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Sermon Title : Keep Calm (and Carry on?)

Occasion : English Sunday Youth Service

Location : Paya Lebar Methodist Girls’ School – Sophia Hall

MPP : God Continues to be with us, Despite our Failure

Good morning!

This morning, as you will be well aware, we are entering into the Christmas season, and are hence going through a sermon series on the Immanuel…

Of course, by this we are not talking about our staff member who is in charge of Young Adults, Emanuel Goh… Of course he’s a great guy… but he is not the focus of our reflection this morning…

Rather, we want to focus our attention on that which had been recorded for us in the Bible…

And I’m sure most of you would be familiar by now, the narration that had been recorded for us, in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 1:23 which reads “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel”.[1]

And I’m sure by now, you will be familiar with the term that it means “God is with us”…

And even if you have never heard of that before… it is actually spelled out in the clear in the last part of v23 which says “Immanuel – which means, ‘God with us’”…

I mean it can’t be more clear that that right?

But I guess what is usually not emphasized is that this particular verse is actually a direct quotation from the book of Isaiah…

In fact, Matthew pointed this out in the preceding verse, in verse 22 to tell us that what was happening at that point of time was indeed a fulfilment of what Isaiah had spoken…

Therefore, to fully appreciate the significance of this verse, we need to revisit this verse, and therefore, this morning, we are going to do a little time travel back to the time of Isaiah, to understand a little more about the background…

But before we do that, let us first read the few verses for our meditation this morning, and then commit this time unto the Lord…

Would you now hear the Words of God…

10 Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz,

11 “Ask the Lord your God for a sign, whether in the deepest depths or in the highest heights.”

12 But Ahaz said, “I will not ask; I will not put the Lord to the test.”

13 Then Isaiah said, “Hear now, you house of David! Is it not enough to try the patience of humans? Will you try the patience of my God also?

14 Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

15 He will be eating curds and honey when he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right,

16 for before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste.

17 The Lord will bring on you and on your people and on the house of your father a time unlike any since Ephraim broke away from Judah—he will bring the king of Assyria.”[2]

This is the Word of the Lord…

Let us pray…

As you can see, verse 14 is almost the exact copy between the Greek version of the Old Testament – the Septuagint

“ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ⌜ἐν γαστρὶ λήμψεται⌝ καὶ τέξεται υἱόν, καὶ καλέσεις (VFAI2S) τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ἐμμανουήλ” ( [LXX])

And the New Testament version

“Ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει καὶ τέξεται υἱόν, καὶ καλέσουσιν (VFAI3P) τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ἐμμανουήλ” .

The only difference is the words here whereby one talks about the addressee being the person Isaiah was talking to, King Ahaz, while in the New Testament, the person that will be doing the naming of the child is not part of the conversation… and is a couple…

And the second, word is here… of which, the difference is that the New Testament version is using a more contemporary way of saying the same thing…

It’s just like how some people will say “Pastor Alex is a well-mannered chap…” I mean who talks like that right now right?

You would just say “Palex is a pretty cool dude…” don’t you agree?

So my point is that Matthew’s quotation here is not accidental, but intentional but what is the context of ?

Allow me now to bring you back in time… and I would need to go back a few verses to verse 1 of our chapter…

Which reads “When Ahaz son of Jotham, the son of Uzziah, was king of Judah, King Rezin of Aram and Pekah son of Remaliah king of Israel marched up to fight against Jerusalem, but they could not overpower it.”[3]

Now, what is going on?

Isn’t it confusing?

I mean in this verse there are five names and three places… what is it all about?

Stay with me… I’ll unpack it for you and introduce you the players in this story slowly…

And I’ll explain to you using this map…

The first name we see here is Ahaz and if you were to look at his family tree, you will see two other names here, namely Jotham and Uzziah which are the immediate father and grandfather of Uzziah… and why in the past we mention the names of the fathers is because they didn’t have surnames and in other to identify who we are referring to, you need to talk about the lineage, which is stated here… And this Ahaz we are referring to, is the main character in our passage, here… who is the king of Judah, here in the South, which has Jerusalem as its capital, marked with a star here…

The next person in the mix is Pekah who was the King of Israel with the capital being Samaria, being the star over here…and if you’re confused so to isn’t Israel and Judah the same thing?

Well, not really, if you recall, after King Solomon, the tweleve tribes of Israel had been divided into 2 groups with 10 following Jerboam what are collectively known as the Northern tribes or Israel, and 2 that are collectively known as the Southern tribes or the tribes of Judah…this is recorded for us in

Finally, we have the third fellow, Rezin, who is the King of Aram, or in some of your versions, Syria, which as you can see if I compare the old map of Asia and the contemporary map of Asia, is the same place except that modern day Syria is very much bigger than before…

So what are these three guys doing?

You see, the King of Assyria, this dude named Tiglath-Pileser III, is the massive bully in town and his empire as you can see stretched over most of the landscape here and for a while, the kings of Israel and Aram were happy with the arrangements with Assyria by paying the Assyrian kingdom protection money but after a while, they were no longer satisfied and wanted to join forces to fight against the Assyrian Empire and they want Judah to be part of their gang to fight against Assyria…

And because the King of Judah wasn’t keen initially, the Israel-Aram coalition started to disturb Judah and were successful in taking some of the land to the North as well as to the South…

So, the King of Judah figured that he had three options…

One was to join in the Israeli-Aram coalition to fight against the Assyrian forces, second was to join the enemy, the Assyrian forces to fight against the Israeli-Aram coalition and the third is to do nothing…

And to appreciate how fearful the King of Judah, Ahaz was only made king a few years before this incident… and he didn’t know what to do…

So, this is where the prophet Isaiah comes in, prompted by God to approach King Ahaz telling him… in verses 4-9 of chapter 7 saying “won’t worry… keep calm… these two puny kingdoms, Israel and Aram will not be able to overcome you… the head of Aram is Damascus who is ruled only by a man, while the head of Israel is Samaria, which is ruled by a man because they had rejected me,[4] and if you have faith in me, I will be your leader”

Then God, through Isaiah, invited Ahaz to trust in Him by asking Ahaz to ask for a sign from God…

Actually it’s more of a dare… it was as if God was telling Ahaz to stop trusting all the idols that he had been praying to, and come and see whether God is indeed bigger than all those idols that he is praying to and come back to God…

And you know what?

Recorded here is a manifestation of God being Immanuel already!

Recorded here is a very clear sign of God being with His people… speaking directly to Ahaz through Isaiah, advising and counselling him..

Isn’t that wonderful?

I mean God himself sent someone to you and tell you don’t worry about all these things… for I am your leader, I am the one who is going to deliver you from all the issues that you are facing right now…

But guess what… instead of receiving God with open arms, Ahaz refused by saying “no, I will not ask, and I am unwilling to trust in you… I rather take matters in my own hands, I’ll trust my own mini-gods thank you very much…”

Ok, ok Palex…. I hear you… all these stories about the past is somewhat interesting… but what has it got to do with my life right now… or some of you might to saying… eh… pastor… very chim leh… so many names being thrown around… I lost you are good morning…

Well, let me try to contemporise the story a little…

Imagine it’s the exam period and you were ill which is why you didn’t have time to study before that…

But you managed to recover in time and had been studying real hard the past few days and now, it’s already 6pm, you have a few more chapters to cover and while you don’t have time to finish studying everything as much as you would like to, you think you have enough time to browse through the last remaining chapters with what’s left of the night…

Then, your classmate call you up and said…

Hey Jeff, guess what?!

I didn’t study for the exam tomorrow and you know what I’m going to go into the teacher’s office tonight to make a photocopy of the answer sheet for tomorrow’s exam…

Want to come along? You don’t have to do much… just act as my lookout can already…

Of course, being a good Christian you tell your friend you need to pray about it, like what you do for every other thing in your life…

Then you know what?

Nothing happened…

But your elder sister overheard the conversation and tells you not to do it…

Reminding you from that says “I am the LORD your God,

who teaches you what is best for you,

who directs you in the way you should go.

18 If only you had paid attention to my commands,

your peace would have been like a river,

your well-being like the waves of the sea.” .

And goes on to quote from not to cheat… Your sister like all the other women is very holy and knows her bible very well… (and all the woman in this room say)

And you know in your heart that that’s the right thing to do… which is to just continue studying as much as you can and God will carry you through…

But then, your friend call you up again shortly later…

Hey Jeff… how? Are you in or out?

At first you try to push it off, but then your friend is very persuasive and you decided to go with his plans… taking the chance to wait while your sister is not looking and follow your friend and get that answer sheet…

The operations went without a hitch and you managed to get that answer sheet…

You got home, happy you have the answers to the exam the next day, and you rationalise that since you were feeling unwell the preceding week, what you did was ok and you are glad you don’t have to study any more that night… just need to memorise the answers in that answer sheet…

You had a good night sleep knowing that you will do well in your exam the next day… you triumphed!

Or so you think....

The next day, when you get to school, you open up your examination sheet with great confidence thinking that you had gotten away with the perfect crime...

But when you saw the question, guess what...

The questions are completely different from what you studied the night before... there was a switch in the question paper!

You tried your best, trying to recall what you studied previously and handed in the paper...

After that, your teacher explained that there was a break-in in the teachers’ office last night...

And upon hearing that, your heart sank...

She went on to explain that she knew that the answer sheet for the examination today was taken, which is why she used another set of questions that she had set before...

She went on to say that the CCTV footage the night before was reviewed and she knew who the culprit was... And upon hearing that, your heart sank further... In fact, it went so low, it probably below the floor of your school building already...

Now, you’re in double trouble… First you probably did very badly in your exam because you didn’t study and secondly, you are caught for an offense…

And all these because you didn’t listen to God’s counsel… through the word and through Godly advice…

<bring map up once again>

And this is what happened to King Ahaz of Judah, when he was confronted with a difficult situation…

Remember the threat of the two kingdoms, namely Israel and Syria that were threatening to overtake Judah?

This is perhaps like the examination that you had to take in my earlier illustration…

And just like in the case of my illustration, there was a clear indication of what needs to be done…

In the story I painted, it was not to steal the answer sheet in the teachers’ office, while for Ahaz, not to do anything, but to trust him…

Yet, despite God telling him through prophet Isaiah, keep calm and have faith in God, for Israel and Syria will not be able to conquer Judah, just like the story I painted, Ahaz decided not to listen to God, but took matters into his own hands…

He thought he had a better plan… he thought he was cleverer than God and decided that he would do the unthinkable… join the Assyrian forces against the Israel-Syrian coalition…

Now, you must know that the Assyrian forces were terrible people, which is why Jonah was so afraid and reluctant to go to Nineveh…

They would impale the people of the land they conquered on stakes, cut off part of the bodies or gouge the eyes out of the troops, burn people alive… terrible people who do terrible things to the conquered people…

And yet… Ahaz decided to join them…

And it was a terrible decision, because now, the King of Assyria, had the perfect excuse not just to fight against and conquer Israel and Syria, the land of Judah was given to them… Subjecting large groups of people to the oppressive rule of Assyria…

This is so typical of us human beings right?

So often, we actually know of what God wants us to do, and what His plans for us are…

So often, we come to difficult points in our lives and rather than listening to the counsel of God, we decide to disregard Him and go for the more attractive option…

This was the case for the first couple, Adam and Eve in the first book of the bible…

Moses murdered an Egyptian who was causing him problem…

King Saul decided not to wait for Samuel and did his own sacrifice when the enemies were gathering…

King David decided not to go to war and pursued unrighteous relationships…

And for ourselves, how many times have we decided not to follow God’s instructions?

How many times have we decided to lie to get out of situations?

How many times have we acted against the wishes of our parents?

How many times have we gossiped or spoken bad about other people, perhaps so that we can be part of the in-group?

How many times have you compromised your standards in order not to get into trouble?

How many times have we elevated human wisdom above God’s wisdom and decided to forsake His good counsel to us?

How many times we have decided to intentionally walked out of His counsel thinking we know best…

The first thing we can gather from our reflection of this morning’s passage is that

1. Despite God being with us, we have a tendency to walk away from Him…

And so, this was what King Ahaz did…

He decided to walk out of God’s counsel and do you know what happened?

God was grieved, which we can read in verse 13 of our text today, where God described Ahaz’s decision as one that was wearing God down…

And because of Ahaz’s decision, there were consequences which we read about in verse 17, where because of his decision, the entire nation of Judah will suffer…

Because of his decision and the deteriorating morality and terrible state of the people of Judah, Judah was allowed to become a subsidiary state of Assyria, and though did not officially become conquered by Assyria, came under the crushing dictatorship of Syria, and had to pay large amount of money to Assyria…

Instead of being in a position of great privilege, being God’s people, but they refused to do so, rejecting God and subject themselves to be slaves to the Assyrians, which God described as a razor that comes to shave off the hair from the head and the feet… which is a picture of absolute shame…

It’s just like me coming up to you, shaving off your eyebrow and the centre part of your head…

It was meant to humiliate the person and a picture of the fall from grace…

Being humiliated and being tortured…

And all these because Ahaz and the people of Judah refused to turn to God and refused to listen to His advice, but turned to human wisdom…

In fact, other than trusting in human wisdom, the people of Judah were engaged in all sorts of idolatry, and all sorts of immorality, and did not turn passively away from God and disregarding His laws, but actively turned away from God…

They worshipped Ba’al and the Asherah poles, and Ahaz was even recorded to have sacrificed his own son () to the Gods….

It was not just a problem with Ahaz, but the problem was much bigger than Ahaz…

This is why in verse 2 of chapter 7, God addressed not only to Ahaz but the entire household of David…

And this goes to show that it wasn’t just Ahaz that rejected God but generations of people of Judah had rejected Gods whether actively or passively… in fact that was how the Northern Kingdom of Israel was split away from the Southern Kingdom… it was a prevalent rejection of God…

But you know what?

God did not give up on His people... and He continues to be with His people, and in fact, despite Ahaz blatantly rejecting God, God’s will for His people continue to be done...

This, we see in the fact that even though Israel and Syria had been disturbing Judah for the longest time, sometimes kidnapping tens of thousands of people from Judah, devastating the land, but God continued to protect Judah and as He had unilaterally promised Judah in verse 6-8, the evil plans of Israel and Syria to conquer and overtake Judah did not come to pass…

In fact, as predicted in verse 16, Israel and Syria came under Assyria rule in 732 and 722 BC respectively… approximately 3 years after this conversation between Isaiah and Ahaz took place…

And if you look at the timeline of God and see in the Old Testament how sometimes things that are prophesied take a long time before they are fulfilled, for example Abraham had to wait almost 30 years before he got Isaac, so 3 years is actually a very short period of time!

And do you know what’s even more amazing?

This timeline is also mentioned by God to Ahaz in verse 14 to 16 of the passage which talks about a child that is soon to be conceived, and all these things will be fulfilled before the child grows up, which came to pass…

This child is meant to be a sign to the people of Judah that God has not abandoned them… and even though they were going to be oppressed by the Assyrians, God is still with them…

And when this child grows up, the child will bring restoration to the land of Judah and rescue them from the threats… which is exactly what happened…

For Ahaz had a child shortly by the name of Hezekiah and unlike his father, Ahaz was a God-fearing king who brought salvation unto the land of Judah…

And he did it in two ways…

First, he made a covenant with God and rescued the people of Judah from themselves by making them come back to the Lord…

He destroyed the places of idol worship

He restored the temple worship to God and turned the people of Judah back to God once again…

Secondly, He stood up against Assyria and the extremely oppressive rule, and allowed the people to return to their homes once again…

He acknowledged God and reminded the people of Judah that God is bigger than the King of Assyria, and with that, the people of Assyria no longer disturbed Judah…

So, the second reflection we can draw from today’s passage is that

2. God continues to be with us, despite our shortcoming

Going back to our story about the examination that you didn’t study for, where we left off in the story was when you realised that you were in deep trouble and your heart was sinking below the floor of the church…

Well, you started to pray…

Pray for forgiveness from God and for mercy upon you…

And guess what?

Your teacher told the class that there will be consequences to the actions that you did…

And because you were not directly involved in the stealing of the paper, you will not be expelled from the school…

Nevertheless, because you were still involved in the crime, she will not take into consideration the marks you got in the examination and in other words, you got zero for that particular exam… And you will receive a letter of warning…

At that point of time, a few things go through your mind…

One is that you regret that you did not listen to God and your sister’s counsel… After all, you did study for the exam, even though you were not completely prepared for it… at least you could have gotten some marks, but now you have none…

But on the other hand, you thank God for the grace that had been extended to you…

You thank God that you can continue your education and was not thrown out of school…

That is what our God is like…

He is with us even when we fail Him…

He is ever ready to receive us when we stop rejecting Him and His ways…

Yet, He is also the God of mercy but also righteousness as well…

There will be consequences to the terrible that we do sometimes, but God’s grace also covers us, tempering the consequences to our actions with grace, directing us to a restorative state with Him, if we are willing to let Him come and do His work in our lives…

So, in the case of our passage today, though the nation of Judah suffered the consequences of Ahaz’s rejection of God, Hezekiah, was the sign God sent to restore the people of Judah back to God…

I’m sure some of you are asking…

Eh, Pastor Alex, now I’m confused…

So is this verse talking about Jesus as the Immanuel or Hezekiah as the Immanuel?

I mean everybody quotes when talking about Jesus and surely this verse must be the same thing right?

Well, the answer is that this verse talks both of Jesus as well as Hezekiah…

They are both Immanuels, but for different seasons…

You see, sometimes prophesies have multiple fulfilment and this is one such example…

So in this case, while Isaiah and all the people of his time probably saw Hezekiah as the sign that was given and this we know given the context of how the child would be conceived and born soon, and how the lands of Syria as well as Israel will be overtaken by Assyria, there was a twist to the story…

While Hezekiah started out really well, brought the people of Judah back to God, and managed to be faithful, this did not last…

Towards the end of His reign as king, Hezekiah became proud and fell…

He started to turn to human wisdom and started to show off his achievements, forgetting that it was God that enabled him to succeed…

And as we can see from history, Judah became more and more conceited and started to reject God just their Northern sister, Israel and eventually fell in 586BC…

God knew…

God knew that man would eventually fall which is why He provided another superior sign to us… Jesus

Therefore, the third reflection we have this morning is that

3. Jesus is the ultimate expression of God being with us…

And in this, we can take comfort because we are no longer bound by our ability to know experience the ultimate reality of God being with us…

We can acknowledge that we have all failed and fall short of the glory of God and while we can reject God and face the consequence, God had reached out to us first and promised us throughout the various generations that God will be with us despite our shortcomings…

And so long as do not reject Him, we are able to enjoy the sweet presence of God in our lives…

And we don’t have to be perfect before we do that… but so long as we genuinely want to come to Him, turning to Him, being willing to start the process of Him coming into our lives…

His grace will cover our shortcoming and allow us, the imperfect to be in the presence of the perfect…

This is what the founder of our denomination, John Wesley calls prevenient grace to allow us to know that we all fall short of His glory and need Him, and allows us to be willing to accept Him… something that we cannot do by our own strength, but the very fact we are willing and able to do it is already in itself a manifestation and result of God already being with us, and working in our lives…

The true essence of Immanuel…

This is the true meaning and significance of Christmas, which is that despite our tendency as humans to walk away from God, God is always with us, constantly pursuing us and his allowing his will to be done…

And we must be careful because even though God continues to be with us, we will still have the tendency to walk away from God…

But despite man’s failures, God sent the ultimate expression of His presence with us, Jesus Christ, God Himself, to be with us, because if we depend our relationship with God on man, we are doomed, but because God Himself is the ultimate guarantor of our relationship with Him, we have assurance and will be saved…

So this Christmas, thank God for the deep and profound truth that God is with all of us, despite our failures, and or darkness, and thank God that His ultimate will had been fulfilled through Jesus Christ our Lord, in whom our salvation is secured, in whom we can put our trust on, and in whom we know will come back and deliver us one day.

Immanuel… God is with us… and this is the timeless truth you can count on… today and forever more…

So this morning, no matter what your situation is right now…

Whether you are going through doubts, thinking whether God is still hearing your prayers, doubting whether God is still here with you, listen to this… Immanuel… God is with us…

This morning, if you’re far from him because of circumstances in your lives, because someone has hurt you, and you are angry with God…

Come back to Him and know that He is the true Immanuel… God is with us…

This morning, if you’ve heard this message for the first time, and while you’ve never thought of receiving Jesus in your life… this morning’s message speaks to you, you feel the prompting of God to respond to a God that transcends all the shallow and temporal pleasures of the world… Come back to Him and respond to the Immanuel who will never fail us…

Come back to God… the Immanuel who was and is and is to come..

The one who loves you enough to come down to earth to do what we cannot do for ourselves…

The Immanuel who is trustworthy and reliable and will never leave or forsake us…

This is our God… loving, merciful, trustworthy and just…

So take comfort and assurance in this my friend, in the great Immanuel…

Amen.

[1] The New International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), .

[2] The New International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), .

[3] The New International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), .

[4]