Basically, In Isaiah, you have chapter six taking place in the year that king Uzziah died. Uzziah was a good king according to 2 Chornicles 26:4. Then his son, Jotham, reigned. He likewise was a pretty good king according to 2 Chronicles 27:2. Then you have Ahaz, who is Jotham’s son, did sins according to the sins of the Canaanites in 2 Chronicles 28:1-4. It says that he actually sacrificed his sons and worshiped the Baals.
The nations of Aram (Syria) and Ephraim (Israel) decided to make alliances in order to resist the Assyrians. They march down on Judah where Ahaz is, of course, who is in the line of David reigning in Jerusalem. This middle eastern conflict, which involved more than just these three nations, went on for several years. Ultimately, instead of trusting Yahweh as Isaiah was called to exhort him to do, Ahaz basically surrendered to be a vassal of Tiglath-Pileser III, king of Assyria.
A brief look at most sources will reveal that the prevailing interpretation is that this whole prophesy about a child that would be called Immanuel are somewhat truncated in my view. By truncated, I mean, “cut short.” The related declarations in Isaiah that is commonly associated with Immanuel of the government resting on his shoulders in chapter 9, and so forth, are likewise misattributed to an “unknown person.” People do tend to attribute them to a local unknown individual child who represented some immediate sense of hope to the downtrodden people of Judah. There are good points in both this and the “fuller sense” type of view that attributes the entirety of fulfillment to Christ.
So here you have the all-too-typical way of on the one hand, downplaying the inerrancy and real point of the text as these cases are in fact referenced in the New Testament. Then there are, on the other hand, reasons of seeing fulfillment, not twice, but as extrapolated in one event and then in a later event with the coming of Christ, who is in some sense, the ultimate fulfillment of “God with us”.
A few texts that quote the OT, like Matthew 1:21ff refer to this. What you will find is that though we as modern readers do tend to read in to the NT a very wooden understanding of something like, “this is literally fulfilled by this,” the NT does actually intend for us to see Jesus as the ultimate “fulfillment” of a sense of “Immanuel” or “God with us” as previewed in prior times. But like the Pharisees, modern persons strain out a nat of technical nuance and swallow a camel of missing the whole point, not to say there isn’t validity in either approach. I intend to allow for the technical nuance (fulfillment in the OT) as well as see the ultimate satisfaction of its meaning as found in Matthew 1. There are not two fulfillments, but meaning that is extrapolated once in the OT and then again in the NT.
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