Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the birth of the Messiah from Isaiah 8:11–9:7
In this first Sunday of Advent, I would like to invite you to turn in your Bibles to Isaiah 8, verse 11, and I shall read to chapter 9, verse 7. For those of you who were following the series on Revelation, we’ll finish that the first Sunday of the new year. Now that Advent has started, the following weeks will be Advent themes. Isaiah 8, beginning at verse 11.
“The Lord spoke to me with his strong hand upon me, warning me not to follow the way of this people. He said: ‘Do not call conspiracy everything that these people call conspiracy; do not fear what they fear, and do not dread it. The Lord Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy, he is the one you are to fear, he is the one you are to dread, and he will be a sanctuary; but for both houses of Israel he will be a stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall. And for the people of Jerusalem, he will be a trap and a snare. Many of them will stumble; they will fall and be broken, they will be snared and captured.’
Bind up the testimony and seal up the law among my disciples. I will wait for the Lord, who is hiding his face from the house of Jacob. I will put my trust in him. Here am I, and the children the Lord has given me. We are signs and symbols in Israel from the Lord Almighty, who dwells on Mount Zion. When men tell you to consult mediums and spiritists, who whisper and mutter, should not a people inquire of their God? Why consult the dead on behalf of the living?
To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn. Distressed and hungry, they will roam through the land; when they are famished, they will become enraged and, looking upward, will curse their king and their God. Then they will look toward the earth and see only distress and darkness and fearful gloom, and they will be thrust into utter darkness.
Nevertheless, there will be no more gloom for those who were in distress. In the past he humbled the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the future he will honor Galilee of the Gentiles, by the way of the sea, along the Jordan. The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned. You have enlarged the nation and increased their joy; they rejoice before you as people rejoice at the harvest, as men rejoice when dividing the plunder.
For as in the day of Midian’s defeat, you have shattered the yoke that burdens them, the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor. Every warrior’s boot used in battle and every garment rolled in blood will be destined for burning, will be fuel for the fire. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever. The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this.”
This is the Word of the Lord.
These last two verses are well known, aren’t they? Chapter 9, verses 6 and 7, “For to us a child is born …” and so forth. They’re recited every year all over the world. They’re Christmas verses, but as is so often the case, their power is diminished unless we carefully think through the context in which they occur. To put the matter differently.… Why does God give us this magnificent promise just here in the prophecy of Isaiah? How does the argument hang together, and what does it say to us today?
We should remind ourselves of the historical context. We are now about halfway through the eighth century before Christ, three-quarters of a millennium before Jesus put in an appearance. The southern kingdom, Judah, is on the one hand fairly prosperous. Economically it’s not doing too badly. It has lost a king fairly recently, King Uzziah, and now it has King Ahaz, and King Ahaz is a wheeler-dealer. He has all of the answers along purely political lines.
At the same time, this little nation is facing a coalition of forces in the North. It led to what was called the Syro-Ephraimitic War, from Syria and Ephraim combining together against the South. Farther north in that was the regional superpower of the day, the mighty kingdom of Assyria, which was expanding on all fronts and ready to crush all the little kingdoms. In this mix, Judah was wheeling and dealing and seeing conspiracies everywhere and trying to sort out its affairs.
It has to be said that Judah herself, though materially prosperous, was wallowing in various sins. If you go back a little in Isaiah, you find these sorts of denunciations. Chapter 2, verse 6: “You have abandoned your people, the house of Jacob. They are full of superstitions from the East. They practice divination like the Philistines. They clasp hands with pagans.” In other words, instead of being covenantally faithful with the God who would actually save them, they’re importing all the Eastern religions in various form of spiritism and the occult.
The text says, “Their land is full of silver and gold; there is no end to their treasures.” The GDP looks very promising, but on the other hand, “Their land is full of idols. They bow down to the work of their hands, to what their fingers have made. So man will be brought low and mankind humbled. Do not forgive them.” So it is possible, you see, to have prosperity with a great deal of idolatry. Then a little farther on, you discover that the prophet pronounces woes on segments of sin.
Chapter 5, verse 8: “Woe to those who add house to house and join to field to field till no space is left and you alone live in the land.” A kind of controlling capitalism that put all the wealth in the hands of so few that little people had no place to live, no place to call their own, and all the laws that preserved the heritage, the clan heritage of family after family were being wiped out in the name of the big powers making money.
Verse 11: “Woe to those who rise early in the morning to run after their drinks, who stay up late at night till they are inflamed with wine. Oh, they have harps and lyres at their banquets, tambourines and flutes and wine, but they have no regard for the deeds of the Lord; no respect for the work of his hands. Therefore, my people will go into exile.” This sounds vaguely familiar, doesn’t it? These sins were not known only in ancient Israel.
Verse 18: “Woe to those who draw sin along with cords of deceit and wickedness as with cart ropes, to those who say (sneeringly, condescendingly),’ Let God hurry. Let him hasten his work so we may see it. Let it approach; let the plan of the Holy One of Israel so come so that we may know it.’ ”
Sneering condescension. Wow. Delighting in all that was deceitful in society. “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil; who put darkness for light and light for darkness; who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” It all depends on your interpretation, do you see? A kind of eighth century BC perversion of postmodernism.
“Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and clever in their own sight. Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine (shaken, not stirred) and champions at mixing drinks, who acquit the guilty for a bribe but deny justice to the innocent,” and so forth. This is Judah in the eighth century BC.
What we find in our text (chapter 8, verse 11) is a remarkable contrast, a divide made by God himself, spread out before the people. A divide between on the one hand darkness and gloom (chapter 8, verse 11 to the end), and on the other light and hope (chapter 9, verses 1–7). First, the darkness and gloom. This section focuses on two massive sins that have generated this darkness and gloom. First, fearing what is fickle and feeble. Second, trusting what is futile and false.
1. Fearing what is fickle and feeble.
Verse 11 in the original actually begins with a “For thus …” connecting this whole section with what precedes. “For thus the Lord spoke to me …” In other words, in the preceding verses at the beginning of chapter 8, God has warned that ultimately the king of Assyria (verse 7) with all of its pomp will descend on this nation and crush it.
Verse 9: “Raise the war cry you nations, be shattered. Listen all you distant lands, prepare for battle, be shattered. Prepare for battle, be shattered. Devise your strategies as you will, but it will be thwarted.” This is what God has decreed. His judgment is coming. For the remnant, “Propose your plan; it will not stand, for God is with us.” Literally, for Emmanuel, God is with us.
Verse 11: “For thus, the Lord spoke to me …” Linking this warning with all that precedes, and now in a strong experience. “The Lord spoke to me with his strong hand upon me.” That is, an intense experience of inspiration. One of the phrases that the prophets use when what they are having from the Lord is burning them up and consuming them. “The strong hand of the Lord was upon me, warning me. Warning me.” Warning me what? “Not to follow the way of this people.”
In particular, verses 12 to 15, “Do not call conspiracy everything that these people call conspiracy, and do not fear what they fear, and do not dread it.” What this conspiracy is, we can’t be sure. There might have been a fifth column siding with Assyria and Ephraim, some sort of secret coalition with Assyria. Possible, I don’t know. I suspect the reference is much more general, an approach to events, an explanation of events that simply leaves God out. You start living in fear of all the external pressures all around you. You look at the world, and you’re scared. You start living your life in fear, and you wonder about a conspiracy here or a conspiracy there, and you start living as if God is not in charge. I’m old enough to remember the first years of the Cold War when we had all these stupid little exercises and hid under our desks at the time the bell sounded to protect ourselves from nuclear attack.
Those of you who are under 40, even under 50, may not remember that. I remember those sorts of things. It was so dumb in retrospect. People were actually giving advice on how to build nuclear blast-proof centers in your backyard with supplies for a whole year and filtered air and so on. There were some actually built in the hometown where I grew up. I asked my father, “What about this? Do you think we should do this?” He said, “Don, when Jesus comes the very elements will melt with fervent heat, and until then you can trust him.”
Do you see what a response was? It was an Isaiahanic response. It was saying in effect, “Don’t be so afraid of these things that everybody in the culture is afraid of, because there’s not much you can do about them in any case. They don’t have the final sway.” Is it not true that the church of God today in the Western world lives in a fair bit of fear? We are afraid; therefore, we must develop our own political conspiracies and our own explanations for what is going on and cheer (depending on our politics) our right wing loudmouths or our left wing loudmouths as if somehow that’s going to turn the whole country around.
When things go wrong, it is easy to become panicky and develop a kind of paranoia and then act on our paranoia. That’s part of what happened in the 1970s, was it not, with the Moral Majority suddenly coming into power? Things seemed to be falling apart, and then suddenly it seemed we had a Moral Majority. As this was trumpeted in our media, as Time magazine called 1976 “The Year of the Evangelical,” I remember thinking to myself, “This spells disaster.”
God hates triumphalism. We’re not going to get ourselves out of our problems by simply putting together a majority. Where’s the humility? Where’s the contrition? Where’s the calling upon God? It was acting out of fear and then out of arrogance. What does God say? “Do not call conspiracy everything that these people call conspiracy. Do not fear what they fear, and do not dread it.”
So also today I could list substantial numbers of movements within confessing evangelicalism that basically say, “Unless you do what we do, unless you follow our party line, unless you develop your methods the way we do, quite frankly you’re passÈ. You don’t understand the culture.” It’s a question of getting the right methods and the right formulas. It’s not as if they don’t have anything useful to say, but should we not be deeply suspicious of this panic-driven approach to finding solutions?
Don’t live your life in fear of what others fear. They cannot see God’s hand in events. Your response is to be verse 13: “The Lord Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy. He is the one you are to fear. He is the one you are to dread.” God is different. Not to regard him as holy, literally, not to sanctify him, not to set him out by your actions and deeds as uniquely God is to make him out to be ordinary, unimportant, incapable, indifferent perhaps, even helpless.
That’s why the people of God in the Old Testament are told again and again and again to sanctify God in their hearts. That’s what it means: to make him holy. For example, Leviticus chapter 22, verse 32: “Do not profane my holy name. I must be acknowledged as holy by the Israelites. I am the Lord who makes you holy and who brought you out of Egypt to be your God. I am the Lord.”
You see, to profane God does not simply mean using four-letter words or using God’s name in vain; it means to make him common. That’s why using his name emptily is profanity. Not because just the phrase, “Oh, God!” is somehow blasphemy, but because it has reduced him. It’s making him common. It’s making him cheap. There are other ways of blasphemy to make God cheap, of course. Simply by not fearing him at all, by sort of acknowledging his existence in some sort of distant creedal sense.
The way we look at society and culture and the church and our hope and everything else is really determined by sociological analysis or the current fears and trends or getting our news from AOL or whatever. That’s why here, sanctifying God, regarding him as holy and fearing God, are put in the same breath. The Lord Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy. He is the one you are to fear. He is the one you are to dread, because you see, if you really do fear the Lord, you fear no other.
Isn’t that what the psalmist says? “The Lord is the light of my salvation. Of whom then shall I be afraid?” If you fear God truly, you fear no one else. If you sanctify him in your heart, if he is central to all of your ways of thinking and speaking, then how can you live your life in paranoid fear? He can be trusted.
In other words, Isaiah is not to act like the Judeans who fail to make God the most central fact of their existence. Indeed, all of the pronouns in verses 12 and 13 are in the plural. It’s not just Isaiah who’s being told this, but Isaiah is to pass this message on to the people. “The Lord is the one you people are to regard as holy. He is the one you people are to fear. He is the one you people are to dread.”
Sooner or later, people discover that God is either their sanctuary, as in verse 14a, or he is the stone that trips them up. He’s one of the two. He will be a sanctuary if you regard him as holy. If you fear him, he will be a sanctuary. For both houses of Israel, for those for whom God is merely part of their creed and not much more, he will be a stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall. For the people of Jerusalem, he will be a trap and a snare. Many of them will stumble. They will fall and be broken. They will be snared and captured.
Sooner or later, people discover that God is either their sanctuary or a stumbling block that trips them up. In other words, in substantial measure what we ultimately find God to be is shaped by our attitude to him. He does not change. He is what he is, but if you try to marginalize him, you don’t remove him. He’s still there, so you will trip over him. Sooner or later, you confront him. On the last day, if not before, you will face him. You cannot possibly escape him.
If instead you trust him, you discover he becomes your sanctuary. That’s why, of course, when a culture is largely removed from God, then it writes a lot of books on theodicy, that is trying to justify the ways of God to human beings. You know, God and the Problem of Evil, God and Suffering. I’ve written one of them myself! You can spend so much time writing books about how to justify the ways of God to human beings that you suddenly overlook something. Whenever you find the people of God in a condition of real revival, they don’t write books on theodicy; they make calls for repentance and contrition.
Later in the spring we’re going to work our way through Nehemiah and see that very clearly. When people are broken before God, they recognize that the problem is not.… How do you reconcile this God and this miserable world? But.… Granted our sin, how come God hasn’t wiped us out yet? How shall we not repent?
It is not God that has changed. It’s still the same God, but for the one group he becomes a sanctuary and for the others you just trip over him all the time, you can’t get around him. Then you have to write books defending him or attacking him or criticizing or defining God differently or getting another method. Something … something … to get around this awkward God who won’t get out of the way.
What does Isaiah say? Verse 16: “Bind up the testimony and seal up the law among my disciples.” This is often taken to mean that Isaiah wants to keep the words of his prophecy secret, training his disciples perhaps in some sort of Isaiahanic school, until eventually the cultural conditions are a little more amenable to this sort of preaching. Just teach the inside crowd and then a little later on then the whole thing can come out.
Possible, but I don’t think so. I think it means rather this, “Bind up the testimony and seal up the law,” literally, in my disciples. It’s a way of affirming the revelation God as opposed to this approach that finds conspiracies here and plans there and political solutions there. No, no, no. Return to the Scriptures. Amongst those who are genuinely following God, bind up the testimony of God. Bind up the law in the disciples. Let them have their confidence there where it should properly be.
The words testimony and law are regularly used in the Old Testament for referring to Scripture, to what God has revealed, his words. Bind them up in the lives and the hearts of the people of God. Even if the culture goes differently, let the disciples, at least, bind God’s revelation in their heart because God is the one you are to sanctify in your hearts, and he is the one you are to fear.
Indeed, you sense Isaiah’s resolution, do you not? “I will wait for the Lord who is hiding his face from the house of Jacob. I will put my trust in him. He is the one I will sanctify.” In other words, “He is the one I will fear. Indeed, not only I but my whole family as well. Here am I and the children the Lord has given me.” I don’t think that he’s referring here just to his spiritual children. I think he’s talking about his real children. They’ve been mentioned in the previous chapters, do you recall?
These children have strange names. Chapter 7, verse 3: “Then the Lord said to Isaiah, ‘Go out, you and your Shear-jashub …” Shear-jashub. His very name meant a remnant will return, because even though destruction was going to fall on the people, nevertheless by naming his son this, Isaiah was saying, “But don’t you understand? Destruction is not the last word. God is still in control and a remnant will return.”
In chapter 8: “The Lord said to me, ‘Take a large scroll and write on it with an ordinary pen: Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz, and I will call in Uriah the priest and Zechariah son of Jeberechiah as reliable witnesses for me. Then I went to the prophetess, she conceived, gave birth to a son and the Lord said to me ‘Name him Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz.’ ” I may be perverse, but I have often wondered what sort of nickname they gave this chap. I just can’t believe that mother yelled out the back door, “Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz, time for bed!” I’ll bet he was called “Baz” for short or something like that.
The point is the name was symbol laden, was it not? We’re told “Quick to the plunder, swift to the spoil.” That is, the judgment was imminent. Thus, even Isaiah’s children were symbol laden. They were signs for the people, isn’t that what Isaiah says here now? “Here am I and the children the Lord has given me. We are signs and symbols in Israel from the Lord Almighty who dwells in Mount Zion.” Here is a man who even by the names he gives his children is declaring the truth of God’s revelation to a whole culture. Here then is what characterizes darkness and gloom: fearing what is fickle and feeble and failing to trust the Lord.
2. Trusting what is futile and false.
Verses 19 and following: “When men tell you to consult and mediums and spiritists who whisper and mutter, should not a people inquire of their God? Why consult the dead on behalf of the living?” The sad reality is that when people forsake genuine revelation, many do not become narrowly secular. Rather, many become superstitious, even occult-oriented.
Is it any surprise in our culture that astrology is on the rise along with tarot cards and gurus, and tea leaves, the demonic, nature religion, sÈances, these voices from the dead that chirp and mutter. Isaiah is using the common language of the ancient world. In society after society it was assumed that when the dead spoke through sÈances they sort of whispered in birdlike little voices.
You find that sort of discussion in Akkadian sources, The Descent of Ishtar; and Babylonian sources, The Epic of Gilgamesh;, and Homer on the Greek side in the Iliad; in Horace on the Latin side in his Satires. You find it everywhere. It’s assumed that the dead can control things, and if you can just sort of tap into them, then their voices come across in birdlike little whispers. You see, people want to control the future, to domesticate it, to handle it, to have an inside track about it, to know it, to find security in getting some sort of inside track about what is coming down the pike.
They trust, finally, what is futile and empty. It would be a good exercise for you this afternoon to go home and read Isaiah 40 to 45, how God simply laughs at all the false pronouncements of the false idols. Who is in control? All this is an attempt to know the future, to control the future and thus to remove fear. What is Isaiah’s response?
Verse 20: “To the law and to the testimony!” Those two words again. Back to the book, in other words. “If they do not speak to this word, they have no light of dawn.” That is, if all of these revelations and so on do not speak according to this revelation that God has given, don’t trust them. The result is invariably disappointment. “Distressed and hungry, they will roam through the land. When they are famished they will become enraged and, looking upward, will curse their king and their God.”
That is to say, they become more and more disillusioned, more and more disappointed, more and more frustrated, so they lash out at the voices that are supposed to be speaking to them. “You believe in God? How can God do this to us? Blame the president! Blame God! Blame the king! Blame whoever is in control because we want security, and our voices tell us it is our due! We should have it!” So they curse God, and they curse the president.
When I was a boy there was a song that was going around, “Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places.” These people are looking for security in all the wrong places. By contrast, in chapter 9, there is light and hope. Verse 1 is transitional. “Nevertheless …” Despite all of this gloomy picture.… There is fearful gloom and darkness, we’re told in chapter 8, verse 22. “Nevertheless, there will be no more gloom for those who were in distress; in the past he humbled the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the future he will honor Galilee of the Gentiles by the way of the sea along the Jordan.”
When all human attempts at order and security and justice have failed, God himself will intervene the prophet says. This is not because the people have found the magic key to power. It is just because God is that kind of God, and he comes in and he finally does disclose himself and rescues his people.
“Galilee of the Gentiles.” This is from Lake Galilee to the Mediterranean, north of the valley of Jezreel and was always a place of a lot of cosmopolitan mix. There were Arameans there and Canaanites and Hittites and Hebrews and Mesopotamians. They were all there. Nevertheless, this was the area where Israel often first encountered foreigners. This was the area of maximum mix.
In fact, when these words were being written, a little farther on we are told that it’s going to get a lot worse because Assyria, the superpower to the North, is going to come in and the first place that he tackles is Galilee. He strips out all of the leaders and all of the artisans and all of the politicos and all of the intelligentsia and transports them, and then brings in another crop from somewhere else, and they intermarry.
Now you’ve got confusion of the races and confusion of Israel. “Galilee of the Gentiles” comes in due course to be a byword in Israel for that which is compromised and impure and religiously mixed and confused. Yet, you know what? This verse is quoted in the New Testament in connection with the gospel.
Matthew, chapter 4: “When Jesus heard that John the Baptist had been put in prison, he returned to Galilee. Leaving Nazareth he went and lived in Capernaum, which was by the lake in the area of Zebulun and Naphtali, (the tribal areas of this region) to fulfill what was said through the prophet Isaiah: ‘Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali, the way to the sea along the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles—the people living in darkness have seen a great light. On those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned.’ From that day on Jesus began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.’ ”
Look at the language that is used. First God’s promise of transformation in verses 2 to 5. “The people walking in darkness (just described at the end of chapter 8) have seen a great light.” They have walked in the shadow of death, but now life is coming. Verse 3: “You have enlarged the nation …” That is, instead of being decimated by exile, by disease, by war, by savagery, now the numbers increase and their joy increases. “They rejoice before you …”
Then it’s as if the prophet is looking for metaphors for joyous people. “People rejoice at the end of a good harvest, as men rejoice when dividing the plunder.” That is, instead of being plundered they’ve won. “For as in the day of Midian’s defeat, you have shattered the yoke.” He’s looking for an historical analogy that will somehow engender faith in what God will do.
He thinks, “Gideon! That’s the one. Gideon, that’s the one.” With only 300 men against vast numbers of Midianites surrounding all of the hill country, God worked something spectacular, and there was a spectacular victory. Three hundred against tens of thousands in a spectacular account that any biblically literate person would have known. As in those days, God shatters the burdens of oppression, the bars across their shoulders. In fact, there is another yoke coming.
Assyria, in its literature, boasted about how it imposed a yoke of oppression, a yoke of slavery, a yoke of bondage on this group and on that group and on this city and on that city. It boasted of its yokes, but Isaiah foresees a time when there’ll be another yoke. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus picks it up, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Bowing to Jesus involves (ironically) freedom. You come under his yoke and find not oppression but the servant king. We sing this irony, do we not? “Make me a captive, Lord, and then I shall be free. Force me to render up my sword, and I shall conqueror be. I sink in life’s alarms when by myself I stand; imprison me within thine arms, and strong shall be my hand.”
Indeed, ultimately this king destroys all oppression, every last scrap of it, and war shall be no more. Listen to the imagery of verse 5: “Every warrior’s boot used in battle and every garment rolled in blood will be destined for burning.” They won’t be needed anymore. There won’t be any place for them anymore. This king finally destroys all oppression and all injustice and all war and all savagery and all idolatry. All the accoutrements of war will be gone. All gone.
In these verses already, we find God’s promise of transformation, and then in the two verses we quote at Christmas (verses 6 and 7), God’s means of transformation. A child is born. There is quite a lovely (I don’t know what else to call it) … child theme? Almost childishness theme in Isaiah.
Isaiah is pretty often talking about a child or children. Thus in the great vision of chapter 11, the new heaven and the new earth, the home of righteousness, a child will play over an asp’s hole in perfect safety. Isaiah’s own children with their symbol-laden names, they’re part of the revelation that God has given. It’s almost as if the prophet Isaiah is anticipating that when God comes, even though God is God and he is to be reverenced and he is to be feared, yet when he comes in his transforming powerful work, he comes as a child.
He didn’t suddenly descend in a sheet of brilliant light, riding on a charger, one of the heavenly “Incredibles” going to solve it all by superior power. He comes as a child. A baby. Vulnerable. You see, this is setting us up for a picture of a servant king who is wounded for our transgressions and is bruised for our iniquities. That’s why he comes.
Moreover, he’s about to get these glorious, divine names. Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God. Isaiah wants us to understand that before these names are given, he is nevertheless a child. A human being. A baby born in the way babies are born: vulnerable, small. He’s certainly a human being in the nature of his reign. He sits on the throne of his father David, we’re told in verse 7. He reigns from this throne. He’s a child born to us.
He’s a human being and here’s the paradox of how God works. Moreover, not only is a child born, “… a son is given and the government is on his shoulders.” This calls to mind the language of enthronement often used in the Old Testament. When the king came to power, God said that he appointed him as his son, or he engendered him as his son because the son was to represent the father. The son was to enact all that the father gave him to do. The king of Israel was to stand, as it were, in God’s place and effect God’s justice and do God’s work.
But those kings so often failed. Those sons so often betrayed their heavenly Father. Here a son will be given, the son whose reflection of the father is absolutely perfect. He reigns on David’s throne fulfilling the promises given in 2 Samuel 7 that eventually David’s king would know no end. “Of the increase of his government and peace, there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever. The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this.”
Look at his titles. Wonderfulcounselor. Not Wonderful Counselor, two words. Wonderfulcounselor. In a book that regularly mocks human wisdom and human counsel, about 10 different passages in Isaiah simply laugh at all human counsel, all human wisdom, as if it has the last word. This one does have the last word. He is the Wonderful Counselor. He is the Mighty God, an expression that elsewhere in the Old Testament always refers to God himself.
He is the Everlasting Father. He is the Prince of Peace who brings in all of the transformation that has been described in the previous verses. Simultaneously a baby and the Mighty God. Simultaneously a son of David, the appointed ruler and the wonderful counselor whose counsel and insight never err, whose plans are always perfect. Though elsewhere he is depicted as one who rules with a rod of iron, he is called a Prince of Peace, for he makes wars to cease. Here is the means of transformation, but surely you must see two further truths that spring from this passage.
First, God’s timing is on a far larger scale than ours. You’re in the middle of the 7th century here. By about 735, the Assyrians are pressing in on the North. The exile in the South finally takes place about 587 BC, and then the prophecies that predict the people beginning to come back, about 535 they’re coming back. The temple built about 520 thereabouts. The wall is not built until about 484, and even then the people are under oppressive regimes, one after another until finally the mighty powers of Assyria are still striking out and trying to paganize the people until the great Maccabean revolt of the second century.
Seven centuries go by between this prophecy and the arrival of Jesus. So when the people are told to trust God, they’re not simply being told, “Trust God and your life will be fine. Trust God and you will have happy children. Trust God and everything will be well with you.” No, no. Trust God across this sweeping pattern of God’s purposes for his people. Now this does not mean that can’t trust with the nitty gritty of life.
Don’t misunderstand. So often our desire to understand history or to understand movements in history is so small. It’s so focused. We want peace in our time. We’re like Hezekiah who can hear about dangers down the road and says, “I don’t mind so long as I can die in my bed.” That’s not the way God looks at things. He wants people to be in solidarity with his own purposes across the centuries until the coming of Christ and to believe that God is in control and will bring all of his own promises to pass one after another, after another.
The part I play in that may be in a time of suffering. It may be in a time of revival, or it may be in a time of declension. It may be in a time of prosperity. It may be in a time of poverty, but still God is trustable to bring about all of his purposes not only for my life, but for his people and for the triumph of his kingdom at the end and for all eternity. It’s a huge scale, and we will always, always misjudge him if our scale is so small that we cannot think in these sweeping terms.
That brings us to the last thing we should learn. Christ came as predicted, seven-and-a-half centuries later, but the consummation of these predicted blessings is only here in measure. We await his coming again. He has not yet made all wars cease. It is not yet the case that all implements of war are destroyed. This is still a savage world, and God works in mysterious ways even behind these sorts of scenes, bringing about his own purposes, calling his own people.
Ultimately our hope is in Christ’s coming again. He came as predicted, but the consummation is not yet. We too, like those in Isaiah’s day are expected to trust God, to take him at his Word. Not to fear what our culture fears. Not find false security in whispered voices of the occult or complex conspiracy theories, but to remember that God is in control and Jesus is coming back.
This does not invite passivity, but genuine God centeredness. Genuine trust in God. Genuine fearlessness before the changing historical tides. As we look back and contemplate how those generations leading up to Christ were exhorted to wait for him, to look forward to him, to trust the God who would send him, we must not look back with smugness and simply say, “Okay, now we survived,” but learn also that we are called in our turn to await his appearance again.
That is why throughout 20 centuries of church history, Advent season has simultaneously been a time to remind us of how people waited for his first coming and as a call to invite Christians to wait for his second coming. So we sing, “O come, O come, Emmanuel.” Let us pray.
Forgive, merciful God, the individualism and narrowness of our little perspectives. Forgive the speed with which we are drawn to conspiracy theories and easy answers, and lead us to trust you and your promises, your faithful Word and the son you have given, in all of life’s changing scenes for Jesus’ sake, amen.
