Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: Signs and Wonders (Isaiah 7)
Date: December 8, 2024
Do you remember doing the science project in elementary school where you grew a lima bean seed to a sprout in a ziploc bag with a wet paper towel in it? I think I did that one two or three times growing up. You put the seed in the bag next to the wet paper towel, leave it in some sunlight, and in a few days you can watch as the seed splits open and a little sprout begins to push its way out. Those particular seeds are chosen because they don’t take long to grow and kids aren’t typically known to be terribly patient scientists. They also get distracted easily. I think that by the time mine had grown only a few inches long, I was ready to toss it and move on to something else.
The lesson that should probably be taught somewhere in there but which often gets ignored in favor of the science stuff, is that growing plants from seeds takes a long time. It’s much faster to let someone else do all the tedious work and just buy plants ready to go in the ground. This is why if you like things like fresh tomatoes, having a Jim Cameron around is pretty handy come planting season. If you want to get some kind of a harvest from a plot of ground, you have to be willing to play the long game. You have to be willing to do a lot of hard work, some of which seems like it’s going to be a waste of time when you do it. You have to be willing to endure hardships and apparent setbacks all the while never taking your eyes off the real goal. When you do, the outcome can be pretty sweet indeed.
This morning, we are in the second part of our Advent teaching series, Playing the Long Game. All this month, leading up to the grand celebration of Christmas, we are talking about how God chose to play the long game when it came to our being in a relationship with Him. Rather than using His power as God to take away our freedom and force us to the conclusion He knew was best for us, He chose the harder, longer, but better approach of leading us step by step toward that end until the point that we were ready to receive it for ourselves of our own volition. Like I said, this wasn’t the fastest approach to His goal, but by playing the long game, He set things up for a far better outcome than was otherwise going to be possible.
His first step toward this long game came, as Pastor Mike talked about with us just last week, when the dust of the bomb that was the Fall was still settling. As God was laying out what the terrible consequences of our choice to live by what we could see rather than what He commanded would be, He announced to the serpent that one day the seed of the woman was going to crush its head. As Mike put it, in spite of sin’s marring the perfection of His creation, God’s response was to declare His intended pathway to setting things right. God wasn’t done with us. He was just getting started.
Although the first couple surely didn’t realize or feel it in the moment, that was a pretty exciting declaration by God. As Chris and Leslie reminded us last week, God chose to inject hope into the world rather than despair in what could have otherwise been an unmitigated disaster. To put that another way, instead of taking a quick path to judgment or removing the meaning and consequentiality of our choices, God chose to play the long game. The thing about playing the long game, though, is that you occasionally go through seasons that seem pretty discouraging. It’s hard to see how what you are doing during those seasons is making much in the way of a positive difference in your efforts to reach your goal. But the thing about playing the long game is that things which look one way in a given moment can look very different with the perspective of greater hindsight.
After Mike’s great introduction from the beginning of the Scriptures last week, we are going to take a giant leap this morning to the middle of the story in the work of the great prophet to Israel, Isaiah. Israel’s history was not ever marked by excessive levels of faithfulness to God. This was especially true after the united kingdom split into two factions. The northern kingdom that continued to be called Israel headed off down the road of apostasy and never really turned back. The southern kingdom which consisted of just the tribes of Benjamin and Judah and took the name of the latter, had a few bright spots, but these were little more than punctuations in a sea of unfaithfulness.
Isaiah came onto the scene during the reign of King Uzziah of Judah. Uzziah started off faithful, but somewhere along the line got too big for his britches, and his pride led to a collapse of the nation’s commitment to the Law. He co-ruled with his wicked son, Jotham, for several years before Jotham’s son, Ahaz took the throne. From a spiritual standpoint, Ahaz was a disaster. He looked to all the nations around Israel for his moral and spiritual cues, and the outcomes for the nation were about what you would expect from his doing that. As happened again and again and again over Israel’s history, when they turned from God, trouble started brewing just beyond their borders. In this case, Israel to the north and Syria beyond began to threaten Judah with conquest. It was as Ahaz was fretting over what to do about this external threat that God sent Isaiah to him with a message of hope and help. If you have a copy of the Scriptures handy this morning, find your way with me to Isaiah 7.
When we think about writing something today, we tend to think chronologically. That’s just the way we are programmed to think in our western, logical society. The guys who contributed to the Scriptures and ancient authors more generally tended to think thematically. As a result, when two narrative episodes are next to each other in the Scriptures while it may be that they happened sequentially in neat, chronological order, there’s a better chance they were put next to each other for thematic reasons.
In Isaiah 6, we read about the prophet’s dramatic call to ministry in which he is transported via a vision into the very throne room of God and called to deliver a message of judgment to a people who were unwilling to listen. In the very next chapter, we find Isaiah sent on what is presumably one of his first missions. He is to go to King Ahaz of Judah and offer him some assurance and comfort in the face of the military alliance of the nations to his north that turned into a military campaign against Jerusalem.
Check this out with me right at the beginning of the chapter: “This took place during the reign of Ahaz, son of Jotham, son of Uzziah king of Judah: Aram’s King Rezin and Israel’s King Pekah son of Remaliah went to fight against Jerusalem, but they were not able to conquer it. When it became known to the house of David [that’s Ahaz’s administration] that Aram [that’s Syria] had occupied Ephraim [that’s Israel], the heart of Ahaz and the hearts of his people trembled like trees of a forest shaking in the wind. The Lord said to Isaiah, ‘Go out with your son Shear-Jashub [which means “a remnant will return”] to meet Ahaz at the end of the conduit of the upper pool, by the road to the Launderer’s Field.’”
Ahaz was trying to keep up appearances for the rest of his people by doing normal things. God sent Isaiah to meet him in the midst of one of his routines in order to give him a bit more perspective on what His plans were for the situation Ahaz was facing. Yet while Isaiah would be called on to deliver messages of judgment, this first message was intended to be one of hope and encouragement. Verse 4 now: “Say to him: Calm down and be quiet. Don’t be afraid or cowardly because of these two smoldering sticks, the fierce anger of Rezin and Aram, and the son of Remaliah. For Aram, along with Ephraim and the son of Remaliah, has plotted harm against you. They say, ‘Let us go up against Judah, terrorize it, and conquer it for ourselves. Then we can install Tabeel’s son as king in it.’”
Well, on its face, that message doesn’t seem like it’s going to be very encouraging. Ahaz might have responded to just this by saying, “Yes, thank you, Isaiah. I’m well aware of what the plans of Rezin and Pekah are.” But that’s not where Isaiah stopped. Look now at v. 7: “This is what the Lord God says: It will not happen; it will not occur. The chief city of Aram is Damascus, the chief of Damascus is Rezin (within sixty-five years Epharim will be too shattered to be a people), the chief city of Ephraim is Samaria, and the chief of Samaria is the son of Remaliah. If you do not stand firm in your faith, then you will not stand at all.”
Okay, but what does all of that mean? God is assuring Ahaz that the plans Rezin and Pekah have for Jerusalem and the whole southern kingdom of Israel will not come to pass. In fact, in just a couple of generations, those two nations will be gone. Their threat to Judah will be eliminated entirely. This was really good news, of course, but it was good news on the “yeah, right” level. And God knew this. He knows when He’s told us something that’s going to be hard to believe. As a result, He gives Ahaz a really unique opportunity. He gives him the opportunity to ask God to prove Himself and His words. Wouldn’t you like a make-God-prove-Himself-for-free card? You’d want to use it carefully, but how great would it be to walk into some situation where you weren’t sure about God’s intentions, and be able to have Him demonstrate it for you with crystal clarity? I would not hate that.
In any event, look how this goes for Ahaz in v. 10 now: “Then the Lord spoke again to Ahaz: ‘Ask for a sign from the Lord your God—it can be as deep as Sheol or as high as heaven.’” In other words, “Ask me to prove it, Ahaz. Ask me to prove that my words are going to come to pass. You can ask for whatever you want. If you want Gideon’s fleece, just ask. If you want something even more dramatic and unmistakable than that, fire away. Whatever it is you want, it’ll be yours.”
The obvious response to this would be to do just what God says, right? I’ve lost count of the number of atheists I’ve dialogued with who have said they would believe in God if He would prove Himself by doing something like writing, “This is God and I really am here” in the sky. Ahaz could have asked for that. The floor was open and he could make his request. But it’s almost like God did that because He already knew what was coming next.
In a moment of disgustingly false piety, Ahaz refuses. Verse 12: “But Ahaz replied, ‘I will not ask. I will not test the Lord.’” Seriously Ahaz? All the testing of the Lord’s patience you have been doing, and you’re not going to play ball when God literally commands you to test Him? This is why the right answer to those kinds of I’ll-believe-when-God-proves-Himself statements is, “No, you wouldn’t. You’d just explain it away as someone constructing an elaborate hoax with some kind of new-fangled super stealth drone.” The problem isn’t one of belief, but of worldview. That’s a matter for another time.
It is perhaps needless to say that God wasn’t impressed with Ahaz’s masquerade of piety covering a heart steeped in unbelief. Having pulled back the curtain on the real problem facing the kingdom of Judah—namely, an internal one, not an external one—God offers up through Isaiah the judgment that Ahaz and his people deserved. This judgment, though, is not what it appears at first.
Check this out with me in v. 13 now: “Isaiah said, ‘Listen, house of David! Is it not enough for you to try the patience of men? Will you also try the patience of my God? Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign: See, the virgin [the word here is better translated, “young woman,” but in the culture of the day, the two ideas were essentially interchangeable] will conceive, have a son, and name him Immanuel. By the time he learns to reject what is bad and choose what is good, he will be eating curds and honey. For before the boy knows to reject what is bad and choose what is good, the land of the two kings you dread will be abandoned. The Lord will bring on you, your people, and your father’s house such a time as has never been since Ephrain separated from Judah: He will bring the king of Assyria.’”
God goes on to offer a pretty unsettling picture of what this season of conquest will be like. “On that day the Lord will whistle to flies at the farthest streams of the Nile and to bees in the land of Assyria. All of them will come and settle in the steep ravines, in the clefts of the rocks, in all the thornbushes, and in all the water holes. On that day the Lord will use a razor hired from beyond the Euphrates River—the king of Assyria—to shave the hair on your heads, the hair on your legs, and even your beards. On that day a man will raise a young cow and two sheep, and from the abundant milk they give he will eat curds, for every survivor in the land will eat curds and honey. And on that day every place where there were a thousand vines, worth a thousand pieces of silver, will become thorns and briers. A man will go there with bow and arrows because the whole land will be thorns and briers. You will not go to all the hills that were once tilled with a hoe, for fear of the thorns and briers. Those hills will be places for oxen to graze and for sheep to trample.’”
Now, let’s just acknowledge for a second that this is the kind of passage that gives the prophets a bad rap. We don’t really have much of an idea what it means, but it sounds judgy and angry. Well, let’s look just a bit closer here. What Isaiah is describing is a scene in which the majority of the population has been devastated by the conquest of a powerful, foreign adversary. Assyria has come in and decimated the land. That’s obviously not a very encouraging picture. And yet, all is not lost. The scene Isaiah describes is of a land that is wild, yes, but it is also a land that is at peace, and in which the survivors of the devastation—the remnant reflecting the name of Isaiah’s son who was with him while he was declaring all of this to the king—are eking out a pretty good living all things considered. Curds and honey aren’t exactly bread and cheese, but they will at least sustain you.
This whole scene is a picture with more than one aspect to it. God can walk and chew gum at the same time like that. On the one hand, there is just judgment and destruction. On the other hand, there is hope and restoration. In other words, God is going to deal with sin justly, but judgment is not His final plan for His people. Restoration is. Wrapped up in this message of conviction and challenge was a core of hope and peace. Isaiah would later call this child whose birth he had foretold the Prince of Peace.
Peace was God’s final intention for His people, but that peace wasn’t going to come instantly or even quickly. This is because God was working toward a deeper, richer, more abiding peace than they had yet experienced. Some of the things He was doing and yet going to do to move them—us—slowly but surely in this direction were going to seem odd and even counterintuitive from the standpoint of our limited understanding of the world and its workings. But this is because, again, God wasn’t forcing Himself. He was and always has been leading us forward gently and patiently so that our receiving His peace is the fulfillment of our deepest desire and not merely something He was forcing us to have or having to maintain with force like the famous Pax Romana of the Roman Empire.
Getting to that place, though, meant that God was going to have to work in ways and places and times when our situations are messy. God has never been in the practice, though, of merely sweeping the messes away. Instead He does the harder and better thing. He enters into them with us and redeems them from the inside out. Because of this and as we said a little while ago, what sometimes appears to be one way, can be seen in an entirely different light with the clear perspective of hindsight.
In this case, about 750 years after Isaiah spoke these words to King Ahaz of Judah, Jesus’ disciple, Matthew, looked at them through the lens of the Gospel, and saw something entirely more hopeful in the prophet’s message than Ahaz would have heard when they were first spoken. Matthew thought about another young woman—a virgin—who conceived and gave birth to a son to whom was given the name Immanuel. He thought about this and realized that God was fulfilling His prophecy through Isaiah in a whole other way in Jesus. In fact, the prophecy that was understood in one way by Isaiah’s original audience, was able to be understood in an entirely larger and even more hopeful way through the lens of the Gospel.
Matthew was able to see—and sought to help us see as well—that in proclaiming judgment to a faithless, cowardly king, God was at the same time working to advance His plans to bless the world through one of Abraham’s descendants like He had long since promised to do. The situation in which He was working there wasn’t a terribly pretty one, but God was working through it all the same. He was still advancing His plans for our salvation even when things seemed geared in an entirely opposite direction. That’s just what God does. That’s what playing the long game looks like. God knew that He wasn’t just keeping His people on track, He was laying tracks that were going to take them to the place He had been trying to get them to go all along. Those are tracks we are still running on and being blessed by today. God advances His work in even our messiest situations. God advances His work in even our messiest situations.
Just like Ahaz’s kingdom thanks to his poor leadership, sometimes our lives are messy. The reason for the mess may be our fault, or it may have nothing to do with us at all. Sometimes our messes are merely the collateral damage of the sinful decisions of the people around us which are often themselves the result of the collateral impact of the sinful decisions of the people around them. That kind of cascading cacophony of misery is just what sin does. And it’s messy. So very messy. And yet, God still accomplishes His plans even in the midst of our messes. God advances His work in even our messiest situations.
We see this kind of thing happening throughout the Scriptures. One of my favorite instances is the story of Ruth which unfolded during the time of the closing chapters of the narrative of Judges. Go home and read that for yourself. The apostle Paul beautifully described God’s approach here in his letter to the Roman believers. Listen to this from Romans 5: “For while we were still helpless, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly.” Got that? Ungodly is a rather pejorative-sounding word, but it means just what it says. We are not like God and so we are un-god-ly. Being ungodly is an inherently messy place to be. Jesus died for us while we were there. He goes on: “For rarely will someone die for a just person—though for a good person perhaps someone might even dare to die. But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. How much more then, since we have now been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from wrath. For if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, then how much more, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.”
Do you see it? God advances His work in even our messiest situations. And through the story of Jesus’ birth that we are preparing to celebrate in grand fashion in the days ahead of us, we experience together how He does this. He doesn’t do it from afar. He doesn’t make us get ourselves all cleaned up. He doesn’t send someone else to do all the work for Him. He enters into our situations. He gets right down in the mess with us. He turns the mundane into the miraculous, brings redemption to our wretchedness, and moves His plans for our good forward step by step. God advances His work in even our messiest situations. He did it during the reign of Ahaz. He did it in the lives of a scandalous young couple from Nazareth. He is still doing it today. God advances His work in even our messiest situations.
So then, what can we do in light of this long-established pattern on God’s part? Let me give you just one thing to remember here, and we’ll be out of here. We stay on the lookout for His work in the world around us. It does not matter how messy our situation might seem, it’s not so messy that He can’t or won’t still advance His work right there in the midst of it. If we will let Him, He will take those parts of our story that seem the most irredeemably broken and use those very parts to advance His work the farthest. God advances His work in even our messiest situations.
So, stay on the lookout. Be ready to join Him in His work. Remain faithful to His path through this life. His way is rarely the shortest or easiest way. Sometimes it will seem like it is primed to take far longer than the evidently obviously shorter route that is easily accessible to us. But shortcuts that take us off of His path always wind up taking much longer and making our messes even messier than sticking with the path of Christ. To borrow some words from For King and Country, we love like we’re not scared, give when it’s not fair, live life for another, take time for a brother, fight for the weak ones, speak out for freedom, find faith in the battle, and stand tall (on Christ) above it all. When we do that, when we follow the path of Christ, we will experience and even take part in God’s ongoing work through Jesus to redeem our messes and make us fit for His kingdom. It’s a long game play, but it is a play guaranteed to win in the end. God advances His work in even our messiest situations. Stick with Him in your messes, and experience the wonder of His redeeming work.