The Branch and the Mountain

Isaiah 2–4 (with Micah 4:1–3; Philippians 2:5–11)

Before this session, read Isaiah 2, 3, and 4 together, as one movement. Watch how the mountain in chapter 2 and the Branch in chapter 4 frame the long judgment held between them, and ask who, finally, is welcome upon the Lord’s holy hill.

In that day the branch of the LORD shall be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the land shall be the pride and honor of the survivors of Israel.

Isaiah 4:2 (ESV)

The Mountain of the LORD’s Temple

We come now to a single sweep of three chapters, and they are built like a jewel set in a rough mounting. At the beginning stands a mountain, gleaming; at the end stands a Branch, beautiful and glorious; and between them lies a long, hard stretch of judgment in which everything proud and high in human life is brought crashing down. Two glories frame this whole unit, the glory of the Lord’s mountain and the glory of His Branch, and between them every rival glory is leveled. Hold that shape in mind as we walk through it, for it is the argument of the entire passage: there is a glory that lasts and a glory that does not, and a day is coming that will tell them apart.

The vision opens on a mountain. In future days the mountain of the LORD’s temple will endure as the most important of mountains, and will be the most prominent of hills. All the nations will stream to it (2:2). In the ancient world the gods were thought to dwell on the high places, and every nation had its holy hill; Isaiah sees one mountain lifted above them all, the mountain of the Lord’s temple, Zion, and the peoples of the earth streaming up toward it. Note the direction. Streams run downhill, but these nations stream uphill, against nature, drawn by something stronger than gravity. It is a picture of grace: the Gentiles, who had no claim, pulled up the holy mountain by the sheer magnetism of the Lord. Micah, Isaiah’s contemporary, was given the very same vision in nearly the same words (Micah 4:1–3); the Spirit pressed one hope upon two prophets at once.

When are these future days? The Hebrew says, literally, “in the latter days,” and that is not, as some would have it, a distant age still wholly future and sealed off from us. The New Testament tells us plainly that the last days began when the Lord Jesus came. Peter, on the day of Pentecost, declares that the outpouring his hearers were witnessing is what was spoken about through the prophet Joel: “And in the last days it will be,” God says, “that I will pour out my Spirit on all people” (Acts 2:16–17), and Hebrews opens by announcing that in these last days he has spoken to us in a son (Hebrews 1:2). The last days are not a calendar square at the far end of history; they are the age we are living in, the age of the gospel, opened by the coming of the Branch. And in this age the mountain has already been lifted up, and the nations have already begun to stream.

What, then, is the mountain, and what is the temple? Not a parcel of land to be re-graded on some future map. The mountain of the Lord’s temple is His dwelling among His people, fulfilled, the New Testament teaches us, in the temple that is the body of the Lord Jesus (Jesus was speaking about the temple of his body, John 2:21) and in the church built upon Him as living stones. The writer to the Hebrews says it without flinching to a congregation of ordinary believers: you have come to Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem (Hebrews 12:22). You have come to the mountain. Every time the gospel draws another sinner to Christ and His church, Isaiah’s vision is coming true. To read it instead as a promise of surveyors and bulldozers in the Middle East is to trade the gospel mountain for a real-estate plot, and to miss that the prophecy is being fulfilled, right now, each time a Gentile is baptized.

There is great encouragement in this for a congregation that does not feel like an exalted mountain. A modest church on a side street, a Bible study of a dozen folding chairs, a country parish where the same few families have worshiped for generations: by every visible measure these are not lifted up above the hills; the world’s high places tower over them and never spare them a glance. But Isaiah is not describing what the eye sees. He is describing what faith sees: that wherever the word of the Lord is taught and sinners are gathered to Christ, there is the mountain, exalted in the only register that finally counts. The kingdom of God, the Lord Jesus said, is like the smallest of seeds and like a little leaven hidden in the dough, never much to look at, and quietly filling the whole earth. The mountain of the Lord’s temple is far more often a mustard seed than a monument.

Swords into Plowshares

Out of that mountain comes a word, and the word moves in two directions at once. For Zion will be the center for moral instruction; the LORD’s message will issue from Jerusalem (2:3). The nations come in to the mountain, and the Lord’s message goes out from it. That is precisely the shape of the church’s mission: the gospel went out from Jerusalem (the risen Lord told the apostles it would be proclaimed to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem, Luke 24:47), and as it goes out, the nations come in. The mountain is not a fortress hoarding the word to itself; it is a wellspring sending it to the ends of the earth.

And where the word is received, the famous thing happens. They will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nations will not take up the sword against other nations, and they will no longer train for war (2:4). These are among the most quoted words in the Bible (carved, among other places, on a wall across from the United Nations), and they are almost always misread. They are taken to mean that humanity, if only it tries hard enough, can disarm its way into peace; that peace is a political achievement, a matter of treaties and goodwill. That is not what Isaiah says.

Look at the order of it. The nations do not first lay down their weapons and then, having made peace among themselves, decide to pay God’s mountain a visit. They come to the mountain first (they go up so that He can teach them His requirements and they can follow His standards) and the beating of swords into plowshares follows from that. The peace is the fruit of conversion, not its precondition. It is what happens to people who have been brought under the reign of the One the next chapters will name the Prince of Peace (9:6). Paul names Him for us outright: he is our peace, the one who made both groups into one and who destroyed the middle wall of partition, the hostility between Jew and Gentile, forging them into one people (Ephesians 2:14). The swords-to-plowshares peace begins wherever the gospel reconciles enemies, first to God, and then to one another, and it will be made complete only in the new creation, where there is no sword left to beat. It is not a program for the nations to carry out. It is a gift the Prince of Peace bestows.

Someone will object, and rightly, that the nations have plainly not stopped training for war: that the bloodiest century in human history is barely behind us and the present one has not slowed down. Just so. This is the already and the not yet that runs through all the prophets, the near hill and the far mountain we spoke of at the very start. The peace has truly begun: wherever the gospel has made a Jew and a Gentile, a master and a slave, an old enemy and his old enemy sit together at one rail and call each other brother, a sword has been beaten into a plowshare that no treaty on earth could have touched. But it is not yet complete, and it will not be until the Prince of Peace returns and there is no more night and no more war to train for. We live between the down payment and the inheritance, tasting the peace in the church now, waiting for the day it floods the whole earth. To deny the peace already given is to miss what Christ has done; to demand its fullness now, by our own arranging, is to ask the not-yet to arrive ahead of its King.

And so the mountain section closes with a call, pointed, and a little embarrassing. O descendants of Jacob, come, let us walk in the LORD’s guiding light (2:5). If the nations are streaming toward the light, what excuse has the household of faith for stumbling about in the dark? The verse turns the prophecy into a summons aimed at God’s own people: you, of all people, walk in the light. And it sets up everything that follows, for the rest of the chapter will show us the descendants of Jacob doing the exact opposite.

The Day of the LORD

For the light reveals what the darkness had covered, and the sight is not a pretty one. The Lord has abandoned His people, Isaiah says, because diviners from the east are everywhere and omen readers are consulted as the Philistines do; the land is full of gold and silver and horses and chariots without end; and, worst of all, their land is full of worthless idols; they worship the product of their own hands (2:6–8). And against the whole of it the prophet announces a day, the day the LORD of Heaven’s Armies has planned (2:12): the day of the Lord.

It is one of the great themes of the prophets, and it lands here with a single hammering refrain. Proud men will be brought low, arrogant men will be humiliated; the LORD alone will be exalted in that day (2:11). Everything that lifts itself up will be brought down: the cedars of Lebanon and the oaks of Bashan, the tall mountains and the high hills, every high tower and fortified wall, all the large and impressive ships with all their cargo (2:12–16). And then the refrain comes again, in case we somehow missed it: Proud men will be humiliated, arrogant men will be brought low; the LORD alone will be exalted in that day (2:17).

Here is the law in one of its grandest forms: not a list of particular sins now, but the exposure of the one sin beneath all the others, pride, the lifting up of the self, the human determination to be high. The day of the Lord is the day all of it comes down. And mark what is left standing when it does: the LORD alone. That is the whole point of the leveling. It is not that God hates height as such; it is that He will not share His exaltation with the things we exalt in His place. On that day there is room for only one glory.

Luther had a name for the religion this day destroys. He called it a theology of glory: the instinct that always reaches upward, that measures God and self by height and power and visible success, that wants a God of majesty it can climb up to and a righteousness it can be proud of. Over against it he set a theology of the cross (Heidelberg Disputation, 1518), which finds God not at the top of the ladder but at the bottom of it, hidden in lowliness and suffering, and which has the honesty to call a thing what it actually is. The day of the Lord is the great undoing of every theology of glory. It tears down the high places we are forever building (our achievements, our reputations, our religious résumés) and leaves us nothing tall to stand on but the Lord alone.

And there is a deep gospel hidden in that refrain, the LORD alone will be exalted. For there was One who did not grasp at height: who, though He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking on the form of a slave. He humbled himself, by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. And precisely because He went down where no proud man would go, God highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord (Philippians 2:6–11). On the day the Lord alone is exalted, it is this One who is exalted: the only man who was never proud, lifted highest because He first went lowest. And the only safety any of us has on that day is to be found not among the proud heights that are coming down, but hidden in the One who went down and was raised.

Stop Trusting in Human Beings

Before the passage ends, it circles back to the idols and shows us what becomes of them when the terror finally comes. The men who had bowed to the product of their own hands will fling those same idols away in a panic, into the caves where rodents and bats live (2:20), and scramble into the crevices of the rocky cliffs to hide from the Lord. There is nothing quite so pathetic in all the prophets as that picture: people who had trusted their gold-plated nothings, hurling them to the vermin in the dark the very moment those gods proved useless. What you trust in the daylight you will throw to the bats in the night.

This is the folly Isaiah keeps returning to, and it is worth letting it search us, because we are no less idolaters than Judah was; we have only changed the materials. Luther, explaining the First Commandment, said that whatever your heart clings to and relies upon, that is your god (LC I). By that measure the land is still full of idols: the product of our own hands, the wealth without end, the horses and chariots we trust to keep us safe. We do not carve them and bow down; we build portfolios and reputations and securities, and lean the whole weight of our hearts on them. And Isaiah’s warning holds: every one of them will be flung to the rodents and the bats on the day it cannot save us. An idol, in the end, is anything that will not be there when you die.

The passage closes with a flat command that is also a mercy. Stop trusting in human beings, whose life’s breath is in their nostrils. For why should they be given special consideration? (2:22). Stop leaning on man (on the strong man, the clever man, the man in office, even on yourself), for man is a creature whose very breath is on loan, held in his nostrils, and can be recalled in an instant. It sounds bleak, and it is bracing; but it is the necessary clearing of the ground. Only when we have stopped trusting in human beings do we stop building the high places; and only then are we ready to be sheltered by the One who does not borrow His breath. The command to stop trusting in man is the law making room for the Branch.

Every Source of Security

Chapter 3 brings the day of the Lord down out of the cosmic register and into the streets of Jerusalem, and it begins by taking things away. Look, the Sovereign LORD of Heaven’s Armies is about to remove from Jerusalem and Judah every source of security, including all the food and water (3:1): the supports a society leans on, bread and water, yes, but also the mighty men and warriors, the judges and prophets, the leaders and advisers, the captains of fifty and the respected citizens (3:2–3). When the Lord judges a people, He does not always send a flood or a fire. Sometimes He simply withdraws the ordinary gifts that hold a society upright, and lets it totter on its own.

And what rushes in to fill the vacuum is chaos. Youths become their officials; the people treat each other harshly, every man against his neighbor; the young proudly defy the old, and the riffraff challenge the respected (3:4–5). No one even wants to lead a house this far gone. Isaiah pictures a man begged to take charge simply because he still owns a coat, and refusing the poisoned honor (3:6–7). It is a sobering portrait of what a culture looks like when God lifts His stabilizing hand: not so much dramatic as disintegrating, coming apart at every seam at once. We are not meant to read it as a coded commentary on this nation or that, but as a standing warning: the gifts which hold a people together, wise leaders and working institutions and ordinary trust, are gifts, and gifts can be withdrawn.

And the Lord names where the rot began: at the top. The LORD comes to pronounce judgment on the leaders of his people and their officials. He says, “It is you who have ruined the vineyard! You have stashed in your houses what you have stolen from the poor” (3:14). The leaders who should have guarded the people have plundered them instead, and the Lord puts to them a question that ought to make anyone in authority tremble: “Why do you crush my people and grind the faces of the poor?” The Sovereign LORD of Heaven’s Armies has spoken (3:15). It is the same charge as the courtroom of chapter 1 (bloody hands, the poor trampled) now aimed squarely at the powerful. The God of Isaiah notices exactly how the strong treat the weak, and He takes it personally: my people, He calls them. To grind the face of the poor is to grind a face the Lord calls His own.

The Women of Zion

From the leaders the prophet turns to the women of Zion, and the judgment here is famous for its long, withering catalogue. The women of Zion are proud, the Lord says. They walk with their heads high and flirt with their eyes. They skip along and the jewelry on their ankles jingles (3:16). And there follows an inventory of finery worthy of a boutique: the ankle jewelry and the neck ornaments, the earrings and bracelets and veils, the headdresses and sashes and amulets, the rings and nose rings, the festive dresses, robes, shawls, and purses (3:18–23). And the Lord promises to exchange the whole wardrobe for its opposite: A putrid stench will replace the smell of spices … baldness will replace braided locks of hair … and a prisoner’s brand will replace beauty (3:24).

We must not mistake what this passage is and is not. It is not a sermon against women, nor against beauty, nor against the wearing of a fine garment; the men of this very chapter were judged first, and at greater length, for their pride. It is the same indictment as the cedars and the towers and the great ships, only now in another key: the pride that trusts in display, that measures itself by how it appears and what it wears, that lifts up the chin and the nose. The women of Zion are an example here, not an exception: a particularly vivid instance of the universal sin the whole passage has been leveling. The jingling ornaments are simply this generation’s high towers. And the lesson reaches every one of us who has ever cared more for how we look than for what we are: the day of the Lord strips the finery off, because finery was never where our true glory lay.

The stripping bottoms out in a scene of sheer desolation. Seven women will grab hold of one man at that time. They will say, “We will provide our own food, we will provide our own clothes; but let us belong to you—take away our shame!” (4:1). The war the proud city brought upon itself has left so few men alive that seven women will plead to share a single husband, asking nothing of him but his name: anything to lift the shame of being left unmarried and childless. It is the lowest point of the whole humbling. Everything the women of Zion had gloried in (beauty, ornament, the admiring eyes of others) has come to this. And it is exactly here, at the very bottom, that the gospel breaks in.

The Branch of the LORD

For the very next words turn the page from ashes to glory. In that day the branch of the LORD shall be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the land shall be the pride and honor of the survivors of Israel (Isaiah 4:2, ESV). After three chapters of human glory torn down (the high towers, the proud ships, the jingling finery, all of it stripped and burned), one glory rises that will never be torn down: the branch of the LORD, beautiful and glorious. The contrast is the whole point. Set every gleaming ornament of the women of Zion beside this single Branch, and they are nothing at all.

The Branch is no ordinary word here. The Hebrew word, tsemach, can mean simply what sprouts from the ground, and some translations (the NET among them) render this verse “the crops given by the LORD.” But across the prophets the same word becomes a settled name for the coming One, the ancient Aramaic paraphrase of Isaiah read this very verse of the Messiah, and so the verse is quoted here from the ESV. Jeremiah promises that the Lord will raise up for them a righteous branch, a descendant of David (Jeremiah 23:5); Zechariah is told to crown the high priest as a sign of the man whose name is Branch, who will sprout up from his place and build the temple of the LORD (Zechariah 6:12). So when Isaiah says the Branch of the Lord will be beautiful and glorious, he is pointing to the Messiah, to the Lord Jesus, the true and lasting beauty that the whole human pageant could only counterfeit. Here is a glory the day of the Lord does not level, because it is not the glory of height grasped but of love poured out. It is the beauty, in the end, of the One who had no stately form or majesty that might catch our attention, who was despised and rejected by people (53:2–3), and who is, to those given eyes to see Him, altogether lovely.

And around the Branch a people gathers. Those remaining in Zion, those left in Jerusalem, will be called “holy,” all in Jerusalem who are destined to live (4:3). The remnant again (the survivors of the fire, the seed left behind by mercy), and now they are called holy, and named in a particular way: those destined to live, literally, those written down for life, enrolled in a register the New Testament will call the Lamb’s book of life. The Lord Jesus told His disciples to rejoice not in their power over spirits but that your names stand written in heaven (Luke 10:20). Isaiah’s holy remnant is that very company: not the proud who survived by their strength, but the ones written down by grace and made holy, beautiful at last with a beauty borrowed wholly from the Branch.

A Shelter and a Refuge

How does a woman of Zion, stripped and shamed, become one of the holy? Not by recovering her finery. At that time the Lord will wash the excrement from Zion’s women, he will rinse the bloodstains from Jerusalem’s midst, as he comes to judge and to bring devastation (4:4). The cleansing is the Lord’s doing, not theirs: the very washing offered back in chapter 1, though your sins are like scarlet (1:18, ESV), now carried out as He comes in judgment and burning devastation, the refiner’s fire that does not consume the metal but purifies it. The holy remnant is holy because it has been washed, never because it kept itself clean. The beauty of the Branch’s people is always a laundered beauty.

And over that washed and holy people the Lord does something breathtaking: He moves back in. Then the LORD will create over all Mount Zion and over its convocations a cloud and smoke by day and a bright flame of fire by night (4:5). Every Israelite would have caught the echo at once: the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night that had led and guarded the camp in the wilderness, the visible sign of God dwelling in the very midst of His people. Isaiah promises it back, only now not over a single tent in the desert but over all Mount Zion and over its convocations. The glory that had filled the temple in the throne room, the glory that undid the prophet, comes to rest as a canopy over the whole city and her gathered congregations. Indeed a canopy will accompany the LORD’s glorious presence: a covering over the glory, the Lord Himself shielding His people.

And the last verse makes the shelter tender. By day it will be a shelter to provide shade from the heat, as well as safety and protection from the heavy downpour (4:6). The God who levels every false height makes Himself a booth, a sheltering shade, a refuge from the storm, for the people He has washed. John would see the far end of this promise in his vision of the redeemed: the one seated on the throne will shelter them. They will never go hungry or be thirsty again, and the sun will not beat down on them, nor any burning heat, for the Lamb will shepherd them (Revelation 7:15–17), and the residence of God is among human beings. He will live among them (Revelation 21:3). The cloud over Zion’s rooftops is on its way to becoming the dwelling of God with men, forever. The session that began upon an exalted mountain ends under a sheltering canopy, and both, from first to last, are the work and the gift of the Lord alone.

Do not hurry past the comfort in that closing image, for it is meant for the believer in the thick of trouble now, and not only at the end of all things. The same Lord who will pitch the booth in the new creation pitches it already over His gathered people (over its convocations, Isaiah says), which is to say the shelter is found where the washed people of God come together around His word and His table. When the heat of the day is too much, when the storm blows up suddenly and there is no protection to be found anywhere else, the refuge turns out to be not a feeling we must work ourselves into but a place we are brought to: under the canopy of His presence, among His people, where the cloud still rests. The God who levels the proud is, to those who have stopped trusting in man and hidden themselves in Him, the gentlest of all shelters.

Gathering the Threads

Set the three chapters side by side now, and the design is plain. They are about two glories, and the day that tells them apart. Human glory (military, financial, political, religious, the glory of the proud look and the jingling ornament) is lifted high through these chapters and then brought crashing down, until the Lord alone is exalted. And the Lord’s own glory (the exalted mountain to which the nations stream, the beautiful Branch, the sheltering cloud over the city of the washed) rises, and stays risen. The whole passage is at once a sermon against the theology of glory and a hymn to the glory of the cross: the One who went lowest is lifted highest, and the people stripped of every glory of their own are clothed in His.

And it leaves us with the question the next chapters will press even harder: which glory are we building on? Isaiah has shown us that everything high in us is already scheduled for demolition, and that the only thing left standing on that day will be the Lord alone, and those sheltered under His canopy because they have been washed. The mountain is open; the nations are streaming; the Branch is beautiful; the booth is pitched against the storm. And the invitation of 2:5 still stands over the whole of it: come, let us walk in the LORD’s guiding light: not in the borrowed light of our own high places, which are coming down, but in the light of the One whose glory does not.

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

1. Isaiah sees the mountain of the Lord’s temple exalted and the nations streaming to it “in future days” (2:2), and the New Testament says the last days began with the coming of the Lord Jesus (Acts 2:16–17; Hebrews 1:2). How does it change the way we read this vision to know that it is being fulfilled now, as the gospel goes out and the nations come in, rather than waiting on a future map?

2. The promise that nations will beat their swords into plowshares (2:4) is often read as a hope for peace through human effort and disarmament. Looking at the order of the verses, where does this peace actually come from? How does he is our peace (Ephesians 2:14) keep us from turning Isaiah into a merely political program?

3. The day of the Lord brings down everything proud, so that the LORD alone will be exalted in that day (2:11, 17). What kinds of “high places” do we build in our own lives? Why must they come down before we can walk in the light? And how does the One who humbled himself and was therefore exalted (Philippians 2:8–9) show us the only glory that survives that day?

4. Isaiah pictures men flinging their idols into the caves where rodents and bats live when the terror comes (2:20), and commands, Stop trusting in human beings, whose life’s breath is in their nostrils (2:22). Luther said that whatever the heart clings to and relies on is its god. What do we tend to lean the weight of our hearts upon, and how is the rule that “an idol is anything that will not be there when you die” a help in naming them?

5. The long catalogue of stripped finery in chapter 3 is not finally about women or clothing, but about a pride that trusts in appearance, and the men were charged with it first. Where are we tempted to measure ourselves by how we look or what we own, rather than by what we are? How does the beauty of the Branch (4:2) expose the difference between borrowed glory and the real thing?

6. After three chapters of stripping, the remnant is called “holy,” but only after the Lord has washed Zion and rinsed away her bloodstains (4:3–4), and He shelters them under a cloud and a canopy (4:5–6). Why does it matter that this holiness is a washed holiness, given and not achieved? How does the shelter of 4:6 point ahead to God dwelling with His people forever (Revelation 21:3)?

Looking Ahead

We have watched the Lord’s glory exalted and human glory leveled; next Isaiah sings us a song about why. In the coming session we take up chapter 5, which opens, surprisingly, as a love song: the song of a man who had a vineyard on a fertile hill, built a hedge around it and removed its stones, planted a vine, built a tower and constructed a winepress, and then waited for grapes. He waited for it to produce edible grapes, but it produced sour ones instead (5:2). The vineyard is the house of Israel, and the song curdles from love into lament into judgment. Then come the six woes: against those who accumulate house after house and field after field, who get up early to drink, who call evil good and good evil, who think they are wise. It is the law naming, one by one, the sour grapes of a beloved vineyard. From the mountain and the Branch, to the vineyard that broke its Owner’s heart.

Before the next session, read Isaiah 5 in full. Listen first for the love song in the opening verses, and feel how it turns; then count the six woes that follow, and ask what each one names. And do not miss, in verse 7, exactly what fruit the Lord had been looking for all along.

Closing Prayer

Almighty God, before whom every proud height must one day be brought low, You have shown us that on the great day You alone will be exalted. Forgive us the high places we are forever building (our achievements and our reputations, our wealth and securities, the finery in which we love to hide) and the idols we have trusted that will not be there when we need them most. Teach us to stop trusting in man, and even in ourselves, and to lean the whole weight of our hearts upon You alone.

We thank You, Father, for the one glory that the day of the Lord does not level: the Branch of the Lord, Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, beautiful and glorious, who humbled Himself to the death of the cross and was therefore highly exalted. Wash us, for we cannot wash ourselves; write our names among the living; and shelter us under the canopy of Your presence as a refuge from the storm. Bring us at the last to the mountain to which the nations stream, and let us walk even now in Your light; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.