Man after man has passed before us out of whose very countenance the image of God had faded. How pleasant it is, and how spiritually exhilarating, to come upon a case in which we read of a different pattern of man! Of Hezekiah it is recorded in the eighteenth chapter of the second Book of Kings:
“And he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord, according to all that David, his father, did.”
After a long journey underground we seem to have come suddenly upon a sweet garden, and the sight of it is as Heaven. The charm is always in the contrast. If things are not quite so good as we supposed them to be, they are all the better by reason of circumstances through which we have passed, which have made us ill at ease and have impoverished or disheartened us; then very little of the other kind goes a long way.
A man comes up out of the underground railway and says, when he emerges into the light:
“How fresh the air is here! What a healthy locality! How well to live in this neighborhood!”
Why does he speak so kindly of his surroundings? Not because of those surroundings intrinsically, but because of the contrast which they present to the circumstances through which he has just passed.
Hezekiah was no perfect man.
We shall see how noble he was, and how rich in many high qualities, yet how now and again we see the crutch of the cripple under the purple of the king.
It is well for us that he was occasionally and temporarily weak, or he would have been like a star which we can not touch, and at which we can not light our own torch.
Even Hezekiah was a man like ourselves in many particulars, and therefore what was good and sound in him is all the more attractive and is all the more possible to us.