Episode 262: A Sign For Ahaz | Tim Henderson+

Alright, you guys doing alright? So I had lunch on Friday with my new bestie, Dave Sloop, and I didn't know that it was his birthday. So as a public act of repentance, I want you all to know that it was Sloop's birthday. Where are you, dude? There he is, Dave's birthday. Hey, happy birthday. He's 57, or he will be someday.

Okay, so you guys, it is always my fondest hope, whenever I'm with you guys on a Sunday morning, to do two things. No matter what the text is, no matter what the topic is, my secret mission is this: I always want you to leave this room believing that God's word is filled with treasure, number one, and number two, that you can find it.

And the reason I love to do that is that when I was a college student, some people did that for me, and it absolutely changed everything about my life. I became convinced that God's word is filled with treasure and that I could find it. It didn't begin that I was able to find it. In fact, I was a rather incompetent student when I was first beginning to learn this thing. But some very kind people helped me.

I think of the Bible as being like a mountain, like this giant rock. And inside the rock, there are these veins of gold. Inside the rock, there are these gems, these jewels, these treasures. But the mountain's opaque and the rock—it's hard to see through rock. But some people came into my life and they began to tunnel into the mountain for me. And as they did, they'd go in there with a pickaxe and they'd say, "Here, here, here, let me show you this. Look at this." And I would go in and I would see the things that they had mined to find that were there. And that's really what I became convinced—that really it was full of treasure. But I knew that I couldn't find it. I didn't know what to do about it. And in fact, sometimes people would show me things and it just looked like a rock, and I couldn't see it. But every once in a while, I would begin to notice that there were shiny things. There was gold. There were gems. And then on longer intervals, I would do the work myself and learning how to tunnel in and to make discoveries of my own, to find things in the word that were just delicious. That was a drug for me—to figure this out and to see it and have it make sense. I absolutely loved it.

But there was a particular time I remember very distinctly where somebody had told me that Jesus fulfilled over 300 prophecies. The Old Testament made 300 predictions, and then when this guy Jesus shows up, he just nails them. He's like checking off a list, all of these things. And it's one of the reasons that we can have enormous confidence that he really is the Messiah because he fulfilled these things. And so I thought, well, sounds like a bag of diamonds, and I want to see these. So I began this. I literally had a list of all of these predictions that Jesus supposedly fulfilled. And so I went and I started to look them up to find these treasures. And do you know what happened when I did that? It was incredibly dismaying and incredibly disappointing. Because if somebody would say, "Yeah, the Bible predicted this would happen. Go look it up," and I look it up and I'm like, "Well, I mean okay, but first of all, I don't even understand what's happening here. But as near as I can tell, it didn't say anything about the Messiah." And it seemed to me that what people had done is just ripped these passages out of context, some verse that has some verbal similarity, and then glued it on Jesus' forehead and said, "Behold." And I began to wonder: maybe people aren't being quite honest with me. Maybe it's not quite as simple as people have said. Or, equally likely, maybe I'm just too stupid to figure this out. Because I'm looking at these things and I don't know how any reasonable person would have concluded that this was a prediction about the Messiah.

So if any of that has any kind of resonance for you today, then this morning is for you. Because what I would like to do—I hope to do in the next twenty minutes or so—is to teach you at least on one of these instances what to do with your pickaxe. How do you dig into this mountain? How do we see what it is? Because I really do think that these things on this list, they were diamonds, they are veins of gold, and there's enormously good news. But it is not anywhere near as simple as I thought they were, not anywhere near as straightforward. And in fact, I think some of the things that people say about these 300 prophecies just isn't really true because they're not very often direct predictions of the Messiah.

We're gonna unpack this. By the time our whole time is done, your Christianity will be intact, and I hope I get to keep my job, and it'll be great.

But I do want to help you unlearn some overly simplistic things and challenge some of the things that you've probably been told that aren't quite true. You ready? It's gonna be good.

So if you have your Bible, you can open it up to Isaiah 7, and I want to dig a tunnel with you. I want to show you what's in this thing, and I think that within twenty minutes, it's gonna look like a diamond, but not before it doesn't. Okay? We gotta take it as it comes.

By the way, even as I tell you to look at your Bible in Isaiah 7, you can do that, but I have the text—it'll be on screen. The version that I've put on screen is a little bit simplified. What we're about to do is a little bit hard, just a little bit. It'll be great, but it's gonna be a little bit complicated. We're gonna have a whole bunch of proper names, a lot of characters, and sometimes they're described with their name, or their father's name, or their grandfather's name, or their city, or their nation, and it's hard. It's complicated.

It's a little bit like when you hear in the news that Putin said thus and such, or the Kremlin decreed this, or Moscow is doing, or Russia is going to—you would know intuitively that those are all the same thing, right? Because you know that Putin and Moscow and Russia, it's all the same. You probably don't have that same instant access to ancient kings, and so when it's the city or the capital or the nation, it's confusing. So I just simplified it all so it's all gonna say the same thing to make it easier. I didn't change the meaning of anything; I just made it a little bit more accessible. So if you're following along and you're like, "his version's different," it is. You can just look at the screen and see it, but I didn't cheat. It's all honest.

The Four Characters

Here's what you're gonna meet. We're gonna be in Isaiah 7, and you're gonna meet four different characters. Okay?

The first one is Ahaz. Ahaz is the king of Judah, and he's our protagonist. I would like to say that he is the good guy, but he's horrible. We don't like Ahaz. He is the worst. But he is the main character of the story. He's the guy that we're following. He's the king of the people of God.

Then the next two are his enemies: Pekah and Rezin. Pekah is the king of Israel and Rezin is the king of Aram. If you look here, you might be like, "Wait, king of Israel, king of Judah—what's the deal with that?" Well, Judah and Israel used to be one nation. They got in a fight, they split up, and now they don't like each other very much. So what you've got is Ahaz and Pekah are basically the leaders of different nations. Aram and Israel have teamed up.

And then our fourth character is Isaiah. He is a good guy. He's not the protagonist so to speak, but he's a good guy. We like him. He's gonna speak into this very chaotic, very painful situation and represent God, speak for God in the midst of it.

So that's what we're gonna look at. We're gonna be in Isaiah 7, and it says this:

By the way, I will warn you—this will be a Christmas message by the time we're done, but not till the very end. We're gonna do it honest, and we're gonna let it say what it actually says and not shoehorn it into some preconstructed idea. Alright? We're just gonna take it straight.

The Passage

When Ahaz was king of Judah, king Rezin of Aram, and king Pekah of Israel marched up to fight against Jerusalem, but they could not overpower it. Now, Judah was told, "Aram has allied itself with Israel." So the hearts of Ahaz and his people were shaken as the trees of the forest are shaken by the wind. — Isaiah 7:1-2

So what's going down here is that Ahaz, he's king of Judah and he's afraid because his two neighboring enemies have ganged up and they're teaming up on him. It'll be a little bit as if Mexico and Canada teamed up and they're gonna come attack us, right? So whatever dread you experience imagining men and sombreros riding mooses in on their attack—that's Ahaz. He's like, "Oh, they're coming, right? It's gonna be bad," and he's really freaked out about it. He's terrified, he's afraid, highly anxious about this whole mess.

And Isaiah is the prophet, and he goes to give a little bit of divine perspective to Ahaz—to be like, "Yeah, gonna be fine, it's gonna be fine."

Take a look at verse 3, and notice where he meets him, because this is meaningful.

Then the Lord said to Isaiah, go out, you and your son, to meet Ahaz at the end of the aqueduct on the upper pool on the road to Washerman's Field, and say to him, be careful, keep calm, don't be afraid, do not lose heart because of these two smoldering stubs of firewood, because of the fierce anger of Rezin of Aram and of Pikka of Israel.

Where does he meet him? What's their location to this little conference here? Is it the aqueduct? Why is that meaningful? Do you know what's going on here? Do you know how they wage war in this time? What the strategy of Aram and Israel is gonna be?

They're gonna block the city—so the general strategy is we're gonna lay siege to the city. When you siege a city, you just surround it and you say nothing gets in and nothing gets out. And if one of the things that's not getting in is water, then you're not gonna last very long. Ahaz is anxious, he's worried. So he goes to the very center point of his pain—like, don't know if we're gonna have enough water, how long can we survive this thing? And right there, Isaiah is there to meet him and he says, hey, Ahaz, it's fine, it's fine, relax. It's going to be fine, you have nothing to worry about.

He's here, he's worried, and God meets him and his message is, be calm, don't be afraid. And he hears the voice of God, but he also is hearing the voice of his enemies. They're like, I'm gonna kill you. We're gonna come in and we're gonna crush you, we're gonna destroy you. And he doesn't know which voice to believe. Do you sympathize with this? I sympathize acutely with this. There's all kinds of things, and I'm like, I don't know how this is gonna play out. There's these promises and maybe, but I don't really know how it's gonna go. That's where Ahaz is.

God says to Ahaz through Isaiah:

This is what the sovereign Lord says, it will not take place. It will not happen. For the head of Aram is only Rezin. Within sixty-five years, Israel will be too shattered to even be a people—like the nation's gonna cease to exist. The head of Israel is only Pikka. And if you don't stand firm in your faith, you will not stand at all. — Isaiah 7:7

God says, listen, I know they're threatening you. I heard them. But can you hear me? I'm telling you, it's not gonna come to pass.

The Struggle to Trust in Uncertainty

Now, I wonder for you, in your life, even just right now—are you there? Have you been there? Where you've lost your job and you don't know if there's a new job coming? Or there's a relationship that is frayed and is dripping away, it's just kind of like sand through your fingers and you don't know what it is? Or has anybody here ever worried about their children? Like, how is this gonna turn out? Like we've done all that we know what to do, I don't know, right? Maybe it's a relationship, maybe it's your marriage. There's some circumstance and you're anxious and you're worried and you're fretful about it, and then some Christian comes along and says like, don't worry, God was with you, and you're like, alright, thank you. Is there a switch that I can be like, oh, stop worrying? Is that a thing? And you don't know what to do. If there's a switch, I would love to find it. But I don't know what's gonna happen.

In the midst of that place of like, don't worry, like, don't know how to not worry. Right there, Ahaz hears Isaiah say, okay, I'll tell you what, let me give you a sign.

What Is a Sign?

A sign is something that's going to happen right now. And when it happens, it gives you confidence, it gives you hope that this later thing that you said is gonna happen—but I don't know when it's gonna happen, I'm not sure if it's gonna happen—that that will happen too. So it's like, I've made a prediction about the long term future, and you're like, yeah, maybe. And so you don't believe me, so I give you a little immediate short term prediction. And when that one happens, it's like, you can borrow hope from the first experience and apply it to the second experience. That's what a sign is.

Isaiah says to Ahaz, I'll tell you what, let me give you a sign. I know you don't believe me, I know you don't have the faith, the courage to trust that these guys aren't gonna crush your head, so let me give you a sign. Let me give you something that's going to happen right now. And when you see it, you'll be able to be like, okay, okay, alright, maybe. And in fact, your maybe turns into like, maybe. Like maybe this will work. That's what's supposed to happen.

So here's the sign. Back in Isaiah seven—or actually, first let's do this. Think about your own. Imagine Christmas is coming. It is. Okay. That's not hard.

And imagine what you want for Christmas. Be outlandish. Be lavish. What would be the most extraordinary thing? For me, my entire life, my fondest hope for Christmas was like a Corvette. On my sixteenth birthday, my seventeenth birthday, my eighteenth birthday—I'm 52 years old—like, my dad's gonna give me a Corvette. Imagine that I tell you, you're getting a Corvette for Christmas. Would you believe me? No, right?

But if I were to say, in a minute, a bird is gonna whip by these windows, fly around, sneak in the door, come around, circle the room three times, and then land on your shoulder. If that were to happen, would your confidence in Christmas bump? Right? That's what a sign is. That's what God's gonna do here.

The Sign Given to Ahaz

Take a look at this:

Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign. The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and he will call him Immanuel. And he will eat curds and honey when he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right. But before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings that you dread will be laid waste. — Isaiah 7:14-16

First question: who is the sign given to? Ahaz. That's really important. This is the sign given to Ahaz. When was it given to him? It's about July. What is the sign? What's the bird that's gonna land on his shoulder? Some woman is gonna have a baby. A virgin's gonna have a baby. And this is all happening in July.

Not only was the sign given in Ahaz's day, it was fulfilled in Ahaz's day. It had to be fulfilled in Ahaz's day. The very nature of a sign—it has to happen within Ahaz's line of sight. Its job is to reassure him that the longer term thing, that's a few years off, is going to happen.

If we were to simply say to Ahaz, "Hey man, I know you're all freaked out, and you're worried these kings are gonna wreck you, but in order that you will know the kings aren't gonna wreck you, in seven hundred years, long after you're dead, something else is gonna happen"—that wouldn't work. That wouldn't do anything for him. Something has to happen. This is a sign given to Ahaz to say, right here, right now, something good is gonna happen.

The sign is that there's a young woman. Ahaz knows her. She's perhaps in the royal family, perhaps in Isaiah's family. We don't have much more information at this moment in the story. But whoever she is, there's no anticipation that she's going to marry and have a child, but she will.

Now something you need to know: Hebrew is rich in verbs, but very poor in nouns. Nouns get used across a broad stretchy context. The word for virgin can mean a woman who's never had sex—a virgin in the most direct sense. But it can also mean a young woman of marriable age without any reference to her sexual activity. In this instance, he's saying a young woman is going to have a child.

You could debate what you think Isaiah means about this, but I will suggest to you that there is one and only one person in the history of the world who was ever born of a woman who had never had sex, and that was Jesus. And there's something happening in Ahaz's life prior to that. All of the meaning of what's going on here suggests that this term—it has a stretchy meaning—but the first instance is about a young woman. This woman, in Ahaz's time, is a virgin, maybe in the most absolute sense at the time the prophecy is given, but she is going to conceive in a normal way and have a child in the normal way.

She'll name him Immanuel. They'll call him Manny. And Ahaz, when this happens—when this surprise pregnancy shows up—pay attention. Because this child is going to become a signpost for you. Before this kid is like two or something, before this kid is like eighteen or twenty-four, they're still pretty short. The land of the kings that you dread will be laid waste, and it's going to be fine. It's gonna happen for you. It's gonna happen now, and all will be well. Relax. Calm down. And if you don't trust me, trust the sign that you're about to see.

Make sense? Now, don't worry—Christianity will be intact. Just stay with me. That was a historical event. It took place in Ahaz's day. It had to take place in Ahaz's day. Not, "Hey, in seven hundred years there'll be a messiah." Something going on right here, right now.

It did happen, but it was done except not done. Because this passage, like countless other passages in the Old Testament, is not merely about its own moment, although it is certainly about that first, but it also secondarily points to Christ. So I want you to think with me what was happening in this moment. Okay? And we're gonna—I made a list for you so you can keep track with me.

Number one, look at this. First thing I want you to see is that there's a group of people that are in distress, and they're facing an enemy that can destroy them, and they are afraid. And into this moment, into this situation, God says, I will rescue you. I just need you to trust me. So be calm. And the people are like, maybe. And then he predicts that a woman who is presently a virgin will have a child. Not only will she have a child, but she will name that child Emmanuel, which means what? God with us. And number five, that child's birth will herald the salvation of a people.

And it all happened. That was fulfilled for Ahaz. He watched it, he saw it with his own eyes. And then, seven hundred years later, something conspicuously similar also happened, and Matthew saw it. And Matthew, you guys, was so absolutely soaked in the Old Testament. It's incredible—if you read his gospel, his story of Jesus' life, his whole thing is framed through the Old Testament. And he knew that there are all of these things that were so conspicuous: story after story after story, event and life and big, little, tiny details and big, broad, sweeping things. And when Jesus shows up, he's like, man, it is uncanny that constantly what we're seeing is a correspondence between the actual lived life of Israel and the life that Jesus shows up and lives.

And it's as if Jesus is walking through the entire history of Israel, and whatever they did, he super does. He fulfills and overfills the story of the life of Israel, and he does it like a jillion times, and Matthew is very fond of pointing them out. According to him, there are hundreds of times that the Old Testament establishes some pattern that foreshadows, that it typifies what God would do. God longs to save, he longs to redeem, and it's like he can't keep a secret. He keeps letting these hints slip of what he is someday going to do, how he would accomplish the great purpose of his heart.

And so in Matthew chapter one, Matthew wrote the passage that Brian read to us. Right? And so just to skip ahead a little bit, Joseph catches wind that his fiancée is pregnant. He's like, well, and he's gonna break up with her. He's gonna move on. But then an angel appears to him and says, hang on, there's more going on than meets the eye. And in verse 20, it says:

After Joseph had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid. Do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife because what's conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son and you are to give him the name Jesus because he will save his people from their sins. — Matthew 1:20-21

And then Matthew says this:

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said to the prophet. The virgin will be with child and give birth to a son and they will call him Immanuel, which means God with us. — Matthew 1:22-23

So do you begin to see what Matthew saw? Okay. Go back to that list again. Okay? So look at this. Not only—in fact, go forward one slide. You don't have to go backward. Come forward. There's a people, right, who are in distress. We are a people who are in distress facing an enemy that can destroy us. In this instance, it's not Aram and Israel, it's sin. And to us, God says, trust me. I know it's a mess, but I have a plan and I just want you to relax. It's going to be okay. And in fact, not just do I want you to trust me—that trusting Jesus is going to be the event upon which the entire thing hangs.

And Jesus' mom, notice this, she was a virgin. Not just in the broadest sense, and not just when the prophecy was given, but in the most exacting sense, she was a virgin when he was conceived, and even still when he was born. And when he comes, he doesn't just bear the name God with us. Nobody called him Emmanuel. But he was God with us—like explicitly, exactly, actually. He doesn't have the name, he fulfills the name.

And not only that, but his birth was not merely the heralding of the salvation of the people, it was the salvation. What Matthew is observing, you guys, is that every key point of Isaiah seven, Jesus not only did, but he super did. He overdid. He fulfilled and overfilled the picture that God gave Isaiah.

And you guys, that phenomena—it happens scores and scores of times. Over and over again, Jesus' whole life is this replay of the life of Israel.

Dozens of events that were real in their own time, but which Jesus then comes and embodies, so that those foreshadowings point to him. And that is why Matthew says:

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: "The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel," which means God with us.

You guys, this is really important. Matthew is not claiming that Isaiah 7 was a direct didactic prediction about the Messiah. He's saying it was one of scores of events that God intended to layer with meaning, the full understanding of which would not come to us until Jesus came and just crushes all of them.

You guys, Jesus is—we could do this all day long. He is the true and better Moses who comes to lead his people out of slavery. He is the true and better Job, the innocent sufferer who is mocked and ridiculed despite his innocence. And once he is saved and rescued from that suffering, he returns to issue forgiveness and restoration to his mocking friends. He is the true and better Esther. Esther said, "If I perish, I perish." But she didn't. Jesus said, "When I perish, I perish," and he did. And he gives his life to rescue his people from certain destruction.

Jesus is the true and better scapegoat. It is upon him that all of your blame and culpability is laid. He is the true and better temple. He is the place where heaven meets earth. He is the true and better Abel. And his blood speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

And every—guys, it's unbelievable. It's uncanny. It is extraordinary. These are gold veins that run through the mountain, these gems that are hidden everywhere. The thing that every one of them shares in common is that they're pictures of Christ. The whole book is about him. The whole world is about him. You guys, you are about him. The book was written, the world was made, and you were made so that you might know him and see him and delight in him.

And what Matthew is saying is, "Did you see that? Did you see that?" Because he did it again and again and again and again. He is the fulfillment of everything. He's the reason the world was made.

You guys, this is not a simple answer. What I was looking for when I was a freshman in college was some little simple answer: when the Messiah comes, his mom will be a virgin. I did not find that and it was disappointing to me. But I'm glad that I didn't because this is better. It is better. It requires more work. But if you will put forward the energy to read and understand this book, oh my goodness, the reassurance that it gives and the hope that it brings.

The Sign in Our Own Circumstances

Many of you right now are in an Ahazy kind of moment. Are you not? Some of you, right now, we're celebrating Christmas. Right? And we're longing for this fulfillment of God's great purposes and everything is great and Christmas is happy. Right? He is letting these moments slip—these pictures of what he's going to do—and we love it. And Advent's wonderful because we're waiting, and Christmas is great because God couldn't hold it in. The Old Testament's bristling with this, and we can't wait for the morning, and it all comes to pass.

But in the midst of it, you're like, "Yeah, but really what I actually want is a job. Really what I actually want is that my kids would walk with Jesus. Really what I actually want is the diagnosis would come back the way that it would."

Christmas is about that. It is about living here in this gap where Ahaz was. He's like, "I know what you said, but I don't know if you're gonna do it. Maybe. Is there any hope? Can you give me a sign? Can you give me some picture, some reason to believe that it's all true?"

Some of you know full well that you need a rescuer. Maybe for your sin, maybe for whatever situation you're in—to have your guilt erased or the relationship restored. But let me just tell you guys, there is a rescuer. There really is. And Ahaz's sign—the ultimate fulfillment of Ahaz's sign—can become your sign.

Paul said:

He who did not spare his own son but gave him up for us all, how will he not graciously give us all things?

The sign that God is with you is this: unto you is born this day in the city of David, a savior who is Christ the Lord. This is the fulfillment of the sign. It is because this actually happened that you can have hope that whatever distress you're facing, he will walk with you in it.

Our purpose this morning as we gather is not just to be excited about Christmas. It's gonna be fantastic, and there's so many things that are delightful. But to also pause and to say, "I know there's a drama behind every face. And there are things that you're like, 'Lord, I don't know what you're gonna do.'"

I would invite you today to come forward and to kneel before him and to say, "God, I believe. Help me in my unbelief. I wanna trust you, but I'm afraid of this circumstance." Or maybe you're not afraid. You're like, "I can see it."

I trust him. I believe it. But there are people adjacent to you that don't. And your job is to be like the friends of the paralytic who believe on behalf of their friend. Right? It may be that you come down here and you're gonna spend some time and you're gonna intercede on behalf of those who just need to know that it's all true and it's gonna be okay.

Life is hard. Sometimes it's magnificent and incredibly fun, but it's often really difficult. So we invite you to come and whatever you're carrying, whatever the people that you love are carrying, let's offer it to him and ask that this sign, the great sign of all signs, would give us the reassurance to walk with him in faith and to trust him at all.

Prayer

Jesus, we love you because you are everything our hearts desire. I don't know how you did it, but you did all of it. You were the one who Israel was sent off into the wilderness, and you began your ministry in the wilderness. Israel was sent off into Egypt, and you went into Egypt. Israel grumbled and complained and disobeyed. And you came along and you danced their steps, except you did perfectly what they failed to do.

You are the true and better everything. We love you. We exalt you. We want to live our lives before your face. Would you give us courage and hope? Right now, there are some heavy sleds being dragged around in this room. Would you give us grace to trust you, walk with us. We long to see you come soon. Amen.