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In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear saints, we’ll turn our attention to this Old Testament prophecy, Isaiah chapter 11, and ask first, what does it mean? And then, what does it mean for us? The picture is of a tree stump, the stump of a particular tree, the stump of Jesse. Now, the key to simply understanding this prophecy is remembering that Jesse was the father of King David. So this tree is the kingdom and the family of David. And when we think of this family of David, the tree that is the nation of Israel, we want to think of a great and glorious and majestic tree.
The other day, I think Daniel had lacrosse practice, and so I was walking around the place where it was, and I stumbled on this huge, gigantic oak tree. It was so… it had a big ring around it and like a driveway around it, and I thought to myself, I wonder if this is some sort of important historic tree. And so I went looking to figure it out, and it turns out that there’s actually a website that’s something like Historic Live Oaks of the South. I couldn’t believe it. Now, this particular tree wasn’t on that list, but it had all these pictures of these great and majestic oaks that are hundreds of years old and whose branches are huge, and they extend out hundreds of feet.
And if you want to think of the kingdom of David, this is the picture that we would want to have in our imaginations, this huge, living, growing, strong, insurmountable, almost take-your-breath-away tree. But by the time Isaiah preaches about David’s family, it’s been cut down. It’s a stump. There’s no life in it at all. In fact, this probably refers to the assault of the Babylonians in the year 586 or 587 BC when they came and simply overthrew Jerusalem and tore it down. They didn’t leave a stone on top of a stone in the temple. The whole place was nothing, and the people have to sit there and think, what are all the promises of God to David going to mean now? After all, the Lord had promised to David that His seed would sit on the throne forever, but now David’s throne is destroyed. His castle, his house, the temple, the whole city are nothing.
A tree stump, but from out of the side of the stump comes a little branch, a little twig with a couple of little leaves on it. Can you see? You’ve got to see the picture in your imagination. This huge big stump that’s cut down and burned and has been dead for hundreds of years, out of the side of it comes a little branch. That’s the shoot from the stump of David, from the stump of Jesse, and that’s Jesus. That’s the One who will be King over the people. That’s the One who will rescue them. That’s the One in whom the Lord will establish His eternal kingdom, and that’s what Isaiah goes on to prophesy.
In fact, the prophecy that we have in the next few verses describes how He will be King, what He will do as King, and what the result of His kingdom will be. Look at this, verse 2: “the Spirit of the Lord will rest upon Him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord,” and “His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord,” so that this King, Jesus, the shoot from Jesse’s stump, will rule not with might, not with armies, not with swords, not with power, but by the Spirit of God.
And what will he do? Verse 4, well, starting halfway through verse 3, “He will judge,” but “he will not judge by what his eyes see or decide disputes by what his ears hear, but with righteousness he shall judge the poor and decide with equity for the meek of the earth,” and “He shall strike the earth with the rod of His mouth,” that’s His Word, “and with the breath of His lips He shall kill the wicked.” So what will He do? How will He rule? The answer is He will preach, and He will preach two words. He will preach the word of judgment that comes in two forms, the judgment of innocence or the judgment of guilty.
I think this is one of these important things for us to remember, because we, at least for me, whenever I hear the word judgment in the Bible, I think, uh-oh. I mean, you think the judgment is going to be a bad judgment. You think judgment is a word of the law, that the Lord is going to judge us, that is, the Lord is going to condemn us. But we want to remember that there’s two ways to make a judgment. When you stand before a judge in a court, there’s two judgments that he can make. He can judge you to be guilty or he can judge you to be innocent, to be righteous. And that’s what Jesus does.
With righteousness, He will judge the poor. He will declare you to be innocent and holy. And what’s the result of all of this? It is the conversion of sinners to the Lord’s kingdom. This is what’s described in verses 6, 7, and 8 where we have these pictures that we’re so familiar with. “The wolf will dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, the calf and the lion and the fatted calf together, and a little child shall lead them.”
I was reading Luther on this text last night, and he says the lambs, the goats, the young calves, these are the Christians. Those who have the Spirit of God, who are gentle and who are innocent and who love peace. And who are the wolves? They’re the false teachers. Who are the leopards? They’re the persecutors of the church. Who are the bears? They are those who want to afflict us. And yet, look, in the preaching of law and gospel, they are converted and they come to us. The Word, in other words, turns lions into peace-loving lambs. It doesn’t go the other way around. It doesn’t make the lambs as ferocious as a lion. It makes the lions as peaceful as lambs. And so, in the Lord’s kingdom, sinners are granted repentance.
The persecutors of the church, and here think of St. Paul who persecuted the church with all of his might and all of his zeal, they’re called in to the patience and to the kindness of the Lord. It reminds me of the prayer that we pray in the prayer of the church for our enemies, where it says, “grant that they would so be inclined to walk with us in meekness and in peace.” In other words, the kingdom of Jesus is a kingdom of peace, and we hope and pray that all who love violence would come into His kingdom of peace. That’s what it says in verse 9: “they shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”
So Isaiah preaches Jesus to the people, to us, who need to hear it most. And He sets their hope, and this is maybe the point, He sets their hope not on their own strength, not on their own might, not on their own glory, but simply on the Lord’s Word. And this is it. This is all we have too. This is all the strength that we have. It’s only in the Lord’s Word. In fact, that’s probably the wisdom that the text would have for us tonight, because this way of doing things, of cutting down the tree and then bringing forth the shoot out of the side of the stump, this is always how the Lord works.
He takes what looks dead and He uses it to bring life. Just think, for example, of how it was with Abraham and Sarah. Abraham’s 99, Sarah’s 90 years old, they’ve been trying to have children their whole life and there’s no children at all, and Sarah herself says, “look, I’m as good as dead, can I have joy now?” And Abraham says, “what good am I?” And yet the Lord waits until they’re so far beyond the hope of having children on their own before He gives them a child. And why? I mean, why does the Lord do this? He does it so that we would have no question, no doubt, there would be no wondering in our own minds that it is the Lord’s work and not the work of Abraham and Sarah.
He says to Abraham, whatever, a dozen years later when Isaac is the only child he has, he says, “take Isaac, your only son, the son that you love, and offer him as a sacrifice.” It seems like the Lord is always gonna bring forth a shoot only out of a stump that’s dead. He says to the children of Israel, “look, I’m gonna rescue you,” and then what does he do? He brings them right up to the edge of the dead, or right up to the edge of the Red Sea, so they have the sea on one side, the mountains on the other, the Egyptians coming behind them.
So it looks like there’s no hope at all, and then he tells Moses to lift up his staff, and they pass through the sea. Or just to think of the staffs that the Lord gave to Moses and to Aaron, the Lord causes Aaron’s staff to bloom with almonds. If you could just think of the thing most unlikely to bloom with an almond tree, it would be a piece of wood that has been cut off from the tree. Or when the people are crying for water, how does the Lord decide to give them water? He says, “take the staff and strike the rock,” so that a river flows out of a rock. Or they’re hungry, how does He feed them? He says, “I’ll give you bread from the air, from the sky.”
He takes the most unlikely things, the most unlikely circumstances to do His work. He takes a virgin to be His mother. Now, I don’t know if this strikes home for you tonight. For some of you, no doubt it will, but for some of you, I want you to store this away, because this is how the Lord works with us also. I mean, He takes us to the end of ourselves before He delivers us. He takes us to the end of our strength before He rescues us. He kills before He makes alive, and He does it all for the same reason, so that we would know that this was not accomplished by us, but by His Word and by His mercy.
And if you think of the deadest wood you possibly can, a stump of a tree that’s been cut down and burned and trampled over, it’s from that that the shoot of Jesse grows. I can think of one more piece of wood that is even deader than that—the two cross beams nailed together, covered in blood, where criminals would hang. I mean, that is the definition of a dead piece of wood. And yet from that wood, from that tree, from that cross, the Lord delivers you. From that death, you have life. From that suffering, you have forgiveness.
God be praised. In that day, says Isaiah, the root of Jesse, who will stand as a signal for the peoples, of him shall the nations inquire, and his resting place will be glorious. God be praised that the root of Jesse has come, your Lord Jesus, and He has delivered you. Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.