Scripture Daily

Context No. 1767 of 4322 · Isaiah

Context · Reflection

Isaiah 11:1-9: in context

1A shoot will come out of the stock of Jesse, and a branch out of his roots will bear fruit. 2The LORD’s Spirit will rest on him: the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD. 3His delight will be in the fear of the LORD. He will not judge by the sight of his eyes, neither decide by the hearing of his ears; 4but he will judge the poor with righteousness, and decide with equity for the humble of the earth. He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; and with the breath of his lips he will kill the wicked. 5Righteousness will be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his waist. 6The wolf will live with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the young goat, the calf, the young lion, and the fattened calf together; and a little child will lead them. 7The cow and the bear will graze. Their young ones will lie down together. The lion will eat straw like the ox. 8The nursing child will play near a cobra’s hole, and the weaned child will put his hand on the viper’s den. 9They will not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.

Isaiah sees hope springing from an unlikely place: a shoot will come out of the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots will bear fruit. On this branch the Spirit of the LORD will rest, wisdom and understanding, counsel and knowledge and the fear of the LORD. He will judge the poor with righteousness. And Isaiah paints the peace he brings: the wolf living with the lamb, the child leading them, none hurting or destroying, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.

The image that opens the vision is worth pausing over: a shoot from the stump of Jesse. A stump is what is left when a tree has been cut down, a sign of something finished, dead, cut off; and the house of Jesse and David, by Isaiah's day, was heading toward exactly that, a royal line felled, reduced to a stump. And from that stump, that image of deadness and defeat, Isaiah sees a green shoot rising, new life where all seemed cut off, and on it the fullness of God's Spirit and the promise of a world made whole. God brings life from the stump; hope springs from what looked finished. This is one of the ways God works that we most need to remember. When a thing looks cut down and dead, a hope, a family, a calling, a life, we conclude it is finished, that nothing can come of a stump. But God is the one who brings a shoot from the stump, life from what looked dead, a future from what seemed cut off. The line of David looked felled, and from its stump came the Christ. This does not promise that every dead thing will spring green again in the way we want; but it says that God is not limited by our stumps, that his life can rise from what we have written off as finished, and that the appearance of deadness is not the end of God's possibilities. When we look at the stump and see only what has been cut down, God may be preparing a shoot. The vision Isaiah saw, of the Spirit-filled branch and the world at peace, all of it began with a shoot from a stump, life from apparent death, the pattern of the God who raises the dead.

When something in my life looks cut down and finished, a hope, a calling, a relationship reduced to a stump, do I conclude that nothing can come of it, or can I remember that God brings a shoot from the stump, life from what looks dead, and that the appearance of deadness is not the end of his possibilities?

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