The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
Isaiah 7:14: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and give birth to a son, and shall call him Emmanuel.” It is without a doubt one of the best-known Old Testament prophecies concerning the coming of the Messiah in all of the Old Testament. The apostle and evangelist Matthew seemed to agree with this. He leads his Gospel off with a quote from this particular passage, there in Matthew 1:22-23: “Now all this took place so that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet would be fulfilled: ‘Behold, the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,’ which translated means ‘God with us.'” Emmanuel — God with us.
But a lot of people understand that in a rather abstract kind of way, and it is not in any way supposed to be an abstraction. The word and the concept point to a literal sense: that God is actually with us, in thought, word, and deed — physically and spiritually, totally with us. That is the context in which this passage is given.
Whenever things look bleak, or like an unredeemable mess, in the Old Testament the question always arose: Where is God? Or in our case: Where is God in our need? Am I alone in this particular kind of trouble? That was a recurring question throughout all of human history. Where do I find God? How do I know where God is? Is God around when I am having the most difficult days? Is God around when I am mourning the death of those nearest and dearest to me? Is God around when someone in the family, or myself, is sick? In those moments we can all feel rather terribly alone.
Remember that old 1968 song: “What is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do? Two can be as bad as one, but one is the loneliest number since the number one.” We know how lonely “one” is when you are in isolation. It is lonely. That lonely, abandoned, and forsaken feeling is the historic context in which Isaiah is sent to King Ahaz, and in which the promise of Isaiah 7:14 is given.
When a person or people face great difficulty, it is our old sinful nature to raise the question about God and to wonder if He still cares. When we encounter things we don’t understand, we even sometimes go so far as to question whether God is there. The psalmist felt this time and time again: “Be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted.” Again, Psalm 39:12: “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry.” Or again in Psalm 102:1: “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my cry come unto You.”
Those questions of God’s presence are actually only a continuation of what Christians — the Old Testament Israelites — have been asking for millennia. God’s presence and work among us is often questioned in the church by church members. That doesn’t make it right; it’s natural. And that’s what Thomas found out: it was not only natural to question and to doubt, but it was also sinful to question — doubting God’s Word, doubting God’s presence. Telling God “no” is simply a reality of all of human nature, and it’s why He has designed the economy of salvation the way He has: both physical and spiritual.
After all, human beings were created to be in fellowship. Before the fall into sin, God walked in the garden with Adam and Eve. That’s not a figurative kind of speech. He walked, and He spoke. They saw Him in that form, whatever that was, and they heard Him speaking externally. It wasn’t something they heard in their mind or conjured up. It was sound waves on their eardrums. His presence was obvious to them. They saw Him, and they talked to Him, and He with them. Adam and Eve did not doubt that He was there, because He clearly was there. What they did do was doubt His Word — and then they rejected it, with the help of the serpent.
After the fall, God’s people have often doubted His presence and work among them. Take for example the patriarchs: Abraham and Sarah thought God had forsaken them, had forgotten His promises and walked away from them. They had waited so long for the promised son that, in their view, never came or was never going to come. He hadn’t fulfilled His promise in a timely fashion, so they doubted and questioned whether God even paid attention to them anymore.
The Lord God delivered the Israelites from bondage in Egypt and led them to the base of Mount Sinai. In Exodus chapter 19, God told Moses to go up on top of Mount Sinai into His presence, where he would receive the Torah — the Law and Gospel. And Exodus 24:18: Moses was on the mountain for forty days and forty nights. And while he was on the mountain for forty days and forty nights, what did the Israelites at the base of the mountain do? Well, they looked up at the cloud — that ominous cloud that covered the mountain — and the newly adopted children of God began to question His presence. By Exodus 32, God’s newly formed Old Testament church concluded that God either didn’t exist or He had abandoned them to die there in the wilderness. That was after all the works that God had done, not forty-plus days before, when they began to question — and made a golden calf for themselves. Why? God had delivered them through the ten plagues. He had parted the Red Sea and drowned the Egyptian army. He had started providing manna from heaven for bread. But in the absence of Moses, and in the absence of any new miracles, they decided God had in some sense left the building and He was no longer with them. So they made a golden calf to worship, one they could see, one that would be good to them.
That’s what happens in our reading this morning, in Isaiah chapter 7. King Ahaz doubted that God was with him — maybe even that the God of Israel existed at all. The Israelites were surrounded by pagan foreign armies who were threatening that kingdom’s existence. God had repeatedly promised the Israelites the promised land. He had protected them through the wilderness and wanderings, and He had protected them thus far in their homeland and the city of Jerusalem as well. The Israelites were surrounded, and they began to wonder if God had just simply left them — or maybe He didn’t exist at all. His people, they all knew the promises, but when they looked around and judged things according to their eyes, they simply stopped believing. They doubted and took matters into their own hands — especially King Ahaz.
The Lord God sent Isaiah to Ahaz with a specific message: God promises to be with you, and He is with you. If you have doubts, just ask the Lord God for a sign for yourself — just something you want — and God will show you that He’s with you. Now Ahaz is the king of Israel, so he represents the people of Israel. He’s echoing what most of the people of Israel are saying: “God has abandoned us. Get us out of this mess.”
So Isaiah said: Ask for a sign for yourself. It’s a test, really — a kind of test to produce some kind of proof. Not of God, by the way, but of Ahaz. When they asked for a sign — why not? Because even if the Lord God of Israel was with His people, including the king, Ahaz was not with God. He had departed a long time ago. He no longer believed in the God of Israel. Listen to how Isaiah addresses him: “Then he said, ‘Listen now, house of David! Is it too slight a thing for you to try the patience of men, that you will try the patience of my God as well?'”
God addresses Ahaz as the head of the household, the house of David. Despite Ahaz’s unfaithfulness, he sat on the throne established by the Lord God Himself — the throne of David — and stood before God as a representative of God’s chosen people. If Ahaz had ever had faith, he had long since forsaken it. He had failed the test. He wouldn’t even ask for something, because he himself was void of faith. He refuses to believe that God can or will do what is being offered. The thinking goes something like this: What good is the word of a liar? Why bother asking a liar for the truth, when once it’s spoken you’ll never know whether it was the truth at all? Ahaz has forsaken God. He’s put his trust in his own political scheming and plans — in alliances to be made with two particular pagan kings for self-defense. In other words, his own political machinations became his golden calf.
God sent Isaiah to speak the words that Matthew would quote some 700 years later: “Behold, the virgin will conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel.” Isaiah’s response to Ahaz’s lack of faith was a rather strange promise. Ahaz is looking for something to deliver him out of political and military trouble immediately — and what does he get instead? He gets a promise of an unborn son who will someday, sometime down the road, come and save the people from their sins. For Ahaz: what good is that to him? He’s promised a child who will be born to a young woman, one who is a virgin. This is hardly the kind of sign one would expect in the middle of political intrigue.
This would be no ordinary child, though. This would be Emmanuel — God with us. This child would be named Jesus, because He would save His people from their sins — the very thing they needed to be saved from: sin and unbelief. The child will be the eternal Son of God. He is God’s proof of God’s fidelity to God’s very own people. He would be the proof that God is indeed really present with His people: the church. Jesus is God’s guarantee, fundamentally, to us that He has and will never forsake us.
This is the real Christmas. Christmas is the celebration not only of the birth of the Christ child — for Christians, Emmanuel — Christmas celebrates His continual presence with us in the church. He doesn’t come and go. He stands here in the Word and Sacrament ministry. That’s what we’re preparing to celebrate during the season of Advent.
Advent is the season of the real Christmas. People celebrate Christmas; they just don’t have the right one. God is with us — not only, by the way, in our individual and collective thoughts. He is with us in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. He is with us in His flesh and blood, in the Word and Sacrament ministry, in, with, and under the elements of bread and wine. And He promised to be so: “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
In the midst of doubting, Jesus provides a Word in which He doubles down. He repeats the promise that God will always be with His people. He will deliver them in His good time and in His good fashion. Yet we still question. We still, in lonely times, in times of depression, in times of hardship and struggle, turn from Christ’s promises and set in place our own versions of golden calves. We don’t see God as solving our problems. We don’t see Him as one who comes to fix our diseases. We certainly would love for Him to fix our family woes. We’d like Him to answer our questions. We want Him to deliver us from mourning and suffering. We’re tempted to believe, when all that doesn’t happen, that He’s no longer with us.
That’s why God gave you yet another sign. That sign is your Baptism. It is why, in our church tradition, the baptized receives a proof — a certificate of Holy Baptism — proving and showing that in fact they were adopted in the water and the Word as God’s very own children. The Lutheran Confessions speak of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper as signs of God’s gracious disposition toward us. Augsburg Confession, Article XIII: they teach that the sacraments were ordained not only to be marks of profession among men, not only for us to declare our faith in God, but rather to be signs and testimonies of the will of God toward us. That is: it’s something He’s doing to and for us. He is coming to dwell with us, to be with us individually in the waters of Baptism, instituted to awaken and confirm faith in those who use them. Wherefore we must use the sacraments, that faith be added, to believe the promises which are offered and set forth through the sacraments.
The Apology quotes the early church theologians: it has been well said by Augustine that a sacrament is a visible Word, because the rite is received by the eyes and is, as it were, a picture of the Word, illustrating the same thing as the Word itself.
Louis IX, the king of France in the 13th century, once reportedly — when he was asked why he signed his name “Louis of Poissy” — responded by pointing out that the location of his baptism was the city of Poissy. Then he went on to explain: “I think more of the place where I was baptized than of Rheims Cathedral where I was crowned. It is a greater thing to be a child of God than the ruler of a kingdom. This last I shall lose at my death, but the other will be my passport to everlasting glory.” He clung to the sign. He knew God was with him in the waters of his baptism.
In the church itself, the sign of the virgin birth was among the greatest signs given to mankind. In our Baptism, He has given us the sign that everything that was in and done by the Son born of the virgin — His life, His death, and His resurrection — is personally yours. That is: God is with you. In the Sacrament ministry, God is with you. In the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, God is with you. In the knowledge of the Gospel and the words of God, God is with you.
Ahaz had forsaken the Old Testament covenant. He had forsaken His circumcision. He had forsaken all the promises that God had given to the children of Israel. But Joseph did not. On the other hand, he was given the same sign — he was given the sign that was given to King Ahaz 700 years earlier, the exact same words: “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child who has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you shall name Him Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins. And behold, the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they shall call Him Emmanuel, which translates: God with us.” And Joseph awoke from his sleep and did as the angel had commanded him. He does the exact opposite of what King Ahaz did. Why? Because he was a man of righteousness — which is to say, he was a man of true Christian faith — and the angel of the Lord had given him a promise, and he could go forth boldly and take Mary as his wife and protect and keep alive his son, legally, Jesus.
So God has given you signs. He’s given you His Word, His prophecies, His promise, Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, a community called the church. He’s given you an outward sign of your adoption. He’s given you His body and blood. In this house, here He is with us always.
So exactly one week from Christmas Day — and we have a lot to get ready for — but as you hurry through the rest of this week and the remaining business, remember: in Christ Jesus, in the church, in your Baptism, and in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, God is in fact present with you. He is your particular, individual Emmanuel — God with you. And your Baptism is a sign that the Babe of Bethlehem, born in the manger many years ago, isn’t an idea. He’s not an abstraction. He’s not a symbol. He’s not only the Savior of the world. He’s your real, flesh-and-blood Savior from sin. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.