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Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of man. If the holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant’s child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too. And this means that we are never safe, that there is no place where we can hide from God, no place where we are safe from his power to break in two and re-create the human heart, because it is just where he seems most helpless that he is most strong, and just where we least expect him that he comes most fully. Frederick Buechner, in The Hungering Dark,

Isaiah 9:6 For to us a child is born, to us a son is given: and the government shall be on his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. 7 Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, on the throne of David, and on his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from now on even for ever. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will perform this.

These last two verses are well known, They’re recited every year all over the world. They’re Christmas verses, but as is so often the case, their power is diminished unless we carefully think through the context in which they occur.

Why does God give us this magnificent promise just here in the prophecy of Isaiah?

How does the argument hang together, and what does it say to us today?

It helps to remind ourselves of the historical context. We are now about halfway through the eighth century before Christ, three-quarters of a millennium before Jesus. The southern kingdom, Judah, is on the one hand fairly prosperous. It has lost a king fairly recently, King Uzziah, and now it has King Ahaz, who is a wheeler-dealer. He has all of the answers along purely political lines.

At the same time, this little nation is facing a coalition of forces in the North. In this mix, Judah was wheeling and dealing and seeing conspiracies everywhere and trying to sort out its affairs.

Isaiah 8:11 For the LORD spoke thus to me with a strong hand, and instructed me that I should not walk in the way of this people, saying,12 Say you not, A confederacy, to all them to whom this people shall say, A confederacy; neither fear you their fear, nor be afraid.13 Sanctify the LORD of hosts himself; and let him be your fear, and let him be your dread.

God says trust me, for the future

With all that is going on, God through Isaiah says to him and them, don’t be afraid.

It is true that the church of God today in the Western world lives in a fair bit of fear?

We are afraid; therefore, we must develop our own political conspiracies and our own explanations for what is going on and cheer (depending on our politics) our right wing loudmouths or our left wing loudmouths as if somehow that’s going to turn the whole country around.

Don’t live your life in fear of what others fear.

They cannot see God’s hand in events. Your response is to be verse 13: “The Lord Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy. He is the one you are to fear. He is the one you are to dread.” God is different. Not to regard him as holy, literally, not to sanctify him, not to set him out by your actions and deeds as uniquely God is to make him out to be ordinary, unimportant, incapable, indifferent perhaps, even helpless.

The way we look at society and culture and the church and our hope and everything else is really determined by sociological analysis or the current fears and trends or getting our news from google, cdc, or whatever.

That’s why here, sanctifying God, regarding him as holy and fearing God, are put in the same breath. The Lord Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy. He is the one you are to fear. He is the one you are to dread, because you see, if you really do fear the Lord, you fear no other.

The psalmist says? “The Lord is the light of my salvation. Of whom then shall I be afraid?”

If you fear God truly, you fear no one else. If you sanctify him in your heart, if he is central to all of your ways of thinking and speaking, then how can you live your life in paranoid fear? He can be trusted.

Isaiah is not to act like the Judeans who fail to make God the most central fact of their existence. It’s not just Isaiah who’s being told this, but Isaiah is to pass this message on to the people. “The Lord is the one you people are to regard as holy. He is the one you people are to fear. He is the one you people are to dread.”

Sooner or later, people discover that God is either their sanctuary, as in verse 14a, or he is the stone that trips them up.

He’s one of the two. He will be a sanctuary if you regard him as holy. If you fear him, he will be a sanctuary. For both houses of Israel, for those for whom God is merely part of their creed and not much more, he will be a stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall.
For the people of Jerusalem, he will be a trap and a snare. Many of them will stumble. They will fall and be broken. They will be snared and captured.

Sooner or later, people discover that God is either their sanctuary or a stumbling block that trips them up. In other words, in substantial measure what we ultimately find God to be is shaped by our attitude to him. He does not change. He is what he is, but if you try to marginalize him, you don’t remove him. He’s still there, so you will trip over him. Sooner or later, you confront him. On the last day, if not before, you will face him. You cannot possibly escape him.

If instead you trust him, you discover he becomes your sanctuary. That’s why, of course, when a culture is largely removed from God, then it writes a lot of books on theodicy, that is trying to justify the ways of God to human beings. You know, God and the Problem of Evil, God and Suffering. I’ve written one of them myself! You can spend so much time writing books about how to justify the ways of God to human beings that you suddenly overlook something. Whenever you find the people of God in a condition of real revival, they don’t write books on theodicy; they make calls for repentance and contrition.

It is not God that has changed. It’s still the same God, but for the one group he becomes a sanctuary and for the others you just trip over him all the time, you can’t get around him. Then you have to write books defending him or attacking him or criticizing or defining God differently or getting another method. Something … something … to get around this awkward God who won’t get out of the way.

What does Isaiah say? Verse 16: “Bind up the testimony and seal up the law among my disciples.”

It’s a way of affirming the revelation God as opposed to this approach that finds conspiracies here and plans there and political solutions there. Return to the Scriptures. Amongst those who are genuinely following God, bind up the testimony of God. Bind up the law in the disciples. Let them have their confidence there where it should properly be.

The words testimony and law are regularly used in the Old Testament for referring to Scripture, to what God has revealed, his words. Bind them up in the lives and the hearts of the people of God.

Even if the culture goes differently, let the disciples, at least, bind God’s revelation in their heart because God is the one you are to sanctify in your hearts, and he is the one you are to fear.

You sense Isaiah’s resolution, “I will wait for the Lord who is hiding his face from the house of Jacob. I will put my trust in him. He is the one I will sanctify.”

Not only I but my whole family as well. Here am I and the children the Lord has given me.” I don’t think that he’s referring here just to his spiritual children. I think he’s talking about his real children. It is symbol laden.

When all human attempts at order and security and justice have failed, God himself will intervene the prophet says. This is not because the people have found the magic key to power. It is just because God is that kind of God, and he comes in and he finally does disclose himself and rescues his people.

Isaiah 8:22 “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 the way of the sea along the Jordan.”

“Galilee of the Gentiles.” This is from Lake Galilee to the Mediterranean, north of the valley of Jezreel and was always a place of a lot of cosmopolitan mix

“Galilee of the Gentiles” comes in due course to be a byword in Israel for that which is compromised and impure and religiously mixed and confused. This verse is quoted in the New Testament in connection with the gospel.

Matthew 4: 17“When Jesus heard that John the Baptist had been put in prison, he returned to Galilee. Leaving Nazareth he went and lived in Capernaum, which was by the lake in the area of Zebulun and Naphtali, (the tribal areas of this region) to fulfill what was said through the prophet Isaiah: ‘Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali, the way to the sea along the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles—the people living in darkness have seen a great light. On those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned.’ From that day on Jesus began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.’ ”

God’s promise of transformation, instead of being decimated by exile, by disease, by war, by savagery, now the numbers increase and their joy increases. “They rejoice before you …”

God’s promise of transformation, then in the two verses we quote at Christmas, 6 and 7, God’s means of transformation. A child is born.

Isaiah is pretty often talking about a child or children. In the great vision of chapter 11, the new heaven and the new earth, the home of righteousness, a child will play over an asp’s hole in perfect safety. Isaiah’s own children with their symbol-laden names, they’re part of the revelation that God has given. It’s almost as if the prophet Isaiah is anticipating that when God comes, even though God is God and he is to be reverenced and he is to be feared, yet when he comes in his transforming powerful work, he comes as a child.

He’s a human being and here’s the paradox of how God works. Not only is a child born, a son is given and the government is on his shoulders. This calls to mind the language of enthronement often used in the Old Testament. When the king came to power, God said that he appointed him as his son, or he engendered him as his son because the son was to represent the father.

The son was to enact all that the father gave him to do. The king of Israel was to stand, as it were, in God’s place and effect God’s justice and do God’s work.

He is the Everlasting Father. He is the Prince of Peace who brings in all of the transformation that has been described in the previous verses. Simultaneously a baby and the Mighty God.

Simultaneously a son of David, the appointed ruler and the wonderful counselor whose counsel and insight never err, whose plans are always perfect. Though elsewhere he is depicted as one who rules with a rod of iron, he is called a Prince of Peace, for he makes wars to cease. Here is the means of transformation,

God’s timing is on a far larger scale than ours. You’re in the middle of the 7th century with Isaiah. By about 735, the Assyrians are pressing in on the North. The exile in the South finally takes place about 587 BC, and then the prophecies that predict the people beginning to come back, about 535 they’re coming back.

Seven centuries go by between this prophecy and the arrival of Jesus. So when the people are told to trust God, they’re not simply being told, “Trust God and your life will be fine. Trust God and you will have happy children. Trust God and everything will be well with you.” No, Trust God across this sweeping pattern of God’s purposes for his people. Now this does not mean that can’t trust with the nitty gritty of life.

God wants people to be in solidarity with his own purposes across the centuries until the coming of Christ and to believe that God is in control and will bring all of his own promises to pass one after another, after another.

The Part We Play

The part we play in that may be in a time of suffering. It may be in a time of revival, or it may be in a time of declension. It may be in a time of prosperity. It may be in a time of poverty, but still God is trustable to bring about all of his purposes not only for my life, but for his people and for the triumph of his kingdom at the end and for all eternity. It’s a huge scale, and we will always, always misjudge him if our scale is so small that we cannot think in these sweeping terms.

Christ came as predicted, seven-and-a-half centuries later, but the consummation of these predicted blessings is only here in measure. We await his coming again. He has not yet made all wars cease. It is not yet the case that all implements of war are destroyed. This is still a savage world, and God works in mysterious ways even behind these sorts of scenes, bringing about his own purposes, calling his own people.

Ultimately our hope is in Christ’s coming again.

He came as predicted, but the consummation is not yet. We too, like those in Isaiah’s day are expected to trust God, to take him at his Word. Not to fear what our culture fears, not to try to find false security in whispered voices of the occult or complex conspiracy theories, but to remember that God is in control and Jesus is coming back.