And You Shall Call His Name Immanuel, Not!
Denn Guptill
Matthew 1:23 “Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son, and he will be called Immanuel (meaning, God is with us).” Now that’s a familiar verse, isn’t it? We hear it every Christmas, We read it with every reading of Matthew’s Gospel. Yet have we ever really stopped and really listened to what it is saying to us? Matthew 1:23 “Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son, and he will be called Immanuel (meaning, God is with us).” Matthew is calling upon the prophet Isaiah here in regards to a particular Messianic Prophesy, which simply means a prophecy about the Messiah or about Jesus. This particular prophecy was written by Isaiah in the book that bears his name Isaiah 7:14 All right then, the Lord himself will choose the sign. Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel—‘God is with us.’
Now let’s see if I’m straight on this point, that sign that God was going to give Israel that the Messiah was born was that he would be born of a virgin, and then that he would be named Immanuel, right? The first part has to be the tricky one, that the virgin will conceive a child, that means whe will be pregnant. Now in High School Biology was not one of my strongest subjects, as a matter of fact in High School my only strong subjects were study hall and lunch. Somehow though I’m still under the impression that a virgin being with child is not the way it happens, you know it’s not in the right order. And yet I’m sure that you’ll remember in Luke 1:30-31 “Don’t be frightened, Mary,” the angel told her, “for God has decided to bless you! You will become pregnant and have a son, and you are to name him Jesus. In the same chapter Mary presents a small problem which she mentions to the angels in Luke 1:34 Mary asked the angel, “But how can I have a baby? I am a virgin.” Do you remember what the angel said, and I quote, “Not a problem” If he had of been an Australian Angel he would have said “No worries, or She’ll be right” actually that isn’t what he said, what he said is found in verse Luke 1:35 The angel replied, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the baby born to you will be holy, and he will be called the Son of God. So that takes care of the first part of the prophecy, the virgin birth. The part that I thought would have been the most difficult. But hey if God can make the natural laws that say that virgins don’t conceive then God can overrule those laws, right? The second part of the prophecy should be more easily dealt with, it was he will be called Immanuel.
Now that is no sweat, I mean you’ve gotta prophesy that concerning naming a child right, so all you gotta do to fulfil that prophesy is to name the kid what the prophesy says you’re gonna name the kid, right? Right. I mean you don’t have to be an Einstein to figure that one out, do you I mean a preacher could figure that out. It’s not rocket surgery.
OK, so how come I never read about “Immanuel the Son of God” in my New Testament? And how come nobody ever calls him, “Immanuel the carpenters son?” How come Mike, you never hear about “The Immanuel Video” and how come Andrew Lloyd Weber didn’t write “Immanuel Super Star”? How come? Inquiring minds want to know.
Because He wasn’t called Immanuel, he was called Jesus or more correctly because He was Jewish and his parents spoke Hebrew they called him, E-A-Soose. Well then maybe Immanuel was his middle name. Now I can appreciate that because I think that parents give their kids their middle name out of revenge. My mother has two middle names they are Hillary Aldia, which isn’t bad when you compare it to her father’s middle name which was Theophilus, he was named after his father. My middle name is Vance, and as an adult I don’t think that is too bad, although I normally just use v, I mean my folks really weren’t thinking when they gave a kid with a lisp a middle name with a c in it. I used to cringe when at school on the first day the teacher would go down her roll and call out Dennison Vance Guptill, and all my friends would snicker and say “Dennison Vance?”
I heard two Jr. High girls talking in a mall once and one asked “Do you like your name?” To which the other replied, “No I hate my name” and the first girl said, “Yeah I hate mine too.” I think it’s a fact of life that most of us hate our name at some point in our lives, probably because of the way our parents abuse it, “Dennison Vance you get in here right now you have some explaining to do” So maybe His name was Jesus Immanuel, Immanuel Jesus and He just went by Jesus.
Or maybe His name was Immanuel and everybody called him Jesus. After all Prince Charles and Princess Dianna have a prince named Henry who they call Harry. And when I was on the tugboats as a teenager I had a Captain named Gerry, well actually his name was Rudolph but everyone called him Gerry, I wonder why? And I have a second cousin who was named after my Great Grandfather, you remember him his name was Theophilus, except she was a girl so they named her Theo, but everyone calls her Teddy. And when I was in New York my senior pastor had a son named Carl but everybody called him Jake, and you I have a friend who sang in our church when we first started, his name was Bim Ingersoll but his real name is Turner but everybody calls him Bim, because when he was a little kid he used to go around singing, “Bimbo, Bimbo, where you gonna go e o.” Now that was a bit of a tangent wasn’t it?
But to tell the truth I don’t think Jesus was ever named Immanuel, I don’t think he was every called Immanuel or even Manny by his family and friends. I don’t even think that Immanuel was even a consideration, ever and I don’t think that Mary and Joseph fought over whether to call him Jesus or Immanuel. And yet even though His name was never called Immanuel I truly believe that He fulfilled the prophesy because His name was called Immanuel.
“There you go again Denn talking in circles. I always knew your true calling was in politics, why you do that better then Paul Martin.” No honest trust me on this one, it makes sense, we just have to follow it through. You see even though the prophecy wasn’t fulfilled on the birth certificate, Jesus wasn’t legally called Immanuel, the prophecy was fulfilled
in His life because even though he was never named Immanuel, His life and ministry reflected the translation, “God with us.” And I don’t necessarily think that it simply means “The Son with us. What Christ achieved was to allow mankind to come to a place of harmony with the Trinity as a whole, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
And so as a result of Christmas, as a result of this teenage Virgin conceiving a child who came to be with us?
1) God, the Father is With Us We really need to start at the beginning, because the beginning is always the best place to start. And so we discover way back in the book of Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament, that Moses wrote in Genesis 1:27 So God created people in his own image; God patterned them after himself; male and female he created them. In the master plan that God laid down for the world and humanity mankind was created to be in harmony with the creator. We were created to be in fellowship with God Himself. And one of the most precious gifts that could be offered was given to man and that was his free will.
Mankind would be free to choose their own destiny. God laid out all of the options for the first couple with all the rewards and consequences spelled out. You do this, this and this and this will happen, but if you do that, that and that then these are the consequences. And the book of Genesis, chapter three records the fall of man. How when offered the choice he chose to rebel against God and how that choice that Adam and Eve made at the dawn of history has effected mankind’s relationship with God from that moment on.
The theologians call it original sin or inherent depravity. Now we all inherit things from our folks, right? From my mother’s side of the family I got my height, and my colouring, from her Estonian Grandfather I inherited a good portion of my temperament and my less then favourable view of the former Soviet Union, from my dad’s side I got my short legs and my sarcasm, thanks dad. My hawk nose and cheek bones come from a Mic Mac girl who got tangled up with a Welsh immigrant four or five generations ago. My father loves the bumper sticker that says, “We’re spending our children’s inheritance” so I’ve probably got all I’m gonna get. But I inherited something else and I got it from Mom and Dad both. And it came via the Irish and Estonian on Mom’s side of the family and through the Welsh and native Canadian on my father’s side, and that is my leaning toward sin, toward rebellion and toward disobedience. And we all have it, we were born with it. I’ve said it before that is why you have to teach your kids to say please and thank you and to be polite but you don’t have to teach them how to say no, or won’t or can’t or how to be rude or how to throw a temper tantrum, and that my friends is original sin or inheritant depravity. We were originally created to be friends with God and yet sin drove a wedge into the relationship. Isaiah 59:2 But there is a problem—your sins have cut you off from God. Because of your sin, he has turned away and will not listen anymore. That is reiterated in the book of Micah 3:4 Then you beg the Lord for help in times of trouble! Do you really expect him to listen? After all the evil you have done, he won’t even look at you! Sin has separated us from a Holy God. In the history of Israel God was approached through an intermediary, and that was the High Priest, people didn’t have a relationship with God He was a remote and distant figure. And that doesn’t sound like, “God with us” And into the void came Christ who died on a cross and spilt his blood for our sins, in order to bring us back into fellowship with God. John the apostle wrote in His first letter in the book of 1 John 2:2 He is the sacrifice for our sins. He takes away not only our sins but the sins of all the world. and in the same letter in 1 John 4:10 This is real love. It is not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins. and finally Paul tells us in the book of Romans 3:23-25 For all have sinned; all fall short of God’s glorious standard. Yet now God in his gracious kindness declares us not guilty. He has done this through Christ Jesus, who has freed us by taking away our sins. For God sent Jesus to take the punishment for our sins and to satisfy God’s anger against us. We are made right with God when we believe that Jesus shed his blood, sacrificing his life for us. God was being entirely fair and just when he did not punish those who sinned in former times. Now that word sacrifice was translated as propitiation back in 1611 when the King James version was translate. That’s a neat word isn’t it propitiation, if I was to ask you for a definition I wonder how many would be game to try it? It easy, you see propitiation means the act of propitiating. It literally means “To appease the wrath of God, so that his justice and holiness will be satisfied and he can forgive our sins.” And so because of this atoning sacrifice that Christ has made for us, once we have repented of our sins, and that simply means telling God that we are sorry for disobeying him and turning away from those actions, and have accepted the forgiveness that Christ offers us then he becomes Immanuel, God with us. Not by name but by character.
2. God, the Son is With Us When Jesus Christ appeared on this earth, born of a virgin, conceived of the Holy Spirit he became by definition, Immanuel, God with us. Now you can either believe in Christ or you can not believe in Him, those are the two options you get. King David wrote in Psalm 14:1 Only a fool would say, “There is no God” and I’m sure that we wouldn’t do any disservice to the text if we read, Only a fool would say, “There is no Jesus.”
Now you may want to believe that there is no Christ, you may have convinced yourself that there is no Christ, but history authenticates His existence. Historical evidence both inside and outside of the Scriptures confirm that there was a man named Jesus, who came from the town of Nazareth, who ministered and taught in Palestine and who was crucified by the Romans. To deny His existence would be the equivalent of denying the existence of Caesar, Charlemagne, Alexander the Great or Napoleon. And so we must accept the existence of Christ. But who was He? A good teacher? A great moral man? A religious leader? A prophet? Josh McDowell lays down the premise that we can accept Christ in only one of three ways, that’s easy isn’t it? Throughout the New Testament Christ defines himself as “God” or “the son of God”
In the book of John chapter 10 verse 30 Christ states, The Father and I are one. “ and in John 8:58 we read, Jesus answered, “I tell you for certain that even before Abraham was, I was and I Am” Jesus was taking upon himself the name that God used in the book of Exodus with Moses. The Jews that Jesus was talking too understood what he was saying because in vs 59 the people picked up stones to kill Jesus, but he hid and left the temple. Why were they going to kill him? Because they knew that he had just called himself God.
Therefore McDowell contends that we can accept Christ only one of three ways, 1) He was a liar, in other words he knew that He wasn’t God but He told people that he was. And He wasn’t just any liar but He was the greatest liar that ever lived because He was willing to go to his death defending the lie. The lie would also have been diabolic, leading others to hell through his lies, all the while preaching honesty and integrity. But there was nothing to support the concept of Christ the compulsive liar either in secular or sacred history. 2) He was a lunatic, in other words Christ wasn’t really God, he only thought he was God he was suffering from delusions of Grandeur.
The third option of course is too accept Him as exactly who he said he was, God. And as such we need to fall on our knees and call Him Lord.
Now this thought isn’t original with Josh , C.S. Lewis wrote in “Mere Christianity” “I’m ready to accept Jesus, as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God” This is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things that Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic on a level with a man who says He’s a poached egg, or else He would be the devil of Hell. You must make the choice. Either this man was and is the Son of God or else a Madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call Him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us, He did not intend to.”
And for the thirty three years that Jesus walked this earth He was very much in a physical sense Immanuel, God with us.
3. God, the Holy Spirit is With Us Christ tells the disciples in John 14:16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, who will never leave you. Christ clarifies this in Vs. 26 of the same chapter when he says, John 14:26 But when the Father sends the Counselor as my representative—and by the Counselor I mean the Holy Spirit—he will teach you everything and will remind you of everything I myself have told you. One of my favourite passages in the Scripture is the continuation of this promise and it’s found in Acts 1:8 But when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, you will receive power . . .
In John Chapter 16 Jesus has told His disciples that He is returning to the Father and He senses that they are not entirely thrilled with this prospect and so He tells them in John 16:6-7 Instead, you are very sad. But it is actually best for you that I go away, because if I don’t, the Counselor won’t come. If I do go away, he will come because I will send him to you. When Jesus left this earth He filled the void with the third person of the Trinity, and that is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is probably the most neglected person of the Trinity and yet today in our everyday life He is the most important to the believer because today, Dec. 19 2004 Jesus Christ has made provision for the Spirit to walk side by side with you. Maybe you’ve heard the Song, “And He walks with me and He talks with me and He tells me I am His own; And the joy we share as we tarry there none other has every known.” The author was thinking about Jesus but He was wrong, Jesus ascended to Heaven to be with the Father, it’s the Spirit that we are supposed to be walking with down here, it’s the Spirit whose supposed to be filling our lives. Jesus might be your Saviour but it is the Holy Spirit that was sent to be your helper on a daily basis. And somehow we forget that. I think it’s a case of throwing the baby out with the bath water, Because some groups of believers really focus on the Spirit we swing too far to the other extreme. I sure hope that isn’t what Christ meant by grieving the Holy Spirit, when we at the best ignore Him and at the worst relegate him to the back corner of the trinity like some distant cousin. Because in a very real way today it is the Spirit who is Immanuel, or God with us.
Is God with you? The provisions were made with the birth of Christ, for your relationship to be restored with the Father, for your relationship to be reaffirmed with the Son and for your relationship to be confirmed with the Spirit.
I hope you enjoyed this message, PowerPoint is available, conact me at denn@powerpoint4preaching.com
