The Shoot from the Stump

Isaiah 11 (with Romans 15:8–13)

Before this session, read Isaiah 11 in full. Watch the shoot rise from the stump of a felled dynasty; notice the Spirit resting upon Him in all His fullness, and how He treats the poor and the downtrodden; and ask what kind of kingdom it is where the wolf and the lamb lie down together, and what it means that the root of Jesse stands like a signal flag for the nations, and the nations look to Him (11:10).

A shoot will grow out of Jesse’s root stock, a bud will sprout from his roots.

Isaiah 11:1

A Stump in the Field

To feel the wonder of the first verse of chapter 11, we have to see how chapter 10 ends, for the two run together as one. Chapter 10 closes with the Lord swinging an axe. Assyria, the proud forest, is hewn down; and Judah too, the high and lofty, is lopped and felled, until the prophet can say, The tallest trees will be cut down, the loftiest ones will be brought low … and mighty Lebanon will fall (10:33–34). The day of the Lord against pride, which we first met in chapter 2, has done its work: the forest of human glory lies flat on the ground, stumps as far as the eye can see. And it is into that clear-cut, that field of dead stumps, that chapter 11 speaks its first word.

We should not miss that the axe in chapter 10 falls upon God’s own people as surely as upon their enemies. It is not only proud Assyria that is hewn down; faithless Judah, the high and lofty cedar of David’s own line, comes crashing down too. The day of the Lord is no respecter of national borders or religious pedigrees; everything that has lifted itself up, pagan empire and covenant people alike, is brought low together. This is the law doing its leveling work one more time, and it leaves the honest reader with a hard question: if even David’s house is felled, where can any hope possibly come from now? Isaiah’s answer is not to soften the felling but to point straight past it, to a shoot. The hope does not come from some lucky tree that escaped the axe. It comes from the stump the axe left behind.

A shoot will grow out of Jesse’s root stock, a bud will sprout from his roots (11:1). Look closely at the picture. Among all the felled stumps, one of them, the stump of David’s royal house, is not quite dead. From the dead-looking wood, against every expectation, a green shoot pushes up into the light. The towering cedar of David’s dynasty would be cut to the ground; by the time the Messiah came, the line of kings would have no throne, no crown, no glory left to it: just a stump in the dirt, a carpenter’s family in a backwater town. And out of that stump, when all hope of a king had long since been buried, God brings forth the Branch. Here is the whole gospel pattern pressed into a single image: life out of death, a shoot out of a stump, hope out of the very place where hope was buried.

And notice the prophet says Jesse’s root stock, not David’s. Jesse was David’s father, a farmer in Bethlehem, a nobody. To name Jesse rather than David is to reach back behind the dynasty’s glory days to its humble root, as if to say: the King will not come from the palace at the height of its splendor, but from the family at its lowliest, the bare stump after the felling. It is of a piece with everything we have been learning about how God works: the light dawning on despised Galilee, the Mighty God laid in a manger. The Branch grows not from David the king in his glory, but from Jesse the farmer in his obscurity. God’s greatest works begin where the world has stopped bothering to look.

And the geography is not incidental either. Jesse lived in Bethlehem, the little town from which David had once been called in out of the sheepfold; and it was to Bethlehem, Jesse’s own village, that another prophet pointed when he said the ruler of Israel would come from there: As for you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, seemingly insignificant among the clans of Judah (Micah 5:2). When the Branch at last sprang from Jesse’s stock, He was born in Jesse’s town, the shoot rising up in the very soil of the root. The God who plants His promises down in real history keeps them down to the detail of an address. The King came from Jesse, and He came from Jesse’s Bethlehem.

And we have met this Branch before. Back in chapter 4 we heard of what the Lord would make to sprout after the judgment had passed, made beautiful and glorious (4:2, where the Hebrew word is tsemach, a sprout or branch); and the prophets together would make the Branch a settled name for the coming One. Isaiah uses a different word here, netser, a bud or sprout, but the picture is the same, and here He is again, sprouting from Jesse’s stump: the same Messiah, the Lord Jesus, springing up green precisely where the dynasty had been cut down. And the church has always heard in this image the deepest note of all: that the One who grows up out of dead wood would Himself go down into death, into the ground, a seed buried, and rise. The shoot from the stump is, in the end, the firstborn from the dead.

This is a word for everyone who has a stump in their life: a hope cut down to the ground, a future that looks for all the world like dead wood. The temptation, when the tree is felled, is to conclude that the story is simply over; stumps do not, as a rule, become forests. But the God of Isaiah 11 is the God of the green shoot, the God who specializes in the place after the felling. He did not bring the Messiah in David’s golden age, when a shoot would have been no miracle at all; He brought Him when the dynasty was a stump and the people had long since stopped expecting anything. We are not promised that every earthly hope will sprout green again in this life. But we are promised the God who raises shoots from stumps and bodies from graves, and that God is never finished simply because we can no longer see the life left in the wood.

The Spirit Will Rest on Him

Having told us where the King comes from, Isaiah tells us what equips Him to reign, and it is not an army or a treasury. The LORD’s Spirit will rest on him (11:2). The shoot from the stump is anointed, not with oil poured from a horn, as the old kings were, but with the Spirit of God Himself, come to rest upon Him. That word rest matters. The Spirit does not merely flutter down and away again, as upon the prophets and judges of old, who spoke and then fell silent; the Spirit comes to abide, to settle, to make His home upon this King. He is the Anointed One, which is exactly what the words Messiah and Christ both mean: the one anointed with the Spirit of God.

And Isaiah unfolds the anointing in its fullness. The NET gives it in three phrases: a Spirit that gives extraordinary wisdom, a Spirit that provides the ability to execute plans, a Spirit that produces absolute loyalty to the LORD (11:2). Behind each phrase stands a pair of Hebrew words, and the church, counting the Spirit of the Lord Himself with the six gifts, has long spoken here of the sevenfold Spirit. Three pairs: wisdom to see truly and understanding to discern; counsel to plan rightly and might to carry it through; the knowledge of God and the fear of the Lord that is the beginning of all wisdom. The King lacks nothing the Spirit can supply. Where the kings of Judah had been foolish (think of Ahaz at the waterworks) and faithless and self-serving, this King is filled with every gift of God’s own Spirit, and filled without measure.

And the Spirit who rested without measure upon the Head does not stay only upon the Head. From the anointed King the anointing overflows to His whole body, for the very name Christian marks us as people who belong to the Anointed and share in the Anointed’s own Spirit. The same Spirit who descended at the Jordan was poured out at Pentecost upon ordinary people, and is given still in the water and the word to everyone baptized into Christ. We do not possess these gifts in the King’s full measure, of course; but the wisdom and understanding, the counsel and might, the knowledge and the holy fear that rested upon Him are, by His sheer generosity, shared out among His people. The Branch is anointed so that the whole tree may be.

We watch this very prophecy come true on the bank of the Jordan. When the Lord Jesus was baptized, the heavens opened and the Spirit of God came down upon Him, and John the Baptist, who saw it, fastened on exactly Isaiah’s word: I saw the Spirit descending like a dove from heaven, and it remained on him (John 1:32). Not descended and then departed, but remained, rested, abode, just as Isaiah had said the Spirit would rest upon the Branch. And from that anointing the Lord Jesus went out and announced, reading from Isaiah’s own scroll, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me (Luke 4:18). The Shoot of chapter 11 is the Anointed of the Jordan. Everything He would do (the preaching, the healing, the casting out of demons, the dying and the rising) He would do in the power of the Spirit who had come to rest upon Him.

And because the Spirit rested, and did not lift away again, the King’s ministry never runs dry and never falters. The old prophets had their seasons: the Spirit came, they prophesied, and then the gift lifted and the man was ordinary once more. Not so the Branch. The Spirit abides upon Him without interruption and without measure, which means there is never a moment when our King is out of power, never a season when His wisdom thins or His might gives out. The same Spirit rests upon Him today as on the day of His baptism. When we come to Him, we never come to a King whose anointing has worn through. The Spirit is upon Him still, and upon Him forever.

The Rod of His Mouth

What kind of King will the Spirit-anointed Branch be? A just one, and a very particular kind of just. He will not judge by mere appearances, or make decisions on the basis of hearsay (11:3). He will not be fooled by appearances, or swayed by what merely looks impressive and sounds plausible, the very things that fool every human judge. He sees straight to the heart. He will treat the poor fairly, and make right decisions for the downtrodden of the earth (11:4). Here is the justice the old vineyard never bore. Remember chapter 5, where the Lord looked for justice and found only oppression, the poor trampled and the courts up for sale. This King is the answer to that failure: the poor are treated fairly by Him, the downtrodden receive right decisions, and the ones with no power to bribe or impress turn out to be exactly the ones He defends.

There is both a terror and a mercy in a King who does not judge by appearances. The terror is that He cannot be managed by a good front: the polished exterior, the right words, the impressive résumé that fools everyone else does not fool Him for a moment; He sees, as we learned back in chapter 1, straight through our religion to the heart. But the mercy is that very same fact, turned around. Because He sees the heart, He is not deceived by our failures either, into writing off as worthless someone the world has already discarded. The world judges the poor and the downtrodden by their lack of power and walks on past them; this King judges them with fairness and takes up their cause. The One whose eyes we can never fool is the same One who will not be fooled into despising us.

And then a striking detail about His weapon. He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and order the wicked to be executed (11:4). The Hebrew is more vivid: with the breath of His lips He will slay the wicked. Not with a sword in His fist, but with the rod of his mouth, the breath of His lips. This King conquers and judges by His word. He speaks, and it is done; He breathes, and the wicked fall. The same word that spoke creation into being, that thundered the law from Sinai, that will pronounce the last judgment: that word is His weapon, and He needs no other. Paul says the lawless one will be undone in precisely this way: whom the Lord will destroy by the breath of his mouth (2 Thessalonians 2:8); and John sees that from his mouth extends a sharp sword (Revelation 19:15). The mouth of this King is His whole armory.

And notice that the very same breath does two opposite things. The breath of His lips slays the wicked, yet the breath of His mouth also gives life, for it was by breathing into the clay that God first made a man a living being, and it was by breathing upon His disciples that the risen Lord said, Receive the Holy Spirit (John 20:22). The word that comes out of this King’s mouth is law to the proud and gospel to the broken; it kills, and it makes alive; it is the selfsame word that condemns the impenitent and raises the dead. We need not fear the breath that slays the wicked, if we have come to the King as the poor and the downtrodden He delights to defend. The mouth that judges the wicked is the very mouth that absolves the penitent.

There is deep Lutheran comfort in that, and Luther himself knew it well. The Reformation was not won by the sword; it was won by the word. Luther said in a famous sermon of 1522 that he did nothing, that the Word did everything, while he slept or sat at Wittenberg with his friends. The King rules His kingdom not by force of arms but by the preached word: the word of law that slays the proud, and the word of gospel that raises the dead. Luther pressed the same truth into his great hymn of the church: that the prince of darkness, for all his grim rage, can be brought down by a single word from Christ. We who feel so powerless against the evil in the world and in ourselves may take heart from this: our King’s weapon is His word, and that word has been placed into our hands, in the Scriptures, in the preaching, in the absolution. Justice will be like a belt around his waist, integrity will be like a belt around his hips (11:5); justice and integrity are the belt He buckles on for battle, and His sword is His word.

And the weapon He wields, He also hands to us. When the Lord Jesus Himself was assaulted by the tempter in the wilderness, He did not summon legions of angels; three times He answered with a word of Scripture, It is written, and the devil was driven off. That is the pattern for every Christian under attack. We are not left to fight the powers of darkness with our willpower or our feelings, which fail us at exactly the moment we need them most; we are handed the word of the King, the same rod of His mouth, to take up against every lie. The smallest child who knows It is written is armed with the weapon that fells the wicked. The whole arsenal of the kingdom stands open to the weakest subject who will only reach for the word.

The Wolf and the Lamb

Now the prophecy opens out into one of the loveliest visions in all of Scripture: the peaceable kingdom. A wolf will reside with a lamb, and a leopard will lie down with a young goat; an ox and a young lion will graze together, as a small child leads them along (11:6). The predator lies down beside the prey and does it no harm. A cow and a bear will graze together, their young will lie down together. A lion, like an ox, will eat straw (11:7). The carnivore grazes on grass. A baby will play over the hole of a snake (11:8): the baby plays at the snake’s den, and the snake does not strike. Everything that tears and devours and poisons in this fallen world is, in that day, made gentle.

And do not pass over the small figure standing at the center of the scene: a small child leads them along. In every other age and empire it is the strong who lead: the warrior, the conqueror, the man on the war-horse. In the peaceable kingdom the leader is a child, and the fierce beasts follow him without fear. It is the gentlest possible picture of rule, and it is no accident, for we have already met a child at the very center of this part of the book: the child born to us, the son given, who shoulders the government. The kingdom where the wolf lies down with the lamb is led by the Child-King who was Himself the Lamb. Brute strength does not lead there. A child does.

What Isaiah is describing is the undoing of the curse. Ever since Eden, creation has been a place of predation and venom and fear, groaning under the consequences of human sin: the serpent in the garden, the thorns in the field, the strong forever devouring the weak. Here the prophet sees the whole of it reversed: the serpent harmless, the wolf tamed, a little child safe among the beasts. They will no longer injure or destroy on my entire royal mountain. For there will be universal submission to the LORD’s sovereignty, just as the waters completely cover the sea (11:9). The Hebrew puts it this way: the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord. The violence ends because the knowledge of God floods the world, and every knee bows to Him, as completely as the water fills the bed of the sea. This is the new creation: the world remade under the reign of the Branch, the peace of the Prince of Peace carried at last into the very fabric of things.

It is worth saying plainly that this is a thoroughly earthy, bodily hope, and not a vague dream of floating away to a disembodied heaven. Isaiah does not see the saved escaping creation; he sees creation itself healed: real wolves, real lambs, a real child, a real and remade earth. The Christian hope has always been larger than the soul’s bare survival; it is the resurrection of the body and the renewal of the whole groaning creation, the very world God called good and will not in the end abandon to the curse. When we confess in the Creed that we look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, this peaceable kingdom is the country we are confessing. Heaven, in the end, comes down.

We must read this carefully, for it has often been misread, and in opposite directions. Isaiah is not handing us a wildlife forecast, predicting that on some fixed future date the lions will turn vegetarian for a thousand years and then resume hunting afterward. Nor, at the other extreme, is he merely painting a sentimental picture of inner peace and personal calm. He is showing us the consummation of the kingdom of God: the new heavens and the new earth, where the curse is fully lifted and harm and death are no more. He will say it again at the very end of the book (65:25); Paul will say it in his own words, that the creation itself will also be set free from the bondage of decay (Romans 8:21); and John will see it finished: a city where death will not exist any more—or mourning, or crying, or pain (Revelation 21:4). The peaceable kingdom is as real as the resurrection, and it is surely coming.

And like so much in the prophets, it is already and not yet. Not yet, plainly enough: the wolf still takes the lamb, the snake still bites, and we still bury our dead. The full peace waits for the world to come. But already, wherever the Branch reigns by His word, the taming has quietly begun, for the gospel makes wolves and lambs lie down together even now. It takes a predatory human heart and gentles it; it seats old enemies side by side at one table and one altar rail; it makes the church a small colony of the peaceable kingdom planted in the middle of a violent age, a foretaste of the day when nothing will injure or destroy on all of God’s royal mountain. We do not yet see the lion eating straw. But we have seen, and by grace we have been, the wolf made gentle by the word of the King. That is the peaceable kingdom already breaking in.

A Signal Flag for the Nations

Isaiah’s last word in the chapter widens the kingdom to the very ends of the earth. At that time a root from Jesse will stand like a signal flag for the nations. Nations will look to him for guidance, and his residence will be majestic (11:10). Notice that He is now called a root from Jesse: not only the shoot that grows up from Jesse, but the root from which Jesse himself once grew. He is both at once: David’s descendant and David’s source. It is the riddle the Lord Jesus would one day put to the Pharisees: If David then calls him ‘Lord,’ how can he be his son? (Matthew 22:45); and it is what He would declare at the very end of Scripture: I am the root and the descendant of David (Revelation 22:16). The Branch from the stump is also the root of the whole tree.

That little paradox (that the Branch is at once the offspring of Jesse and the root of Jesse, both David’s son and David’s Lord) is one more glimpse of who this King really is. A mere man could be David’s descendant; only God could be David’s source, the root from which the whole line, Jesse and David and all the rest, first grew. So the title quietly says again what Mighty God said outright in chapter 9: the One who springs up from the human family tree is the very One who planted it. He is rooted down in our history, and He is the root of all history; our brother according to the flesh, and our God from before the foundation of the world.

And He stands like a signal flag for the nations: a battle-standard, a banner lifted high on a hill, that the scattered and the lost rally to from every direction. Nations will look to him for guidance. This is the very note we heard on the mountain in chapter 2, the nations streaming in, now gathered not to a place but to a person, to the raised banner of the Branch. Paul heard it exactly so. Gathering up the promises that the Gentiles would be brought in, he reaches for this very verse: The root of Jesse will come, and the one who rises to rule over the Gentiles, in him will the Gentiles hope (Romans 15:12). Every Gentile believer (which is to say most of us reading this study) is the fulfillment of Isaiah 11:10. We are the nations who saw the banner raised, and came.

And we should ask how that banner came to be raised at all, for a standard is something lifted up, on a pole, on a hill, where all can see it. The Lord Jesus said, And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself (John 12:32), and John tells us plainly that he said this to indicate clearly what kind of death he was going to die (John 12:33). The banner that gathers the nations is the Branch lifted up upon a cross, raised on a hill outside Jerusalem where the whole world could see Him. The banner around which Jew and Gentile rally was, first, a gibbet. It is the strangest standard ever raised, a crucified King, and yet from every nation under heaven the lost have looked up, caught sight of it, and come home.

The rest of the chapter fills out the picture: the Lord will again lift his hand to reclaim the remnant of his people, gathering them in from Assyria and Egypt and the far seacoasts, building a highway home and removing every obstacle from the road (11:11–16). It is the great ingathering: the scattered people of God brought home from all the nations of the earth. And we are living in the days of that gathering still, as the gospel goes out and people from every tribe and tongue are brought in to the King. His residence, Isaiah says (the Hebrew word means His resting place), will be majestic: the kingdom of the Branch, gathered out of all the earth, will be a place of glory and of rest. The shoot that grew from a dead stump becomes, in the end, the banner of the whole world.

There is gospel sweetness in the detail of that homecoming road. Isaiah says the Lord will divide the gulf of the Egyptian Sea, turn the great river into seven dried-up streams, and enable them to walk across in their sandals; and there will be a highway leading out of Assyria for the remnant of his people (11:15–16). The obstacles that had kept the exiles from coming home are lifted out of the road by God Himself. And so it is with sinners coming home to the King. Every obstacle that stood between us and God (our guilt, the just demand of the law, the great gulf our sin had fixed) has been taken out of the way, not by our climbing over it but by the King who leveled it at the cross and built a highway where there had been no road at all. The banner is raised, the road is opened, and the nations are called home, drawn by the One who was lifted up.

Gathering the Threads

Stand back and take in the whole chapter. It begins in a clear-cut field of stumps, the forest of human pride felled by the Lord’s own axe, and out of the deadest-looking stump of all, the cut-down house of David, a single green shoot rises: life out of death, the King from the humblest root. The Spirit of God rests upon Him in sevenfold fullness; He rules not by the sword but by the rod of His mouth, defending the poor and slaying the wicked with His word; and under His reign the curse itself is undone, the wolf lying down with the lamb in the new creation, while the nations of the earth rally to Him as to a banner raised upon a hill.

And every line of it is the Lord Jesus. He is the shoot from Jesse’s stump, born to a carpenter’s family when the dynasty had become a memory; the Anointed upon whom the Spirit came to rest at the Jordan; the King whose only weapon is His word; the Prince whose peace is even now taming wolves, and will one day fill the earth; the root of Jesse, to whom we Gentiles have come. We who feel the violence of this world, and of our own hearts, may lift our eyes to Him: the kingdom is not held up by our strength but grows like a shoot, by the power of the Spirit and the word of the King, and of His peaceable kingdom there will be no end. From a single stump in a felled and ruined field, God grew the hope of the whole world.

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. The Messiah comes not from David’s house in its glory but from Jesse’s root stock, a stump left behind after the dynasty was felled (11:1). What does this image of a green shoot from dead wood teach us about how God works? How does it connect to the lowly origins we have already seen: despised Galilee, the manger?

2. The Spirit of the Lord will rest upon the Branch in all His fullness (11:2), and John saw the Spirit remain on the Lord Jesus at His baptism (John 1:32). Why does it matter that the Spirit comes to rest and remain, and not merely to visit? What does it mean that the very word Christ means “anointed”?

3. This King conquers and judges not with a sword but with the rod of his mouth (11:4). How does ruling by the word rather than by force shape the way Christ’s kingdom actually advances in the world? Why was it such comfort to Luther, and why should it be to us, that our King’s weapon is His word?

4. The Branch will treat the poor fairly, and make right decisions for the downtrodden of the earth (11:4). How is this the direct answer to the failure of the vineyard in chapter 5, where God looked for justice and found oppression? What does it tell us about whom this King especially takes up the cause of?

5. The wolf lives with the lamb, and the lion eats straw (11:6–7). Why should we read this as the new creation, rather than as a literal forecast of animal behavior on a future calendar, and also rather than as a mere picture of inner peace? Where do we already see the peaceable kingdom breaking in, and where do we still wait for it?

6. The root of Jesse becomes a signal flag, and nations will look to him for guidance (11:10), which Paul applies to the bringing-in of the nations (Romans 15:12). How are most of us reading this study ourselves the fulfillment of that verse? How does this connect back to the mountain of chapter 2, with the nations streaming in?

Looking Ahead

We have followed Isaiah from the throne room through the courtroom, the vineyard, the virgin’s son, the child upon the throne, and now the shoot from the stump and the peaceable kingdom He brings. The first great movement of the book, chapters 1 through 12, is about to close, and it closes the way every true encounter with God’s salvation closes: in song. Chapter 12 is the shortest in this part of Isaiah, just six verses, and it is pure praise, the song the redeemed will sing at that time: Look, God is my deliverer! I will trust in him and not fear … Joyfully you will draw water from the springs of deliverance (12:2–3). It rings with one word again and again, the word the NET renders deliverer and deliverance and older versions render salvation, and that word, in the Hebrew, is very nearly the name the angel would one day give the child: the Lord saves. In the next session we will take up the song of the saved, and the springs we are invited to draw from with joy.

Before the next session, read Isaiah 12. It is short, so read it twice, and if you can, read it aloud. Count how many times the words deliverer and deliverance ring out across these six verses, and notice that the song is something we are told to say and to sing. Ask what it means to draw water, joyfully, from the springs of deliverance.

Closing Prayer

Almighty God and Father, when the tree of every human hope had been cut to the ground, You did not abandon Your promise but caused a shoot to spring from the stump: Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Branch from Jesse’s root, upon whom Your Spirit came down to rest and to remain. We praise You that You bring life out of death, and kings out of stumps, and hope out of the very places where we had buried it.

Grant that we may live as the subjects of His kingdom: ruled not by force but by His word, defended in our weakness by the One who treats the poor with fairness, and made gentle (wolves turned into lambs) by the Spirit He pours out upon us. Hasten the day when nothing will injure or destroy on all Your holy mountain, when all the earth knows You as completely as the waters cover the sea. And until that day dawns, keep us rallied to the banner of Your Son, together with all the nations who have looked to Him; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.