YHWH’s proximity is an inconvenient wealth.
The Lord’s covenanting labors with Israel in the desert before Sinai are paradigmatic of the demanding consolation that his presence brings to a people with whom he chooses to live in close quarters. Rightfully, the Israelites of the Exodus narrative have a difficult time deciding whether this is precisely what they wanted.
The seventh to ninth chapters of the book of Isaiah pack more enigma and fuzzy-set suggestion into what is an historically anchored text than it is possible to find almost anywhere else. Mysteriously named children mingle with prophetic salvation oracles and solemn assurances of YHWH’s judicial anger to create a section of this book that gestures lyrically in multiple directions with no apparent apology for the complexity of the result. With good reason, these chapters have occupied hymnwriters, liturgists, Bible readers, and scholars in comparable measure.
Nothing here is easy.
Not even the words ‘God (is) with us!’, which appear once as an anguished outcry in the face of Assyrian devastation and then again as the name of a promised child who will bring about the salvation of his people.
‘Immanuel’ becomes one of those exclamations and/or names, the effect and meaning of which is transparently dependent upon the context in which the referenced deity makes himself at home. Like so much in this demanding textual matrix, it can be good news or bad. YHWH of the hand still lifted in anger is also YHWH the God who is almost obsessed with blessing his Israel.
‘Immanuel’ cannot rightly be taken for granted. The idea in Isaiah represents a kind of kairos moment, a challenge to decide in what manner YHWH’s proximity will be experienced by the people to whom the word is addressed.
Will he wound or will he heal?
The question is not an accident of incoherently assembled texts. It is the interrogative that will shape and reshape a nation, the summons to human hearts that have not after all been God-forsaken in the hurly-burly of imperial politics and craven kings.
Canter Bridge 
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