Humiliating judgments.
After such boastings and threatenings as the Rabshakeh had uttered, it was utterly humiliating to lose his army without fighting a battle, to be compelled to take a miserable remnant home, as a circumvented, disgraced general. It was all the more humiliating if Sennacherib himself headed the army at the later stage. "The greatest men cannot stand before God. The great King of Assyria looks very little when he is forced to return, not only with shame, because he cannot accomplish what he had projected with so much assurance, but with terror and fear, lest the angel that had destroyed his army should destroy him; yet he is made to look still less when his own sons, who should have guarded him, killed him."
I. GOD'S JUDGMENTS OFTEN TAKE SURPRISING FORMS. Anything so overwhelming as this even his people, with all their experience, could not have imagined. God's ways of judgment are never exhausted.
II. GOD'S JUDGMENTS ALWAYS HAVE A PRECISE FITNESS. This humiliation was exactly the thing for a people so proud, boastful, and over-confident as the Assyrians. The high looks of the proud God will abase.
III. GOD'S JUDGMENTS CARRY SOLEMN WARNINGS TO THOSE WHO HEAR OF THEM. They say, "Who art thou that repliest against God?" "Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish."—R.T.
Isaiah
Isaiah 37 - isaiah-37 - worlddic.com