Over the past couple of days, I’ve shared some insights regarding Isaiah 7:14—it’s original context during the lifetime of the prophet Isaiah, and then how that impacts our understanding of Matthew’s use of Isaiah 7:14 in his story about the birth of Jesus. Today, though, I want to share more of a personal story of how that verse, and the famous Christmas song, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” has impacted my life. Biblical insights and biblical study are good things, but without the personal encounter in one’s life, such things are in danger of remaining solely intellectual exercises.
Episode One: My Epiphany in Kazakhstan
As I am guessing many can relate to, when I graduated college, I still didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I had a teaching certificate, a degree in English, and no job. In fact, for my first two years after college, I lived with my parents and scrapped through life as a substitute teacher at the various schools in the Wheaton area. That could be a story in and of itself, but suffice it to say, I was miserable. Many of my friends were off getting married, getting into careers, and starting families…and I was living with my parents, unable to get a date to save my life, and routinely being called “Doogie Howser” by junior high brats. I did that for two years—and as my mom would tell you, I was “not a nice person to live with.”
Such is the angst of many kids in their early twenties. They feel they’re supposed to be “adults,” but really aren’t, and in a tight job market, they feel like they’re spinning their wheels and going nowhere, and they feel like utter failures. That was certainly me. And so, what I decided to do was to join the Peace Corps, and by the summer of 1993 I found myself in post-Soviet Kazakhstan, teaching English as a Foreign Language to Kazakhstani nationals. I had figured that since I had an English degree, why not use it to see the world?
And I had gotten to…Kazakhstan, specifically, the northern city of Karaganda, where winter came by October, and they didn’t turn the hot water on until November. Now, it certainly was an adventure, but I quickly realized one thing: I found teaching English as a foreign language really boring. And, as anyone who has lived overseas will tell you, there is a significant culture shock and the inevitable feeling of loneliness.
To make a long story short, by mid-October I found myself at my desk in my little, cold dorm-room, writing to my parents about how much I hated my life, and how I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. Even though it was October, I decided to put in a Christmas tape that another Peace Corps member had given to me: A Winter Solstice, Volume 3. It was that night that I had an epiphany that changed my life.
I don’t like to over-spiritualize things, but I don’t know how else to explain it—God entered the room, through that tape. It was one of those moments in one’s life that you remember distinctly. I was at my desk, writing to my parents about how I hated my life, and then the Turtle Island Quartet’s version of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” came through the speakers. Here is the actual recording:
I had heard that song all my life, but for some reason, that version, that particular arrangement, was light a shaft of light in my soul:
“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, who ransoms captive Israel,
that mourns in lonely exile here, until the Son of God appears.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!”
Two things immediately struck me. First, how is that about Christmas? It’s about Israel in exile, not the baby Jesus in a manger! O, I knew that yes, ultimately it is about Jesus, but having grown up in church, I had just been conditioned to “jump to the end,” so to speak, and get the “Jesus answer” without really pondering the deeper questions that the Old Testament lays out.
But the other thing that struck me at the same time is what changed my life. I knew, before that song finished playing that night, that I wanted to go back and get a master’s degree in the Bible. I had always been fascinated with biblical stories; the Bible had always fascinated me. I just had never thought of pursuing that as a mode of study, though, because I thought the only thing I could do with it was to be a pastor—and believe me, if there was one thing I knew about myself, it was that I was not suited to be a pastor.
But that night, as I listened to “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” I felt God saying to me, “Look, you have that interest and passion…pursue that. Even if you end up not doing anything with it, learn it for the sake of learning it. Pursue that interest because the desire is in your soul.” And so, I ended my letter to my parents by asking them to send me some college catalogs, so I can look into programs for theology or biblical studies. I stayed in the Peace Corps for that year, but then came back to the states to work full-time at anything for a year, so I could save up enough money to go to graduate school.
During that year, as I worked as both a custodian and a teacher-aide, I also took a correspondence first-year New Testament Greek class. I ended up going to Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, where over the course of the next two years I took classes from Eugene Peterson, Bruce Waltke, J.I. Packer, and Gordon Fee. It was the best life decision I had ever made. I got a master’s degree in New Testament, and then, as life tends to go, I ended up getting a job teaching English and Bible at a small Christian high school in California.
Episode Two: Academic Emmanuel
After four years at that Christian school, I decided I wanted to go back and get a PhD in the New Testament. As it turned out, I didn’t get in to the programs I applied for, so I decided on a “Plan B.” I went back to British Columbia, to Trinity Western University, and got another master’s degree—this time in the Old Testament. I had figured I should “bone up” on the Old Testament before I went on and pursued a New Testament PhD.
Well, my time at Trinity Western altered my path a bit. Growing up in Evangelicalism, I thought I knew the Old Testament fairly well. Guess what? I didn’t. But far from being discouraged, Trinity Western opened the door to the world of the Old Testament for me, and as I looked through to that country, I realized I could spend my entire life exploring it, and I would never see it all. And so, I decided I would still pursue a PhD, but it would be in the Old Testament.
In any case, one of the classes I took was on the Book of Isaiah. Peter Flint, the famous Dead Sea Scrolls scholar taught the class, and it was in that class that I had first ever heard of the “Syro-Ephraimite Crisis.” As I took that class, it simply amazed me to realize that all those verses from Isaiah I had thought were just predictions about Jesus really had their own original contexts in which that actually made sense. I ended up doing my paper for that class on, you guessed it, Isaiah 7:14 in its original context.
In the process of researching that paper, I realized there was a whole lot more to Isaiah 7:14 than I could fit in a 25-page paper. And so, as it turned out, a few years later, when I wrote my PhD dissertation, I chose to expand on that paper from my Isaiah class, and write on Isaiah 7:14 within its original context in Proto-Isaiah.
“O Come, O Come Emmanuel” was the song that essentially began my path into the academic study of the Bible, and the verse that inspired that song, Isaiah 7:14, was the focus of my PhD dissertation that essentially completed my formal academic study of the Bible. Emmanuel was at the beginning, all throughout, and at the end of that particular journey in my life.
But my Emmanuel story doesn’t end there…
