Immanuel

Isaiah 7 (with Matthew 1:18–23)

Before this session, read Isaiah 7 in full, and read Matthew 1:18–23 alongside it. As you read, notice Ahaz’s fear and his false piety, and ask why the Lord would give a sign to a king who would not even ask for one, and what it means that the sign is a child called God with us.

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

Isaiah 7:14 (ESV)

The Trees Shaking in the Wind

We come now to one of the great peaks of the book, and we reach it by way of a political emergency. The year is around 734 before Christ. Two kings have formed an alliance, Rezin of Syria and Pekah of Israel, the northern kingdom, and they are marching south on Jerusalem with a plan: to depose Ahaz, the king of Judah, and set a puppet of their own, a nobody the text calls the son of Tabeel, upon the throne of David (7:6). This is more than a military threat. It is a threat to the house of David itself, to the very line through which God had promised the Messiah would come. If Rezin and Pekah were to succeed, the Davidic dynasty would be finished.

And Ahaz is afraid; the text gives us an unforgettable picture of his fear. They and their people were emotionally shaken, just as the trees of the forest shake before the wind (7:2). Picture a stand of trees in a gale, every trunk swaying, every leaf shaking: that is the king and the whole nation, rattled down to the roots. Faith would have steadied them; instead they tremble. And a frightened king is a dangerous king, for fear makes a man reach for whatever looks like safety, and Ahaz’s eyes are already drifting toward the great power on the eastern horizon, Assyria, even as the Lord prepares to offer him something far better.

We should feel the full weight of what is at stake, because it is more than one king’s survival. The promise of God ran through the house of David: the Lord had sworn to David that his throne would be established forever, and that from his line would come the One in whom all the families of the earth would be blessed (2 Samuel 7). When the two kings plot to snuff out David’s line and put the son of Tabeel in its place, they are striking, whether they know it or not, at the promise of the Messiah Himself. The drama of Isaiah 7 is not finally about geopolitics. It is about whether the promise of God will hold when the house that carries it is shaking in the wind.

It is worth knowing what kind of king this was, because it deepens the wonder of everything that follows. Ahaz was no tragic near-miss of a believer; Kings and Chronicles remember him as one of Judah’s very worst: a man who burned incense to idols, who would in time shut the doors of the Lord’s own temple (2 Chronicles 28:24), who even passed his son through the fire, a horrible sin practiced by the nations whom the LORD drove out (2 Kings 16:3). This is the heir of David to whom Isaiah now comes bearing a promise of the Messiah. And there is a hard, bracing comfort in that. The line that carried the Christ ran straight through men like Ahaz, faithless, idolatrous, frightened men, and was kept alive not by their goodness but by God’s stubborn fidelity to His own word. The genealogy of the Lord Jesus is not a roll of honor. It is a record of grace refusing, against all reason, to let go.

If Your Faith Does Not Remain Firm

Into that panic the Lord sends His prophet, and He sends him with company. Go out with your son Shear Jashub and meet Ahaz (7:3). The boy’s name is itself a sermon: Shear Jashub means a remnant will return. Isaiah brings his little son along like a walking promise: whatever comes, a remnant will be left, a remnant will return. And he meets the king out at the waterworks, by the conduit of the upper pool, where Ahaz is no doubt inspecting the city’s water supply against a coming siege, busy with his contingency plans while the prophet arrives bearing the word of God.

And the message is steadying. Make sure you stay calm! Don’t be afraid. Don’t be intimidated by these two stubs of smoking logs (7:4). The Lord looks at Rezin and Pekah, the terrors keeping a king awake at night, and calls them two stubs of smoking logs, burnt-out stubs of wood, nearly spent, a little smoke and no fire left in them. Their plot to carve up Judah will simply not stand: the Sovereign LORD says: “It will not take place; it will not happen” (7:7). Within a fixed span of years the northern kingdom Ahaz so dreads will itself lie in pieces. The things that loom largest in our fear are very often, in the Lord’s sight, two smoking stubs.

There is a whole theology of fear tucked into that picture. Fear is, very often, a failure of perspective, a trick of the eye that swells the thing in front of us until it blots out the God above us. Ahaz looked at Rezin and Pekah and saw two unstoppable armies; the Lord looked at the very same men and saw two stubs of burnt-out wood. Both were looking at the same threat; only one of them was seeing it truly. This is why one of the most repeated commands in all of Scripture is some form of do not be afraid: not because the dangers are imaginary, but because they are so much smaller than they appear to a heart that has lost sight of God. Faith does not pretend the smoking logs are not there. It simply remembers who is holding the match.

And then the word that is the hinge of the whole chapter, a word built on a play the English can only approximate. If your faith does not remain firm, then you will not remain secure (7:9). In the Hebrew the two verbs are the same root: if you will not be firm in faith, you will not be made firm at all. It is the root from which we get our Amen. Everything in this chapter hangs upon one thing: whether Ahaz will believe. The promise has been spoken: the smoking stubs will not stand, the house of David will not fall. But a promise must be believed to do a man any good. Faith does not make the promise true; the promise is true whether Ahaz believes it or not. But only faith will let him stand on it. Unbelief will leave him forever scrambling for some other ground to stand on.

We should be clear about what kind of believing the Lord is asking for here, lest we turn faith itself into a work, one more thing Ahaz must somehow muster up by his own strength. The faith that establishes is not a heroic feat of the will, a confidence the king generates from somewhere inside himself; it is simply the empty hand that takes hold of the promise already held out to it. To believe, here, is to let the Lord’s word be truer than the two kings on the horizon, to reckon the smoking logs smaller than the One who called them stubs. That is all of it, and it is everything. Ahaz is not asked to be brave. He is asked to trust a promise. And the tragedy is that he found it easier to trust an empire he could see than a God who had just told him exactly how the story would end.

Ask for a Sign

Then the Lord does something almost without parallel in Scripture. He stoops to the frightened king and offers him proof, any proof he should care to name. Ask for a confirming sign from the LORD your God. You can even ask for something miraculous (7:11). The Hebrew behind that last line reaches in two directions at once: make your request deep, down in the depths, or high, up in the heights. Name your sign, Ahaz. Reach down to the depths of the grave or up to the height of heaven; ask the sun to reverse its course, ask the dead to speak, anything at all, and the Lord will do it, to anchor your faith. It is an extraordinary condescension. God does not owe us signs, and rarely grants them on demand; here He fairly presses one upon the king, like a father holding out his hand to a child afraid to cross the street.

Pause over how much this offer gives away about the heart of God. He is under no obligation to argue His case with a faithless king; He could simply command, and let Ahaz obey or perish. Instead He bends all the way down to the level of the man’s fear and says, in effect, what would help you trust Me? Name it, and I will do it. This is not the God of the philosophers, aloof and self-contained, indifferent to whether the creature believes. This is a God who wants to be believed, who would rather coax a trembling king into trust with a freely offered sign than stand on His dignity and watch him drown. And the same God would one day give the greatest sign of all to a whole world that had not asked for it, and could never have deserved it. Here, already, in the offer to Ahaz, is the God who runs to meet.

And Ahaz says no. But Ahaz responded, “I don’t want to ask; I don’t want to put the LORD to a test” (7:12). On its face it sounds devout, biblical even; the law itself had said, You must not put the LORD your God to the test (Deuteronomy 6:16). Ahaz wraps his refusal in a verse of Scripture. But it is a lie wearing a halo. This is not the reverence of a man too humble to ask; it is the evasion of a man who has already made up his mind and does not want his unbelief disturbed by a sign that might oblige him to trust. For Ahaz had a plan, and it was not the Lord. Even as he piously declines the sign, his messengers are being readied to go to the king of Assyria with silver and gold and the words, I am your servant and your dependent. March up and rescue me (2 Kings 16:7). He would not ask the Lord for a sign because he had already chosen himself another savior.

Linger on this, for the human heart is endlessly capable of it. There is a kind of unbelief that has learned the whole vocabulary of faith, that can quote the right verse, strike the humble pose, decline the wrong thing for exactly the wrong reason, and uses religion itself as a way of holding God at arm’s length. Ahaz did not refuse the sign because he revered God too much; he refused it because he trusted God too little, and then dressed the refusal up in piety so that he would not have to say so out loud. It is worth asking where we do the very same thing, where we reach for a spiritual-sounding reason (I don’t want to presume; I don’t want to put God to the test) to avoid the harder and simpler thing, which is to take God at His word. False piety is not a lesser sin than open rebellion. It is very often the same unbelief, only better dressed.

The Sign Given Anyway

Isaiah’s patience snaps, and he answers for the Lord with a weary exasperation. Pay attention, family of David. Do you consider it too insignificant to try the patience of men? Is that why you are also trying the patience of my God? (7:13). Notice that the address has shifted: no longer Ahaz but family of David, the whole dynasty, for what hangs in the balance is far bigger than one man. And notice the ache in those words, trying the patience of my God. Ahaz’s faithlessness does not merely fail; it wearies God, wears Him out, the way a faithless child wears out a parent. The unbelief that hides behind piety is never neutral. It grieves the very One it pretends to honor.

And then comes the turn, one of the great turns in all the prophets. Ahaz would not ask for a sign, so the Lord gives him one regardless. For this reason the Lord himself will give you a confirming sign (7:14). Read that slowly. The king refused; the sign comes anyway. The faithlessness of Ahaz cannot cancel the faithfulness of God. The promise to the house of David did not finally rest on whether this particular son of David happened to believe it (thank God), and so the Lord reaches clean over the head of the unbelieving king and gives the sign to the whole house of David and to every age after it. He will keep His covenant with David whether David’s heirs keep faith or not.

And note who gives it: the Lord himself. Not a prophet’s clever reassurance, not a court chaplain’s wishful word, but the Lord Himself, in person, undertaking to provide the sign. The same would be true of the sign when at last it came in full: the Lord Himself would give it, by coming Himself. Immanuel is not a sign God sends in from a distance, the way a king might dispatch a banner or a courier. It is a sign God is: God Himself, given. When heaven wanted to prove its faithfulness to a faithless house, it did not send down a token to be examined. It sent the Son to be received.

Stay here a moment, because this is gospel, and it is exactly the kind we most need. Our deepest comfort is not that our faith is strong (most days it is not; most days we are as shaky as wind-blown trees ourselves) but that the promise of God does not hang on the strength of our believing. The Lord gave Immanuel over the head of a king who would not so much as ask for him. He sends the Savior to a people who were not looking for one, keeps the covenant with a house full of Ahazes, and brings His Christ into the world not because we had faith enough to deserve Him but because He had sworn that He would. If the coming of Immanuel had waited upon human faithfulness, it would be waiting still. It did not wait. The Lord himself will give you a confirming sign.

The Virgin Shall Conceive

And here is the sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel (Isaiah 7:14, ESV). Here this study quotes the ESV rather than the NET (this young woman is about to conceive), because Matthew, writing by the Spirit, reads the verse as the virgin (Matthew 1:23). Two wonders are folded into one short verse: a virgin will bear a son, and the son will be named God with us. Both halves have been fought over for centuries, and we should look honestly at the fight, because the answer turns out to be part of the gift.

The first battle is over the word virgin. The Hebrew is ‘almah, and critics have long urged that it means only “a young woman” of marriageable age, not specifically a virgin; that had Isaiah meant virgin he had a more precise word ready to hand; and that the sign was simply an ordinary birth in Ahaz’s own day. There is something here to weigh, and we need not pretend otherwise. But three things settle the matter for us. First, the word ‘almah is never, in any of its handful of uses in the Old Testament, applied to a married woman or to one known not to be a virgin; it denotes a young, unmarried woman, and in that world her virginity was simply assumed. Second, and this is decisive against the charge that virgin is a later Christian invention, the Jewish scholars who translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, well over a century before Christ, chose the word parthenos, the ordinary Greek word for a virgin. The reading was there, in Jewish hands, long before any Christian had the least stake in it.

And third, and finally, the question is settled for us by an apostle. When Matthew tells of the conception of the Lord Jesus in the womb of the virgin Mary, he reaches for this very verse: This all happened so that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet would be fulfilled: “Look! The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will name him Emmanuel,” which means “God with us” (Matthew 1:22–23). By the Spirit, Matthew declares Isaiah 7:14 fulfilled in the virgin birth of the Lord Jesus, and that is authority enough for us. None of this requires us to deny that the verse had a nearer reach in Ahaz’s own day: a child whose infancy would mark off the few short years until the two kings were gone, as the very next verses show the clock already running. This is the near horizon and the far that we learned at the start to watch for in the prophets: a sign in Ahaz’s generation, and beneath it, carried in the name itself and pressed forward by the chapters still to come, the sign for all generations, the One the angel would announce, conceived in a virgin by the Holy Spirit. The near child kept the calendar. The far Child keeps the world.

Some will feel that holding two horizons at once is a convenient escape, a way of making the verse mean whatever we happen to need it to mean. It is the very opposite. It is the discipline of letting prophecy be what it actually is: not a coded riddle with a single hidden answer, but a word planted in real history that grows toward a fullness greater than its first soil could ever contain. The seed sprouts in Ahaz’s day; the harvest comes in Bethlehem. We do not honor the text by flattening it down to one horizon or the other, pretending Isaiah meant only a baby born in 734, or pretending Ahaz’s own generation was given no sign at all. We honor it by watching the near fulfillment open out, as the prophets’ words so often do, onto the far one, and by letting the apostle, and not our own ingenuity, tell us where it finally comes to rest.

And we must not rush past the wonder that the sign is a virgin birth, for that is the whole point of it. Ahaz had been told he could ask a sign in the depth or in the height, and a child conceived without a man, God Himself knit together in a virgin’s womb, is exactly such a sign: the height of heaven come down into the depth of the earth, a thing only God could do. The church has confessed it ever since in the plainest words she owns: conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary. The virgin birth is not a quaint ornament hung on the Christmas story; it is a guardrail of the gospel, the way Scripture secures that this child is at one and the same time true God, of the Father from eternity, and true man, of His mother in time. Take away the virgin and you have lost the wonder; you are left with an ordinary child, and the sign is no sign at all.

There is a quiet rebuke and a quiet comfort in noticing who finally received this sign. It was offered to a king of David’s house, and refused; it was fulfilled in a girl of David’s house, who said yes. Where Ahaz, asked only to believe a promise, hid behind false piety and reached for Assyria, Mary, asked to bear the very promise in her own body, answered, Yes, I am a servant of the Lord; let this happen to me according to your word (Luke 1:38). The faithless son of David would not so much as take the sign; the faithful daughter of David became its bearer. And that, too, is grace, for her yes was no more the root of her salvation than Ahaz’s no was the end of the promise; it was itself the gift of the God who gives Immanuel to those who could never have produced Him on their own. The chapter that opens with a king too faithless to ask ends, in its fulfillment, with a servant too lowly to refuse.

God With Us

But the deepest wonder of the verse is not in the how of the birth; it is in the name. The child will be called Immanuel, and Matthew, knowing his Greek-reading congregation might miss the Hebrew, stops to translate it for them: which means “God with us” (Matthew 1:23). Hold those three words, for they hold the whole gospel. Not God against us, which is what our sin had every right to expect. Not God far from us, watching from a safe and sterile distance. Not even merely God for us, helping from somewhere up above. God with us: God come down, God among us, God as one of us.

This is the mystery the church would spend centuries learning how to confess, and it is all already folded into the name. The child of the virgin is God with us because in Him God has taken our very flesh: the Word became flesh and took up residence among us (John 1:14). The Greek says He pitched His tent in our camp, the very thing the cloud over Zion had promised. In this one child true God and true man are joined in a single person: God from all eternity, born of Mary in time; the One the seraphim dared not look upon, now small enough to be held in a young girl’s arms. God with us is the two natures of Christ pressed into one name. Luther never got over it: that the God who fills heaven and earth should lie in a manger; that the Maker of the breath in every nostril should draw His own first breath from a virgin in Bethlehem. God with us is the most that can possibly be said, and here it is said of a baby.

And He did not take our flesh merely to visit, the way a king might tour the slums and then go home to the palace. He took it in order to trade. Luther loved to speak of the joyous exchange: that the Son of God became with us precisely so that He might take to Himself everything that was ours, our sin and our death and our whole sorry account, and give us in return everything that was His, His righteousness and His life and His standing with the Father. God with us means God in the dock with us, God under the law with us, God in the grave with us, taking our place at every point where we stood condemned, so that we might be given His place where He stands beloved. The entire gospel is the slow unfolding of that one swap, and it begins the very moment the Word is made flesh.

And mark what kind of God this name reveals: a God whose deepest instinct toward sinners is not to keep His distance but to close it. The whole long story of redemption is the story of that little word with: God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, God in the pillar of cloud, God in the tabernacle and the temple, and now God in the flesh, Immanuel. It is no accident that Matthew opens his Gospel with this name and closes it with the same promise on the lips of the risen Lord: I am with you always, to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20). From its first page to its last, Matthew’s Gospel is bracketed by Immanuel: God with us in the womb of Mary, God with us to the end of the age. The name given over the head of one faithless king turns out to be the name that holds the whole story together.

And He is with us all the way down. The God who came to be with us did not stop at the manger; He went on to be with us in the places we would least have dared ask Him to come: into our temptation, our grief, our dying, and at the last into our God-forsakenness upon a cross, crying out from the one spot where it seemed God was not with us, so that He might be with us even there. Immanuel is not a fair-weather name. It is the name of a God who has followed us into the depth and the height both, so that there is now no pit so low He has not been down in it ahead of us, and none we can be cast into where He will not still be with us.

The King He Trusted Instead

The sign comes with a clock attached. Before the child knows how to reject evil and choose what is right, the land whose two kings you fear will be desolate (7:16). Before a child grows old enough to tell right from wrong, a matter of a few short years, the two kings whose alliance has Ahaz trembling will both be gone. And so it fell out: Damascus was crushed within a couple of years, and the northern kingdom not long after. The thing Ahaz feared so badly that he sold his soul to Assyria to escape it would have dissolved on its own, if only he had believed.

For here is the bitter irony the chapter closes upon. Ahaz refused to trust the Lord and trusted the king of Assyria instead, and the Lord’s word is that Assyria is precisely what He will bring down upon Judah. The LORD will bring on you, your people, and your father’s family a time unlike any since Ephraim departed from Judah—the king of Assyria! (7:17). The very power Ahaz had courted as his savior would become the rod that flogged him. Assyria would bleed Judah white with tribute, ravage the countryside, and leave it a wilderness of thorns and briers (7:23–25). The savior Ahaz chose in place of God turned out to be his destroyer.

This is the law’s sober lesson, and it has not aged a day. What we reach for instead of God, to save ourselves when we will not trust Him, has a way of becoming the very thing that ruins us. Ahaz’s Assyria is everyone’s: the second job that was going to secure the family and swallowed it whole; the relationship clutched at to escape a fear, that broke us; the compromise made for the sake of safety that became a cage. Luther’s explanation of the First Commandment in the Large Catechism cuts straight through it: whatever you run to for refuge in the place of God, that is your god, and a god who is not God will in the end devour you. The deepest tragedy of Isaiah 7 is not that Ahaz was menaced by two kings. It is that, with Immanuel Himself on offer, Ahaz chose Assyria.

And yet (for this is the strange grace that runs underneath the whole chapter) even Ahaz’s faithlessness could not finally derail the promise. The Assyria he ran to brought the judgment Isaiah had foretold; the land was indeed stripped to thorns and briers. But the house of David was not extinguished. Through the wreckage of his own bad choices, through exile and ruin and the long dark centuries that followed, the line was kept, until, in the fullness of time, a daughter of that battered house conceived by the Holy Spirit and bore the Son who was God with us in truth. Ahaz chose Assyria, and he got Assyria. But God had promised Immanuel, and God kept Immanuel, over the head of the king’s unbelief, exactly as He had said. The faithlessness of men is real, and it reaps real ruin. It is simply not stronger than the faithfulness of God.

Gathering the Threads

Stand back and see the shape of the chapter. A king is shaking in the wind, and the house that carries the promise of God is under threat of being snuffed out. The Lord speaks a steadying word and stakes everything on one thing: if your faith does not remain firm, then you will not remain secure. He even offers a sign, any sign, depth or height; and the king, in pious-sounding unbelief, refuses it, because he has already secretly chosen Assyria. And then, in the very teeth of that refusal, the Lord gives the sign anyway, a virgin’s son named God with us, and so reveals that the promise was never hanging on the king’s faith in the first place. It was hanging, all along, on the faithfulness of God.

That is the gospel of this chapter, and the comfort to carry out of it. We are, most of us, a good deal more like Ahaz than we would care to admit: frightened, hedging our bets, dressing our unbelief in respectable clothes, reaching for our own Assyrias. And it was to people exactly like that that God gave Immanuel, not as the reward for faith but as the sign that He would keep His word over the head of our faithlessness. The child of the virgin is God with us: God come down into our flesh, into our fear, into the very depths, and with us to the end of the age. Ahaz was offered Immanuel and chose Assyria. We are no better choosers than he was; but the Immanuel given over his head is given to us still, in the Word and at the font and the altar, and He is God with us.

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

1. Ahaz and his people shake just as the trees of the forest shake before the wind (7:2), and the Lord’s word turns on one thing: if your faith does not remain firm, then you will not remain secure (7:9). What is the difference between faith making a promise true and faith letting us stand on a promise that is already true? Why does fear so easily crowd faith out?

2. The Lord offers Ahaz any sign he likes, and Ahaz refuses with a Scripture verse: I don’t want to put the LORD to a test (7:12). How can a true-sounding, even biblical statement become a cloak for unbelief? Where are we tempted to use a spiritual-sounding reason to avoid simply taking God at His word?

3. Ahaz would not ask, and yet the Lord himself gave a sign anyway (7:14). What does it tell us about the gospel that the promise of Immanuel did not depend on the king’s faith? How is it a comfort that our salvation rests on God’s faithfulness rather than on the strength of our believing?

4. Critics say ‘almah means only “young woman.” What three things settle the matter for us: the word itself, the pre-Christian Greek translation, and above all Matthew 1:22–23? How does the “near and far horizon” let us take both Ahaz’s day and the virgin birth seriously without setting the two against each other?

5. Matthew stops to translate the name: God with us (Matthew 1:23). Why is God with us more than God for us or God above us? How does the name hold the two natures of Christ, true God and true man, in a single word, and how does Matthew’s closing promise, I am with you always (28:20), complete it?

6. Ahaz refused God and trusted Assyria, and Assyria became the rod that beat him (7:17). How does what we grab for refuge in God’s place tend to become the very thing that harms us? With Immanuel on offer, why would anyone choose Assyria, and where do we? What comfort is there in the fact that Immanuel was given over the head of exactly that unbelief?

Looking Ahead

The child of chapter 7 is named only Immanuel, God with us, but Isaiah is not yet finished telling us who He is. In the next session we come to chapter 9, and to words every Christian has heard sung at Christmas. Into the very darkness that closed over chapter 5, a light breaks: The people walking in darkness see a bright light (9:2), and it dawns first, Isaiah says, upon Galilee, the despised northern country that would one day be the Lord Jesus’s own. And then the child is named in full: For a child has been born to us, a son has been given to us. He shoulders responsibility and is called Wonderful Adviser, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace (9:6). The baby called God with us in chapter 7 is called Mighty God in chapter 9. We will take up those names one by one, and the throne of David that this child will hold forever.

Before the next session, read Isaiah 9:1–7 in full, and, if you have time, chapter 8 before it, for the darkness the light breaks into. As you read 9:6, say the names slowly (Wonderful Adviser, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace) and ask how a child could possibly bear them all.

Closing Prayer

Almighty God and Father, when we are honest with ourselves, we are Ahaz: frightened, calculating, shaking like trees in the wind, and quick to dress our unbelief in the language of piety while we reach for our own Assyrias to save us. Forgive us the saviors we have trusted in Your place, and the false reverence with which we have kept You at arm’s length. We have wearied You with our hedging, and You know it well.

And we thank You, Father, that You did not wait for our faith to grow strong before You kept Your promise. Over the head of an unbelieving king, and over ours, You gave the sign: a virgin’s Son, Immanuel, Your own Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and true man, God with us in the flesh, with us in our fear, with us into the very depths, and with us to the end of the age. Make us to believe, that we may be established; and when our faith is as shaky as wind-blown trees, hold us fast by the faithfulness that gave us Immanuel before ever we asked. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.