“God helps those who help themselves.” It almost sounds biblical. Some people think it does come from the Bible, but it doesn’t. It is unbiblical, even anti-biblical. For the Bible says the opposite: God helps the helpless, those who cannot help themselves. God saves those who cannot save themselves. For we are prisoners who cannot free ourselves. We are dead and cannot raise ourselves. We are hell-bound and cannot change our direction.
God must come to us to help us. He must reach down to us; we cannot reach up to him. He must come to be with us.
“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14). Emmanuel means “God with us.” God sets down his crown, takes off his royal robes and puts on the work clothes of a servant. In humility he takes our humanity. Emmanuel works and weeps and suffers and sleeps and bleeds and dies. God comes to help those who cannot help themselves – for he is Emmanuel.
Verse one: O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appear. Refrain: Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to you, O Israel!
“A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit” (Isaiah 11:1). The Root of Jesse is God’s Promise that David’s throne would stand forever. Jesus is in the family tree of David, Israel’s greatest king. Jesse is David’s father. Even when the tree of the nation of Israel was cut down and reduced to a lifeless stump, the Promise lived on in the Root.
Our sin goes all the way to the root. Not only is the fruit tainted, but the whole tree is bad, roots and all. That’s why God says in Malachi 4:1: “Surely the day is coming; it will burn like a furnace. All the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble, and that day that is coming will set them on fire. Not a root or a branch will be left to them.”
We must be grafted to a new Root. We must be joined to the Root of Jesse and connected to the Vine who is Jesus. We are now the living branches grafted to the living Root of Jesse. Jesus is your Vine and your Root. Apart from him you can do nothing. Joined to him, believing in him, you bear much fruit.
Verse two: O come, O Root of Jesse, free your own from Satan’s tyranny; from depths of hell your people save, and give them vict’ry o’er the grave.
God is Light, and in him there is no darkness. God spoke Light into the darkness. Light is life. Without light there is no life. Darkness is death, the silence of God, the absence of God.
Our sin plunged the creation into darkness and death. Sin loves the darkness and hates the light. Sin loves the death and hates the life. Adam hid in the darkness of the trees. Judas betrayed his Lord at night. Sin seeks shelter under the cover of darkness. Darkness cannot produce light. It is nothing, formless and void, empty. Light must be spoken into darkness from the outside.
God sent his Son, the light of the world thrown into darkness. He is the light no darkness can overcome. “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned” (Isaiah 9:2). Jesus is the Morning Star, the Dayspring from on high, the signal of the coming morning. Day is at hand. The Dayspring has risen. The sun of righteousness rises with healing in his wings. He was born in darkness that we might be reborn as children of the light. He died in the darkness that we might live in the light of his life. He rose at dawn to usher in the new day of his resurrection. He shines into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who works through the Word, dispelling the darkness, killing the death and bringing light and life.
Verse three: O come, O Dayspring from on high, and cheer us by your drawing nigh; disperse the gloomy clouds of night, and death’s dark shadows put to flight.
Isaiah had prophesied: “I will place on his shoulder the key to the house of David; what he opens no one can shut, and what he shuts no one can open” (22:22). Sin locks the door to heaven. It makes our lives a prison of fear of death. Like the disciples in the locked upper room on Easter evening, we are hiding from our enemies, hoping death doesn’t find us. We are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. No matter how much we struggle against the chains and rattle the bars, we are unable to break out of prison. The eternal penitentiary of hell is waiting us once death finds us.
But Christ has come and entered the prison. He endured the Law’s death sentence. He stormed the gates of death and hell with his death and his descent into hell. He turns the key to our prison cell. He is the Key that closes hell’s cell doors and unlocks heaven’s gates and breaks the chains of death. He sets us free to live as free children in his free city. For Jesus is the Key of David who opens and no one can close, and who closes and no one can open.
Verse four: O come, O Key of David, come, and open wide our heav’nly home; make safe the way that leads on high, and close the path to misery. Refrain: Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to you, O Israel!