Transcript
We are entering the season of Advent. Advent derived its name from a Latin word called Adventist, meaning the coming or the arrival. It's a season of anticipation and preparation for the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ at Christmas and the anticipation of his return at the second coming. So it's a season of anticipation. I just would encourage you have the next four weeks leading up to your Christmas time and it's going to be a crazy busy time, right? There's a lot of things that are stressful. It's a unique season. People drive fast, malls are packed. Shopping centers are miserable to go into, but one of the things that I'd encourage you to do during this time is just reflect on and have that spirit of anticipation of, Lord, what do you'd want to do in my heart? Historically, advent has been a time of spiritual reflection, penitence and renewal akin to lent that season leading up to Easter, but it has a focus on joy and hope of Christ's birth.
It's a period where believers prepare their hearts and minds for the arrival of the savior, remembering the long period of waiting and expectation before the birth of Jesus. So our theme is going to be the awaiting the King, and we will talk about love, hope, peace, and joy over the next four weeks, all embodied with this idea of just awaiting the king. This morning I want to focus our attention on the love of God and the advent of God's love. Our text is going to be Isaiah seven 14, which I'll put up here on the screen. I'll read it and then we'll pray together. Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign. See, the virgin will conceive, have a son and name him Emmanuel. Let's pray together. Lord, we ask that during the next four weeks that we would be able to stop the normal routine and anticipate, have that spirit of anticipation for the advent of Christ, just like those who waited eagerly year after year, hoping to see the Messiah.
We want to join in that anticipation, Lord, that as we have that spirit of anticipation, may you find in us soft and tender hearts to receive what you would say and what you'd show us. We pray that you'd speak to us this morning through this text. I pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen, amen. So what I want to do this morning is look at this passage from Isaiah, Isaiah chapter seven, and then two similar passages from prophets. 200 years later, I'm going to give you some historical information. My hope is that this is not for the sake of being new, but that you're going to consider the idea of this anticipation for the coming of Christ in a whole new way. Isaiah seven 14, it was delivered in the eighth century before Christ. So 800 years before the time of Jesus during the reign of King Ahaz.
Lemme give you a map of what the world looked like at the time of King Ahaz. The thing that you need to see there is that there is the northern nation of Israel, and then in the South there's that green little area that's this area of Judah. So Israel had been split into two separate nations after the death of King Solomon. And for years and generations and generations there had been idolatry and walking away from God, the kings of Israel were rebellious and did not follow the teachings of Moses. And so God raised up the Assyrian nation and the Babylonian nation about a hundred years apart from each other to come and take captive Israel. So the Assyrians came first and carried Israel off captive, and then later the Babylonians came and took sacked Jerusalem basically and took captive the people of Judah and Judea.
So Isaiah is a prophet during the time leading up to Assyria, coming and taking and invading, and Isaiah's prophesying to King Ahaz. King Ahaz is a king in the southern region there of Judah. And at this time there was a significant political and military upheaval. Judah faced threats from surrounding nations, especially from Israel. Their northern brother was a threat to them. An arum who was the leader of Syria, was pressuring Judah to join their alliance against the Assyrian Empire. So you have Assyria threatening, and then you have kind of this alliances being made in the south between Israel and Syria trying to fend off this growing nation called Assyria. The immediate backdrop for Isaiah seven is a prophecy During the mite war, Israel also known as Ephrem, an arum, they had formed a coalition to resist Assyria and they wanted Judah to join them again, the king of named When Ahaz refused those two nations, Syria and Efrim or Israel, they attempted to invade Judah and install a puppet king in Jerusalem.
So imagine Ahaz operating from a place of incredible vulnerability. Think of some of the modern wars that are taking place and the leaders of nations and the threat of a major nation coming against you. And you've got to decide, do I join this alliance with these foreign nations in Syria and Israel? What do we do? And so it's into that context, that big giant question that A has, not just a question but terror of potential harm. Isaiah prophesies to King Ahaz was in a difficult position facing a threat of invasion and overthrow. He was considering seeking help from the Assyrian Empire, basically going around the back of Israel and going to Assyria, a decision that the prophet Isaiah strongly opposed because it showed a lack of faith in God's protection. So the prophet urged king aas to trust in God rather than foreign alliances or military might the prophet urged the king to trust in God rather than foreign alliances or military might. It was during this encounter that the prophecy of Isaiah seven 14 was given God with us. This is going to be the basis. I'm going to try to make the case for you that God loves you and that he demonstrated his love for you by coming and being with you. This prophecy is given to Ahaz through Isaiah.
Imagine going to Isaiah. You're a king, and this is a spiritual Sr. And there's people, you've gone through things, moments in your own life where you're like had great questions or Let me pose that to you as a question. Can you think of a time where you had great questions and the fear of calamity in your own life? Have you ever felt anxious about something on the horizon? And you're wondering, what does the future hold? You're upset. You're afraid, and you look for somebody who's spiritual somebody, somebody give me a word from God, somebody speak to me. That's the place where Ahaz is at. And so this is the bizarre word that comes from Isaiah, not just God with us, but the Lord himself is going to give you a sign, Ahaz, a virgin will conceive and have a son and name him Emmanuel. You got to love just kind of the bizarre nature of how God works, right?
Imagine your moment of anxiety and you're like, I don't know what to do. I'm upset. And the spiritual person says, well, God's going to give you a sign, a virgin's going to conceive, which is miraculous, right? Because that's not how conception takes place. A virgin's going to conceive and his name is going to be God with us. What a crazy thing to say to somebody who's anxious right in the midst of their terror, and yet that's the word that is spoken to Ahaz. He's saying, should I join this political alliance? And the answer from God is a virgin will conceive, his name will be God is with us. Here's the point that I often make, you know that this is a theme in my teaching over and over again. It's that God works in a patterned way and that you can be a king facing calamity. You can be a mother in a tight spot. You can be a senior facing the last 10, 15 years of your life. You can be a student
Feeling out. It does not matter. The stories of the Bible can map onto our life. And God's word to ahaz can be the word 200 years later, which we'll see. And it can be the word that's given to Joseph as he's learning of the pregnancy of his wife. The God of the Bible is the God who comes along and he speaks into this king's life and he says, God's going to work. He's going to give you this sign. And in the name of this person that's conceived is Emmanuel, God is with us. There are other times where God speaks this same thing.
Haggai prophesied during a time when the Jewish people were returning from the Babylonian exile. Remember I showed you that map and Babylon's on there? Well, they got carried off. They ended up in captivity, and they were there for 70 years. This period is around five 20 BCE, nearly 70 years after the first wave of exiles and the destruction of the first temple. And Haggai is prophesying. He's speaking on God's behalf to the nation. This small group of people that had come back from Babylon and were trying to rebuild Jerusalem. His primary message, Haggai's primary message was focused on the rebuilding of the temple. The Jewish returnees had initially started rebuilding the temple, but they faced opposition. They became discouraged leaving the work incomplete. So here's another just really human experience that you probably could relate to. If we sat with this group of people in five 20 BC and asked them about just what are you guys feeling?
You got a half-built temple. You've got people that are opposed to the rebuilding of the temple. You got some political stuff, some threats against you. Their emotional experience as humans would be very similar to your emotional experience in your setting. And God has a spiritual person called a prophet who speaks on his behalf into that setting. I would encourage you to understand this is one of the reasons why we want to recognize the work of God's spirit through us, that God speaks through his words, but then he also speaks through one another. And there's never going to be a person who's going to speak into your life where that's going to disagree with the Bible, but God uses, even to this day, he uses people with this gift of prophecy, this spiritual ability to speak right into the moment. I've always told people, you need to have friends, you need to have counselors, you need to have prophets.
And I forget what the fourth thing is that I tell people, but you got to have, there's four, I'll remember it right? Get on slack. It's been a little while since I've given my four, but you ought to be, I would look around you and think about, okay, you got friends. Friends are just loyal, right? You can talk with them about anything. There's a sense of safety that those friends provide for you, and then you're going to have people that counsel you. That's where they're going to take and understand the systems of the world. Maybe it's a therapist, but maybe it's just somebody that they're not necessarily your buddy. You're not going to go bowling with them. Well, I'm not going to go bowling with anybody. I hate bowling. But okay, maybe you like bowling, right? You're not going to go bowling with your therapist, but they're really good at taking just the observed systems in the world and they're going to apply them to your life and say, here's how the observed wisdom and systems apply to your life.
And they're a counselor to you. But then there's this other group of prophets that really God provides. They have the spirit of God working through them. It's not like they're really trying to gin it up or do something magical or fancy. It's just that they have a relationship with God and they use their mouth and they communicate, and it's just like God speaks through them. We got people like that in our church where they don't know that they're operating in that gift, but they just talk like, Hey, here's what God's showing me on my heart and I'm listening. I'm going, oh, that's from God. God speaks to that person. And it happens over and over again through that person, and I know and I listen to them differently than maybe I would listen to somebody else. So this guy named Haggai is one of those people.
He's a prophet, and God's spirit is on him speaking to a bunch of discouraged construction workers, right? Don't you love the Bible? Here's a whole book of God's spirit comes on these guys to talk to construction guys, construction workers. Here's what he says. Haggai one 13 and 14, then Haggai, the Lord's messenger delivered the Lord's message to the people. What does God say to the people? I am with you? Where did we hear that before? The word Emmanuel, right? Emmanuel. God is with us. God says to these discouraged construction workers, I'm with you. This is the Lord's declaration, right? So God promises it. But look at verse 14. The Lord roused the spirit of Zabel. He's one of the leaders at the time of SheTiel, governor of Judah, the spirit of the high priest, Joshua son, Joseph Zak, and the spirit of the remnant of the people.
So these three different groups, like two individuals in a group, their spirit is roused. They began to work on the house of the Lord of armies, their God. I love that. I love that picture of where again, the spirit of God comes along and just says, Hey, I'm with you. I'm with you. There's another contemporary of Haggai named Zacharia Zacharia. He's got a whole book in the Old Testament. Zacharia is prophesying in the exact same context to the exact same group of people. He's a contemporary five 20 BC while sharing Haggai's concern for the rebuilding of the temple as Zachariah's prophecies. They had this broader scope, and he included visions that point to the future restoration of Jerusalem and the coming of the Messiah. The establishment of God's kingdom like Haggai Zacharia encouraged the people to in the task of rebuilding the temple and assuring them of God's presence and support.
I'm going to show you two verses here from Zechariah in just a second similar theme. But the reason why I am showing these verses to you, and I want to meditate on them with you this morning, is that there's this anticipation of God, we need you to be with us. We need the king. We need you to come and put on flesh and blood and be in our midst. So Zechariah says this daughter, Zion, shout for joy and be glad for I am coming to dwell among you. This is the Lord's declaration. Many nations will join themselves to the Lord on that day and become my people. I will dwell among you and you will know that the Lord of armies has sent me to you. Zacharia has a bunch of distraught, discouraged, demoralized, I can't think of any other words in front of them.
And the temple, the wall is not getting built. There's a threat from the surrounding enemies. There's this worry of there's just total instability. And yet God speaks this word to them. And the amazing thing is God's going to encourage this group to finish the work. Jerusalem does get rebuilt and this temple happens. It's the temple that Jesus does ministry from. But not only does this passage get fulfilled in the sense of God's rousing their spirit and he's in their midst as a spirit, but this speaks to Jesus coming and literally dwelling among you. Here's the point. If you're new to the Bible, if you're new to the Bible and Christmas, the idea that Jesus was born of a virgin, it's not this idea that all of a sudden this alien appeared and as Jesus like in the story of human history, there's this whole backstory of the nation of Israel anticipating and waiting for a king, a priest, king that would come and right what is wrong, bring justice, bring peace, establish the flourishing that they had longed for.
And there had been these occasions where the enemy was threatening and they were reaping the consequences of their own sin, and they just didn't know what to do. And they had questions, all experiences that you and I can relate to, yet God speaks through his spiritual people. God speaks into that setting. He says, I will be with you. That's a loving God. You think of the gods of the Greek mythology, the presence of God wasn't always the most pleasant thing, but yet the God of the Bible, when he says, I will be with you, it's there to be with his people, to strengthen them, to be what their hearts long for. And so that leads us into our New Testament text in Matthew one 18 through 23. It says that the birth of Jesus Christ came about in this way after his mother, Mary had been engaged to Joseph.
Remember she's about 13, maybe 14 years old. It was discovered before they came together, before they had sex, before they came together, it was found that she was pregnant from the Holy Spirit. So her husband, Joseph, being a righteous man and not wanting to disgrace her publicly, decided to divorce her secretly. But after he had considered these things, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream saying, I'm going to stop for there for just a second. So here again, we have this human experience relationship, right? And this relationship is a bit strained because his fiance is pregnant and he's like, this doesn't work. This isn't going to go very well. Think of ahaz, stressed out as a king. Think of the discouraged construction workers, distraught over, what do we do next? How do we build the rest of the temple? And here's Joseph, right?
God is faithful in these people's point of questioning, frustration, not knowing what to do next. God works in that context, not just to get you by the skin of your teeth, but it's like, no, this is the context for my glorious work. This is me setting the stage so that I can do something awesome in your life. Do you hear that? That's important for you to know as a follower of Jesus, because you are going to face, we all face moments where things are tight and we have questions, and life's a little bit frustrating. And you've got to see this pattern throughout the Bible that anticipates the arrival rival of God in the person of Jesus Christ where he's with us. So here is Joseph ready to get this divorce from Mary, and an angel appears in a dream and says to him, Joseph, son of David, don't be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because what has been conceived in her, it's from the Holy Spirit.
She will give birth to a son, and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. Now, all this took place. So we go back to the narrator being Matthew. Matthew says, he comments on Joseph's experience here and this word from the angel, he says, now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet Isaiah. See, a virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son. They will name him Emmanuel, which is translated. God is with us. So Matthew, as he's retelling for us the story of Jesus, he's deeply aware of this Jewish history all these times where God has said, I will be with you. And then he says, but let me tell you about this story of Joseph and how he's redirected right at the end, right at the end, right before he divorces Mary, and he's told about Jesus, who's going to save his people from their sins. This is Emmanuel, the God who is with us.
There is a virgin woman that becomes pregnant, engaged. Her future husband is ready to break off the relationship. And the angel says, this pregnancy is from God. And the angel's message to Joseph aligns itself with Isaiah seven 14, part of this idea of walking by faith. We talk about that a lot as Christians, that God works as we trust him. The idea of walking by faith, a big part of that is this belief that God is in control working in a patterned way, and that the pieces of your life that sometimes feel like puzzle pieces spread all out in all kinds of directions. That picture there, that God's in control of that, and that he's putting the pieces together, that is a fundamental act in our faith. Walk, trusting that God is putting the pieces together and that he is going to be with us.
So I want to encourage you this morning in closing, to identify with figures like an ahaz, like the returnees, the construction workers in Haggai, in Zacharia's time, like a Joseph who felt overwhelmed and know that as we do four weeks of advent and live in anticipation, we're awaiting the king who wants to be with us in love that you are deeply loved. And when God is like for Zacharia and for Haggai, when he said, I'm going to be with you, think of Joseph, the story of Joseph out of Genesis. Joseph was in a tight spot. His brothers betrayed him, sold him off to slavery in Egypt. It's a difficult situation, right? And the text says over and over again that God was with Joseph. That was not Jesus the Messiah incarnate as his buddy. Like Joseph couldn't touch. Joseph couldn't touch Jesus. But God's presence with Joseph, God being with Joseph, meant that Joseph succeeded in the house of Potiphar.
He succeeded when he was in the jail of Pharaoh. He succeeded when he was called upon by Pharaoh to interpret the dreams. And so that in a sense, is God with us. Same thing with Ahaz. Same thing with Zacharias and Haggai's people. But man, when we celebrate Christmas, we're celebrating God with us at a whole nother level. It's a miracle that God was like, because hey, any one of us would be like, I'll take Joseph's experience if God could just be with me in that way. Let me succeed in all those difficult settings, like yes. And in a sense, we now live with the presence
Of Holy Spirit with us. But yet there is a point, a historical act that God did in our history, human history where God took on flesh and blood and was with humans for 33 years as the loving God who was willing to die on the cross for our sins. The love of God has been demonstrated through Jesus being Emmanuel, the God who is with us. So in closing, I just commend that God, that person of Jesus Christ to you. Sometimes it is a stressful setting, a stressful season being Christmas time, and just know that God wants to reveal himself to you as the God who is with us. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for your word to Joseph, and to Zachariah and Haggai, to Isaiah, to Ahaz. Lord, we pray that concept of you being with us as the Messiah, that our hearts would be inclined to anticipate a greater sense of your nearness to us. Lord, help us to give space for the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, Lord, to be open. Just Paul prayed that the eyes of our understanding would be enlightened to understand a bunch of spiritual stuff. Lord, give us this capacity to be tuned in to the work of your spirit, to hear your voice, to hear you speaking through the spiritual people around us. Lord, would you just turn the lights on in our life to know you? Thank you. Thank you for Jesus. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.