Thought for the Week 2020 – Advent 1

Isaiah 7: 10 - 17

¹⁰ Again the Lord spoke to [King] Ahaz, ¹¹ ‘Ask the Lord your God for a sign, whether in the deepest depths or in the highest heights.’

¹² But Ahaz said, ‘I will not ask; I will not put the Lord to the test.’

¹³ Then Isaiah said, ‘Hear now, you house of David! Is it not enough to try the patience of humans? Will you try the patience of my God also? ¹⁴ Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel. ¹⁵ He will be eating curds and honey when he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, ¹⁶ for before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste. ¹⁷ The Lord will bring on you and on your people and on the house of your father a time unlike any since Ephraim broke away from Judah – he will bring the king of Assyria.’

 

Advent 1 – Time is in the Lord’s Hands.

Advent is the season in which look ahead and we wait upon the Lord. We look ahead to the coming of the Messiah – remembering the first time he came and in expectation of the second time he will come. In the Bible Course, which some of us have been studying recently, we have just come to the end of the Old Testament. It is the period in which prophets such as Malachi set the scene, and whose words were left hanging in expectation for about 400 years.

Isaiah wrote the words that we have read today, roughly 700 years before Jesus came. These are long periods of time! In the case of Isaiah, it is as if we were reading a book today that is even older than Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (written between 1387 and 1400), and spotting and interpreting a prophecy about the covid-19 crisis! And the gap after Malachi is similar to the time that has passed since the publication of the King James Bible. It was a long time in which there was silence – no prophets, and no word from God.

The people of God were waiting for the fulfilment of prophecy – they were waiting for the coming Messiah, and they waited a very long time. And finally, by the time the Angel Gabriel visited Zechariah the priest in the temple, and then, six months later, a teenage peasant girl called Mary in Nazareth, the people were longing and desperate to see God do something in order to restore the nation, and get rid of the hated Romans.

It is fair to say that some of the prophecies in the Old Testament that we recognise as being about Jesus are only recognisable because we have that wonderful gift called hindsight! Also, the fact that some of the New Testament writers quoted the relevant passages gives us a huge pointer! At the time Isaiah wrote chapter 7 (and during the 700 years that followed) it is likely that few people would have realised that right in the middle of it we find a prophecy that the Messiah would be born to a virgin. But there it is, in verse 14: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.” And this verse was quoted by Matthew in Matt. 1: 23 – a verse that we hear read every single year in Carol services.

When Isaiah wrote chapter 7 of his book, he was writing about Middle East politics of the day. Power struggles can change very quickly, as we know. Ahaz, the king of Judah, was fearful about possible attacks from Israel and from Aram. And the Prophet Isaiah says here, bringing the Word of God, that Ahaz could stop worrying, because within the next couple of years both of those lands would be laid waste by a much bigger player – Assyria. And the ‘sign’ was the length of time it takes for a baby to be conceived, born, grow old enough to eat curds and honey, but not be old enough to be able to choose right from wrong. How long is that? A couple of years?

So the theme for this week’s reading is ‘time’. There are the centuries that passed as people waited for the Messiah, and there is the very short time (measured in the period of a baby’s early stages) in which whole nations and empires can rise and fall! How long is God’s time? We have waited nearly 2000 years for Jesus to return and we are still waiting. Meanwhile, we have waited a few months for the development of a covid-19 vaccine. Through it all we trust in God. We trust in the King of kings – and we have no alternative, because who else is there that we can we turn to? God sees the big picture, and sometimes it seems to us that things happen too quickly; and often it seems that we have to wait a very long time. We have limited vision – the length of a day, a year, even a lifetime. But God has the whole of world history in his view, and indeed, in his hands. It can sometimes be difficult to be patient and it can be difficult to trust God, but he is utterly faithful, and we need to learn to rest in his goodness, rest in his peace and rest in his timing, knowing that he knows best and he sees the end from the beginning.

 

Prayer

Heavenly Father, this Advent may we have peace in our hearts as we wait on the Lord. We wait for the Saviour to be revealed in our lives, in our church and in our world. We thank you for the Good News of the Saviour who was born in Bethlehem – at just the right time, even 700 years after the words of Isaiah, and over 400 years after Malachi. May we hold on to the hope and expectation of seeing Jesus come again: we wait with eager anticipation! Please bless us during this Advent season – very different from previous years, but the truth and relevance of the birth of our Saviour remain unchanged. Amen.