Isaiah 7:14: The Sign He Wouldn’t Ask For

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

Isaiah 7:14 (NIV)

The Sign He Wouldn’t Ask For

Isaiah goes out to meet Ahaz at the end of the aqueduct of the Upper Pool, on the road to the Launderer’s Field. Two armies have marched on Jerusalem, and the hearts of the king and his people have been shaken the way wind shakes a forest. Be careful, keep calm and don’t be afraid, Isaiah is told to say. The two kings he’s afraid of are a pair of smoldering stubs of firewood.

Then Ahaz is told to ask for a sign, in the deepest depths or the highest heights, and he won’t do it. I will not ask, he says. I will not put the Lord to the test. It sounds like reverence, and Isaiah doesn’t take it that way. He asks the house of David whether wearing out the patience of people wasn’t enough.

The sign comes anyway. Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel. There’s a clock inside it. Before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings Ahaz dreads will be laid waste, and the king of Assyria is coming for Judah after that.

So the sign given to a frightened king carried a war’s deadline, measured out by how long a small child takes to tell right from wrong. The child gets his name before any of that is settled, and the name is Immanuel, God with us.

Matthew reads that sentence over the birth of Jesus. All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet, he writes, and then he says what the name means: God with us. Between that road outside Jerusalem and a night like this one there are centuries, a war, and a name that outlived both.

There’s a man driving home tonight with his phone face up in the cup holder, waiting on a call that was supposed to come by six. He’s got the radio off so he’d hear it ring. It’s the same road as every other night, past the school sign with last week’s date still on it and the house that never brings its bins back in.

He pulls into the driveway with the phone dark and sits a minute with the engine off. Nobody in the house of David asked for that sign, and the name in it went out over a king who wouldn’t ask.