Unto Us A Child Is Born
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Hello and welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way.
We’ve been in the book of Isaiah. Today we’re in chapter 9. We’ve been talking about the Assyrian empire, what it was like, what the threat to Israel was, and Isaiah’s response to it. As we said before, it didn’t seem very intuitive. “For unto us a child is born. The virgin shall conceive.” What does that have to do with the invading hordes? But we’re going to get into it some more today.
As Christians in the 21st century we say, “Ah! Spoilers! I know why the child is important, because Handel’s even written an oratorial about him.”
Yeah. If you have a certain experience, you have a song stuck in your head right now, but that song came from Isaiah chapter 9, so let’s pick up there. Greg?
As you say, we’ve been talking about Isaiah for a while and will continue, because Isaiah is a really long book and a lot of it does just simply hold together, despite liberal claims that there were two or three Isaiahs writing at different times.
What we’ve seen is what I’ve called Isaiah’s Christmas sermon, because when pastors go to preach Christmas sermons there’s a really good chance that if they’re not in the New Testament they’re in Isaiah and in these chapters.
The background, as you said, is imminent Assyrian invasion, and even more imminent the possible invasion from the northern kingdom Israel and its neighbor Syria into Judah, the southern kingdom. King Ahaz of Judah is not interested in God’s solutions. He concocts his own political solution of an alliance with Syria.
Which, if you know anything about Old Testament history, is a very bad thing.
Yeah, it’s dumb, but he thinks he’s brilliant for coming off with this, and God sends Isaiah. He doesn’t go and look for Isaiah. God sends Isaiah the prophet to say, “That’s not how I’m going to solve this. And if you’d like, in order to be encouraged, you can ask for any sign you want. You can ask for a sign in the heavens, a sign in the earth,” but Ahaz is already dead set on his political solution to things and says, “I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord my God.”
Isaiah says, “Fine!” or something like that. “Is it a small thing, of house of David, for you to worry men, but will you worry my God also? Therefore, the Lord himself shall give you a sign. Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and call his name Emmanuel,” and the nature of the sign is indeed a virgin birth, not the birth of an ordinary child from an ordinary young woman, as the gospel writers make very clear.
Matthew and Luke make it clear that when Isaiah said that, they were talking about the birth of our Lord Jesus, that he was indeed born of a virgin, that is a woman who has not had sexual relations with a man, just in case we’re not sure what the word virgin means anymore.
Both the liberal critics and often even conservatives say, “But that doesn’t seem to fit, because how does that answer the immediate military and political problem of first this conspiracy of nations to the north, and beyond that the Assyrian war machine that’s about to roll over everybody? It doesn’t seem like that’s a really useful answer.”
We continue into the 21st century oftentimes not understanding the relevance of God’s answers, of God’s plans, of God’s signs, because we have too small, too narrow of a focus when we look for how things could be fixed.
“I have this huge financial problem. Obviously, God should give me a sign by dropping a few million dollars into a Swiss bank account in my name. I’m waiting for that kind of sign.”
“Well, that’s not helpful then. I don’t know what God is up to, but I’m going to wait for that.”
I mean he could, but that’s not generally how he does things. God’s not like that. We misunderstand God. Ahaz misunderstood God. Judah misunderstood God. Israel misunderstood God. Assyria misunderstood God. God’s ways are not our ways, and the works of the flesh – the normal methods whereby human beings solve problems without reference to God, without trusting God, without falling back on God’s perspective of what’s important – all of that usually fails a lot. And even when it succeeds, it may not succeed the way we think it’s succeeding.
What Isaiah says to Ahaz in effect is, “You’re getting cocky. You’re the house of David and all that. You’re in the line of kings that supposedly leads to Messiah, so you think you basically have God in a bind here. You can ignore God because God is bound by his covenant promises to use you to maintain your dynasty and all that, so you can play both sides of the street. You can go seek your political solutions, but you know that God’s going to be forced to back you up at the end, if gods there be.”
God’s message through Isaiah is, “Forget you. Don’t need you.” The triune God can bring the Messiah, the Savior into the world without reference to the house of David, at least as they think of such things. A virgin, a woman untouched by a man is going to give birth to a child who will be God with us.
God’s people stared at that and marveled at that for another 500 years or so, trying to figure out, “What does that mean? I mean God is with us – his promises, his Word. What’s so special about this child? What and who could he possibly be that makes his coming into the world such a big deal?
“All right, so God doesn’t need the house of David, but really that just makes things worse. If God doesn’t need the house of David, we’re all toast because that was our one card left. God will always protect us because God needs us. Oh, he doesn’t need us? Well, basically we’re screwed then.” It doesn’t sound like the kind of hope that God’s people needed right then.
What’s so interesting too is it just fits the broader pattern in scripture of God providing the way out, of being the one to work power that saves. Obviously, we see that – we’re all Calvinists here – in soteriology, but constantly throughout all the different issues that have faced God’s people and their covenant heads, some of it was accomplished through them doing actions. But there’s an awful lot of it where the battle is the Lord’s.
Like Moses and Israel at the Red Sea. “Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord.”
But it’s also true that when the people had to act in faith, that was God saying, “Do this and then you’ll see that the battle is mine.” It’s not like it was really riding on them.
Oftentimes when God did require his people to do something, it wasn’t the obviously sane thing to do.
“Grab a torch and a pitcher and a trumpet and watch what’s going to happen here.”
We can track this through Hebrews 11, all of the heroes of the faith, but again and again – two things here. First, God comes up with amazing powerful solutions that glorify him and that rarely leave any room for glory upon the part of the human instrument. Secondly, what God’s people accomplish, or God accomplishes for them, often is not what God’s people want. God’s people want let’s say, “Let’s see the world converted.”
“Oh, didn’t see that one coming. Let’s march out through some easy path out of Egypt.”
“We’re going through a sea, and it’s just sitting there laughing at us. That’s not good.”
“All right. How about the little boy is going to take on a giant. Let’s give him some heavy weapons.”
And so we go. God is always doing something strange and, aside from the flood itself perhaps, there’s I think maybe not another time in scripture where the solution seems so absolutely like not the solution. Basically, God is saying, “You’re all going into captivity. That’s my great plan.”
Israel is already on its way out. Judah is going to join them in a short time. The land is going to be desolate. The Davidic kingdom is falling apart. It’s not going to be revived anytime soon. “You’re going to be slaves to a foreign power, but you’ll be alive. There’s my solution. What do you think of that?”
You’re both familiar – and I hope our listeners are – with Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in Daniel 2 and then again in Daniel 7, with the various animals followed by the one who comes in glory. In each case they looked at that and said, “Oh, here is God’s plan for history. Okay, there’s going to be this really powerful glorious kingdom, followed by a slightly less glorious kingdom, which isn’t God’s or Israel’s or anybody’s, followed by another kingdom which isn’t really God’s or Israel’s or anybody’s, followed by this really mean, nasty kingdom that’s going to stamp on everything and just be like a bar of iron crushing everybody, and this is going to take 490 years?
“Our plan was different here. We weren’t going to go into captivity. God was going to send angels and turn back all of the armies,” like he does at one point and destroys the Assyrian army. “Then he’s going to exalt us and lay down our enemies, and we’re going to have this great kingdom and we’re going to rule the world and it’ll be cool!”
“No, captivity is really what you guys need. It’s going to be the best solution all around for what I need done, and you’re going to have to trust me on this one, and you’re going to have to keep on trusting me for nearly 500 years. But when that’s done, it’s still not going to be the solution you think it is, but trust me because it’s going to be a lot better, if you have faith to believe.”
Somehow a baby in a manger wasn’t exactly what they had in mind, let alone a man on a cross.
So as we read through Isaiah we are constantly hit in the face with, “Here’s the plan. It’s not what you thought. Here’s the victory. It doesn’t look like the victory you had in mind. Here’s the solution. It’s not political or military. Here’s the kingdom. It’s not about lording it over Gentile nations. It’s all different.”
The prophet speaking for the Lord says, “God does not need any of this. You’re going to have the honor of being a vessel that God is going to use in the midst of it anyhow, at least a remnant of you will be, the faithful. God is going to bring you through all this. He’s going to take you out of the land. He’s going to take care of you while you’re out of the land. He’s going to bring you back into the land. He’s going to take care of you while you’re in the land.
“In fact, those very pagan powers that look so scary, they’re the ones who are going to oversee things and build you roads and offer military protection and courts and all that. Yeah, you’re going to be kind of a poor no-account nation, but you’ll be here right on time when Messiah comes.”
This is Psalm 8, right? Talking about the majesty of God, and then zooming in and focusing on the child, “Out of the mouths of infants…” There’s such an irony in that, that God delights in.
Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. Yes, throughout this Christmas sermon we keep coming back to the idea of a child. Sometimes the child is explicitly Jesus and sometimes he just talks about children. “A little child shall lead them.” The reference isn’t exactly to Jesus, and yet there’s some parallels, to be sure.
Anyway, that’s chapter 7. God is going to dispense with the kingdoms that are a threat – Syria and Israel – but Assyria is coming, and God’s okay with this. “Assyria is going to thrash you really good. Assyria is going to be like an axe, chopping things down left and right, and your world will become darkness.” In fact, chapter 8 ends with this –
And they shall pass through it, hardly bestead and hungry. And it shall come to pass, that when they shall be hungry, they shall fret themselves and curse their king and their God, and look upward. And they shall look unto the earth, and behold trouble and darkness, dimness of anguish. And they shall be driven to darkness.
Nevertheless, the dimness shall not be such as was in her vexation, when at the first he lightly afflicted the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali…
He’s referring to the early Syrian invasions when the Syrian armies came in and began to depopulate those regions but didn’t completely overwhelm them, so the affliction was relatively light, except of course for the people who were going to be captive or died.
…and afterward did more grievously afflict her by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, in Galilee of the nations.
That’s one of the first times that the name of Galilee pops up. Why Galilee in the midst of all this? Oh, why? Because…
The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light. They that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.
So the very place where the Assyrian armies are going to begin their work and do the worst of their work, northern Israel – they’re going to take that whole nation, all those ten tribes captive – one day that’s where the light is going to pop up.
Matthew in his gospel picks this up and says, “This is about Jesus preaching” – not in Judea, not in Jerusalem, but in Galilee, which bordered on the Gentile territories, Galilee of the nations. Of course, all his disciples except Judas apparently came from Galilee. Many of them fished on that sea. It’s in this context then – let me read what follows –
Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not increased the joy, the joy before thee according to the joy in harvest, and as men rejoice when they divide the spoil. For thou hast broken the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, as in the day of Midian.
For every battle of the warrior is with confused noise and garments rolled in blood; but this shall be with burning and fuel of fire.
So there’s going to be battle. There’s going to be war. And yet in the midst of this, God has got their back, as he did in the day of Midian.
It’s so interesting that it’s called the day of Midian, because usually we talk about the day of somebody as the victor. If we were going by that, it would be the day of the Lord, but then every day would be the day of the Lord. There would be no distinguishing.
Sometimes we cower in the shadow of the one that lost. We still speak with a little bit of trepidation of the former Soviet Union, of the collapse of the wall. We look back at World War 2 and we don’t speak so much of VE day. We speak of the Nazi hordes, of Adolf Hitler. Even children who don’t remember it anymore at least have seen Marvel movies and they know that at that point HYDRA was trying to take over the world, because that background works.
It’s easy to look back and see the bad guys, so God picks the name of the bad guys here. He says, “Yeah, that day…” in other words, think about it. What happened when Midian was a threat? What happened when Nazi Germany was a threat? What happened when the Soviet Union seemed unstoppable? God did some things that no one expected.
I grew up in the shadow of that. Obviously I didn’t live at the end of World War II. I didn’t hear Churchill say, “A great iron curtain is coming down upon Europe,” but I grew up with that as an established fact, and for my generation it was an established fact. The Soviet Union has the satellite nations firmly under its control. It controls East Germany, it controls East Berlin, and it will always be that way. We could not imagine anything short of an incredible war, that probably would not go very well for anybody, that would ever change that.
And then one day, to be sitting up late at night watching television cameras in East Berlin or West Berlin, since they were right on the wall, and seeing people just climb up on the wall and no one was shooting them. Then seeing people kind of jump over the wall or climb back both ways over the wall, and see East German soldiers standing there not sure what to do, and West Germans coming up and hugging them. “What in the world is going on here? This is not…”
Then we started hearing about the revolutions in Romania, and then all over the satellite countries. “This is not how this works. God would have notified us.” Most of the church would have said, “We’re on the road to World War 3. We’ve got the Soviet Union that’s going to move on Israel, then somewhere in there comes the rapture and Armageddon. This is it!”
Even those of us who didn’t buy into dispensational eschatology still pretty much could not imagine a world where this wasn’t the way things were, and when it fell apart it wasn’t nuclear war. It wasn’t any of the things that normally prove a great challenge to great empires. There wasn’t an assassination plot to bring down the leader and all that. The leader simply cowered and backed down again and again, not knowing what in the world to do, as various peoples and various nations finally said, “We’re tired of this. We say it’s over,” and the West rejoiced, but with a great deal of confusion.
God rescued his church from the control of the Soviet empire, and the United States had very little to do with it, only in a very indirect sense, and even God’s people in the West did not have nearly as much to do with it as we should have. It wasn’t that we were there holding all-night vigils praying for the collapse of the Berlin Wall. We just kind of stood there awestruck saying, “What?”
If there’s a lesson here for us, I think that at least part of it is that. First, God has not abandoned history. Secondly, what God is going to do with history isn’t what you think. It’s not what you plan. It’s not how you would do it.
I’ll give you another example. I had one gentleman come up to me just before the last election, just before things were questionable, saying, “I don’t know. I have this assurance from the Lord that Donald Trump is God’s anointed man. He’s going to see us through this. God is going to raise him up. God is going to give him the victory in the election, and everything is going to turn around. I’m sure that this is what God has planned.”
By the way, for YouTube’s sake, that was the safest most secure election in American history, for clarity.
And so Isaiah. “This is not what you think it is. You’re looking for God to make your life comfortable and easy by some kind of big wow kind of solution that will turn the world upside down and will require very little of you, except maybe some applause and a few bows at the end, and that’s not it. Judah is doomed. Judah is going into captivity.”
The captivity will be long, as Jeremiah says, a full generation, 70 years and more before God’s people will be back, and they will never come back to an independent kingdom truly again. There will always be powers about them to whom they have to kowtow. There will always be other forces, and even their own leaders will not always be particularly godly. In fact, they’ll get worse and worse as we move on.
A child! Most of the prophecies of Messiah focus upon the Messiah in his maturity, and sometimes upon his glory, and sometimes upon his suffering, but a very few point out that he will be a human, and he’ll be marked as a human because he will be born into this sinful cursed world and become one of us, God with us, Emmanuel, born of a virgin, and from there he will grow up. This is not going to be instantaneous.
The baby himself, as a baby, is not going to coo and peep and change the world. He’s going to grow up and he’s going to have a life and he’s going to do things. Isaiah himself later will tell us some of what he will do, and it mostly is kind of scary because it’s mostly suffering, ending in death, and that somehow through that he’s going to change everything.
See, the first thing you have to understand is that man’s problem is not that there are scary empires and devious conspiracies and technology that can destroy us all and nuclear weapons that can blow up the planet. None of those are the problem. The problem is our own sin.
This is kind of a sideline, but interesting. Today I asked my students, “Where does sin come from?” and they all said, “Well, the heart of man.” I said, “Whose heart would that be?”
That’s hard, and then what follows is, “And God is angry with the wicked every day.” It’s not the Arminian gospel of “God loves everybody and is trying to save everybody, and he really would if he could, but you know he’s limited by our free will choices, so we don’t know where this is going. It’s going to be a bumpy ride. It’s probably going to Armageddon and the rapture, but God really means us well and he would help us if he could.”
Not that God. The God who punishes sin, who punishes it either in the lake of fire or who punished it in his Son, and therefore the most important thing to happen in history with regard to man’s problem is the death of this child. This child came into the world to die. Now, the story doesn’t end there, but without that the rest of the story doesn’t make any sense and it wouldn’t even happen. He came to die.
“But why is this child so important then? You’ve already said he’s Emmanuel, God with us. We’re not sure what that means. He’s virgin-born. Okay, I guess. That’s really miraculous and kind of weird. The child is born, the son is given. Is there something in that? Why did you say that twice? The government shall be upon his shoulder, so alright, he’s going to be a ruler. We figured that – the house of David and all – and his name shall be called Wonderful.”
A lot of modern translations – and it’s not a translation issue in the sense of looking at the text, it’s a translation issue in terms of figuring out what Isaiah and what God actually meant – but a lot render it as Wonderful Counselor, because it keeps the adjective/noun thing that seems to predominate. But the thing is, Wonderful is a word we’ve seen before.
When the angel appeared to Samson’s parents they said, “What is your name, that we may do you honor?” and he responded, “Why do you ask after my name, seeing it is Wonderful.” The King James says “secret,” but the Hebrew text says, “My name is Wonderful.” Then we’re told the angel, whose name is Wonderful, did wondrously by stepping into the flame on the altar and descending in it. He became the sacrifice. He identified himself with the sacrifice. So when God says Wonderful – yes, a wonderful Savior who is a wonderful God who does wondrous things – him.
Counselor – Isaiah is full of references to how God alone is the one who has solutions. He did not ask counsel of anybody else. He doesn’t need anybody’s advice. There was no one kibbitzing with him when he created the world or when he planned salvation. He’s got it all figured out. His wisdom is infinite. We’re left in the dust with it.
The mighty God – well, there you go. At which point Jehovah’s Witnesses backpedal and say, “Well, that’s because Jesus is a god.”
“Wait, I thought you were a monotheist. Now you’ve got a couple gods going on? Are there more – maybe 3, 4, or 5 gods? How many gods?”
But this is a phrase that’s used elsewhere in scripture for Jehovah, for Yahweh – the mighty God – and so in calling him this, for those who are listening and paying attention, “What makes this child so important?”
The everlasting father – the Hebrew says “the father of eternity.” Here is an eternal being, i.e. God, who is from everlasting to everlasting, who transcends time. Again yes, it’s a child that’s born, and yet he is eternal, beyond the constraints of time and space and matter. He is sovereign.
He is the Prince of Peace. We’re talking about peace. He’s the Prince, the author, the ruler of peace.
“That’s because you’re looking at the wrong thing. If you’re looking at the immediate political effects of Jesus coming into the world, well, let’s see – destruction of Jerusalem, death of Nero, repeated assassinations and deaths violently of emperors, persecution of the church.” Jesus said, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” If you look at that it takes a much longer viewpoint to see what God is all about, and that’s what the text immediately calls us to.
He’s coming as a child, a divine child, God come in the flesh, God with us, but his work has a beginning that seems relatively small, maybe insignificant, but it will grow and grow and grow. Here again think of the prophecy of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar’s dream where the stone smites the image of the pagan kingdoms and then grows to fill the whole world. It’s not instantaneous. This is not a premillennial victory where Jesus is suddenly there, and suddenly the whole world is converted or subdued or whatever. This is a progressive thing.
When we get to the New Testament and we see Jesus saying, “Go and make disciples of all nations,” and see him ascend into heaven, and the angel saying, “He’s not going to be back for a little while,” –
“Oh, this was the ‘it takes a while’ thing? It starts small? Didn’t our master say like leaven or a mustard seed?”
Most of us I think if we saw Jesus ascend would do what the disciples did initially, just stare at the sky. “He’s coming back, right?”
Some while back I was talking to a young woman for whom I have a great deal of affection and respect, but she had grown up in this dispensational mindset and she was focused on the idea that Jesus was coming back soon.
I said, “You mean he can come back when he pleases. He can come back anytime?”
“No. Anytime is literally any time, which could be right now or 1,000 years or 10,000 years.”
I remember being 38 weeks pregnant and thinking, “Oh, any time now,” and then it was not in the 38th week.
Any time – who’s measuring the time here? Who’s setting the parameters? Who’s setting the goalposts? Well, it’s been 2,000 years so far and Jesus’ kingdom continues to grow. But as in the days of Isaiah it doesn’t grow the way we in our fleshly attitudes would like it to.
Most of us are probably good enough to not want laser blasts from heaven knocking down all the strongholds of wickedness, but we would at least like to see some major revival sweeping the country, and hoards of people swarming into churches, and heretics being kicked out of churches and out of seminaries and out of Christian radio ministries and television ministries, and really godly people standing up and preaching, and everyone rushing to go to church on Sundays. Can’t we have that, at least?
Well, not yet. There have been times in earth’s history where God has done that, little brief times, and probably there will be times like that again, but in the meantime Jesus has done a lot of smashing of nations.
Here again is the inverse understanding. People will look back at the 20th century and say Balkan wars, World War I, World War II, Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf wars, all of that and say, “One just blends into another. Where is Jesus Christ? Where is the kingdom of God? See, it all failed. We’re losing. This is the end.”
That’s the wrong perspective, just as Israel should not have said when they saw the Assyrians coming over the hill, “Oh, God failed us,” they should have said, “Oh, this is exactly what God has said. It is chastisement for our sins and the opening up of new possibilities that we had not foreseen. It is God getting rid of idolatrous Syria and apostate Israel, while he punishes us for our sins, and he’s escorting us to a place where we won’t be all that terribly comfortable, but we’ll be safe until he’s ready for the next move, because that’s what he said. We’ve read the book and we believe it.”
We need a major readjustment of what victory looks like. We use semi-technical terms like post-millennial, amillennial, pre-millennial. I really am not liking those terms a whole lot, often because we misunderstand each other.
“Post-millennial – that means you’re utopian, where you think everything is going to get better real fast, and there’s going to be peace and joy throughout the world any day now!”
“Yeah, once we stone the adulterers and all the homosexuals then there will be so many…”
One writer coined the term “preppy post-millennialism,” and if that’s what you’re talking about, no, that’s not what the Bible teaches.
Preppy as in you wear button-down shirts? Or preppy as in like, “I have a stock load of food in my cupboard.”?
I think it was the first. I think it meant a victory that you can get simply by reading books and watching YouTube videos and never really having to do much that’s going to cause you to sweat or stain your clothes – that kind of preppiness – and as a small child or young teenager that’s probably where I was, because all I heard was victory, victory, victory. But the older I get and the more I read scripture, the more I understand that God’s kingdom hastens to the darkness.
One of my favorite songs, which you perhaps know, is “God the All-terrible.” First of all, there you go with the title.
Yeah. Our church pianist, who conducts the children’s choir, was having each of the elders come in and share with them the elder’s favorite song, explaining why he liked said song. I wasn’t thrilled to do this because I’m not great with small children, “But okay, if that’s what you want. God the All-terrible.”
She knew it but, “Can you come in and explain to the children what those words mean, and why that’s your favorite?” I don’t remember what I said, and I don’t know if the kids understood it, but I tried to be really simple.
Aside from the fact that the words are set to something called Russian Hymn, which by itself is really cool – like the Austrian Hymn, “Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken” – there’s the line “Through the thick darkness Thy kingdom’s hastening.” That.
You look at World War I and World War II and you say, “How is that the kingdom of God? It left Europe in shambles. It killed so many people. It left half of Europe enslaved to the Soviet empire, to communism.” At the same time, in the United States we went from being something kind of like a republic to being a socialist oligarchy under the New Deal. Where were the victories here?
I don’t have all the answers, but I know that nations who had apostatized, who laughed at God, who ignored him and thumbed their noses at him, suddenly felt the full weight of his wrath. I know that the underground churches prospered despite the persecution, with a true faith that was better than that of the established orthodox churches that were in bed with the State. I know that churches in the West were roused to work with the underground churches and realized that there are people here who are suffering for Christ, and tried to help.
So you can go through these things and see the hand of God in retrospect, but it’s not how we would have done it. It’s not how we would have written the story, because God would draw glory to himself, and he’s not in a hurry.
I remember hearing I think a Lutheran pastor talking about God’s providence and the hard providences. God has put himself there, but that’s not where he’s put himself to be found. Where he’s put himself to be found is on the cross and in his Word. We can try to read God’s mind, but really he spelled it out for us with the things we really need to know.
Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even forever. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will perform this.
So God does have an agenda. It involves peace – peace first of all between God and men, but lest we make light of that and say, “Well, that means a few people are going to be saved,” that’s not really what he’s saying. It’s peace between God and the world.
God loved the world in such a way that he gave his Son. God gave his Son that the world through him might be saved. We confess that this is the Christ, the Savior of the world over and over again in the New Testament. It is very clear that God’s goals are not slight. He is not satisfied with just getting a few people here and there, and that counts somehow, but he is slow by our standards and we have to wait a lot.
The kingdom continues to increase. “His power increasing still shall spread, His reign no end shall know: Justice shall guard His throne above, And peace abound below.” A wonderful Christmas song, but it upsets all of our sociological, political, and military notions, and simple selfish notions of what victory is going to look like, of what God is really up to.
We’re going to continue in Isaiah and we’re going to see that this really doesn’t change. In fact, we’re going to find out that this wonderful child who we praise so highly here is going to die a most miserable death. And while the explanations are there, as we read through it in our haste and in our fears and our misunderstanding, we may miss them and say, as the Jews did, “Who is this person the prophet speaks of?” which is exactly the question the Ethiopian eunuch asks. “Is the prophet talking about himself or someone else, this person who’s going to suffer so much?”
Well, we have to get to the New Testament, and eventually maybe Lord willing in this podcast we will, but in the meantime we walk by faith. We say, “Yeah, God knew all along.” When we get to the prophesied events we look back and say, “Wow, look! God had it all planned. We knew all this all along,” – 20/20 hindsight.
Yeah, “I saw that coming!” No, nobody saw that coming, and looking back we still often misunderstand. Classical dispensationalism, which not many people hold anymore, praise God, basically said, “God’s plan failed. The Jews rejected their Messiah, so God had to come up with Plan B. That’s the cross and that’s temporary and that’s not going to succeed very well.
“Then one day God will go back and pick up that other plan, and the solution will be Jesus coming back and reigning by military/political/divine force from Jerusalem, because that’s the solution that we can understand and that must be what God has in mind. This gospel thing of winning souls one at a time – hey, we’ve been at it for 2,000 years and not much has happened. Obviously, this failed.”
Or maybe all of our parameters of judgment are way off because we so easily fall into the standards that our own flesh sets for how God ought to do things.
“America has fallen. Hope is lost for the world.” It’s like alien invasion movies. “Ah, they took DC. The world is lost.”
The only reason they say that is because they’re in Hollywood and they think the only places that exist are Hollywood and DC.
When Independence Day came out – the movie with the alien invasion – I didn’t know this at the time, but I should have figured it out. A lot of other nations complained afterwards that this was America-centric…
That’s interesting because the whole point is that they brought all the other nations together as well, and they all had to do stuff in their parts of the world, too. It’s like, “Did you watch the movie?”
To be honest, look at World War II and tell me you can tell that story without being America-centric. I’m a big Winston Churchill fan, but he needed some help.
The Brits gave it a good try, being England-centric, but yeah. And to be somewhat fair, the whole story is a little bit centered around Germany, so it couldn’t have happened without them.
And Japan. And you know what’s between Germany and Japan? The United States.
I will begin, I guess. In Bible study I began teaching the gospel of John, only to find out that the commentaries I have are mostly horrible. So not having a lot of expendable money, I settled on one commentary that got high praise, and I know the author from other things he’s done, so I bought it. It was a hefty expenditure, but I found a relatively cheaper version of it. The author is William Hendriksen and the title is A Commentary on the Gospel of John.
It was such a breath of fresh air after reading all these liberal commentaries, and even the conservative ones who kowtow to the liberals left and right. “Well, the liberals say this, and I’m sure they mean well and they have a lot of evidence on their side, but maybe it wasn’t that way. Maybe John wasn’t written in 100 AD. Maybe it was more like 90 AD when John was really old and mostly remembered accurately.” It was horrible, reading from one commentary to another.
Along comes William Hendriksen and just says, “Yeah, the liberals are a bunch of heretics and liars, so we’ll just leave them behind now, but if you want to know the answers to what they’re saying, it’s this, this, this, this,” about four pages of boom, boom, boom, boom. No long wrestlings with the soul. No fear of being rejected as a scholar because you’re not on the right page. He just walks through it, and then he comes to the text. His is one of the most marvelous theologically insightful and yet devotionally open commentaries I’ve ever seen.
Now, I’ve only read the first couple chapters, so there’s more, but I know the man by his other work, a godly man, a conservative evangelical Reformed in the Dutch tradition. It’s a thick book, and normally it comes in at least two volumes. I got a single volume and the print is not super tiny, so you can get it used.
There’s scholarly stuff along the way, but he nicely puts it out of the way. In fact, he says up-front, “I want this to be something everyone can use, and I don’t want the scholarly stuff in the way so that it scares people off, so I’m going to put it over here in the corner. If you’re interested you can look at it, but you can just follow the main argument otherwise. The goal is to speak to the common believer.”
So that’s William Hendriksen on the gospel of John. He also wrote commentaries on most of the New Testament, and I’ve found them all to be excellent.
Recommendation: William HendriksenGreat. I’m going to recommend auditing classes. I am just about to start one on the Church of England and the Anglican communion since the Reformation.
It’s through Davenant Hall. Rhys Laverty is head of it, or Brad Littlejohn is head of it, I don’t know.
Brad Littlejohn is the head or at least the founder. I don’t recognize the name Rhys Laverty, but I interact with a lot of the people who are authors for it. They’re a really solid group.
I was talking with my friend Virginia, who was an early guest on this podcast, and she’s like, “Yeah, I’ve been auditing classes,” and I was like, “Oh, that’s cool – with the college near where you live?” and she said, “No, with these people,” and I’m like, “Well, that’s fun! Can I take a class with you?”
She’s Anglican, hence the interest in the Anglicanism class. I might be the only non-Anglican in there, we’ll see, but it’s a really affordable way to scratch some scholarly itches without committing to huge expenditures or a scheduled degree.
There is. This one, with the book that I’ll need for the class, came to about $260, not bad for a graduate-level class.
Right. Of course, I don’t get any sort of brownie points for it, but I’m looking forward to it being a nice introduction to Davenant as a school as well, so that if I did want to pursue a degree from them, I would know what I was getting into.
I think it’s headquartered in New England right now, or maybe it’s Florida. I know that Brad moved to New England from somewhere.
But it’s chiefly online. It’s like a publication. The authors live all over. Well, they have a publication. They’re also this sort of seminary thing and they’re also a website.
They just had an in-person week of classes in something, and I believe that was in Florida.
Oh, it was Virginia, yes, sorry. So they’ll do in-person stuff. I remember seeing pictures of it somewhere and it just looked like someone’s house. It was great, like 12 people.
I have two, I think. The first one is very whimsical, not serious at all. We had a guest come over and spend some time with us yesterday, and towards the end we were like, “You know what? We don’t want the night to end, but we don’t want the night to go on too much longer. Let’s find something short to watch on Amazon Prime,” and we found a documentary from 2017 about the Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia.
Because we run in the right circles. Anyway, basically in the late ‘60s there were a bunch of sightings in this little town that borders the Ohio River between Ohio and West Virginia called Point Pleasant. A bunch of people in Point Pleasant reported seeing a giant birdlike humanoid creature in the forest, and it was flying above their cars and all this stuff. What’s funny is every single description said, “It was like a big bird,” and somehow they all still made it Mothman. So we watched that, and the particular one we watched is called The Mothman of Point Pleasant.
Recommendation: The Mothman of Point PleasantIt is the most all-over-the-place documentary I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s written like it was written by the Mothman, different lights, getting distracted by them. So that’s the whimsical one. It was very funny. It’s on Prime for free, so if you have Amazon Prime it’s not going to cost you anything, but if you don’t, it’s $2 to rent. Don’t rent it, just don’t. It’s not worth that, but if it’s free you should watch it. So that’s the whimsical one.
The more serious recommendation is I’ve been reading a lot more books the past several months. You guys can see now, that’s my book pile. It’s about the length of my forearm.
Yes. I am at present just about 30 pages short of finishing the one that’s on my desk right now, which is about Vietnam, fittingly enough, since you mentioned it, particularly Mei Lei, which is not a fun kind of detail to read through.
The one I read before that was also really good, Mark Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. It was very good. It doesn’t really have the narrative arc that I was expecting it to have. It’s more just like, “Here’s an opinion, here’s the other side, and here’s the context that’s evident.”
You’re right, it is. When I read through it I was just like, “All right, I can just see the Excel columns filling up.”
It’s incredibly organized. He kind of goes through antebellum opinions on slavery from the north pro-slavery, the north anti-slavery, the south pro-slavery, and the rare south anti-slavery. I think at some point he also goes into the opinions of contemporary Europeans on American slavery in particular.
It’s very, very interesting, but the whole point was just to show that the Civil War wasn’t just political. It was about both sides being very strongly people of the book, of the scripture, and coming to different conclusions based on any number of factors you could name.
It’s really interesting. And interestingly enough as well, something I noticed in my read-through of it was that I was like, “Wow, that sounds familiar,” that people who came down on one side were criticized by the other side because the people on the one side had also had people who held to that view that went liberal in the theological sense of the term.
Exactly, even though they were like, “Look, we’re not.” They were talking about the opinion of Protestants abroad and how generally speaking in Europe the kind of general focus on Protestantism on being anti-Catholic, against Rome, still maintained its priority, but in America it became, “Okay, what side of the slavery debate are you on?” That was the new kind of primary marker of your theological affinity.
He says, “By temporarily displacing historical anti-Catholicism, American Protestants may have worked a subtle theological alteration in which Christian sanction or censure of a currently vexing American problem took precedence over a traditional theological agenda where anti-Romanism was the key to religious self-identity. If so, the war was modernizing American Protestantism by shaking it loose from history and substituting contemporary interests as stronger reference points for theological alignment.”
Oh wow, there is a lot of application to what happens for the next 100 years or so.
Yes. I read that, and I was skimming through it at that point because I was coming up on my inter-library loan return date and I was like, “I’ve got to get through this,” and I remember I stopped reading right there and I read that paragraph like three more times. I was like, “Wow, he nailed it.”
Super great. Thank you, guys, so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to our financial supporters. We appreciate you keeping the show rolling.
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