Isaiah 7-8 - God With Us

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. 2 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. 3 And the Lord said to Isaiah, “Go out to meet Ahaz, you and Shear-jashub your son, at the end of the conduit of the upper pool on the highway to the Washer’s Field. 4 And say to him, ‘Be careful, be quiet, do not fear, and do not let your heart be faint because of these two smoldering stumps of firebrands, at the fierce anger of Rezin and Syria and the son of Remaliah. 5 Because Syria, with Ephraim and the son of Remaliah, has devised evil against you, saying, 6 “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,” 7 thus says the Lord God: “ ‘It shall not stand, and it shall not come to pass. 8 For the head of Syria is Damascus, and the head of Damascus is Rezin. And within sixty-five years Ephraim will be shattered from being a people. 9 And the head of Ephraim is Samaria, and the head of Samaria is the son of Remaliah. If you are not firm in faith, you will not be firm at all.’ ” 10 Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz: 11 “Ask a sign of the Lord your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven.” 12 But Ahaz said, “I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test.” 13 And he said, “Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary men, that you weary my God also? 14 Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. 15 He shall eat curds and honey when he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. 16 For before the boy knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land whose two kings you dread will be deserted. 17 The Lord will bring upon you and upon your people and upon your father’s house such days as have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah—the king of Assyria!” 18 In that day the Lord will whistle for the fly that is at the end of the streams of Egypt, and for the bee that is in the land of Assyria. 19 And they will all come and settle in the steep ravines, and in the clefts of the rocks, and on all the thornbushes, and on all the pastures. 20 In that day the Lord will shave with a razor that is hired beyond the River—with the king of Assyria—the head and the hair of the feet, and it will sweep away the beard also. 21 In that day a man will keep alive a young cow and two sheep, 22 and because of the abundance of milk that they give, he will eat curds, for everyone who is left in the land will eat curds and honey. 23 In that day every place where there used to be a thousand vines, worth a thousand shekels of silver, will become briers and thorns. 24 With bow and arrows a man will come there, for all the land will be briers and thorns. 25 And as for all the hills that used to be hoed with a hoe, you will not come there for fear of briers and thorns, but they will become a place where cattle are let loose and where sheep tread.

Target Date: Sunday, 4 February 2024

Sermon Text:

I’m not sure about you, but for me it is sometimes a challenge to read and teach these mighty chapters about God’s judgment in the Old Testament.

Not that these chapters are surprising to us – God is holy, and He cannot abide unholiness.

We know that.

I hope there is no one hearing me today who does not have some idea of the vast depth of your own natural wickedness,

And the abounding love that God proved by sending His only begotten Son to be a sacrifice to save us from that wickedness.

To free us from the kingdom of darkness and bring us into the kingdom of God.

God has not changed – He is the same in the Old Testament as in the New Testament.

Judgment and grace are found in the Old Testament.

Judgment and grace are found in the New Testament.

The difference between the two is that the revelation of God in the Old Testament is a revelation “in progress”:

The self-revelation of God by the end of the New Testament is complete.

When John signs off at the end of the Revelation, we have in this book everything we ever need to know about God, about life, and about how to live a godly life.

There is not, nor will there ever be, any more Bible.

So let us turn our attention this morning to the seventh and eighth chapters of Isaiah.

As we find so often in the writings of the prophets, and will find time and again in Isaiah, we see the promise of God’s judgment on His wayward and wicked people.

We read chapter 7 this morning, so we can see that this prophecy was delivered directly to the evil king Ahaz.

Israel and Judah – they were two separate nations after Solomon died – they had a lot of bad kings.

And when the Bible calls them bad, it is not simply talking about them the way we might say “He was a bad president”.

It really had little to do with how well they did their job;

It had everything to do with how faithful they were to the LORD.

And in the list of bad, evil kings, Ahaz was near the bottom.

Ascending to the throne at age 20, he reigned 16 years over the kingdom of Judah.

We see in 2 Chronicles 28 just a few of the things he did:

He made metal idols for the false gods, the Baals (v.2).

He worshipped the false god Molech by burning his sons as an offering (v. 3).

He built high places and worshipped false gods all over the nation (v. 4).

He plundered the treasures of God’s temple and sent them to Assyria.

He locked the doors of the temple of God and forced everyone to worship other gods all over Jerusalem and across all Judah (vv. 24-25).

The only good thing that can be said of him is that he was a descendant of David.

He was in the line of David that leads directly to Jesus Christ, the Messiah:

Uzziah the father of Jotham, and Jotham the father of Ahaz, and Ahaz the father of Hezekiah - Matthew 1:9

But just because he was in that line doesn’t mean that God was pleased with him:

If his children forsake my law and do not walk according to my rules, 31 if they violate my statutes and do not keep my commandments, 32 then I will punish their transgression with the rod and their iniquity with stripes, 33 but I will not remove from him my steadfast love or be false to my faithfulness. 34 I will not violate my covenant or alter the word that went forth from my lips. 35 Once for all I have sworn by my holiness; I will not lie to David. – Psalm 89:30-35

So based on this warning, and the incredible evil Ahaz caused the nation to commit, 2 Chronicles 28:5-6 tells us:

Therefore the Lord his God gave him into the hand of the king of Syria, who defeated him and took captive a great number of his people and brought them to Damascus. He was also given into the hand of the king of Israel, who struck him with great force. 6 For Pekah the son of Remaliah killed 120,000 from Judah in one day, all of them men of valor, because they had forsaken the Lord, the God of their fathers.

Perhaps you would think that might bring him to repent and return to God, but it didn’t.

In the time of his distress he became yet more faithless to the Lord—this same King Ahaz. 23 For he sacrificed to the gods of Damascus that had defeated him and said, “Because the gods of the kings of Syria helped them, I will sacrifice to them that they may help me.” But they were the ruin of him and of all Israel. – 2 Chronicles 28:22-23

I can think of no sadder commentary on someone:

When they were chastened by the Lord, they abandoned Him altogether.

Rather than remembering God’s promises to His people,

Rather than looking at his own unfaithfulness to God,

Rather than seeking God and crying out to Him as the people of Israel had done many times before,

He abandoned God altogether and began worshipping the false gods of Syria.

It might remind us of the wicked in the book of Revelation who were enduring God’s judgment:

They were scorched by the fierce heat, and they cursed the name of God who had power over these plagues. They did not repent and give him glory. - Revelation 16:9

That, unfortunately, doesn’t seem that much of a stretch for us to understand.

Every day, Christians somewhere make this same kind of choice.

They see someone who is following a false doctrine who seems happier or healthier or wealthier than they are, and so they begin to inch toward that false gospel.

Osteen’s congregations and others, like the Highlands, they grow to thousands even while they proclaim dangerous doctrines that have no basis in the Scripture or in the God of that Scripture.

The gospel they preach promises success in this world, telling their hearers that God WANTS them to be successful and comfortable.

This Bible, though, says:

I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.” – John 16:33

And Blessed [joyfully congratulated] are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. 12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. – Matthew 5:11-12

But Ahaz had turned from the true God, and everything he had taken Judah through had only made him worse.

It is in this light that Isaiah intercepted him while he was inspecting the emergency water supplies for the city.

Not in the palace, not in an audience with the king, but while the fretful king worried whether the defenses of the city would hold.

And the message the prophet had for him?

Don’t worry about Israel and Syria. They will be gone shortly.

And a greater terror will follow them - Assyria.

The same Assyria you are reaching out to, asking them to save you.

None of those idols he worshipped had told him that.

Not a single priest of those false gods could see that coming.

And so God gives him a chance to name a sign of God’s truth – any sign.

And the faithless Ahaz refuses.

So God declares His own sign.

the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

Immanuel – God with us.

Can anything be more comforting to the people of God than that?

Can anything be more terrifying to those who reject God than that?

I won’t delve this morning into who the “maiden” in Isaiah’s time was;

The child was really born in that day.

But Matthew also tells us this was a prophecy of the Messiah Himself, Jesus Christ.

The child in Isaiah’s time was born naturally;

The baby Jesus was born to a maiden who was a virgin all the way to the time of His birth – a miraculous birth.

And we can see this is Isaiah’s intention because he talks about this child all the way into chapter 9, which we looked at during the Advent season this year.

But what I suggest we look at this morning is the name – Immanuel, God with us.

On the instruction of God, Isaiah had a couple of sons with unique names:

His oldest named “A remnant will return”,

And the younger “Speedy spoil, quick prey”.

And so we see another boy born: “God with us”.

But what does it mean?

There are many who might say it this way: God with US.

As opposed to “God with YOU” or “God with THEM”.

He is OUR God, and we are His people.

There is certainly Scripture that says this very thing:

Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker! 7 For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. - Psalm 95:6-7

you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. – 1 Peter 2:9

Christian, let this truth comfort you in all your times of trouble: you are God’s people, and He will never forsake you.

Nothing can separate you from His love:

Not death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. - Romans 8:38-39

If you are His, you are His forever.

But we must be careful in our understanding of who is the “us”.

There are some who think or act like the “us” is really the U.S. – the United States.

I think it takes little discernment to see the lie in that.

Or that “us” is a political ideology or party or group.

That God is a Republican or a Democrat.

Or, worse, that He is white or black or Latino.

Or the “us” is a particular denomination. Like “God with us [Baptists]” or “God with us [Calvinists]”.

The “us”, though, is His people, His sheep, His church.

Across all nations, parties, opinions, races, and Christian denominations, the followers of Jesus Christ are the “us”.

And God is with us.

But what does it mean to be “with” us?

It doesn’t mean He is on our side.

Ahaz may have thought that;

Certainly many in his day did.

They comforted themselves with the fact they were God’s people, that they had His temple.

And they told themselves He would always protect them, no matter what.

They took God for granted.

Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23 And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ – Matthew 7:21-23

We must never assume our salvation when we have no evidence of it.

Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. – 2 Corinthians 13:5

We can, and most often ought to, have assurance of our salvation, but it is a great mercy of God to remove that assurance from us at times where we may become mired in sin.

That is one of the ways He chastens us and hurries us in repentance back to Him.

We saw in Ahaz that the chastening did not bring repentance,

But in the true child of God, that loss of assurance rescues us from many griefs of sin.

No, God with us doesn’t mean He takes our side;

It means He is BY our side.

Holding fast to those who are His.

But in this we must never forget who God is: the Holy One.

Ahaz thought he could dump God and go to some other idol when God stopped doing what he asked.

But it doesn’t work that way.

In 7:9, God told him:

If you are not firm in faith, you will not be firm at all.

If you do not trust God fully, you will not stand at all.

It is no accident that this pathetic encounter with the wicked Ahaz comes in the chapter immediately following Isaiah’s vision of God in the temple.

His holiness, His majesty, and the utter hopelessness of any sinful flesh before Him without God’s mercy and grace.

A king has no advantage over a beggar before the Holy God.

And sin, any sin, is a pollution worthy of eternal hell.

Please don’t make the fatal mistake of believing God is just like us, but better.

That demonic lie sends people every day into everlasting torment.

God is holy, holier than you can ever even imagine.

Holier than you will ever be.

God’s wrath against sin is more violent than you dare conceive.

His anger against sin is hotter than a thousand atom bombs.

And that means His grace is so much more tender than you can know.

That the suffering of our Lord Jesus Christ at the cross was so much greater than we understand.

That the Father’s love for His people is so much deeper than we can ever fully tell.

The salvation God has given through Jesus Christ saves us completely from His wrath,

Releases us from our enslavement to sin.

And transports us from the kingdom, the dominion, of the darkness of this world into His kingdom.