The Names of God
09/16/2001 - Immanuel, "God With Us"
Unless you live on another planet, you know the tragic events that have occurred this week. And you'll never forget where you were when you first heard the news that the World Trade Center had been attacked. You'll never forget where you were when you first saw the Trade Towers collapse. Those images are forever burned deep into our soul.
On Tuesday morning, September 11, I was at breakfast with Tim. We had just come from prayer here at the Y. We were in a local restaurant and the TV was on and it was very loud. In fact it was so loud and distracting that I was about to ask our server if they could please turn it down when she said, "Have heard the news? There's been an explosion at the World Trade Center!" And immediately we looked at the screen. It must have been 9:02, because no more than a minute later we watched in horror as the second plane slammed into the Tower. I thought it was a replay. But it wasn't! And in that moment of stunned silence everyone in that restaurant knew that life in America would never be the same.
"This can't be happening," I thought. It seemed surreal, almost like a made for TV movie. Part of me was waiting for the commercial to come on, but the commercial never came. And as the rest of the day unfolded and then the rest of week, we all emerged out of our shock only to realize that it wasn't a movie at all, it was a tragedy of epic proportions. America had been attacked. And of course while all this was going on in New York, at 9:45 the Pentagon was hit by a jetliner and then less than a half-hour later a fourth plane, apparently headed for the White House, crashed into a field eighty miles southeast of Pittsburgh. There has never been a day like it in the history of our country. And what's frightening is, it may not be over.
Last Sunday, God led us to meditate on Psalm 23. 1The Lord is my shepherd, I shall want. 2 He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, 3 he restores my soul. He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake. 4 Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me, your rod and your staff, they comfort me. 5 You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil, my cup overflows. 6 Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Psalm 23 we said wasn't written for life on a golf course, but for real world tragedy. Who would have thought, just two days later our President, George W. Bush, would be reciting Psalm 23 to bring comfort and hope to a nation in crisis. He quoted verse 4, Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.
You are with me, O God. God is with us. God's with us today, he's been with us all week, and he was with us on Tuesday when tragedy struck. God didn't go off duty at 8:45 a.m. on September 11 when that first jet slammed into the north tower. Nothing that happened this week took him by surprise. Nothing that happened this week occurred without his full permission. God is completely sovereign and in control of his world. God is with us.
And today I stand amazed that the name of God we're going to consider in the final teaching of this series is the name Immanuel, "God with us." When we planned to study The Names of God months ago, we had no idea of the horrific events that were going to occur. We had no idea that we would need to remember the Lord is my shepherd the Sunday before the tragedy and that God is with us the Sunday after. I didn't need to go searching through the Bible this week to find out what to talk about today. It's all in our passage this morning.
If you have a Bible turn with me to Isaiah 7. Let me give you some very important background. The book of Isaiah was written by the prophet Isaiah about seven hundred years before Jesus Christ was born. At that time the kingdom of Israel was divided in half. There had been a Civil War. The northern half was called Israel and was made up of the ten northern tribes. Its capital city was Samaria. The southern half was called Judah and was made up of just two tribes, Judah and Benjamin. Its capital city was Jerusalem.
The northern kingdom of Israel existed for about 200 years until it was overrun by the Assyrians in 722 BC and it's people scattered forever. Historians talk about the ten lost tribes of Israel. No one knows where those tribes ended up. The northern kingdom never had one God fearing king. They all worshipped pagan idols. The southern kingdom of Judah had a few godly kings, so it lasted a little longer. But eventually it was taken out by the Babylonians in 586 BC. But before that happened Isaiah was a prophet to Judah, pleading with them to return to God.
The book opens with a vision that Isaiah received from the Lord about Judah and Jerusalem. Isaiah 1:1, The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, concerning Judah and Jerusalem which he saw during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.
Isaiah saw a vision and in his vision he caught a glimpse of what God saw when he looked down on his people. And it wasn't pretty. Listen to the indictment that God leveled at Judah in these selected verses from Isaiah 1-7.
Ah, sinful nation, a people loaded with guilt ... They have forsaken the Lord. They have spurned the Holy One of Israel and turned their backs on him ... Your country is desolate, your cities burned with fire ... Your hands are full of blood. Wash and make yourselves clean ... Take your evil deeds out of my sight! Stop doing wrong, learn to do right! ... Their land is full of silver and gold, there is no end to their treasures ... They bow down to the work of their hands, to what their fingers have made ... The Lord Almighty has a day in store for all the proud and lofty, for every lofty tower and every fortified wall ... Stop trusting in man, who has but a breath in his nostrils ... Woe to those who call evil good and good evil ... Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight ... for they have rejected the law of the Lord Almighty and spurned the word of the Holy One of Israel.
God loved Judah. They were his people and he was their God. But they turned their backs on him. They cheated on him and worshipped false gods. They hoarded wealth and trusted in their affluence. They mistreated one another and took advantage of the poor. They did wrong and called it right. They made up their own rules. The rejected the Bible, the Word of God.
Yet God in his infinite love gave them chance after chance to come back to him. In Isaiah 1:18-20 he says, " Come now, let us reason together," says the Lord. "Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool. If you are willing and obedient, you will eat the best from the land. But if you resist and rebel, you will be devoured by the sword." For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
God is saying to his people, "I'll give you another chance. Let's work this thing out. Let's reason together. Call out to me for forgiveness and I will wash you white as snow and bless your land." And when I read that this week, I couldn't help but think of our country.
God loves America. It's a great land, perhaps the greatest nation that ever existed on the face of the earth. We have incredible freedom and opportunity and resources and wealth and strength, which is why some nations hate us. Which is why some people were dancing in the streets this week when they heard the news of the destruction in New York and Washington DC. My kids asked me, "Dad, why are they so happy?" "They're happy," I said, "because they hate us." "Why do they hate us, Dad? We're such a great nation." "That's why they hate us, because we are a great nation."
God loves our nation as he loves every nation on the face of the earth. But over the years he's given us incredible blessings, just like he gave Judah. But sadly, we've taken his blessings for granted and congratulated ourselves, instead of worshipping him. We've put our confidence in our wealth and technology and military might, the very symbols that came under attack on Tuesday, the Trade Towers and the Pentagon. The biceps of America came crumbling down. And what it all means, I'm not sure. But one thing I do know is that God is calling us back to himself.
I've been so encouraged this week to see so many people gathering to pray. We had a house full on Tuesday night. Tim did as well. There were prayer vigils and interfaith events and candlelight services and a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance on Friday. That's the response God is looking for. As in every tragedy, national or personal, God wants us to call out to him. And so we pray for our leaders and we pray for the victims and their families and we pray for our enemies, but we also pray that God would forgive our sin, heal our land and draw us to himself. He's calling us back to him, just like he called Judah back to him.
But they never came back and so God gave them over to their enemies. Look at Isaiah 7. In Isaiah 7:1, we find Judah's leader, King Ahaz, under attack by two hostile kings, Rezin of Aram and Pekah of Israel. These two kings had formed an alliance and together they tried to topple Jerusalem. And Ahaz was shaking in his sandals.
Look at verse 2, So the hearts of Ahaz and his people were shaken, as the trees of the forest are shaken by the wind. They were shaken just like many of us were shaken this week by the attack on America.
So the Lord tells Isaiah to go find Ahaz and calm him down with the assurance that his enemies wouldn't prevail. So Isaiah finds the king at the aqueduct, checking the city's water supply, and tells him in verse 4, Be careful, keep calm and don't be afraid. Do not lose heart because of these two smoldering stubs of firewood. Wonderful words for us this morning. Be careful. Keep calm. And don't be afraid, because of those two smoldering towers.
But Ahaz didn't trust the Lord. He was a godless king. 2 Kings 16 tells us that he sacrificed his own son to Molech and did all kinds of horrible things. And instead of turning to God in this crisis, he turned to the pagan king of Assyria and hired his army to defend Jerusalem. Which God had said was way out of bounds. Don't enter into an alliance with a pagan nation, God had commanded. But they did.
And the Assyrians defeated Aram and Israel. And King Ahaz concluded that the god of the Assyrians must be more powerful than his God. So he went to Damascus, the Assyrian capital, and got the blueprints of their pagan altar and brought them back to Jerusalem He took God's altar from in front of the Temple and shoved it around to the side and built a pagan right in its place. It was an abomination to the Lord.
And yet as God is gracious, he's still willing to work with this guy. Look at verses 10-11, Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz, "Ask the Lord your God for a sign, whether in the deepest depths or in the highest heights." But Ahaz says, self-righteously in verse 12, I will not ask. I will not put the Lord to the test. Why? Because he was already trusting in his own wisdom and tried to disguise it with a pious answer.
But Isaiah didn't buy it so he says in verse 13, "Hear now, you house of David! Is it not enough to try the patience of men? Will you try the patience of my God also? Therefore, verse 14, the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel, which means "God with us."
The sign that God gave Ahaz, didn't have anything to do with his current battle. God had already told him he'd win that. But it had everything to do with the fact that God was going to preserve his people long into the future and that one day God himself was going to come down from heaven and live with them. And we now know that that prophecy was fulfilled about seven hundred years later when Jesus, the Son of God, was born. He was Immanuel, "God with us."
In Matthew 1, when the birth of Jesus was announced to Mary and Joseph, this prophecy was quoted in verses 22-23, All this took place to fulfill what the Lord has said through the prophet. "The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel which means 'God with us.'"
God is with us. We don't have a God who's distant and detached from our world. We don't have a God who's indifferent to pain and suffering. We don't have a God who sits up in his ivory tower and dictates memos about how the world should be run. We have a God who got down and dirty. A God who was born in poverty. A God who knows what it's like to be terrorized. A God who knows what it's like to be despised and rejected. A God who knows what it's like to be betrayed and abandoned. A God who knows what's it like to be beat up and to suffer and even to die. A God, who himself, was the victim of the greatest tragedy this world has ever witnessed, the brutal crucifixion of the perfect Son of God.
And because he is with us and was one of us, when we hurt, he hurts. When we weep, he weeps. God was crying on Tuesday morning, September 11. He's been crying all week with those who've lost loved ones. In a world filled with pain, like ours, how could we possibly run to a God for comfort who was untouched by it?
I love how British theologian John Stott responds to the question of suffering when he says, "I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross which symbolizes divine suffering. The cross of Christ is God's only self-justification in such a world as ours."
God is with us in our suffering and he wants us, his people, to be with those who are suffering too. I read a cartoon this week that pictured two turtles cautiously sticking their heads out of their shells. One was saying, "Sometimes I'd just like to ask God why he allows poverty, famine, and injustice when he could do something about it." The other turtle looked at him and said, "I'm afraid God might ask me that very same question."
As we close this morning I want to encourage all of us to do something about the human tragedy of this week. In a few minutes, we're going to pray for our nation and for the victims and even for our enemies and that's huge. That might be the single most important thing we can do. But we can also give blood and send money and donate rescue and cleanup materials. Some of us have placed our names on lists with the Red Cross as volunteers for medical assistance and spiritual support. And when we do those kinds of things as the body of Christ we show those who are hurting that God is with them too.