Sermon Tone Analysis

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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...