Who Is This Jesus?

The name "Jesus" is not a job description tacked onto a man. It is a declaration that YHWH himself has arrived — that the One who alone can forgive sins has stepped into the dust of His own creation to do what only He can do.

Immanuel is not a coincidence. It is the whole story of Scripture in two words — the desire of God, covenant by covenant, to close the distance between heaven and earth and dwell with His people.

Two names crowd the first chapter of Matthew, and neither one is accidental.

The angel speaks first to Joseph — a man who had just resolved to do a quiet, merciful thing and put Mary away without scandal. Into that moment of suspended sorrow, the angel cuts:

"She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." — Matthew 1:21 (ESV)

Then Matthew pauses to tell us something the disciples would have recognised — a thread running back through Isaiah:

"Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel (which means, God with us)." — Matthew 1:23 (ESV)

Two names. And if you read them the wrong way around, you miss everything.

The name is the identity.

Jesus is the Greek form of Yeshua — itself a compression of YHWH-saves. Every devout Jew in the first century knew exactly what hung in that syllable. The divine name. Not a title of office, not a description of vocation, but the name that Moses heard from the burning bush: the self-existent, covenant-keeping God of Israel.

This is not decoration. The Westminster Confession of Faith is precise on the point: the Son is "very God, of one substance and equal with the Father" (WCF 8.2). The reason that matters here is simple and devastating: only God can forgive sins. When the Pharisees objected to Jesus forgiving the paralytic in Mark 2, they were not wrong about the logic — they were wrong about the man.

"Who can forgive sins but God alone?" — Mark 2:7 (ESV)

Exactly. Which is why the name has to carry what it carries.

Matthew's own gloss leans toward action — "he will save his people from their sins." That is right and it should stay right. But identity grounds mission. He can only do what only YHWH can do because He is YHWH. The saving is not the whole sentence; it is the predicate of a much larger subject.

R.C. Sproul drew the line clearly: the atonement is not the achievement of a gifted teacher or a willing martyr. It is the self-offering of God. Strip that and you have a noble death. Keep it and you have a rescue.

The covenant is the desire.

Immanuel, then, is not a second name competing with the first. It is the direction everything has been moving.

Go back to the garden. God walked there in the cool of the day. The tabernacle was designed so that the holy God could pitch His tent among a pilgrim people. The temple was built so that His glory might dwell in a house in the city of the great King. Prophet after prophet looked forward to the day when the exile would end, not just geographically but cosmically — when God and His people would no longer be separated by sin and distance.

Geerhardus Vos, the architect of Reformed biblical theology, read the whole of redemptive history as a story of progressive nearness — God drawing closer, step by step, to the fullness of communion with His people. Immanuel is not one more moment in that sequence. It is the arrival. The thing every prior shadow was pointing toward.

This is why Matthew reaches for Isaiah 7:14. He is not merely proving a prophecy was fulfilled. He is saying: you wanted to know what God's purpose has been all along? Here it is. God with us. Not hovering above. Not speaking through intermediaries. Flesh and blood and dust and a name — God with us.

What this asks of you today.

You are not reading about a distant figure who performed services on your behalf. You are reading about the God of the universe, who entered His own creation carrying a name that announced His identity, driven by a desire that has characterised His heart since before the fall.

That changes how you come to him. Not as a client approaching a service provider. Not even as a subject petitioning a king — though that would already be more than we deserve. But as one of His people, for whom He came, to whom He draws near, in whose midst He is still Immanuel.

Come to him today as though that name means what it says. Because it does.