O Come, O Come Emmanuel

Isaiah 7:14

In 1999, George Bell, CEO of the search engine Excite (second largest at the time, only behind Yahoo), turned down a game-changing offer, the opportunity to purchase a young startup called Google. The purchase price was only $750,000, while Google’s current valuation stands at $1.6 trillion. Why did Mr. Bell say no?

Ten years after this decision, he explained his reason in an interview by the Internet History Podcast. He claimed that his rejection had nothing to do with the asking price, which was a good deal. Nor did it have anything to do with Google’s capabilities or design, which was also solid. He turned down the deal because of a stipulation that Google’s co-owner, Larry Page, insisted on including in the purchase agreement.

Mr. Page said, “If we come to work for Excite, you need to rip out all the Excite technology and replace it with Google’s search.” But Mr. Bell and others at Excite were unwilling to accept such a dramatic and complete change of culture and infrastructure. Since that time, Google has become the dominant search engine in the world, while Excite has become almost entirely obsolete. Larry Page could have become an incredibly influential and wealthy man, but he was unwilling to accept Google’s demands.

Have you ever turned down an offer or opportunity because it required something from you – something you would not accept? Despite many benefits, people increasingly delay getting married or having children, for instance, since they prefer the freedom and flexibility of their current lifestyle over what they perceive to be a more demanding, restrictive lifestyle that comes with committing to and caring for someone else.

Such choices feel empowering on the front end, but their disadvantages increase over time. The holiday season intensifies the ramifications of this tradeoff as we realize in a special way the priceless, timeless value of giving more than receiving and of spending time with family. Consider, for instance, how Scrooge – in Charles Dickens’ The Christmas Carol – chose being “solitary as an oyster” over married life so he could concentrate on accumulating wealth. Meanwhile, his clerk, Bob Cratchit, enjoyed the love and warmth of his family, despite having very little money.

More than 700 years before the birth of Christ in Bethlehem, a king of Israel named Ahaz faced a similar consequential choice, only his choice would have serious political and spiritual implications. Would he accept a special offer from God? Or would he turn God down because he was unwilling to accept the ramifications of doing so? This was a crucial moment in biblical history because God provided one of the most infamous prophecies about the birth of Christ in response to the choice that Ahaz made. Let’s take a look!

God promised help for King Ahaz.

To understand the famous prophecy found in Isa 7:14, we first need to understand the backstory behind it and the context leading up to it. We so easily quote this prophecy all by itself without knowing why we have the prophecy in the first place.

Now it came to pass in the days of Ahaz the son of Jotham, the son of Uzziah, king of Judah, that Rezin king of Syria and Pekah the son of Remaliah, king of Israel, went up to Jerusalem to make war against it, but could not prevail against it. And it was told to the house of David, saying, “Syria’s forces are deployed in Ephraim.” So his heart and the heart of his people were moved as the trees of the woods are moved with the wind.

According to Isa 7:1-2, two territory kingdoms to the north were preparing to declare war on Jerusalem. This enemy alliance consisted of the northern ten tribes of Israel and the nation to the north of them, called Syria. They were attacking the southern kingdom of Israel, called Judah, because they wanted to force Ahaz to join their coalition and help them fight back against the Tiglath-Pileser III, ruler of Assyria, the growing world superpower of that time, who was preparing to overtake them.

Ahaz believed that his smaller kingdom would be unable to resist an invasion by the Israel-Syria coalition. So, one day he went outside Jerusalem to inspect the city’s water source (Isa 7:3).

Then the LORD said to Isaiah, “Go out now to meet Ahaz, you and Shear-Jashub your son, at the end of the aqueduct from the upper pool, on the highway to the Fuller’s Field

Kings would do this to evaluate a city’s ability to endure an invasion or siege. As he did so, God sent Isaiah to meet with him and bring him a message from God (Isa 7:3-9):

And say to him: ‘Take heed, and be quiet; do not fear or be fainthearted for these two stubs of smoking firebrands, for the fierce anger of Rezin and Syria, and the son of Remaliah. Because Syria, Ephraim, and the son of Remaliah have plotted evil against you, saying, “Let us go up against Judah and trouble it, and let us make a gap in its wall for ourselves, and set a king over them, the son of Tabel”—thus says the Lord GOD: “It shall not stand, Nor shall it come to pass. For the head of Syria is Damascus, And the head of Damascus is Rezin. Within sixty-five years Ephraim will be broken, So that it will not be a people. The head of Ephraim is Samaria, And the head of Samaria is Remaliah’s son. If you will not believe, Surely you shall not be established.” ’ ”

With this message, God challenged Ahaz to reconsider the nature of the threat. Ahaz viewed this invading coalition as an overwhelming forest fire, but God viewed it as nothing more than two burning twigs about to be extinguished, nothing to be afraid of – more light than heat. Very soon, Assyria would conquer the northernmost kingdom of Syria, and only 65 yrs. later, the northern tribes of Israel would be conquered by Assyria, as well.

To encourage Ahaz’s faith, God invited him to request a sign. A sign would be some special, miraculous act of God through which God would demonstrate his faithfulness, power, and reliability to the king, further enabling the king to make a difficult decision to trust in God. He would do something similar in the years ahead for Hezekiah, son of Ahaz, by moving the shadow on a sundial backwards by 10 degrees (Isa 38:10-11).

Moreover the LORD spoke again to Ahaz, saying, “Ask a sign for yourself from the LORD your God; ask it either in the depth or in the height above.”

This was an incredible offer from God. If God had given you this opportunity, what would you have asked him to do?

Ahaz refused to accept God’s help.

You may be surprised to know that Ahaz refused God’s offer (Isa 7:12).

But Ahaz said, “I will not ask, nor will I test the LORD!”

At first, this sounds like a humble and spiritual answer. After all, Moses commanded God’s people (esp. the nation’s future kings) this way: “You shall not test the Lord your God” (Deut 6:16). Perhaps Ahaz was alluding to this command? But if this was the case, Ahaz misused this command because it was given to prevent Israel from complaining to God, which is not what God was asking Ahaz to do. What’s more, God himself was inviting Ahaz to ask for a sign, and God would never ask anyone to sin.

The problem here is that Ahaz did not have a close, trusting relationship with God. In fact, his relationship to God was quite the opposite. Here’s the rest of the story.

According to 2 Kgs 16:1-4 and 2 Chr 28:1-4, Ahaz was a wicked king who led the people of Judah to worship Baal and even sacrificed his own son to a pagan god. As consequences for these sins, God had sent the northern coalition against him (2 Chr 28:5, 9). In this clash, over 120,000 soldiers from Judah died, approx. 200,000 people were taken captive, and the land around Jerusalem had been plundered (2 Chr 28:6-8).

Despite all this devastation, the city of Jerusalem itself had not been conquered, though Ahaz feared it would be conquered soon. That’s why he was out inspecting the aqueduct, to see how well Jerusalem was prepared for an impending invasion. To prevent further devastation, Ahaz would go on to send gold and silver from the palace and Temple (2 Kgs 16:8-9) to the Assyrian king, Tiglath-Pileser III, to form an alliance with him. He intended to form an alliance with the pagan Assyrian empire.

From this we can see that Ahaz had no interest in trusting God. That’s why he refused to request a sign. To request a sign would prove the reliability of God, make trusting in God a necessity, and undermine Ahaz’s plans. To trust in God would also mean that Ahaz would need to repent from all his other sins and change his entire governing approach, personal values, and religious beliefs – all changes he was stubbornly unwilling to make.

Have you ever had to make a similar choice – choose to trust God and do what God’s Word says or choose to do what you wanted to do instead?

God gave a long-range prophecy instead.

In response to Ahaz’s stubborn, pious, unbelieving response, God gave a long-range prophecy instead. By this I mean that since Ahaz refused to ask for a sign, God did not give Ahaz a sign that he could observe; instead, God gave Ahaz a sign which would come to pass sometime after the current scenario with the northern coalition and the Assyrian empire had come to an end.

Why would God do this? Why would God give a sign at all? Because he was working out a much bigger plan than Ahaz’s immediate military quandary, and he was working out a much bigger purpose Ahaz’s personal survival. You see, Ahaz, despite his ungodly behavior and beliefs, was part of the dynasty of King David, through whom God would provide the world with a Messiah – a King who would deliver us not only from the problem of war but also from the much deeper, individual, and personal problem of sin and death.

According to Psa 89:3-4, God said:

I have made a covenant with My chosen, I have sworn to My servant David: “Your seed I will establish forever, And build up your throne to all generations.”

Then later in Psa 89:30-37, God said:

If his sons forsake My law and do not walk in My judgments, if they break My statutes and do not keep My commandments, then I will punish their transgression with the rod, and their iniquity with stripes. Nevertheless My lovingkindness I will not utterly take from him, nor allow My faithfulness to fail. My covenant I will not break, nor alter the word that has gone out of My lips. Once I have sworn by My holiness; I will not lie to David: His seed shall endure forever, and his throne as the sun before Me; it shall be established forever like the moon, even like the faithful witness in the sky.

From this we see that God would (a) punish and set aside any descendant and king from David’s royal line who rebelled against him but (b) would not allow David’s royal line to come to an end. Since Ahaz refused to believe God, God would bypass him completely – in a miraculous way – while also remaining loyal to David’s royal line and his promise to provide the ultimate King and Savior to the world from that line.

There are two key parts to this prophecy and sign from God. First, the sign would involve a virgin birth. Second, the sign would assign a specific name and purpose to the child who would be born.

A virgin would give birth to a son.

Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son…

We should not fail to appreciate the miraculous nature and profound significance of the virgin birth, which is prophesied here in Isa 7:14. This detail about the future birth of Christ is special in so many ways.

It alludes back to the first redemptive promise God gave to mankind when he said that the “seed of the woman” would “crush the head of the serpent” (Gen 3:15). This is an unusual promise because seed is normally associated with a man rather than a woman. This connection demonstrates that had God meant what he said nearly 4,000 years. before in the Garden of Eden.

What’s more, that promise of salvation had come not in response to faith but in response to unbelief, the unbelief which plunged all of mankind into sin. Remarkably, this promise appears once again in response to unbelief, demonstrating that our sinfulness only reinforces God’s determination to save rather than destroy.

Furthermore, that this would be a virgin birth indicates that God would provide a Messiah despite the unbelief of David’s descendant kings. He would not need a king to produce the Messiah, he would do so through a woman who had descended from David instead.

Before moving on, let me clarify something important about what some call the “Immaculate Conception.” Some may think that this terminology refers to the virgin birth, but it does not. It refers, instead, to the birth of Mary rather than the birth of Jesus. This was a teaching officially accepted by the Catholic Church in 1854 which asserts that in order to give birth the Christ, Mary herself had been born (rather conceived) without sin.

Such an idea is entirely foreign to Scripture, which never says anything to support the idea that Mary was sinless. Paul clearly says that “all have sinned,” and this includes Mary. The only exception is Christ.

Ultimately, the virgin birth establishes the unique identity of Christ. After all, why couldn’t Christ have been born exactly like the rest of us, through normal procreation between a husband and wife? The special nature of Christ’s birth ensures at least two things.

First, the virgin birth ensured that Christ did not inherit a sinful nature. According to Paul, we all inherit our sinful nature from Adam, the original father of the entire human race. The only exception is Christ.

As through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous. (Rom 5:19)

As in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive. (1 Cor 15:22)

Since Christ bypassed a human father at his conception, he became a human being without inheriting a sinful nature. So, we are all born sinners, but Christ was not.

Second, the virgin birth ensured that Christ was a special and unique person. It ensured that Christ would be a genuine human being because he was conceived within and through a human mother and therefore received a fully human nature. It also ensured that he was conceived from God, so he maintained his original divine nature as well.

The virgin birth ensured that this future child would be the perfect God-man, unlike any other person ever born.

The child’s name would be Emmanuel.

and shall call His name Immanuel.

The word Immanuel means “God with us.” Matthew makes this clear in his NT gospel, when he says this about the birth of Christ (Matt 1:23):

So all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying: “Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,” which is translated, “God with us.”

As “God with us,” this child, born to a virgin, would not only be a Davidic king as God had promised, but he would also be God. He would not merely be a blessing from God but God himself. Thanks to this incredible reality, this child, this king would replace not only the failed King Ahaz who was of no use in saving or protecting Israel, but he would replace and surpass all the Davidic kings, including David himself, who all proved to be quite unreliable in leading and protecting God’s people.

This, friends, is the greatest gift of all, a gift which deserves to be celebrated at Christmas. The gift not of God’s help, as he offered to Ahaz, or of any of God’s good blessings, of which there are many, but the gift of God himself. And this greatest of all gifts is one which you must personally choose to accept. Will you, like Ahaz, refuse? Or will you accept?

Your refusal to believe God is your loss.

Here is a point we must all take to heart. You cannot hinder God’s plan of salvation, but you can personally miss out. First, hear what the rest of this prophecy says (Isa 7:15-17):

Curds and honey He shall eat, that He may know to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the Child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land that you dread will be forsaken by both her kings. The LORD will bring the king of Assyria upon you and your people and your father’s house—days that have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah.

From this, we see that the child would not only be “God with us,” but he would be a normal human child, learning to eat and developing normally through growth stages like any other human child.

We also see that he would be born into the nation of Israel at a time when the nation was not prosperous. “Curds and honey” describe the food of a depressed rather than prosperous economy.

We see that this child would be born sometime after both nations of the northern coalition (“both her kings”) had been defeated by Assyria, which would certainly occur after Ahaz had died.

We see, also, that the Assyrian empire, with whom Ahaz would attempt to form an alliance would first take the gold that he offered only to oppress him and his people afterwards.

From these things, we see that though God would provide his people with a Savior, he would do so apart from and much later than anything Ahaz would do or experience in his failed, ungodly attempts to solve his problems. This all matches what Isaiah had said to Ahaz previously: “If you will not believe, surely you shall not be established” (Isa 7:9).

From this statement, we learn a crucial lesson about the way that individuals intersect with the plan of God. On one hand, none of us can “mess up” God’s plan or prevent God from accomplishing the great plan of redemption and restoration that he is bringing about in history and the world. He will rid the world of all evil, he will make all wrongs right, he will banish Satan and ungodly people forever, and he will establish a New Creation – a new universe and Earth free from all effects or possibility of sin forever.

There is nothing you can do to change that. But your response to what God is doing makes all the difference, not for God’s plan but for you.

Like Ahaz, if you will believe in God’s promised Savior, who is Jesus Christ, then you will be established.

As Peter said, “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins” (Acts 2:38).

As Paul said, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31).

Have you accepted Christ as your Savior? If you do, then you must also accept him as God, which means that you must accept him not only as Savior but as King, as the one who will have sole authority over your life. You must accept him as the one to whom you must submit and follow to the end of this life into the next.

Christ himself put it this way (Luke 14:33):

Whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be My disciple.

We call this repentance. It means to turn away from your sinfulness, your wrong religious beliefs and practices, and whatever else you may be relying upon to trust in entirely in Christ instead. Ahaz was unwilling to trust in God for help because to do so would mean that he would also have to turn away from his sinful lifestyle and wrong religious beliefs. This is the tradeoff we must be willing to make.

Remember how George Bell was unwilling to let Google technology take over his own company’s technology? That’s why he was unwilling to accept a merger, even though a merger would have been far better for him in the end.

Will you be like Ahaz and refuse to trust in God because you want to remain in control of your life, you want to continue in your sinful, selfish lifestyle, and you want to hold on to your wrong religious beliefs and practices? Or will you turn away from those things to trust in Christ, the God-man who was born of a virgin, come to save you from your sins?

Christ’s birth proves the reliability of God.

In closing, Christ’s miraculous virgin birth proves the complete reliability of God, for 700 years later, this child was born to a virgin just as the prophet Isaiah recorded. Once again (Matt 1:23):

So all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying: “Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,” which is translated, “God with us.”

No human beings could cause this to happen. Only God himself could do this, and he did it, just as he had promised. He indicated that he would do something like this in the Garden of Eden at the beginning of history, he emphasized this even more clearly nearly 4,000 years later, then he did exactly what he promised some 700-800 years after that.

Other promises from God recorded in Scripture demonstrate the same fact, that God is in complete control of history and is perfectly reliable in all that he says he will do. This prophecy, along with many others which were also fulfilled through the birth of Christ, remind us that whatever other promises God has made will also be fulfilled just as he has promised. He is faithful to his promises. He is faithful to his people. As Paul told believers in the church at Thessalonica:

He who calls you is faithful, who also will do it. (1 Thess 5:24)

May we be like Isaiah who believed God before Ahaz. May we also be like so many others in the New Testament record of the birth of Christ who also believed God’s promises and trusted in him completely – like Anna, Zechariah, Elizabeth, Mary, Joseph, the wise men, and more. I’m thankful for Christmas because this season reminds us to acknowledge that God is faithful to his promises.

Will we believe and be established? Or will we refuse to believe and miss out on the salvation and security that God promises to provide through Jesus Christ?