Hey everybody, I'm Matt, and this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. This time around it's brought to you by Dwell. It's an audio Bible app that's very customizable that I super like. You can check out the show notes for more information on that. You know what absolutely kills me emotionally? And I know no matter how tough you try to act, come on, you've all got like something that when you see it, it makes you irrationally weep. And for me, one of like four or five that I have are the reunion videos between people who are in the military and their kids, and the kids don't know they're coming home, and then they come home and the kids like, what? My dad and my mom's home and they cry and they hug, and then I cry, and everybody feels things. And it's just cool to see that distance resolved and those people who need each other and love each other put back together. I'm getting squishy already. Here's the thing: when we get to the beginning of Matthew, you've got a Jewish audience to whom this book was written who felt this way about their God, estrangement. It had been forever. And this isn't like you or me where it's like, oh, I haven't gone to church for a while and I kind of miss it and I like the rhythms and I'm sad about that. Maybe I should go back. This was different. They were the chosen people of God, and these people grew up on these stories of God showing up in gigantic break the laws of time and space and physics kind of ways. They were constantly receiving feedback from God in terms of they screwed stuff up. Well, God would punish them. They got stuff right, God would bless them. And there was an intimacy and a connection there that it seems like had been largely lost. The prophets for several hundred years hadn't been communicating the stuff of God in the same way. It seems like the people of Israel, the Jewish people are kind of adrift on the tides of history over those 400 years. And no doubt tons of people are starting to despair. Well, it'll never be the way it was again. It'd be great if I could know a God. Like the people before said they knew God, or like we read about in the books or whatever, but it's just not how things are. But maybe in the back of their brains, they'd still allow themselves to hope a little bit that it could be like it was, or even better than it was. And so the astute reader, I think, probably would have picked up Matthew chapter one. They've never talked to anybody about it. It's a brand new book. It's got that you know delicious smell to it as they crack it open or rather unroll that scroll and they start reading the thing. They're like, huh, I wonder if this guy knows what he's doing, because he's accidentally ticking a whole bunch of boxes that would indicate that this teeny tiny little glimmer of hope we have that God is not done with us is maybe actually true. Well, that genealogy accidentally ticks a bunch of the boxes. And then where this is all happening and who everybody's related to and how this is going down and this virgin birth thing, uh, this actually smacks a lot of the thing that I can't even allow myself to hope for because it's just too good to be true. And then they get to verse 22, and it says, All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet. Verse 23, the virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel, which means God with us. I imagine that kid at that assembly doing the mental dad with us thing, and having it be almost too much to hope for because it hurts because of how much they missed him. And then when Dad shows up at the assembly, it was this flood of emotion and you don't even really know what to do with it, it's so overwhelming. I wonder if people felt the same way when they got to this God with us. Could it be that Jesus is God with us? That this divide, this estrangement is about to be resolved? Well, to understand that a little bit better. We've got to jump back into what we're actually talking about here, because this is a reference to Isaiah chapter seven, and it doesn't seem like Isaiah chapter seven is talking about Jesus or the Messiah or any of that stuff. So it's a little bit tricky. It's it's actually talking about Ahaz, son of Jotham, son of Uzziah. Hey, look another genealogy. Maybe a coincidence, maybe not. And his cruddy reign that he had, this guy was not a spectacular king. We get the details about what happened with him over in 2 Kings 16, and he struck a weird, ill-advised deal with the oppressor, the Tiglith Paliser, the king up in Assyria to deal with some of the enemies that were attacking uh, you know, his kingdom, Ahaz's kingdom. And he gave him a bunch of money from like the temple treasury. Then while he was up there hanging out with the king of Assyria, he saw an altar that he liked and was like, ooh, we should have a bonus altar where I can go to try to divine information. We'll put it alongside the altar God said to make in his temple. Ick, really frankly, the original audience would have known that Ahaz was one of the key points in the derailing of the good stuff that David had left behind. So as we go along, we get the details of what Isaiah was supposed to communicate to Ahaz and the warning that God has for him. And then we get to the home stretch here, and it says, Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz, ask the Lord your God for a sign, whether in the deepest depths or in the highest heights, because Ahaz doesn't know what to make of this because he's kind of a superstitious man. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, I will not put the Lord to the test. Then Isaiah said, Hear now, you you house of David, is it not enough to try the patience of men? Will you try the patience of my God also? So God's like, Ask for a thing and we'll do it. And Ahaz is like, Nope, I'm not doing that. And then Isaiah's like, Come on, he said, ask. It's cool, just do the thing. But then in verse 14, in following up on that, Isaiah says, Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign. So you're not gonna ask, fine, all right, here's your sign anyway. I wanted this to go a different way, but you're being like this. The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son and we'll call him Emmanuel. Then it goes into a whole bunch of the stuff that's gonna work out for Ahaz in that moment, and the rest of chapter seven, frankly, doesn't really sound like a Christmas song at all. It sounds like an Old Testament prophecy that mattered in one particular moment of history, and then we got on with it, and that's that. So what does it mean? Well, I suppose option number one is it means nothing, and that this whole prophecy in Isaiah 7 was um something that the Jews assigned meaning to to get through a difficult time in their history. Nothing supernatural occurred whatsoever, but primitive ancient world divining led them to believe they had heard this thing or that thing. I mean, it's a possibility. We should at least consider it. Option number two is that the message to Ahaz was from God. It was an oracle or a sign, a message from God that Ahaz was really supposed to understand something and then do stuff in response. Ahaz saw it, it happened, he wasn't really on board, he continued to do weird stuff, and it's yet another chapter in the strange unfolding of the Mosaic covenant. I'm your God, you're my people, you do what I say, I'm gonna bless you, you don't do what I say, I'm gonna punish you. Either way, everybody will know you're my king. It's a cycle of the whole Old Testament narrative. So it could just be another chapter in that, and it's isolated in history. Another possibility is that this oracle, this message from God, meant more or less nothing to Ahaz. He had his head in another place, and nothing really happened, and things played out the way they were going to play out, but it would only be understood 800 years later, and nobody at the time the prophecy happened could understand it at all. I think that kind of thinking sets a dangerous precedent when we come to the Bible. That's where your super secret Bible code conspiracy theory people come in. And I'm really sorry, by the way, to any of you who listen who are like super secret Bible code conspiracy person who thinks that you can solve the numbers and everything else. The problem with that interpretive approach is that you have to assume that the people it was actually written to got nothing out of it, and that God pretended to be interacting with them but wasn't at all and was actually blowing them off. And only hundreds of years later, even thousands of years later, in our infinite wisdom, would we finally be able to understand what those dumb idiots back then could only hope to understand, because we're really the chosen people. God was behind this thing, this message to Ahaz. It did mean what it meant in that moment in time, it did unfold, it did affect things, and it also means something more eight hundred years later. This is kind of the pattern of the New Testament. It never washes its hands of what God had done in the past and then co-opts it for new purposes now, it treats it as fulfillment. And a chief amongst those books that do that would be Hebrews and of course Matthew that we're looking at. So here's what's happening. I think the Emmanuel thing, the whole idea of God with us, was meant to be understood in part in the moment it was written as an indictment of the way some of these kings who rejected God were rejecting being with God, God with us. And it also means what it means according to Matthew, that this is the fulfillment and completion again of that arc lobbed forward into history that lands on Jesus. You get the God with us thing happening in Isaiah, that's the bump, bum, bum bump, bump, and then it lands in verse 23 of Matthew chapter 1 with the bump bump, and we get the completion. The concept of Emmanuel is mentioned more than once in Isaiah. It comes up in verse 8-8. It comes up in chapter 9, verses 1 and 2. This is the one you've heard a lot. Nevertheless, there will be no more gloom for those who were in distress. In the past, he humbled the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the future he will honor Galilee of the Gentiles by way of the sea along the Jordan. And then the people walking in darkness have seen a great light, and you get that whole super famous Christmas passage that has, For unto us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders, and he will be called wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. And that's verses uh that's verse six of that same passage. So why does all of this matter? What's going on here? Why are we taking all of this time on what we do with the Old Testament version of what Matthew's referencing here? Well, two reasons. One, once again, I think if we treat the Old Testament as a separate entity and we just say, well, they didn't really get it or understand, and the New Testament's the real thing, then what you're effectively doing is saying that God divorced himself from everything he did in the past and did something new with Jesus. That his first plan was insufficient and the new plan is going to be better. But according to Hebrews 8, there's nothing wrong with the old plan. God is doing something more and different on top of it here. Further, it demonstrates that Jesus was always the plan. Jesus was always the plan when those kings were doing weird stuff, when there were wars and fights and battles, and just the bizarre, mind-melting, confusing stuff of the Old Testament. If nothing else, it points out the chaos and brokenness apart from the ultimate final redemption of God and points us all the more toward Jesus. Like I mentioned at the beginning, the people at Dwell are on the same page with all of this stuff. They make an audio Bible app that I think is great. I want to be around this document. I want to read it more and understand it. I think you're in the same boat. You can go and check out what they're doing at dwellapp.io slash tmbh. And if you like it, they're giving you 33% off a year membership. So instead of 30 bucks, it's 20 bucks, and it's hard to remember that URL. You can just click the link down below in the show notes. We're gonna get to Herod and the Magi soon enough, but I've still got more I want to think about on this whole virgin birth God with us stuff. I think it's a gigantic deal and merits a bit more thought. Looking forward to talking about that with you tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. We'll catch you soon.