Isaiah 7:3

"Then said Jehovah unto Isaiah, Go forth now to meet Ahaz, thou and Shear-Jashub thy son, at the end of the conduit of the upper pool, in the highway of the fuller's field; and say unto him, Take heed, and be quiet; fear not, neither let thy heart be faint, because of these two tails of smoking fire-brands, for the fierce anger of Rezin and Syria, and of the son of Remaliah. Because Syria, Ephraim, and the son of Remaliah, have purposed evil against thee, saying, Let us go up against Judah, and vex it, and let us make a breach therein for us, and set up a king in the midst of it, even the son of Tabeel; thus saith the Lord Jehovah, It shall not stand, neither shall it come to pass. For the head of Syria is Damascus, and the head of Damascus is Rezin; and within threescore and five years shall Ephraim be broken in pieces, so that it shall not be a people: And the head of Ephraim is Samaria, and the head of Samaria is Remaliah's son. If ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be established."

Isaiah 7:3 gave God's instructions for Isaiah to take his son Shear-Jashub with him when he went to meet Ahaz; and the very presence of this son was a stern warning to Ahaz that troubled times lay ahead for Judah. The name Shear-Jashub was in all probability prophetically given by God Himself and had the meaning, "a remnant shall return."[3] The prophecy implied by this indicated not merely that "a remnant shall return," but also that Judah would also go into captivity. This conviction regarding "a remnant shall return" was a frequently reiterated doctrine in Isaiah's great prophecy.

The very place where Isaiah would meet Ahaz was significant. As many have surmised, the king was engaged at that very moment in carrying out his own schemes for the defense of his city, probably securing the water system, or devising to make it unusable for the enemy, or perhaps both.

"Smoking firebrands ..." This actually means burnt-out firebrands, thus no threat that should have concerned Judah as long as they believed and trusted God.

"It shall not stand; neither shall it come to pass ..." God here vetoed the evil purposes of Judah's enemies; then in Isaiah 7:8 God gave through Isaiah the reason why such evil purposes of Judah's enemies were doomed to failure and frustration, that reason being that whereas Syria and Ephraim had merely human heads and leadership, Judah belonged to God, their true king, whose purposes would inevitably prevail.

The heavenly promise that Ephraim would be broken in pieces and stand no longer as a separate and distinct people (Isaiah 7:8b) is believed to have been given in 735 or 733 B.C.; and if this date is correct the sixty-five years allowed for the fulfillment of this prophecy would have fallen somewhere in the reign of Ashurbanipal over Assyria. A much earlier indication of the prophecy's accuracy came only about 11 years later (722 B.C.) when Samaria fell to Assyria and thousands of citizens of the Northern kingdom were led away to Assyria in long lines held together with ropes or chains through the ears of the victims who later were either worked or starved to death in Assyria.

This horrible disaster to Northern Israel (Ephraim) should have been warning enough for Ahaz. A foreign alliance had led only to defeat and extermination for Ephraim; and if Ahaz had been blessed with the ability to think properly he should have been able to see that a foreign alliance for Judah would lead to the same disastrous results. The total fulfillment of this predictive prophecy, however, came within about one lifetime, the sixty-five years of Isaiah 7:8b. "In 669 B.C., Esar-Haddon, having made his son Ashurbanipal king of Assyria, moved his own residence to Babylon; and this was probably the same year in which he sent from Babylon and vicinity many colonists to re-populate Samaria."[4] Following these events, "Ephraim was no longer a people."[5] The colonists intermarried with the few remaining Jews; and the mixed racial descendants became the Samaritans who were despised by the Jews of later times.

Some have questioned whether or not this warning to Ahaz would have been effective because of the time it took to be completely fulfilled; but such an objection is completely nullified by the utter destruction of Samaria and the captivity of its people within a mere eleven years from the date of the prophecy, making the ultimate and complete fulfillment of it absolutely certain, even as early as 722 B.C. Cheyne and other scholars have supposed that this prophecy might have been given at some other point chronologically; but as Rawlinson noted "There is no appearance in this chapter of any need for such theories."[6]

In the final verse of this paragraph, Isaiah's call to faith is uttered with a slogan-like play on words which is almost impossible of translation into English, although James Moffatt's Translation of the Bible (1929) attempted it as follows: "Hold God in doubt; You'll not hold out," or, "Unsure, Insecure!" Faith in God is always a pre-condition of pleasing God, whether by individuals or nations.