Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.
Isaiah 7:14 NIVUK
Naval engineer Richard James was known for being clumsy. One day, as he was carrying some things up some stairs, he dropped a tension spring and observed how it moved down the staircase. That triggered what would seem like a crazy idea: sell multi-coloured springs as toys to children. But on that day, the Slinky was born.
The first batch was made available in 1945. All four hundred sold out in just ninety minutes.
But here's the thing: up until now Richard James has made $250 million from a toy spring that does nothing more than fall down stairs!
Sometimes crazy ideas just click.
And believe me, this prophecy at first glance sounds like a crazy idea. And yet it is one of the main promises used to justify Jesus as being the Messiah, as Matthew explains:
All this took place to fulfil what the Lord had said through the prophet: ‘The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel’ (which means ‘God with us’).
Matthew 1:22-23 NIVUK
So how could that happen? How could a seemingly bizarre promise become elevated to clear and unequivocal evidence of who Jesus is? And what can we learn from it?
Let’s first look at a serious problem:
When Ahaz son of Jotham, the son of Uzziah, was king of Judah, King Rezin of Aram and Pekah son of Remaliah king of Israel marched up to fight against Jerusalem, but they could not overpower it. Now the house of David was told, ‘Aram has allied itself with Ephraim’; so the hearts of Ahaz and his people were shaken, as the trees of the forest are shaken by the wind.
Isaiah 7:1-2 NIVUK
It’s hard to overstate how serious this was. 2 Chronicles paints a dreadful picture for us:
In one day Pekah son of Remaliah killed a hundred and twenty thousand soldiers in Judah – because Judah had forsaken the Lord, the God of their ancestors. Zikri, an Ephraimite warrior, killed Maaseiah the king’s son, Azrikam the officer in charge of the palace, and Elkanah, second to the king. The men of Israel took captive from their fellow Israelites who were from Judah two hundred thousand wives, sons and daughters. They also took a great deal of plunder, which they carried back to Samaria.
2 Chronicles 28:6-8 NIVUK
One hundred and twenty thousand soldiers dead. Two hundred thousand taken captive. All this in a context of a nation that would not even have reached a million occupants.
This was nothing short of a disaster.
The thing is that it was absolutely avoidable.
Isaiah uses two events that show us how Ahaz reacted to this awful situation.
Ahaz was terrified. And because he was terrified, so were all his people.
Now, that might seem like a completely normal, human reaction. After all, his nation was being shattered by war.
And yet when his son, Hezekiah, faced a similar situation, likely with a much smaller army, the outcome was different: the siege was lifted and the enemy defeated (Isaiah 37).
But why was Ahaz so terrified?
For a very simple reason;
Ahaz was twenty years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem for sixteen years. Unlike David his father, he did not do what was right in the eyes of the Lord.
2 Chronicles 28:1 NIVUK
Ahaz had no relationship with the Lord. He turned aside to the sins of his forefathers. That is what made him weak. That is what made him vulnerable.
That is what made him afraid.
But there is another side to this:
‘Ask the Lord your God for a sign, whether in the deepest depths or in the highest heights.’ But Ahaz said, ‘I will not ask; I will not put the Lord to the test.’
Isaiah 7:11-12 NIVUK
Isaiah has told Ahaz that this merciless attack against Judah will not be successful. He now challenges Ahaz to ask the Lord for a sign – for evidence that the Lord will come through for them.
Ahaz refuses.
This might sound spiritual, but it really isn’t. Not from a man who burns his children in pagan sacrifice and indulges in idol worship everywhere he can (2 Kings 16:2-4; 2 Chronicles 28:2-4).
No, this was God making a graceful offer to prove Himself to Ahaz, even though He had no need to, and Ahaz refused it.
Why did he refuse it?
Because Ahaz has no intention of believing God. He had already turned his back on God.
And this leads us on from a serious problem to a human solution.
The Bible is unflinching about what happened next:
Ahaz sent messengers to say to Tiglath-Pileser king of Assyria, ‘I am your servant and vassal. Come up and save me out of the hand of the king of Aram and of the king of Israel, who are attacking me.’ And Ahaz took the silver and gold found in the temple of the Lord and in the treasuries of the royal palace and sent it as a gift to the king of Assyria. The king of Assyria complied by attacking Damascus and capturing it. He deported its inhabitants to Kir and put Rezin to death.
2 Kings 16:7-9 NIVUK
Ahaz took the silver and gold used to worship the Lord, and instead offered it as a payment for him to enter servanthood under the pagan king of Assyria. He essentially turned aside to politicking and corruption to pay his way out of trouble.
And for a short time, his conniving seems to have worked. The threat was averted. The attacking armies withdrew.
But Ahaz’s new found friend gave him nothing but trouble (2 Chronicles 28:18-20). Moreover, his attachment to them brought even more problems upon Judah, because he began to worship the Assyrian gods too (2 Chronicles 28:22-23).
As is often the way, a rejection of God leads to sin that is compounded with each passing day.
What seemed like a sensible, pragmatic political decision turned into a nightmare for Ahaz and his people which lead to the Temple itself being closed and its furnishings destroyed (2 Kings 16:10-18; 2 Chronicles 28:24), all out of deference to the pagan king he had turned to for help.
It turned into a disaster for the Jewish people.
Yet in the middle of this tale of woe and poor decision-making we have an unusual promise:
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.
Isaiah 7:14 NIVUK
This verse seems out of place. Incongruous. Bizarre, even. All the talk is of war and death and destruction. And yet in the middle of the deafening noise, Isaiah talks of a birth, and an impossible one at that.
Why?
If it puzzles you, let me tell you, you are in good company. Some of the greatest minds have been confused by this verse. Some have theorised that somehow, in the royal palace, a child would be born to a young woman (the Hebrew word for ‘virgin’ can also be translated as ‘young woman’) and that she would call him Immanuel.
That would be something. Immanuel means ‘God with us’. I don’t feel any vibes that Ahaz thought God was with him.
Quite the opposite.
There is no evidence to support that hypothesis.
Moreover, prophets lived and died by their predictions coming true (see Deuteronomy 18:18-22). If something like this happened, why didn’t Isaiah record it?
Matthew gives us an explanation. He attributes this prophecy to Jesus (Matthew 1:22-23). And not without good reason: Mary was a virgin.
So here we have two situations that appear to be unconnected: the brutal slaughter of a hundred and twenty thousand soldiers amidst a painful siege of Jerusalem (although the city did not fall), and the birth of Jesus hundreds of years later.
How can they be linked?
I believe God, through Isaiah, is making a very profound point.
There was a root cause of the invasion against Judah. The fact that Jesus was born into a Roman-subjugated Israel had the same root cause:
Sin.
And Jesus came to break the power of sin.
The one who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.
1 John 3:8 NIVUK
Sin was, and still is, a far greater enemy than any armed forces of any nation.
But in these verses, we see a tremendous irony. Ahaz has seen a devastating armed attack that has cost his nation very dearly. His solution is to find another army – an even stronger one – to counter-attack. God’s sign that victory will come is not some wonderful military stratagem or advanced technology or even the intervention of an angelic army.
No, the sign of sure victory is a baby: the most fragile and vulnerable human form.
I’m sure Ahaz would have been exasperated about this. All this brutal loss of life and yet all God can send him is a baby?
Yet look at the baby’s name: Immanuel, meaning ‘God with us’.
This baby is not just a sign that God is with the Jews. That would be an incomplete understanding of what these verses actually mean. No, this baby is actually God with them! God is coming into their situation, into their struggle, into their pain, into their frustration. God is breaking into their world!
In the 1980’s, when I was a boy, I used to love to stay up to watch a TV show called ‘Tomorrow’s World’. It was a show that demonstrated the very latest in technology. Some of these new technologies were built around an old one: laser.
The existence of laser had been theorised by Albert Einstein in 1916 and then invented by Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow in 1958. But still, for years, it was labelled as ‘a solution looking for a problem’. Commercial applications had still not been discovered.
Nowadays, though, things could not be more different. I watched ‘Tomorrow’s World’ when the first CDs were demonstrated (yes, I am that old). We now have laser pointers, laser printers, laser eye surgery, laser operations. Even our broadband Internet is often transmitted down fibre optic cable using lasers.
These verses, at first, seem out of place. Sandwiched between verses that talk of war and bloodshed, it seems that they are a solution to the wrong problem.
But they are God’s laser. They are his focused light on the exact nature of the problem. The people had a serious issue with believing God, so He would make a virgin have a baby. They believed He had abandoned them, so He would be born among them. They were overpowered by their own sin, so He would deliver them.
Sometimes Christmas seems like that. We find ourselves in countless queues, stressing out over minor details, wondering how a stressful mid-winter festival could possibly be the solution to anything at all.
But Christmas is God’s solution to the war inside. Christmas is God’s promise that one day all our struggles will be over.
Christmas is God with us. And no matter what we are going through, there is nothing more precious than that.
Prayer
Lord Jesus, when I experience problems, I often forget that You are with me. Forgive me for that. Help me to see that Christmas tells me how much You care about me, that You would come to earth to save me. Thank you. Amen.
Questions
1. Why did Ahaz turn his back on God? What caused him to do this?
2. Were Ahaz’s problems God’s fault or his own?
3. How does the promise of Christmas show that there is a way out of our problems?
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