My favorite opening to a movie review is: “Re-creations of 70’s schlock, from ‘Starsky & Hutch’ to ‘The Dukes of Hazzard,’ all seem to obey the second law of movie dynamics: remakes drift to a state of inert uniformity known as entropy.” (Alessandra Stanley, New York Times, Nov. 18, 2005, “TV WEEKEND: Red Update Alert: Poseidon Goes Belly Up Again”)
I quote this sentence when teaching science, because it gets the concept of entropy right (and makes a nice pun about the second law of thermodynamics). I quote this sentence here, because it gets my experience of movies right.
At the movies, remakes and sequels almost always disappoint. I’m sure you’ve felt it too. I can count the number of movie remakes or sequels that are truly better than the original on one hand. (We can debate which ones they are, but everyone agrees the list is too short.)
Remaking a movie is usually like mixing crayon colors: the colors subtract to “a state of inert uniformity,” and the movie only gets murkier the more you change it. But once in a while inspiration strikes and a sequel movie is more than the sum of its parts. The mixed colors add together and become brighter, like mixing glowstick solutions, or like mixing the colors of different passages in Isaiah. Colors mix between books of the Bible, too. Today, we’ll see how the books of Judges, Isaiah, and Luke go together.
Isaiah 9:2-6 remixes colors from throughout the Bible, and they end up shining so bright that they inspired George Handel to write some of his most famous music, “For Unto Us a Child is Born.” Tomorrow we reach WHAT this child is, and will be introduced to the multi-colored rainbow of names for this child. Today we find out HOW the child is given, and into what kind of context.
God tells a specific story from the book of Judges for how He will give this child. The book of Judges is full of (you guessed it) judges who lead Israel, each in a different time and in a different way. Each shines with his or her own colors. Of all the judges in Judges, God chooses the shades of meaning in Gideon’s story. God says He will work again like He worked through Gideon, when the army of Midian was defeated.
This is made explicit when Isaiah 9:4 says God will save Judah “as in the day of Midian.” Before that there are hints: Gideon’s story involves the tribes of Naphtali and Zebulon, who are named in Isaiah 9:1 (they are two of the four tribes in Gideon’s army, and the Midianite camp was located just south of their dwelling-places). The Midianites always attacked at harvest-time, which is when the rejoicing in 9:3 occurs. The battle of Gideon took place in the darkness, with a sudden, great light (9:2), and with a noise so great it shook the enemy to their very core (9:5).
The way God worked through Gideon is the way He is promising to work again. At first, Gideon’s army wasn’t multiplied by God, it was divided — but from this diminished, tiny beginning, God produced a huge increase of victory.
The numbers don’t make sense from a military standpoint. Gideon started with 32,000 men, then he let 22,000 men choose to leave. Out of the remaining 10,000, God told him to select a mere 300 of those, one percent of the original force! This was not going to be a normal battle – it was going to be a battle fought God’s way.
God’s way involved a night of bad dreams that unsettled the Midianite army. Then each of Gideon’s men hid a torch in a jar, took a horn, and waited on the hills above the camp. All at once, they broke the jars, blew the horns, and shouted. The Midianites waking in darkness saw a great light, then panicked, and fell on each other in the confusion.
Midian was a time when God divided the original army but multiplied the result. Isaiah 9:3 says God is working in the same way, and accomplishing two mathematical actions: He has multiplied (made many) the nation and increased (made large) their joy. God expands His people in multiple ways, in multiple directions.
God is promising to do what he did with Gideon again with Hezekiah – and we will see that Hezekiah’s coming battle against the Assyrian Empire is won not by the swords of an army, but by God’s action alone, in the middle of the night.
Applying this to Hezekiah is the normal expectation of what we think prophecy does. But after Hezekiah, there’s another step of multiplication and transformation to come beyond what a normal kind of prophet expects. God’s own promises enlarge on his previous ones. God’s sequels expand on the original. Just as Isaiah 9 has parallels back to its prequel in Judges 7, it also has parallels forward to its own sequel in Luke 2, the culmination of the trilogy.
Hundreds of years after Isaiah, shepherds on a hillside by night, working in darkness, will see a great light. Above them is not an army of men on the hills, but a host of angels in the sky. They hear not a tumultuous noise, but a message of peace that will increase their joy exponentially.
For unto them a child will be born, of the line of David, a king transformed to be more than a king. Hezekiah’s reign and kingdom both ended, but this child’s increase will have no end. This is the way God works, not giving us what we expected, or perhaps even what we think we want — but giving much, much more, expanding from glory to glory, giving us Himself incarnate.
(Image credit: Holy Redeemer Burton stained glass window of Judges, “Near the bottom of the center window, we see the fleece coat of Gideon and the water jar which played an important part in his battle at the camp of Midian (Judges Ch. 6 and 7).” https://www.holyredeemerburton.org/stained-glass-windows )