1.
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from
God our Heavenly Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The
message from God’s Word today is taken from Isaiah 7:1-14 (Read Text). It’s entitled, “The Lord Saves,” Dear
brothers and sisters in Christ.
2.
“Follow the
signs. You can’t miss it.” I’ve heard
these words when I’ve asked for driving directions. Maybe you have too. Despite
accurate instructions and good advice, though, I have on occasion missed my
destination anyway. Sometimes people
like me just don’t believe what the signs say. The signs may tell me to go five
miles further, but after four miles, or four and a half, I start looking around
and figuring that I’m not seeing what I expected. Things just don’t look right,
for whatever reason. So, I turn around and go back. I have missed my destination. I thought I knew what
I was doing, so I didn’t believe the signs. Arrogance led to unbelief. In
unbelief, I got lost.
3.
The Lord sent Isaiah the prophet to
his people at a time of great distress. During Isaiah’s prophetic career,
Israel, the Northern Kingdom, fell to the Assyrians, the people to whom the
prophet Jonah had been sent some years before. By Isaiah’s time they had
reverted to their cold and cruel ways. They attacked and nearly destroyed
Judah, the Southern Kingdom, too. These
were fearsome times. Unbelief ran rampant. People often didn’t to hear what the
Lord was saying through Isaiah. But, Isaiah kept on proclaiming the Lord’s
message, including the good news of salvation. This prophet’s very name means “the
Lord saves.” That’s not a bad summary of his message. Isaiah is often
called the “Evangelist of the Old Testament” for the fact that he
consistently pointed to the coming Christ and his kingdom. Isaiah gave people
something to believe and Someone to believe in.
4.
But, so often they didn’t want to
hear it. Take young King Ahaz of Judah as an example. Shortly after Ahaz began ruling,
Syria and Israel, the Northern Kingdom, invaded Judah. They intended to take
Jerusalem, remove the new king Ahaz from his throne, and set up their own
puppet king in his place. This was another hard time for Judah and for the
Davidic line of kings through which the Messiah was to come into the world. A
couple of sermons back we saw a huge threat that could have wiped out David’s
line completely. Now, about a hundred years later, another such threat had come.
Ahaz, the descendant of David, stood at risk of being deposed in favor of
someone else. If that happened, what would become of the Messianic promise? Isaiah found young Ahaz preparing for an
attack upon Jerusalem. The king was inspecting the city’s water supply when
Isaiah came to him and told him not to worry. The prophet had good news for the
king. Isaiah foretold that Syria and Israel would not succeed in their plans.
In fact, these nations would soon be shattered.
5.
Through Isaiah the Lord even invited
the king to ask for a sign. Ahaz didn’t want one, though. He tried to sound
pious about the whole matter, but he was really saying, “Thanks, but no
thanks.” What a terrible thing to
say to God! Hold on for a moment, though. When the Lord comes to us with the
greatest good news for us to drink in and ponder and share, aren’t we perfectly
capable of saying something equally bad? When is the last time you disengaged
from God’s Word or failed to be engaged with it, saying or thinking something
like this: “Oh, I’m far too busy! I have too many things to do.” This is
an excuse. Why don’t we make more time for the Lord and his Word? The time is
his anyway, after all.
6.
It took a lot of gall for Ahaz to
cast aside God’s invitation with his seemingly pious way of saying “Thanks,
but no thanks.” The Lord was offering Ahaz help, but the brash king
determined that he did not want it. Instead, Ahaz wanted to get back to the
preparations he could count and control, the things he could calculate and
arrange. Really, what we are talking
about goes beyond arrogance. The real trouble, whether for Ahaz or for us,
remains unbelief. Unbelief doesn’t want to hear anything the Lord says, not
even when he says things that are good and pleasant. For unbelief does not want
to depend upon him. The Church Father Augustine once observed, “If you
believe what you like in the gospel and reject what you don’t like; it is not
the gospel you believe, but yourself.”1 Quoted in IBP, 134.
7.
Does that sound like Ahaz? Does it
sound like us? In unbelief we say to God something similar to what Ahaz said. We
say, “I don’t need you. I want to make it on my own.” At length, God
tells sinners that they can have their way, and be without him forever in hell.
Unbelief always plays with fire. How
unexpectedly gracious the Lord was, then, with Ahaz! And, whether Ahaz realized
it or not, God is also surprisingly gracious with the whole world of sinners. Despite
the king’s unbelief, the Lord determined to give a sign to the house of David
anyway. Isaiah said, “Behold, the
virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.”
“Immanuel” is Hebrew for “God with us.” Remarkably, the Lord chose
this situation of arrogance and unbelief to reveal one of the most celebrated
Messianic prophecies in the entire Old Testament! The Lord inspired Isaiah to
foretell an event that would occur some 730 years in the future, the conception
and birth of Christ.
8.
Sometimes the question is raised: “As
important as the birth of Christ was and is, how good a sign could it have been
for King Ahaz, who lived all those years beforehand?” Actually, the future
coming of the Messiah was a great sign for Ahaz, in at least three ways. First, it showed that the Lord would
really grant deliverance from the very danger that Ahaz feared so much. God
would preserve the family of David and the Messianic line, and at length the
Messiah would be born in that line. There was plenty of reason to trust in the
Lord, who had the situation well in hand. Ahaz ended up calling upon the
Assyrians for help and they turned out to be the big threat, much more menacing
than Syria and Israel. Second, the Lord
would go beyond giving signs to giving himself. The Son predicted in this
passage would be none other than “God with us,” Immanuel. Third, the Lord himself was acting in his
own way and time. Underscoring this fact, the Child would be conceived and
born of a virgin.
9.
Of course, you and I live after the
coming of Christ. We await his second coming. Still, God’s message to Ahaz
through Isaiah also applies to us in three similar ways. First, God is the One who grants us deliverance.
Isaiah’s name tells the story. The Lord saves. We don’t save ourselves.
Science and technology have been responsible for many advances that we find in
life today. Still, we need to keep things in perspective. Recycling paper or
aluminum cans is not nearly the same as restoring a person to a right
relationship with God, his Creator and his Lord. Curing diseases like polio
is significant, but it’s far from healing what’s really wrong with every
sinner. Only by the Lord’s great mercy have the technological advances come
about, and—make no mistake—only he can grant the full and final salvation we so
desperately need. This he does in our Lord Jesus Christ. He saves.
10.
For, second, God has given us
himself. He is “God with us.” This goes far beyond giving us a sign or a
message. He gives us himself as a gift. Christ didn’t come for his own benefit
or advantage. He came to save us. The lashes on his back, the crown of thorns
on his head, the nails driven in his hands and feet, the spear thrust in his
side—every bit of this was for us. Because he is the Man who is also God, his
suffering and death have infinite worth. St Paul says in 2 Cor. 8:9, “Although
Jesus was rich with all the riches of God, for our sake he became poor, so that
by his poverty we might become rich.” He came to give himself as a
sacrifice for our sin and unbelief, a sacrifice unto death, yes, death on a
cross.
11.
Even after he died, Jesus continued
to be Immanuel, “God with us.” In the animated television program “Easter
Is,” produced some years ago, a little boy named Benji was upset because
his dog Waldo had gotten lost a few days before Easter. But on Easter Sunday,
as the family was leaving home to go to church, Waldo turned up! He loved Benji
so much, someone said, that he could not stay away. So with Christ: he loved us
so much that he could not stay away in death. He rose from the dead.2 He
remains Immanuel, “God with us.” 2
Easter Is, Lutheran Television, 1975
12.
Third, the Lord acted in his own way and time. Christ was born of
a virgin. This was the work of God! St. Matthew pointed out that Jesus was
conceived by the Holy Spirit. He added that the birth of Jesus to Mary, a
virgin, fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecy (Matthew 1:20– 23). The “first gospel,”
Genesis 3:15, had already hinted along these lines, calling the coming One who
would crush the devil’s head “the Seed of the woman,” not of a man. But
Isaiah went even further in our text, mentioning that the Messiah’s mother
would not ever have known a man before he was born. This miracle underscores
the initiative of the Lord who sent his Son when he was ready to do so, without
intervention by any sinful human being. Christ came as a gift, out of grace.
The Lord saves.
13.
He comes to us still today as a
gift, in his Word and in the Sacraments. In a way, it can be said of us as
God’s children that we, too, are virgin-born. St. John wrote that those who
believe in Christ are the adopted children of God, “who were born, not of
blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God”
(John 1:13). 3 See George F. Wollenburg, “Some
Thoughts for Preaching at Christmas,” Concordia Pulpit Resources 6 (Dec. 3,
1995–Feb. 18, 1996): 9. Once again, the Lord gets all the
glory for our salvation. He saves, from beginning to end.
14.
The Lord saves us from our unbelief,
among other things. As Isaiah put it a bit later: You will say in that day: I will give thanks to you, O LORD, for though
you were angry with me, your anger turned away, that you might comfort me.
Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid, for the LORD
GOD is my strength and my song, he has
become my salvation (Isaiah 12:1–2).
Amen. The peace of God that
passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus until life
everlasting. Amen.
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