Join Nicole McBurney and Pastor Bob Enyart on this insightful journey into the Bible, unraveling the mysteries behind one of its most profound prophecies—the birth of Emmanuel. This episode delves deep into ancient texts such as the Esarhaddon Prism, and their relevance to today’s belief systems. Discover the historical and prophetic significance of the Virgin Birth and explore the surrounding debates and theological perspectives that have intrigued scholars for centuries.
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country and welcome to Theology Thursday. I’m Nicole McBurney. Every weekday we bring you the news of the day, the culture, and science from a Christian worldview. But today join me and Pastor Bob Enyart as we explore the source of our Christian worldview, the Bible.
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Now we learn about some of this from a famous engraved prism this extraordinary stone with small print all around it on each side. And that is currently, today, it’s in the British Museum. You could find out about it online, get the transcript of the writing, and it’s called Esarhaddon Prism. and it mentions Manasseh of Judah by name, and it was during the time of Manasseh, king of Judah, that this 65 years later utter destruction came about. Okay, verse 9. The head of Ephraim is Samaria, and the head of Samaria is Remalia’s son. If you will not believe, surely you shall not be established. That is, God offers deliverance to Ahaz as he offers eternal salvation to all who will believe him. But if you will not believe, then you will not inherit eternal life. As for him, so too for us. As for us, so too for him. Eternal life is knowing God. It’s a relationship. And when you know God, you believe him. And you believe them to know them, and you know them to believe them. Verse 10, and here we come to the great prophecy. Moreover, the Lord spoke again to Ahaz, saying, Ask a sign for yourself from the Lord your God. Ask it either in the depth or in the height above. So through his prophet Isaiah, the king has offered, go ahead, ask God for a sign. God will give it to you. Shall I write a sign in the clouds? What do you want to know? How do you want me to prove myself to you? Or should I open up the earth beneath? Ahaz, what should I do for you? And the king answered, but Ahaz said, I will not ask, nor will I test the Lord. I think that was wise on his part. Very wise. God did put up with people on occasion asking him for a sign. But we could see that God gets very annoyed with people for asking him for a sign. Jesus was annoyed. People treat God like he’s a magician, like he runs a sideshow. Herod was so excited to meet Jesus the morning of the day he was crucified because he said, oh, I’m so excited. I’ve been longing to meet you. I’d love for you to do a sign. Will you do a sign for us? Show us a miracle, signs and wonders. Wouldn’t that be great? And so today, how often even believers, even leaders will say, God, we’re not going to let you go until you show us a sign. And they think it signifies their spiritual maturity that they want God to show them a sign. But Herod was evil, of course. He hated the Lord. So it’s not a sign of maturity to say, oh, I want to see a miracle. That’s just not. And God does get annoyed with it repeatedly in the Bible. So Ahaz said, I’m not going to ask for a sign, nor will I test the Lord. Verse 13 says, Then Isaiah, then he said, here now, O house of David. So Ahaz was a descendant of King David. That’s why he’s called the house of David. And archeologists have dug up an inscription that mentions the house of David from the 10th century BC, around 900 and something. Maybe it was 800. I don’t have it right in my notes. But I think around 900 BC. And it was written not by the Israelites, but by one of their enemies, the king who defeated them. And it says, I defeated the house of David. Here’s how many chariots, here’s how many soldiers, and so on. What an amazing historical account from virtually 3,000 years ago testifying to the house of David, which even that the atheist and the skeptic mocks. And we’ll say there was no monarchy in Israel. Don’t you know history at all? Israel didn’t have any kind of civilization back then. They had no kingdom. There was no house of David. So on every turn, everything they attack, everything. Dinosaurs, oh, it’s ridiculous. The Bible’s ridiculous. Dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. Well, here’s a bone. Look at these blood vessels. They’re still squishy and transparent. Squeeze them and guess what comes out? Red blood cells. And we’ve got DNA now from a hadrosaur and a T-Rex. And we have a dozen different proteins sequenced from half a dozen different dinosaurs. And we’ve got stuff way older than that. So at every turn, God laughs in the heavens. Because wherever men say that God is a liar, God says, oh, well, look at this. Look at this. So… Hear now, O house of David, is it a small thing for you to weary men, but will you weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. And God wasn’t saying here that he was wearied because Ahaz asked him for a sign. He didn’t ask him for a sign. God was wearied because his people were perpetually weak because they didn’t trust in him. So sin makes people weak and vulnerable, just as France is vulnerable, Britain. America is vulnerable against Islamic terrorists because we lack the blessing of the Lord that comes not through supernatural miracles. I don’t pray to stop bullets. I don’t do that personally. I know some people do. I don’t pray to stop bullets, but I pray for God’s strength and wisdom and courage that even could benefit a nation if its leaders are humbled before God. So a nation becomes stronger against their adversaries, even if God is not about to use miracles to stop bullets. Still, they’re stronger or weaker. So God is forever in the Old Testament—I say forever— time and again, not all the time, but repeatedly, coming to their aid or to rescue them because of their sin. So God is weary. Verse 14, Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel, God with us. Wow, what a beautiful prophecy. Shall call his name Emmanuel, God with us. Our Christmas message, December 2014, we referenced this passage, of course, and the quote of it in the Gospel of Matthew. And we talked about this prophecy that a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, Emmanuel, the Messiah. We’ve been speaking about skeptics and skeptics, including many Jews who have so far rejected Jesus Christ as their Messiah, as most all Gentiles have done also. And when they read this in their own Bible, they say, oh, that doesn’t say virgin. It says a maiden, a young maiden. So we think that through and we see that, well, the translations of it we have from thousands of years ago say virgin. They don’t say maiden, they say virgin. So let’s think that through. Matthew 1, verse 22 says, we read, all this was done that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, Isaiah 7.14 here, saying, behold, the virgin shall be with child and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which is translated God with us. Matthew did not take that out of context. Now, that’s actually possible. There are statements in the Old Testament that are taken out of context, knowingly, obviously, admittedly, even by the author, and applied to a different context. You can do that, it’s okay, as long as it’s obvious to everyone what you’re doing. Matthew was not doing that here. The Hebrew word in Isaiah 7.14 for virgin is Alma. Skeptics and others say, well, we should translate that young woman. And unfortunately, the RSV, which we have long called the reversed version, the revised standard version, translates this, a young woman shall conceive. Now, if a young woman bore a son, would that be a sign? That’s not a sign. It’s just normal. It happens every day, literally. It would be perfectly normal unless she were unmarried, and then it wouldn’t be a sign. It would be a sin unless she were a virgin. If a virgin conceives, that’s a sign. And that’s obviously the meaning of the text, and it’s clearly the meaning when this was translated to the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, 200 years before Jesus was born, and in the New Testament. By the way, the Hebrew word Alma is used a handful of times in the Old Testament. For example, speaking of Rebecca before she married Isaac. So it’s not used in any instance where you could say, oh, see, it’s used of a woman who’s not a virgin. It’s never used like that. used of Rebecca before she married Isaac. It’s used of Moses’ sister Miriam when she was a young woman. In none of the instances is it obvious it’s not referring to a virgin. Now there’s another Hebrew word which is translated virgin on occasion. It’s Bethula. But what’s interesting about that word is it’s clarified at times. Like in Genesis chapter 24, we read, neither had any man known her. So she is Bethula and neither had any man known her. So if the word means virgin, and that’s all it means, you’d think you don’t have to clarify it. So the clarification means it could mean other things. And in fact, Bethula is also used of widows who are not virgins. And it was even used of a pagan goddess who’s not a real person. But Baal, you know, the Canaanite god Baal had a promiscuous partner and she was referred to as Bethula. She’s promiscuous. So Bethula is not a technical term that only means virgin, and Alma only means young woman. That’s simply a twisting of the argument to try to get people to doubt the fulfillment of the Scripture. The Septuagint, translated 200 years before Jesus… From this Hebrew here into Greek, use the word Parthenos, like we speak of the Parthenon, Parthenos, which is the normal Greek word for virgin. And it’s the word that Jesus used in Matthew in his parable of the ten virgins, and in Matthew 1, where the Holy Spirit inspired that the virgin shall conceive. By the way, the King James Version translates that word, Greek word, parthenos, 14 times, all 14 as virgin. The NAS, for example, the New American Standard, translates it once as chaste and the other times as virgin. Okay. So, and the virgin birth of the Lord goes back to what the ancient church referred to as the Proto-Vangelion, which was the first mention of the gospel in the Bible, Genesis 3.15. I will put enmity between us. You and the woman between your seed and her seed, he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. So her seed, the seed of the woman, very unusual. Normally it would be the seed of the man, but the first reference of the gospel in the Bible speaks of the seed of the woman. And Mary’s conception of Jesus Christ had to be a virgin conception because if Jesus had a human father, the sin of the Father would pass through to the Son. And that’s made explicit in the Bible. We read about from Paul that even though Eve sinned first, all the world sinned in Adam. The world died in Adam. So we inherit our sin through our Father, our sin nature. So the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary. and gave her a complement of chromosomes, added divinely created 23 chromosomes to complete her 23, and there was one X and one Y, and the Holy Spirit created the Y chromosome, the other 22, and Jesus was conceived in Mary’s womb, yet without sin. By the way, the Roman Catholic Church teaches the Immaculate Conception, and millions of people, even Catholics, think that refers to Jesus. It doesn’t. It refers to Mary. They teach that Mary was immaculately conceived to be sinless, otherwise Jesus couldn’t be sinless. And so if that were true, then… How could Mary have been immaculately conceived? Her mother would have had to been immaculately conceived all the way back to Eve, and clearly no such thing ever happened. We are in Isaiah 7, verse 14, the great prophecy. Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel. That’s translated God with us. It’s beautiful. curds and honey the curds that doesn’t sound too great to us probably referred to butter you know we make yogurt today most likely butter like butter and honey curds and honey he shall eat that he may know to refuse the evil and choose the good so that is as a child This is Emmanuel conceived by the Virgin. As a child, he shall be fed and nurtured as he grows. He’ll grow up like a normal little boy. As the New Testament says, he’ll grow in stature and in wisdom and in favor with men and even favor with his father. That’s in Luke 2, verse 52. So the infant Jesus, he was a baby. He was God incarnate, but he was a baby. He wasn’t like Hollywood would make a freak show out of it. He didn’t reach out of his crib and pick up his mother’s chair. He didn’t do that. If his cereal was on the other side of the family table, he didn’t pick up the table so it would slide to him. He was a little… baby first in a manger then traveling in egypt as a toddler and then as a little boy in nazareth in the family home growing in wisdom and stature and in favor with god and man he had to be growing for he must increase Verse 16, for before the child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land that you dread will be forsaken by both her kings. So there is in prophecy as a normal tactic, prophecies that are short term, and then long-term aspects to the same prophecies so that they have short-term and long-term fulfillments. And the short-term often is overlooked or even unknown to us because we’re here now 3,000 years later, we’re so excited about the long-term fulfillment. But God was saying that, hey, your land is going to be devastated in the near term. But in the long term too, this world that we call our home will be devastated apart from the salvation that comes from this child. And so here there’s a reference in this verse to the age of accountability. The Bible doesn’t use the term age of accountability, but it teaches the concept very clearly. For before the child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good… We have a study on the age of accountability in Romans chapter 5, our Romans verse-by-verse study through Romans. Also, we covered this topic at some length on the radio, and I might have the date of that broadcast. Yes, it was in 2010, July 9, 2010. If you’re interested on the age of accountability, And we do read that, for example, Paul says in Romans 7, there’s a few statements in Romans that we can discern the age of accountability, but he says that I was alive once before the commandment came. And then the commandment came and sin revived and I died. So the commandment is the law. And here in this verse, before the child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good. In Romans, we read that the law is the knowledge of good and evil. The law is the knowledge of good and evil. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a symbol of the law. For God said that the day the law was given, death came to Israel. Death. In fact, 3,000 were killed the day the law was given. And 3,000 were saved the day the Spirit was given at Pentecost in Acts chapter 2. An incredible parallel, which Paul capitalizes on writing to the Corinthians and says the Spirit, he says the law kills, but the Spirit gives life. So Paul writes in Romans 1 that all the world was alive to God. but then they turned on God. They turned on him. And so although they knew God, They did not retain him. So when we’re conceived as a child in the womb, a child, I mean, how much does a child know? We’re not sure because we don’t have good memories. But the child is alive to God. So that when John the Baptist was in his mother Elizabeth’s womb at just six months of age, and Mary walked into their home with Jesus in her womb, John the Baptist sensed the presence of the Lord and he leapt for joy in his mother’s womb. Isn’t that exciting? That a baby could recognize the blessing of God. So that every child is conceived alive to God. But then something happens. As they grow, they become mature enough, aware enough to recognize that there is a war between good and evil. They might not be able to even put it into words in all different ages. Some people who are handicapped and never develop mental faculties beyond that of a young child, may never reach the age of accountability throughout their whole life, even if they live to be 80 and die, and then God will specially deal with them because they never had the opportunity to side with, for or against him. And so if a little one, a toddler or a young child sins, he may sin and be disobedient and be bratty. But God does not present in the scriptures that that’s an indicator that he has the full mental capacity to choose the rebellion. At some point in our lives, given enough time to develop, we get to the point where we could consciously, willingly choose the rebellion against God. And every human being, given the opportunity, has done that, except for Jesus Christ. He’s the only one who hasn’t. In Deuteronomy chapter 1, there’s a reference to the knowledge of good and evil, those who are not yet old enough to have the knowledge of good and evil. But there, it’s in a historic parable, so to speak. The nation of Israel is being used, personified as a person. And they’re coming out of Egypt, and they’re supposed to go into the Promised Land, but because of the rebellion, they end up wandering for… 40 years until all the adults die all the adults die and then the young ones the little ones who haven’t died they enter into the kingdom doesn’t mean they’re all righteous they just happen to be the ones that didn’t die and they are referred to as the little ones who do not have the knowledge of good and evil but they happen to be up to 20 years of age it doesn’t mean that the age of accountability is 20 years of age that was a historic parallelism, what was happening through the nation of Israel, we can see happens even in our own individual lives. And so when there’s a parable like that, a symbolic truth being presented, it’s also often presented with historical actual details. And if you try to force the historical details to have specific literal meaning, then you’ll come up with the belief that the age of accountability is age 20. And you have only one Bible verse for that. And so anyone who dies under 20 doesn’t go to hell. And if this were true, you’d think the New Testament would say something about it. Because most people died in their 30s and 40s back then. Just living to 20 was an accomplishment. So at any rate, the edge of accountability we teach varies with each child. And for children who grow up in an atheist household, it undoubtedly is older than a child who grows up in a Christian household. Because to whom much is given, much is required. And to whom less is given, less is required. Jesus taught. So the child grows up learning about the Lord, they become sensitive to the things of the Lord, and they’re far more aware of the spiritual war that we’re all in. It’s just like a kid growing up in a sports house. He can tell you the pros and cons of whether the Cowboys win or lose. You know, it’s over my head. But kids grow up in an environment, and they become very adept at understanding the nuances of those issues. Okay, verse 17. The Lord will bring the king of Assyria upon you and your people and your father’s house days that have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah. And that’s way back in the time of Jeroboam and how evil Jeroboam was. And this king was evil like Jeroboam and that king was evil like Jeroboam. Verse 18. And it shall come to pass in that day that the Lord will whistle for the fly that is in the farthest part of the rivers of Egypt, and for the bee that is in the land of Assyria. So the Lord will go, I can’t do it, you know. Cheryl does it really well. Hey, you, come here, hornets, come here. I need you. And God could do that. He could call all the animals, two of each kind, to come to Noah in the ark. He could do that. This is a figure of speech here. It doesn’t mean God brought all the flies, but the point is God’s going to bring misery upon those who rebel against him. Verse 19, they will come and all of them will rest in the desolate valleys and in the clefts of the rocks and on all thorns and in all pastures. And the same day the Lord will shave with a hired razor So a hired razor, maybe like a barber, he’ll get some guy, come here, cut this guy’s hair. The Lord will shave with a hired razor with those from beyond the river, beyond the Euphrates, with the kings of Assyria, the head and the hair of the legs, and will also remove the beard. In other words, he will humiliate them. Verse 21, it shall be in that day that a man will keep alive a young cow and two sheep. So it shall be from the abundance of milk they give that he will eat curds for curds and honey. Everyone will eat who is left in the land. So imagine everyone left in the land after the captivity. The only food left won’t be from herds of cattle or nor even a single grown cow, but from one little calf and from two little sheep. And that’s it. That’s what everybody has to drink from their milk. Not much to go around. Verse 23, it shall happen in that day that wherever there could be a thousand vines worth a thousand shekels of silver, it will be for briars and thorns. With arrows and bows, men will come there because all the land will become briars and thorns. So instead of cultivating the land, they’ll go there to hunt because there are no farms, there are no vineyards. And finally, verse 25, “…and to any hill which could be dug with a hoe, you will not go there for fear of briars and thorns, but it will become a range for oxen and a place for sheep to roam.” So no more cultivation. Instead, wild stock on the free range will forage and find, in fact, nothing really to eat for themselves other than weeds and thorns. Yet with all this coming judgment, God will send his son, born of a virgin, whose name will be Emmanuel, God with us, Jesus Christ. And may he bless you. God bless you guys.
