Today in God's Word—September 2023
East Tallassee Church of Christ
September 18, Isaiah 11
There shall come forth a shoot from the branch of the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit... He will raise a signal for the nations and will assemble the banished of Israel, and gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.- Isaiah 11:1,12
The privet hedge must be one of the hardiest plants in all the plant kingdom. It seems to thrive in all conditions — hot or cold, sun or shade, wet or dry. When it is cut back to the bare stump, the new green shoot emerges almost immediately and grows rapidly. I thought about that prolific shrub and how it grows back from a bare stump when I read Isaiah 11.
The Lord showed Isaiah how the Assyrians would be destroyed. He likened them to the vast cedar forests of Lebanon, and how a great fire would so completely consume the forest that a little child could count the surviving trees. Assyria had been God's axe. But after they defied God and exalted themselves, God would lop off their boughs and take the towering trees down with another of his axes. The mighty “forest” of the Assyrians would fall at the hand of the Majestic one, never to rise again.
Before Assyria’s fall, God used the Assyrians to punish Israel. The northern kingdom of Israel was so devastated that it could not recover. Judah would continue for a while before she, too, fell to an enemy invader. The people would be relocated to Babylon, just as the Israelites were taken to Assyria. But a remnant of Judah would return from captivity and continue to live as a distinct people. Isaiah had named one of his sons Shear-jashub, which meant "a remnant shall return." The southern half of the Israelite nation would be cut down as well, but there was still life in the stump.
From that stump, Isaiah saw a shoot, a branch of new life growing from its root. The stump was the stump of Jesse (David's family) out of the descendants of Abraham. The promises were still intact. God would still send the one who
would bring blessing to all the families of the earth through Abraham's descendants.
Chapter 11 is about Messiah and his kingdom. It describes this Branch of Jesse who will be called the root of David in the New Testament. Isaiah praised his character, his power, his spotless integrity and perfect righteousness. His kingdom would be a kingdom of peace, illustrated by the unthinkable peaceful coexistence of predators and their prey, peacefully grazing together and lying down side by side. Isaiah was not painting a literal time and place where such an unnatural thing would occur, any more than saying that the Messiah would be a literal shoot growing from a literal tree stump.
Perhaps the most striking feature of Messiah's kingdom mentioned here is the clear prophecy that the Gentiles (the nations) would be called and included in this kingdom. Israelites would be invited too, and the two groups would be joined together as subjects of Messiah. Ephraim and Judah would be reconciled and reunited. There would be no more division among God's people. And God's people would include Gentiles, who had been strangers to the covenants of promise and without God in the world.
Dark times were coming for God's people who had disobeyed and rebelled in Isaiah's day. They would face severe consequences. Many would die and the survivors would live in difficult circumstances. But Isaiah's message to them was not all death and destruction. There were still promises to be kept, and God who cannot lie would keep those promises he made centuries before. You and I are beneficiaries of those promises and the covenant that was written in the blood of God's Son. He is the glorious One of whom Isaiah wrote in this chapter.
Copyright © 2023 by Michael B. McElroy. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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