An Unexpected Deliverance

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You know, one of the lessons that the Bible teaches us over and over is that rescue often comes from unexpected places. It kind of reminds me of the time that we had an electrical fire at the house. Obviously, we were not expecting that, at least I wasn’t.

But we had this round, rusty iron receptacle out in our yard when we moved there. And I didn’t know what it did until the night we heard the loud explosion as we were trying to get the kids ready for bed. And the electricity went off in the house, and we look outside, and there’s smoke coming out of this thing.

I still don’t know what it is, but we thought somebody ought to call the fire department. So we did. And we waited a couple minutes for the fire department to get there.

And we’re out talking to the neighbors, and one of the kids said, Dad, the Comanches are here. I don’t even know what that means. As a student of history, you know, should I be concerned?

What is that? Are the British coming to? And no offense if you’re Comanche, no offense intended.

but I looked out and it was the Comanche Nation Fire Department. I didn’t even know they had a fire department, but I was really thankful they had a fire department, and then another, Paradise Valley showed up. That was my first fire in a rural area.

It may have been my first fire anywhere, but you know, I grew up in the city where just your town’s fire department shows up. By the time all was said and done, we had three or four fire departments out there taking care of this little electrical fire, and the last one even to get there was ours, which is no fault of, you know, they’re all volunteers, so it’s just whoever gets there first. But I was not expecting all these people to show up, least of all the Comanches and their really cool truck that I think had the Mustang on the side of it. I was not expecting the Comanche nation to come and rescue us like it did.

And we probably all have stories where if we think about it in our lives, we’ve been rescued, we’ve been helped out by somebody we did not expect or in some way we did not expect. And God is really good at working out circumstances where He would rescue His people in ways they did not expect, which is what we’re going to talk about this morning in Isaiah chapter 7. We’ve been doing this series on looking for Jesus in the Old Testament.

And part of the trouble I’ve had with this series was trying to figure out which stories, which passages to do, because once you start looking for it, He’s all over the Old Testament. And we just, you know, I guess I could spend years and years on it, but I thought at some point you’ve got the idea and you can continue to research this for yourself. But one of the concepts we’ve started looking at over the last couple of weeks is the idea of prophecy.

Because we started out with some of these pictures, how God used events that happened in history, in Old Testament history, to point to Jesus. People like Isaac, people like Joseph, things like the Passover lamb, He used these things to point to Jesus. But there’s also prophecy in the Old Testament that says, when I send my Son, when I send the Messiah, when I send the One who’s going to fulfill all of these promises, here’s what it’s going to look like and here’s how you’re going to know.

And He does this, one of the places He does this is in Isaiah 7. So I noticed several of you are already turning there. If you haven’t already, please turn with me to Isaiah 7.

And once you find it, if you’ll stand as we read together from God’s Word. If you can’t find Isaiah 7 or don’t have your Bible, it will be on the screen for you this morning. But we’re going to look at the first 16 verses of chapter 7.

As God speaks to the nation of Judah, that’s the southern kingdom of Israel when the two split. As God speaks to the nation of Judah through the prophet Isaiah, it says, Now it came about in the days of Ahaz, the son of Jotham, the son of Uzziah, king of Judah, that Razan, the king of Aram, and Pekah, the son of Ramaliah, the king of Israel, went up to Jerusalem to wage war against it, but could not conquer it. That’s a lot of names because the Bible wants you to know this is not a fairy tale.

This really happened in history. But just to simplify it a little bit, Ahaz is king of Judah, and he’s being threatened by these two kings, Razan, the king of Aram, and Pekah, the king of Israel. And they have come down to Jerusalem to lay siege to the city and try to conquer it.

Verse 2 says, When it was reported to the house of David, saying, The Arameans have camped in Ephraim. His heart and the hearts of his people shook as the trees of the forest shake with the wind. Then the Lord said to Isaiah, Go now to meet Ahaz, you and your son, Shear-Jeshub.

I practiced these names earlier, and I don’t care how well practiced you are. They do not roll right off the tongue. Take your son, and at the end of the conduit of the upper pool on the highway to the fuller’s field, and say to him, Take care, and be calm, have no fear, and do not be faint-hearted.

because of these two stubs of smoldering firebrands, on account of the fierce anger of Razan and Aram and the son of Ramaliah. Because Aram with Ephraim and the son of Ramaliah has planned evil against you, saying, Let us go up against Judah and terrorize it, and make for ourselves a breach in its walls, and set up the son of Tabeel as king in the midst of it. Thus says the Lord God, It shall not stand, nor shall it come to pass.

For the head of Aram is Damascus, and the head of Damascus is Raisin. Now within another 65 years, Ephraim will be shattered so that it is no longer a people. And the head of Ephraim is Samaria, and the head of Samaria is the son of Ramaliah.

If you will not believe, you surely will not last. Okay, it gets easier from here. But what he’s talking about here is these two kings have decided they’re going to make war against Judah. They’re going to come down and they’re going to try to lay siege against Jerusalem, try to punch their way through the walls of the city, get in, overthrow the kingdom, and put their own puppet on the throne.

And when Ahaz hears this, when the other people of Judah hear this, they’re terrified. The Bible says they shook like trees in a forest in the wind, okay? But God told Isaiah, go and tell him, go and tell King Ahaz, it’s not going to happen.

I’m not going to let it happen. I know you’re scared that they’re camped right outside the city in Ephraim, but you go tell him not to worry about it because I’m not going to let it happen. As a matter of fact, God says to let them know that these two rulers and their countries, their time is very limited.

They think they’re going to overrun God’s people in Judah, but their time is limited, and they’re the ones that are going to fall. So he explains how they’re going to know that this happens. Let’s pick back up in verse 10.

Then the Lord spoke again to Ahaz, saying, Ask a sign for yourself from the Lord your God. Make it deep as Sheol or high as heaven. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, nor will I test the Lord.

Then he said, Listen now, O house of David, is it too slight a thing for you to try the patience of men that you will try the patience of my God as well? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call his name Emmanuel.

He will eat curds and honey at the time he knows enough to refuse evil and choose good. For before the boy will know enough to refuse evil and choose good, the land whose two kings you dread will be forsaken. You may be seated.

The reason I bring this up this morning is because Matthew, as we’re going to talk about later on in this message, Matthew says that this is fulfilled in Jesus. One of the things that we have to remember, though, to be very careful about as we study God’s Word is not to try to read into it what meaning we want to be there, but we ask ourselves, how would the original audience have understood this? And they were not looking at this as a prophecy of the Messiah.

That doesn’t mean it’s not one. If Matthew, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, says this was fulfilled in Jesus, then it was fulfilled in Jesus. But we go back first and ask ourselves, the people that this was written to, what did they think this meant?

What was God telling them? Because their mind did not jump ahead 700 years. And by the way, this was written 700 years before the birth of Jesus.

this is a story to them about God promising to save their people about God promising that this big scary threat that seemed insurmountable that seemed like something they could not avoid they could not overcome this this enormous threat God was saying I’m going to take care of it you can trust me in this and Aram wanted to do I’m sorry Ahaz there’s too many names Ahaz wanted to do everything but trust God. Ahaz wanted to make it work himself. He wanted to come up with these other alliances.

He wants to come up with defense plans. Ahaz was not on the best of terms with God. That’s why when God says to him, ask me for any sign, Ahaz says, oh, I would never do such a thing.

I would never presume to tempt or test the Lord. God’s telling you you can. There’s a time and a place to just believe God because He says so and not demand a sign.

But if God says the sign is you can ask for a sign, then you can ask for a sign. So He pretends to be pious and religious when really He wanted to do His plan is the reason He didn’t ask for the sign. But this is about God promising to save Israel, and this story teaches us that when God promises to save us, he’ll follow through.

That was the message that Israel, that Judah was intended to understand from this. And so we have this virgin birth prophecy where God says, all right, fine, Ahaz, if you’re not going to ask for a sign, I’m going to give you a sign anyway. Because when all this is said and done, I don’t want you to look at it and think, I worked that out.

I want you, when all of this is said and done, to realize that it was God who So he says, I’m going to give you a sign. And that’s what this virgin birth prophecy was originally about. It initially addressed this pressing Old Testament situation where Ahaz and the people of Judah had this serious problem.

We see in verses 1 and 2 that their enemies are camped all around the city. They’re just outside. They’re just waiting for a chance to bust in and overthrow the city and enslave the people.

And we see in verses 3 through 9 that God promised a solution. He said, I will take care of it. And then right after that, we see that Ahaz wasn’t interested in God’s solution.

But you know, the funny thing about God is that God is faithful to do what He promises, even if it’s not on our agenda. God is faithful, and God will always follow through. The point of this was for them to understand that they could trust God when He said something, He would follow through.

God is not like us, all right? Even with the best of intentions, sometimes we lack follow through. And I say we, I could just as easily say me.

The other night, we were watching a Christmas movie with the kids that I’d never seen before, and one of the characters was worried about dying without having had the opportunity to take care of some repairs around the house that he’d promised his wife he would do. And I told Charla, my list of those things that I need to worry about is getting pretty long. You know, there’s all these things I’ve told her, I’m going to fix that, I’m going to fix that.

And it’s not that I’m not a man of my word. It’s just, do you ever feel like projects you have to do? And I don’t just mean home projects, just the stuff on your to-do list. It’s like Hydra in Greek mythology.

You cut off one head and two more grow back. So the to-do list gets infinitely long, and I just run out of time, and I forget stuff. It happens at home, it happens here.

I told Tammy this morning, she was asking, can you make sure Abigail comes dressed like this for the play next week? I said, can you ask Charla? Because I promise.

It’s a promise I can keep. I promise I will forget to do that. So if you’ll ask Charla, that’ll get done.

But all of us, no matter how good our intentions are and how much we try to be people of our word, sometimes we just don’t follow through. God doesn’t have that problem. If God says it, He will do it.

When God says it, it’s as good as done. And so He’s giving them this promise so they would understand, even if it’s not on Ahaz’s agenda, even if it’s not the way they think it’s supposed to work or the way it’s going to work, God is faithful to His Word, and He’s going to do what He said. And in this case, He was going to deliver them.

And this virgin birth prophecy, it was originally meant, it was originally understood by the Jews to show how quickly God would deliver Judah. That was the point of it. So 700 years before Jesus, what did they think this was about?

Because they’re not scratching their heads going, virgin birth, we don’t know what that is. 700 years before Jesus, this was a prophecy to let them know God is going to act and God is going to act quickly. And hopefully most of you know me well enough to know by now I’m not going to be graphic in this, and hopefully it doesn’t lead to any uncomfortable questions.

Some of my kids are sitting in here as well. But there’s a debate that rages over this word virgin in Isaiah 7, 14. Because in Hebrew, the word al-mah, that’s the Hebrew word here, it can mean a literal virgin, or it can mean just a young woman.

It can mean either of those. And so you may come across versions of the Bible that will translate Isaiah 7. 14 as a young woman will give birth, which in and of itself is not that amazing a sign.

But some versions particularly like the Revised Standard Version, the New Revised Standard Version, some theologically liberal versions, We’ll translate it that way to try to downplay the idea of the virgin birth. Here’s the thing. That word can mean either of those things.

But before Jesus was even born, the Jews also translated their Bible, our Old Testament, into Greek, into something we have called the Septuagint, that you can go look at online now, like I did this week. And there are multiple, when you see the word al-mah in the Old Testament, it’s translated multiple ways into that Greek. One of those is neanis, which means a young woman, and one of those is parthenos, which means an actual virgin.

And in Isaiah 7. 14, it’s translated as parthenos, an actual virgin, a woman who’s never been intimate with a man. That tells me that even 700 years before the time of Christ, the virgin birth wasn’t something invented by Christians generations after Jesus.

The virgin birth is something that the Jews 700 years before Jesus knew they were looking for. Now, their understanding of it in Ahaz’s day was a little bit different. But it’s important that we understand that because there are people who will tell us, oh, that part of the Christmas story, that’s a fairy tale.

The Bible doesn’t mean that. If we can’t trust that, it has major implications for the deity of Jesus Christ, for His ability to save us. If He was born just like any other mortal man, then the idea of Him being the sinless Savior, the Son of God, the gospel is shot through with holes.

So we need to understand that the virgin birth is important. But here’s what was going on that they understood 700 years before Jesus. God promised here to utterly destroy these kings, the king of Aram and the king of Israel, who threatened Judah, and God was going to take away their kingdom.

He says this at the end of verse 16, when he said, The land whose two kings you dread will be forsaken. Those kings and their lands, their time was going to run out with God. And God promised that there was a time coming where he was going to turn the nation of Judah around where they would experience peace and prosperity.

verse 15 when he’s talking about this this young child he’s talking about the Emmanuel he says he will eat curds and honey at the time he knows enough to refuse evil and choose good these are foods that they would have fed to a baby but they were foods that were in abundance when there was when there was peace and when the land was fruitful these are not things that they had time to produce in times of war these are these are things that God promised that the land of Israel would be flowing with, milk and honey, when times were good. So God’s not just promising an end to the threat. God’s promising there’s going to be a good time of peace and prosperity coming.

And to Ahaz, looking at this threat of war, these people camped right outside his city walls. That’s kind of an incredible promise. But on top of that, God says it’s going to happen fast. It’s going to happen in a shockingly short amount of time.

Because what they understood and what indeed happened was that at that time, if a woman who was a virgin went ahead and got married, conceived a child in the normal way, by the time that child was born and began to grow and was eating the milk and eating the honey, eating the fruit of the land, before that child was old enough to know right from wrong, God will have already dealt with these pagan kings. He’s not promising in the days of Ahaz that something was going to happen like what happened in Bethlehem. But his promise here was God is going to be at work and you’re going to know it was God because you won’t believe how fast this turnaround happens.

And this child, and we don’t know, you know, theologians debate, well, who was the woman? Was it Isaiah’s wife? Was it Isaiah’s daughter-in-law?

Was it somebody in Ahaz’s court, we don’t know. We don’t know today. But they knew.

And as this child grew up, he was going to be a reminder to them that God is with us. As they saw him grow, they would be reminded that, you know what, before he was even old enough to know right from wrong, God had already intervened. But you know, God is clever.

Clever is not even a strong enough word to describe God. God words things in such a way that they have an immediate fulfillment and they can have an ultimate fulfillment. Where God can take something that was technically true 700 years before, and God can make it also be true in a whole different way 700 years later.

And so for 700 years, they’ve been looking at this thinking, this was fulfilled already. And it was, in part, that there was a young woman who at the time of the prophecy was a virgin. She got married.

She and her husband had a child. And as that child grew before he was old enough to know right and wrong, God had already dealt with the problem. And God had moved nations and empires around like pawns on a chessboard.

For 700 years, they’re thinking that was, God is amazing enough that he was able to do that. But God is so amazing that he had a second fulfillment of that prophecy in mind. See, God doesn’t just follow through.

God goes to miraculous lengths to follow through. God has gone to miraculous lengths to save us. Matthew tells us that this prophecy has an even more incredible fulfillment, and that’s the one that most of you are going to be familiar with.

And it’s amazing to me, you know, part of me has thought, if we look at what did that originally mean, what’s the Old Testament fulfillment of it, that maybe that detracts a little bit from the story. But on second thought, I think it adds to our, or it should add to our sense of wonder at this, that God was orchestrating things not only to save people then, but to build on this plan to save us now. That God can do all of these things and fulfill all of these things in multiple ways.

Matthew chapter 1, just a few verses here, starting in verse 18, it says, now the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit. And Joseph, her husband, being a righteous man and not wanting to disgrace her, planned to send her away secretly.

But when he had considered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child who has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. Now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet.

Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and shall bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which translated means God with us. And imagine being Joseph, or imagine being Mary, imagine being any of the people who heard this for the first time, and for 700 years your people have thought, God did this incredible thing, and then all of a sudden the angel of the Lord shows up and says, but wait, there’s more. like the best infomercial in history.

There’s more. God can do even more with this prophecy, and God is going to fulfill it in a literal way. There’s going to be a literal virgin birth.

And people today say, I don’t believe that’s possible. Listen to me. It all depends on the premise that you start with.

If you start with the premise that there’s nothing outside of nature, then yeah, it’s a little bit of a stretch. But if you start from the premise that God spoke the universe into existence, that God by the words of His mouth was able to speak to nothing, and even nothing had to obey to the point that it became everything. If you start with the premise that there is a God who exists outside of and beyond the physical universe, who has that kind of power, it is not a stretch in the least to think that that God, That same God would be able to will DNA to begin to exist in us.

All the DNA we have, He created to begin with, if you start from that premise. So there’s nothing that stretches the imagination. I was listening to something this week where they were debating the idea, is it anti-scientific to believe in the virgin birth?

Listen, science, the way I understand it, the scientific method, does not prove things. It can disprove or it can say, based on the evidence we have, this appears to be the case. And we can get pretty certain about things, but we’re always looking for different parameters and different evidence.

The scientific method and science itself is meant to help us understand things that normally happen in nature. This, by its definition, is not something that normally happens in nature. It’s something that happened one time in history.

It’s an apples and oranges discussion. It’s separate from science. We don’t have to find a scientific explanation for it because nobody’s saying it’s a scientific thing.

We’re saying God intervened beyond the laws of science that He put in place. So we have a situation where God has said, this child is going to be born. He’s going to be born of a virgin.

That’s important because if He doesn’t have a human father, He’s not inheriting the sin nature that’s been passed down from Adam. He is the seed of the woman spoken of in Genesis 3, who’s going to crush the serpent’s head. He is the fulfillment of all these prophecies.

He has a biological mother because somebody had to carry the baby. But his parentage, his father is God the Father. He is God the Son in human flesh.

So when it says that the child that we’re talking about would be Emmanuel, the one in the Old Testament was a reminder that God is with us. This child spoken of in the New Testament is actually God with us. Jesus was something the religious leaders did not expect.

They didn’t expect this story. They didn’t expect Him to be who He was. They didn’t expect Him to do the things that He did.

He was born to a literal virgin conceived by the Holy Spirit. That’s something they did not expect. and He is God with us.

And this virgin birth prophecy, as it applies to Jesus, it demonstrates some important facts about Jesus. And we can look at verse 23 and see that He is no ordinary man. Who is born that way?

Nobody. Only Him. And the prophet said it would be a sign that He is God with us.

And John expounds on this. I think my favorite passage to read at Christmastime is John chapter 1, which even though it doesn’t really go into the details of the story, it explains who was coming at Christmastime. The Word was made flesh.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus was not an ordinary man.

He’s not just a good teacher. He was God in human flesh. And the virgin birth tells us that.

And look at verse 22, back up just one verse. And Matthew says, all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet. This virgin birth tells us that from the very beginning that Jesus came as the fulfillment of God’s plans.

And back up one more verse to verse 21. She will bear a son and you shall call his name Jesus for he will save his people from their sins. What was that plan that he came to fulfill for the the Father, He came to deliver us from our sin.

And that was the most unexpected deliverance of all because mankind has, to the extent we have understood our sin, to the extent that we have admitted our sin, our natural inclination is to try to do something, to try to bargain with God, to try to earn God’s forgiveness, to try to be good enough. And we never could. And the religious leaders of his day certainly didn’t expect that God was going to send this little baby to take responsibility for our sins, to deal with our sins, because we couldn’t.

People today still will look for anything other than Jesus to try to deal with our sins, but God made one way of deliverance. And folks, I just want to leave you with this thought. From the Old Testament prophecy to the New Testament fulfillment, a God who would go to these lengths to deliver us is a God we can trust. to deliver us.

That was a lesson that Ahaz had to learn as he’s trying to figure out how he can position his military, how he can forge alliances, how he can do all these things to try to rescue his people, and God is saying, wait, I’ve got this. Or whether it’s the religious leaders in Jesus’ day saying, well, we have to follow these laws, we have to follow these traditions, we have to do all of these things. Whether it’s in our day saying, well, I’ve got to be religious, I’ve got to check all the right boxes.

Folks, the only thing we’ve been called to do is trust in Him and the deliverance He’s provided. And sometimes we hear that and we think that sounds good, but you don’t know what I’ve done. And it’s true.

I probably don’t know what you’ve done. I probably don’t know what’s going on in your life right now, unless you’ve told me. But here’s the thing, that baby that was born, the fulfillment of God’s plans, when He grew up to die on the cross, He not only knows what you’ve done, He knows what you’ll do, and He took responsibility for it all already and was punished in your place.

Let me tell you, God has gone to the ultimate lengths to deliver you. A God like that is a God you can trust to follow through and deliver you.