By Collin Ross
Scripture Reading: Isaiah 10:20-34, Isaiah 11:1-16, Isaiah 12:1-6, Colossians 1:13
When my family lived in Colorado, we saw firsthand the grave effects of a forest fire. We were driving along a mountain road, surrounded on every side by groves of aspens and pines. Suddenly, we came around a bend in the road and were immediately met with nothing but fallen trees and charred stumps. A lush alpine paradise turned barren wasteland.
This is the image I think of when I read Isaiah’s description of Israel. Because of their unfaithfulness to God and the many ways they had been cruel to the poor and vulnerable, they became like a wasteland in the eyes of the Lord, a forest ravaged by fire, leaving behind only blackened stumps. However, Isaiah’s words were not just a spiritual metaphor, for God raised up the Assyrian Empire who laid waste to Israel. Assyria was the axe prepared by God to cut down Israel’s tree.
But even though Assyria was God’s instrument of discipline for his people, Assyria’s own cruelty and arrogance was not overlooked. Isaiah described how God’s might would be brought against them, using a very familiar metaphor: “Look, the Lord GOD of Armies will chop off the branches with terrifying power, and the tall trees will be cut down, the high trees felled” (Isaiah 10:33). Israel and Assyria would both become barren wastelands.
Of the two, one of these trees would be cut down and remain dead. Assyria would be destroyed by the combined forces of Babylon, Media, and Persia, and nothing would ever rise from its ashes. However, the tree of the people of God, though also felled, had a very different future forecasted.
Then a shoot will grow from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots will bear fruit.
—Isaiah 11:1
Allow me to state the obvious: dead things don’t come back to life. At least not without divine intervention. And that is precisely the point—Isaiah’s vision is one that sees God stepping into the barren wasteland of Israel’s sinfulness and still bringing about a divine resurrection. Even as the royal line of David laid like a rotten stump, God had a plan to cause life to bloom from it. A new king would come from David’s line, and oh what a king He would be. “He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, he will not execute justice by what he hears with his ears, but he will judge the poor righteously and execute justice for the oppressed of the land” (vv.3-4).
The king who brings things from death to life is Jesus. And what He did for Israel He promises to do for all who place their trust in the resurrected King.
Written by Collin Ross
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