Monday, December 13, 2021

Out of the Stump

 

Monday, December 13, 2021

Out of the stump of David’s family will grow a shoot—yes, a new Branch bearing fruit from the old root.  And the Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.  He will delight in obeying the Lord.           

Isaiah 11:1-3a

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.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!  

[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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