I will back up and pick up with the verse we ended with on Friday and go forward from there, since it is closely connected to the remainder of his writing. "The living, the living---they praise You, as I am doing today; parents tell their children about Your faithfulness. The Lord will save me, and we will sing with stringed instruments all the days of our lives in the temple of the Lord." (Isaiah 38:19-20)
Hezekiah rejoices over the Lord's goodness to him. The Lord has saved his physical body from death. The Lord has saved his soul from spiritual death as well, for Hezekiah has been a believer for many years. It is right for Hezekiah, upon his recovery, to go up to the house of the Lord to praise Him there. It is right for Hezekiah to sing the praises of the Lord, both for his physical healing and for his salvation.
Earlier in the book of Isaiah we found Hezekiah going up to the temple of the Lord to spread out the threatening letter from the king of Assyria and pray over it. We talked about how Hezekiah could have remained in his palace to pray since there's nothing wrong with praying to the Lord in our own homes. But we also talked about how there can be a feeling of special closeness to the Lord in His house. When something is weighing heavily on our hearts, it can be more comforting to pray in a house of worship than to pray in our own homes. Even though we may have a special place in our homes where we regularly go to the Lord in prayer---and that place can certainly feel like holy ground to us!---there is just something so powerful about talking to Him on the ground consecrated for His worship.
While Hezekiah was lying sick in bed he was unable to go to the house of God to pray to Him there but it's easy to see why he would want to go there and give his thanks "in person" in a sense. I imagine that many of his family members and his top officials went up with him to the temple to thank God for sparing his life. I imagine that a great number of the people of Jerusalem and of the nation of Judah gave praises to the Lord for restoring their king to health.
This next verse provides a clue as to the nature of his illness. "Isaiah had said, 'Prepare a poultice of figs and apply it to the boil, and he will recover.'" (Isaiah 38:21) This verse is what has led many physicians and historians and Bible scholars to conclude that the king was afflicted with the Bubonic Plague, for it creates large painful boils. These boils can become so infected that the entire body becomes septic, often leading to death after that happens. There is also evidence from the historical annals of ancient Egypt that an outbreak of Bubonic Plague occurred there around the same time period. In addition, a very much speeded up version of the Bubonic Plague may be what struck 185,000 Assyrian soldiers dead outside the gates of Jerusalem at this same time. The Lord is certainly capable of causing the disease to be magnified in such as way as to cause those soldiers to come down from it and actually die of it in a matter of hours.
A poultice of figs was a fairly common treatment for various minor skin ailments because it was known to help bring down inflammation and to draw out fluid. It was not known to cure deadly illnesses though, and I do not believe the poultice itself was curative for Hezekiah. You may recall, for example, that the prophet Elisha told people to cast salt into a body of undrinkable water and that the water immediately became safe for consumption. It was not the salt that cured the water; it was the Lord's power and the people's faith in the Lord's power that cured the water. In the same way it was the Lord's power and the faith in the Lord's power that cured Hezekiah.
Another example of this would be when the prophet Elisha told the leper Naaman to dip himself in the waters of the Jordan seven times to be healed of his disease. Naaman considered the waters of the Jordan to be unclean and to be inferior to the waters of his own nation. He scoffed at the idea and was about to go home without even trying it when his servants pleaded with him to try this simple thing. He tried it and it worked. The power was not in the Jordan; the power was in God and in Naaman's faith (weak though it was) that Elisha's God might really be able to help him.
Our God is able to help us! No matter whether we use a home remedy, a prescription medication, a surgery, or just time for our immune systems to do their work, the healing actually comes from the Lord. He created our immune systems. He created the substances on this earth from which home remedies and prescription medications are formulated. He gave mankind enough intelligence to be able to figure out how to perform many surgical procedures and how to formulate thousands of medications. We owe Him our gratitude every time we recover from anything at all because our recovery is from Him!
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