In Second Kings, chapter eighteen, verse seven, at this time in Judah’s history, the southern kingdom was required to pay an annual tribute. Hezekiah identified with the international conspiracy against Assyria and refused to pay any more money. The result of this attempt at independence is from chapter eighteen, verse thirteen through chapter nineteen, verse thirty-seven.
Hezekiah adhered to God and His service, and God was with him. Having the presence of God with him, he had success in all his enterprises, his wars, his buildings, and especially his reformation, in which the work carried on with less difficulty than he could have expected. Therefore, we have in him an instructive and encouraging example, teaching us that they who do the work of God with an eye to His glory and confidence in his strength may expect to prosper in it: for great is the truth, and will prevail. Hezekiah threw off that yoke of subjection to him to which his father had basely submitted and re-assumed that full and independent sovereignty that God had settled in the house of David. The response, though here called rebelling against him, was no more than asserting the just rights of his crown.
Hezekiah was a true son of David. Some others did that which was right, but not like David. Let us not suppose that when times and men are not good, they must grow worse. That does not follow: after many evil kings, God raised one like David himself. The story of the brazen serpent in Second Kings eighteen, verse four, had been under care as a memorial of God’s goodness to their fathers in the wilderness. However, it was idle and wicked to burn incense to it. All help to devotion, not warranted by the word of God, interrupt the exercise of faith; they always lead to superstition and other dangerous evils. Human nature perverts everything of this kind. True faith needs not such aids; the word of God, daily thought upon and prayed over, is all the outward help we need.