Sermon Tone Analysis

Everyone has a family Christmas tale.

So do I.

Christmas 1983.

Now I wasn’t old enough to remember much of this, but this is how it is told.

Our tradition was to go to my great grandparents’ house and do Christmas there on the night of Christmas Eve.

Then we would drive back home to Morganton so we could do our family Christmas at home.

Then, Christmas morning, after our Christmas at home, we would get back in the car and go back to Asheville to my grandparents house and have another Christmas there.

Well, on the evening of Christmas Eve, 1983, we had finished up our big extended family Christmas at my great grandparents’ house.

We head outside and our car is frozen.

Now, this Christmas Eve was one of the coldest of my lifetime.

Weather records for Asheville show that it was one degree below zero at 9pm in Asheville with a 30mph wind.

And our car was one of those diesel station wagons that you had to plug in.

So we weren’t going anywhere.

We ended up spending the night at my grandparents’ house and going home the next day.

In 1983, I was three years old.

I don’t remember hardly any of this.

Or anything else difficult that was going on behind the scenes.

Christmas was always such a fun time for me as a kid that I had no clue that the car was messed up or even that there were things in the world that were difficult and scary.

I remember almost every Christmas from the age of five on.

You know what I don’t remember, what I wasn’t aware of?

I wasn’t aware of the fact that the US and the Soviet Union were on a hair trigger, with the very real possibility that at any moment the world would be plunged into nuclear winter.

I was sheltered — in a good way, and all I remember are the things that kids ought to remember about Christmas.

But when we get older, it gets harder, right?

We can’t avoid the tough things.

We can’t escape from the things we fear.

We know that things are out of our control.

This was the case for King Ahaz too.

Ahaz and his people were facing the imminent threat of war.

They were facing the imminent threat of invasion, destruction, death.

Those are terrifying realities.

And King Ahaz was faced with a clear choice: Ahaz has to ask himself, who will I look to to save us?

Who will I hope in?

Will I trust God, who is greater than my fears?

Or will I hope in myself?

What were they facing?

Notice with me the frightening reality of impending war.

#1: The frightening reality of impending war

I hope you have your Bibles out and open or your Bible app on your phone.

The southern kingdom of Israel, and particularly those in Jerusalem, are facing imminent war.

Look with me at verse 1: “In the days of Ahaz the son of Jotham, son of Uzziah, king of Judah, Rezin the king of Syria and Pekah the son of Remaliah the king of Israel came up to Jerusalem to wage war against it, but could not yet mount an attack against it.”

[SLIDE: BEHIND THE SCENES]

Behind the scenes in verse 1:

Israel divides into north & south in 931 BC

Northern kingdom = Israel (capital = Samaria)

Southern kingdom = Judah (capital = Jerusalem)

Syria: a northern neighbor (capital = Damascus)

It’s 732 BC.

The one kingdom of Israel occupying the promised land has split in half.

You remember your 8th grade Civil War history?

North vs. south?

That’s exactly how it is here.

After King Solomon dies the northern kingdom becomes a breakaway region.

And out of the 12 tribes of Israel, they have ten tribes.

The southern kingdom had only two tribes.

The southern kingdom is called Judah and its capital is Jerusalem.

The northern kingdom is Israel and its capital is Samaria.

Except now, the northern and the southern kingdom are facing a common enemy: Assyria.

Assyria is like Nazi Germany in about 1938-1939.

Like Germany, Assyria is expanding its kingdom by invading neighboring nations and slaughtering them and destroying their land.

That’s about to happen to Israel, the northern kingdom of Israel.

Syria was Israel’s neighbor to their north, like Canada is to the United States.

But all three countries — Syria, the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Israel — all three countries are tiny.

Think of the size of the old Soviet bloc states like Hungary and Chechnya and Ukraine, compared to the size of the Russian Federation.

They don’t stand a chance.

So Syria and Israel — the northern kingdom — they get together and they’re like, “Together we stand a better chance of surviving.

Let’s band together and fight against Assyria.”

But they wanted a larger alliance.

They wanted the southern kingdom of Judah to help them too.

But they refuse.

So knowing all this background, read the text with me again, verse 1:

[SLIDE: ISA 7:1]

These are fearful days for Jerusalem.

And it’s not until we look down to verses 5-6 that we realize exactly what their intentions are.

Look there with me: “Because Syria, with Ephraim and the son of Remaliah, has devised evil against you, saying, ‘Let us go up against Judah and terrify it, and let us conquer it for ourselves, and set up the son of Tabeel as king in the midst of it” (Isa 7:5-6 ESV).

They want to cause chaos, they want to terrorize the city, they want to conquer them, and they want to install their own king in the place of Ahaz.

And there is no such thing as a peaceful transfer of power in these days.

If they do this, lots of people are going to die.

That’s the fearful expectation of war.

How many of you in the room this morning were old enough in the 1960s to remember the Cuban Missile crisis?

There’s virtually no one left who remembers what it was like during world war 2. But you could imagine how hard it might have been to celebrate Christmas in 1941, just 18 days after Japan launched its attack on Pearl Harbor.

Most recently, we celebrated Christmas during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic during December 2020.

Our nation knows what it is to celebrate the seasons of light while darkness looms overhead.

That helps us understand the next part.

Notice with me, the fearful response of Ahaz and his people.

#2: The fearful response of Ahaz and his people

Notice their fearful response.

Notice first of all that the fearful response comes on the heels of bad news.

Bibles out and open?

Bible app on your phone?

Read along with me.

“When the house of David” — that’s King Ahaz and his family, named in terms of his ancestor King David — “when the house of David was told, ‘Syria is in league with Ephraim,’ the heart of Ahaz and the heart of his people shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind” (Isa 7:2).

How many of you have gotten a phone call that changed your life?

This is the equivalent of the phone call that changes your life, or the headline that changes your life.

This would be like checking your news app after church and seeing that China and Iran and Russia had formed an alliance and missiles from all three countries were incoming to the United States.

What do you do?

Where do you go?

Is there anywhere you can be safe?

What does this mean for your friends and relatives far away?

These two countries, the northern kingdom of Israel and the country of Syria, both of these nations had already attacked the southern kingdom of Israel, in the past, on separate occasions.

Now they come together with more power, more numbers, greater strength [Ortlund, p88].