Isaiah prophesies in Jerusalem in the eighth century B.C., as the Assyrian war machine grinds through the northern kingdom. Tiglath-Pileser has already taken Galilee — the very region Isaiah names a few verses earlier as the place where a great light will dawn. To a people whose kings keep failing them and whose enemies keep advancing, Isaiah promises a son. The titles he stacks on this child are not Davidic flattery; they are divine names. Isaiah is telling a frightened Judah that the throne of David will one day hold a king who is, in his own person, God with us.

From the writers we read together

C.S. Lewis

Oxford literary scholar, Anglican lay theologian (1898-1963)

Lewis' famous trilemma — liar, lunatic, or Lord — was an attempt to close off the polite middle ground his generation had built around Jesus. Isaiah closes the same ground seven hundred years earlier. The names piled on this child do not leave room for a wise rabbi or an inspiring prophet. Mighty God and Everlasting Father are not titles a sane Jewish prophet hands to a human prince. Either Isaiah was mad, or he saw what he said he saw.

Lewis' instinct was that Christianity stands or falls on the identity of Jesus, not on the quality of his ethics. Isaiah agrees. The child is given before the government is given; the person comes before the program. If you are tempted today to keep Jesus useful but small — a counselor in the therapeutic sense, a peacemaker in the diplomatic sense — Isaiah's titles will not let you. He is the warrior God on a throne that has no end, and the only sane response to him is to bow.