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"The Promise of Messiah" Isaiah 11:1-10

by Clancy Nixon

December 5, 2005

Church of the Holy Spirit

Ashburn, Virginia

Besides Jesus, the Bible has another Giving Tree the stump of Jesse. Please turn

with me to Isaiah chapter 11, verse one page 686 of your blue pew Bibles. Verse one says

a shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse, and from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. As

the rest of the passage makes clear, this is a messianic prophecy. Isaiah tells us that the

messiah would come who will bring justice to the land, and rule with wisdom. The coming

of Messiah is such a departure from what has come before, that it will change the very order

of creation, so that the lion will lay down with the lamb, and a little child will lead them.

All this raises several basic questions. What is a prophecy? How do we know it is

true? Who is Jesse? What is the Messianic hope all about?

Prophecy is both the foretelling and the forth-telling of God. Prophecy is both the

foretelling and the forth-telling of God. Foretelling tells of things that will happen in the

future; forth-telling is the proclamation of the messages of God. Our word "prophet" is

derived from the Greek prophetes: pro, which means before, and the Greek phemi, meaning

"to speak, or to say." (Robert R. Wilson, Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel, p. 22) So a

prophet proclaims the message of God, and on occasion, speaks of the future, of events

before they have taken place. Today we focus on this future aspect of prophecy.

This can only be possible if the prophet has indeed heard from God. Only God knows

the end from the beginning; only God can know the future, since God is both above time and

beyond time. The standard way to judge whether a prophet truly hears from God, and not just

his fevered imagination, is to see whether or not the prophet's predictions of the future come

to pass. This can be a tricky business, since oracles are typically given as imprecise

metaphors that can be pushed off into the future almost indefinitely. In the case of the

prophet Isaiah, many of his predictions could be tested.

Isaiah lived from about 760 to 681 B.C., and he prophesied of the coming fall of the

northern Kingdom of Israel to the Assyrians. God would judge the people and their king

because of their great sins. This happened during his lifetime, in 721 BC. Isaiah also

predicted the eventual demise of the southern kingdom of Judah, which fell in 586 B.C.

Judah fell at the hands of Babylon, and two generations later, the Judean captives were

liberated by Persia, all as Isaiah predicted.

Back to Isaiah chapter 11, verse 1. "A shoot will come from the stump of Jesse." The

tree that is Jesse has been lopped off, leaving only a stump. The Jesse tree is a metaphor of

the Davidic line of kings in Jerusalem. Jesse was the father of King David. An earlier

prophet named Nathan prophesied to David around 1000 B.C. that King David's descendants

would reign on the throne in Jerusalem forever. That prophecy and promise is found in

Second Samuel 7:11, 12, 16. In your blue pew bibles, that's p. 301 at the very bottom, and p.

302. Let's read that together from the screen: "The Lord declares to you that the Lord

himself will establish a house for you; When your days are over and you rest with your

fathers, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, who will come from your own body,

and I will establish his kingdom.... Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before

me; your throne will be established forever." This promise of a Davidic King is an

unconditional promise of God, not bound by time or the sinfulness of the kings. Now along

comes Isaiah and says that the Jesse tree will be cut down, that the Davidic line would be cut

off. When the people of God found themselves dragged off in chains to captivity in Assyria

and Babylon, they had a serious theological problem. What about the promise of God given

by the prophet Nathan of a Davidic king ruling his people? These Israelite captives must

have wondered: Does our captivity mean that Nathan was not a trustworthy prophet? Does it

mean that God is not trustworthy? Their hopes seemed to have been cut off along with their

beards, nothing but a stump of a tree.

Isaiah 11:1 says, from the stump of Jesse will come a shoot, a rod, a new growth, a

branch bearing fruit. A descendant of David will arise, and verse 2, the Spirit of the Lord

will be upon him, a spirit of wisdom and understanding, counsel and power, knowledge and

fear of the Lord, and he will usher in a new order of creation. The fulfillment of this

prophecy, like many prophecies, has two aspects. First, it has an immediate, historical

fulfillment for Israel in good King Hezekiah, the son of Ahaz; and second, it has an ultimate

messianic fulfillment in Jesus Christ. Isaiah says to his people and to us, fear not! God is

trustworthy, Nathan his prophet is trustworthy, and God will ultimately prevail through his

messiah. Though the damage looks irreparable, like hoping that a tree stump will grow a

strong tree again, God will prevail.

Messiah is the Hebrew word for Christ, and it means the anointed one, the one who is

anointed with oil and with the Holy Spirit's power. In the Old Testament, only Kings and

Priests were anointed for their office. Since the time of Nathan's prophecy, the Jewish

people were given hope by God that one day, a messiah would come, who would rule the

people as both king and priest, and his government would finally bring justice to the people.

The story of the kings of Israel and Judah is the story of fallible men who did not live up to

the high standards of God's law, but instead lived up to Samuel's prophecy. They became

like the kings of the other nations, caring more for their own power and prerogatives than for

God or for the poor. They may have been anointed with oil, but not with the Holy Spirit.

Most Jews today still hold to the messianic promise, they think the messiah is still to

come. Their standard complaint is that Jesus was not really the Christ, since he did not fit the

picture of an earthly king exercising government. When Christians read the book of Isaiah,

the words fairly jump off the page at us, screaming of Jesus of Nazareth. The suffering

servant who was wounded for our transgressions in Chapter 53; the virgin giving birth to a

son called Immanuel in chapter 7. Christians see Jesus as having fulfilled some of these

prophecies when he came the first time, and that he will come again to fulfill the rest. The

first time, Jesus came in weakness, and was bruised for our iniquities. When he comes again,

it will be in great power. Amen? In Chapter 11, verse 4, it says that the messiah will slay

the wicked. That is an act of a warrior king.

Nicholas Kristof wrote a piece in the New York Times in July 2004 called "Jesus and

Jihad," where he uses two handy epithets to slime true believers of both Christianity and

Islam: he calls us both "intolerant" and "fundamentalists." Note that this includes all

Christians who hope in the second coming of Messiah as king to judge people, not just those

who call themselves fundamentalists Roman Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans all get called

fundamentalists. Kristof referred to the last book in the Left Behind series by Jenkins and

LaHaye called Glorious Appearing. I have not read any of the "Left Behind" books myself.

Kristof wrote that Christians who believe in God's judgment helped cause the Abu Ghraib

prison abuses, because, and I quote: "It is hard to have empathy for people if we regard them

as infidels..." He calls our belief in the second coming of Christ as King both "religious

intolerance" and "ethnic cleansing" precisely because we believe in the promise in verse 4,

that God will slay the wicked. Never mind his factual errors: Christians actually believe that

ethnicity has zero relevance in the judgment of God; and Christians' belief that people are

lost without Christ gives us more compassion for them, not less, because we believe that God

loves these people. Love for the lost is why missionaries risk their lives in places like China

and Saudi Arabia. I don't know about you, but I have not heard one Christian attempt to

justify the abuses at Abu Ghraib. I can't even imagine one. It is a shame and a spot on the

honor of our country. It has nothing to do with Christianity. But thousands of Muslim

Palestinians danced and celebrated in the streets on hearing the news of the Muslims who

murdered thousands of Americans on 9/11. Every day still, sermons are preached in

Mosques around the world extolling the murder of innocents. Yet Kristof sees Christians and

Muslims as part of the same problem, which he calls "fundamentalism." Friends, let's wipe

the slime off and pray for these people who so misread us and mislead others about us.

This kind of writing is everywhere in our culture today, especially in the New York

Times. The best that can be said about it is that it is tone deaf. I heard that the writing staff of

the New York Times were recently asked if they were gay, or personally knew anyone who

was. 100% of them at least personally know someone who is gay. Then they were asked if

they were an evangelical Christian, or knew someone who was. Not one person said that they

personally know an evangelical Christian. That is how out of touch these people are with

ordinary American life today, where probably one third of Americans are evangelical. Some

people just need to get out more!

Isaiah tells us that after the judgment, a new era of peace will come on the earth.

Verse 5: "The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat... and the

lion will eat straw like the ox." What a beautiful picture of God's consummation of his

creation. This is symbolic writing of perfected tranquility. Clearly, this part of the prophecy

has not yet been fulfilled in the earth in a literal way. This tranquility will come, Isaiah tells

us in verse 9, when the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord. This is the vision of

the Bible, not of intolerance, but of harmony. All the prophets, from Isaiah to John the

Baptist, tell us that harmony comes only after repentance and judgment.

Verse 10 says that the root of Jesse, the Messiah, will stand as a banner for the

peoples, and the nations will rally to him, and his place of rest will be glorious. The good

news is that the Messiah has already come, and he still stands as a banner for the nations, as

more people are Christians than any other religion on the planet, over 2 billion. While we still

have work to do to see that the knowledge of God fills the whole earth, still Christ is a place

of glorious rest for us.

Jesus is the messiah. As we worship him, let us rest in him. Listen to him, and let

him speak to you. Open yourself to the possibility that God can use you to speak a prophetic

word to the congregation. Prophecy begins with listening to God. Most often, it is forth-

telling, giving a message of encouragement from God to his people; rarely is it a message

about what will happen. This kind of message does not have the authority of the prophets of

Scripture. Prophetic words can be very encouraging to us. Let's pray: God open our

spiritual ears...