“Immanuel” — God With Us

Read Isaiah 7:14 and Matthew 1:22-23 Fourth Sunday in Advent (Year A) “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Augustine of Hippo There is a great yearning inside every person to know God. From the very beginning, we were made to know God, and there is something in us that wants to know our Creator. We yearn to know that God has broken through into our world, and it is not enough to know that God is "up there" or "out there" somewhere. We want to know that God has come down to where we are. We want to know that he knows where we live, that he knows our name, that he cares about us, that he has "walked this lonesome valley" the same way we do. We want to know that we are not alone in the universe. All the prophets spoke of this universal yearning in the human heart. Joel spoke of it, as did Malachi, Hosea, Jeremiah, Daniel, and Zechariah. But no one spoke more eloquently than Isaiah. Seven hundred years before the birth of Christ, during the reign of a king named Ahaz, Isaiah predicted the birth of the One who would be God coming to dwell with humanity.