Monday, December 13, 2021
A stump is not the kind of icon you’d choose to represent heath and
vigor. The land on which our house
stands was full of pine and gum trees, not exactly what we wanted to see. The unwanted trees were cut down, and then
came the stump-grinder. His work wore-away
what was left of huge trees to a network of disconnected roots 6-8” below the
ground surface. Eventually they rot and
disintegrate. Such is the nature of
ground-down stumps.
Not so in the case of David’s line.
The prophet wrote these words about Jesus, a direct descendant of King
David’s line. God saw fit to have
Messiah come from this stump of a bloodline.
And when Jesus was born, the spirit of wisdom and understanding
(internal wealth) and the Spirit of counsel and might (external usefulness) and
intimate relationship with Creator God (spiritual life) came to live among
us. His perfect obedience in holiness
became our salvation.
In the timeline of Advent, now just a dozen days from celebrating the
birth in a livestock feeder, Mary and Joseph are packing their bags for a trip
to the tax collector’s office in Bethlehem.
It’s going to be a hard journey, the better part of a week to cover 90
miles back to their hometown. Mary is a
tough young girl, braving the grueling combination of being jostled by the
donkey beneath her for ten hours a day with the child within stretching and
kicking in preparation to enter the land of the dying. The stump is about to sprout, and nothing
about life would ever be the same for Jesus’ parents…or the world.
Later, after the accomplishment of everything Jesus came to do, I’m
certain Mary remembered this trip, and the excitement and wonder she was
carrying. As certainly as she accepted
what the angel told her about the source of her condition, she still had
questions about how it would all play out.
The bumping and discomfort of the journey was but a foreshadow of the
epic struggle to come.
I am just as certain that Isaiah’s prophecy of the blossoming of
Jesse’s stump was not lost on Mary. This
was her ancestor’s line; she was a daughter of Judah; her blood included
Abraham, and even Rahab, the prostitute.
The stories were told to her from a tender age of how Messiah would come
from this stump. And Mary had a
front-row seat for it all.
For You Today
What excites you about Christmas? If you’re like most people, there was a time
that the gifts under the tree were the main event. But what about now? What excites you now? Perhaps the first blush of hushed joy ought
to be the sight of the stump of that Christmas tree you bring home, and remembering
the image of a new shoot coming out of a (supposedly) dead stump. Everything that holds your eternity is held
in that stump…and another one that would be raised on Golgotha 3 decades later.
[1] Title and Other Images: Pixabay.com Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©
For another post on this text see Jesse's Stump
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