Next comes the seductive offer. The commander offers to make a bargain and give them horses. The enemy seeks to discourage us, then he makes an offer that seems to offer an easy way out. We must never be fooled be this. If they had given in to this offer they would only have been slaughtered or put into slavery.
Then the commander says he had been sent by the Lord. Now this claim was true. Isaiah himself had said that Assyria was the Lord's instrument. Yet it was only partially true. The enemy will use bits of scripture and half-truths. The Lord had also said that Assyria would not succeed. Moreover, the answer was for Judah to turn to the Lord and trust in Him. Whatever situation we are facing, the solution lies in turning to the Lord.
The Jerusalem officials then asked the commander to speak only in Aramaic, not Hebrew, for they did not want all the people to hear the enemies taunts and become afraid.
Not surprisingly the commander refused, he wanted all the people to hear, then he made the taunts worse, telling the people what lay ahead for them. We need to understand that the enemy will speak to us in a language that we understand. For each of us there are different things that will press fear buttons. One person will fear financial ruin, but not illness, another will have complete trust in the area of money, but will fear sickness. The enemy knows which buttons to press. We can spend our lives hoping that the enemy will not press these buttons, or we can just accept that he will press them at certain times and learn to overcome. Just because the enemy says something is going to happen to us does not mean that it will happen.
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