allies will become thy conquerors.