Hope In Dark Times - Isaiah 8

© February 6th, 2022 by Rev. Rick Goettsche SERIES: Isaiah

I enjoy movies that take me by surprise at the end—movies where you’re thinking things are one way and then at the end you find it’s something completely different. What I’ve learned from watching such movies, however, is that directors like to drop hints throughout that you may pick up on when you watch the movie a second time. Once you understand what’s going on, you realize that some of the details you thought were insignificant actually tell you a lot.

A similar principle applies as we read the Bible. Sometimes we are given information that seems somewhat random and pointless, but we need to remember that the writer put that information there for a reason. It’s intended to communicate some truth to us, so we should stop and take the time to understand what they’re saying.

I believe we find one of those sections in our text this morning. Last week, we looked at the story of King Ahaz and his concern about the invasion of the northern kingdom, Israel, and their ally, Syria. Isaiah told him not to worry about those people, because God would take care of it. When God told Ahaz to name a sign by which He could prove His faithfulness, Ahaz refused. So Isaiah said God declared the sign would be that a virgin would conceive and have a child and before the child was old enough to speak clearly, Assyria would be destroyed. Isaiah goes on to reinforce this idea throughout the remainder of chapter 7. When we get to chapter 8 (remembering there weren’t chapter breaks originally), it seems the story shifts randomly for a moment. But that’s where we need to stop for a second and ask why Isaiah shifts focus when he does.

The Boy with the Strange Name

Isaiah shifts his focus to the birth of a child (many think this was Isaiah’s own son). We may be tempted to think these are just the words of a proud father, but we would be wrong.

Then the Lord said to me, “Make a large signboard and clearly write this name on it: Maher-shalal-hash-baz.” 2 I asked Uriah the priest and Zechariah son of Jeberekiah, both known as honest men, to witness my doing this.

3 Then I slept with my wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. And the Lord said, “Call him Maher-shalal-hash-baz. 4 For before this child is old enough to say ‘Papa’ or ‘Mama,’ the king of Assyria will carry away both the abundance of Damascus and the riches of Samaria.” (Isaiah 8:1-4, NLT)

Isaiah says the Lord told him to make a sign with the name Maher-shalal-hash-baz written on it. He did this in the presence of two reliable witnesses. Then a young woman (again, many think this was Isaiah’s wife) became pregnant and gave birth to a son. Isaiah gave him the name Maher-shalal-hash-baz at the direction of the Lord. There are lots of strange names in the Bible, but this one seems to take the cake. The name is significant, because it is prophetic and symbolic. It means “swift to plunder and quick to carry away.” God said that was exactly what would happen before this child was old enough to say “Papa” or “Mama”. Assyria would plunder Israel and carry them away.

So why would Isaiah include this story here? Is it just to give us another prophetic view of what will happen? Possibly. But I think (as do many scholars) that the reason Isaiah includes this story here is that this child was part of the fulfillment of the prophecy he made in chapter 7. If you recall, we talked last week about how there was both an immediate fulfillment of the prophecy, as well as a long-term fulfillment of it in the person of Jesus.

It seems possible that Isaiah married a young woman (who would have been a virgin) and then she conceived and gave birth to a son. This child was to be the evidence of the fact that God was with the nation of Judah, so they should not fear the armies of Israel and Syria. This would have been the near fulfillment of the prophecy. I believe the reason Isaiah includes this story is because he is showing us how the prophecy he made just a few verses before was fulfilled.

Regardless of whether the birth of this child is the fulfillment of the prophecy in chapter 7 or not, he does fulfill the prophecy in chapter 8. Isaiah said that Israel and Syria would fall before the child could speak well, and that timeline seems likely. When Isaiah spoke to king Ahaz the first time, it was likely in around 735 BC. Assyria destroyed Israel in 732 BC. This means that if Isaiah made these prophecies before the child was conceived, then at the oldest the child would have been 2 years old when the prophecy was fulfilled—in other words, he still would not have been able to speak clearly. It’s possible (even likely) that the child was even younger than that. The point is that God did exactly what He said He would. God proved Himself faithful to His promises. Unfortunately, Ahaz did not trust in God’s promises and went in a different direction.

Ahaz’s Attempt at Alliances

Ahaz didn’t trust in the Lord, and he tried to give Isaiah the brush-off. To Ahaz (and likely many of his advisors), there seemed to be no way they could defeat the armies of Israel and Syria. They were outnumbered, and Ahaz was understandably scared. God had been clear that he didn’t need to worry about these armies, but Ahaz ignored the Lord, ignoring his promises and continuing to make sacrifices to false gods.

Ahaz didn’t trust God, and when the armies of Israel and Syria came to attack them, he decided to call in reinforcements. He sent a note to the king of Assyria (the superpower of that day) and asked for his help. But things didn’t go the way Ahaz thought they would. God had prophesied that this would be the case.

5 Then the Lord spoke to me again and said, 6 “My care for the people of Judah is like the gently flowing waters of Shiloah, but they have rejected it. They are rejoicing over what will happen to King Rezin and King Pekah. 7 Therefore, the Lord will overwhelm them with a mighty flood from the Euphrates River—the king of Assyria and all his glory. This flood will overflow all its channels 8 and sweep into Judah until it is chin deep. It will spread its wings, submerging your land from one end to the other, O Immanuel. (Isaiah 8:5-8, NLT)

God told Isaiah that the king of Assyria would come and wipe out the people of Israel and Syria, but that this flood that would overwhelm these two nations would also sweep into Judah, until it was chin deep. This is a poetic way of saying that God would not allow Judah to be destroyed by the Assyrians, but they would barely survive. They would be like a person just keeping their head above water—surviving, but only just.

When the king of Assyria heard that Ahaz needed help, he decided Judah was weak and ripe for the taking. Instead of helping Ahaz, he attacked him! Ahaz responded not by running to the Lord, but by closing up the temple and giving the king of Assyria all the valuable things from inside the temple and his own palace. He then set up altars to false gods and commanded the people to worship them instead of the Lord. Though Assyria didn’t destroy Judah at this time, they only barely survived.

Isaiah’s Hope

Isaiah saw everything that was happening around him. I’m sure it grieved him as the people continued to rebel against the Lord. But Isaiah shouldn’t have been surprised at this outcome—God had told him that his message would mostly fall on deaf ears. God had said the people would hear him but would not listen to him. Still, Isaiah had a confident hope, even as the world around him seemed to be falling apart.

9 “Huddle together, you nations, and be terrified. Listen, all you distant lands. Prepare for battle, but you will be crushed! Yes, prepare for battle, but you will be crushed! 10 Call your councils of war, but they will be worthless. Develop your strategies, but they will not succeed. For God is with us!” (Isaiah 8:9-10, NLT)

Isaiah was confident that the Lord would be victorious. He declared that the invading armies could make all the plans they want to, but they would be no match before the Lord. I’m sure the people around Isaiah thought he was crazy. But he wasn’t, he just had a very different perspective.

Isaiah said the Lord had told him to think differently from the people around him. God’s words to Isaiah sound like words we could benefit from today!

11 The Lord has given me a strong warning not to think like everyone else does. He said, 12 “Don’t call everything a conspiracy, like they do, and don’t live in dread of what frightens them. 13 Make the Lord of Heaven’s Armies holy in your life. He is the one you should fear. He is the one who should make you tremble. 14 He will keep you safe. But to Israel and Judah he will be a stone that makes people stumble, a rock that makes them fall. And for the people of Jerusalem he will be a trap and a snare. 15 Many will stumble and fall, never to rise again. They will be snared and captured.” 16 Preserve the teaching of God; entrust his instructions to those who follow me. 17 I will wait for the Lord, who has turned away from the descendants of Jacob. I will put my hope in him. (Isaiah 8:11-17, NLT)

God told Isaiah that even though everyone else around him was panicking, he should stand firm. The reason was simple: he should fear the Lord more than he should fear the world around him. If he made sure he was on the Lord’s side, then he didn’t need to worry about who was on the other side—because the Lord would be victorious.

God gave Isaiah several commands that I think we should pay attention to. First, there were two things he told Isaiah not to do.

First, don’t call everything a conspiracy. We live in a world where we don’t trust anyone to give us the straight truth. We have come to distrust various media outlets (with good reason), and the result is that we are bombarded with all sorts of competing information and opinions. Most of the time we’re not sure who to believe. This has given rise to all sorts of conspiracy theories in our world today. If you search very long on the internet, you can find someone who will tell you almost anything you believe is actually a vast conspiracy. I’m not here to tell you which things are conspiracies and which are true. Isaiah tells us we shouldn’t exhaust ourselves chasing after all the conspiracies the world tells us exist because our confidence doesn’t come from knowing who is lying to us, it comes from knowing what is ultimately true. If we stick by the Lord, the conspiracies are irrelevant.

Second, don’t live in dread of what frightens them.News media outlets (and politicians, advertisers, salespeople, etc.) have learned that fear motivates people more effectively than many other things. So most forms of media come up with endless reasons for us to live in fear. There is an old adage in the news that “if it bleeds, it leads.” Fear gets people worked up and causes us to seek out people who can alleviate our fears. Of course, the savior being held out to us is usually some political pundit, candidate, cause, or product.

There is always something new the world tells us to be afraid of. Once the thing we were supposed to be afraid of last week stops being scary, they find something new for you to fear this week.

Just looking at the last couple of years we’ve been told to fear a virus, vaccines, not getting vaccinated, the danger of not wearing masks, the dangers of wearing masks, the loss of freedom, civil war, world war, the collapse of the economy, and any number of other things. Our challenge is not to decide which of these things is right to fear, it’s to focus on being obedient to the Lord in all things instead. Isaiah’s principle is simple: it is always better to do what the Lord tells us, even when everyone else tells us it is foolish.

He tells us two negative commands, but then he also gives us some positive commands. First, fear the Lord. You see the juxtaposition here. God tells Isaiah not to fear what the world does, but to fear the Lord instead. We don’t like the idea of fearing the Lord, because we recognize that He is loving and gracious to us. He certainly is, but we should also recognize that He is not someone to be trifled with. The Lord is a powerful ally, but He can also be a powerful enemy. We must examine our lives to see on which side of the fence we are living. We should live with a holy fear of God, and do what He says. We must fear the Lord more than we fear anything the world can do to us.

Second, preserve the teaching of the Lord. Isaiah knew that many people would not listen to what the Lord said, but that didn’t mean he could stop speaking on His behalf. Isaiah’s job (and ours) is to hold out the truth to the world. Our world longs to have truth, but continually finds it out of reach. The truth they are looking for cannot be found on CNN or Fox News. It will not be found in the latest scientific research or in the latest trends in psychology or medicine. It will not be found in the popular opinion of our society. It is only found in the word of God. When we, as Christians, focus on proclaiming anything else more loudly than we do the teaching of the Lord, we are failing in our duties and we are leading others astray. Our focus should be to preserve the teaching of the Lord both in our lives and in the lives of those around us. God’s Word is the only truth on which we can rely.

Isaiah tells us that those who fear the Lord will be kept safe by Him, but to many others, He will be a stone that makes them stumble and a rock that makes them fall. People claim to want the truth, but often we really only want truth that coincides with what we already believe. As such, many people, when confronted with the truth, reject it because they don’t like it. As Christians we must be careful not to make this mistake. We must look intently into God’s word and see what it says. When what God says goes against what we believe, we must change. If we choose to ignore the difficult teachings of scripture, the things we don’t like, or the things we would rather weren’t there, then we too will find ourselves tripped up by the Lord rather than protected by Him.

Conclusion

Isaiah concludes this section with a sad commentary on the people of his day. I suspect you may see some commonalities with our society.

19 Someone may say to you, “Let’s ask the mediums and those who consult the spirits of the dead. With their whisperings and mutterings, they will tell us what to do.” But shouldn’t people ask God for guidance? Should the living seek guidance from the dead?

20 Look to God’s instructions and teachings! People who contradict his word are completely in the dark. 21 They will go from one place to another, weary and hungry. And because they are hungry, they will rage and curse their king and their God. They will look up to heaven 22 and down at the earth, but wherever they look, there will be trouble and anguish and dark despair. They will be thrown out into the darkness. (Isaiah 8:19-22, NLT)

The people in Isaiah’s day didn’t like his message. They didn’t like what the Lord was saying, so they began to look in all sorts of other places searching for truth and hope. They were consulting mediums, hoping to ask the dead for wisdom. Isaiah points out the nonsense that this is, “Should the living seek guidance from the dead?” He asks the right question, “Shouldn’t people ask God for guidance?” The answer is clearly yes, but often we don’t want guidance, we want approval of what we have already decided. When God doesn’t approve of what we are doing, the temptation is to find some source of “truth” that will.

Isaiah shows us the emptiness of this approach. People who contradict the Lord are walking in darkness. They grope about hoping to find something that will satisfy them, but instead find themselves ever emptier. They curse God for their lot in life, while never taking stock of their rebellion against Him. When we look anywhere other than the Lord for our answers and hope, we will only find trouble and anguish and despair.

I hope you can see the relevance of Isaiah’s words to us today. The world seems grim. Our society seems to be moving ever further from the Lord, and we feel helpless to do anything about it. God’s words to Isaiah apply to us as well. Rather than looking at the circumstances in the world around us, we should look to the Lord, who controls all things. If we focus on obeying the Lord, on ensuring that we are on His side, then we can tell the world to do its worst, knowing that ultimately it will not prevail.

This does not mean that doing what the Lord calls us to do is going to be easy or pleasant, but it does remind us that God will ultimately ensure victory.

I’ve got a twofold challenge for you this morning. First, study the Bible for yourself and diligently work to align your life with God’s truth. If we want to stand on the side of the Lord, then we need to align our hearts with His. This means we should be people of the book. We should spend time daily reading our bibles—not to get through a reading plan, but to understand what God tells us about how we should be living our lives. As you see things in the scriptures that are hard or that challenge what you believe, don’t simply gloss over them. Stop, pay attention, and strive to put them into practice, even if they are hard. When the scriptures show us we need to change, we need to change. If we will live this way, we need not fear any enemy, because we are on the side of the Lord.

Second, hold out the hope of the gospel to those around you. Everyone seems to agree that our world isn’t as it should be, but we disagree on what the solution is. There is only one hope and one solution and that is Jesus Christ. We need to devote far more energy to pointing people to Jesus than we do trying to convince them of our political beliefs, the conspiracies we believe, or whatever other soapbox we may choose to stand on. If we are pointing people somewhere other than Jesus, we are sending them to grope in the darkness.

We have hope, we have truth, we have light! That light is Jesus Christ alone. So we must share Him with the world.

© February 6th, 2022 by Rev. Rick Goettsche SERIES: Isaiah