To recur to the narrative,--Hezekiah's appeal was not without results. As he lay there tearfully communing with his own heart and with God, Isaiah returned to his chamber with a message of healing assuring him that he should go up to the temple on the third day, and directed him to take a lump of figs and place it upon the boil. This simple direction goes to refute and correct some errors very common in our day. The one is that remedies are to be absolutely tabooed, that they do no good; faith and prayer alone are to be resorted to to effect a cure. The theory, and the heresy that has prompted it, are set at naught by this one direction, in which God's prophet, under the direction of the almighty Physician, specified the remedy to be used. And the other error which it sets at naught is, that medical remedies have, in themselves, aside from God, any virtue or value. Too much does suffering humanity rely upon medicine; the drug bottle has become with many a veritable idol; that is their god who is going to help them. The application of figs to boils was a remedy known before Isaiah suggested it, in all likelihood it had been tried in Hezekiah's case without result; now, at the prophet's injunction, it is tried again and effectively. In other words, this time God worked through it, and so it proved of value. All the medicine in the world is worthless if He does not put divine properties into it. And so let us beware of idolizing the medicine, and forgetting over it Him who put the good into it, and when we take it, let us not fail to offer up with it prayer to Him who can and must make it efficacious.
And so it came about, through the use of the means which the prophet prescribed, that Hezekiah improved,--_improved_, I repeat, only physically, to natural strength and health? Is that all that his sickness was intended for, that is included in his recovery? Is that all that our affliction is intended for, that, having been confined to the sick-room for a while, we return to our work and calling as before? Hezekiah was a wiser man than that. The song that he wrote after his recovery, recorded in the 38th chapter of Isaiah, shows that looking death in the face had not failed of good results. No man, if he be a thinking man, can be brought to the brink of the grave, and raised almost as if from the dead, without some benefit from the experience. For one thing, it ought to make him a better Christian. "Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee, e'en though it be a cross that raiseth me." Luther was wont to say that his three great teachers were prayer, study, and trial, and any reader of his life can perceive that if it had not been for the experiences that he passed through, he would not have been the sturdy character that he was. What the tempering is to the iron, giving it the toughness and endurance of steel, that afflictions are to the soul. The wind might shake and uproot the stripling of a tree, but its blasts are harmless to the oak that has passed through many a hurricane and storm. And so unbelief may give out its miserable twaddle, the faithless world raise its scoffing and deriding tongue, the man who once turned his face to the wall and prayed will not be upset, he knows whom he has believed, what he has experienced in his own soul and life.