Message Information
- Key Scriptures: Isaiah 7:1-16, NASB
- Series: Jesus in the Old Testament (2024), no. 10
- Date: Sunday, December 15, 2024 (Morning)
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
Listen Online
Watch Online
Text
Rescue from Unexpected Places
One of the lessons the Bible teaches us over and over is that rescue often comes from unexpected places. It reminds me of the time we had an electrical fire at the house. Obviously, we were not expecting that. At least I wasn’t.
We had this round, rusty iron receptacle out in our yard when we moved there. I did not know what it did until the night we heard a loud explosion while we were trying to get the kids ready for bed. The electricity went off in the house, and when we looked outside, smoke was coming out of this thing.
I still do not know what it was, but we thought somebody ought to call the fire department. So we did, and we waited a few minutes for the fire department to get there. We were outside talking to the neighbors, and one of the kids said, “Dad, the Comanches are here.”
I did not even know what that meant. As a student of history, should I be concerned? What is that? Are the British coming too? No offense if you are Comanche; no offense intended.
But I looked out, and it was the Comanche Nation Fire Department. I did not even know they had a fire department, but I was very thankful they did. Then another one, Paradise Valley, showed up. That was my first fire in a rural area.
It may have been my first fire anywhere, but I grew up in the city, where 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. The last one to get there was ours, which was no fault of theirs. They are all volunteers, so it is just whoever gets there first.
I was not expecting all those 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. We probably all have stories where, if we think about it, we have been rescued or helped by somebody we did not expect, or in some way we did not expect.
God is very good at working out circumstances where He rescues His people in ways they do not expect. That is what we are going to talk about in Isaiah 7. We have been doing this series on looking for Jesus in the Old Testament.
Part of the trouble I have had with this series was trying to figure out which stories and passages to use, because once you start looking for Him, He is all over the Old Testament. I suppose I could spend years and years on it, but at some point you have the idea and can continue to research this for yourself. One of the concepts we have started looking at over the last couple of weeks is the idea of prophecy.
Prophecy and the Promise of Rescue
We started with some of these pictures: how God used events that happened in Old Testament history to point to Jesus. He used people like Isaac, people like Joseph, and things like the Passover lamb to point to Jesus. But there is also prophecy in the Old Testament that says, “When I send My Son, when I send the Messiah, when I send the One who is going to fulfill all these promises, here is what it is going to look like, and here is how you are going to know.”
One of the places God does this is Isaiah 7. In Isaiah 7, God speaks to the nation of Judah, the southern kingdom of Israel after the kingdom split. He speaks to them 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 Rezin the king of Aram and Pekah the son of Remaliah, king of Israel, went up to Jerusalem to wage war against it, but could not conquer it.” That is a lot of names, because the Bible wants you to know this is not a fairy tale. This really happened in history.
To simplify it a little, Ahaz is king of Judah, and he is being threatened by two kings: Rezin, the king of Aram, and Pekah, the king of Israel. 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-jashub.” I practiced these names earlier, and I do not care how well practiced you are; they do not roll right off the tongue. God told Isaiah to take his son “at the end of the conduit of the upper pool, on the highway to the fuller’s field,” and to say to Ahaz, “Take care and be calm, have no fear and do not be fainthearted because of these two stubs of smoldering firebrands.”
God was talking about the fierce anger of Rezin and Aram and the son of Remaliah. Aram, with Ephraim and the son of Remaliah, had planned evil against Judah. They were 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.”
But God said, “It shall not stand nor shall it come to pass. For the head of Aram is Damascus and the head of Damascus is Rezin. Now within another sixty-five 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 Remaliah. If you will not believe, you surely shall not last.”
It gets easier from here. What he is talking about is that these two kings had decided they were going to make war against Judah. They were going to come down, lay siege against Jerusalem, try to punch their way through the walls of the city, overthrow the kingdom, and put their own puppet on the throne.
When Ahaz heard this, and when the people of Judah heard this, they were terrified. The Bible says they shook like trees in a forest in the wind. But God told Isaiah, “Go and tell King Ahaz it is not going to happen. I am not going to let it happen. I know you are scared that they are camped right outside the city in Ephraim, but you tell him not to worry about it, because I am not going to let it happen.”
As a matter of fact, God says to let them know that these two rulers and their countries have very limited time. They think they are going to overrun God’s people in Judah, but their time is limited, and they are the ones who are going to fall. Then God explains how they are going to know that this happens.
A Sign for a Frightened King
Verse 10 says, “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 Isaiah 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?”
Isaiah continues, “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 Immanuel. 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.”
The reason I bring this up is because Matthew, as we are going to talk about later in this message, says this is fulfilled in Jesus. One of the things we have to remember, though, and be very careful about as we study God’s Word, is that we should not try to read into it whatever meaning we want to be there. We need to ask ourselves, “How would the original audience have understood this?”
They were not looking at this as a prophecy of the Messiah. That does not mean it is 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 what the people to whom this was written would have thought it meant.
What was God telling them? Their minds did not jump ahead seven hundred years. By the way, this was written seven hundred years before the birth of Jesus. To them, this was a story about God promising to save His people.
God was promising that this big, scary threat, which seemed insurmountable and seemed like something they could not avoid or overcome, would be taken care of by Him. God was saying, “I am going to take care of it. You can trust Me in this.” Ahaz wanted to do everything but trust God.
Ahaz wanted to make it work himself. He wanted to come up with other alliances. He wanted to come up with defense plans. Ahaz was not on the best of terms with God.
That is 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 was telling him he could. There is a time and place to believe God simply because He says so and not demand a sign. But if God says, “You can ask for a sign,” then you can ask for a sign.
So Ahaz pretends to be pious and religious, when really he wanted to do his own plan. That is the reason he did not ask for the sign. But this is about God promising to save Judah, and this story teaches us that when God promises to save us, He will follow through.
That was the message Judah was intended to understand from this. So we have this virgin birth prophecy where God says, “All right, Ahaz, if you are not going to ask for a sign, I am going to give you a sign anyway. When all this is said and done, I do not want you to look at it and think, ‘I worked that out.’ I want you to realize that it was God who did this.”
God Follows Through
God says, “I am going to give you a sign.” That is what this virgin birth prophecy was originally about. It initially addressed this pressing Old Testament situation where Ahaz and the people of Judah had a serious problem.
We see in verses 1 and 2 that their enemies were camped all around the city. They were just outside, waiting for a chance to break in, overthrow the city, and enslave the people. Then we see in verses 3 through 9 that God promised a solution.
He said, “I will take care of it.” Right after that, we see that Ahaz was not interested in God’s solution. But the funny thing about God is that God is faithful to do what He promises, even if it is 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. Even with the best of intentions, sometimes we lack follow-through. I say “we,” but I could just as easily say “me.”
The other night, we were watching a Christmas movie with the kids that I had never seen before. One of the characters was worried about dying without having had the opportunity to take care of some repairs around the house that he had promised his wife he would do. I told Charla, “My list of those things I need to worry about is getting pretty long.”
There are all these things I have told her I am going to fix. It is not that I am not a man of my word. It is just that projects you have to do, and I do not just mean home projects but all the stuff on your to-do list, can feel like Hydra in Greek mythology. You cut off one head, and two more grow back.
So the to-do list gets infinitely long. I run out of time, and I forget things. It happens at home, and it happens here.
I told Tammy this morning, when she asked, “Can you make sure Abigail comes dressed like this for the play next week?” I said, “Can you ask Charla?” It is a promise I can keep. I promise I will forget to do that. So if you ask Charla, that will get done.
All of us, no matter how good our intentions are and how much we try to be people of our word, sometimes do not follow through. God does not have that problem. If God says it, He will do it. When God says it, it is as good as done.
So God gives them this promise so they would understand that, even if it is not on Ahaz’s agenda, and even if it is not the way they think it is supposed to work, God is faithful to His Word. He is going to do what He said. In this case, He was going to deliver them.
The First Meaning of the Sign
This virgin birth prophecy was originally meant, and was originally understood by the Jews, to show how quickly God would deliver Judah. That was the point of it. Seven hundred years before Jesus, what did they think this was about?
They were not scratching their heads and saying, “Virgin birth? We do not know what that is.” Seven hundred years before Jesus, this was a prophecy to let them know that God was going to act, and that God was going to act quickly.
Hopefully most of you know me well enough by now to know I am not going to be graphic in this, and hopefully this does not lead to any uncomfortable questions. Some of my kids are sitting in here as well. But there is a debate that rages over this word “virgin” in Isaiah 7:14.
In Hebrew, the word is almah, and it can mean a literal virgin, or it can mean a young woman. It can mean either of those. So you may come across versions of the Bible that translate Isaiah 7:14 as, “A young woman will give birth,” which in and of itself is not that amazing a sign.
Some versions, particularly the Revised Standard Version, the New Revised Standard Version, and some theologically liberal versions, will translate it that way to downplay the idea of the virgin birth. Here is 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 call the Septuagint, which you can go look at online now, like I did this week.
When you see the word almah in the Old Testament, it is translated multiple ways into that Greek. One of those words is neanis, which means a young woman. Another is parthenos, which means an actual virgin. In Isaiah 7:14, it is translated as parthenos, an actual virgin, a woman who has never been intimate with a man.
That tells me that even seven hundred years before the time of Christ, the virgin birth was not something invented by Christians generations after Jesus. The virgin birth is something the Jews seven hundred years before Jesus knew they were looking for. Their understanding of it in Ahaz’s day was a little different, but it is important that we understand this because there are people who will tell us, “That part of the Christmas story is a fairy tale. The Bible does not mean that.”
If we cannot trust that, it has major implications for the deity of Jesus Christ and 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, leaves the gospel shot through with holes. So we need to understand that the virgin birth is important.
But here is what they understood seven hundred years before Jesus. God promised to utterly destroy the kings who threatened Judah, the king of Aram and the king of Israel. He was going to take away their kingdom.
He says this at the end of verse 16: “The land whose two kings you dread will be forsaken.” Those kings and their lands were going to run out of time with God. God also promised that there was a time coming when He was going to turn the nation of Judah around, and they would experience peace and prosperity.
In verse 15, when He is talking about this young child, Immanuel, He says, “He will eat curds and honey at the time He knows enough to refuse evil and choose good.” These are foods they would have fed to a baby, but they were also foods that were in abundance when there was peace and when the land was fruitful. These were not things they had time to produce in times of war.
These are the things God had promised, that the land of Israel would be flowing with milk and honey when times were good. So God is not just promising an end to the threat. He is promising that there is going to be a good time of peace and prosperity coming.
To Ahaz, looking at this threat of war, with these people camped right outside his city walls, that is an incredible promise. On top of that, God says it is going to happen fast. It is going to happen in a shockingly short amount of time.
What they understood, and what indeed happened, was that if a woman who was a virgin at that time went ahead and got married, conceived a child in the normal way, and that child was born and began to grow, then by the time he was eating the milk and the honey, the fruit of the land, before he was old enough to know right from wrong, God would already have dealt with these pagan kings. God is not promising, in the days of Ahaz, that something exactly like what happened in Bethlehem was going to happen then. His promise was that God was going to be at work, and they would know it was God because they would not believe how fast the turnaround happened.
We do not know who the woman was. Theologians debate whether it was Isaiah’s wife, Isaiah’s daughter-in-law, or somebody in Ahaz’s court. We do not know today, but they knew. As that child grew up, he was going to be a reminder to them that God was with them.
As they saw him grow, they would be reminded that before he was even old enough to know right from wrong, God had already intervened. But 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 can also have an ultimate fulfillment. God can take something that was technically true seven hundred years before, and He can make it true in a whole different way seven hundred years later. For seven hundred years, they had looked at this and thought, “This was fulfilled already.” And it was, in part.
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. As that child grew, before he was old enough to know right from wrong, God had already dealt with the problem.
God had moved nations and empires around like pawns on a chessboard. For seven hundred years, they were thinking that God was amazing enough to do that. But God is so amazing that He had a second fulfillment of that prophecy in mind.
The Greater Fulfillment in Christ
God does not just follow through. God goes to miraculous lengths to follow through. God has gone to miraculous lengths to save us.
Matthew tells us this prophecy has an even more incredible fulfillment, and that is the one most of you are familiar with. It is amazing to me. Part of me has thought that if we look at what this originally meant, and at the Old Testament fulfillment of it, maybe that detracts a little from the story.
But on second thought, I think it adds to our sense of wonder. It should add to our sense of wonder that God was orchestrating things not only to save people then, but also to build on this plan to save us now. God can do all of these things and fulfill all of these things in multiple ways.
Matthew 1, starting in verse 18, 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. 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, 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.” Matthew then says, “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 Immanuel,’ which translated means, ‘God with us.'”
Imagine being Joseph. Imagine being Mary. Imagine being any of the people who heard this for the first time. For seven hundred 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 is more.”
It is like the best infomercial in history. There is more. God can do even more with this prophecy, and God is going to fulfill it in a literal way. There is going to be a literal virgin birth.
People today say, “I do not believe that is possible.” Listen to me. It all depends on the premise you start with. If you start with the premise that there is nothing outside of nature, then yes, it is a little bit of a stretch.
But if you start from the premise that God spoke the universe into existence, that by the words of His mouth God was able to speak to nothing and even nothing had to obey, to the point that it became everything, then it is not a stretch at all. If you start with the premise that there is a God who exists outside of and beyond the physical universe, and that He has that kind of power, it is not a stretch in the least to think that the 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 is nothing here that should stretch the imagination. I was listening to something this week where they were debating whether it is anti-scientific to believe in the virgin birth. The way I understand the scientific method, science does not prove things. It can disprove things, or it can say, “Based on the evidence we have, this appears to be the case.”
We can get pretty certain about things, but we are always looking for different parameters and different evidence. The scientific method and science itself are meant to help us understand things that normally happen in nature. This, by its definition, is not something that normally happens in nature.
This is something that happened one time in history. It is an apples-and-oranges discussion. It is separate from science. We do not have to find a scientific explanation for it, because nobody is saying it is a scientific thing. We are saying God intervened beyond the laws of science that He put in place.
God With Us
So we have a situation where God has said this child is going to be born. He is going to be born of a virgin. That is important because if He does not have a human father, He is not inheriting the sin nature that has been passed down from Adam.
He is the seed of the woman spoken of in Genesis 3, who is 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 Father is God the Father. He is God the Son in human flesh.
So when it says the child in the Old Testament would be Immanuel, that child was a reminder that God was with them. But this child spoken of in the New Testament is actually God with us. Jesus was something the religious leaders did not expect.
They did not expect this story. They did not expect Him to be who He was. They did not expect Him to do the things He did. He was born to a literal virgin, conceived by the Holy Spirit. That is something they did not expect, and He is God with us.
This virgin birth prophecy, as it applies to Jesus, demonstrates some important facts about Him. We can look at verse 23 and see that He is no ordinary man. Who is born that way? Nobody. Only Him.
The prophet said it would be a sign that He is God with us. John expounds on this. I think my favorite passage to read at Christmastime is John 1, which, even though it does not really go into the details of the story, 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 is not just a good teacher. He was God in human flesh, and the virgin birth tells us that.
Then look back at verse 22. 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, Jesus came as the fulfillment of God’s plans.
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 the plan He came to fulfill for the Father? He came to deliver us from our sin.
That was the most unexpected deliverance of all, because mankind, to the extent that we have understood our sin and admitted our sin, has always had a natural inclination to try to do something. We try to bargain with God. We try to earn God’s forgiveness. We try to be good enough.
But we never could. The religious leaders of Jesus’ day certainly did not expect God to send this little baby to take responsibility for our sins and to deal with our sins because we could not. People today still look for anything other than Jesus to try to deal with their sins, but God made one way of deliverance.
A God We Can Trust to Deliver
I 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 Ahaz had to learn as he tried to figure out how he could position his military, forge alliances, and do all these things to rescue his people. God was saying, “Wait. I have this.” It was also a lesson for the religious leaders in Jesus’ day who said, “We have to follow these laws, we have to follow these traditions, and we have to do all of these things.”
It is a lesson for our day as well, when we say, “I have to be religious. I have to check all the right boxes.” The only thing we have been called to do is trust in Him and the deliverance He has provided.
Sometimes we hear that and think, “That sounds good, but you do not know what I have done.” And it is true. I probably do not know what you have done. I probably do not know what is going on in your life right now, unless you have told me.
But here is the thing. That baby who was born, the fulfillment of God’s plans, grew up to die on the cross. He not only knows what you have done; He knows what you will 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.