As Deep as Sheol and as High as Heaven
How would Jesus have started His explanation to His disciples on the road to Emmaus?
I imagine that He’d have begun at the very beginning. God’s first promise of the Messiah to come is right at the beginning of the Bible. After creation, Adam and Eve fell into sin through their disobedience to God’s Law. When God confronted them in the Garden of Eden, He made this prophecy, called the Protoevangelium, to the serpent,
“And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” (Genesis 3:15)
This promise was again reiterated by the prophet Isaiah when God tells Ahaz to choose a sign “as deep as Sheol or as high as Heaven.” When Ahaz refuses, God Himself gives that sign, “Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call His name Emmanuel.” See Isaiah 7
Women give birth to sons every day, yet this Son is different from all others. This Son has no earthly father. If Christ were to have had an earthly father, He would have carried original sin like the rest of us. Scripture tells us that the sins of the fathers are passed on to their children.
“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.”(Galatians 4:4-5)
Sheol was forever changed when Christ descended into Hell to declare His victory over sin, death, and the devil. He rose from the dead, a perfect, spotless, acceptable sacrifice for the sins of mankind.
God marked this event with a sign in the Heavens, as He had promised. The star led the Magi to worship the newborn Christ child in Bethlehem. Let us think today of this great sign from the Heavens, and what it signifies to us about the Virgin birth of Christ the Messiah.
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