Isaiah really tried to help Ahaz. The king of Judah had made a mess of things. By abandoning God and worshipping idols, Ahaz had made Judah weak. The Edomites and the Philistines had both won battles and taken portions of the kingdom (2 Chronicles 28:17-18). Now, his two northern neighbors, Israel and Syria, had formed an alliance and were attacking Judah together (2 Kings 16:5; 2 Chronicles 28:6-8; Isaiah 7:1-2; 2 Nephi 17:1-2).
Ahaz’s response was twofold: beg for help from the much larger kingdom of Assyria (2 Kings 16:7; 2 Chronicles 28:16), and worship the gods of his apparently more powerful neighbors:
He sacrificed unto the gods of Damascus, which smote him: and he said, Because the gods of the kings of Syria help them, therefore will I sacrifice to them, that they may help me. But they were the ruin of him, and of all Israel.
2 Chronicles 28:23
As the armies of Israel and Syria approached Jerusalem, Isaiah went out to calm Ahaz’s fears. The invasion would not be successful, he said. Israel and Syria were not as powerful as they seemed, and they would not accomplish their goal of dethroning Ahaz (Isaiah 7:4-7; 2 Nephi 17:4-7). Isaiah urged Ahaz to remember that both Israel and Syria were led by mortal men. Then, he issued a warning to Ahaz:
If ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be established.
Isaiah 7:9; 2 Nephi 17:9
The Hebrew version of this warning is more poetic. The two verbs, “believe” and “be established,” are the active and passive versions of the same Hebrew verb, aman (אָמַן), which means to make firm or to support. Here’s the sentence as it appears in Hebrew:
Im lo ta-aminu, ki lo te-amenu.
A possible English rendering which preserves the parallelism would be: “If you will not hold firm, then you will not be held firm.”
Why did Nephi include this story in the excerpts from Isaiah he quoted in his record? Probably because he wanted to emphasize the relationship between belief (holding firm) and stability (being held firm).
After prophesying of the death and resurrection of Jesus, Nephi writes, “All those who shall believe on his name shall be saved in the kingdom of God” (2 Nephi 25:13). After describing a second scattering of the Jews, he declares that they will one day “be persuaded to believe in Christ, the Son of God, and the atonement, which is infinite for all mankind,” and at that time, “the Lord will set his hand again the second time to restore his people from their lost and fallen state” (2 Nephi 25:16-17). And then, Nephi personalizes the principle:
We labor diligently to write, to persuade our children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God; for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do.
2 Nephi 25:23
Just as Isaiah explained to Ahaz, Nephi wants his children and his readers to understand that belief and stability are inseparable. If you hold firm by trusting God, then He will hold you firm.
Today I will believe in Christ. In a tumultuous and uncertain world, I will build my foundation on the Eternal One.
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