Message 12-23-07

Series:            Say the Words

Scripture:            Isaiah 7:10-17 [John 1:1-14]

Title:                                        Right and Wrong

Can you imagine this moment? How many times in life have you been faced with a difficult choice, some excruciating decision and begged God for guidance, for a sign? How many times, even if you didn’t ask for a sign would you have loved receiving a sign? Can you imagine this moment when a man is given the chance for any sign, anything you ask for – anything from the heavens ripping open to someone returning from the dead – from the highest heavens to the deepest depths, just ask and God will show you. And this guy turns it down.

Crazy, isn’t it?

God gives him carte blanche and the man says, “No.” And it appears as though he is doing it for pious reasons. You may know that in the Law of the people of Israel they were warned not to test the Lord, not to ask for signs. It was showing distrust. Later, Jesus says, it is a wicked and adulterous generation that is always seeking a sign. The issue with God and signs is trust. Do you not know that God is here? Do you not realize that God can be trusted? And that is still the issue with Ahaz. The king is a man who trusts in himself. He trusts what he sees and what he hears. He trusts in what he produces. God comes to this man and says, “Trust in me. In this instance, because I know how hard this is for you, I’ll give you a break. Go ahead and ask for a sign.” Ahaz seems almost pious as he says, “Oh no, I’ll not put God to the test.”

But what he is saying is, “I’m not going to trust in God.” Isaiah gives Ahaz a simple test – right and wrong – and then gives him the answer to the test. And Ahaz gets it wrong. This is not a bright man. This was a man who brought destruction down on his country. Ahaz is like the “King George III” for Israel. Remember King George III, ruler of England at the time of the American Revolution. If you go through the palaces of England you won’t find pictures of him. A friend of mine asked about that and the tour guide said, “If one of your leaders lost a continent for you, would you celebrate him?” When Ahaz died he wasn’t buried with the rest of the kings it says. He was just buried some place. Ahaz brought down on his people the destruction of Assyria.

Assyria was this brutal and horrific kingdom that stripped Ahaz and his people of all the gold in the treasury and all the gold in the temple of God. Ahaz was looking for help he could trust in, help that made sense in the “real world” so he made an alliance with the king of Assyria. God came to him saying, “Make your alliance with me. Trust in me and I’ll get you through the trouble you’re facing and even the greater trouble later and Ahaz says no.”

So, what’s all this got to do with us?

Well, that depends on whether you expect God to speak to you or not. Ahaz didn’t believe that God would speak to him. He didn’t really think God was there or worth the effort. Do you expect God to be there in your life?

Matthew did. Matthew the writer of the Gospel of Matthew expected God to speak. Some 7-800 years after Isaiah was saying these words to King Ahaz, Matthew plucked them out of this story; he took the words of God into his own story and into his own life. “The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son and they will call him Immanuel.”

Now, some people believe that Matthew used these words out of context. The likeliest reading of Isaiah’s words, back in the story of Ahaz, is that Isaiah turned to look at a woman who was actually seated there in the courtroom of the king. The way the Hebrew reads it’s really possible that Isaiah, “Look! This virgin is going to have a son and before he is old enough to tell right from wrong, the trouble you’re facing will dissipate.“ People suggest that Matthew has taken these words randomly, but that wasn’t the way people who first read Matthew understood it.

At the time of the writing of the Gospel people understood that when God said words they became living things. So you could go back into the words of God and discover that he was speaking into your own life and into your own time. Matthew expected that if God said it, those word became a living force and you could trust them to explain life to you today. Some people read the Bible this way today. They expect God to speak to them today. Matthew didn’t only expect God to speak through the words of his Bible. He expected that the words that were said could actually be fulfilled in a new context. That’s what people of Matthew’s time expected as well. This was the way people understood the Bible and used it. They wouldn’t have been surprised that Matthew did it.

And what that might tell us is that God speaks to us in ways we can understand. In this moment, what is God saying to us? Maybe God’s revealing that he’s a re-gifter. You know about re-gifting. You receive a gift that you don’t really like, so you package it up again and give it on to someone else.   But God does it in his own way. In God’s way, he both gives a gift that he’s really pleased with and then, he’s so pleased with it that he gives it again. He re-gifts us with the sign.

Some people suggest that Matthew “created” the story of the virgin birth in order to bolster the idea that Jesus was God. Some people think that Matthew wanted to show people of his time that Jesus was like the gods of the stories around him and that he used the same elements of their stories to place it on Jesus.

The trouble with that is that if anything Matthew, it appears, was writing to a Jewish audience. The last people in the world who would be interested in Jesus appearing like the gods of other countries would be the Jews. The more likely scenario goes with the natural history of the church of Jesus.

Jesus came and people were blown away. They struggled to take in everything he said and did and everything he meant. As they did this they went back to Scripture and studied it because that’s where God reveals himself. The likely scenario for Matthew and the other Gospel writers is that they didn’t lay something on Jesus’ story. They discovered what it said in the Bible that helped them understand Jesus’ story.

So, Matthew is reading Isaiah and discovered Scripture fulfilled. He’s reading the words of Isaiah “The virgin will bear a son and call his name Immanuel” and he’s saying to himself – that’s the story of Jesus.

You see the sign wasn’t a virgin birth. The sign wasn’t that Jesus was born through a virgin. The sign was Jesus.

The sign that is given to us is Jesus, but the question that comes with that sign is the same as the question that came to Ahaz. And that question is not really would you like a sign? The question is “Do you trust in God? Can God speak into your life today?”

From the heavens opening and Jesus coming down to us, or from the place of the dead and Jesus rising, coming up to us – what more would God have to do to convince you that he’s on our side?

Ahaz couldn’t hear it. For whatever reason, Ahaz just wasn’t going to take in the promise of Immanuel – God is with us.

I have a million stories in my life that are about rejection. My family hates it when I tell these stories. They hate it because they love me and they hate to think of what I’ve been through. It hurts them to think of me going through heartache. But it is my story. It is my life. It is what I went through. I don’t live that life anymore, but there was a time when every kid who was supposed to come to my birthday party called to say they weren’t coming. They called the day of the party. There were so many kids who called that as soon as I heard who was on the phone I’d ask, “So why can’t you come?” But there was one kid who called whose name was Donald Bass. I asked him why he couldn’t come and he said, “What? Oh, I’m coming. I just needed directions.” Do you understand why I still remember the name Donald Bass? He and John Olson, my best friend, both made it to my party that day. I have a million of these stories, but they remind me of the ones who came alongside me when I was in pain.

There is one who comes alongside us. When Ahaz heard the word, God is with us. He may not have heard comfort in that. He may have heard judgment. God was telling him, you are rejecting me, but I am telling you that I am with you and you are going to feel the truth of my presence.

But we can hear those words and discover what Matthew discovered. We can hear those words and see them fulfilled in Jesus. They explain Jesus.