Coming Home (eBook)

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The Shoot from Jesse,
the Nations, and Israel

Isaiah 11

John Piper

The book of Isaiah begins, “The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah” (1:1). So the prophecies of Isaiah are mainly concerning the southern kingdom of Judah from about 740 to 700 BC. Looming on the horizon is the massive empire to the east, Assyria, huffing and puffing with threats against Jerusalem.

Isaiah hears Assyria in 10:13 boasting,

By the strength of my hand I have done it.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

like a bull I bring down those who sit on thrones.

But God has already made clear in 10:5 that this huffing and puffing Assyria is a mere tool in his hand: “Woe to Assyria, the rod of my anger.” So when Assyria boasts that it has cut down the great, God says in 10:15, “Shall the axe boast over him who hews with it?” And when God has done his work with this tool, Isaiah says in 10:12, “he will punish the speech of the arrogant heart of the king of Assyria and the boastful look in his eyes.”

Then the word of judgment on Assyria comes to climax in 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.

So with a picture in front of us of a vast forest of nothing but jagged stumps that God has made by hewing down the power of Assyria, Isaiah prophesies the coming of the Messiah as a shoot from the stump of Jesse (11:1):

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,

and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.

Jesse was the father of King David. So we know that Isaiah is prophesying the fulfillment of 2 Samuel 7, that a son of David—a new shoot of Jesse—will come and rule the people of Israel and rule the world. All of Isaiah 11 is a description of that Son of David—that shoot, that branch—and the kingdom he will rule.

And what is so typical of the prophets, and so mystifying to us, is that chapter 10 flows into chapter 11 seamlessly, as if chapter 10 would happen on Monday and chapter 11 would happen on Tuesday. Read it again without the chapter division:

[God] will cut down the thickets of the forest with an axe,

and Lebanon will fall by the Majestic One.

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse. (10:34–11:1)

Not the slightest indication that there might be seven hundred years or twenty-seven hundred years separating these events.

Prophetic Perspective

When I was cutting my teeth on the prophetic books in seminary, one of the really helpful things I was taught was that the way prophets looked at the future was the way we may look at a mountain range with distant mountains and nearer mountains in the one mountain range, all of them looking like one mountain. For example, to the north of our home in Pasadena was Mount Wilson. From where we stood on East Orange Grove Boulevard, it looked like one mountain. But in fact, if you started hiking, or driving, you quickly found that it was not merely one mountain, but a series of ever-higher ridges with valleys in between, about five of them.

We called that the “prophetic perspective.” From where Isaiah stood, God granted him to see the Mount Wilson of the future. Some of the nearer ridges of Sennacherib’s comings and goings he knew were very near, and when they would happen (e.g., Isa. 37:29). But beyond that there were other events he saw on Mount Wilson with no clear idea about how distant they were. So repeatedly in the prophetic books you read of an imminent attack by or deliverance from an enemy, and the next moment you read about an event in the distant future, with no indication of how much time is in between.

The apostle Peter says in 1 Peter 1:10–11, “Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories.” In other words, when the Spirit moved the prophets to write, he did not answer all their questions about how the pieces fit together. Which means that as we read the prophets, not all our questions may be answered either.

However, we do have some advantages over the prophets—which may sound strange, since they were inspired by God, and we are not. First, we have all the prophets, so we can compare them with each other, and we have the New Testament use of the prophecies; and second, we have the perspective of twenty-seven hundred years to see what has happened. So, strange as it may sound, we may understand the timing and the relationships of some things more clearly than they did.

Avoiding Overreactions to Prophecy

This leads me to insert an exhortation and prophecy of my own here. Many evangelicals in my generation have held dispensational eschatological charts in such derision that they have been virtually paralyzed in their study of prophecy. For two generations, perhaps, we have failed to study prophecy with anything like the rigor that it deserves. We have been so afraid of being viewed as one of those Zionist, right-wing, Antichrist sniffing, culture-denying, alarmist leftovers from the Scofield/prophecy-conference era that we give hardly any energy to putting the prophetic pieces together—at least not in public.

So my prophecy is that younger evangelicals who take the Bible seriously will start to feel like the paralysis of my generation was an overreaction to prophetic studies; Chris Tomlin and others will write more worship songs about the second coming; and younger scholars will not be embarrassed to write doctrinal dissertations on Daniel 9 and Matthew 24 and 2 Thessalonians 2, unintimidated by the academic scorn of futuristic possibilities.

And my exhortation is this: Go for it! But in the process don’t lose any of the real gains of the last sixty years—like the chastening of our abilities to predict the end, and the full-blooded engagement with the challenges of this present day. If anything is clear from the prophets, it is that their prophecies were meant to empower present, God-centered righteousness and sacrifice for the relief of all suffering and, we know now, especially of eternal suffering.

So as we walk through Isaiah 11, we will not be able to avoid some of these prophetic perplexities and controversies. But, oh, the riches that are here, and that are clear!

Four Parts

Chapter 11 has four parts, as I see it. First, verses 1–5 describe the Son of David and the way he rules his kingdom. Second, verses 6–9 describe the peace of that global kingdom where the knowledge of God fills the earth and the wolf lies down with the lamb (11:6). Third, in verse 10, the nations of the world come to the Messiah and find rest in his glory. And fourth, in verses 11–16, the remnant of Israel gathers from the four corners of the earth (11:12).

Part 1: The Character of the Shoot of Jesse,
the Son of David, and How He Rules (Isa. 11:1–5)

Isaiah 11:1–2 says:

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,

and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.

And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him.

This is very similar to Isaiah 61, which Jesus applied to himself in Luke 4:18, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.” And so Jesus saw himself as the fulfillment of this prophecy. He was the shoot from the stump of Jesse.

Isaiah 11:2 continues:

The Spirit of wisdom and understanding,

the Spirit of counsel and might,

the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

Wisdom and understanding are the foundation for being able to give good counsel and rule well with might. And the aim of all counsel and power is to know the Lord and to fear the Lord, and to fill the earth with the knowledge and the fear of the Lord. So the shoot of Jesse has everything he needs to bring God’s world back from its rebellion to the knowledge of God and the fear of the Lord.

In verse 3 we read, “And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.” What a statement! It is so contrary to the emotions of the world. His joy is to stand in awe of God. His joy is to tremble at the terrible prospect of displeasing God. This makes him utterly reliable in his judgments among men. Isaiah continues:

He shall not judge by what his eyes see,

or decide disputes by what his ears hear,

but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,