Wednesday, November 19, 2025 PM

Isaiah’s Sign of Immanuel in the Reign of Ahaz

Chapter 7 beginning in verse 10. Moreover the Lord spoke again to Ahaz, saying, Ask a sign for yourself from the Lord your God. Ask it either in the depth or in the height above. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, nor will I test the Lord.

Then he said, Hear now, O house of David, is it a small thing for you to weary men? But will you weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

Curds and honey he shall eat, that he may know to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land that you dread will be forsaken by both her kings.

The Lord will bring the king of Assyria upon you, and your people, and your father's house, days that have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah. So here in the first 12 chapters of Isaiah, we have a contrast being established that serves the rest of Isaiah's prophecy.

The contrast is between the children of Woe, chapters 1 through 6, and the child of hope, verses 7 through 12. The child of hope stands where the children of Woe should have been, and in another way you may say the child of hope is the whole point of the children of Woe.

The promised seed, the promised seed of Abraham, the promised seed to even as far back as to Eve. The Messiah comes into view against the backdrop of a very bleak picture of Judah. Judah, the southern kingdom, is the nation to which God sent Isaiah, and Isaiah served and preached for many decades.

And the first five chapters of Isaiah are undated. They don't particularly refer to any one moment in history, but they survey all of the transgressions of this covenant people, showing how pagan they had become.

They had forgotten that God was their father. They had become thoroughly canonized. They were fully idolatrous, and God brought very severe rebukes against them. Our first signal of a date is in chapter 6, in the year that King Uzziah died.

We have Isaiah having his vision, and he was called and commissioned by the Lord to preach. He says, here am I, send me. And then God says, you go preach to this people this message of rebuke, this message of judgment.

And then Isaiah says, how long? And God says, until only a remnant remains. And so in the first six chapters, we see signs in chapters 2 and 4 and 6 that there's going to be great destruction, and yet out of the destruction from the ashes of the fires of judgment, there will be a promised new growth of some kind, that there is still hope.

And that hope comes into view in chapters 6 through 12 in the form of a child, who was even called things such as a new shoot, a new growth coming up out of a stump. And who is this but the descendant of Jesse, the son of David, the promised Messiah.

The Historical Crisis of Ephraim, Syria, and Assyria

And in chapter 7, in particular, we have another historical moment in time. This one's very particular, not just the year that King Uzziah died, that one's fairly specific, this one's even more particular, during the reign of King Ahaz.

Now, Ahaz is the son of Jotham, who was the son of Uzziah, so we've moved some years ahead. And God sends Isaiah to King Ahaz to confront Ahaz in his trembling fear of men. The historical setting is this, that the northern kingdom, sometimes called Ephraim, sometimes called Samaria after their capital city, had allied itself with the kingdom of Syria, whose capital was Damascus.

And they wanted the southern kingdom of Judah to ally with them, so that they would have a bulwark against the new superpower of doom in their world, called Assyria, whose capital is Nineveh. The southern kingdom, Ahaz, refused to partner with them, and so they decided, well, we'll just attack Judah, we'll destabilize the kingdom.

And they had come up with a conspiracy to overthrow Ahaz by means of a coup and replace him with a puppet king that would do their bidding, and thus they would have their trifecta alliance against Assyria.

A battle ensued in which 120 ,000 men of Judah were killed, terrible defeat, and 200 ,000 subjects of Judah were taken away captive to the north by Ephraim and Syria. And all of the house of David, Ahaz the king, descendant of David, and everyone left in Jerusalem who had run there for refuge, were shaking like leaves in the wind.

And while the king is inspecting the aqueducts, trying to make sure that enough water is going to be coming into the city, this is prior to Hezekiah, digging the tunnels and making sure they had plenty of water.

While he's looking to his defenses, getting ready for the next siege, God sends Isaiah with his toddler son, Shear Jashub, to confront Ahaz. Shear Jashub's name means, a remnant shall return. Because even at this moment, some things have been happening.

At this moment in the north, God has sent a prophet to confront the leaders of Israel, saying, what you have done is not good, taking these 200 ,000 captive. Are they not of your same family? I mean, you're related to them, so why are you treating them like slaves?

No, this is not good. Send them all back home, the ones who are sick and weak, put on animals, get them home. And this is happening even as Isaiah is confronting Ahaz with Shear Jashub, his toddler son, a remnant shall return.

Something else has already happened as well. Ahaz, having been attacked, knows that he needs to find some allies quick. And so he has sent word to the king of Assyria and has proposed hiring him to attack Dabascus, Syria, which is a little bit farther north of Israel.

Attack them, take the pressure off me, I'll pay you. And in fact, he has promised to pay him the gold and silver of the temple. This is all in play as Isaiah confronts Ahaz and says, you are afraid of the wrong people, and you are putting your faith in the wrong people.

You need to fear the Lord, think of him first and him most, not Pekah and Rezin, the kings of Israel and Syria. And you don't need to rely and trust in the king of Assyria, Tiglath-Pileser II. Don't put your faith in him, because in fact, he's your worst enemy.

And Isaiah says, ask a sign, ask a sign of the Lord. Any sign will do. Something to establish you in your faith, because you need to believe. And in a veil of piety, Ahaz says, I'm not going to ask a sign of the Lord, I'm not going to test the Lord.

What's his point? Ahaz is in a moment of profound disappointment in Yahweh. He thinks the gods of Syria are far better than the Lord. After all, they won the victory on the battlefield. What good is a god if he doesn't give you victory on the battlefield?

Later on, when Tiglath-Pileser takes payment and attacks Damascus, routes the armies of Syria. Ahaz goes up to meet his ally in Damascus, and he's still so impressed with the gods of Syria that he learns how to use their main pagan altar.

He takes down all the dimensions, gets the blueprints, basically, sends those prints back to Jerusalem, and has the high priest build that very same pagan altar, puts it into the temple courtyard, displaces the authorized holy furniture and artifacts of the Lord, puts those to the side, says we're going to do worship the pagan way even in the temple, because their gods are more powerful than the other gods.

This is the kind of king that Isaiah is dealing with. And so, when there was a refusal to ask for a sign, God says, I'm going to give you a sign anyway. Here is a sign of Immanuel. I'm going to give you a sign of a child.

So here is one little child with a weird name. A remnant shall return, she or Jashub, but I'm telling you about another child with another odd name, Immanuel, God with us. We talked about how this sign of a child was fulfilled in the near history as a sign, just like God says the sign, but also the destination is Jesus of Nazareth, who is Immanuel.

He is the destination that the sign pointed forward to. But this child is Immanuel, meaning God with us, and this is a meaning that plays out throughout the rest of chapter 7 into about halfway through chapter 8, and the meaning of Immanuel in this context is, God is with you in this invasion.

He's the one who is making sure it happens, and you will not be able to stop it. You would as soon stop God to stop this invasion, and this is an invasion not of the Syrians, not of the Ephraimites, this is an invasion of the Assyrians.

Remember your old friend Tiglath-Pileser, who you paid off with gold and silver from the temple? Yeah, he's not stopping with those two kingdoms you were so concerned about. In fact, before this child will get to be very old at all, before he can tell the difference between right and wrong in chapter 8, before he even learns to say mama and dada, those two kings that are your world, that you're so afraid of, Pekka and Rezin, they're going to be dead.

Their armies are going to be displaced, and what you were so afraid of is going to be gone in very short order, and in fact the one you put your faith in, Tiglath-Pileser, yeah, he's going to be the one that comes through and invades your land and leaves you and your people in ruins.

The Judgment of the Divided Kingdom in 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles

Now that's the basic overview of what's going on. We've left off in chapter 7 verse 17, where Isaiah says to Ahaz, still out there by the aqueduct, the Lord will bring the king of Assyria upon you and your people and your father's house.

Now notice how he describes this type of invasion. This is where our focus will be tonight. Days that have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah. So that's the scale of the doom that's being declared.

This invasion by the Assyrians is going to be of such a massive scale that it's going to be of the same type of disaster that happened when the ten tribes broke away from the descendant of David, Rehoboam, son of Solomon, son of David.

It's going to be on that level of disaster. So what were those days like? Well, we don't have time to read all the chapters, but you can read about them for yourself. I would say read 1 Kings chapters 12 through 14.

1 Kings chapters 12 through 14. It's a fairly interesting time period in Israel. Very interesting reading. You can also read about it in 2 Chronicles chapter 13. So 2 Chronicles chapter 13 would be another place to read about it.

So 1 Kings chapters 12 through 14 and 2 Chronicles 13 will be a good place to go read and survey the days that when Ephraim departed from Judah. But what happened during those days? Well, we have the northern tribes rejecting Rehoboam's harsh rule wherein Solomon had taxed the people very heavily in his many building projects.

And the people were very much exhausted, brought to the end of themselves. And when they approached Rehoboam, they were looking for a break, a reprieve. And the elder counsel to Rehoboam was just that.

Yes, listen to them, give them a reprieve, back off, let them have some rest. Rehoboam didn't like that very much, and so he asked his friends, he asked his echo chamber. And they said, you've got to be a tougher, bigger man than even your dad was, and go tell them that.

Treat them very harshly, and that's the only way they're going to respect you. That didn't work out so well. It appealed to his pride, but it was folly. And even though the leaders of those ten tribes told Rehoboam, what do we have to do with the house of David?

We're out. We're going away now. And Rehoboam thought he would go ahead and try to test the waters, and so he sent the guy in charge of collecting supplies. He sent the taskmaster to them to say, hey, pony up what we're owed.

And they immediately killed him, and Rehoboam hightailed it for Jerusalem. And then he marshaled his army of 180 ,000 men, and they went out to war. He said, we're going to go set these things right, and then God sent word and said, no you're not.

Go home. Basically telling Rehoboam, this is of me. This split of the kingdom is of the Lord, that he had determined this because of, well, first of all, the idolatry and the failures of Solomon, and also because of the pride of Rehoboam.

And we read that the entire time that Jeroboam was king, and he was king a pretty long while up in the north, and the whole time that Rehoboam was king, they were constantly in a state of de facto war.

So they were guarding their borders, they were staring at one another, ready to get into a fight, and they actually did get into fights, especially as the next king came on board in Judah, Abijah. When Abijah became king, they had a face-off with Jeroboam, where the army of Judah, 400 ,000 strong, faced off with the armies of Jeroboam, 800 ,000 strong, and the king of Judah, Abijah, through his messengers, basically yelled at the Ephraimites and told them about how pagan they were, how awful they were, and how God was on our side, and while he's yelling all of that, Jeroboam just sat there and listened to the whole thing because he had an ambush walking around the whole place coming up behind them.

And all of a sudden, the armies of Judah were surrounded. But you know, even though Judah panicked, and they looked and they saw that they were surrounded, they called upon the name of the Lord, and the Lord acted on their behalf, and they won the day, and killed 500 ,000 Ephraimites in that day.

And there was no more state of constant war between the north and the south for quite some time. And so the Lord definitely showed his favor upon Judah as Judah looked to him to remain faithful to him, and this was good for Abijah to show fidelity.

Also, his son was Asa, good king Asa, and they showed fidelity to the Lord. In contrast to Jeroboam, who was concerned about his subjects going back down to Judah and staying there, because that's where the temple was, that's where the sacrifices were made, and the people had been instructed to gather in Jerusalem at the temple three times a year.

And so in order to forestall that, he put in shrines at Dan and Bethel, golden calves, and in like fashion of Aaron, told the people, these are the gods that brought you up out of Egypt. It was a return to the wilderness.

And there's an intentionality in the historian giving us this detail, because once again there are two groups. Even in the wilderness, there was the wicked and perverse generation, the idolatrous, murmuring, complaining generation that was lost under judgment, and then another generation that came into the promised rest.

In like fashion, we have once again a northern kingdom following the golden calves. Actually, archaeologists excavated the shrine at Dan, the place where Jeroboam put the golden calf, and there's still artifacts there and some instruction about what to do when you get there.

So there's a great contrast between the nation. There was a great deal of of idolatry that came out of that. But why is this time period invoked in verse 17? Why did Judah and Israel divide on that day?

Very clearly, it was God's judgment on the house of David for Solomon's idolatry. So let's be clear on that. So first Kings chapter 11. Now first Kings chapter 10 is the height of the glory of Israel, of the United Kingdom.

It's the height of the glory of Solomon. It is the the farthest expanse of influence and glory that the nation ever had when all the other nations were turning their attention to Jerusalem, turning their attention to the temple, turning their attention to the Son of David, and learning about the grandeur of the one true God.

The heights, the very very heights. Well, chapter 11 begins the trip down, and we hear about the failures of Solomon. Now in verse 9 of first Kings 11, we read this. So the Lord became angry with Solomon because his heart had turned from the Lord God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice, and had commanded him concerning this thing that he should not go after other gods.

But he did not keep what the Lord had commanded. Therefore the Lord said to Solomon, Because you have done this and have not kept my covenant and my statutes which I have commanded you, I will surely tear the kingdom away from you and give it to your servant.

It was Jeroboam. He was working for Solomon. Nevertheless, I will not do it in your days for the sake of your father David. I will tear it out of the hand of your son. However, I will not tear away the whole kingdom.

I will give one tribe to your son for the sake of my servant David and for the sake of Jerusalem which I have chosen. So very particularly when Rehoboam, remember Jeroboam split, the tribes, ten tribes split away from Judah, and Rehoboam gathered his army and said, I'm gonna go retake it, we're not gonna let them secede, and God said, no, no, no, this is from me.

This is from me. It was the judgment that God brought on the following generation for the previous generation's sin, for Solomon's sin and idolatry. That's the way the Old Covenant worked. But Rehoboam had a part to play.

We also read in 1 Kings 12 and 2 Chronicles 10 and 11 that also it was because of Rehoboam's pride. So Rehoboam played his part too. That's why God brought this about, the split of the kingdom. Now, guess who's sitting in the same throne that Rehoboam had sat in?

The same throne of David, same city, Jerusalem, and guess who's full of pride and full of idolatry? Ahaz! And things have gotten really bad, and so here's Ahaz, the son of David, full of pride, full of idolatry, and so here comes a judgment like the days in which the split of the kingdom occurred.

God as the Mastermind of Judgment and Salvation

What is God saying in this combined with his sign of that name, Emmanuel, God with us? What is he saying with all of this expression? He is saying, this thing is from me. This invasion, this disaster that's about to roll over your land, this thing is from me.

Make no mistake, this is not an unfortunate circumstance, just the way that the dice land given the socio-political situation. God is saying, this judgment is from me. It's intentional. Now, we know from the context of Isaiah that God's covenant related judgments are designed to pave the way for salvation, clarifying the way of salvation in the Messiah, and whether it's from the flood or to the fall of Jerusalem, what can we say?

We can say this thing is from God. This thing is from God. He oversees it, he designs it, he intends it, he brings it to pass, and accomplishes everything that he desires through it. This thing is from God.

To what end? What he promised, new creation, new covenant, salvation, restoration. God's exiling of Adam and Eve from the garden, that wasn't Adam and Eve's plan. That wasn't their decision. That wasn't their design.

This thing is from God. This thing is from God. And if you read it carefully, you'll notice that the momentum with which he expelled them from the garden included the force by which they were compelled to call upon his name and believe in his promise of the seed.

Our temptation is to say in life, this thing is not of God. Our temptation is to blame men, we blame nature, we blame the self, how often we are loath to give glory to God. We often also adopt a veil of piety and refrain from according to God glory due for the doom that he orchestrates and implements.

We say, well, God is as appalled at this mess as we are, he's right alongside us wringing his hands and saying, oh my goodness, what a mess. You know, in fact, God's up there hoping we'll do something about it, or at least we'll maybe ask him to help us, and we may say, well, he's never the mastermind behind these things.

But as we already saw in the first part of verse 17, the Lord is the mastermind. The king of Assyria, as powerful as he was, was just his minion. The Lord is the one who is doing it. All of redemptive history may be summed up in God's great act of salvation through judgment upon Christ for his glory.

We live on the wonderful side of the cross and resurrection, and we look at the cross on this side of Christ's resurrection, we see a dark and terrible wrath expended there at the cross. This thing, this doom that fell upon Christ, this is from God.

This is from God. The Son of David interceding, pleading, interposing for his people, God uniting all the divisions in Christ, reconciling all things in Christ, God dethroning Christ's enemies in Christ's death, in his resurrection, in his ascension.

This thing is from God. This thing is from God. And so where we see it most critically, in the death and resurrection of Christ, we see it also everywhere else in history. All of history revolves around the incarnation and the incarnate works of Christ.

Psalm 96 and the Praise Due to God’s Sovereign Rule

So to help us with that and to help us with the proper kind of praise, where else do we go but the Psalms of Psalm 96. I'll read this in conclusion as an example of the praise for our God. Psalm 96. O sing to the Lord a new song, sing to the Lord all the earth, sing to the Lord bless his name, proclaim the good news of his salvation from day to day, declare his glory among the nations, his wonders among all peoples.

Why? Verse 4. For the Lord is great and greatly to be praised. He is to be feared above all gods, for all the gods of the peoples are idols. But the Lord made the heavens. Honor and majesty are before him, strength and beauty are in his sanctuary.

Give to the Lord, O families of the peoples, give to the Lord glory and strength. Give to the Lord the glory due his name. Bring an offering and come into his courts. O worship the Lord and the beauty of holiness.

Tremble before him all the earth. Say among the nations, the Lord reigns. The world also is firmly established. It shall not be moved. He shall judge the peoples righteously. Let the heavens rejoice and the earth be glad.

Let the sea roar in all its fullness. Let the field be joyful in all that is in it. That all the trees of the wood will rejoice before the Lord, for he is coming, for he is coming to judge the earth. He shall judge the world with righteousness and the peoples with his truth.

It's of the Lord, so we give him the praise, give him the glory due to his name. All right, let's close with a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, I thank you for the time you've given us in your word. I thank you that you see not just the big picture, but the whole picture, and that you're the one in charge and you're the artist.

We thank you that you call us to trust you even when we can't hardly see the next couple of steps in front of us. We thank you for the promise that you work all things together for the good of those who love you, who are called according to your purpose.

We thank you that you are a master artist in how you weave together the tapestry of history to bring about your good purposes for your glory.