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One of the historic Scripture passages for the Advent season, Isaiah 7, also speaks of signs. In Isaiah's day, Judah's King Ahaz was being bullied by the northern kingdom of Israel and by Syria. Faced with this challenge, Isaiah tells us, the hearts of Ahaz and his Judean people shook like leaves in the wind; they were sure their only hope against the bullies was the "benevolent" protection of the Assyrian Empire. "Stay calm," Isaiah advised. "Do not lose faith. Israel and Syria are just smouldering chunks of firewood. Those burned-out kingdoms have already had their blaze of glory."
To encourage Ahaz to trust in God, not Assyria, Isaiah told the king to ask for a sign of God's promise. In a pious charade, Ahaz protested that he shouldn't put the Lord to the test in this way. Isaiah erupted in righteous anger. Despite the refusal, he said, "The Lord Himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel. He will eat curds and honey when he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right" (Isaiah 7:14-15).
This was a double-edged promise for Ahaz and the Judeans. On the one hand, Isaiah prophesied that the danger posed by Israel and Syria would evaporate quickly. By the time a young woman would give birth to a son, she would, in thankfulness for Judah's deliverance, name him "God-with-us". On the other hand, Isaiah predicted ruin for Ahaz's policy of befriending Assyria. By the time the "God-with-us" child reached the age of knowing right from wrong, he and his people would be reduced to eating a simple farm-folk diet of curds and honey, in place of the sumptuous fare of the royal court in Jerusalem.
Why? Because apart from genuine faith and trust, "God-with-us" cannot last. Soon God would turn His face away, and He would use a "razor hired from beyond the River", the same king of Assyria in whom Ahaz trusted (7:20), to trim Ahaz and Judah down to size for their faithlessness. Judah would be devastated, and the survivors would eke a simple existence from the land, just as they had done when God's people had first entered the land of milk and honey.
Isaiah's prophecy receives a whole new horizon of meaning in the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew says that, in a fuller and more total way than Isaiah or Ahaz could ever imagine, the birth of Jesus represents deliverance, "God with-us" (Matthew 1:22). But in the Gospel, too, the double-edged character of the prophecy is visible. "God-with-us" was born in a barn, on the very margins of society. Even as He came in helplessness and vulnerability, powers far greater than Assyria were rallying for the great confrontation. This confrontation would determine the outcome of God's painstaking efforts to love His creation back into covenant faithfulness.
Sometimes we sing "O Come, O Come, Immanuel" with only the first part of Isaiah's prophecy in view. We focus on deliverance and overlook the fact that the song speaks of captive people who "mourn in lonely exile here until the Son of God appear".
While the day of fulfillment is much closer today than it was for Isaiah and even Matthew, the full scope of "God with-us" still remains a promise of which we have but a foretaste.
The sign of Immanuel serves as an encouraging reminder of the ultimate meaning of our efforts to raise signposts of the reign of God in our culture. We carry on from day to day, knowing that Jesus is Immanuel, God-with-us. We strive to put our trust not (as Ahaz did) in the principalities and powers of this age but in our faithful God. With such trust, we can go forward against incredible odds. And we live in anticipation of a day when our faithful God will be with us fully, a day when we may eat not just curds and honey, but the fruit of the tree which bears 12 crops each year "for the healing of the nations" (Revelation 22:2).
Harry Fernhout is president of the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto. Reprinted, with permission, from the ICS newsletter, Perspective.
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