day three: Christ, Immanuel
/Readings: Isaiah 7:1-9:7, Matthew 1:18-25
We leap ahead in history a millennium or more from the death of Jacob. Israel is not a young nation anymore. She has been enslaved in Egypt, she has wandered in the wilderness, she has conquered the Promised Land, she has experienced rebellion and repentance, she has been divided in two. Now each half has squandered the mercy of God on unspeakable idolatries, and judgment looms inevitable, according to the prophets.
Dropped into the middle of one such prophecy, spoken in the year 735 B.C. to the erring half-nation of Judah, sandwiched between warnings and visions of total destruction, comes the proclamation of a curious sign with a hopeful name:
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.
Isaiah 7:14
Like most Biblical prophecy, this one has layers. The first layer is the immediate relevance to Isaiah’s contemporaries in history. You will see, reading on, that the sign of this child meant something to Isaiah—he was like a timeline of events to come. “Before the boy knows how to cry out ‘My father’ or ‘My mother,’ the wealth of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria will be carried away before the king of Assyria” (Isaiah 8:4).
But there is a second layer—one we are much more familiar with in relation to this passage: the future relevance of the sign for those who would live centuries after Isaiah. More than seven hundred years later, Matthew used this very passage in his Gospel to corroborate the legitimacy of Christ’s identity.
Dropped into the middle of a dark and broken world, sandwiched between hundreds of years of God’s silence and the constant threat of Roman oppression, was a curious sign with a hopeful name: Immanuel.
God is with us.
And He still is.
