Isaiah 7 vs. Isaiah 55 (Introduction)

Sorry about the erratic updating this week…occasionally Jack Bauer distracts me. The paradox that we’ll address now is one that I spent most of last semester researching and grappling with: a paradox I like to call the Isaiah paradox. In Isaiah 7, Isaiah prophesies about what we now know is the birth of Christ. In verse 14, he says, “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin* shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” Now Immanuel means “God with us”, and I’m guessing that it’s where we get the word “immanent” to describe our God. The immanence of God can be explained thusly: The Trinitarian God is a God who is intimately aware and active in His own creation. He is not a deistic clockmaker who winded the world up and then let it go, but rather a loving God who continually delivered and disciplined his chosen people, Israel, and who became human in the person of Jesus Christ to save mankind. Pretty simple, right? Cool. But there is also another side of God (there always is, isn’t there?). In Isaiah 55, the prophet has some words that a lot of people like to quote: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” The Hebrew names for God, El Shaddai and El Elyon, translate to God Almighty and God Most High, pointing to a different attribute of God: His transcendence. We serve a God who is very much out of our league. Our minds cannot come close to fully comprehending the length, width, and depth of His majesty. So how do we reconcile these two? How do we pray to a God that we know is always “with us”, but who we also know is perfect, holy, and completely out of our league?

In essence, this was the basis of one of the biggest and earliest large-scale theological battles of Christian history and it led to the writing of the Nicene Creed.  There were two sides of this epic battle. In one corner, there was the bishop Athanasius, arguing for the necessity of a pre-existent Jesus Christ for the sake of salvation, presumably a Jesus, who is the Word of John 1, where it says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”. For Athanasius, Jesus needed to be as much God as God the Father. In the other corner, we have the bishop Arius, as constructed mainly through people’s writings against him. His stance was that Jesus, because he is the “only-begotten” Son of God, there must have been a time when he was begotten. Therefore, it follows that there was a time that Jesus was not. This became a battle for the divinity of Christ because it struck deep at how people viewed who God is. Is God truly among us? Is God “way out there”? To explore this, over the course of the next few weeks, I'm going to look at the immanence of God and the transcendence of God and how they both characterize a glorious aspect of the wonderful God we serve.

*The translation here is based on the Greek translation of the Hebrew term for young woman. Some translators have used this fact to insinuate that the virgin birth was a fabrication of the early church. Do not be fooled, brothers and sisters. When you read the books of Luke and Matthew, the circumstances of Jesus’ birth are clear. Mary was indeed a virgin (though I do not think she was perpetually so, as some believe) and Jesus’ birth was indeed a miracle.