God with us – part II (Matt 1:18-25 and Isa 7)

In my last post, I explored the story of Ahaz and the choice he had between entrusting God with his difficulties or resolving the issue his own way. But what does the boy Immanuel in Isaiah’s time have to do with Jesus? One way of understanding the connection is through a typological reading. This means that the events in Isaiah’s time foreshadow Jesus’s coming as Immanuel. There is a pattern of events that is repeated in a new context. In both situations there is the challenge of trust when in difficulty. Around Jesus’s birth, it was the Romans who dominated God’s people. Some Jews opted to work together with them to maintain relative peace, others planned a military uprising. These groups looked to human solutions and strength, just like Ahaz in Isaiah’s time. Once again, God points to a different answer in the name of a child called Immanuel, God with us. He calls His people to trust Him for deliverance.

However, in the events around Jesus we recognise a fuller expression of the pattern or type set in the time of Ahaz. In Isaiah 7, the mother is likely a young, married woman and there is no indication that the conception is supernatural, whereas Mary, Jesus’s mother, is a virgin, who conceives by the power of the Holy Spirit. [1] Further, her son is not only a symbolic expression of hope that ‘God (is) with us’, but God Himself in the flesh! Moreover, Jesus will be more than just a sign of coming deliverance, but the actual means of it. Thus, the type and its fulfilment are like shadow and substance. We get the outline in the OT story and a much fuller expression in the NT.

Isaiah’s prophecy to Ahaz, though, cuts both ways. God is with us for deliverance if we turn to Him, but in judgement if we don’t (compare John 3:16–18). Isaiah 7:17–25 anticipates that Ahaz will turn to Assyria for help and describes the consequences. This rising empire, which looked like the sure thing of support will in turn conquer most of Judah in 701 BC and damage the land so badly that only animals can feed on it (hence the abundance of curd). In the parallel context, the Jews as a people (with some exceptions) rejected God’s salvation offered in Jesus. The Jewish uprising against Rome in AD 66–70 ended in the destruction of the temple and much of the city. This is not the place for Christians to feel smug, but a sober reminder for us too. No one deliberately chooses death, but when we reject God’s answers and solutions in our daily decisions, we reject LIFE and our trust in human strength or false hopes will ultimately destroy us. Let us pray for those who do not know the Lord and commit ourselves to choose God’s ways in our day-to-day walk, as we remember our Immanuel.

[1] The ancient Greek translation (Septuagint) that Matthew probably cites uses a word that means ‘virgin’, whereas the Hebrew original has ‘maiden’, which implies an unmarried virgin, but it seems to be used in Isaiah 7 loosely of a young (married) woman.