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| Common, Miracle |
Often in a story, you find something which fits for that situation but is also something which foreshadows something to come. My daughter, Elizabeth, noticed this in a series not long ago, in which a weather vane in a western town had a dragon on it, which showed up at the end of the series. This isn't anything new in fact we see God doing it scripture quite often and we see it here in Isaiah 7:14.
The scripture tells of a young woman conceiving and this was a sign to them that God would bring deliverance. The Hebrew (Old Testament) word Virgin and a young woman are the same but context changes everything. Here it is actually both. For Ahaz, it was a young woman, but for God's covenant people it would be fully realized in a virgin (never been with a man Matthew 1:18-23; Luke 1:34-35).
God was giving a prophecy not just for that time but was laying the foundation for the greater deliverance that God would bring. This sign (both the first and second) was given not at the request of man but by God himself. Both events, a child born, look from the outside like nothing extraordinary, but they were far more. For the birth of Jesus, it was the event which angels sang and which turned the world upside down, though the world didn't know it at the time.
For me, this double-sided prophecy demonstrates just how powerful a storyteller God is.
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