Isaiah Lesson 13

Cornerstone Church

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All right, welcome to Lesson 13. Can you believe this is already the 13th week and we're just entering the 7th chapter?

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So if someone do the math there, 66 chapters. By the time President Trump gets reelected in 2024, we should be done.

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Yeah, there you go. True, not over yet. That's right.

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John, would you open us in a word of prayer? Father God, there is an amazing promise that's given that the

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Messiah will come. And as we are able to look at the prophecies of the virgin birth and realize that you are not only sovereign, but you're true to your word.

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I pray, Father, that your Holy Spirit would speak through Jeff and that our hearts would be opened to grow in it.

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We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. When I was in college,

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I took a class on the Bible. Sounds good, right? Trouble is,

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I was at Eckerd College, which was a liberal arts school, and it was in their religious studies program.

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And so this professor, who was actually very winsome and everybody loved him, was influential in my life.

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And it got to the point where I was about ready to abandon not the faith, but the doctrine of inerrancy.

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My whole faith was on shaky ground. So one night, I just went to the

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Lord instead of this professor. And I prayed and I said, Lord, if this word is true, show me.

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And I just let the Bible fall open and it fell open to Micah 5 .2, which is the prophecy of Jesus being born in Bethlehem.

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And I knew at that time, no, this word is true because only God can tell the future.

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And it confirmed my faith. And then I became basically a warrior for the truth for the rest of my college years and ended up having to,

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I was a quote -unquote student ministry coordinator on campus. And I resigned that because the same professor was doing interfaith thanksgiving, which was

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Muslims, Christians, and Jews all coming together to do a joint service as if it was all the same

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God. And the Lord opened my eyes that this guy was a deceiver. But he did that through the word.

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So the word can be a protection to us. This morning, well, it's almost afternoon, this afternoon now, just after 12, we are looking at a different passage,

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Isaiah chapter 7. But the 14th verse has a similar prophecy. Not the birthplace, but that Jesus would be born to a virgin.

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The virgin birth is in Isaiah 7 .14. So exciting things. It's something that can be confirming to our faith that God has spoken this prophecy so many years before bringing it into fulfillment.

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So let's get into Isaiah chapter 7. Here we have the prophecy of the virgin birth.

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But really, before we get to the 14th verse, there is so much interesting interaction and material of things that are going on.

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So raise your hand if you do not want me to call on you. Note, you do not want to be a reader. Okay, I see a couple of non -readers.

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One was at the dentist, so I can understand. That's not going to go well. Your mouth is numb.

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Yeah, we won't do that to you. All right, so the first reader, just the first two verses, and we'll go kind of verse by verse.

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Isaiah 7, 1 and 2, Sandy. Okay, so here we have a threat of war.

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To understand what the threat is and what the attack is, we need to understand who these players are. All right, so you have basically three kingdoms, and two are allying themselves against the other.

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The southern kingdom, this is the kingdom of Judah, okay? Ahaz is the king at this point, and we will say definitively he is a wicked, wicked man.

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In fact, as I was studying him again and reminded of the things that he did, I would say he's just as bad as Ahab and Jezebel.

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He is the worst of the worst. So in 2 Chronicles 28, 5, we learn about his idolatry, some of the things that he would do.

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He would set up idols under every green tree and on every high place.

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He also made idols to Baal and all of that idolatry. Even worse still, he made his sons to pass through the fire.

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What does that mean, to make your sons pass through the fire? Yes, and not only making them dedicated to him, by killing them, literally sacrificing them to Baal.

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He killed his own children. That's how demonic and demented he was in the worship of these gods.

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It was a stronghold over him. So this Ahaz is a wicked, wicked player, and he is the king of the good guys in the story, okay?

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So the northern kingdom now is led by the king

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Pekka. Probably not worse in terms of what he stood for, but he was now allying himself,

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Pekka, with a kingdom that is just north. What Sandy read from, what version are you reading?

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Is that King James? NAS, yeah. It says

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Aram, which is a good translation, but Aram corresponds to, yeah, you're welcome.

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Aram corresponds to Syria. So now you have Syria. Don't mistake that with Assyria.

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That'll come into play later. But Syria is just north of the northern kingdom, and there's an alliance formed between those two northern places and Ahaz, the king of the south.

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All right, so Ahaz, again, is a wicked king. He'll rule for 16 years. Prior to him, Jotham was on the throne.

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Do you suppose, Jotham, by the way, was a good and righteous king who walked in the ways of David. Do you suppose things prospered in Israel, or do you think things were, in Judah, or were things bad under Jotham?

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Good under Jotham. Well, why is there a correlation between how wicked the king is or good the king is and the people and the way things go?

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Yes. That is exactly right, and that is

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Deuteronomy 30, 28 through 30, and at the end of Leviticus as well.

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This is the arrangement, part of the covenant, that you have blessings and curses associated with obedience or disobedience.

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So under Jotham, things are going pretty well. Now, can we just make a one -to -one correspondence with America in that way?

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No, you cannot. The covenant that we have is not one -to -one with the covenant of Israel.

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Okay, that's important to understand. You can have a wicked king, and that doesn't mean that the country is going to economically fail, that we're going to have all kinds of terrible disasters coming on it.

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The covenant that God made with Israel, he made with Israel.

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Very important distinction. But here in this time, you see that that is the case.

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Now, there is some general equity. If we do wicked things, in the end, do we prosper or do we fail?

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Right, wickedness will be judged, but it's very often a punishment in the next life, and you'll see delay of God's judgment.

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You'll see, just like in Habakkuk, even in this country, the wicked will prosper, and sometimes

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God will overlook that and judge in the end. Okay, so you can't make the one -to -one comparison, but it's important to recognize here, you have a wicked king, so you're going to see judgment.

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The nations will come and conquer unless mercy is granted. So this is where we are in verses 1 and 2.

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You have an alliance, a coalition coming against the southern kingdom.

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Verse 3, Kimberly. Anybody know what that name means?

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You probably have a note in your Bible. Do you? No? Anybody have it?

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A remnant will return. I like the way that Matthew Henry describes

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Shear Jashub. He says he carried a sermon in his name. He carried a sermon in his name.

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Shear Jashub means a remnant shall return. Now, the particular sermon is related to the context here, because if we had time to read 2

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Chronicles 28, which you can do later, you would learn a few things about the sons of Ahaz.

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First of all, Ahaz's sons were put to the fire, right,

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Luis? Which means he's lost his sons by killing them. Now, his oldest son, the one he would look to to be kind of his successor, was dead as well, because in the judgment of God, Israel and Syria have already sent waves of persecution.

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And in one of those, they killed his oldest son. So what effect would this have on Ahaz if Isaiah shows up to him?

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Now, he's at this particular fountainhead of this aqueduct, the conduit from the upper pool to the washerman's field.

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Why do you think he's there? The king is there to inspect the water source in case they're overrun.

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That's a logical place to find him. So Isaiah goes and finds the king, and he brings his son.

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His son has a sermon in his name. A remnant shall return.

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What a beautiful picture of God's mercy. Here's why. In the 28th chapter of 2

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Chronicles, we learn that in the first raiding effort, they did kill over 100 ,000 of the

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Jewish people. They also took 200 ,000 women and children, mostly, captive.

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But when they were bringing them back to the north, they were met by a prophet, because even though the north was wicked and apostate, there was still a remnant there.

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And this prophet, his name is Oded. Oded came out to meet them, and he said,

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You will not subjugate this people to slavery. And other righteous men in the north stood up and said,

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You cannot do this. Who are you to take them as slaves when you're as wicked as them?

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Send them back. We're not bringing them here. And by the grace of God, they prevailed. And the 200 ,000 captives, a remnant shall return.

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A sermon in the name. This is the 200 ,000 people who would then be brought down to Jericho, the city of palms, and returned to the southern kingdom.

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So here comes Isaiah with a remnant shall return, and it's not a message of judgment per se.

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It's a message, God will be merciful to that remnant. The women and children. This 200 ,000, think how many people that is.

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What a mass migration. Remember when Germany received all those hundreds of thousands of immigrants during the

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Arab Spring and all of that? It's hard to receive that many people. Jericho was swamped with 200 ,000 people, but then back into the land.

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God is merciful towards them here. So that's what Shear Jeshu means. A remnant shall return.

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I find it interesting that there's Isaiah with his son, and there's Ahaz with his dead sons.

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The difference, I think, would, there had to have been some kind of jealousy in Ahaz's heart, some sense of,

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I need to listen to Isaiah, because where did this get me? Sacrificing my sons to the fire, versus trusting

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God, a remnant shall return. All right, verses four to six. Bob, we'll forgive you.

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Okay. Say to him. Yeah.

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This is quite amazing. Ahaz, wicked king or righteous king? Wicked.

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Wicked, as the day is long. He is thoroughly wicked, bad to the bone.

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And yet, God, in his mercy, sends a prophet to say, do not fear.

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A remnant shall return. He says, be quiet, do not fear. Do not let your heart be faint.

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There will still be a stay of judgment. There will still be some mercy.

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In God's wrath, he will remember mercy and withhold his judgment for a time, at least from these two countries.

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All right. And this is one of the major themes of the book of Isaiah.

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In fact, when I was thinking about teaching Isaiah, I almost preached it on Sunday mornings, but we decided to do this instead.

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The reason Isaiah was so much in my mind is because I thought about the eighth chapter. And we'll see this next week.

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In the eighth chapter, God reprimands the people because they put their fear in the wrong place.

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And in our country right now, people are very anxious, very afraid. There's never been a time in our nation's history, at least since 1977 or since I've had memory, that I've seen people so afraid.

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There is just a spirit of panic in this nation. But it's not a fear of the

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Lord. And that's the problem. In the eighth chapter, he says, do not call conspiracy everything that this people calls conspiracy.

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And he says, do not dread what they dread, but your fear shall be of me. And that's what this nation lacks.

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That's what maybe us as Christians often lack, because we tremble at the wrong thing.

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Now, there are reasons to be afraid of things, but our ultimate fear should be God. And really, not even afraid.

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We can be wise to the things of this earth. I'm coming to you. But our ultimate fear needs to be of the

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Lord. Rich. Wow.

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Yeah. Yes. Fear the one who can cast body and soul into hell. And then in Isaiah 41 .10,

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one of my Bible verses that I memorized as a kid. Maybe you did too. Fear not, for I am with you.

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Be not afraid, for I am your God. I will strengthen you. I will help you.

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I will uphold you in my righteous right hand. This is one of the big themes of Isaiah.

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And so we're seeing it here. What's the problem in verse four? Ahaz is trembling.

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Be careful. Be quiet. Do not fear. And do not let your heart be faint.

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This is a very prominent theme. Syria and Ephraim.

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Why do you think they would just conquer Judah? Most of the commentaries

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I read have said that it was probably because Judah was relying on Assyria.

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And there in Aram and some of the other countries, there was developing an alliance that would stand up to Assyria.

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And because Judah wasn't joining that, they thought, let's throw him out. Let's throw this king out and put in our guy, the son of Tabeel, we'll learn is who it is, that would be with us to the son of Tabeel as king in the midst of you.

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So they would want somebody who could join there with their kind of resistance to the great

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Assyrian empire. In any case, this king Ahaz is not trusting in God, but God is going to be merciful anyway.

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Verses seven to nine. Carol. Oh, the

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NLT. I actually do like the New Living's translation because it doesn't pretend to be word for word.

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It's a tool of kind of thought for thought translation, which can be a useful tool.

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Whereas some other ones, I always have to give a commentary. NASB is great. The problem with the

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NIV is it masquerades as more of like a loose translation, but it's not really faithful.

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The needs improvement version. The NLT is helpful though. It's a good tool. Go ahead.

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Israel. You do not believe me.

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Wonderful. And it's a good paraphrase. Again, that's not a word for word translation. And one of the points that you'll pick up here, in the

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Hebrew, you don't have Pekah. You don't have his name. He's just called the son of Ramaliah.

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And that's part of the point. We learn at the beginning of the chapter who he is. This is Pekah, which is the son of Ramaliah.

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And then time and again, he's just referred to as the son of Ramaliah. He's just that guy.

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Just the son of Ramaliah. It's not even using his first name because the point is he's just a man.

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This is the big idea. He's just a man. Not even called, he's merely a man. And your faith and your fear needs to be placed in God.

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The big idea here at the end of verse nine. If you are not firm in faith, you will not be firm at all.

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Meaning you will not be established. Faith is what establishes you before God.

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That's a secure place, the firm place. When you're walking by faith, you're standing and you're strong.

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But in fear, you're trembling. Notice the imagery back in verse two.

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When the house of David was told Syria is in league with Ephraim, the heart of Ahaz and the heart of his people shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind.

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There's no firmness there. There's a shakiness. Well, to be firm is a picture of faith.

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To be firm in trusting God. Now, interesting. Why the 65 years?

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We'll say that this prophecy happens around 735 in one commentary or 734 in another.

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Right about there. In 722, Assyria is going to wipe out the

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Northern Kingdom. But that's only 12 or 13 years to come. So why 65 years?

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Look at verse eight. The head of Syria is Damascus.

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The head of Damascus is Rezin. And within 65 years, Ephraim will be shattered from being a people.

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I found the answer to this in the Bible knowledge commentary, which is Dallas Seminary's great one.

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And his name is John Martin, who wrote this particular book. I have a quote for you in your notes.

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When Assyria conquered Israel in 722, many

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Israelites were deported to other lands by Assyria. Okay?

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But see, again, that's only 12 or 13 years later. It's not 65 years later. And when foreigners were brought into Samaria, and foreigners were brought into Samaria, however, in 669, many more foreigners were transferred to Samaria by Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria.

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This, quote -unquote, shattered Israel, making it impossible for her to unite as a nation or a people.

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Very interesting. See, if a vast majority of the people were carried off into captivity or killed, what was left in the land?

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A remnant. And a remnant can return. Out of a stump can grow a shoot,

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Isaiah 11. So the destruction in 722 was not the final undoing of the northern kingdom.

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Isn't that interesting? So what was the final undoing? Because the north will never regather as a people as such.

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They'll come back out of captivity from the south and then repopulate the whole land, but the north is kind of a lost tribe, 10 lost tribes from this point in time.

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Their undoing was when they accepted and intermarried and became not a people.

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You see that? Isn't that interesting? What's that? They became the Samaritans. They became the

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Samaritans, yeah. That's right. So according to John Martin, I think he's right, it's this wave of people coming into the land that intermarry with them and become a different people.

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That's what ultimately this prophecy is about. Isn't it amazing how precise our

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Bible is? Because there was this wave. It's said here that it was

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Ezra 4 .10 where this is noted. So I didn't get a chance to look up that reference, but we can do that later.

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I think this is the idea here of people coming in and that's what ruins it.

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Okay, Kristen in the back, would you mind reading 10 through 12? Okay, Ahaz, the wicked southern king, right?

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He sounds pious here. He just quoted from Deuteronomy. Do not put the Lord your

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God to the test. But it is a feigned piety.

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Feigned, it's not really piety. This is a wicked, wicked man. So wicked that he can quote the word of God in his rebellion and to justify his rebellion because what are you to do when

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Isaiah, a prophet of the most high God who was commissioned by God by seeing

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God in the throne room and chosen by God, who will go for me?

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Here I am, send me. Remember the commissioning of Isaiah from last week? What are you to do if he commands you to do something?

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Obey, just do it. See, look at this. This is not a suggestion. Again, the

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Lord spoke to Ahaz. Who spoke? Yahweh. Yahweh spoke.

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So when Isaiah's speaking, this is Yahweh speaking, and he doesn't ask him a question.

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What does he do? He issues a command. Verse 11, ask a sign of the

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Lord your God. Let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven. This is like Gideon.

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When Gideon asked the Lord and the Lord granted, said, yeah, I'll give you a sign. Throw down your fleece. And it came back as a sign to him that God was with him.

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This was God's mercy to him. But all through this story, Ahaz is nothing but wicked.

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God is going to bless in compassion and mercy, despite the wickedness of the king, despite that he's a twister of God's word.

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Remember the devil in Genesis 3? Very often what we're facing in our culture is false teachers who feign to be godly.

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No one who raises the Black Lives Matter flag says I'm opposing righteousness and justice.

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They raise it in the name of social justice. But is it really justice when the founders of it,

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Patricia Cullors, says she contacts demons to give her the power to do what she's doing?

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She contacts demons. Saying their name means calling up the dead to give them the power.

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But it's masqueraded as righteousness. And it's not.

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It's a feigned piety. And they even use the term justice, right? Social justice.

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But it's a modification of biblical justice. Social justice is not justice at all. It's redistribution of wealth.

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It's Marxism. It's the confiscating of property to redistribute to somebody else.

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But they use the biblical word justice. Let justice roll down like a river. They will put that Bible verse on their foreheads.

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While they oppose the justice of God's word. This is

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Ahaz. Quoting scripture to a prophet to tell him no. It's complete defiance.

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And yet, look at what comes next. One of the most beautiful prophecies in the

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Bible. The prophecy of the virgin birth. Who gets the privilege to read this? Rich, you up brother?

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Therefore, the Lord himself. Amen. Go back and read all the way, 13 to 16.

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Because the prophet's going to say, alright, the Lord will give you a sign. You won't do it?

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Well, he's still going to do it. Yeah. 13 to 16. Then he said,

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Hear now, O house of David. Is it a sin? Therefore, the

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Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name

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Emmanuel. Curds and honey he shall eat that he may know to refuse the evil and choose the good.

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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.

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The Lord will bring a king of Assyria upon you and your people and your father's house.

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Days that have not come since the day of Ephraim departed from Judah.

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They would say, well, there's near -term fulfillments here. It has to apply to Israel and Assyria and the boy and the king and overthrowing and all of the promises that are in context here.

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Another interpretation, the second one, is that this only refers to Jesus because it refers to a virgin birth.

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And he's the only one that was ever born of a virgin. And the third interpretation, the one that I take, is that there is a near -term and a far -term fulfillment.

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And it's fulfilled in slightly different ways. The Hebrew word for virgin can mean young woman.

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Yes, ama is the word. Correct.

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Yes, okay. And there's a trend. The reason for that in the Greek Septuagint, which was translated after,

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I mean, before the time of Christ, but after the writing of this. The word for virgin that the

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Greek uses in the Septuagint can only mean virgin, whereas this original Hebrew word could mean young woman or virgin, as we understand in English the word virgin.

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Okay, so that's where you get some of the misunderstanding. But it was actually

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God's providence that did that. In fact, have you guys heard about how the Septuagint came about?

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Interestingly, the view, and this isn't written in Scripture, so we don't know for sure. Seventy Hebrew scholars from Alexandria were set out to translate it independently, and they all came back with the same exact translation.

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That's the historical belief of the Jews, so that the

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Septuagint was fully trustworthy because it had the consistency of all those scholars coming back with exactly the same wording into the

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Greek. I'm not gonna say that's impossible. I think that's very possible that God would do that miracle.

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And here's the corroborating evidence for that. Whenever the New Testament quotes, I won't say whenever, there could be exceptions, but the vast, vast majority of the use of the

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Old Testament by the New is from the Septuagint. So the New Testament authors utilize the

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Septuagint, which is the Greek translation, in their quoting. So it makes me think that God has put a stamp of approval on that translation, so that he would also bring the

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Greek New Testament in Koine Greek. But even if that particular historical thing is not true, the word can go beyond the original language.

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In other words, when we read NASV or NIV or ESV or KJV, God has protected that word, that we could have it in our own language.

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So it can go beyond the original language that it was written in. In any case,

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I think it's clear from the text that there has to be a near fulfillment. Otherwise, you lose the contextual meaning of the passage.

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It has to mean something to say that Assyria will overthrow the north and Syria.

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That has to mean something in the context, right? And it does. But it also can go beyond that meaning to something bigger and fuller and greater.

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And that's the hope of the world. The virgin birth of the Messiah. So I see it as the third option that there's a near fulfillment.

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What would that be? Well, in chapter eight, let's just flip over there real quick. Verses one to four, the

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Lord said to me, take a large tablet and write on it in common characters, belonging to Maher Shalal Hashbaz.

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And I will get reliable witnesses, Uriah the priest and Zechariah, the son of Jeberekiah, to attest for me.

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And I went to the prophetess and she conceived and bore a son.

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Then the Lord said to me, call his name, Maher Shalal Hashbaz, for before the boy knows how to cry, my mother or my father, my father, my mother, the wealth of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria will be carried away before the king of Assyria.

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Flipping back to chapter seven, it's the same issue. It says, verse 16, before the boy knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land whose two kings you dread will be deserted.

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The Lord will bring upon you and upon your people and upon your father's house such days as have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah, the king of Assyria.

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You have a similar, you have a correspondence there. I think that's the boy that's being referred to.

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Now, there's some that doubt that as well, that this is the same son. It could be, I even read one commentator that said

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Isaiah might have had different wives, meaning the first wife gave birth to Sheer Jashub.

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She would have died. Now he's married a virgin who in fact is a virgin and that's how the next son will be born.

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There's a lot of different interpretations, but I think what we can clearly see is that there's some near fulfillment, right?

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And what is the fulfillment? That the fear that they have of the northern kingdom and Syria is a misplaced fear because before this little child grows up, can even eat the curds or the honey or say mother or father, even before a few years, that whole threat is going to be eliminated.

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And in fact, this I think is corroborating evidence again. Second Kings 14 .9 and Second Kings 15 .30

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place within three years, this is in your notes, both Rezin and Pekka are killed.

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Within three years. Now, the part that we love.

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There is also a far fulfillment. So John, would you want to read for us?

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He can't. Oh, okay. Bob, I'll come back to you. Can you jump over to Matthew 1 .22

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and 23? Now that is powerful.

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Because in the near fulfillment, you could see that God was still with them.

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This threat from the north would be eliminated. God will still have mercy on them.

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But in the birth of the one named Jesus, the Messiah, you have literally

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God with us. See the far fulfillment, which points to Jesus, is far greater and even more literal, actually.

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God with us. This is God in human flesh.

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The hypostatic union that God would add humanity to his deity in one person, one hypostasis.

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This is who Jesus is, the literal fulfillment. And whereas a young woman, which is sometimes used of that phrase, it's even more literally true.

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Because the word virgin, if you follow that, the use in the Old Testament, it more often did refer to virgins.

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You see back in Genesis, you see the use of it. It's in my notes here.

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I can give you a couple quotes. Genesis 24, 43. Exodus 2, 8.

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Psalm 68, 25. These uses of this word generally referred to a virgin, as we understand.

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So the most literal fulfillment is in Jesus Christ, the only one ever in the history of the world born to a virgin.

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He's unique. What do we learn about Jesus because he is born to a virgin?

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Why is that important to the Christian faith? The virgin birth. You know, liberal scholars like, ah, they scoff at that.

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You don't need the virgin birth. You can have Christianity without it. No transmission of Adam's sin.

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Inherited sin from Adam. The federal headship of Adam meant that sin would pass through the male to the descendants.

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But Jesus is not descended from Adam in that way.

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He's the seed of the woman. Genesis 3, 15. The seed of the woman.

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The proto -evangelium. The first, the only woman to give birth without the seed of a man.

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This is why it's so important. This prophecy contains all of that. A literal virgin did give birth to the

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Son of God. Amazing, amazing. Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign.

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It's not only a sign to Ahaz. It's to his house and it becomes a sign to all the world.

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There's many people who worship and follow different ideas and movements and people and leaders.

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But we follow one who was born to a virgin. Let that be a sign to anybody listening to this video that the one that we follow is, in fact,

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God. Unique. None other like him. And God said it before he did it.

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700 plus years before he did it, he wrote it that we would know and believe that Jesus is the

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Christ. He know it yet. And in Isaiah in the 40s, in the trial of false gods, we'll see that this is his criteria to recognize his truthfulness.

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He's the only one that can tell the end from the beginning. Tell things before they come to pass.

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All right. And so we'll move quickly through the last parts. This doesn't absolve

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Judah of their guilt. This does not absolve Ahaz of his guilt. This is

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God's mercy interposing into a wicked situation. But there's still judgment coming.

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So, Bob, would you mind reading? We're gonna take just 17. Well, we already read 17.

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So 18 through 25. You got a lot to read. Oh, I'm going to this,

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Bob. Yeah. All right. Yes, when that day comes for the bee in the land to sweep the bodies and holes in the rock, when that day comes, the

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Lord will shave with a razor higher beyond the Euphrates River, that is, with the king of Asher, the head of the hare to clean the legs and get rid of the beard as well.

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When that day comes, a man will raise a young cow and two sheep. Will they produce in abundance?

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No, he will have to eat curdled milk. Indeed, everyone left in the land will eat curdled milk and wild honey.

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When that day comes, wherever there once were a thousand grapevines worth a thousand pieces of silver, there will be only briars and thorns.

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One will go there to hunt with bow and arrow because all the land will be briars and thorns.

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You won't visit hills once worked with a hoe. For fear of the briars and thorns, it will be good only for pasturing cattle and being trampled down by sheep.

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Okay, the big idea here is that Assyria and Egypt will be overrunning the south.

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They would try to lean on Egypt for help but find that they're only a reed that breaks. You can't lean on Egypt.

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They had been trusting in Assyria, but you can't trust in Assyria because they'll turn around and wipe you out.

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So this is the problem for Ahaz. He has always relied on other nations rather than relying on God.

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His trust is not in God. This whole idea of the eating the

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Kurds and the honey. When I was a kid, we had this thing that we did in our house where we would get white bread and then we'd take a scoop of butter and pour honey on top of that and mix it up.

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It was like this paste that you'd put on top of the bread and it was my favorite snacky dessert.

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I loved it. I just remembered that the other day because I haven't done that in a long time. Butter with honey.

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This is a similar thing actually to what they would do back at that time. They would mix, Kurds was like a churned product of milk.

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What was happening here is the young of the cattle were wiped out.

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All you have is these cows that can produce but you don't have any young cows to eat it.

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They have plenty of Kurds and they had honey. Why would they have honey? Because without the cultivated fields, you have just wildflowers popping up and so you have abundance of bees and honey.

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This is how one commentator described it. In other words, it's a desolate kind of picture where they have just Kurds and honey is sort of what they're eating.

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Again, before the child can eat the Kurds or the honey, this will all happen. That was a sign to them.

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When you see this land that's just flowing with milk and honey back to kind of its pristine conditions and that's all you have left, this is a sign of being desolated is kind of the idea.

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Bees everywhere in the wildflowers making honey. I think that's what it's getting at.

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In any case, as soon as the child is able to eat on his own, he's been weaned. So within definitely less than three years, before that, you know that the prophecy has been fulfilled and what happens?

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Assyria wipes out the North. First, the king is killed and then Assyria finally comes in 722 and we'll find out here at the next king, it'll get right up to the neck of Jerusalem itself but Assyria won't be the one that conquers

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Jerusalem. So you have this final picture of judgment because remember, is Ahaz ever a good and righteous king?

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No. God is giving this sign as his mercy and blessing by grace.

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By grace. That was Ahab. Ahab married Jezebel but this is Ahaz but both wicked, yeah.

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So in closing, the application is that we need to trust the word of the Lord and not fear the threats of the world.

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In 2020, that's an important lesson because there's a lot of real threats out there.

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Of what account is he?

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Amen. All right, Bob, would you mind hitting the thing after John prays? Close in a word of prayer, brother? Thank you.

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Lord God, our focus as we've read this is in amazement, in awe, in thanksgiving, your holiness and your faithfulness and then your provision.

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We thank you, Father. What you've said is true to the very date.

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What you've said is true to the very, very countries it took place and so we can trust in you.

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We do need to trust in the word of the Lord, not be overcome by things that are going on in the world, but to trust in you.