by C. H. Spurgeon
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HT Chapel Library
The kingdom of Judah was in a condition of imminent peril. Two monarchs had leagued themselves against her; two nations had risen up for her destruction. Syria and Israel had come up against the walls of Jerusalem, with full intent to raze them to the ground, and utterly to destroy the monarchy of Judah. Ahaz the king, in great trouble, exerted all his ingenuity to defend the city; and amongst the other contrivances which his wisdom taught him, he thought it fit to cut off the waters of the upper pool, so that the besiegers might be in distress for want of water.
He goes out in the morning, no doubt attended by his courtiers, makes his way to the conduit of the upper pool, intending to see after the stopping of the stream of water; but lo! He meets with something which sets aside his plans, and renders them needless. Isaiah steps forward, and tells him not to be afraid for the smoke of those two firebrands, for God should utterly destroy both the nations that had risen up against Judah. Ahaz need not fear the present invasion, for both himself and his kingdom should be saved. The king looked at Isaiah with an eye of incredulity, as much as to say, “If the Lord were to send chariots from heaven, could such a thing as this be? Should he animate the dust, and quicken every stone in Jerusalem to resist my foes, could this be done?”
The Lord, seeing the littleness of the king’s faith, tells him to ask a sign. “Ask it,” says He, “either in the depth, or in the height above. Let the sun go backward ten degrees, or let the moon stop in her midnight marches; let the stars move athwart the sky in grand procession. Ask any sign you please in the heaven above, or, if you wish, choose the earth beneath; let the depths give forth the sign. Let some mighty waterspout lose its way across the pathless ocean, and travel through the air to Jerusalem’s very gates. Let the heavens shower a golden rain, instead of the watery fluid which usually they distill. Ask that the fleece may be wet upon the dry floor, or dry in the midst of dew. Whatsoever you please to request, the Lord will grant it you for the confirmation of your faith.”
Instead of accepting this offer with all gratitude, as Ahaz should have done, he, with a pretended humility, declares that he will not ask, neither will he tempt the Lord his God; whereupon Isaiah, waxing indignant, tells him that, since he will not in obedience to God’s command ask a sign, behold, the Lord Himself will give him one—not simply a sign, but the sign, the sign and wonder of the world, the mark of God’s mightiest mystery and of His most consummate wisdom, for, “a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.”
It has been said that the passage I have taken for my text is one of the most difficult in all the Word of God. It may be so; I certainly did not think it was until I saw what the commentators had to say about it, and I rose up from reading them perfectly confused. One said one thing, and another denied what the other had said; and if there was anything that I liked, it was so self-evident that it had been copied from one to the other, and handed through the whole of them.
One set of commentators tells us that this passage refers entirely to some person who was to be born within a few months after this prophecy, “for,” say they, “it says here, ‘Before the child shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good, the land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings’ (Isa 7:16). Now,” say they, “this was an immediate delivery which Ahaz required, and there was a promise of a speedy rescue, that, before a few years had elapsed, before the child should be able to know right from wrong, Syria and Israel should both lose their kings.” Well, that seems a strange frittering away of a wonderful passage, full of meaning.
And I cannot see how they can substantiate their view, when we find the Evangelist Matthew quoting this very passage in reference to the birth of Christ, and saying, “Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel” (Mat 1:22-23).
It does strike me that this Immanuel, Who was to be born, could not be a mere simple man, and nothing else, for if you turn to the next chapter, at the eighth verse, you will find it said, “He shall pass through Judah; he shall overflow and go over, he shall reach even to the neck; and the stretching out of his wings shall fill the breadth of thy land, O Immanuel.” Here is a government ascribed to Immanuel which could not be His if we were to suppose that the Immanuel here spoken of was either Shear-Jashub, or Maher-shalal-hash-baz, or any other of the sons of Isaiah. I therefore reject that view of the matter. It is, to my mind, far below the height of this great argument. It does not speak or allow us to speak one half of the wondrous depth which coucheth1 beneath this mighty passage.
I find, moreover, that many of the commentators divide the sixteenth verse from the fourteenth and fifteenth verses, and they read the fourteenth and fifteenth verses exclusively of Christ, and the sixteenth verse of Shear-Jashub, the son of Isaiah. They say that there were two signs, one was the conception by the virgin of a son, who was to be called Immanuel, Who is none other than Christ; but the second sign was Shear-Jashub, the prophet’s son, of whom Isaiah said, “Before this child, whom I now lead before you—before this son of mine shall be able to know good and evil, so soon shall both nations that have now risen against you lose their kings.” But I do not like that explanation, because it does seem to me to be pretty plain that the same child is spoken of in the one verse as in the others. “Before the child”—the same child, it does not say that child in one verse and then this child in another verse, but before the child, this one of whom I have spoken, the Immanuel, before He “shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good, the land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings.”
Then another view, which is the most popular of all, is to refer the passage first of all to some child that was then to be born, and afterwards, in the highest sense, to our blessed Lord Jesus Christ. Perhaps that is the true sense of it; perhaps that is the best way of smoothing difficulties. But I do think that if I had never read those books at all, but had simply come to the Bible, without knowing what any man had written upon it, I should have said, “There is Christ here as plainly as possible; never could His name have been written more legibly than I see it here. ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son.’ It is an unheard-of thing, it is a miraculous thing, and therefore it must be a God-like thing. She ‘shall call his name Immanuel. Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good’; and before that child, the Prince Immanuel, shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good, the land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings, and Judah shall smile upon their ruined palaces.”
This morning, then, I shall take my text as relating to our Lord Jesus Christ, and we have three things here about Him; first, the birth, secondly, the food, and, thirdly, the name of Christ.