Isaiah 11:1-10
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1 Then a shoot will grow from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots will bear fruit.
2 The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him— a Spirit of wisdom and understanding, a Spirit of counsel and strength, a Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.
3 His delight will be in the fear of the Lord. He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, he will not execute justice by what he hears with his ears,
4 but he will judge the poor righteously and execute justice for the oppressed of the land. He will strike the land with a scepter from his mouth, and he will kill the wicked with a command from his lips.
5 Righteousness will be a belt around his hips; faithfulness will be a belt around his waist.
6 The wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the goat. The calf, the young lion, and the fattened calf will be together, and a child will lead them.
7 The cow and the bear will graze, their young ones will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like cattle.
8 An infant will play beside the cobra’s pit, and a toddler will put his hand into a snake’s den.
9 They will not harm or destroy each other on my entire holy mountain, for the land will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the sea is filled with water.
10 On that day the root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples. The nations will look to him for guidance, and his resting place will be glorious.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to week two(one?) of the GBC Advent Series, Let Heaven and Nature Sing: Isaiah and the Coming King.
Last week, we had to call a bit of an audible as Pastor Caleb was too sick to preach, so we didn’t really get to hang out in Isaiah, which is why I’m not sure if this is week one or two.
Either way, this week, we’re starting in Isaiah in earnest for three sermons that will highlight how the Son of God’s incarnation, that is, putting on human flesh and becoming a man, fundamentally changes everything.
One wonderful thing about Isaiah is that as he looks into the future and sees God’s king coming, he paints different portraits with highly evocative poetry that’s filled with all sorts of imagery. We’ll look at three of these portraits, as it were, that are effectively paintings of the same king and his transformative effect on all creation, all done in different hues, with different emphases, yet they all share really significant similarities.
And this is true of the entire book of Isaiah. It’s a masterful tapestry of poems that are woven together, threads being laid down here and picked up there, and there’s no way to do any one scene full justice apart from looking at the whole. Unfortunately, this tapestry is way too big for just an advent series, so Caleb, Hayden, and I are going to do our very bests to whet our appetites so that the primary result of this series will be a deeper hunger, a deeper longing, to see Jesus as he really is in all his glory.
Let’s dive in.
Now, today’s text divides into three sections
11:1 — A New David
11:2-5 — A New King
11:6-10 — A New Creation
and these three sections will fill out what today’s main idea means:
Main idea: The arrival of God’s perfect, anointed king fundamentally transforms the world and everyone in it.
Let’s look at our first section, Isaiah 11:1
1 Then a shoot will grow from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots will bear fruit.
At this point, we need to fill out the background as much as we can, as quickly as possible. We are, after all, diving straight into prophetic literature with no context, which is not a great way to read the Bible.
First off, we need to know that Isaiah 11 is near the end of the first major unit in Isaiah, which is chapters 1-12. These chapters contain visions, songs, and narratives about a nation coming to invade and destroy Jerusalem, the capital city of the southern kingdom, where Isaiah lived. In these chapters, we learn that Assyria is going to come and destroy Jerusalem, but after they’re done, the LORD is going to destroy them for their haughtiness.
After all of this destruction, God’s chosen people who have rejected God will be like the stump of a tree that has been chopped down, and that stump will be burned, according to Isaiah 6:13
13 Though a tenth will remain in the land, it will be burned again. Like the terebinth or the oak that leaves a stump when felled, the holy seed is the stump.
It’s this stump that the shoot is going to grow out of — the stump of what remains of Israel, but most specifically, the stump of what remains of the family line of the king of Israel, going all the way back to Jesse, the father of David, who was the greatest king Israel had ever known.
We may be tempted to think, then, that this shoot is going to be yet another son in David’s family line, just like the other kings of Israel — a few of them were good, but most of them were bad — but that misses the point. Isaiah recalls Jesse so that we understand that this shoot isn’t just a son of David, but a new David entirely.
This new David is the one we’re waiting for from Isaiah 9:7
7 The dominion will be vast, and its prosperity will never end. He will reign on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish and sustain it with justice and righteousness from now on and forever. The zeal of the Lord of Armies will accomplish this.
who is the seed through whom God fulfills his promise to David in 2 Samuel 7.
To put it as succinctly as I can — David’s family line had flourished in spite of David’s sons’ egregious failures. His dynasty lasted generation after generation because of Yahweh’s faithfulness until they had gone too far. The mighty oak would be felled and its stump scorched, but it would not be uprooted. God himself seemingly obliterated David’s family line for their sin, but God faithfully kept his promise to David and promised that even though it would seem like all was lost after he was done, he would still be faithful to his covenant with David by raising up a new king who would be like David in some very significant ways, but newer — and better.
Let’s see how this new king would be even better than David, God’s chosen man who had a heart like God’s.
2 The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him— a Spirit of wisdom and understanding, a Spirit of counsel and strength, a Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.
3 His delight will be in the fear of the Lord. He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, he will not execute justice by what he hears with his ears,
4 but he will judge the poor righteously and execute justice for the oppressed of the land. He will strike the land with a scepter from his mouth, and he will kill the wicked with a command from his lips.
5 Righteousness will be a belt around his hips; faithfulness will be a belt around his waist.
Notice three things about this king.
He is perfectly anointed by God’s Spirit.
He is perfectly in tune with God’s judgment.
He is perfectly aligned with God’s character.
First, the perfect anointing of God’s Spirit. This is one way in which this king is like David, but better. Hear 1 Samuel 16:13
13 So Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the presence of his brothers, and the Spirit of the Lord came powerfully on David from that day forward. Then Samuel set out and went to Ramah.
In this passage, we see the Spirit of the LORD come powerfully on David after Samuel anoints him. This is how the Spirit usually acts when he empowers a human being in the Old Testament.
But in Isaiah, what is the Spirit doing? Isaiah 11:2
2 The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him— a Spirit of wisdom and understanding, a Spirit of counsel and strength, a Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.
He’s resting on this king. This is not a king who suddenly receives power from on high as a gift that could just as easily be taken away as it had been from Saul before David. This is a king with whom the Spirit is entirely at home, whose presence is not going anywhere anytime soon.
And not only is the Spirit not going anywhere anytime soon, He’s enabling this king to be a king like no other. The sevenfold description of the Spirit, in fact, teaches us that this king is absolutely perfect, lacking nothing, so that his reign is everything God intended for his king all along.
This king has wisdom and understanding, so that he knows God’s will in every situation and has the skill to bring it about.
This king has counsel and strength, so that his plans are perfect and he can carry them out successfully.
And so far, this king looks just like David, or, even more fully, like David’s son Solomon, whose wisdom, political prowess, and military might secured peace and prosperity for Israel that would make you think Solomon was the king we needed all along, if it weren’t for his one fatal flaw — he delighted in anything other than the fear of the LORD.
For all of David and Solomon’s greatness, they both were found lacking in the final three blessings of God’s spirit.
The perfect king, on the other hand, has knowledge, the fear of the LORD — and not just a possession of the fear of the LORD, but an active delight in the fear of the LORD.
Without the fear of the LORD, wisdom, understanding, counsel, strength, and knowledge only make the inevitable downfall of a king — or a family of kings — all the more catastrophic.
But this king is different. He’s so different, in fact, that his reign is something we only caught a glimpse of in Solomon.
He is perfectly anointed by God’s Spirit.
He is perfectly in tune with God’s judgment.
He is perfectly aligned with God’s character.
3 His delight will be in the fear of the Lord. He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, he will not execute justice by what he hears with his ears,
4 but he will judge the poor righteously and execute justice for the oppressed of the land. He will strike the land with a scepter from his mouth, and he will kill the wicked with a command from his lips.
Solomon was able to judge and execute justice by his great wisdom in, for example, the case of the two women disputing over whose child was still living, but we don’t hear a whole lot about his judging the poor righteously or executing justice — in fact, he tries to execute the very man God chose to take his place as king over Israel, but failed, which is a far cry from being able to destroy his enemies with the scepter from his mouth and the command from his lips, as Isaiah’s king is able to do.
Yes, this king is able to destroy all of his enemies not by the strength of his arm, as normal kings do, but by, as the Hebrew literally puts it, the mere breath — the same word as Spirit — of his lips.
He is perfectly anointed by God’s Spirit.
He is perfectly in tune with God’s judgment.
He is perfectly aligned with God’s character.
5 Righteousness will be a belt around his hips; faithfulness will be a belt around his waist.
Isaiah’s coming king, it must be said, reflects God’s character in a way that no other king, especially not Solomon, ever has. Righteousness, that is, acting according to what is right and good; and faithfulness, that is, reliability in keeping one’s word and doing what one says he’ll do, are two of God’s characteristics that are most frequently praised and listed in tandem together throughout the Old Testament, and these same characteristics are the very garments clothing the king in his splendor.
At this point, we’ve seen a pretty full description of who Isaiah’s coming king is. He’s a new David and a new king, perfectly anointed with God’s Spirit, who will carry out his kingly duties in perfect accordance with God’s will and God’s character as he sits on David’s throne, fulfilling God’s promises back in 2 Samuel 7.
And at this point, we’re ready to ask one of Pastor Hayden’s favorite questions: so what?
If we’re being cynical, all we’ve said so far is that this wonderful, perfect king is going to come after some nation we don’t care about destroys another nation we don’t care about to execute justice in a land we don’t care about to fulfill a promise that has nothing to do with us that God gave to some king who reigned 3000 years ago and then died and his sons we don’t care about ruined everything.
What does this wonderful, perfect king have to do with us, today?
Main idea: The arrival of God’s perfect, anointed king fundamentally transforms the world and everyone in it.
Let’s look at what happens when God’s perfect, anointed king comes on the scene.
6 The wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the goat. The calf, the young lion, and the fattened calf will be together, and a child will lead them.
7 The cow and the bear will graze, their young ones will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like cattle.
8 An infant will play beside the cobra’s pit, and a toddler will put his hand into a snake’s den.
9 They will not harm or destroy each other on my entire holy mountain, for the land will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the sea is filled with water.
10 On that day the root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples. The nations will look to him for guidance, and his resting place will be glorious.
In this section, it’s less likely that Isaiah is giving a literal account of zoology under this new king’s reign, and more likely that he’s giving a highly symbolic and poetic account of anthropology — I won’t go into all of the reasons because we don’t have time today, but I will give a couple of keys that lead me to this conclusion, and you can test them out in the rest of Isaiah in your own reading.
First, this is all happening because, as we see in verse 9, the land is full of the knowledge of the LORD, after the king has struck the land with the scepter of his mouth in verse 5. And in the Old Testament, it’s human beings who can have knowledge of the LORD.
This is made more explicit in verse 10, where peoples and nations are searching out this king for guidance as to how they ought to conduct their affairs.
So in verses 6-7, it’s best to understand that Isaiah is depicting that nations, which formerly were characterized by the powerful eating up the less powerful, are no longer doing so, and there’s peace throughout all the earth.
But that’s not to say there’s nothing about animals at all.
In verse 8, we have this curious but extremely evocative imagery of very young children playing by snake dens, with snakes conspicuously absent from the previous two verses.
And if your snake-senses are tingling right now, you should heed them, because this symbolic language indicates reversal of something right at the beginning of the Bible.
Hear Genesis 3:14-15
14 So the Lord God said to the serpent: Because you have done this, you are cursed more than any livestock and more than any wild animal. You will move on your belly and eat dust all the days of your life.
15 I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.
The perfect king’s reign isn’t just characterized by worldwide peace between peoples — it’s characterized by peace between humans and creation, because the curse of Genesis 3 has been lifted. There’s no more hostility between humans and serpents because the serpent’s den was emptied when the king’s tomb was emptied at his resurrection from the dead — the snake’s head has been crushed, his offspring have been eliminated forever, and he presents no more danger to even the most vulnerable human beings.
And I do think it’s perfectly fair to extend the symbolism in verses 6-7 at this point because all these peoples and nations living in peace are actually living in an entirely new world, as well, that’s no longer under any sort of curse. Death is a thing of the past in God’s holy mountain where all this takes place, because God’s holy mountain is shorthand for a new heavens and a new earth. Hear how Isaiah picks up this theme again towards the end of his book.
17 “For I will create new heavens and a new earth; the past events will not be remembered or come to mind.
25 The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like cattle, but the serpent’s food will be dust! They will not do what is evil or destroy on my entire holy mountain,” says the Lord.
In case I haven’t painted the whole picture clearly at this stage, what Isaiah is saying is that this perfect king won’t just usher in a new way of humans relating to one another, but an entirely new manner of existence in an entirely new creation.
The symbolism in these verses primarily refers to human beings, but it’s been deliberately chosen to make it clear that all of creation is being transformed by the king’s reign.
In other words, it’s not just Genesis 3:15 that’s been reversed.
Genesis 3:17-18 have been reversed, as well.
17 And he said to the man, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘Do not eat from it’: The ground is cursed because of you. You will eat from it by means of painful labor all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.
Now, maybe you’re experiencing a little bit of whiplash. We’ve gone from talking about a perfect king coming from the line of a guy who lived 3000 years ago in a country we don’t really care about to talking about a perfect king reigning in the future, in a new heavens and a new earth, while we’re here living in the old earth where people die, and even kill each other, and that ancient serpent is still running amok, biting people and poisoning their hearts and minds.
Yet again, we ask — so what?
I’m glad you asked.
First, I want to tell you who the king is. Welcome to Sunday School — this king is Jesus of Nazareth.
Hear how Matthew identifies him:
17 so that what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled:
18 Here is my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved in whom I delight; I will put my Spirit on him, and he will proclaim justice to the nations.
19 He will not argue or shout, and no one will hear his voice in the streets.
20 He will not break a bruised reed, and he will not put out a smoldering wick, until he has led justice to victory.
21 The nations will put their hope in his name.
Now that we know who the king is, we can easily answer the so what? question when we recognize that Isaiah 11:9-10
9 They will not harm or destroy each other on my entire holy mountain, for the land will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the sea is filled with water.
10 On that day the root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples. The nations will look to him for guidance, and his resting place will be glorious.
isn’t just about the new heavens and the new earth; it’s about our lives here and now.
After all, what does it mean for the land to be full of the knowledge of the LORD? Do you remember Isaiah 11:2
2 The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him— a Spirit of wisdom and understanding, a Spirit of counsel and strength, a Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.
Where there is knowledge of the LORD, there is the Spirit of the LORD — and where has Jesus richly poured out his Spirit other than in the church?
Isaiah 11:10
10 On that day the root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples. The nations will look to him for guidance, and his resting place will be glorious.
And we’ve seen this already starting to be fulfilled in Acts, haven’t we? After Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit is poured out, Jesus’ disciples go and proclaim the gospel of his kingdom in Jerusalem, and by the end of Acts, this gospel has gone everywhere in the known world, and God has started bringing the nations under the banner of his King Jesus.
So, the answer to “so what” has a couple parts today.
First, we’re seeking to live out what we’ve studied in 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus, for almost unspeakably profound reasons.
As we model godly living in our individual households and in the household of God here, we’re giving each other, and the world, a glimpse of life in the new creation.
As we live at peace with one another, we’re doing so not just because it’s a better way of living and it’s more enjoyable, but because it’s what we were created to do in the first place and what we’ll be doing for all eternity, so we might as well start practicing now.
The peace that should characterize our relationships — husbands with wives, parents with children, brothers and sisters with brothers and sisters, and friends with friends — is a peace that proclaims, “our perfect king has come and put hostility to death, and one day he’s going to return and bury it once and for all.”
As we proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ, and his death, resurrection, and ascension, we’re not only proclaiming a gospel that forgives sins and allows people to live in God’s presence. We’re proclaiming a kingdom, and a king. We’re saying that God’s perfect king has come to earth, died a death he didn’t deserve to ransom his people and set creation free, and risen from the dead to put death to death and usher in a new creation — a creation that is everything God intended for it to be in the first place, and more.
And as we live out the implications of the gospel, we’re doing so as citizens of that kingdom, not just sinners who have been cleansed and created anew.
Because Jesus, God’s perfect, anointed king came, the world has already been transformed, along with a significant number of people in it.
But when he comes again, the world will be created anew, and the citizens of his kingdom will be its exclusive owners and residents.
Until that day, let us uphold the banner, the root of Jesse, and walk by his Spirit. Let’s live at peace with one another and show the world what our perfect king has taught us about life in his kingdom.
Please pray with me.
Lord’s Supper
As we take the Lord’s Supper today, we’re participating in a kingdom meal.
Jesus taught the following at the first Lord’s Supper, Matthew 26:29
29 But I tell you, I will not drink from this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”
and so this meal is yet another opportunity for us to train for life in the new heavens and new earth — perhaps another good reason to take it every week, as is our practice here at GBC.
This meal is also another opportunity to for us to seek peace with one another. I think the principle of Matthew 5:23-24
23 So if you are offering your gift on the altar, and there you remember that your brother or sister has something against you,
24 leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled with your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.
applies well.
If you know today that someone in our body has something against you, go and seek to be reconciled to them — not at this exact moment, but today. Let’s let our body be characterized by quick, humble repentance, and the mercy and patience with one another that make repentance as easy and not scary as it can be.
Now I’d like to invite our ushers forward as I pray for our meal.