A Green Branch from a Dead Stump

Jerusalem was still singing Isaiah's song
about a child on David's throne
when the news came down from the north.

"The Assyrians have come to Aiath!"
"They have marched through Migron!"
"They crossed the pass, and tonight they sleep at Geba!"
Ramah trembled.
The people of Gibeah grabbed what they could carry and ran.
And the king of Assyria stood on the hill at Nob
and shook his fist at Jerusalem.

(Isaiah said Assyria was only an axe in God's hand,
and an axe has no business bragging to the woodcutter.)

"Look!" Isaiah told the frightened city.
"The LORD will lop off the branches with a crash.
The tallest trees will be chopped down,
and the whole proud forest will fall."

Then Isaiah spoke about a different tree,
David's family tree, cut down too.
Nothing left but a stump in the ground,
the stump of Jesse.
(Jesse was David's father,
a sheep farmer in Bethlehem.)

"A green shoot will push up out of Jesse's stump," said the LORD.
"A branch will grow from his old roots and bear fruit.
The Spirit of the LORD will rest on him,
the Spirit of wisdom and understanding,
of good advice and strength,
of knowing the LORD and bowing low before him.

He will not decide by what his eyes see
or by what his ears hear.
He will judge the poor fairly
and stand up for the gentle people of the earth.
His word will strike the earth like a rod,
and the breath of his lips will kill the wicked."

Then Isaiah saw the strangest farmyard in the world.

The wolf lay down beside the lamb,
and the lamb did not even twitch.
The leopard curled up with a baby goat.
The calf and the lion stood side by side,
and a little child led them all.
The cow and the bear grazed together,
their babies asleep in one heap.
The lion chewed straw like an ox.
(Lions are not built for straw.
That lion must have needed a whole barn of it.)
A baby played beside the cobra's hole,
and a toddler reached right down into the snake's den,
and nothing bit.

"They will not hurt or destroy
anywhere on my holy mountain," said the LORD,
"because the earth will be full of knowing the LORD
the way the waters fill the sea."

The stump sat in the ground a long time.
Babylon came,
and the last king from David's family was led away in chains.
Wolves still ate lambs, and snakes still bit,
and people walked past Jesse's stump for hundreds of years,
wondering if anything would ever grow there.

Then in Bethlehem, Jesse's own town,
a baby was born into David's family.
At the river the Spirit came down like a dove
and rested on him.
He ate with cheats, touched people no one would touch,
and stood up for the poor.
Then they cut him down.
He died on a wooden cross,
and on the third day, green came up out of the dead place.
Jesus was alive.

The branch is growing already,
and one day he will come back to make the whole world his holy mountain,
where the wolf sleeps by the lamb
and the earth is full of knowing God
the way the waters fill the sea.