NOTES for Isa 7:10-16
Ahaz does not want to ask God for any signs or portents. Why? The answer is plain: he behaves like an ordinary religious person. Such a person thinks it best not to trouble God unnecessarily with requests for signs, that this would be a kind of test of God's commitment to the relationship, a test no human being is entitled to make. God may test a person to see how faithful they are to Him. But a person testing God? Yet this is precisely what the prophet demands of Ahaz.
In contrast to the Saviour, who refuses to give the Pharisees the signs that would, in their eyes, confirm that He is the Messiah. Why such a difference? Evidently, the same action, the same request, can have directly opposite meanings in different situations. This is hardly surprising: in every case, what is at issue is the relationship linking a person to God. All requests are simply a consequence of that relationship. As is the absence of any requests at all.
Ultimately, everything comes down to trust in God. Or its absence. In Ahaz's case, it was precisely his unwillingness to ask that revealed a lack of trust. This is always what happens when one sees God not as a Father or a Friend, but as a powerful superior whom it is best not to approach unless absolutely necessary. Even then, one thinks twice: might such an appeal only make things worse? There can, of course, be no question of trust here. And therefore no relationship with God either, although someone who sees God as a powerful, fearsome superior may think there is one.
In fact, however, this is only an illusion. And not even because God has no intention of being a powerful, fearsome superior to anyone. After all, communicating with people who have little idea of what He is really like is nothing new to Him. The problem lies elsewhere: a person who pictures a distorted image of God directs all their attention towards that image rather than towards God's real presence in their life.
In this sense, Ahaz is no different from the Pharisees, who wanted the real Messiah to resemble the image they had made of Him. In both cases, there is a desire to live not with God or with the Messiah, but with an image of God and the Messiah that is so familiar and dear to one's heart. An image that makes life difficult not only for people but also for God, insofar as God wants to live alongside people. Not because these images make it hard for Him to see us, but because, if we spend our whole life with an illusion of God, at the journey's end we will have to settle for a mere illusion of the Kingdom instead of the Kingdom itself.