“Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.” Isaiah 7:14 (NKJV)
In Matthew 1:23 the translation of Immanuel is given as “God with us.” Some might ask, “Hasn’t God always been with mankind?” The answer is yes, God has always been present in the form that He has chosen. In the Old Testament we find that God the Father is most prominent in the interaction of the Divine with humanity. Many bible scholars agree that there are appearances by a “pre-incarnate Jesus” as “the Angel of the Lord”, and several mentions of the Holy Spirit are also found in the Old Testament.
Mankind had limited knowledge of God apart from God the Father, until the New Testament time and we were blessed with the birth of Jesus; Who became the abiding presence and face of “God with us”. For the thirty-odd years of His life, Jesus would be Immanuel, God with us in the flesh.
Near the end of Jesus’ ministry He began to speak about the “Helper”; in John 16:7 Jesus tells His disciples that it is to their advantage that He depart and that the Helper come. How could it be so that the disciples would be better off without Jesus? The short answer is that they would not be without Him at all; they (and the whole of mankind) could now have access to the Spirit of Jesus through the presence of the Holy Spirit. His face may not be with us, but the presence of Jesus is now “omni-present” or everywhere present as the Holy Spirit abides with us.
Just as Jesus said in John 16:13-15, the Holy Spirit will not speak of Himself but will in all ways glorify Jesus. The Holy Spirit is the Divine messenger Whose only message (He has many other functions) is to glorify Jesus as the Son of God slain from the foundation of the world; so that the sinfulness of mankind could be forgiven and afford us the opportunity to have eternal life with God. It is shameful that many embrace the Holy Spirit and never see that He is here to draw attention to the Messiah; just as it is shameful that there are many who do not embrace the precious Holy Spirit without Whom we can not know Jesus. The Holy Spirit; truly Immanuel until Christ comes again.
