40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Isaiah 7:10-25 (Episode 449)

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

God tells King Ahaz to ask for a sign, but Ahaz refuses. God says He will send His people a sign anyway, and the sign will be a virgin-born baby who will be God with us. But after this promise is given, God speaks of more judgment. Have a listen. Show Notes: Support 1517 Podcast Network 1517 Podcasts 1517 on Youtube 1517 Podcast Network on Apple Podcasts 1517 Events Schedule 1517 Academy - Free Theological Education What's New from 1517: Bible in One Year with Chad Bird Broken Bonds: A Novel of the Reformation, Book 1 of 2 by Amy Mantravadi Junk Drawer Jesus By Matt Popovits  More from the hosts: Daniel Emery Price Chad Bird

Join me, Chad Bird, in reading through the Bible in one year in 2025. It doesn't matter if it's your first time or your hundredth time through the Bible, there's always more to learn about our Lord. The reading schedule we will follow is called the Blended Plan. It has daily chapters from the Old Testament and New Testament. And I will post a short video every day that unpacks one of the chapters for that day. So for the reading plan, for a link to daily videos, and for additional resources, go to 1517.org forward slash one year. May the Lord bless your daily study of his word in 2025.

Hi, podcast listeners. This is Amy Montravati, 1517 contributor and author of the new historical fiction, Broken Bonds, a novel of the Reformation. The year is 1524. With the church fracturing and revolution brewing, the lives of Martin Luther, Desiderius Erasmus, and Philip Melanchthon are woven together as events spiral out of their collective control. Erasmus is pressured to take a public stand against Luther. Melanchthon is caught in the middle and forced to choose between the two men he venerates. Journey with them as they discover the things that terrify and the hope that ultimately leads to strength. You can purchase your copy at 1517.org forward slash shop or head to the show notes for more information. Happy reading!

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast and check out all the other podcasts that are living over there and everything else that 1517 is doing. academies articles videos all of it uh go check it all out and while you're over there make sure you go to the donate link hit that and become a contributor if you're not one already keep everything that we're doing free for everyone to uh consume uh thank you so much to those of you who already do that chad we are in isaiah chapter seven and uh we are uh we got through the first

nine verses. We ended with this thing, and we talked a little bit about it, that if you want to stand firm, the thing you've got to stand firm in is faith. See, if you stand firm in faith, you're going to be firm everywhere else. If you're not firm in faith, then you're not going to stand firm at all. And so it's believe God first, and then everything else is going to be all right. Don't believe God, and it doesn't really matter how firm you try to be in the rest of this stuff it's it's not gonna work it seems like that is the the thing that they uh that they were unable to do for all these years is that try to do everything but believe god yeah the context here especially with king ahaz under underlines that because so we i think we talked about this in the

last episode but just to to recap ahaz who's the king at this point he faces the decision so you got the assyrians who are the big dog on the international scene at this moment they're uh they're coming they're coming in hot and there's been a a team up of the northern kingdom call it israel call it samaria whatever you want to call it the northern part of israel they've teamed up with the syrians also known as the arameans and these guys are going to try and provide a united front against the assyrians who are going to be breathing down everybody's neck all right and they're trying to pressure Ahaz and, of course, along with Ahaz, Judah, the southern kingdom, to join them so that, you know, there's strength in numbers. There's going to be three of these

nations against the Assyrians. Now, Ahaz realizes just on a political level, this is not wise. So rather than joining up with them, the temptation for him is to say, forget you guys, I'm going to join forces with the big guy, with the Assyrians, and they're going to protect me. I'll become their vassal. And when the Assyrians come in and wipe you guys out, I'm still going to be okay. So that's the temptation that he's facing. And Isaiah shows up and says, basically, listen, if you go down that route, if you go trusting in the Assyrians, if you put your faith in them, then everything else is going to fall apart because you're taking the tiger by the tale here. This is not going to be to your or your nation's advantage. So that's why this is

such a critical moment in the history of the Old Testament, really. Because if Ahaz goes down the road that he is not only tempted to go down, but we know historically he does go down, then basically from this point, really this point onward, Israel is in a downward spiral. The Assyrians are going to come in. And even though Hezekiah, who's going to be the next king, even though Hezekiah is going to survive their onslaught, barely, remember the Assyrians had besieged Jerusalem, but the angel came in, wiped out the Assyrian army. So Hezekiah and Judah, they survive, but it's too late. I mean, they're already in this downward spiral that's eventually going to end in 586 with the destruction of the southern kingdom by the Babylonians. So this is a critical moment. It's a crossroads.

and ahaz is going to take the wrong road but that's kind of the the situation here it's a it's called the faith in the trust to trust in the promises of god so uh having said all that and ending with verse 9 this firm in faith and not firm at all then god is going to offer kind of a last chance to ahaz and that's what we're going to pick up here with 7 10 again the lord spoke to Ahaz. So this is the Lord speaking through Isaiah to the king. Ask a sign of the Lord your God. Let it be as deep as Sheol or as high as heaven. Man, I don't even know what I would say if a prophet of God came up to me and said, hey Chad, got a great deal here for you. Ask for a sign and it doesn't matter what it is. I mean, it can be as outrageous as you can

possibly imagine. Deep as Sheol, high as heaven, just ask for a sign. God is going to give you the sign so that you will trust in Him. I mean, I guess I would come up with a sign, right? I mean, God is offering this. Well, and this is an anomaly in Scripture. You go to, I mean, in the Old Testament as well, but you go to the New Testament, people ask for signs from Jesus all the time. Now, Jesus does lots of works. He does lots of healing and miracles and all this kind of stuff. And all the time, his opponents say, give us a sign. What sign do you do?

You know, we need a sign from you. And he never does it. And he always rebukes them, right? And he says it's an evil and adulterous thing, you know, to ask for a sign. So God is not typically, like God does lots of miraculous stuff, But he doesn't typically offer signs just for the sake of signs, for the sake of proving things. He doesn't do that. These signs are always like in service of the neighbor to heal someone, to feed somebody, whatever it is, raise someone from the dead, this kind of stuff.

But he won't just do some kind of work or create some kind of wonder in order that you just might know that he is. He doesn't do a lot of that. He definitely doesn't do it on demand. yeah at the very at the very most you have gideon who out of fear ask if he can be given a sign and god you know does relent and say okay okay all right we'll do the whole fleece thing i'll give you a sign but yeah typically either god just on his own initiative does a sign or on rare occasions will say all right to someone who needs a sign but to come to someone and say hey you want a sign Ask me for a sign and I'll give it to you.

Pretty rare thing. Pretty rare thing. Now Ahaz does not take advantage of this anomaly. Instead, he pretends as if he is the most pious king who has ever sat on Israel's throne. I mean, I am, listen, I am so righteous. I am so holy. I am so committed to the one true God. I would not dare ask a sign or in his own words, he says,

I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test. This just sounds like he thinks it's a trap. It's such an anomaly that he's like, I am suspicious of this. This seems like something that doesn't usually happen, and I feel like I'm being set up here. If you've already basically made up your mind to do a thing, and the prophet is saying, Hey, man, I put your faith in the wrong place. If your faith isn't in God, then whatever else you're planning, that's not going to work. But you've kind of decided.

Then he says, tell you what, ask anything of God. Maybe you don't want to do that, where you're like, I've already kind of made up my mind, and I don't know if any sign is going to change that, and I don't need to see some sign, heap up condemnation upon myself for rejecting this sign by doing the thing that I'm planning on doing anyway. That's what it kind of seems like here. Or like, yeah, like you're going to say this in a pious kind of way, but mostly I think you're like, I don't, there is no sign that's going to keep me from doing what I've already decided to do. So like, why even risk engaging in this?

Yeah, the sign is going to be just one more hurdle that he has to get over in order to accomplish his own will, which he's already decided he's going to do. so he uh he says that and verse 13 continues with you know he's always rejected this offer from god and so isaiah goes on to speak this word and it's not keep in mind too that this is not just addressed to ahaz because the address c as we're going to hear is the house of david and when he goes on to say is it too little for you to weary men that you is in the plural so we kind of have a bigger picture here this certainly is addressed to ahaz contextually that demands that demands that he be at least included in this address but it's also a bigger picture too it's kind of this the house of david of course is a name for the whole dynasty of david so i'm going to read uh

let me read 13 through i want to get the whole context here so let me read 13 through 17 and then we'll pick this apart detail by detail so ahaz refuses and then the prophet goes on speaking this word from the lord here then oh house of david is it too little for you to weary men that you weary my god also therefore the lord himself will give you a sign behold the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel. He shall eat curds and honey when he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the boy knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land whose two kings you dread will be deserted. The Lord will bring upon you and upon your people and upon your father's house such days as have not come since

the day that Ephraim departed from Judah, namely the king of Assyria. So a lot going on here. This, of course, is a famous verse because it's quoted by Matthew in reference to the Virgin Mary conceiving and bearing Jesus, whose name is Emmanuel, of course, meaning God, God with us. so i want to talk about we should talk about a few things here first of all god responds by saying you're really wearying me house of david you're wearing me out i mean how much of this do i have to put up with but it's one thing for you to wear out to weary men but now you're wearing me as well so it's kind of this idea of i'm putting up with with so much of you and it's really it's getting old. So I'll tell you what, you didn't want a sign. Well, too bad. I'm going to give you a sign

anyway. And here's what the sign is going to be. The virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel. So there's so many interpretations of exactly what this means. And we're not going to go over all of them. I just want to maybe highlight a couple of them. The challenge here is this the challenge is that if you just were to take isaiah 7 14 that verse and take your scissors and your paper bible and cut out those words and remove it from its context then it would be pretty clear that this is direct prophecy of the virgin birth the challenge of course is that it is situated within this bigger context when you read on after that verse, it talks about how before the boy reaches a certain age where he can refuse

the evil and choose the good, then the land whose two kings you dread, talking about the king of Syria and talking about the king of the northern kingdom, is going to be deserted. And so the context, at least in my opinion, and I'm very open to disagreement about this, but the context to me suggest that we're looking at at least some sort of immediate partial, I'll explain what I mean by partial in a minute, partial fulfillment of this. That there's some child that's going to be born in the near future that is going to be a sign for Ahaz and for the house of David in general. And then the ultimate fulfillment of this, what you might call the true fulfillment of it or the major fulfillment of it or whatever you whatever terminology you want to use is when

the virgin mary herself gives birth to jesus and he is the true the true emmanuel that's one way of reading this verse this is where you basically are looking at either it's called a double fulfillment or something which is partial and then it comes to its complete fulfillment in the birth of jesus that's one way to understand this another way is to see simply see this as as a direct prophecy of of the virgin birth and to understand the history that's described after that as kind of a uh like an accordion that's it's got this big broad history that like an accordion is pressed together into this small small framework but it's got a bigger historical fulfillment in view. I'm not going to go into all the other interpretations of this, but that's at

least a couple of different ways that this verse has been understood. Let me say this, though, just to clarify for those of you who might be wondering about the whole language of virgins and what that means. So the Hebrew that's used here for virgin is Alma. We've got a couple different words in Hebrew that can refer to a girl who's at this stage in life where she is of marriable age in puberty but has not born children yet and one of these is alma which is what is what is the other is betula so that's that's the hebrew that's used here it's it's not really i wouldn't call it vague but it's a more general term for a young girl who's not married and has reached the age of a puberty it's not talking exclusively about her sexual condition in other words

however that being said when you go forward in time and you go to the septuagint the greek translation of the hebrew the word that that they use uh is the greek that's used there parthenos is specifically in reference to a virgin and that then becomes the translation the greek word that's used by matthew when he uses this in reference to in reference to mary so it becomes even more specifically in reference to uh to a the sexual condition of the woman to the fact that she is a virgin when you get to to the greek so it it's much more specific in the greek translation than it than it is in the hebrew and so if you see this as a partial and then a full fulfillment or a double fulfillment then the ultimate fulfillment in mary is in fact

because she is a true virgin, and you have the virgin conception and the virgin birth of Christ from her. What do you make of, so you have this part that's strange, which is, you know, he'll eat curds and honey when he knows how to refuse evil and choose the good, and before that, you know, before he knows how to choose the, you know, to refuse evil and choose good, the land is going to, they have two kings, those are going to be deserted, and all this stuff's going on. So this is going to happen before this this thing happens right before the certain now most people think about this as like an age in fact if you've ever heard anyone make some sort of age of accountability argument this is like a text that they'll go to and they'll say like well right here see like even

jesus had like an age of innocence or whatever i've always thought that because with with the son of god and we've done a we've done a lot of this you have jesus like showing up in the old testament and stuff sometimes you get stuck in this this very like time constrained way of thinking and when you have a prophecy like this you you tend to revert to this thinking that like jesus doesn't exist uh yet right like so that like this well this is going to happen but like that he's talking about a person in this son that is born that like does not yet exist which is not true right like this is not how this works and so certainly like christ is present for anything that you could possibly prophesy like christ is present now he might not be like born of the

virgin yet but like he is still there for it and probably active in it i mean he's active all throughout the old testament right and so sometimes i think that if you can pull yourself out of that sort of thinking and say like listen the bible can kind of speak two ways at the same time about like an event but the person that's like attached in the incarnation doesn't have to be removed from like the rest of what's going on even if it happens before that or if it happens after that it doesn't matter and so this this some a little bit like this before he he's you know when he's young and and knows how to refuse evil and choose good. Some of this language, and this might be totally wrong,

but some of this seems like what happens in the Incarnation is Christ is born under the law at a certain time in human history. And before that, there is no having to choose evil or refuse evil and choose good or anything like that that goes on. He's just with the Father. He's not born under the law. he's not taking on human flesh and all this sort of stuff now in some ways like he shows up in human flesh and you do have this sort of the the Christ who walks the earth is still like the

Christ that stands in the furnace with Shadrach Meshach and Abednego so all these things are true at the same time but uh but there's this this period of time where Christ is living as one under the law um and that would seem like the time to me that like there is is now refusing evil and choosing good like this time period is like is isolated to that i mean does that make any sense yeah yeah yeah yeah if i'm following you then uh there's certainly gonna be a time when that is true for for christ himself when he refuses the evil and chooses the good and of course i completely agree with you that christ is always there he's in fact he's the one who is speaking through Isaiah

about the ultimate fulfillment of this. If the word is being spoken, he's there, right? Yeah, he is the word. And I'll add this too, just to kind of, not that it's going to solve the mystery here, but I mean, it is one thing to keep in mind that when the prophets,

when the Old Testament prophets would talk about the future, they would often, I use the example of the accordion, they would often i'm going to make up a word here accordionize they would often accordionize or shrink as it were history because they would they would often look at things that were far off but they would describe them as if they were near or they will collapse by the way the way that god does way that god does yeah i mean you see this you see this also famously in the gospels when

Jesus talks about the destruction of the temple and his second coming in the same kind of context. This is a shrinking of history. I mean, Jesus tells his disciples that he has to leave for a little while. Yes, and here we are. What year is this? The year of our Lord, 2025. Yeah. Yeah, the example that's often used is, say you're nearing the Rocky Mountains,

And you see a peak in front of you, and then you see another peak behind that. Now, from the perspective in which you stand, the two peaks, the near peak and the far peak, look like they're, you know, I don't know, a couple of miles apart from each other. Whereas in reality, they might be 50 miles apart, whatever it is. There's a much, from your perspective, you're only able to see a short distance between those two. whereas in reality if you were to actually get to that first peak you'd see oh man no it's a lot farther than i realized and the old testament prophets were often like that they would speak of the near and the far as if there were a a short distance or a short time and that might be part of what's going on here as well in the end i mean a lot of this is just kind of just abstract kind of

speculation because in the end we know that the the word was fulfilled in the birth of jesus in conception and the birth of jesus and as i mentioned you have the hebrew in this case made more clear by the greek because when the hebrew was translated into the septuagint and the septuagint was quoted by matthew then they used that greek word parthenos which is the specific greek word for a virgin so even if you and this is the direction i lean even if you view isaiah 714 as in referencing, at least initially, some young woman having a child who's named Emmanuel within that historic context, then that doesn't in any way detract from the fact that that promise still needed to be fulfilled in a true virgin conceiving a son who is truly God with us,

jesus the messiah i think also you have to remember that this this prophecy is not something that this particular king has to see so the the way that the god addresses his hero here then house of david so that so he's talking to a king but he's addressing him like that he's addressing his people and he's saying and he's not saying okay king uh you said you didn't want a sign well i'm going to give you personally a sign it's like okay you've rejected a sign i am going to give the my people a sign like that is and that is exactly what he does right so you might be long dead when i do this but my people are going to receive a sign and not just any sign but like the sign like the the biggest sign that i will ever do for anybody is going to happen

And this fits to the idea of a child being a sign, son or daughter, as far as that goes, fits within the salvation story perfectly. I mean, even though, for instance, Isaac isn't called a sign, he's still a sign in the sense of he is the sign of the Lord's, not only his ability, but his faithfulness to fulfill this promise to Abraham and to Sarah. And then you have the three children of Hosea and Gomer, all three of whom are signs, and their names are indicative of the signage that they embody. And you have, in Isaiah itself, you already have him with a son whose name means, a remnant shall return. He's going to have, in chapter 8, another son who is famously named, it's the mouthful, Maher Shelal Hashbaz. That name itself is a sign. and so here you also have a child who's going to be a sign so you can trace this use by god of children born to people as signs already from genesis through the end of the old testament which

is a perfect lead in the course to what's happening in the conception and birth of jesus the ultimate sign that god is fulfilling all those promises in him i mean even i mean it starts in genesis and goes all the way up and even into the new testament with john the baptist who is clearly a sign, right? I mean, and so, yeah, I mean, directly preceding the ultimate fulfillment of sort of

every miraculous birth, I mean, you have one that happens literally right before the sign is ultimately fulfilled. Yeah, you have these two births, conceptions of birth, John the Baptist and Jesus, back-to-back, both of which are

signs of different things. John's birth is a sign of the coming to the end of the old covenant the arrival of elijah and then the coming of the new covenant and the work of christ in the course then christ as the sign is the fact that now all god's promises are yes in in him yep all right so i think that's really all that we need to talk about in in those verses we spent quite a bit of time on those but i think it's uh good to And good to add a little bit of clarity to those, just to kind of get us back to the history. At the very end of that section, verse 17, God is talking about how he's going to bring upon his people a coming destruction.

And he names it at the very end. In fact, he kind of saves it to the very end. And the English translation did a good job bringing this out. It's the king of Assyria. He's the one who's on the way. And we're going to hear more about who he is in the verses that follow. The only other thing I would say is that God is sort of doing this last plea through Isaiah to like, hey, stick with me, you know, like stand firm in your faith in me, like trust

me, like stick with me, and they say no. And then the promise is, well, then all this stuff is going to happen, but the sign that I'm going to give you is I'm going to come for you, right? So since you won't stick with me, I'm going to come and get you in the flesh. Yeah, it's not the sign that you would have thought that would follow the rejection of the proffered sign. The sign is still, okay, I'm still going to be Emmanuel, and I'm going to be God with you to rescue you, despite the fact that you have proved unfaithful, despite the fact that destruction is coming, I'm still going to be faithful and be the God who is with you and for you.

Yeah, because what you have is the people unwilling to be people with God. but God still be willing to be God with his people, and that's what he's going to do. Yeah, yeah, perfect. All right, so we'll pick up with verse 18, and we'll hear more about what God is going to do in the immediate context with the coming of the king of Assyria. We have different images that are used here,

I want to fly, I want to be, and then we'll hear about a barber with a razor here in a minute. So verse 18, in that day, the Lord will whistle for the fly that is at the end of the streams of Egypt. So that's one direction. And for the bee that is in the land of Assyria. So he's doing some divine whistling, calling for the fly from Egypt, the bee from Assyria. And what will these do? 19 says they will all come and settle in the steep ravines and in the clefts of the rocks and all the

all the thorn bushes and on all the pastures so this is basically a extended metaphor where god is going to call for the nations whether it's the egyptians or whether it's the assyrians and just like flies settle all over the place or bees buzz in all sorts of different locations so these enemies are going to come in and they're going to occupy not just occupy but of course They will be engaged in domination and instruction. So that's going to happen. Then he goes on, verse 20. In that day, the Lord will shave with a razor that is hired from beyond the river.

The river here being the Euphrates River connected with Assyria. And then he goes on to clarify that. This is with the king of Assyria. So the Lord's going to shave with a razor that's hired beyond the river, namely with the king of Assyria. What's he going to shave? he's going to shave the head and the hair of the feet and it will sweep away the beard also no more hair in other words and the hair of the feet could be a euphemism we know that feet elsewhere in the bible are used for uh uh sexual organs of a man so this could be like the hair

you can see hair on your head as well as your beard as well as a hair that you can't see so a full shaving that's going to take place and I would assume that if the king of Assyria is wielding the razor there's probably going to be a few cuts in there as well he's probably not the most skilled barber that's out there

well this is an interesting way to describe a complete wiping away I might have talked about this before I don't remember but this would have been over 20 years ago now

i went to mount saint helen uh when i lived out in seattle and uh i don't know what it looks like now but at that time it had been you know 20 years since that it happened it's been 45 years now a while yeah as a kid when it happened yeah it happened the year i was born but anyway so i was i was 20 years old at the time but where we were up on this road up above it and the thing that was crazy about it is even 20 years later everything had been had been swept away and you could tell that it had been like swept away in the same direction like and like and almost like the hand of god had come down and just in one sweeping motion uh just laid everything to waste uh but you could you could see the the force and the direction the force came it wasn't like an

explosion it wasn't like that you know like if something like got blown up like you would see in a war movie or something it was very it was very eerie because it was like a flood almost you know and uh and that's the image i kind of get in my head with this razor thing if you think about you know if you've if you're a guy and you've ever shaved your face or i suppose if you're a lady and you've shaved your legs or anything else if you let them grown out a little bit i mean a razor just kind of takes everything off and uh i mean if you leave one path if you just you know if you just shave one part you just have to and so if you're talking about god being like i'm going to uh i'm going to send these people in and they're going to do the work and

it's going to be uh imagine if my people are like the hairs on the head of a person or the hairs of a beard like this is what it's going to be like it's going to be like that complete it's all going to be like taken off in one sweeping motion which is a fairly startling image if this is being talked about being done to you yeah yeah it's a it's an image of complete reversal complete undoing complete removal and in this case the complete yeah complete destruction and that destruction is outlined in a different sort of way with more agricultural, I guess you'd call it, images in what's described next.

He says, in that day. So verse 20 begins, in that day. And then you have the razor image. And now we have another, in that day. A man will keep alive a young cow, a couple of sheep. And because of the abundance of milk that they give, he will eat curds. For everyone who is left in the land

will eat curds and honey. so this is not the typical way that israelites would feed themselves they were agriculturally based so you didn't just have a cow and a couple of sheep that you hope to get some milk from and that was your sustenance you had crops that's how you that's how you fed yourself this is a in different regions of the world supported themselves in different sorts of ways you certainly did have places that were more directed toward herds of cattle or goats or sheep you also had places like tyrant side in which were located by the sea and so they fed themselves with a lot of a lot of fish but israel was an agricultural a culture so what's happening here is that there's

been such a destruction that the only way one thing people have to eat is curds from the young cow that they're milking and then any any honey that they can gather and we're not sure if this is actual like honey from beehives which would have been unusual in israel or if this is the date honey which you can still purchase in israel today it's made from made from fruit but either way you're just kind of you're eking out an existence in other words because things are so bad and he goes on in verse 23 to describe this in in greater detail in that day he says so a third in that day in that day every place where there used to be a thousand vines worth a thousand shekels of silver, those places are going to become briars and thorns. It sounds a lot like

that parable that we heard back in chapter four, where God makes this vineyard and does everything necessary to get it ready. So that's going to produce an abundance of crops. And then nothing happens. It produces, you know, stink fruit, this bad kind of fruit. And so God just lets it be run over with all sorts of animals and enemies and it becomes a place of briars and thorns and that same thing is described here except in a actually more a more literal way so there were a thousand vines and they're worth a thousand shekels of silver you go there now and what do you see just briars and thorns and then it goes on to say uh with a bow and arrows a man will come there for all the land will be briars and thorns and as for all the hills that

used to be hoed with a hoe. You will not come there for fewer briars and thorns, but they will become a place where cattle are let loose and where sheep tread. I think of these kind of ghost towns that you'll see, or, you know, sometimes when I'm mindlessly scrolling, I'll come across these profiles that are like deserted places. You know, it used to be some mansion, or it used to be some hotel or it used to be whatever it was and these pictures show that nature has taken back over this place you know you got vines growing every place you got wild animals live in these houses it what used to be in this lavish beautiful home or very expensive hotel or whatever it is has now gradually it's been taken over by nature since it's been deserted it's kind of the

image i get here too you know you had a place that was full of these fruitful vineyards worth a lot of money you go there now and you better take a weapon because there's going to be dangerous animals there and all you're going to encounter are briars and thorns same with hills that used to be hoed you know kind of you just got to use your hoe to get ready for planting or to take care of the weeds or whatever it might be and now it's just place for grazing of animals and it's full of briars and thorns. And this is, all of these images, whether it's the razor or whether it is the eating of honey or curds, or whether it's the reversal of creation to where a vineyard is now a place of briars and thorns and a place for hunting and grazing, all of these are God's way through

Isaiah of saying, this is what's going to happen to Israel. This is what's going to happen to Judah. because not only ahaz but so many ahaz like people in israel refused to be faithful refused to put their trust in the one true god and as a result of putting their trust in the assyrians or in their false idols then there's going to be a reversal and this once place of you know flowing with milk and honey is not going to be fruitful anymore it's going to be a place for destruction which will then await God's reversal once more where he brings his people back and restores them to the land

and makes it fruitful once more. Yeah, one of the things that's interesting about this is that you have, I don't know, maybe I'm making too much of this, but one of the things that is happening in the judgment is that you're going to be sort of this reduced to eating this curds and honey. Now, if, in fact, this time in the, I don't want to say life of Jesus, who is eternal,

but this period of time for Jesus is, in fact, is time after the incarnation of eating curds and honey when he is able to refuse the evil and choose the good. there is this uh this interesting thing that i think it's interesting that both of those things come up like right out like right next to each other and that this is part of the thing that's going to be going on the judgment is that you're going to be eating what curds and honey and that part of god being made flesh is that he's going to join you in that judgment he's going to do that as well during that period of time when uh when he is born as one under the law that has taken on human flesh he also takes on that too and uh there's something kind of cool about that that

you have like in this prophecy of christ being born uh why do you even need to include this like curds and honey talk what the point does it serve if it's not to come up again here as this judgment is coming and what is the purpose of of emmanuel well is is to come and take on the judgment himself to be born into it to ultimately die under it and i don't know i've always thought that that there's a connection there that i don't know if people make much of it but i've always thought it was cool no it fits perfectly i mean the the fact that this prophecy was put in where it where it is in this context is a perfect lead into the fact that what does emmanuel do he doesn't come down and live among us as one who is absent from our sufferings but he enters into those

sufferings and ultimately not only enters into the sufferings but in an even greater way enters into the divine judgment itself finally taking that into himself on on the cross and swallowing down that judgment in full so that we who don't deserve emmanuel will actually receive him in full by grace well because i think that some people like when they when i maybe it's just when this gets isolated but uh when they take that text and it's like this christmas text and stuff and they're like oh he's gonna eat curds and honey that's nice like that's you know that's what a little baby would do or so i don't know like and i it's like they missed it it's like no it's not good actually that's actually not a good thing it's a bread and water kind of situation

this is not apple pie and t-bone steaks or something no this is what you eat when you don't have anything else to eat basically yeah this means that he's going to be born into the judgment that his people are under that's what it means

that's who God is that's good news good way to end alright well we'll leave it there the Syrians are coming so we're going to hear more about that next episode I'll see you then Chad see you then

We'll see you next time.