Isaiah’s Hope, Part 3: The Branch and the Stump

When Popie and I moved into our house almost forty years ago, we inherited lots of little oak trees. They were small, bush-sized sprouts, and I had no idea that they would grow so fast into towering shade trees. But they grew at a rate of three feet a year, and we soon discovered there were way too many. They crowded each other and needed thinning. Some, too, grew in awkward places and began to lean on buildings. We had to cut some of them down.

I learned that when you cut down an oak tree, you haven’t eliminated it. You’ve merely set it back. New shoots will come up from the stump and grow into a new tree with great rapidity. It’s hard to get rid of an oak tree. They keep sprouting anew.

That’s one image that Isaiah uses to establish hope:

“A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; From his roots a Branch will bear fruit.” (11:1)

Jesse was David’s father, and therefore the first in the line of Israel’s kings. That “royal line” came to an end in Isaiah’s time, a victim of corruption, idolatry, injustice, and ego. The last of the kings was taken into captivity by the Babylonians when they destroyed the capital. By that time, there wasn’t much to regret. From God’s point of view, good riddance.

In that grim time, when the nation was about to be decapitated and the Temple decimated, Isaiah offered hope. In many passages Isaiah predicts a new, rescuing king to save Israel. This new hope doesn’t come out of nowhere, however. Isaiah says that the new beginning will spring out of the old. The Branch comes out of a stump. The “branch” passages make it clear: the new king will come from the old line.

A stump is a terrible fate for a magnificent, spreading tree. That is what Israel had become. It was cut down to the ground: no leaves, no shade, no fruit—just a wreck and a ruin. That’s what Isaiah faced. Today, when we think of our beloved nation and our beloved Church, our greatest fear may be that we will suffer similarly. Polarization, immorality, rancor and lies may destroy us. There will be nothing left but a stump.

I hope and pray that we have not reached that point. Reading Isaiah, however, convinces me that we should look calmly at the possibility that such a punishment may come upon our nation and our church. I pray that it will not be so, but it may be. And what then?

What then is that God causes bright, fast-growing green shoots to grow out of the stump. There is new life in the wreckage. It comes from the old root. What grows may be cut down, but new growth will come from healthy, deep roots—below ground and invisible, not easily chopped or burned.

We need tall trees, but even more we need deep roots. How do we nurture healthy roots for America? How do we nurture healthy roots for the church?