Nine Lessons and Carols – Christmas for Animal Lovers


Sermon by Derek Thomas on December 9, 2007 Isaiah 11:1-9

The Lord’s Day
Evening

December 9,
2007

Isaiah 11:1-9

Nine Lessons
and Carols

The Fourth
Lesson

Christmas for Animal Lovers?

Dr. Derek W. H.
Thomas

Please be seated. Now as Ligon reminded us this morning,
this is “Isaiah day”… (or “I-zaa-ah” day!) It’s fascinating why in the Nine
Lessons and Carols why they chose the particular texts that they chose. For
example, many of us, I suppose, if we were doing this as a piece of homework, we
probably would have inserted Isaiah 7, the prophecy that a virgin will conceive
and give birth to a child. That’s one of the most familiar of all the prophecies
in the Old Testament with regard to the coming of the Savior.

In these two particular prophecies in Isaiah 9, as we
saw this morning, the major metaphor, as we heard, was one of light shining into
darkness. And this particular prophecy that is before us tonight in Isaiah 11,
is a very different metaphor altogether of tree stumps out of which will come a
shoot or a branch. Both of these prophecies have in common that the Savior, the
promised One, will be a deliverer, a warrior-like figure, a king; one who come
to rule and reign and exercise power and dominion, the like of which even Isaiah
himself probably did not fully understand and fully appreciate.

I’ve been having a little bit of fun with the title
this evening. As I read this passage over a week or so ago, a certain person in
the congregation came to mind who loves animals, and I thought what a wonderful
title for this particular passage of Scripture — “Christmas for Animal Lovers.”

Let’s look to God’s word before we read it together.
We’re going to read verses 1-9 of Isaiah 11. Before we read the passage
together, let’s look to God in prayer. Let us pray.

Father, You have given to us an extraordinary
gift. Where would we be without the Bible? I suppose it is possible that You
could have saved us without giving to us the Bible that we have, but we would be
altogether at sea; there would be so many things that we would not know, so many
things that we could not possibly understand, so many things that we couldn’t go
back and check and re-learn all over again. We thank You that You have given to
us a Bible that is without error that holy men of old wrote as they were carried
along by the Holy Spirit. We pray now again tonight that You would come down.
Help us as we read the Bible together, that You would help us read, mark, learn,
and inwardly digest, and all…and all…for Jesus’ sake. Amen.

This is God’s word:

“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,

the Spirit of wisdom and
understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might,

the Spirit of knowledge and the
fear of the Lord.

And his delight shall be in the
fear of the Lord.

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,

and decide with equity for the
meek of the earth;

and he shall strike the earth
with the rod of his mouth,

and with the breath of his lips
he shall kill the wicked.

Righteousness shall be the belt
of his waist, and faithfulness the belt of his loins.

“The wolf shall dwell with the
lamb,

and the leopard shall lie down
with the young goat,

and the calf and the lion and
the fattened calf together;

and a little child shall lead
them.

The cow and the bear shall graze;
their young shall lie down together;

and the lion
shall eat straw like the ox.

The nursing child shall play over
the hole of the cobra,

and the weaned child
shall put his hand on the adder’s den.

They shall not hurt or destroy in
all my holy mountain;

for the earth shall be full of
the knowledge of the Lord

as the waters cover the sea.”

Amen. May God add His blessing to that reading of His word.

I suppose as we read this opening chapter, for some
of you this metaphor of tree stumps…I was thinking of when you drive up the
Trace, and come to the northern section of it where the reservoir begins…and
presumably some of you remember when there was no reservoir; there must have
been trees there, because now there are just dead stumps sticking up out of the
water. Some of you are thinking perhaps of Saruman ordering those Orcs to cut
down the Forest of Fangorn, to keep alive the fires of Eisengard, a wasteland
with just dead stumps. Well, that’s the image.

The image this morning was the image of darkness
giving way to light. The image has changed, but the idea is exactly the same.
It’s death giving way to life. What is being foretold here in terms of these
tree stumps, in terms of the darkness, has not yet occurred, at least not in its
fullness. The prophecy is being given in the year 733. Eleven years later in
722, the Northern Kingdom of Israel with its capital in Samaria will be
destroyed, overrun, overtaken by the Assyrians. In about a year from the time
Isaiah is now speaking, in just less than a year, one of the great leaders of
the Assyrian Empire…and the Assyrian Empire was one of the most fearsome empires
the world has ever seen. It was way ahead of its time in terms of its military
might, its knowledge of war and the machinery of war. It was a fearful empire.
In about a year from the time Isaiah is speaking, Tiglath-pileser, one of the
great leaders of the Assyrian Empire, would come and amass large portions of the
northern territory of Israel. Shalmaneser V would overtake him; he would be the
one who would begin the siege of Samaria, the capital of the Northern Kingdom of
Israel. That siege would last for three years. In the meantime, Shalmaneser V
died, and Sargon II came to power. He took all the credit for the taking of
Samaria. Twenty-eight thousand of the inhabitants were said to have been marched
summarily off to the hills of Assyria.

In the South, Hezekiah, a good king, kept the
Assyrians at bay for at least two decades by paying taxes, to be sure. Then
Hezekiah began a revolt, and the forces of Assyria would march down into Judah;
the immensely strategic city of Lachish would be taken; Jerusalem would be
surrounded; 185,000 Assyrian troops were killed by the angel of the Lord as they
encircled the city of Jerusalem. But all of that is in the future, that
darkness, the tree stumps of what was left of the dynasty of David. You notice
how chapter ten closes:

“He will cut down the
thickets of the

forest with an axe,

and Lebanon …”

That’s where all the trees were, of course. You want
to know where Fangorn Forest is, it isn’t in Jerusalem, it’s up in Lebanon…and
Lebanon “will fall by the Majestic One.” It is God who is doing this. Yes,
Assyria is the tool. Assyria is the weapon, but it is merely a weapon in the
hands of God. God is coming in judgment upon His people. They have rebelled.
They have forsaken God’s covenant. He’s coming in retribution. He’s coming to do
what He had threatened to do. He swings His axe and the whole forest is
destroyed.

Judah would be safe for a couple of decades, but the
Babylonians would come. They may escape the hand of the Assyrians, but the
Babylonians would come and take them into captivity. But the Northern Kingdom…
Isaiah is in the South; he’s in Jerusalem and he’s speaking now about this
Northern Kingdom of Israel, but within eleven years it will be gone. It will be
gone. No more branches swaying in the wind. No more birds singing from the
treetops. No more deer grazing beneath the shelter and shade at twilight of
these beautiful trees. That’s the image. It’s a picture. It’s a very graphic
picture.

And then suddenly from the stump, from this dead
stump, there comes up a shoot, a green shoot. And it grows to a branch and bears
fruit, and then suddenly the metaphor changes from a branch and a shoot to a boy
and a man, and a king and a ruler, and something about this ruler that is going
to affect not just little Israel or little Judah, or little Jerusalem, but the
whole world: that “the knowledge of the Lord will cover the world as the waters
cover the sea.” Something vast, something extraordinary, something that blows
all of your categories now is coming out of this little picture. It’s hope! As a
light was shining in Isaiah 9, there’s this shoot, branch, tree that brings
hope.

Down in the South where Isaiah is ministering, King
Ahaz isn’t so much frightened of Assyria. In fact he is trying to make league
with Assyria. He’s trying to cobble some kind of agreement with Assyria because
Israel was a threat to Judah, and Assyria was a threat to Judah. And Ahaz is
trying to cobble together some kind of agreement with Assyria, and Isaiah is
saying ‘Don’t do it! Don’t do it! Trust in the Lord. Ask for a sign, any sign
you want.’ And Ahaz says, ‘I don’t need a sign.’ And God gives him a sign
anyway: the sign of the virgin who will conceive and give birth.

Now in this passage I want you to see three things
here. First of all, I want you to see the ancestry and endowment of the king in
verses 1 and 2; and, secondly, the rule of the king in verse 3 and 5; and the
world of the king in verses 6 to 9.

I. The ancestry of the King.

In verses 1 and 2 — “There shall come forth a
shoot from the stump of Jesse…” the seed of Jesse, the son of Jesse.
There’s
only one person in the Bible who’s called the son of Jesse, and that’s David. No
other king in Israel or Judah had ever been called the son of Jesse. When Isaiah
said that something is going to come from the stem of Jesse, they listened. You
notice in verse 10 of chapter 11… We didn’t read that section, but it picks up
again: “In that day the root of Jesse….”

The stem of Jesse…the root of Jesse. Now think about
that. One is going to come from Jesse, but Jesse comes from him. He comes from
Jesse, but Jesse comes from him. It’s puzzling, isn’t it? It’s not puzzling to
us, you understand, because David is the seed of the woman, the seed spoken of
in Genesis 3:15. The promise that God had made that the seed of the woman would
crush the head of Satan, this offspring of David, this one from the lineage of
David precedes David because He made the world and fashioned the world, and was
in existence before the world ever was. You must think of how Isaiah and those
who heard Isaiah speak must have puzzled over what in the world Isaiah was
saying. How can somebody spring from David’s father and yet precede David’s
father?

And God has been true to His covenant, and God has
been faithful in a day of darkness, in a day when all you can see are tree
stumps, and all you can see is death and decay. And they must have begun to
wonder what has happened to the promise of God. Can God be trusted? Has God
abandoned His word? Has God forgotten to be faithful? And in the darkest
moment–and these were dark moments–Isaiah is saying God’s word can be trusted.
This seed of David will come, this seed of Jesse, and He will be endowed with
the Spirit, the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him. He’ll
have wisdom and understanding and counsel and might, and knowledge and the fear
of the Lord, and all of these are by the Spirit. He’ll be conceived by the
Spirit. He will grow in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and with men
by the Spirit. He will be baptized by the Spirit. He will give up His life by
the Spirit, Hebrews 9 says.

Here, of course, in ways that Isaiah could never have
begun to understand, are all three persons of the Trinity behind the salvific
purposes of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The endowment of the King, this
extraordinary king-like figure endowed with such skill and wisdom and insight
and abilities beyond anything that they had ever seen before.

II. The rule of the King.

And the rule of this King, in verses 3-5. He
won’t judge by simply what He sees, and He won’t judge by simply that which He
hears. He won’t be like a king that they had seen in Jerusalem. He won’t be like
a king that they had seen up in the Northern Kingdom of Israel and in Samaria,
to be sure. He’ll rule with equity. He’ll rule with absolute integrity and
fairness. He’ll seek the good of the poor. Like David, He’ll be a man after
God’s own heart.

And how does Isaiah explain to us the nature of this
kingdom that this king will inaugurate and rule over, and reign over?

“The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,

and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat,

and the calf and the lion and he fattened calf together,

and a little child will lead them.”

III. The world of the King.

It’s Narnia! (This is where he got it from, of
course.) It’s a picture of — what? Animal Planet? No! It’s a picture of Eden.
It’s a picture of paradise. It’s a picture of how God made this world and
everything that’s in it. He made man, to be sure, after His image; but He made
the trees and He made the wolves. And He made the bears, and He made the calves
and the lions and leopards. It’s a picture of the restoration of Eden. It’s a
picture of paradise regained. It’s a picture of a world without the curse, the
world without the fall, the world without sin, the world without pain, without
disease, without death.

Do you remember in the account of our Lord — and
Ligon referred to it this morning — when our Lord was tempted of Satan in the
wilderness? The major accounts of the temptation narratives are found in Matthew
and Luke, but there’s a passing reference — it’s just a one liner. It’s so
typical of Mark to have abbreviated to one line, but Mark says something
fascinating. If you haven’t been there recently in Mark’s Gospel, in 1:13 Mark
says that immediately after the temptation “He was with the wild animals,” Mark
says, “and the angels ministered to Him.” Now why did Mark say He was with the
wild animals? Well, perhaps simply because He was out in the wilderness. But
perhaps, too, Mark is saying having won this immensely important battle against
Satan that there was just a little glimpse of what He had actually come to do:
not just to save us from our sins, but to restore us into an existence and an
environment where there is no more sin. It’s a little glimpse, a foreshadowing
of Eden…of the new heavens and the new earth. “He was with the wild animals.”
It’s an extraordinary statement that Mark makes. It’s a picture of course here
in Isaiah 11…a picture of carnivores that had become herbivores; of a leopard
lying down next to a goat, and a lion lying down next to a calf. You know what’s
going through the mind of a leopard and a lion when they’re lying down next to
goats and calves! They’re thinking “Dinner!” Have you ever watched those Animal
Planet, those special things on the Serengeti? And you see these huge cats with
all of their muscles, the beauty of their bodily movements as they’re going
along. I don’t know how fast they go, but the camera slows it down and you know
lunch is coming! You can see this poor creature, and it’s all over. Absolutely
extraordinary pictures, but that’s the world of course that we live in. You
understand that.

What is Isaiah talking about, really? All right, it’s
a picture. We remember Chesterton’s famous words: “Stand up and believe all the
pedants, creeds, and strictures; but don’t believe anything that can’t be told
in colored pictures.” And this is a colored picture, to be sure.

I spoke to my best friend in all the world today. I
speak to him every Sunday afternoon. He’s in London. He’s finished. He’s
preached his two sermons and he’s relaxing. I’m still biting my fingernails
because it’s Sunday afternoon and I’ve got a sermon to prepare. I asked him,
“What does this passage mean?” “Realized eschatology,” he said to me. (He went
to Westminster Seminary and I was expecting that answer.) It’s a picture of
spiritual truth, of the peace that we know in union with Jesus Christ, that
we’ve come now into a relationship with Christ where the warfare has ceased and
we’re at peace with Christ.

It’s very interesting that verse 10 is actually cited
by Paul in Romans 15, and he is citing it to prove that the gospel has come not
just for the Jew, but also for the Gentiles — for the nations of the world. So
what you have here is a picture of the gospel, the redeeming work of this
king-like Redeemer affecting the whole world — every tribe, every tongue, every
nation, every people; and no longer in hostility against each other and at war
with each other, but in peace and harmony and fellowship, as Christians from
different tribes and different nations and different languages and different
skin color are one in Jesus Christ. That’s what this picture means.

Well, perhaps. There are those who see this as
depicting something that happens here on earth after Christ has returned. He
will return, take up His throne in Jerusalem, and for a thousand years (whether
that’s literally a thousand or whether that’s metaphorically a thousand) there
will be some kind of peace and blessing. I don’t think so. That seems to me to
contradict a whole lot of other things in Scripture about end times, so I’m
ditching that one. Then there are some — and there may be some here…I think
there may well be some here who look to a future near the end, before Christ
comes but right up close to when Jesus is about to come, a time of extraordinary
blessing, a time of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, a time of — well, let me
use the word! — a postmillennial era.

Look at that ninth verse: “The earth shall be full of
the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” That there’s going to
come a time when the gospel will so spread to nations of the world that it will
be as though the entire world — not necessarily every individual — but it will
be as though the gospel has spread throughout the whole world. Perhaps. But I
rather think that what Isaiah is speaking of here is what he’s speaking of in
the very final chapter of Isaiah, in chapter 66. And he’s talking about an
expression that actually comes into vogue in the New Testament: the new
heavens and the new earth
.

What is God’s ultimate plan? Yes, to save us; yes, to
redeem us; yes, to bring us home to be with himself; yes, that to be absent from
the body is to be present with the Lord. But we’re looking forward to a day of
resurrection. We’re looking forward to a day of transformation. We’re looking
forward to a day when there will be a new heavens and a new earth in which
righteousness will dwell.

And what will be in that new earth? Wolves. And
leopards. And bears. And calves. And perhaps Isaiah is painting a picture, the
details of which we’re not sure about. C.S. Lewis believed in a couple of places
that the new heavens and the new earth will certainly be populated by
animals…tamed animals, he said. Perhaps.

I can’t imagine but that God having made these
extraordinary creatures in all their magnificence and beauty — and you can be
transfixed watching the beauty of some of these creatures that God has made, and
if you’re not, there’s something wrong with you — that the new heavens and the
new earth will bring out extraordinary exquisiteness about the creative
abilities of God. Surely we shall not wish to measure the saving work of God by
what has already been accomplished in these un-right days in which our lot is
cast. The sands of time have not yet run out. Are not the saints to inherit the
earth? Does not the gospel promise to the meek the earth? The restored earth?
The renewed earth? Is not the knowledge of the glory of God to cover the earth
as the waters cover the sea?

Imagine little old Isaiah in Jerusalem in the eighth
century B.C. seeing an extraordinary vision that even blows the categories of
Narnia away, as though he has gone inside the cupboard and out into a world
beyond where there are all these animals, and everyone knows the Lord in this
world. And there are so many of them — millions upon millions upon millions of
them. And the vastness of it, and all of it the accomplishment of this king, of
this shoot that emerges from the stump of Jesse. In a day when it must have
looked to the Israelites as though everything was entirely gone and forsaken,
and God had forgotten His promises, and it is as though Isaiah is saying to
them, ‘You haven’t seen anything yet. You haven’t seen anything yet….’

And whatever your eschatology may be — and some of
you nodded in different places, so you’re not all on the same page! — but
whatever your eschatology is, there is ahead of us an extraordinary work of God,
whether in this world or in the world which is to come. That should give us such
great hope. And that’s what Christmas is about! That’s what the story of the
little baby in the manger in Bethlehem who was bigger than the whole world
because He had come to restore that broken world in which you and I live, and to
make it a reality that the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as
the waters cover the sea.

Let’s pray together.

Father, we thank You. We do not know where to
begin as we think of the extraordinary thing that You have promised in Your
word. We look forward to our death-day when we shall be with Jesus, but we look
forward, yes, with even greater anticipation to our resurrection day, to that
glimpse, that first glimpse on that morning of the new heavens…
[Tape ends.]

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