Matthew 1:21-23 - He will save the people from their sins

1:21

The angel then expanded on the instructions, telling Joseph that she would have a son and he was to name him Jesus. Jesus is the Greek form of Joshua, and means “the Lord saves”. He was to call him this because he would save the people from their sins. Note this last bit. The Bible is clear from beginning to end that we need to be saved from our sins, that that is the whole purpose of the gospel. We are all too ready to forget this.

1:22,23 (a)

Matthew then gives his first quotation from the Old Testament, saying that these things happened to fulfil this saying. This first one is rather controversial, so we will look at it in some depth. First, we need to have a general look at what “fulfilment” of prophecy means. We tend to take it in the sense that a specific prediction was made, and that Jesus was the fulfilment of this. However, prophecy and prediction are not the same. Many, probably most, prophecies in the Old Testament had both a fairly immediate fulfilment, and then a later complete fulfilment. The initial fulfilment would be partial, but demonstrated the veracity and reality of the prophecy, in particular the reality of the thing it was pointing forward to (which was usually God’s plan of salvation in Christ).  The prophecy would show the sort of things that would happen, or what the Messiah would be like.

Here Matthew cites Is 7:14. The controversy arises over the fact that the original Hebrew version can mean “young woman”, not necessarily “virgin”. While the word can mean young woman, most of its uses apply to virgins. However, the partial/complete fulfilment concept is very relevant here. The immediate fulfilment referred to children that Isaiah would father, and this would not be a virgin birth! Moreover, the aspect of the verse that Matthew is focusing on is the “Immanuel” part and the salvation aspects. He is not using this as “proof” of the virgin birth.