To Us a Child Is Born

Isaiah 9:1–7 (with Matthew 4:12–17; Luke 1:30–33)

Before this 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.

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.
Isaiah 9:6

A Light in Galilee

We ended the session on the vineyard with the lights going out (clouds will turn the light into darkness, 5:30), and that darkness has only deepened through chapter 8, where Isaiah’s people, having rejected the gently flowing waters of Shiloah, are swept off by the floodwaters of Assyria and left peering into gloom: distress and darkness, gloom and anxiety (8:6, 22). Hold that blackness in your mind, because the first word of chapter 9 is a sunrise. The people walking in darkness see a bright light; light shines on those who live in a land of deep darkness (9:2). Into the very dark Isaiah has been describing, not after it lifts but while it is still pitch, a great light breaks. That is how the gospel always comes: not to those who have found their own way out, but to people sitting in deep darkness.

Hold on to that, because it is easy to get it backward. We are prone to think that we must first do something about our own darkness (clean ourselves up, scrape together a little light of our own to show God we are worth the saving) before the great light will trouble to come to us. Isaiah says the opposite. The light comes to the people walking in darkness, to those who live in a land of deep darkness: not to people who had begun to see, but to people who could see nothing at all. The sun does not wait for the night to lighten before it rises; it rises on the dark, and that is how the night ends. So it is with the Light of the world: He comes to us at our very worst, and His coming is itself the dawn.

And notice where the light dawns first. Not on Jerusalem, not on the temple mount, not on the religious heart of the nation, but up north. In earlier times he humiliated the land of Zebulun, and the land of Naphtali; but now he brings honor to the way of the sea, the region beyond the Jordan, and Galilee of the nations (9:1). Galilee was the backwater: the borderland farthest from Jerusalem, the first region to be overrun and deported by Assyria, mixed with Gentiles, and looked down upon by the people of the south as a half-pagan provincial nowhere. Galilee of the nations was very nearly an insult. And it is there, on the despised and darkened edge, that Isaiah says the great light will rise.

Seven centuries later an evangelist took up this very verse and told us exactly when its light dawned. When the Lord Jesus began to preach, He did not set up in Jerusalem; He went north and made His home in Capernaum, in the old territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, and Matthew tells us why: so that what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah would be fulfilled … the people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, and on those who sit in the region and shadow of death a light has dawned (Matthew 4:14–16). The great light of Isaiah 9 is the Lord Jesus, and He shone first exactly where Isaiah said He would: in despised Galilee, among the people in death’s shadow. The grace of that is worth feeling: the Light of the world chose to rise first over the dark and the disregarded. He still does.

There is real comfort in that for anyone who has ever felt like Galilee: out on the edge, overlooked, a long way from where the important things are thought to happen. The gospel did not begin among the powerful and the central; it began among fishermen on a provincial lake, in a region the capital looked down on. And it has gone on that way ever since, rising over backwaters and border towns and ordinary kitchen tables, over people no one in the centers of power would think to watch. If you have ever wondered whether the light could really reach a place as small, or as dark, as yours, Isaiah’s answer is that yours is exactly the sort of place where it likes to rise first. The Light of the world has never once been impressed by an address.

Joy in the Harvest

What does the light bring? First, joy, and a particular, hard-won kind of joy. They rejoice in your presence as harvesters rejoice; as warriors celebrate when they divide up the plunder (9:3). Isaiah reaches for the two happiest scenes his world knew: the joy of harvest, when long months of labor and worry give way at last to barns full of grain; and the joy of dividing the plunder, when a beaten enemy’s goods are shared out and the danger is finally past. That is the joy the light brings: not a thin, nervous cheerfulness, but the deep, settled relief of people who have come through, whose long winter of fear is over and whose enemy is broken.

And how is the enemy broken? For their oppressive yoke and the club that strikes their shoulders, the cudgel the oppressor uses on them, you have shattered, as in the day of Midian’s defeat (9:4). The yoke that bowed their necks, the club that fell again and again on their shoulders: shattered. And Isaiah names the pattern of the victory: as in the day of Midian’s defeat. Every Israelite knew the day of Midian: Gideon and his three hundred men, with torches and clay jars and trumpets, routing an army that covered the valley like a swarm of locusts (Judges 7:12). It was a victory engineered by God precisely so that Israel could not turn and say, Our own strength has delivered us (Judges 7:2). The yoke is broken not by superior force but by the bare hand of God, working through what looks for all the world like weakness.

We should not pass over that pattern lightly, for it is the pattern of the whole gospel. God delights to save in a way that leaves no room at all for human boasting: three hundred men against an army, a shepherd boy against a giant, a virgin’s child against the powers of hell. God chose what the world thinks weak to shame the strong, Paul says, so that no one can boast in his presence (1 Corinthians 1:27–29). The day of Midian is a small rehearsal for the great deliverance, in which the yoke of sin and death would be broken not by a conquering army but by a man nailed to a tree, looking like the most utter defeat the world had ever witnessed. The strength of God is forever hidden under what appears to be weakness, which is why the proud keep walking past it, and the desperate keep finding it.

And the result is the end of war itself. Indeed every boot that marches and shakes the earth and every garment dragged through blood is used as fuel for the fire (9:5). The soldier’s boots and his blood-soaked cloak, the gear of endless human warfare, are gathered up and thrown on the fire as so much kindling. The instruments of war become fuel. It is the same vision we met on the mountain in chapter 2, swords beaten into plowshares: the deep peace that comes when the true King at last reigns. And Isaiah is about to tell us how all of it (the light, the joy, the broken yoke, the burned weapons) will come to pass. It comes by way of a birth.

For a child has been born to us, a son has been given to us (9:6). Everything hangs on that small word for: the light dawns, the joy breaks, the yoke shatters, the weapons burn, all because of this: a child is born. The mighty deliverance Isaiah has been describing does not arrive on a war-horse. It arrives in a cradle. The way God breaks the oppressor’s club, ends the world’s wars, and floods the deep darkness with light is to give a baby. It is the day of Midian all over again: the victory that comes through weakness, the strength of God hidden in the smallest and most helpless thing in the world.

Hear the two verbs, and hear who does them. The child has been born: born of a woman, true flesh, one of us. The son has been given, and that quiet passive hides a Giver: God gives Him. He is not achieved, or earned, or summoned up by us; He is given to us, a gift let down out of heaven into a manger. And hear, twice over, the little phrase Luther loved as much as almost any in Scripture: to us. Not merely that a child is born somewhere, to someone; a child has been born to us. The angels would say it the same way over Bethlehem: Today your Savior is born (Luke 2:11). The whole gospel lives in that us, that your. It is not enough to know that Christ was born; the joy of Christmas is that He was born for me: given to me, on purpose, by a God who wanted me to have Him.

And the gift is the more astonishing for whom it is given to. Look again at the people standing in the light: a nation that had walked in darkness, dwelt in death’s shadow, worn the oppressor’s yoke; the faithless vineyard of chapter 5, the trembling house of Ahaz in chapter 7. These are the us to whom the child is born. The gospel does not read, to the deserving a child is given. It reads to us: to exactly the sort of people the previous chapters have spent themselves indicting. That is what makes it gospel and not reward. The Son is given to people who had earned the darkness, and, when we are honest, that is the only kind of people there are.

He shoulders responsibility. The Hebrew says it more pictorially still: the dominion, the government, will rest upon His shoulder. The rule of all things will rest on this child, not propped up underneath by armies and senates, but borne on His own shoulders, the way a yoke is borne. He carries the government as a strong man carries a burden. And there is a shadow of the cross already lying across that line, for the shoulder that bears the government of the universe would one day bear a wooden beam up a hill outside Jerusalem. This King reigns by carrying: first the cross, and then the crown. His shoulders are broad enough for both.

And those same shoulders, Isaiah’s first hearers could not yet have known, would carry one thing more. The Lord Jesus would tell of a shepherd who, having found his one lost sheep, places it on his shoulders, rejoicing (Luke 15:5), and carries it the whole way home. The shoulder that bears the government of the universe and bore the beam of the cross is the same shoulder that carries home the straying, the exhausted, the ones who cannot walk another step on their own. We do not climb up to this King; He stoops down, lifts us up, and carries us. The government rests upon His shoulder, and so, thank God, do we.

Wonderful Adviser

Then Isaiah does the most extraordinary thing: he names the child. Wonderful Adviser, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. These are not nicknames; in the Bible a name tells you what a person truly is. Isaiah is telling us, name by name, who this baby is, and the names are far too large for any baby ever born, save one. We will take them slowly, one at a time, for they are among the most precious words in the Old Testament. The first is Wonderful Adviser. Older translations, and Handel’s Messiah with them, print it as two names, “Wonderful, Counsellor”; but in the Hebrew the two words belong together, as the NET recognizes, and both of them reach past the merely human.

Wonderful translates a Hebrew word, pele’, a wonder, that is very nearly reserved for God. It is the word for the miraculous, the things only God can do: the wonders at the Red Sea, the marvels beyond all human reach. When the angel of the Lord appeared to Samson’s parents and they asked His name, He answered, You should not ask me my name, because you cannot comprehend it (Judges 13:18); the Hebrew word behind cannot comprehend, from the same root, calls His name wonderful, too high to be told. To call the child Wonderful is to say that He is not merely a worker of wonders but a wonder Himself, His very person a thing only God could bring to pass. A virgin’s son who is the Mighty God is Wonderful in exactly that sense: He ought not to be possible, and there He is.

And He is the Adviser, in Hebrew yo’ets, the counselor: the One whose wisdom and whose plan can be trusted utterly. Earthly kings keep counselors at their elbow because their own wisdom runs out; this King needs none, for He is wisdom itself. Paul would call Him the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:24), the One in whom God’s whole plan of salvation, hidden for ages, is at last unfolded. And what a wonderful counsel it proved to be: that God would save the world not by destroying His enemies but by becoming a child for them and dying in their place. No human counselor would ever have advised it. It is the wonderful counsel of God, and the child is its name.

And because He is the Counselor, He is the One to whom we may take every tangled thing. We are forever seeking counsel (from friends, from experts, from our own anxious midnight reasoning) and it so often fails us, because the counselors themselves are as much in the dark as we are. But the child is wisdom in person; His counsel never runs short and never runs wrong. To bring our confusion to Him is not to bother a busy king with trifles; it is to come to the Wonderful Adviser who has already thought His way, with perfect love and perfect wisdom, clear to the bottom of everything that frightens us. The wisest thing a confused heart can do is to stop trusting its own counsel and begin trusting His.

The Mighty God

The second name is the boldest thing in the verse, and one of the boldest in the whole Old Testament. Mighty God. Isaiah looks at the child in the cradle, the baby born, the son given, and calls Him Mighty God. Not godlike. Not a god in some watered-down, honorary sense. The Hebrew is ’el gibbor, and lest anyone try to soften it, Isaiah himself uses the identical phrase just one chapter later, of the Lord Himself: A remnant will come back, a remnant of Jacob, to the mighty God (10:21). The same title, the same two words. The child of chapter 9 is called by the name of God Almighty.

Here, then, the wonder is pressed to its sharpest point. The One who has been born (who has a birthday, who nursed and grew and tired and wept) is Mighty God, who has no beginning and never tires. This is the mystery the Immanuel of chapter 7 had already announced, and that the church would labor for centuries to confess: true God and true man, not two persons but one, the Almighty laid in a manger. Thomas would fall before the risen Lord and say it in a single cry, My Lord and my God! (John 20:28); and John would write that the Word was fully God (John 1:1), and became flesh. Isaiah got there first. The Mighty God has been born to us.

And the two together are our whole salvation, for we needed precisely this and nothing less. We needed one who was man, truly one of us, who could stand in our place under the law and die our death; a God who was only God, untouchable and undying, could not have done it. And we needed one who was God, so that His single life and death could count for the whole world, and His obedience be of infinite worth; a mere man, however good, could have saved only himself, if even that. The cradle holds the one and only person who is both at once: true man, to take our place; true God, to make it count forever. Take away either nature and the manger is empty of any help for us. The Mighty God is born, and in that joining is everything.

And the title has muscle in it. Gibbor is the word for a mighty warrior, a champion of the battle. The child is not only God; He is God the warrior, the very One who broke the yoke and shattered the oppressor’s club a few verses earlier. We must never picture the Prince of Peace as merely mild. The hands that will bless the children and break the bread are the hands of the Mighty God who goes to war against everything that has enslaved us (against sin, against the devil, against death) and wins. The day of Midian was only a preview; Calvary and the empty tomb were the battle itself, where the Mighty God, looking for all the world like a beaten man, crushed the head of the enemy.

And there is bottomless comfort in the fact that it was God who fought, and not merely a good man or a great prophet. A human champion, however brave, could only have done so much against sin and death; he would have been overmatched in the end, as we are. But the One who stepped into the ring against our enemies was the Mighty God Himself, and there is no power in heaven, on earth, or under it that is His match. When we are tempted to fear that our sin is too deep to be forgiven, or death too strong to be undone, the answer is folded into this name: the One who took up our cause is the Mighty God. He has never lost a battle He has set Himself to fight, and He has set Himself to fight for us.

The Everlasting Father

The third name asks us to slow down and be careful, because it is easy to stumble over it. Everlasting Father. A Christian who knows his creed may flinch: is Isaiah confusing the Son with the Father here, collapsing the persons of the Trinity into one? He is not, and Scripture never does. The Son is not the Father; the church confesses one God in three persons, neither confounding the persons, nor dividing the substance, as the Athanasian Creed has it. So the name does not mean that the child is God the Father. It means something else, and something rich.

The Hebrew is ‘avi ‘ad, literally Father of eternity. It tells us two things about the child. First, that He is eternal, the everlasting one, without beginning and without end, exactly as we should expect of the One just called the Mighty God. A child with a birthday who is nonetheless the Father of eternity: there is the wonder yet again. And second, that He is fatherly: a father to His people, and not merely for a span of years but forever. Earthly kings, even the best of them, were fathers to their people at most for a lifetime, and then they died and left them orphaned. This King fathers His people eternally. He will never die and leave us; He will never age out of caring for us; His tender, providing, protecting rule over His own has no expiration date. To the people of God He is an Everlasting Father, which is to say, we will never be orphans again.

Let that be a comfort, especially to anyone who has known what it is to be left. The child who shoulders the government does not rule us at arm’s length, as a distant magistrate rules strangers. He rules us as a father rules a household he loves, and forever. The deepest dread of the human heart is the fear of being finally alone: unfathered, unheld, no one left who is for us. Isaiah names the child squarely against that fear: Everlasting Father. The Mighty God who came to be God-with-us comes also to be Father-to-us, and of His fathering there is no end.

The Prince of Peace

The last name gathers up everything the others have promised. Prince of Peace. The Hebrew word for peace, shalom, is far larger than the mere absence of fighting; it means wholeness, soundness, everything set right: the deep well-being of a world at rest with its God. This is the King who brings exactly that, the Prince (the ruler) of Peace. He is the answer to the burned weapons of verse 5 and the broken yoke of verse 4: not merely a truce between rounds, but peace itself, with a Person at the head of it.

But we must get the order right, or we will shrink the Prince of Peace down to a mere peacemaker among the nations. The peace He brings is, first of all, peace with God. By nature we were not at peace with God; our sin had made us His enemies, and the whole weight of chapters 1 through 8 has been the war between a holy God and a faithless people. The Prince of Peace ends that war, not by overlooking our sin but by bearing it, making peace through the blood of his cross (Colossians 1:20). Paul states the result as plainly as it can be put: since we have been declared righteous by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 5:1). That is the peace lying at the bottom of all the others. The war with God ended; the enmity put to death; the sinner reconciled.

Do not hurry past how personal that peace is. It is not first a peace out in the wide world, among nations and neighbors, but a peace at the very center of a troubled conscience: the deep quiet that comes when a sinner who knew himself to be at war with God hears that the war is over, that the blood has been shed, that the verdict has come back not guilty, and that he may stop forever bracing himself for the wrath he had every reason to expect. There is no peace on earth quite like the peace of a forgiven conscience, because there is no war on earth quite like the war between a guilty soul and a holy God. The Prince of Peace ends that war first, and everything else He calls peace flows outward from it.

And from that root the rest of His peace grows: peace among those reconciled to God, the old wall between Jew and Gentile broken down, for he is our peace (Ephesians 2:14); and, at the very last, the peace of the new creation, where the weapons are all burned and the wolf lives with the lamb. Of that peace, the Hebrew of the very next verse says, there will be no end. Earthly peace is always only a lull between wars. The peace of this Prince does nothing but increase: begun in a believer’s justified conscience, spreading out through His reconciled people, and filling heaven and earth at the last.

This is why a Christian can have peace in a world that plainly has none. The wars still rage; the weapons are not yet all burned; the wolf still hunts the lamb. But the peace this Prince gives does not wait upon the evening news. It is a peace that has already been made, at the cross, between God and the believer, a peace that holds in a hospital room, in a war, at a graveside, precisely because it does not depend on the circumstances being peaceful. We taste the not-yet-finished peace of the world to come even now, in the already-finished peace with God. And we wait, without panic, for the day the Prince of Peace makes the whole groaning creation as quiet and as whole as a forgiven conscience.

The Throne That Has No End

Isaiah’s final word about the child is about His kingdom, and it is staggering in its reach. His dominion will be vast, and he will bring immeasurable prosperity. He will rule on David’s throne and over David’s kingdom, establishing it and strengthening it by promoting justice and fairness, from this time forward and forevermore (9:7). The Hebrew says it more bluntly still: to the increase of His government and peace there will be no end. Every other government the world has ever known has risen and fallen; every throne has had a last occupant. This one increases without limit and never ends. And it is David’s throne, the very throne the two kings of chapter 7 had plotted to topple, the dynasty that looked, by Isaiah’s own day, to be guttering out like a spent candle. The child secures it forever.

When the angel Gabriel came to a girl in Nazareth (back in despised Galilee, where the light had been promised to dawn) he told her she would bear a son, and he announced that son in the words of Isaiah 9: the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and his kingdom will never end (Luke 1:32–33). Heaven itself read Isaiah 9 over the cradle of the Lord Jesus. The throne with no end is His; the everlasting Davidic kingdom that Isaiah saw is the kingdom of God that the Lord Jesus came preaching, and that He now rules from the right hand of the Father.

And how shall such an impossible thing (an eternal kingdom of perfect justice and unending peace, hung upon the birth of one child to a no-account northern girl) ever come to pass? Isaiah ends with the only answer that could bear such a weight. The zeal of the LORD of Heaven’s Armies will accomplish this. Not the zeal of Judah, not the cleverness of her kings, not the striving of the faithful, but the zeal, the burning and jealous commitment, of the Lord Himself. He has set His heart upon it, and He will do it. Everything in this passage is gift (the light is given, the child is given, the kingdom is established) because the whole of it rests not on what we will do for God but on what the Lord, in His zeal, has determined to do for us. The same hand that gave the child will keep the throne. The zeal of the Lord will see it through.

This is where a weary believer may finally set down a burden he was never meant to carry. The kingdom does not advance because we are zealous enough for it; it advances because the Lord is. We are not asked to hold the throne up by the strength of our faith or the success of our striving, which is a mercy, for our faith is small and our striving falters. The throne is held up by the zeal of God, who finishes what He starts and keeps every word He has ever spoken. The same divine zeal that laid the child in the manger and set Him upon David’s throne is at work still, and it will not flag or cool until the kingdom has filled the earth. Our part is not to accomplish it, but to rest in the One who surely will.

Gathering the Threads

Look back over the passage and see what Isaiah has done. He has taken the blackest darkness in the book (a people in deep darkness, a vineyard with its lights gone out) and into it he has spoken a sunrise: a great light, dawning first on the most disregarded ground; joy like the harvest and like the dividing of plunder; the oppressor’s yoke shattered as in the day of Midian; the very weapons of war burned for kindling. And then he has told us how it all comes: a child has been born to us. The mighty deliverance comes wrapped in a baby, and the baby’s names tell us who He is: the Wonderful Adviser whose person and plan are the wonder of God, the Mighty God born in a manger, the Everlasting Father who will never leave His people orphaned, the Prince of Peace who ends our war with God by the blood of His cross.

And over the whole of it stands that little phrase, spoken twice: to us. This is the comfort to carry out of the session. The child was not born in the abstract; He was given to us: to people in the dark, people under the yoke, people at war with God and unable to make their own peace; given freely, out of the zeal of a God who wanted us to have Him. The throne of David has no end; the peace only increases; and the One upon the throne is the Mighty God who is, to us, an Everlasting Father. We began the last session with a frightened king who would not receive the sign. We end this one with the sign received, and named, and reigning forever. A child has been born to 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. The great light dawns not on Jerusalem but on Galilee of the nations (9:1–2), the despised, half-Gentile borderland, and Matthew tells us the Lord Jesus began His ministry there to fulfill this very word (Matthew 4:14–16). What does it tell us about God’s grace that the Light of the world rose first over the dark and the disregarded?

2. The yoke is shattered as in the day of Midian’s defeat (9:4): Gideon’s tiny band, so that no one could say, Our own strength has delivered us. How does this prepare us for a deliverance that comes through a child, and finally through a cross? Why does God so often choose to save by what looks like weakness?

3. Twice Isaiah says the child is born and given to us (9:6). Why did Luther treasure that little phrase so much? What is the difference between knowing that Christ was born, and believing that He was born and given for you?

4. Isaiah calls the child Mighty God (9:6), the same title he uses of the Lord Himself only one chapter later (10:21). How does this name guard the truth that the child is at once true God and true man? Why does it matter that the baby in the manger is not merely godlike, but God?

5. Everlasting Father does not mean that the Son is the Father; the church confesses one God in three persons without confounding them. What, then, does the name mean, about His eternity and about His fatherly care of His people forever? How is it a comfort to those who fear being finally alone?

6. The Prince of Peace brings, first of all, peace with God: since we have been declared righteous by faith, we have peace with God (Romans 5:1). Why must that peace come first, before peace among people or peace in the world? And how does it change our hope to know that his kingdom will never end (Luke 1:33), and that the zeal of the LORD of Heaven’s Armies will accomplish this (9:7)?

Looking Ahead

We have seen the child enthroned forever on the throne of David, but Isaiah knew that, by the time the child came, David’s royal house would look far less like a throne than like a stump. In the next session we take up chapter 11, where the prophet sees a tree cut down to the ground and, against all hope, a single green shoot pushing up out of the dead wood: A shoot will grow out of Jesse’s root stock, a bud will sprout from his roots (11:1). Upon that shoot the Spirit of the Lord will rest in all His fullness, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, of counsel and might, of knowledge and the fear of the Lord (11:2), and under His righteous reign the ancient enmities will at last be healed: A wolf will reside with a lamb … as a small child leads them along (11:6). From the child upon the throne, to the shoot from the stump, and the peaceable kingdom He brings in.

Before the next session, read Isaiah 11 in full. Watch the shoot rise from the stump of a felled dynasty; notice the Spirit resting upon Him in all His fullness, and how He treats the poor and the downtrodden; and ask what kind of kingdom it is where the wolf and the lamb lie down together, and what it means that the root of Jesse stands like a signal flag for the nations, and the nations look to Him (11:10).

Closing Prayer

Almighty God and Father, we who walked in darkness thank You that You did not leave us there, but caused a great light to dawn upon us in the despised and unlikely places where we sit. We bless You for the child born to us, and the Son given to us: not earned, not deserved, but given freely out of the zeal of Your love for us.

Grant us, we pray, to know Him by every name You have given Him: to marvel at the Wonderful Adviser, to bow before the Mighty God in the manger, to rest as never-orphaned children under the Everlasting Father, and to have peace, first with You, through the blood of His cross, and then with one another and within ourselves. Establish in us the kingdom that has no end, and keep us by the same zeal that gave us the child; through that very child, now reigning, our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.