Hallelujah!  Amen!  Merry Christmas to everybody.  It's great to be in the house of the Lord; amen?  We think back, of course, here in Christmastime—let’s turn to Isaiah’s great prophecy—and thinking at Christmastime, and so much of the world, of course, is focused upon little baby Jesus laying in the manger.  It reminds me of Talladega Nights.  It was a spoof movie about stock car racing.  They were sitting down to pray, and they were trying to be thankful.  One of the characters would constantly use the term or the phrase, “Baby Jesus.”  “We thank you, Baby Jesus.  We love you, Baby Jesus.”  Of course, later on when he had a crash, and he was running around trying to get the fire out, yelling, “Baby Jesus!  “Oprah!  Oprah!”  And they just about put them in the same category, don’t they?  Of course, we’re all very familiar with what God’s plan was through the incarnation: to invade humanity and become one of us, so that He could reconcile us back to Himself.  Can you say, “Praise God,” for that?

Man was in the predicament of being in bondage to sin and under the lordship of Satan, the god of this world’s system.  There was no hope in the natural, but God had foreseen the need, and from eternity past had a plan for our redemption, didn’t He?  The Lamb of God was slain from before the foundation of the world, praise God!  How was it going to come about?  How was this going to take place?

We’re all very familiar with this: the prophet, speaking here in Isaiah, Chapter 7, brings forth the great prophecy of the sign that was to come.  The Scripture says in this seventh chapter, verse 14, “Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bare a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.”  For centuries, theologians have argued over the deity of Jesus Christ.  Thousands and thousands of hours have been spent in debate, in meditation, in writings concerning this great aspect of the virgin birth, of the divinity of Christ and how that divinity actually manifested itself.  There was a great segment of people for long periods of time, even until this day, that believed that Jesus—this Man, this Prophet—had the spirit of Christ come upon Him at baptism and departed from Him just prior to the death on the cross.  The Gnostics, who propagated a number of different concepts on the incarnation, promoted that back in the first century.  John, in his writings, wrote toward that quite prolifically throughout the gospel and the epistles.