The Fulfillment of Promise

Big Idea: We will explore the idea of God being ‘with’ us. In two places, we learn that the Messiah’s name is going to be Emmanuel and yet that’s not actually what Mary and Joseph end up calling him. They are given a different name: Jesus. Emmanuel isn’t a title either. Messiah, Christ, Wonderful Counselor, and Prince of Peace are all titles. So if Emmanuel isn’t a name and it isn’t a title…what is it? That’s what this series is about. In this first installment in the series, we will look at how Jesus’ coming is the fulfillment of an age old promise to bring blessing to the entire world through the family of Abraham when God came to be ‘with’ men for the very first time. Immediately in that story, we are suspect of this mans ability to bring blessing into the world as it leads directly into Abrahams first of many failures. If this blessing is truly going to come, the Old Testament makes it clear that we are going to need a better man born from the line of Abraham than any who’ve come before.

I hope everyone had an amazing Thanksgiving…

Explain that I was looking up the origins of Thanksgiving…honestly, its origins are super dark and bloody and people remember that holiday for many different reasons, and not all of them are good. Nobody really knows why we actually celebrate it…which I think is wild. The story that many of us grew up hearing about the pilgrims and native Americans eating together is largely due to a story told by Abraham Lincoln and nobody really knows if it is true or not. We do know that the Holiday’s origins are rooted somewhere in giving thanks for the life sustained through the final harvest… if that is truly the case, then this was celebrated way before the 1620 event.

Also of note, the 1620 giving of thanks event between two different people groups (Pilgrims and Native Americans) isn’t even unique or the first of its kind. The first recorded instance of that type of Thanksgiving actually happened in 1565 in Florida when Spanish settlers and members of the Native American Seloy tribe ate salted pork and garbanzo beans together…anybody want to adopt that as their new Thanksgiving tradition?

We do know that some combination of all of those events is what led George Washington, and later Abraham Lincoln to mark the final Thursday in November as Thanksgiving day. For a number of years, Thanksgiving day was celebrated on the first Thursday in December. And for two years 1939 and 1940 president Roosevelt tried moving the holiday to the third Thursday in November because…and get this…he wanted to extend the Christmas shopping season. And here I thought black Friday starting on Thursday afternoon was bad.

Whatever the case may be, Thanksgiving is typically recognized as a time to give thanks for the blessings that change our lives. In fact, that’s what just about all of our major holidays are about: they are a marker for remembering change.

Have you ever thought about them that way before? Here I’ll show you:

Let’s start simple:

New Years Marks the change of the New Year.

We’ve already talked about Thanksgiving.

Independence Day Marks the day we won our independence from England.

Sometimes though, it is about celebrating the people who have brought change.

Presidents Day, although originally called something else is on the birthday of George Washington.

Then there is Columbus Day…but I’m not touching that one with a 39 and a half foot pole.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

And then there is Christmas… I think there is a certain beauty and goodness about Christmas that is lost when we reduce it down to simply the birth of Jesus. We don’t celebrate the birth of Martin Luther King Jr…he was just a man. No, we celebrate the change that man brought to this country.

Obviously the birth of Jesus is a big deal, and yet, just celebrating His birth can come off sort of trite and reductionist. Its easy to turn it into a Christian platitude that really doesn’t mean anything other than being our rote response for the true “reason for the season.”

No, Christmas is a lot like Thanksgiving. It has a very storied past and a lot of it is dark and bloody and way more complex than we imagine it to be as we are stuffing ourselves full of ham and cranberry sauce. Unlike Thanksgiving, however, the more you look into this dark, complex, and bloody story, the greater appreciation you come away with. That is why we have chosen the text we have for this Christmas season:

Let’s check it out and just dive right in:

The title of our sermon comes from two verses in the Bible and they are honestly one in the same. The first is:

Isaiah 7:14 NASB95

14 “Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call His name Immanuel.

And

Matthew 1:23 NASB95

23 “Behold, the virgin shall be with child and shall bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,” which translated means, “God with us.”

Here is why I think these two verses (which are really one and the same) deserve five sermons dedicated to them. Let’s look at the verse from Matthew in its context and I think you’ll understand why:

Matthew 1:19–25 NASB95

19 And Joseph her husband, being a righteous man and not wanting to disgrace her, planned to send her away secretly. 20 But when he had considered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife; for the Child who has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. 21 “She will bear a Son; and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.” 22 Now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet: 23 “Behold, the virgin shall be with child and shall bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,” which translated means, “God with us.” 24 And Joseph awoke from his sleep and did as the angel of the Lord commanded him, and took Mary as his wife, 25 but kept her a virgin until she gave birth to a Son; and he called His name Jesus.

Did you catch the seeming contradiction? The prophesy which came close to 700 years before the birth of Jesus said he was going to be called Immanuel and yet that wasn’t his name. Now our first clue that should tell us there is more than meets the eye is the fact that Matthew references this prophecy in the context of Jesus receiving his name. You would think if this was a Bible mistake that Matthew would just sort of glaze over it and yet, he actually draws attention to it.

Here is the deal:

Immanuel is not a name.

His name is Jesus (or Joshua in Hebrew) which means: God is Salvation.

Immanuel is also not a title.

Isaiah, who gives us Immanuel also gives him a bunch of titles that we also throw around at Christmas time. Check out Isaiah 9:6

Isaiah 9:6 NASB95

6 For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us; And the government will rest on His shoulders; And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.

Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, and Prince of Peace are all titles referring to what he is and what he will do.

We also get the titles of Messiah meaning anointed one from the Old Testament. And translated as Christ in the Greek New Testament. Those are titles.

Immanuel is a marker of remembrance for change.

Honestly, given the last few years, we could stand some change right now. For that reason, I can’t think of a better thing for us to study this Christmas Holiday.

Here is how we get the marker of remembrance for change. Let’s go back and look at our verse again:

Matthew 1:23 NASB95

23 “Behold, the virgin shall be with child and shall bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,” which translated means, “God with us.”

Underline that phrase in your Bible: “God with us.”

If Immanuel is about God being ‘with us’ then we have to understand that there was an entire history about when God came to be ‘with’ His people. Matthew just dropped this huge bomb on us that he is using to make a statement with, but because Matthew was written with a decidedly Jewish audience in mind, he expects you to understand the significance of it as well as the dark, complex, and often bloody history of it.

Five weeks is a long time to wait for the full picture so I’ll give you the spoiler now:

When God shows up, things drastically change.

For the next several weeks, we are going to unpack that small yet significant bomb that Matthew referenced by looking back at the times that God came to be with His people and see what it was showing us about this Immanuel that was coming into the world. My hope is that a fuller understanding of that concept will bring about worship, hope for future change, and a deeper celebration in your heart this Christmas season.

So…if you have your Bibles, turn to Genesis chapter 12 with me.

Before you start reading, give the context that it had been hundreds if not thousands of years since God last spoke. The last four times God spoke it was all pretty doom and gloom.

Just to catch you up on what those were:

God came down in the Garden of Eden to curse the serpent, man, woman, and earth and then proceeded to kick mankind out of paradise.

Next, God spoke out to arbitrate the first murder trial where he cursed Cain.

Then, God spoke to Noah because mankind was so wicked he was about to wipe them from the face of the earth…which he proceeded to do.

THEEEEN, God came down because man had rebelled again at Babel and scattered them across the face of the earth confusing their language effectively setting mankind back technologically 2,000+ years.

And so, when you open up to chapter twelve…one chapter after the last time God spoke out…and you hear the words: “Now the LORD said to Abram...you are meant to sort of cringe…like oh goodness, what’s coming next. But let’s read it together.

Genesis 12:1–6 NASB95

1 Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go forth from your country, And from your relatives And from your father’s house, To the land which I will show you; 2 And I will make you a great nation, And I will bless you, And make your name great; And so you shall be a blessing; 3 And I will bless those who bless you, And the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.” 4 So Abram went forth as the Lord had spoken to him; and Lot went with him. Now Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. 5 Abram took Sarai his wife and Lot his nephew, and all their possessions which they had accumulated, and the persons which they had acquired in Haran, and they set out for the land of Canaan; thus they came to the land of Canaan. 6 Abram passed through the land as far as the site of Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. Now the Canaanite was then in the land.

This is a big deal in the story thus far. Everything since the Garden has been a downward spiral into worse and worse problems marked by greater and greater acts of judgment from God.

We are going to talk about this again here in a few weeks, but Genesis chapters 1-11 are an expose in human brokenness and depravity. These first eleven chapters in Genesis are what happens if God doesn’t intervene in our story somehow. Within four chapters, God has to wipe all of humanity off the map and begin again. And just in case you are inclined to see Noah as some sort of savior, the very next story is how he and the family he brought onto the ark are failures too. Then as if that weren’t enough, we get the tower of Babel story to show that…yep…the problem of sin is still humanity wide.

Chapter twelve marks a turning point in the story, however. God is beginning the great rescue plan of humanity through this promise of blessing…whatever that may be.

Look at how God seals this promise.

Genesis 12:7 NASB95

7 The Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your descendants I will give this land.” So he built an altar there to the Lord who had appeared to him.

God comes to be with Abram. And Abram realizes the importance of remembering this moment when God came to be with him so he builds this altar to bring his mind back there.

I think there is a benefit from stopping here and just resting in the fact that:

It is important to set up intentional moments of remembrance for how God has intervened in our story.

This is what the Christmas season is for us. We don’t have altars anymore, we do this with a holiday. Sure, we give gifts and eat meals and put up Christmas trees, and all that is just fine so long as we don’t forget to stop in remembrance of how God has intervened in our story.

This was important for Abram because there is about to be a bad famine that will drive he and his family down into Egypt where thy will be saved from the famine. God’s people have a bad tendency all throughout the Old Testament of looking to Egypt (which is a picture of the world) for salvation. It was by coming back to this altar years later that Abrams heart was brought back to the realization that God is the true promise keeper and deliver…not Egypt.

But, let’s go back to the whole part about God coming down to be with Abram. You may be thinking, what a weird thing to do. Why couldn’t he just speak to Abram? Here is the deal: God has shown up twice so far in the story and both times drastically altered the trajectory of human history.

First, God showed up to be with man in the Garden only to discover he had sinned. God then proceeded to kick them out of the Garden.

The next time God showed up to be with man, it was because of their rebellion at Babel. Consequently, God also kicked them out of that place as well.

But this time, the story is different. God is beginning the redemptive work of bringing mankind back into His kingdom.

Maybe there is something different about this Abram character. Maybe he’s different than Adam and Even. Maybe he’s more righteous than Noah. He’s definitely got to be better than the people at Babel.

But then, what happens immediately after God comes to be with Abram? Well, if you read the rest of the chapter, you realize that Abram is no better than any of the other people who came before him. Abram lies and then uses his wife to save his own skin.

But then…read the rest of chapter 12. Explain how Abram was a failure...

Not just Abram, but:

Isaac was a terrible father showing favoritism.

Jacob was a liar, thief, and con-artist.

Jacobs sons were murderers, scheemers, adulterers, and sexually abusive.

The nation of Israel was unfaithful to God.

Moses, the guy God used to lead His people out of slavery in Egypt had some serious anger issues and flat out disobeyed God in front of the entire nation.

After watching what a single failure did to Moses, Joshua still failed to uphold God’s commands by making a peace treaty with some of the people in the promised land that God specifically commanded them not to.

The Judges come next and they were a lot full of failures…as were the people of Israel.

Saul was a terrible king.

David was a bright spot but even he eventually proved to be a murdered and adulterer.

Solomon took hundreds of wives. Honestly, we give the other kings after Solomon a really hard time and yet Solomon was honestly the one responsible for leading Israel down a path to Idolatry.

It just gets worse from there…Child sacrifice, idol worship, and outright assault against God and his messengers sent to warn them of the cost of their actions.

We can tend to think of the kings as like these really bad dudes and the people being like helpless…that’s not the case. The kings were just the figureheads of what was actually going on in the hearts of the people. They were representative of the actual state of Gods chosen people that were supposed to bring blessing into the whole world.

What’s really wild, is that Matthew (the author who highlighted the Immanuel name) includes all of these people in the opening of his letter in the lineage of Jesus. Its a list filled with failures.

If you go back and read the first part of chapter one in Matthew, all of these guys are there. This isn’t the only place that we get this lineage of Jesus though. If you go to Luke chapter 3, there is another lineage of Jesus there…and get this…it’s completely different once you get past king David. You are going to have to stick with me really closely for the next like five minutes though, because we are about to take a deep nerd dive into the Bible.

Matthew’s lineage is that of Joseph while Luke’s account is generally accepted as the lineage of Mary.

That’s actually a really big deal when we consider our key text. Let’s look at it one more time:

Matthew 1:23 NASB95

23 “Behold, the virgin shall be with child and shall bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,” which translated means, “God with us.”

Circle that phrase “The virgin shall be with child and shall bear a son.” Here is where we get to nerd out for a second. This is why its a big deal that Immanuel has to be born by a virgin.

It has to do with something we read in Romans chapter five:

Romans 5:12 NASB95

12 Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned—

The problem is sin. Sin that has been passed down like a dominate trait from generation to generation from Adam all the way to you. You don’t have to teach a child to fight, lie, steal, or hurt others. They know all of those things from the moment they are born. They know those things, because like a hereditary disease, a sinful nature that will one day kill us is passed down from person to person. Its the reason we knew before ever even reading Abraham or Isaac or Jacob or any other persons story in the Old Testament, that they were going to be failures. They were all infected.

But not Immanuel. Immanuel was born of a virgin. Immanuel provided a break in the chain of sin. Like a new Adam, Immanuel came to be our representative succeeding where our forefather Adam and every other human after him has failed.

And here is where the whole nerdy genealogy comes in to play. God promised Abraham that it would be his descendents that would bring blessing into the whole world. God also promised king David that it would be one of his heirs that would sit as the true, rightful, and final king of Israel and Immanuel was that legal heir on both his father and mothers side.

Immanuel means the fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham and the blessing of all the earth.

Said another way:

God coming to be with us and acting on our behalf was the only way our end of the covenant would be upheld. Only this would allow for the promise made to Abraham to be fulfilled so that God’s blessing of life and freedom from the curse could extend to all the earth.

Because here’s the deal: The entire Law…actually, the entire Old Testament and all of the stories of God coming to be with us, is meant to make you understand one thing. If you miss everything else from the Old Testament, you are meant to take away this one burning truth.

You and I aren’t good enough to fix what is wrong with us and the rest of the world.

You and I aren’t good enough to fix the problem of sin.

We can never do enough or be enough.

We will always have leaders who fail us. We need a better king.

No policy that enforces morality will ever be good enough to solve what is wrong. We need a new heart.

No community, no matter how committed it is to living rightly, will ever remain pure relying on its own efforts.

Most importantly, no amount of your own righteousness will ever make you blameless before God.

Only Immanuel or God with Us can do and be all of those things. Only Immanuel was strong enough to resist the temptation of sin. Only Immanuel was perfect enough to deal with our brokenness. Only Immanuel is the perfect king. Only Immanuel has the power to transform the human heart.

In fact, the final chapter of the Old Testament is a terrifying reminder of this. Do you know how the Old Testament ends? It ends with the threat of a curse. I know it may be a rather dark way to begin our Christmas series but I truly believe we do not appreciate the light until we have gazed intently into the darkness so let’s close out today by reading it:

Malachi 4:1–6 NASB95

1 “For behold, the day is coming, burning like a furnace; and all the arrogant and every evildoer will be chaff; and the day that is coming will set them ablaze,” says the Lord of hosts, “so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.” 2 “But for you who fear My name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings; and you will go forth and skip about like calves from the stall. 3 “You will tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day which I am preparing,” says the Lord of hosts. 4 “Remember the law of Moses My servant, even the statutes and ordinances which I commanded him in Horeb for all Israel. 5 “Behold, I am going to send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord. 6 “He will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, so that I will not come and smite the land with a curse.”

Now, there will one day be another iteration of this prophecy in the last days. But, we also know that Jesus viewed himself and John the Baptist in light of this prophecy. John the baptist was the forerunner of Jesus (the greater Elijah) that turned peoples hearts back to where they should be as he pointed their eyes to Jesus. It is through Jesus that we are saved from the curse, both present and future.

I can’t think of a better and more precious gift to make this the most special Christmas of your entire life than the gift of salvation…and so I want to close by asking you this question:

Is Jesus the fulfilled promise of blessing for you through salvation, or is he just a man whose name is attached to Christmas?

One answer to that question makes Christmas about trees, gifts, overspending, and overeating.

The other is rooted in the reality of our hopeless and broken situation outside of God coming to be with us, live for us, and eventually die for us. Through that lens, Christmas becomes an intense season of worship, remembrance, and hope.

Close by offering salvation...