[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Welcome to the collective table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy.
This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation and even the podcast. So we're glad your here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: For those of you who don't know, my name is Jason. I'm one of the co lead pastors here. Today we are going to be continuing our Advent series. And of course, Advent is a time of waiting, a time of expectation, a time when we cultivate the ability to slow down and to exercise a bit of patience for what has been promised, what's to come. And it occurs to me today that these are all the things that we are terrible at as a society. And so I want to lean into that a little bit today.
There's a passage up here on the screen. Isaiah, chapter 7, verses 10 through 16. We're going to get to that in just a moment. But first I want to, just by way of a reminder, read to you this short passage from Matthew chapter one.
And this is going to sound very familiar to you. In fact, we're just a couple of days away from this moment of celebration. But it's important, I think, before we get into Isaiah for you to hear this.
This is Matthew chapter one, starting in verse 21. And she will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people who from their sins. And all this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet. Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call him Emmanuel, which means God is with us.
This is of course, a very familiar Christmas passage from Matthew chapter one. And I think oftentimes we gloss over what's happening in that passage when we talk about Christmas.
So today I wanted us to jump backwards a bit and visit this little snippet that look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call him Emmanuel. We, we sing songs about Emmanuel. We use that name in reference to Jesus all the time without really understanding where it comes from. And today I want to go back to revisit where that comes from. So we're going to read from Isaiah, chapter seven, verses 10. I'm going to actually read verses 10 through 14.
So this is of course, a couple hundred years before the events of Matthew chapter one. And in Isaiah chapter seven, we pick up the story here in verse 10 where it says this Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz, saying, ask a sign of the Lord your God. Let it be deep as Sheol or high as the heavens.
But Ahaz says, I will not ask and I will not put the Lord to the test.
And then Isaiah said, hear then, O house of David. Is it too little for you to weary mortals that you weary my God also?
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son and shall name him Emmanuel. He shall eat curds and honey. But by the time he knows how to refuse the good and refuse the evil and choose the good.
For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted. Would you pray with me?
God, we thank you again for today. We thank you for this season of Advent, this season of waiting and hope and anticipation, and along with that, a bit of frustration.
We ask God that you would work through that frustration to teach us how to persevere through times of waiting. Teach us to trust in the good things that you have promised.
We pray all this in Jesus name.
Amen.
So listen, I'm Gen X. I'm a child of the 70s, which means that by the time I was nine years old, there was nothing cooler, nothing more coveted on the face of the planet for a nine year old boy growing up in San Bernardino, California, than a BMX bike.
You know what a BMX bike is? It's been a long time since they were like, popular. But when I was nine years old, every kid that I knew, that I looked up to, that I admired, that was 10, you know, older kids, kids, 10, 11, 12 year olds, right? The ones who could roam freely throughout the Inland Empire. These all rode BMX bikes.
And as Christmas approached when I was nine years old, I knew that I wasn't going to get a bicycle for Christmas because we were lacking those kinds of resources as a family. And so I tempered my expectations and I asked for more reasonable gifts. But like, maybe a lot of you, my parents did this thing that my wife Janelle and I have perpetuated this like, little bit of Christmas torture, right? That goes like this. We actually start wrapping presents and putting them under the tree like at the beginning of December, right? This is what my parents did too. Parents would begin appearing or presents would begin appearing after Thanksgiving, which meant we had to wait an entire month to open presents that we were seeing every single day under the tree.
And that is excruciating, right, because you have big boxes and Small boxes. And they're all wrapped so you can't see what's in them, but you can see that they're there.
So every day you get up and maybe, you know, there's another present under the tree. You know, the second week of December and then another present under the tree. And the anticipation, the expectation builds, as does the frustration.
What is in those wrapped boxes?
I remember one year, again, I was about nine years old, so this would have been 1979. I don't know what you were doing in 1979, but on Christmas Eve in 1979, I couldn't handle it anymore. And in the middle of the night, I got up from my bed and I snuck very carefully into the living room where the Christmas tree was. And I couldn't turn the lights on because our house was like L shaped. And there was a sliding glass door in our living room and a sliding glass door in my parents room. So I knew that if I turned the light on, it would wake them up. So in the dark, I crept towards the tree very, very quietly and I looked as closely as I could and I began to like, just tear little bits of wrapping from like the back corner of boxes, hoping that I could see what was in the gifts. And I couldn't see anything because the lights were out, it was dark, and they were wrapped. And I grew frustrated and didn't want to get caught. And so I went, you know, back to my bedroom and went to bed. And I got up the next morning and came out a little bit deflated because I didn't know what my gifts were going to be. And also they seemed rather unimpressive. And as I walked into the living room with my parents awake and like welcoming me and my little brother in for Christmas, I noticed that right in the middle of the living room was a Schwinn BMX bike. Now here's the thing about it. It had been there the night before, But because it was dark, I like crawled like army style right past the bike and didn't even see it because the lights were out. And I was busy under the tree ripping tiny bits of paper from these boxes while a BMX bike just sat there right in the middle of the living room.
Sometimes, of course, we miss the good things that God has for us because our vision is obscured.
There's a message in the wrapped presents that you get for Christmas, or the wrapped presents that you get for your birthday, or the wrapped presents that you get for any other occasion. Or maybe they come in a bag with little bits of Tissue paper sticking out from the top. I can never quite figure out how to do the tissue paper right.
But the point of obscuring presents, the point of hiding them, of wrapping them in festive paper, is that it says something about our lack of control.
We don't get to be in charge of the gifts that we receive.
And wrapping them is a kind of symbolic way of demonstrating that you are disconnected from control of the very good things that you receive.
That's how grace works.
You don't buy it, you don't earn it, you don't control it. You just get it, and you're disconnected from the ability to control it. We see the same thing, believe it or not, happening in Isaiah chapter 7. And the story of Christmas is wrapped in this idea.
And I think we miss that story when we miss what's happening here in Isaiah chapter 7.
What's happening in Isaiah chapter 7 is that Ahaz is the king of Judah. And what you may or may not know is that at that time, about 300 years before the birth of Christ, what we think of as Israel was actually divided into two different kingdoms. There was the Kingdom of Judah and the Kingdom of Israel.
These two related kingdoms were sort of in competition with each other. They had their own kings, their own capitals, their own politics, their own worship centers, and they were sort of competing for God's attention.
And what happens right before Isaiah chapter 7, verse 10, is that there is some political intrigue going on in the surrounding kingdoms.
So what's happened here is that the kingdom of Israel has aligned with Syria, another nearby kingdom. And Israel and Syria have conspired to attack Jerusalem, which is in Judah, in order to conquer Judah. Right? Judah and Israel desperately want to conquer each other.
And so Ahaz, who is the king of Judah, is freaking out.
And what's happening here is that Israel and Syria are trying to leverage Judah so that they can then get to another political power, Assyria. So you have four kingdoms essentially locked in this sort of geopolitical conflict.
And at the center of that conflict is the king Ahaz. And Ahaz is deeply afraid and is therefore turning to Assyria, the fourth kingdom, to build an alliance with them so that he can rebuff this attack by Syria and Israel.
Isaiah is concerned about that alliance.
Isaiah the prophet is against this alliance because it will give over the kingdom of Judah to this foreign kingdom. They'll become essentially their servants.
And Isaiah knows that this is bad. This will be bad for all the people who live in Judah. So he brings a message in verses one through Nine to Ahaz, essentially, to convince him to not enter into this political alliance with Assyria. And he does something really interesting. In verse three, it says, then the Lord said to Isaiah, go out to meet Ahaz. This is in order to go to Ahaz and say, hey, don't make this alliance with Syria. It's a bad idea. And then God says to the prophet Isaiah in verse three, go out to meet Ahaz, you and your son, Sheer Jashub.
Now, now, here's the thing about these old prophetic books is they're highly poetic, they're highly literary. There's all kinds of interesting symbolism going on in them. And one of those symbols is that Isaiah was instructed to name his son Sheer Jehov, which means a remnant shall return.
And that is the message.
The message to Ahaz is, don't make this alliance with Assyria. I know that you're afraid of what's going to happen here. I know you're afraid that your kingdom is going to be conquered. But my message to you is, don't make this alliance because a remnant shall return.
Now, I don't know if you're picking up what Isaiah is putting down here, but that's a pretty terrible gospel, because the message essentially is, hey, I know you're afraid that you're about to be conquered, and you are.
Things are about to get worse.
But a remnant shall return.
I know that you're tempted to give into power because you're afraid of what's going to happen. And I'm not here to tell you that you're going to be completely rescued. I'm not here to tell you that everything is going to be okay. I'm here to tell you that. That for now things are going to be bad, but in the future, a remnant shall return.
And that is not the message that Ahaz wants as a king.
He wants to be told that God is going to rescue them now, that there won't be a battle, that there won't be a conquering, and that they are going to be preserved exactly as they are.
But that is not God's promise.
And so Ahaz says, no, no, thank you.
Not interested in that message. I'm not interested in that Gospel.
And Isaiah, of course, is persistent. And so that brings us to our passage for today.
Isaiah, chapter 7, verse 10.
Again, the Lord spoke to Ahaz, saying, ask a sign of the Lord your God.
Let it be as deep as Sheol or as high as heaven. In other words, ask whatever you like, any sign you like, to reassure you that this Message that I've given that our remnant shall return is trustworthy. It's good. You can believe it, any sign you want.
And Ahaz, instead of just saying no, says something a bit infuriating.
Ahaz says, I will not ask and I will not put the Lord to the test. In other words, what's happening here is Ahaz is cloaking his lack of faith in religious language.
Oh, no, no, no, I won't put God to the test. I'm not. I'm not that kind of believer.
But God is specifically inviting him to ask for a sign, specifically inviting him to ask for some way that he can be reassured in his faith that God is good. Instead, Ahaz chooses to make a political alliance with an enemy rather than trust in God's promise. This is essentially what Ahaz is doing, and there are real consequences to this choice.
The reason Isaiah and God through Isaiah doesn't want Ahaz and Judah to ally themselves with Assyria is because first it places trust in power rather than trusting God.
Ahaz is deeply afraid of what's about to happen.
And instead of trusting that God will be faithful to them in the long run, he trusts in his own ability to build power and political alliances in order to preserve Judah.
And this, of course, leads to resources flowing from Judah to Assyria.
One of the very real consequences of this is that Judah's commitment as people who are followers of God, Judah's commitment to taking their resources as a community and making sure that the poor are taken care of, making sure that everybody in the community is covered, everybody is supported. Those resources, as we see later in first and second Kings, begin to flow to the surrounding kingdoms, and inequality becomes a bigger problem in Judah and Israel.
This weakens these communities over time until they become so vulnerable that they're more easily conquered.
But ultimately, what this means is that Ahaz places his trust not in the goodness of God, the promises of God, but in his own ability to survive, to ensure the survival of his kingdom and his own power.
God, of course, does not buy into his false piety, and instead God offers him a sign anyway.
And that is what we see happening in the rest of this passage.
But Ahaz said, I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test.
Then Isaiah said to him, hear then, O house of David.
Is it too little for you to weary mortals that you weary my God also? Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign.
So God is insisting on offering this sign, this symbol, this. This indication that God can be trusted.
God is good. And here is what the sign is. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son and shall name him Emmanuel.
The sign that God is good, the sign that God can be trusted. The. The sign that a remnant shall return is a pregnant woman.
Now, I don't know if you've ever been a pregnant woman, if you've ever been around a pregnant woman, but babies take time.
Have you noticed that?
Have you noticed that babies take more time than you'd like?
Have you noticed that babies grow and develop inside their mother's womb in ways that are excruciatingly slow and yet offer, like, signs of hope along the way? Like little bits of, like, kicking and turning, right? Hiccuping inside their mother's belly. All these little indicators that something is happening, that something good is coming. And yet at the same time, my God, why is it taking so long?
Have you noticed that in addition to signs of hope, like kicking and moving and hiccuping inside the mother's belly, that there are also pains experienced as that child gets bigger, as the weight gets bigger, that mom is often struggling, uncomfortable in pain, and then ultimately leading to an experience of pain that I obviously don't understand.
You've heard this story before, right? When Alana was born, Janelle thought I hadn't suffered enough in pregnancy. So while she was in the midst of delivering, she turned over, screamed, buried her face in my stomach and bit down.
And so I feel like I can say, I know the pains of childbirth.
This image, this image of something good that's coming but is a long ways away. Something good that's coming that offers little signs of hope along the way. Something good that's coming, but involves pain and suffering along the way is the sign that God chose to demonstrate God's faithfulness.
It's not the sign that Ahaz wanted.
Ahaz wanted the salvation, the deliverance to come now.
And I think we do, too.
I think that we struggle with this kind of salvation.
This is also the story of Christmas.
When Matthew wrote Matthew's gospel and in the very first chapter chose a passage from the Hebrew Bible that could indicate what kind of promise, what kind of salvation Jesus birth represented. Matthew chose this passage.
Matthew chose Isaiah, chapter 7, verses 10 through 14, a passage where the world that Jesus is born into is fraught with political turmoil and political violence and uncertainty for survival. And in the midst of that, a child is born.
By the way, some of you know this too, but, like, the long, slow waiting doesn't end at birth.
Janelle and I were just talking yesterday about, like, how much money we have now that our kids are grown. Oh, my gosh.
Children take a long time to gestate, but after that, they take a whole lot longer to fully bake.
Like, they're helpless when they come out.
And they do clever little things like smile at you to engender hope right before they fill their diaper or vomit on you.
And then just when you think things are getting good, when they're like 9 and 10 and they're so fun and so cool, they hit middle school.
And if you think middle school is hard for students, man, try parenting a middle schooler.
Listen, I mentioned this a couple weeks ago. One of my favorite writers, Pierre Tallard de Chardin, wrote, always trust in the slow work of God.
That is what this is teaching.
It's what God was trying to teach. Ahaz, I am at work. I am fulfilling my promises.
It just takes a long time.
Be patient.
It's the story of Christ too.
God is saying every year in Advent and at Christmas, I am at work.
My promises are coming.
It's just going to be a helpless infant that you have to care for and nurture and pour everything into out of love.
But someday we'll grow up and break your heart by picking the wrong prom date. I mean, someday it will grow up and it will be there for you.
This is how God's salvation works. And this is one of my takeaways personally from this passage. And maybe you have different takeaways, but for me, I noticed three things. The first is that the salvation that God offers us is. Is not always the salvation that we want.
That's been true in my life, maybe it's been true in yours, that what God delivers is not what I asked for.
But I've noticed it's always better.
My imagination when I pray, my imagination when I appeal to God. My imagination is so impoverished compared to what God actually delivers.
But it's not always the salvation we want.
The second thing I notice is that even though God doesn't always offer the salvation that I want, because it's always the salvation I need, I can trust God anyway.
I can trust in God's goodness. I can trust in God's judgment.
I can trust in God's justice. I can trust in God's faithfulness, even when it appears that I'm not getting my desires met.
And the third thing that I take away from this is that it will take time.
If things are hard for you right now for any reason, if things are hard for you right now, personally, if things are hard for you right now in our relationship. If things are hard for you right now in your career, if things are hard for you right now, politically, maybe.
Our remnant shall return.
You can trust that.
And in the meantime, the last little bit of amazing symbolism in this story is that the name Emmanuel means God with us.
Shir Jashub means a remnant shall return, but Emmanuel means God with us.
God is with us in the pregnancy of God's promises. God is with us in the deliverance of God's promises. God is with us in the raising up and the maturing of God's promises. God is with us through all of it, whether we know it or not, whether we see it or not.
[00:28:37] Speaker B: Whether.
[00:28:37] Speaker A: We'Re groping around in the dark or we have finally discovered them because the lights have been turned on. God was always with us in the midst of all of it.
And to me, that's very good news.
Amen.
Would you pray with me?
God, we thank you again for today, for this opportunity for us to be encouraged by these ancient words, for this opportunity for our faith to grow, for us to learn to have patience, To wait for the fulfillment of your promises, to recognize the signs of hope along the way. God, we pray that you would impart all of these skills and abilities to us by your good grace.
We ask that you would open our eyes to see the gospel that you're bringing rather than the gospel that we've asked for, and that when it arrives, we would recognize it and that we'd be joyful.
We pray all this in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:30:03] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where you're tuning in.
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