Notes of an address given in Edinburgh, 1921
“Moreover the Lord spake again to Ahaz, saying, Ask thee a sign of the Lord thy God; ask it either in the depth or in the height above. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord. And he said, Hear ye now, O house of David; Is it a small thing for you to weary men, but will ye weary my God also? Therefore the Lord Himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:10-14).
“For to the angels has He not put in subjection the world to come, whereof we speak. But one in a certain place testified, saying, What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? or the son of man, that Thou visitest him? Thou madest him a little lower than the angels; Thou crownedst him with glory and honour, and didst set him over the works of Thy hands: Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet. For in that He put all in subjection under him, He left nothing that is not put under him. But now we see not yet all things put under him. But we see Jesus who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour; that He by the grace of God should taste death for every man. For it became Him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to make the Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings. For both He that sanctifies and they who are sanctified are all of one: for which cause He is not ashamed to call them brethren. Saying, I will declare thy name to my brethren, in the midst of the church will I sing praise to thee. And again, I will put my trust in Him. And again, Behold I and the children which God has given me” (Hebrews 2:5-13).
We learn from Kings and Chronicles that King Ahaz walked not in the steps of his father David, but acted according to the abominations of the heathen. The Lord, wearied by his ways, bid him ask a sign, either in the depth or in the height above. What sign could he ask of the Lord? And what sign could any of us ask of the Lord? Surely our depth would be very shallow and our height of very small elevation.
Ahaz felt his utter incapacity as well as his disinclination to ask a sign, so replied, “I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord.” The Lord Himself, then, gave him a sign, and in giving it, gave it in view of all mankind. “Therefore the Lord Himself shall give you a sign; behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a Son, and thou shalt call His name Immanuel.”
How we read in this on the one hand man’s utter inability to please God or reach up to His thoughts; on the other hand, that, spite of all that man is, God is set upon blessing him, and that Christ is His Resource in doing so.
Behold in Christ God’s Sign. It is in following the details given in Scripture as to who He was, as to what He did, as to where He has gone, that the full import of the wonderful sign is seen.
“Behold, A VIRGIN shall … bear a Son.” This takes us back to Genesis 3:15. Following hard on the account of man’s fall with all its appalling consequences comes the triumphant prophecy, “It [the woman’s seed] shall bruise thy [the serpent’s, Satan’s] head.” The woman’s seed is clearly Christ.
In creation God has ordained that procreation is by the seed of the man, yet here we read of the woman’s seed. Who told Moses this? Surely it was by divine inspiration he wrote down that which apart from inspiration would have been folly. Christ was born of a virgin. The angel said to Mary, “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35).
The modern theologian often in his blind folly denies the virgin birth of Christ in face of the direct testimony of Scripture, both as in prophecy and in fact. Whilst the Lord Jesus is a true man, yet He stands by Himself even as a man, incomparable and unique. Thus God would draw attention to His beloved Son as to none other. In Him centres all the hope of the human race.
His name was to be “Emmanuel” [literally God with us]. This wonderful child of the virgin was none less than “the mighty God, the everlasting Father” (Isa. 9:6).
The sign then was that God should appear in this world as a Man; but this Man was perfectly unique. No man knows the Son, but the Father” (Matt. 11:27) is an absolute statement showing that no creature can ever understand the inscrutability of the Person of Christ. God and man, one Person, who can fathom this? This knowledge is confined for ever to Divine Persons. The how of it is not revealed, but the fact is presented for our faith. If the finite could grasp the infinite, it would cease to be infinite. That such things should be beyond us is the demand of faith.
“‘Tis darkness to my intellect.
But sunshine to my heart.”
said the Christian poet.
But the full meaning of the sign is not seen in one verse. Hebrews 2 indicates both the depth and the height that were utterly beyond King Ahaz’s thought or imagination, indeed utterly beyond the comprehension of any.
“O God the thought was thine!
(Thine only it could be)
Fruit of Thy wisdom; love divine,
Peculiar to Thee.”
Hebrews 2 quotes the wonderful Psalm 8. This Psalm is clearly a night Psalm. David says, “When I consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained” (v. 3). Doubtless this is intended to convey a spiritual lesson. The sun is not mentioned. It was the night of Judaism; the day of Christianity had not arrived. The moon and stars told of light, and in the case of the moon, reflected light. So the types and prophecies told of the coming day. Their light was reflected. Faint as it was, they were the harbinger of the coming day.
In the second consideration of this verse the psalmist is impressed by the insignificance of man. There were the heavens, the moon and stars. How puny man looked in comparison. Generations of men come and go, but the moon and stars abide. The vastness of the heavens impressed the psalmist, so he completes his sentence, saying, “What is man [Heb. Enosh] that Thou art mindful of him? and the Son of man [Heb. Adam] that Thou visitest him” (Ps. 8:4).
What made the psalmist choose two distinct names for man? The English version does not make this distinction plain; but the Hebrew does. Adam simply means man, man as God created him out of the dust of the earth, man unfallen, man “who is the figure of Him who was to come” (Rom. 5:14). Enosh means man as well, but man as frail, fallen, dying, passing away.
Psalm 144:3-4 is in great and striking contrast to Psalm 8. It says, “Lord, what is man [Heb. Adam], that Thou takest knowledge of him? or the Son of man [Heb. Enosh], that Thou takest account of him? Man is like to vanity; his days are as a shadow that passes away.” Here Adam unfallen is first. How soon the scene changes and man fallen, hopeless, despairing in himself is seen; his prospects—his days soon passing away—fills in a picture that is sad beyond words.
How different is Psalm 8. Poor frail, fallen man is looked upon. There is no hope in him. No son of Enosh, no sinful son of fallen man, could bring in blessing and glory. But God is full of compassion and, blessed be His Name, full of resource. So the psalmist changes the word and indicates that One who is not a sinful son of sinful man, and yet whose title is the Son of man, is to have dominion over the works of Jehovah’s hands. Here we see the reason of the guarding of the manhood of Jesus in the virgin birth. God’s resource is in Christ. There is no breakdown with Him, and He is the Son of man, and yet the Son of God, born of the virgin. The Son of man is a glorious title, indicating His wide dominion from pole to pole, but it was also the appellation that He used in speaking of Himself more than any other in His humiliation on earth.
Verse 5 tells us that He was made a little lower than the angels, and that He has been crowned with glory and honour. Here we have indicated, though not explained, the meaning of the depth and height in the sign given.
What a stoop was that when the mighty God took upon Himself humanity! How incomprehensible to behold in that lowly babe in Bethlehem’s manger “God manifest in the flesh.”
But this raises the question, Why did He take upon Himself flesh and blood? And the solemn answer is that He came to die. Death being the penalty of sin, only death could meet that penalty.
Behold the blessed Son of God going on step by step till we behold Him dying on the cross, and at last laid in the borrowed grave. There we get the fulfilment of the sign in regard to the depth. Hebrews 2, quoting from Psalm 8, connects the prophecy with Christ and brings in His death as necessary. “We see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour” (v. 9).
Christ’s death was the only sign to be given to an unbelieving world. “An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign; and there shall be no sign given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas: for as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt. 12:39-40).
Feeble indeed is our comprehension of the depths to which the Lord went in meeting God’s glory and our need. First from the eternal throne to the stable at Bethlehem, to Egypt, to Nazareth; profounder still, to Gethsemane; awful beyond words, to Calvary; and finally Joseph of Arimatha’s new tomb—who can measure that road? It surely was the Via Dolorosa of the ages. The cross of Calvary was, indeed,
“The centre of two eternities
Which stand with rapt adoring eyes.”
But the eye of faith can look up, and see in the highest place in glory a Man, yet much more than a man—the same blessed Person who stooped in grace is now exalted to the very summit of glory.
The wonderful thing for the angels to see was God in this world in the Person of a man; now the wonderful thing for them to see is a Man sitting on the Father’s throne, and that Man their Creator and their God. The same blessed Person who hung upon yonder cross is now exalted and crowned and sitting on the Father’s throne.
Behold in Jesus on the Father’s throne the sign in the height above.
And all this—His intervention in humanity, His humiliation, His death, His resurrection, His ascension, His glorification—was in relation to and for the blessing of mankind.
Alas! that so few get the benefit of all this. But for those of us who are blessed, Hebrews 2 shows how Christ, the Sanctifier, and believers, the sanctified, “are all of one, for which cause He is not ashamed to call them brethren” (v. 11).
How wonderful that all this should have come to pass in order that we, poor sinners, should be brought into blessed and eternal association with Himself.
Well may we admire the wisdom and prudence of God. Well may we worship Him who stooped so low to meet us in our vile estate, that He might lift us so high as to be in association with Him where He is; He, indeed, worked out in His own blessed Person the sign in the depth and in the height above. It is a wonderful story. What mind of man could even faintly have reached out to this? None surely. “For of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things to whom be glory for ever. Amen” (Rom. 11:36).