Root and Shoot of Jesse
Notes
Transcript
Prayer
Prayer
The Prophet Isaiah reminds us in Isaiah 40:8 “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.”
Would you please pray with me?
Be Thou My Vision: A Liturgy for Daily Worship Appendix 4: Collects from the Book of Common Prayer (1552)
Blessed Lord, you have caused all Holy Scriptures to be written for our learning—grant us that we may in such a way hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them; that by patience and comfort of your holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Third Sunday in Advent
Third Sunday in Advent
We are now on the third Sunday of the Advent season, and we, as a church, have been going over prophecies related to the coming Messiah. Christians believe that Jesus is the Messiah, which Isaiah prophesied almost 700 years before the birth of Christ. Advent is a word in Latin that means coming. So this is the coming season, we celebrate the coming of our Lord to earth in his birth 2000 years ago, and we study these prophesies because it helps us understand the depth and riches of the meaning of Christmas and who Jesus is.
Context
Context
So far, we have looked at two passages in Isaiah, ch 7 and 9, describing what the Messiah will be like. He will be born of a virgin and restore the Davidic dynasty by bringing about peace to the whole world.
Messiah
Messiah
Now, what exactly is a Messiah, and why were the Israelites waiting for someone to come? We learn that in the beginning, God made this amazing place, and at the pinnacle of his creation, he made this royal representative exercise God’s dominion on his behalf on earth. This kingly figure was a man named Adam, who was given the power to subdue, rule, and have dominion over all creation. Well, the good times don’t last long, and very quickly, we learn that this man failed to live as God had intended and brought about a great curse on the land. This curse we read about in Genesis 3 where God curses all of creation on behalf of humanity’s sin. Yet we see a glimmer of hope; we see that even amid the brokenness and despair that the failed King brought about, God offers a promise that a new king will come one day who will defeat evil and restore creation as far as the curse is found, but it will wound him in the process. So from the very beginning, God’s people have been waiting for this wounded victor to come into the world to restore Eden and rule as God had always intended.
This is the expected Messiah or King we read about in our Isaiah passage. Messiah is the Hebrew term for A future deliverer and savior who would rescue his people and usher in a time of prosperity and blessing. A future deliverer, so the Israelites were waiting for someone to come and save them from the oppression they were experiencing. We learn in 2 Samuel 7 God had promised the greatest king Israel had ever seen, David, that the Messiah would come from his bloodline. Even at the height of his kingdom, David ultimately proved no better than Adam, the first king who failed, and humanity still needs someone to break the curse and restore creation.
Divided Kingdom
Divided Kingdom
Hundred of years later, the Davidic Kingdom is divided into Israel in the North and Judah to the south, which had been led by corrupt kings for generations now. God’s patience has finally run out, and he used the kingdom of Assyria as a disciplining rod for his people, but we know what our God is like. Even amid judgment, God offers a glimmer of hope. In Chapter 10, we learn that the Assyrians have teamed up with the Israelites to come and take down Judah, the southern kingdom whose capital city is Jerusalem. Their armies work their way down south and systematically destroy city after city on the way to Jerusalem but are stopped just a mile outside of Jerusalem in a city called Nob. The effect of chapter 10 is to show that the Assyrian army is all but unstoppable. Yet, in a glimmer of hope and against all odds, we read in Isaiah 10:33-34 “Behold, the Lord God of hosts will lop the boughs with terrifying power; the great in height will be hewn down, and the lofty will be brought low. He will cut down the thickets of the forest with an axe, and Lebanon will fall by the Majestic One.”
Lebanon is a city in Assyria that is known for its strong and mighty trees. So when it says that Lebanon will fall, it means that Assyria will fall. The invading army was destroyed by God in the last moments before Jerusalem was overtaken because there is no army that can match the power of the Almighty, and God saved the city of Jerusalem from utter destruction. Assyria is a forest cut down and destroyed, but God will bring his plans out from the ashes of their destruction, he will bring a shoot out of the stump of Jesse.
Themes
Themes
This brings us to our text this morning. Three themes jump out of this text about this that I want to highlight today, and those are:
His Rule
His World
His Reach
His Rule
His Rule
Verses 1-5 describe what this leader's rule will look like. We learn that he is from a shoot of the stump of Jesse. This is garden imagery to describe that the Messiah will come from Jesse, the father of King David, and we learn that this shoot will come from the same lineage. This shoot will bear fruit, and the Spirit of the Lord will rest on him. Like David, this King will be endowed with God’s spirit to confirm his royal status. This sevenfold spirit will be given to this King and of all the blessings given to him in his Rule through what he will delight most in the fear of the Lord.
Fear of the Lord
Fear of the Lord
Now, what exactly is the fear of the Lord? Well, we read in Proverbs 1:7 “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.” The Fear of the Lord is a term used in the Bible to describe how one should posture themselves in this life. The opposite of the fear of the Lord would be like the fear of man.
The fear of man is a great temptation to bend our priorities and values to things that go against God’s will for our lives. We are often tempted to fear man over fearing God when our boss asks us to do something unethical to push things along faster in the company because no one will know or when we decide to make counter-cultural decisions for our children as followers of Jesus, and get push back from other parents or family members. It is easy to give into stronger personalities and just follow the crowd to not make more of a problem than there already is. But when you die, you will not be asked to give an account of your life to your boss, your friends, or your parents; you will be standing in front of a Holy God and will be asked what did you do with what I entrusted you with? This is what the fear of the Lord is.
Now can anyone live up to this perfectly? No, no mere human can live up to this ideal which is why we need someone to come and save us. but it does mean that we follow a King who did and someone who empowers us daily to live like the Kingdom has come here on earth as it is in heaven. This fear of the Lord motivates believers to live godly lives because they know their lives are not theirs; they were bought with a price.
Judging Righteously
Judging Righteously
We place our trust in a Messiah who said that he’ll not judge by what his eyes see or what his ears hear because he has wisdom and understanding and can look beyond mere appearances and see reality for what it truly is. We usually think of judging someone to means condemning them. That is not what this means. It means he will make things just for the poor and the meek. To say that he is going to judge means he will decide for them and will stand up for them. This King not only has the authority to do it but also the power to execute his judgments.
Christmas sheds light on this passage. We see that the king was to be born to defend the poor and was born among the poor. When Jesus went to be circumcised at the temple, you have an animal sacrifice. The poorest people sacrificed two pigeons because that's all they could afford. Jesus was born into the poorest of families. Jesus was not born in a palace surrounded by wise and learned men who taught him all he needed to know his whole life to become the greatest ruler the world had ever seen. He lived his whole life in small, out-of-the-way villages; he didn't have a career in a major city or a major urban area or cultural center; he was entirely outside the networks of economic, political, social, or academic power and three years into his career he was executed in disgrace on false charges. This is what the Bible means when it says that God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise and what is weak in the world to shame the strong. Who would choose this as their plan? Who would say I want to start a worldwide movement that civilizations in the future will build off of my teachings and in 2000 years, I want almost everyone in the known world to have heard my name. This would be a terrible strategy!
And look at this King's priorities; when Jesus started his ministry, he didn't just go around preaching the gospel, meeting with foreign diplomats, and trying to get his face out in the public. NO, he kept telling everyone he met not to talk about him, and he went to spend all of his time with the poor and needy to get food and healed their bodies.
How to live Righteously
How to live Righteously
What does this mean for us? This is the way we are to live as well. We worship a Messiah who cares for the poor and the meek. Here at Midtown we say that our values are hope and mercy. We believe that living like Christ means offering mercy to others. One way we try to live as Kingdom citizens is by serving at loaves and fishes. This is a fantastic way to be the hands and feet of Jesus here in the city of Columbia. Jesus did not serve the poor from far away, by just sending some money to people so that they could make a difference; no he actually got close with them, close enough to know their names and hand them real food. This is the beautiful picture of the Kingdom and how we, as disciples of Christ, live in counter-cultural ways. In Jesus’ kingdom, the first are last and the last are first. We actually become more human by serving. I think anyone who has served can attest to this; you should go and ask someone who has been serving at loaves and fishes for some time and just ask them about how the experience of feeding people actually draws their own humanity out. our world is telling us in this season that Christmas is about how many presents we can get or about how much stuff we can accumulate, but what will actually bring about true joy in Christmas is dying to yourself for the sake of others.
His World
His World
When we see God bending all his thought and will on our behalf, preparing a place for us, everything changes. How so? C. S. Lewis understands when he writes in the Weight of Glory”
“ If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Bible,, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
Isaiah’s vision of God can stimulate in us such a longing that we stop settling for the mud pies of this slum and set our course for that holiday at the sea, far away in God’s promised new world. To see God as our King of Grace, laboring to take us there despite what we deserve, makes the difference.
The result of this new world order can be seen in verses 6-9. Many Kingdoms and rulers have tried to bring peace about on earth. but only this one will actually do it. What sounds like harsh judgment is actually a purifying fire that will restore Eden. There are two major interpretations of this section of Isaiah. On one side, Christians have said that the wolf, leopard, and lion represent the empires of the day, which will be turned around. The once chaotic nations that were bringing about death and destruction are now no different than lambs and young goats. Other major interpreters say this passage foretells a future time when the entire created order will be reversed and that even the animal kingdom will no longer see death. I can see elements of both in these. I am more inclined to think that this text is saying that the one predatory imperial powers coming under the Messiah’s sway will learn to be peaceable because of this verse and preceded and followed by unrighteous Kingdoms who will be judged. Either way you see this text I believe that what we see coming from here is that peace will reign on earth.
We read that all these nations will be gathered up to God's holy mountain and will not hurt or destroy. Why? Well, because of this King’s righteous rule, because he judged with equity faithfulness, the whole earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. We finally see what the coming kingdom will look like, what it will mean for this shoot to rule and for the curse to be overturned. This is the deep longing of our hearts for peace among men. For the end of wars and strife and pain, the only way for that to happen is through the knowledge of the Lord.
Other revolutions have promised us liberation and instead oppressed us. The technological revolution promised us that we could do this that we could have never done before! Now we can speak with people all around the world in seconds, unlike before, we can have access to almost every piece of information human society has even known at the push of a button. We were so enraptured with the promises of what it would do for us that we never realized what it was taking from us. Technology has left us slaves to our devices; we were promised liberation from human limitations of space and time, but what we are left with now is slavery to a device and to the cloud. We offer worship to our screens in the morning and give our tithes and offerings to the cloud so it can hold all of our stuff safely and securely. But this is a false god. But if we submit to the rule of Jesus Christ, he will lead us into everything safe and pleasant, with no dark side, no guilty conscience, and no unhealed wounds.
His Reach
His Reach
The last verse in this section closes this section off by describing the root of Jesse. The Messiah is described as someone who will come from the Davidic line, a shoot that will come from his line, but this King needed to be more. We have seen over and over again that the shoot that comes from Jesse are not enough. The real King to come, needed to be better than David ever could have been. This needs to be the person for who David cries in Ps 110:1 “The Lord says to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.”” This is going to be David’s Lord. The Messiah is also described as the root, the foundation for the entire Davidic line. The King comes from David and is the one from whom David comes. This is the wild prediction of the God-man to be born, the miracle of Christmas. God would have to come in and do something that the world would have never expected or known.
The Sign of the Messiah
The Sign of the Messiah
This Messiah to come is going to stand as a signal for the people. The scope of his kingdom is not just the people of Israel because that was never God’s intention. No, when the king comes, he will be inquired of by the nations; the entire world will bast in the glory of his might. The signal Jesus sends, though, isn’t one of military strength and conquering by brute force like the Assyrians. No, Jesus says in John 12:32 “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” Jesus says that the signal he will send to the nations of his triumphant Kingdom will be one of suffering. Jesus will be lifted up on a cross and killed so that we can experience life. All of the pain and suffering we experience in this world are taken up in his signal to let the nations know that his resting place shall be glorious. The curse has been broken, and the long-expected wounded victor has come to crush evil.
Application
Application
How do we engage in the spirit of Christmas this year? What are you waiting on to help you face life and death and the inevitable sufferings of life? What Kingdom are you placing your trust in to give you all you’ve ever wanted? If it is anything but God himself, you are listening to the world's wisdom, and I can tell you that you will experience another frustrating and disappointing Christmas this year. I can promise you relying on anything else will ultimately fail you. How you live your life will disappoint you along the way and will desert you because everything else does.
Christmas means that the wisdom of God has been revealed. He has come to do something for you that you could never do for yourself, and you must embrace that. If you do and live here in Columbia, most of your friends and coworkers will think you are a fool. Who would believe in such a thing? But that is the way of it, as Paul said in 1 Cor 3:18 “Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise.” You are to embrace the foolishness of the Cross to find true wisdom.
Let’s pray
Heavenly Father, we praise you in this advent season that you came into the world to judge righteously and to restore Eden to its original purpose. You sent your Messiah into the world in obscurity and shame so that you could redeem people from their stubbornness. We ask that you teach us how to follow this great messianic King in the way of wisdom. You have given us your spirit, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, of counsel and might, of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. Teach us to see things not by mere appearance but by how things really are. Most importantly, help us submit to your Kingship as we await your second coming. We pray all of these things in Jesus name, amen.