TEXT: Matthew 1:18-25

SUBJECT: Emmanuel

Last Sunday morning I preached my annual Christmas sermon, but I was not entirely pleased with it. What I said then was true and useful (I hope), but I wanted to say more. I’ll do that today with a second Christmas sermon, which is either one week late (if you’re a pessimist) or fifty-one weeks early (if you’re an optimist). In either event, I hope you listen with an open heart, for whatever the quality of this sermon, its message is of the highest importance.

While every Word in the Bible is true, some words make our hearts burn within us. And none more than the long foreign word in the middle of v.23—

Before we get to that word, however, let me remind you of the story in which it is found. Mary is a young woman living in Nazareth, one of the poorest towns in Israel. She is engaged to a carpenter named Joseph whose ancestors had once been kings in Jerusalem. But that was long ago, for the House of David was in ruins and had been for nearly five hundred years.

The couple were soon to be married, but until that happy day, they would deny their God-given passions and live in the wholesome love of chastity. This is sound advice for everyone: Not because sex is bad and dirty, but because it is good and clean—and the only way to keep it good and clean is to keep it in marriage.

Think of it this way: Marriage is the coloring book and sex is the crayon. Inside the lines it’s neat; outside the lines it’s messy! This is a good sermon--but not this sermon. Back to the story.

Not long before the wedding day, he finds his dear fiancée a little thicker around the waist than she used to be. Mary has become pregnant, and because he has not touched her, he knows another man has. Under the Law of Moses, a woman could be stoned to death for this sin, and all Joseph had to do was turn her in.

Because he was not a vindictive man, he did not publicly accuse her. But neither would he marry her. Our engagements are informal affairs and they can be broken off with a word. In Israel, however, they were legal matters, and couples who called it off had to file for divorce. This is what Joseph intended to do.

He wanted to do it quietly, and this took careful planning, some of which he did in bed. When he dozed off one night, an angel came to him in his dreams and told him Mary had not betrayed him, and the Father of her unborn child is God!

Joseph is to marry the woman and when her Baby is born he is to name Him—

‘Jesus’ means ‘Savior’ and Mary’s Son will live up to His Name.

This is the end of Joseph’s dream and nearly the end of our story. But not quite: for Matthew, being a good scholar, has a footnote at the bottom of the page.

The Virgin Birth is a unique thing, of course, as is the birth of the Savior. But these things—new as they are—are not unexpected. More than seven hundred years before, God had promised these things in the Book of Isaiah, and now—at long last—the Promise would be kept! A Virgin had conceived, and the Child she would soon bear would be ‘Jesus’—the Savior.

But wait a minute! Isaiah did not name the Child, ‘Jesus’. He said He would be called Emmanuel. Now, we have to allow for discrepancies between languages, of course, but there’s no way to get ‘Jesus’ out of ‘Emmanuel’!

Or is there?

From a linguistic standpoint, there isn’t. There is a Hebrew word for ‘Jesus’, but it is not Emmanuel, it is Yshua or, as we would say, ‘Joshua’.

But Matthew is not playing word-games! Jesus means ‘Savior’, and the only Savior is…whom? Let me give you a couple of clues. The first is Isaiah 45:22

Got it yet? Here’s the second clue, Isaiah 43:11—

It goes like this: If ‘Jesus’ means ‘Savior’ and if God is the only Savior, then ‘Jesus’ means ‘Emmanuel’—

In one way, God has always been with us. When He made Adam and placed him in the Garden, He did not leave him alone. He joined him--the Lord Himself walked with Adam in the cool of the evening; and spoke to him face to face as a man speaks to his friend.

Adam’s sin complicated things a bit, but it did not drive God from the earth or banish Him from the lives of His people. He walked with Enoch; He dined with Abraham; He wrestled with Jacob; He appeared to Moses in the Burning Bush; He came down on Mount Sinai; later, He took up a more fixed residence in the Temple where He lived for close to five hundred years.

When the Temple was burned down and the People carried into captivity, the prophet Ezekiel had a remarkable vision. He saw the Glory of the Lord leave the Temple. But where did the Glory go? You would think it would go straight up to heaven. But the prophet says otherwise: it went east! What does this mean? It means the Glory of the Lord went with His people into exile! When they came home, tired and ragged and few, the Lord came with Him. Though the Temple was a shell of its former self, all its glory was still there—because the Lord was there!

Thus, God has always been with us. He assured His people they didn’t have to pull Him down from heaven or drag Him up from the pit or cross the sea to find Him. He was near them, as near as His Word.

Yet the God who has always been with us has come even closer in the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Emmanuel promise was ‘kept’ before His birth, but with His birth, it was ‘fulfilled’.

Before the Incarnation God visited the world, and this was a wonderful surprise. David is staggered that the Master of the Universe would lower Himself to drop in on us. Psalm 8—

This is what God did, from the creation of the world until the day the virgin conceived a Son in her womb. At that time, however, He quit dropping in on us and…moved in with us! John 1 starts with the Divinity of Jesus Christ, v.1—

It goes on to list His Divine attributes and works, vv.2-5—

God did not assume a human form, only to discard it when He didn’t need it anymore. He became a human, a real human with all the weaknesses and problems common to the human race.

Job said Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. Not ‘some’ men are born to trouble, but all of us are. Not everyone suffer the same number or troubles or troubles of the same severity, but we all have had our share of them, and there are plenty more to come, up to and including death. This is what it is to be a man.

And this is what God became in Jesus Christ! He became Emmanuel, God with us. No longer the God way off on a cloud somewhere, but the God who is one of us, the God who—like you and me—keenly feels the pains and losses of life.

There was a sect in the Early Church called the Gnostics. They believed Jesus was God. With the True Church, they would have affirmed the Nicene Creed that calls Him—

But they denied His humanity. ‘He looked like a man’—they said—but that’s all: ‘looked like a man’. To their way of thinking He was an alien—like the ones on the old TV show The Invaders. Taking on a pretended body and human soul, He showed us how to live good lives.

There’s a problem with their teaching, and I’m sure you can see what it is: If He was a make-believe man then His holiness was make-believe, and He set no example for us at all!

Was He a make-believe Man? He wasn’t. He was a completely human Man. Who was also God. Thus, in Christ, we have—in the fullest sense of the word—Emmanuel, God with us.

This is what He became way back in the First Century. But many years have passed since then and He’s now gone to heaven. Is He a Man up there—or has He shucked off His humanity. He is still a Man. The angel called Him, This same Jesus. Not the ‘Old Jesus’ (before He became a Man) or the ‘New Jesus’ (who used to be a Man but isn’t anymore), but this same Jesus, whom the disciples knew as a Man on earth and who is the same Man now in heaven.

The story of Stephen’s death is full of interesting details. He was the first Christian martyr, stoned to death about three years after the great Day of Pentecost. As the heavy rocks rained down on his head, something happened: the curtain of heaven was pulled back and Stephen saw the Glorified Lord. Note carefully: It doesn’t say he saw a vision of the Lord, but he saw the Lord Himself. Not with his faith but with his eyeballs! And, seeing Him in heaven, he recognized Him—

How did he know that Man in heaven was the Lord Jesus? That’s east to explain: Stephen recognized the One in heaven because He was the same Man he knew on earth. This same Jesus, still—

This means: although our Lord has left the earth, He has not left the human race because He is still part of it!

What does Emmanuel mean? It means God with us. If this was all our story said about God we would read it with great anxiety if not appalling fear. For God with us is not a comforting thought to sinners. Before he sinned, Adam enjoyed God’s company. But when the forbidden fruit was eaten, the man felt ashamed of himself and scared. The last thing he wanted was God with us.

We feel the same way he did, and that’s why we won’t retain God in our thoughts and the thoughts of God we can’t get rid of we shape into an idol. Emmanuel is terrifying to sinners.

Unless He is also Jesus (or Savior). Luckily for us He is both—both Emmanuel (God come near) and Jesus (God come near—not to condemn us for our sins, but to save us from them).

There’s one last thing you should notice in our story. The word, Emmanuel, is translated. The writer of this Gospel was a Jew and he wrote it for the Jews. Both he and they knew what Emmanuel meant, and he didn’t need to translate it for them.

But most of the world back then didn’t speak Hebrew, and had no idea what Emmanuel meant. So he translated it for them into Greek, which was the language everyone spoke in the Roman Empire.

Why did he do that? Because, in Jesus Christ, God has not drawn near to one people only. He’s come to live with the whole world. He’s come to live with you and to live in peace—not by accepting your sins—but by accepting you and saving you from your sins.

This He does by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.

The peace of God be with you. For Christ’s sake. Amen.