START WITH SCRIPTURE:
Isaiah 7:10-16
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OBSERVE:
This is one of those passages that clearly has a double meaning prophetically. On the one hand, there is the meaning for the time of Isaiah, who is prophet in the time of King Ahaz of Judah (reigned 736-716 B.C.). On the other hand, Matthew’s Gospel interprets this oracle as a prophecy concerning the birth of Jesus.
Ahaz ruled Judah in turbulent times. Early in his reign, Rezin the king of Syria and Pekah the king of Israel forged a military alliance in order to invade Judah and divide it between them under a puppet ruler (Isaiah 7:1-6). The Northern Kingdom shared common heritage and religion with Judah as part of the original 12 tribes of Israel, until Israel rebelled against Rehoboam’s harsh rule in 931 B.C (1 Kings 12). From that time on there was intermittent strife between Israel and Judah. Israel is also known variously as the Northern Kingdom, Ephraim, and Samaria.
However, Ahaz is assured by Isaiah that Syria and Israel will not be a threat to Judah — he predicts that in 65 years Israel itself would be broken up (Isaiah 7:8-9). This is what did happen when Assyria invaded and conquered the Northern Kingdom in 721 B.C., and deported its inhabitants, scattering them throughout the Assyrian empire.
So, Isaiah’s question on behalf of Yahweh is significant:
Yahweh spoke again to Ahaz, saying, “Ask a sign of Yahweh your God; ask it either in the depth, or in the height above.”
This is an invitation to seek even more blessing and success. What Isaiah says to Ahaz in the verse prior to this is very revealing:
If you will not believe, surely you shall not be established (Isaiah 7:9).
This seems to be the problem for Ahaz — he lacks faith. He is too timid to ask anything of Yahweh, even though the prophet himself has offered on behalf of Yahweh:
But Ahaz said, “I will not ask, neither will I tempt Yahweh.”
Yahweh has lost patience with Ahaz’s timid faith, and promises a sign:
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin will conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.
The Hebrew word for virgin is almah, which many modern commentators point out means simply a young woman of childbearing age who has not yet had children.
As the oracle continues it does apply to the time of Ahaz:
For before the child knows to refuse the evil, and choose the good, the land whose two kings you abhor shall be forsaken.
In other words, the child will eat of the abundance of the land, and before he is old enough to have moral accountability, the kings of Syria and Ephraim will face disaster.
Obviously, the New Testament interpretation of this text takes us in a very different direction. Let’s take that up in the Apply section.
APPLY:
Again, we return to one of the dilemmas of Biblical interpretation. There is a definite historical context for Isaiah’s prophecy in chapter 7 — the threat of invasion that Ahaz’s kingdom of Judah faces from Syria and Israel. The prophet is advising the king that his sign will be the birth of a male child who will be named Immanuel — and that before he is old enough to know right from wrong, the threat will be eliminated.
But Matthew’s Gospel makes it clear that there is a dual nature to this prophecy. When Mary conceives prior to her marriage to Joseph, Joseph is alarmed. But an angel appears to Joseph in a dream to reassure him that he is to marry her, because the child has been conceived by the Holy Spirit of God (Matthew 1:18-21). Matthew then quotes Isaiah’s prophecy as evidence of this miraculous conception:
Now all this has happened, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying,
“Behold, the virgin shall be with child,
and shall give birth to a son.
They shall call his name Immanuel”;
which is, being interpreted, “God with us” (Matthew 1:22-23).
If there is any doubt that Mary is truly a virgin, Luke’s Gospel corroborates Matthew’s claim. The Angel Gabriel appears to Mary and tells her that she will conceive and give birth to a son whom she will name Jesus. But Mary is deeply troubled:
Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, seeing I am a virgin?” (Luke 1:34).
In other words, Mary knows that this is an impossibility based on normal human biology. She’s not naive. But the angel assures her:
The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore also the holy one who is born from you will be called the Son of God (Luke 1:35).
There will be more to say about this in the Gospel reading for this week, from Matthew 1:18-25. But for now, suffice it to say that at least two Gospel writers were convinced that Jesus was virgin-born, and this was the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy.
This has also been the belief of the church for nearly 2000 years, and this faith is reflected in the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds. The reason for this is very simple — Jesus fulfills this prophecy more completely than a child born in the 8th century B.C. Only Jesus can truly be described as Immanuel — God with us.
RESPOND:
I recently had a conversation with a close friend who speculated about the Virgin Birth, and wondered how important it really is. After all, he suggested, wouldn’t it be just as meaningful if Mary had conceived Jesus by the normal human process, and God lifted him up from his humble origins? Isn’t that something that God often does in Scripture, he said — lift up the humble and the lowly?
I was pretty emphatic in my response. The Virgin Birth points to a truth about the nature of Jesus. That truth is not that Jesus was lifted up to God; instead, Jesus is God in the flesh who has humbled himself and come down to us from heaven! My friend’s view, I said, is Arian — that God looked with favor on Jesus and adopted him as his son. But the view that Jesus is God who has become human is consistent with the Scriptures:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…. The Word became flesh, and lived among us. We saw his glory, such glory as of the one and only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth (John 1:1, 14)
Christ Jesus, who, existing in the form of God, didn’t consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men (Philippians 2:5-7).
This is why the Virgin Birth matters — other than the obvious fact that it is a doctrine of the church. It reveals something about the nature of Jesus. Jesus isn’t a human being aspiring to be close to God. Jesus is God who becomes a human being in order to lift us up to God. He alone is Immanuel.
Our Lord, we find it hard to wrap our minds around what you have done because it seldom matches our expectations and boundaries. You reveal yourself through a Virgin Birth, and you become like we are so that we can become like you because it is unique. Thank you for humbling yourself so that we might be exalted with you by faith. Amen.
PHOTOS:
“Isaiah 7_14” by Baptist Union of Great Britain is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.
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