Meditation No. 19

Meditation Title: Confusing Prophecy

Isa 9:6 For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

If we have one characteristic that gets us nowhere, it is the desire to be in charge and fully understand everything that is going on! The desiring to be in charge simply means that so often we end up getting ourselves in a mess – we need God's guidance and grace! The desiring to understand all that is going on is a fruitless desire because although we can know many things, when it comes to God we are so limited in our knowledge, especially about what He is doing today!

Our verse above is a classic example of this. Of course we read it and say, oh yes, that applied to Jesus. And we would be right, but suppose you were someone in Isaiah's day? How do you think you'd feel about this verse then? It refers to a child, a son, but the only son we've had brought to our attention is Isaiah's son, and he's not of the family of David, he's not a ruler. Is this a word that Isaiah is applying to his own son? But no, in the next verse we find, “He will reign on David's throne and over his kingdom,” which seems to suggest that this is someone from David's family tree, so this would suggest that this is another child as yet unborn perhaps.

So first there is the confusion over who the son is but next there must be confusion over the description of this son. It may be too familiar to us perhaps because we may have read it so many times or even heard it sung in music or sung it ourselves. First he's going to be a ruler: “the government will be on his shoulders.” But then look at these incredible descriptions that follow, descriptions of this child yet to be born: “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” The fact that he's going to be a great counselor and a bringer of peace is acceptable, but to call him Mighty God and Everlasting Father is outrageous! This child is going to be seen as God? He is going to be seen as the Father from heaven? How can such a thing possibly be?

Surely that must have gone through the minds of the people who heard Isaiah. He's flipped! He's really gone off the rails now! We always said he was a bit weird. Now we know! Hundreds and hundreds of years would pass before Jesus came and then there was controversy over whether he was, in fact, the Son of God. So why did God say this to Isaiah all those centuries beforehand? Well, I can only make a suggestion. We know from Scripture that the Trinity had planned the coming of Jesus from before the foundation of the world (1 Pet 1:20 , Eph 1:4, Rev 13:8). It's almost as if the Father was so excited by the prospect of redeeming the world through His Son that He couldn't help just dropping hints through His prophets throughout Israel 's Old Testament history.

These prophecies are God's constant signposts, over 300 of them in the Old Testament pointing towards the coming of Jesus, things that had the Jewish scholars puzzled, signposts pointing to a God of love who has it in His heart to send His one and only Son to redeem mankind. Recently I was involved in a publicity campaign, seeking to raise the awareness of the world to the plight of persecuted Christians in China . At one point we sent out a Press Release: In twenty four hours there will be breaking news in Beijing. Twenty four hours later we released a second Press Release stating what had happened and why. This is the nearest I can get to a picture of what the Father was doing, inspiring His prophets through the centuries with tit-bits of information about the coming of His Son. As the archivists held on to the prophecies and the scholars studied them, they became aware of this recurrent theme: there is One coming who will be God's anointed One, the Messiah.

Perhaps many of us take all this for granted now, but the truth is that if God wasn't a God of love He would have given up long back and completely wiped out the whole world. The apostle Paul starts his famous 1 Corinthians 13 passage about love with, “Love is patient.” How we must have tried the Lord's patience, and yet the wisdom of God had decreed that in time space history in what we call two thousand years ago, THAT would be the right time to send His Son. How He must have wanted to intervene earlier yet knew that that was the right time. The apostle Paul spoke of it as “at just the right time.” (Rom 5:6). Writer Michael Green in his book Evangelism in the Early Church points out that there were a number of things in the world that made that precise time probably one of the best times in history for the Gospel to be shared around the world.

The question of how much God could share with his prophets takes us down the path of thinking how the Lord brought His revelation to the world. Without doubt, as we read through the history of the Old Testament in particular, we see that there is a gradual revealing of the Lord Himself through His interaction with individuals and the nation of Israel , and a gradual revealing of His purposes for mankind. As we noted earlier, Jesus coming was not a last minute crisis act on behalf of the Godhead, but something planned even before they brought the world into being, knowing what would happen and knowing how they would have to act into history to redeem us. This word from Isaiah may not have brought great revelation when he spoke it, but it certainly did in the fullness of time. Perhaps this suggests that we ought to see ourselves as sometimes having much greater significance that merely in what we do today!