"Lord, be gracious to us; we long for You. Be our strength every morning, our salvation in time of distress." (Isaiah 33:2) Previously in the book of Isaiah we learned that the people were attempting to ally themselves with Egypt in hopes that their forces combined with the forces of Egypt could repel their common enemy. But time and time again the Lord instructed the people to trust only in Him. Here we find them calling upon Him alone, in obedience to those instructions.
There's nothing wrong with looking for help from earthly things if we have called upon the Lord first and are trusting the situation to Him. For example, when we get bad news our first thoughts ought to go heavenwards, asking the Lord the same thing the people in our text today are asking Him: "Lord, be gracious to us!" But after committing our problem to Him, that doesn't mean He won't use other people or medical science (in the case of illness) to solve our problem. In the case of the Assyrian army coming to lay siege to Jerusalem, the Lord will handle the entire matter Himself without involving any human beings at all, but there are other instances in the Bible where the Lord brings help to His children through other human beings.
Everything King Sennacherib of Assyria will say about his success on the field of battle, up until the day he sends his army against Jerusalem, will be true. It is true that he has already defeated other nations and tribes. He has already destroyed several villages around the land of Judah. He has already managed to affect the economy of Judah by disrupting trade routes and by instructing his men to rush in and destroy crops before they can be harvested. He is going to send a very threatening letter to King Hezekiah of Judah and in that letter he will brag about how no one has been able to stand against him. Hezekiah will spread the letter out and pray to the Lord over it and in his prayer he will admit that the things the enemy king is saying are true. But he will also profess his faith that the reason Sennacherib has been successful is because the gods of the other nations don't exist and that the Lord does exist and that the Lord fights on behalf of those who trust in Him.
As we've already mentioned several times over the past few days, we know that the Lord struck down 185,000 of the soldiers encamped around Jerusalem. This obliged King Sennacherib, who was not camped with his soldiers but at another location, to pack up and go home with the remainder of the forces he'd brought into Judah. His intent was to come back once he figured out a new strategy. The Lord's swooping in during the night and putting the enemy to flight may be what these next two verses are about. We don't know whether these verses are being spoken as a prophecy (the event hasn't occurred yet) or whether these verses were written after it had already happened.
"At the uproar of Your army, the peoples flee; when You rise up, the nations scatter. Your plunder, O nations, is harvested as by young locusts; like a swarm of locusts people pounce on it." (Isaiah 33:3-4) The phrase "Your army" may indicate that the hosts of heaven came in under the leadership of the Lord and fought for Jerusalem during the night. You may recall when we were studying the life of the prophet Elisha that when enemies surrounded the city where he was staying, Elisha's servant became panic-stricken. Elisha prayed for the Lord to open the servant's eyes and when He did the servant saw all the hills around the city filled with horses and chariots of fire: a heavenly army waiting to defend them from the enemy. Something like this may be what happened when the Lord saved Jerusalem from the enemy or this could just be a figure of speech in our text today when we find the reference to the Lord's army.
When the people of Jerusalem found all the enemy soldiers lying dead, they took the plunder of the plunderers. They took the goods the Assyrians had brought with them from Assyria and the goods the Assyrians had stolen from the people of Judah and from many other places. This is why verse 4 above states that the plunder was harvested. The weapons of the enemies of God's people are now in the hands of God's people. The food of the enemy is now food for God's people.
The Lord has accomplished many astonishing turnarounds in my own life and I bet He's accomplished many of them in yours too. He is our strength every morning! His mercies are renewed every morning! This means there is an unending, inexhaustible supply for us when we submit our lives and everything in them to Him and trust in Him to help us.
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