A Meditation on Advent from Isaiah 7
Introduction
Advent is a Latin word meaning “arrival” or “coming.” Since around 431 AD the church has been recognizing the four Sundays leading up to Christmas as the Advent Season. It’s a season of anticipating the birth of Jesus as the promised king who would usher in peace. It’s a period pregnant with anticipation, like an expectant mother. Life gets increasingly uncomfortable, but there is hope in the assurance that the pregnancy will soon result in new life, though there is also the realization that the birth process itself is a very unpleasant experience. The years preceding the birth of Jesus were filled with anticipation that God would bring about justice to his people through the promise of an anointed king—a Messiah, or Christ—who would relieve them of their oppression. In the years since the birth of Jesus, the church shifted its anticipation to his second coming, when that which Jesus began would find its ultimate and final completion.
The four Sundays of Advent are Hope, Peace, Love, and Joy. The first Sunday of Advent is Hope. But what is hope, and where can hope be found? In 1734, Alexander Pope penned a 4-part poem entitled “Essays on Man,” in which he outlines his philosophy of life, grounded in his own understanding of God’s relationship to humanity. It’s an overtly optimistic view of reality grounded in a deterministic theological framework. Pope writes,
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurl’d,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world.
Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar;
Wait the great teacher Death; and God adore!
What future bliss, he gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.[1]
Notice how Pope says humans never are, but always will be blessed. For Pope, since God has ordained every event, good and evil, humans can only hope that God will make things better than they are now. Hope springs eternal because the present is always miserable.
The Bible has a different view on hope, one that doesn’t just spring eternal but is grounded in history; not in blind optimism, but in brutal realism. Pastor Jay Kim nicely sums up the Christian vision of hope this way:
This is what Christian hope looks like. It doesn’t ignore fear, anxiety, and doubt; it confronts them. It holds steady, clinging to peace in the midst of chaos. Through life’s many treacherous storms—be they pandemics, political divisions, social unrest, or personal struggle—Christian hope is buoyed by something greater that has happened and something greater that is going to happen again.[2]
The Christian view of hope is not tethered to “the power of positive thinking,”[3] but is anchored in the power of Immanuel, our only great hope. We can see this in Isaiah 7:1–17.
1 When Ahaz son of Jotham, the son of Uzziah, was king of Judah, King Rezin of Aram and Pekah son of Remaliah king of Israel marched up to fight against Jerusalem, but they could not overpower it.
2 Now the house of David was told, “Aram has allied itself with Ephraim”; so the hearts of Ahaz and his people were shaken, as the trees of the forest are shaken by the wind.
3 Then the Lord said to Isaiah, “Go out, you and your son Shear-Jashub, to meet Ahaz at the end of the aqueduct of the Upper Pool, on the road to the Launderer’s Field. 4 Say to him, ‘Be careful, keep calm and don’t be afraid. Do not lose heart because of these two smoldering stubs of firewood—because of the fierce anger of Rezin and Aram and of the son of Remaliah. 5 Aram, Ephraim and Remaliah’s son have plotted your ruin, saying, 6 “Let us invade Judah; let us tear it apart and divide it among ourselves, and make the son of Tabeel king over it.” 7 Yet this is what the Sovereign Lord says:
“‘It will not take place,
it will not happen,
8 for the head of Aram is Damascus,
and the head of Damascus is only Rezin.
Within sixty-five years
Ephraim will be too shattered to be a people.
9 The head of Ephraim is Samaria,
and the head of Samaria is only Remaliah’s son.
If you do not stand firm in your faith,
you will not stand at all.’”
10 Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz, “Ask the Lord your God for a sign, whether in the deepest depths or in the highest heights.”
12 But Ahaz said, “I will not ask; I will not put the Lord to the test.”
13 Then Isaiah said, “Hear now, you house of David! Is it not enough to try the patience of humans? Will you try the patience of my God also? 14 Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel. 15 He will be eating curds and honey when he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, 16 for before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste. 17 The Lord will bring on you and on your people and on the house of your father a time unlike any since Ephraim broke away from Judah—he will bring the king of Assyria.”
Hope Instead of Darkness
Isaiah refers to this period in Israel’s history as darkness (Isa 9:2; 9:1 MT):
The people who walked in darkness (חשׁך)
have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep darkness (צלמות)—
on them light has shined.
Isaiah was not referring to some demonic darkness, he was referring to the darkness of the geo-political turmoil in Judah in the middle of the 8th century BC.
One reason for Judah’s darkness was its current ruler, King Ahaz (2 Kgs 16:1–4). Unlike his father Jotham and his grandfather Uzziah, Ahaz walked in the ways of the kings of Israel: he offered sacrifices at unsanctioned sites (the so-called “high places”) and practiced child sacrifice.
Another reason for this darkness was the Syro-Ephraimite War. For most of their history Aram and Israel were strong adversaries, only occasionally forming brief alliances for political expediency. In the year 734, King Rezin of Aram and King Pekah of Israel formed an alliance to wage war against Judah and depose Ahaz. Their plan apparently was to put a son of Tabeel in his place as a puppet-king (Isa 7:6) to join their anti-Assyrian coalition. Ahaz tried to hold off the coalition with his own military strength, but it soon became clear that he was outmatched. In a state of vulnerability, Ahaz hired Assyria to protect Judah. But protection comes with a price. Ahaz had sold Judah’s soul, enslaving them to the Assyrian Empire.
But Ahaz was in a seemingly no-win situation—sellout to Assyria or lose the throne, and possibly the country. Isaiah’s advice seemed counterintuitive: “If you do not stand firm in faith, you shall not stand at all” (Isa 7:9). In other words, don’t trust your political instincts; trust the Lord.
We are still living in darkness. In fact, every generation has faced its own darkness. Some sects of Christianity have commonly looked at their own time as the darkest of days, which, to them, surely signals the end times. But that view typically forgets that there have almost always been darker days in the past.
Nonetheless, we are living in days of darkness. First, there’s COVID-19. The pandemic has increased distress, anxiety, fear of infection, depression, and insomnia, both among the general population and among healthcare professionals.[4] It’s not a baseless fear. More than a quarter of a million Americans have died, 1.4 million worldwide. There have been over 13 million cases in the US. Some are asymptomatic; some have flu-like symptoms; some are severe with lasting and lingering effects. Hospitals and healthcare workers are being taxed to exhaustion. Businesses are closing and unemployment is twice as high as it was a year ago as a result.[5]
But it’s not the only darkness facing us. There is racial unrest, political fighting and infighting, distrust in experts and objective facts, children separated from families, food insecurity, foreclosures, divorce, abortion, opioid addiction…You get the picture. Darkness is all around us.
Hope Instead of Empire
There is hope—our only great hope— instead of darkness. But before Isaiah points us to hope, he reminds us to be careful where we look for it. Hope is not found in empire.
The story of the Bible is set within the framework of historical events, and that history is one that is entrenched in empire. Isaiah 52:5 names the empires that have oppressed God’s people: Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon. The books of Daniel and Revelation describe the empire as “beasts”: lion, bear, leopard, ten-horned beast, and dragon.
The Assyrian Empire was a notoriously ruthless empire. Their palace walls and their royal annals testified to their brutality. Their vision of peace in the land was one in which all nations so feared them that they dare not revolt. Yet, for lack of apparent options, Ahaz placed his hope in empire. Ahaz bought Assyria’s protection with his loyalty and his tribute.
The main point of the book of Daniel is how to live faithfully under the duress of empire. Through its main characters, we see that God honors our integrity. We read that these men followed the laws of government until the government expected loyalty to empire instead of loyalty to their God. We observe that Daniel and his three friends didn’t protest the violation of their personal freedoms. They lived as servants in a God-forsaken government.
It can be hard to imagine the United States of America as empire. We have a Constitution upholding self-evident truths concerning certain unalienable rights. We have its Bill of Rights granting us personal liberty, including freedom of religion, speech, and the right to assembly.
So, the threat of empire to the American church is not the diminishing of religious liberty or personal freedoms. Mask mandates are not oppressions of empire. Restriction on church attendance is not oppression of empire.
The real threat of empire to the American church is when the church places her loyalty in the empire over or equal to her loyalty to Christ. The threat of empire to the American church exists when we pledge allegiance to party or personality for the sake of political power. Or when we attempt to leverage the influence of “the Evangelical vote” for political favor. The American church has too often placed its own interests above truth and protected its privilege rather than serving through self-sacrifice.
Around 200 years after Christ, Tertullian wrote Apology for Christians. This was at the height of the Roman persecution of the church. To those who persecuted the church, he wrote:
And now, O worshipful judges, go on with your show of justice, and, believe me, you will be juster and juster still in the opinion of the people, the oftener you make them a sacrifice of Christians. Crucify, torture, condemn, grind us all to powder if you can; your injustice is an illustrious proof of our innocence, and for the proof of this it is that God permits us to suffer; and by your late condemnation of a Christian woman to the lust of a pander, rather than the rage of a lion, you notoriously confess that such a pollution is more abhorred by a Christian than all the torments and deaths you can heap upon her. But do your worst, and rack your inventions for tortures for Christians—it is all to no purpose; you do but attract the world, and make it fall the more in love with our religion; the more you mow us down, the thicker we rise; the thicker we rise; the Christian blood you spill is like the seed you sow, it springs from the earth again, and fructifies the more.[6]
Although Pew Research shows the correlation between persecution and church growth isn’t necessarily true today, it certainly was in the early church.[7] The church stood in stark contrast to the Roman Empire. They shared their personal belongings with each other. They practiced love and forgiveness. They would rather give up their lives than to kill someone in self-defense. The church looked completely opposite of empire.
In his book Postcards from Babylon, Brian Zahnd offers a simple point of application for the American church: we need to read the Bible differently.
I have a problem with the Bible. Here’s my problem…I’m an ancient Egyptian. I’m a comfortable Babylonian. I’m a Roman in his villa.
That’s my problem. See, I’m trying to read the Bible for all it’s worth, but I’m not a Hebrew slave suffering in Egypt. I’m not a conquered Judean deported to Babylon. I’m not a first-century Jew living under Roman occupation.
I’m a citizen of a superpower. I was born among the conquerors. I live in the empire. But I want to read the Bible and think it’s talking to me. This is a problem.
One of the most remarkable things about the Bible is that in it we find the narrative told from the perspective of the poor, the oppressed, the enslaved, the conquered, the occupied, the defeated. This is what makes it prophetic. We know that history is written by the winners. This is true—except in the case of the Bible it’s the opposite! This is the subversive genius of the Hebrew prophets. They wrote from a bottom-up perspective.
Imagine a history of colonial America written by Cherokee Indians and African slaves. That would be a different way of telling the story! And that’s what the Bible does. It’s the story of Egypt told by the slaves. The story of Babylon told by the exiles. The story of Rome told by the occupied. What about those brief moments when Israel appeared to be on top? In those cases the prophets told Israel’s story from the perspective of the peasant poor as a critique of the royal elite. Like when Amos denounced the wives of the Israelite aristocracy as “the fat cows of Bashan.”[8]
Isaiah challenged Ahaz because there is hope instead of empire. And there is hope instead of darkness. Now we can turn to where hope can be found, our only great hope. To the surprise of Ahaz, hope was there in his midst.
Hope is in Our Midst
Isaiah told Ahaz to “ask for a sign of the Lord your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven” (Isa 7:11). Ahaz, not known for having any inkling of sincere piety, said he would not put God to the test. Even here, he is unwilling to listen to the Lord, even when directly instructed to do so. Nonetheless, Isaiah gives him the sign.
14 Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel. 15 He will be eating curds and honey when he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, 16 for before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste. 17 The Lord will bring on you and on your people and on the house of your father a time unlike any since Ephraim broke away from Judah—he will bring the king of Assyria. (Isa 7:14–17)
Notice when the child would be born. The “virgin” (young woman in many modern translations) has already conceived. The Hebrew verb is in the past tense (past tense verb הרה). She will give birth as a result of that conception (Qal act ptcp וְיֹלֶ֣דֶת). Before the child is old enough to know right from wrong, approximately 2 years old, Aram and Israel will be devastated. Two years later, in 732 BC, both Aram and Israel were handed heavy defeats by Assyria. In short, Isaiah is not predicting the birth of a child 700 years later. He is predicting the birth of a child very soon!
As was the custom in ancient Israel, the woman would name the child, and she would name him Immanuel, which means “God is with us.” The Syro-Ephraimite War was dark and the empire was brutal. The child Immanuel was a sign—a reminder—that God was with Ahaz in the midst of that darkness, if he would only trust God, not empire.
But we all know that Immanuel is Jesus. Right? After all, the gospel of Matthew flat-out says that Jesus was born to fulfill Isaiah 7:14. But it’s important to remember that fulfillment is not the same as prediction. For Matthew and all of the New Testament authors, Jesus was the fulfillment of the entire plan of redemption. As they watched the life and ministry of Jesus followed by his death, burial and resurrection, they realized that Jesus was the thread that tied together the entire story of the Hebrew Scriptures. Jesus accomplished God’s mission, so he was the fulfillment of all Scripture. Jesus was not simply a sign of God’s presence. He was God in the flesh. He is our only great hope.
Conclusion: Our Only Great Hope
The Christian vision of hope is not wishful thinking for personally favorable circumstances. The Christian vision of hope is bound to the double-edged vision of Isaiah: the Immanuel of 732 BC and the Immanuel of 0 AD. The Immanuel of the 8th century was an immature child whose role was to point the empire to God’s faithfulness. The Immanuel of 0 AD was the god-child whose role was to supplant empire as the fulfillment of God’s faithfulness. The Christian vision of hope, then, is intricately bound to the person and work of Immanuel, and to the mission of the church to carry it out.
First, the Christian vision of hope is found in Jesus, the Immanuel of 0 AD, our only great hope. Some of you may remember Edward Mote’s hymn from the early 1800’s that starts, “My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.” But what does it mean to place our hope in Jesus’ blood and righteousness? In short, our hope rests in the historical reality of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection. Because he conquered death, we stand assured that he will also, eventually, conquer darkness and empire. The Christian hope for the future is that Christ reigns in the present. That he ushered in the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven; that death has been defeated; that the principalities and powers of human empire will one day fall at the feet of the Kingdom of God, whose dominion “is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away and [whose] kingship is one that shall never be destroyed” (Dan 7:14).
Second, the Christian vision of hope is found in us, the church, represented by the Immanuel of 732 BC. This child was not God. This child was a signpost to their only great hope. Whenever Ahaz and the people of Judah saw this child, they were reminded that God was with them in the midst of darkness, despite the threat of empire. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told his disciples,
13 “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled underfoot.
14 “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. 15 No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” (Matt 5:13–16)
Jesus’ time with his disciples was short. The world would continue to long for and look for hope in the midst of darkness and empire, especially after he left to return to his father. So he had a plan—he would train a few faithful followers, who would train other faithful followers. These faithful followers would come to be known as the church. Our role as the church is to be salt and light, to be a city on a hill, and to be beacons of hope in the midst of darkness and empire.
How do we do that? According to Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann,
The early church is entrusted with the power of God. As witnesses they are able to stand before Roman authorities and attest to an alternative truth about the world. The world they describe is a world in which the divine power of healing forgiveness, restoration, and well-being is on the loose.”[9]
For Brueggemann, the church testified to hope as they enacted tangible change in the lives of people trapped in darkness and empire.
2000 years later, the mission hasn’t changed. In his 2008 book, Surprised by Hope, N.T. Wright sums it up this way:
Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings and for that matter one’s fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honored in the world—all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make. That is the logic of the mission of God.[10]
We are surrounded by darkness. The COVID-19 pandemic has merely made it more obvious. And the natural response is to look to empire to save us. Whether the empire is represented by lion, bear, leopard, a ten-horned beast (Dan 7:1–8), a dragon (Rev 12), an elephant or a donkey, the empire will always offer itself as the last great hope. But our only great hope is Jesus. And we, the church, are called to be a city shining on a hill, to be beacons of light in the midst of darkness and empire, so the world can see that Jesus is our only great hope.
Notes:
[1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44899/an-essay-on-man-epistle-i
[2] Jay Y. Kim, “Hope is an Expectant Leap,” Christianity Today 64:8 (Nov., 2020): 60. https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/november/advent-hope-is-expectant-leap.html
[3] Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking: A Practical Guide to Mastering the Problems of Everyday Living (Prentice Hall, 1952).
[4] https://academic.oup.com/qjmed/article/113/10/707/5857612
[5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/273909/seasonally-adjusted-monthly-unemployment-rate-in-the-us/
[6] http://www.tertullian.org/articles/reeve_apology.htm; p. 143.
[7] https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2014/december/sorry-tertullian.html
[8] Brian Zahnd, Postcards from Babylon: The Church in American Exile (Spello, 2019), 48.
[9] Walter Brueggemann, Names for the Messiah: An Advent Study (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2016) p. 31.
[10] N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008), 208.
Artwork:
The Nativity with the Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, painted 1308-1311, by Duccio di Buoninsegna
