To take the Word of God and open to the book of Isaiah, Isaiah chapter 9, Isaiah chapter 9. We're going to start reading in verse 1 of Isaiah 9 and those willing and able, I'm going to ask you to stand with me please. We'll get the context of the birth of Christ. Isaiah chapter 9 beginning in verse 1. But there will be no more gloom for her who was in anguish. In earlier times he treated the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali with contempt. But later on he shall make it glorious by the way of the sea on the other side of the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles. The people who walk in darkness will see a great light. Those who live in a dark land, the light will shine on them. They shall multiply the nation. You shall increase their gladness. They will be glad in your presence, as with the gladness of harvest, as men rejoice when they divide the spoil. For you shall break the yoke of their burden and the staff on their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor, as at the battle of Midian. For every boot of the booted warrior in the battle tumult, the cloak rolled in blood will be for burning, fuel for a fire. For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us, and the government will rest on his shoulders. His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. There will be no end to the increase of his government or of peace. On the throne of David and over his kingdom to establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness from then on and forevermore. The zeal of the Lord of Hosts will accomplish this. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the promises that are in it. We know, Heavenly Father, that you are a God that cannot lie, that everything that comes out of your mouth is true. In fact, your plans cannot be reversed by men. Once you make your plans, they are set according to divine will. We have here before us a reading of the promise you made concerning your Son, Jesus Christ, and His coming to this earth hundreds of years before it actually was fulfilled. I pray, Father, that you would help us to realize that the world, yes, is still in darkness. Help us to realize that the light of the world is still Jesus Christ. The world needs to hear the truth about their sinfulness, The world needs to hear the truth about their iniquity and the world needs to hear the truth that they have nothing within them to somehow or another make themselves right. with you. All men are born as sinners, lost and undone, and born already captive to an eternal hell. I pray, Heavenly Father, that you would breed within our hearts today a desire, a new desire, a revived desire to take the message of the Beyblade and the manger to this world. The only hope that men have is in the person, the Lord, the Master, Jesus Christ, who came of his own volition to this world to die in our place on the cross and pay for our sins. We are forever grateful for the personal application of that truth to our lives. We know you personally through Jesus Christ. Now, Father, I pray that you will take this stammering lips of this servant of yours and this congregation before whom I stand, who stand before you with bowed heads, and work what only you can work in their hearts, which is hope and peace and joy and forgiveness. In Christ's name we pray, amen. Thank you and please be seated. All right, so the birth of Jesus Christ, by all accounts, was the most monumental event that ever took place in the history of mankind. And a large part of that monumental event of the birth of Jesus Christ has to do with the very fact that his birth was prophesied hundreds of years before it actually took place. There is nobody who is at least half sober who looking at the scriptures could deny the reality that Jesus Christ is the one who was prophesied about. You cannot ignore the prophecies of the Lord Jesus Christ. So our text verse will be verse 6 this morning. I've read the context for you, but I want to really drill down on what was prophesied in verse 6. So that's where we're going to start. We'll look at some of the prophecies as well as some other verses as well in our sermon this morning. But here we have in verse 6 an indication of really what's going on. It says, for a child will be born unto us. What makes this such an incredible passage of scripture is that Isaiah is not speaking of his own initiative. This isn't something that he just thought of on his own and said, yeah, this would be a good idea. I think I'll introduce the coming Savior like this. This isn't some takeoff of Babylonian mythology or pagan folklore. This is a story. This is the voice of God speaking directly to him in a very real way. You say, how do you know that? The Bible says this, all scriptures inspired by God. All scriptures inspired by God. Isaiah was speaking the voice of God. The word inspired simply means that God breathed into him the words that he would have him to say. God is speaking through a man in verse 6. Isaiah is the man that God has personally chosen picked out to prophesy to the southern kingdom of Judah At this particular time that he was prophesying the northern kingdom Israel had been Captured by the Assyrian Empire. This was about 722 BC My point is this, is that the Assyrians came into the northern part of Israel and they literally destroyed, annihilated, completely dominated anybody and anything that got into their way. They were a marching machine that literally could not be stopped. They rolled over anything and everything that stood before them. So here they come, they roar into the northern kingdom of Israel, and they get right up to the boundaries of Judah, and Hezekiah was the king at this particular time. And they send some messengers to Hezekiah, and they make great threats about how Syria is going to overtake the city of Jerusalem and how how you cannot stop them it would be impossible to stop them and From our perspective and from a man's perspective what they said was absolutely true. I mean you gotta realize Judah was shaking literally shaking in their sandals if they had any sandals on Because they realized nothing could stop what was about to happen except for God Almighty, right And so they get right up to the doorstep, just about, of Hezekiah the king and all the people of Judah. God sends a mighty destroying angel into the Assyrian camp. You may remember the story from the book of Kings. And you may remember the story how that death angel, the angel of the Lord, slew hundreds of thousands of the Assyrians, wiped them out, embarrassed them. The result was they went back. They went back home. God saved Judah. And I believe God saved Judah for the sake of us. And I believe God saved Judah for the sake of the passage of Scripture that we're looking at this morning. God saved Judah for Isaiah to come on the scene and deliver this particular message to them. You've got to realize, Judy and I were at an intersection here recently, I don't remember how many months ago. But as we were coming up on the intersection, a wreck just took place. I mean, it just happened. We saw it happen. A guy didn't stop at a stop sign, side swiped a truck. And the guy that hit the truck, the guy that was at fault, hit the truck. The truck went on, but the guy in the car, his car kind of spun around. And it was spinning around, it was coming toward our car. And I realized I could go nowhere. There was no way that we could get out of the way of this car. It was going to hit us if it kept coming. It stopped, fortunately. My point is this, is that Judah was watching that take place before them. There was nothing to stop the Assyrians coming toward them and taking them over except the hand and the power of God. And that's what happened. So Isaiah then is rising up. God raises. He spares Judah. He raises up Isaiah so that Isaiah can give them some prophecies. And basically, it's a it's a double edged prophecy. Isaiah tells them, hey, look, number one, if you don't straighten up, you will you will suffer punishment. You will go into captivity. You will be destroyed. You must get yourself right before God. And the second message that Isaiah gave them was Hope of the Lord coming the coming of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ the hope of the Messiah was coming Isaiah gave them those two prophecies now when Isaiah gave this particular prophecy about this child being born As I mentioned to you earlier, Hezekiah was the king of Judah. He was a very, very good king. His dad was very, very bad. Ahab was his father. He was a very bad king. Isaiah comes on the scene. He's just the opposite of his father. He's a very, very good king. As a matter of fact, he comes into the throne and he begins to destroy the idols. He begins to purge the land of their idols. down the high places. He breaks down the pillars. He cuts down the pole of Asterah. He breaks into pieces the bronze servant that Moses had made and who were now, they were now worshipping that bronze serpent. He breaks that into pieces and he brings the land back to the Lord and he's worshipping the Lord and the people are worshipping the Lord and from a a purely cursory look, it looks like that Hezekiah was the child that this particular prophecy was talking about. Because he brings the nation of Israel back into tune with God's laws and with God's will. And so everybody was kind of thinking, well maybe this child is talking about Hezekiah. There was only one problem with their assumption that this child might be Hezekiah. He died, okay? And so there was a glitch, there was a snag in their plans because his kingdom did not last forever. And as we find out Judah does after Hezekiah dies, Judah does go on and reject the Lord and God punishes them by sending men to Babylonian captivity for 70 years. So he didn't fit the bill. He didn't fit the bill. So let's go back and let's take a closer look at Isaiah's prophecy here. And maybe we can understand why he in particular did not fit the bill. So we go back and we notice that it says, for a child will be born to you. The King James Version says unto us a child is born. Now, this is a very strange, I looked at this and this is a real strange way to refer to the birth of a child. And the thing that makes it strange and unusual here is unto us. Those two words. It's not unusual that a child would be born, okay? That's not bad, that's a good thing. But he goes on, he says this child is born unto us. And that caught my attention because that's not an ordinary way to refer to the birth of a child. Normally the parents are named, you know, like Jacob the son of Isaac and Isaac the son of Abraham and stuff like that. But that's not what this particular verse says. And it makes no reference whatsoever to the child's parents or the child's lineage whatsoever. It simply says that this child is going to be born to us. Now, God was pretty smart. You know, He's pretty intelligent. He could have said, you know, this child's going to be born into Mary and Joseph, right? I mean, He already knew the plan. He already picked out the agents who were going to be the parents of this particular child. He could have made it very plain that this child was going to be born into Mary and Joseph. But He didn't say that. He knew that. But he didn't say that. Not at all. But he uses a strange construction here that this child is born into us. That's a very strange linguistic model, as a matter of fact. The preposition here is a benefective It is for your welfare. It is for your well-being. That's the idea behind the dative that is particularly used here, unto us. He's talking about, and notice it's a personal pronoun, a plural, yes, nonetheless, but it's personal. So he's referring to us. Okay. Us. When this prophecy was given, it wasn't just for the nation of Israel 700 years ago or the nation of Judah 700 years ago. No, no, no, no. God had us in mind there. That's why he used personal pronoun. It's so personal that you can even plug your own name in. came for Daryl or plug your own name. That's how personal this prophecy is. You and I, we, you and I are the object, the beneficiary. of the birth of the child. But let's go on, let's develop this thought a little more because I find it quite interesting is what the prophecy was referring to here and develop it. He says, a son will be given to us. Notice the particulars here that he delves down into. He says a son. Clearly, he leaves no guess as to the sex of this child. It wasn't like a 50-50 chance, right? When you get pregnant, you don't know whether you're going to have a boy or a girl. You kind of got a 50-50 chance there. At least that's what the statistics tell us. But there is no guessing here. There's no doubt here. They didn't have the ability, you know, to determine the sex of the child when Jesus Christ was born. They didn't have all the technology that we have today. They had, you know, a woman lore. You know, if the baby's high, it's boy or low. If it's a girl, I don't know. There's the folklore out there. Whatever the folklore is, you know, that's all they had. They didn't have any assurance. There was no technology guarantee that this was going to be a baby boy. But the fact that this child is guaranteed to be a baby boy tells us that this is a supernatural birth. There's no doubt. That fact alone tells us it's a supernatural, it's an assertive attitude, assertive statement made by God. This child is positively, absolutely, unconditionally, categorically identified as a boy, and that puts it into the realm of the supernatural. It does. There's no deviations. A girl, he goes on to describe, a girl cannot be identified as one upon whom the government would rest, right? A girl could not be identified as one who would bear the name Wonderful, or Counselor. Or a girl could not be identified as a Mighty God, the Eternal Father, or the Prince of Peace. These are not the titles that women bear. These are masculine roles. masculine role. These are not roles that women are to bear. These are not roles that God intended for women to bear. And I know, I know what it means to be a chauvinist. You know, I know what it means to sound bigoted and narrow-minded. I get all of that stuff, you know, when you talk about things like this and gender exclusion or gender whatever can just bore you, you know. I get all that. But you've got to understand what's going on here. Look closely. A woman's role is to be under the authority of her husband to bear children, to be primary caretakers of the home. This child will bear masculine roles. Notice the repetition of the phrase, given unto us, given unto us. In the Hebrew, that's what's called a passive. This doesn't mean that this was something that this person did of himself. It was put upon him. He did not give himself, but someone gave him. He was given unto us. It's a passive thing going on here. Who has the power to give his son away? That's what he's talking about here who gave away the Lord Jesus Christ. He said I'm gonna give him to you So who has the authority who has the power to do that kind of thing with their own child? The father Who's the father of the child then that's the next question we kind of ask if he's given And the father gives, then you got to ask. We're not left to guess who might be the child's father. As a matter of fact, I would invite you to flip the page back to the seventh chapter of Isaiah. Let's drag up another prophecy here in Isaiah chapter seven and notice what it says again in verse 14. Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a virgin will be with child, alright? Number two, and bear a son. Alright, we've covered that. And she will call his name Emmanuel. So now we begin to drive down a little deeper here as to who the father is by the term, by the very name that is given to the child, which is Immanuel, which we all know means is God with us. God, how can this be? A virgin? will be with child? How can that be? How can a virgin have a child without a father? You say, well that's impossible. It is, unless of course you're talking about God. God, God the Father, Isaiah laid down the principle 700 years before Mary came on the scene. So I want you now, flip to the New Testament. Let's get ahead here. Let's go back. Let's go forward, I guess I should say, to the book of Matthew, okay? Let's go forward to the book of Matthew. Pardon me, Matthew. I'm stuck in my mind. Luke. Luke is where I want you to go and let's let's bear down on this a little further and Develop this thought a little more in Luke chapter 1 Luke chapter 1 700 years later Luke comes on the scene and he begins to write Luke chapter 1 notice what it says beginning in verse 30 Luke chapter 1 verse 30 The angel said to her Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb, and what, bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus." Luke 1, 30 and 31, right? So we're still on track with a virgin prophesied in Isaiah. You're going to bear a son, not a 50-50 chance. Now skip down to verse 34, same chapter of Luke, Luke 1-34. Mary said to the angel, How can this be, since I am a virgin? That's pretty obvious. We've got a problem here. It's a question we're all going to ask. It's natural. So she asked the question, How can this be, since I am a virgin? The angel answered and said to her, The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. And for that reason the Holy Child shall be called the Son of God. See, her question and our question are all the same. How can this happen? How can this possibly be? There's only one answer. God the Father is going to overpower you and He's going to send His power upon you in such a manner that you're going to conceive and you're going to have a physical body growing within you. This was 700 years of prophecy being fulfilled Right before our very eyes, even though it's 2,000 years old, it is still real, still applicable. And just like Isaiah said a virgin, that's exactly what happened. Mary was impregnated by God, not by man, and she bore a child. And that means the child in her womb was absolutely 100% a human body. Her body changed just like any other woman's body changes. when I get pregnant. Okay? All the physical evidence was there, you know, that she was bearing within her another human baby, a human body. I mean, you know, the kick, yeah, she felt the baby kick. Yeah, she could, you know, see the, you know, the fist or the heel sticking up, you know, and put her hand on the heel or whatever it was that was pushing, you know, pushing up. And, you know, she could feel it and she could push it down. And, you know, she could feel the baby pressuring her womb, the baby was a 100% human being. Let's not forget what Isaiah said, she would bear a son. She had no power to choose the sex of this child no more than anybody else does. God chose the sex of the child and she was the only one that could go around all of the village, and she didn't do this because of the circumstances involved here, but if she could have, if she could have, she could have been the only one to go around the village and said, I am going to have a son. She's the only one that could have said, I don't have a 50-50 chance. I know, I know I'm going to bear a male child. She could have done that with confidence and assurance and no doubt whatsoever. Her mind as to what she bore in her womb now everybody else would be saying Huh, this is the Mary over here. She thinks she's got a corner on this. She thinks she knows she's gonna have a baby boy Oh, man, what's the matter with her? She doesn't she know by now that you can't predict what you're gonna have, you know So everybody else was mocking her, you know, but she knew she knew she knew the truth. She knew what happened She knew that she was going to bear Emmanuel right the Son of God God with us. Emmanuel. He should be called Emmanuel. Now, when you get to the New Testament, you notice, of course, that they never call him Emmanuel, right? You don't find anywhere in the Bible where somebody actually goes, hey, Emmanuel, hey, Emmanuel, won't you heal me? That doesn't happen. But they call him Jesus. So why this conflict? I mean, obviously the prophecy said he'd be called Manuel and you get to the New Testament, his name is called Jesus. So how do you get these two things to correlate, to work together, coincide together? Well, they didn't call me Manuel for the same reason they didn't call him Counselor. or Mighty God, or Prince of Peace, or Wonderful. They didn't call him any of those things. Why? Because those names were referring to his descriptions of his offices, and descriptions of his character, and descriptions of his nature. In nature, he was Emmanuel. He was God with us, because God was his Father. The God in heaven, the God that created the earth. He was the father of this child, of this baby in her womb. He was 100% God! We've already talked about the fact that He's 100% human, right? But we also know that He's 100% God. The Bible verifies this. And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth." Glory as the only begotten from the Father. 100% human. 100% God combined in one body. No other being in the course of the history of this world, past, present, or future, shall ever, ever, ever, ever meet both of these qualifications. Somebody might try to convince you, well, you know, it's all mythology, right? The fact that Jesus Christ is God, you know, That's mythology. We've seen that in the past. Greek mythology, Babylonian mythology, Roman mythology, all that kind of stuff has man and humans coming together. Man and gods coming together. Well, that's true. Mythology does have that. But if you really look at all of those works of mythology, they've all been discredited by academia. And they all have logical fallacies. And they cannot compare to the evidence, the historicity, and the logicalness, and the eyewitness accounts of the Gospels. They can't hold a candle to the Gospels. The Gospels have withstood 2,000 years of examination and scrutiny, and guess what? We still have the Bible. We still have it. The alleged parallels between Jesus Christ and the other gods totally disappear when the original myths are examined and when they are compared to the Gospels. Christianity is based on the indubitable, certain, surefire reality that Jesus Christ is 100% God and 100% man. Just like God said. So let's go back to our scripture in Isaiah. Let's pick it up again in verse 6. A little more here I want to develop. It says again, a son will be given to you. I want to flesh that out just a little more. I know I've already covered a little bit, but I want to go back to it and flesh it out a little bit. Both prophecies in Isaiah, we've looked at 7 and 9, and both prophecies in Isaiah tell us that the child will be a son and that he will be given to us. The father gives the son, right? That's what we've determined so far. That baby laid in the manger? The baby that laid in the manger, that was God's baby. That was God's son. That's what it was in the manger. You see, God didn't just give us a baby, but babies grow up and become boys, and boys grow up and become men. Alright? That's what happens. So now we look at Philippians chapter 2 and we really speed ahead in Philippians chapter 2. But I do want to speed ahead because we don't have time to cover everything that's involved here. All the details involved in the life and death of Jesus Christ. So we're going to pick it up real fast. We're going to get to the end here real fast in Philippians chapter 2. So we've got the baby in prophecy. We've got the baby born. We've got the baby growing up. So in Philippians chapter 2, It says, who, although he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped. But he emptied himself, taking the form of a bondservant, being made in the likeness of men, being formed in appearance as a man. He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross. God gave us His baby, ultimately, as the scripture says here, and identifies Him as the one who's going to die on a cross. And I'll use those two words, for us. For us, this whole thing is for us. It's repeated over and over again. He could not have been sent by anybody else. There was nobody else that could have been sent outside of Jesus Christ to die on the cross for our sins. Nobody would have covered it. Jesus is uniquely God and is uniquely 100% man. Why then did Jesus have to be God to die for our sins? Why that half of the equation of the coming of Jesus Christ? Why did he have to be God? Because our sins offend a holy God and our sins are not temporal. When we sin, we think, well, you know, okay, I've sinned. I've done something wrong. I've done something I shouldn't have done. I need to make up for it. Whatever the case may be. But we don't take the fact that when we have sinned, it doesn't just stop with the physical action. Sometimes we think it does, and it doesn't. We deceive ourselves that way. It doesn't stop with the physical action. We have offended a holy, infinite God. We've broken His infinite laws, His infinite commandments. You don't just fib. The Bible calls that a lie, and a lie breaks the character nature of God being truth. That is an eternal offense. God gives our sins names. So that we will know in what ways we have broken His eternal laws. Fornication, adultery, watching pornography is adultery. It's not just something you do. Okay? These laws we've broken are eternal laws of God because they are part of His character and nature. You understand that? Those laws that God makes up, that God gives us, they're not just because, they're not without substance, they're not without foundation. The foundation is the character and nature of God. And so when we sin, when we break His laws, we offend the person of God, His being. And that calls for an eternal punishment in a place called hell. That's the only place where God can express the depth of our depravity and the depth of our lostness and help us understand how serious it is to offend Him. The word hell carries with it a sense of its own awesomeness, its own offensiveness. There's something about that word that people say, I don't want you to talk to me about that. God put that character in hell. Jesus Christ came for your eternal offenses against God. He sent His Son into this world in a way that we could grasp and understand. And that's why He came in the form of a baby. That's why He came in the form of a human body. And that is even why He was laid in a manger. That is even why the shepherds came and verified it. That's why the wise men came and verified it. And that's why we have the Gospel verifying His miracles, and His raising the dead, and His coming out of the tomb, His death on the cross. to verify that this one was the one prophesied. He is worthy of you repenting of your sins and putting your faith in Him. In Him. And nobody else, no one else, could satisfy God like Jesus. Artie's gonna come, he's gonna help us with an invitation, him, this morning. That little bitty baby wrapped up, swaddled, and laid in a manger. Beloved, that was God's gift of love. God's gift of love for us. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. Let's stand together, please, and let's bow our heads, let's close our eyes, and let's have a word of prayer. Father, we thank you so very much for the beautiful gift of Jesus Christ that you sent to this world. Nobody could have designed such a perfect plan by which men's sins could be paid for. Jesus Christ was the perfect Lamb of God. Without blemish and without spot, no sin was found in Him. He obeyed you completely and totally, which means that He satisfied your righteousness. And when He went to the cross, He satisfied your need for justice. Our sins must be paid for. They must be paid for. And Jesus Christ willingly took our sins upon Him while He was on the cross and satisfied your wrath against our sins. That's the reason He came. That's the reason for the prophecies, Father, that He came and would satisfy your wrath against us. Help us now, Heavenly Father, to leave this building encouraged, glorifying in the coming of Jesus Christ, in His conception, in His virgin birth, glory and reality. He is the only one who has ever been God and man in one and willing to come to this earth according to your will. Die for us. Give us heaven. Give us eternal life. Give us something beyond this world with all of its struggles and cares and miseries and sorrows and death. Yes, sometimes life is good, but ultimately, ultimately, we're going to meet our ends. Help us, Heavenly Father. to leave with hearts joyful singing in our hearts about the birth and coming of Jesus Christ. In his name we pray, amen.