Isaiah 11

The Book of Isaiah talks a lot about political power. The prophet was on the wrong end of it for most of his life. 

The Assyrian Empire was the dominant power in his region of the world. They conquered every country in their path, and came this close to destroying his homeland of Judah.

The Assyrians viewed their power as a sign of their own greatness. It's the way every empire throughout human history, including the U.S., has viewed themselves.

Isaiah saw things differently. He rejected the idea that any country could be great. They were all just trees in a forest to him. Assyria towered over its neighbors at the time. But God would chop them down to size:

See, the Lord, the Lord Almighty, will lop off the boughs with great power. The lofty trees will be felled, the tall ones will be brought low. He will cut down the forest thickets with an axe.  

- Isaiah 10:33-34 

In Chapter 11, he contrasts them with the coming Messiah:

A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.  

- Isaiah 11:1 

The Messiah, rather than a mighty tree, would be a humble branch of one that had already been cut down. The kings of Judah had all been descended from David, the most legendary king in Jewish history, and his father Jesse. They would eventually be removed from the throne a century after Isaiah's prophecy when the kingdom was conquered by Babylon.

For the next 600 years, the Jewish people waited for one of their descendants to emerge and claim the mantle of Isaiah. His prophecies gave them hope for their future as they were passed from one empire to the next, going from Babylon to Persia, Greece, and then Rome:

In that day the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples; the nations will rally to him, and his resting place will be glorious.  

- Isaiah 11:10 

Jesus claimed that mantle when he began his public ministry, reading a passage from Isaiah 61 and claiming that it was fulfilled. (Luke 4:16-21)

His people were ready for a savior. The Romans had conquered them 60 years before he was born. It was hard to have much hope of overthrowing them without divine intervention. They ruled the known world with an iron fist. Their evil was obvious. They wanted their emperor worshipped as a god, an incredible sacrilege for a people famous for refusing to worship their neighbor's gods, much less their actual neighbors.

So when Jesus performed his most public miracle, feeding 5,000 people with a basket of bread and fish, the people knew what to do:

After the people saw the sign Jesus performed, they began to say, “Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.” Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself.  

- John 6:14-15 

One of the most interesting things about Jesus' time on Earth is that he never got involved in politics. It's very counterintuitive.

The Jesus of the Gospels was essentially a superhero come to life. He walked on water, healed the sick, and even raised the dead. There was no limit to his power.

Yet he didn't fight the Evil Empire when he had the chance. Imagine if Luke Skywalker had heard about the Death Star and said "Render unto Vader" instead of joining the Rebellion.

Jesus isn't mentioned in any of the contemporary histories of the period, which has caused many modern observers to wonder if he ever actually existed. But, then again, why would he be? He didn't actually do much to make historians notice him. What would someone in Rome care about an itinerant preacher from a backwater province who was killed before his movement got off the ground?

It was his followers that changed the world, not him. We know that Jesus was real because we know that people like Peter and Paul were. They had to have come from somewhere.

That was the key to what Jesus did with his time on Earth. He spent his life investing in the people around him.

The only way to change the world is to change it one person at a time. The multiplier effect does the rest. If you change the lives of two people, and they change the lives of 2 people, and each of those people changes the lives of 2 more, the numbers add up fast.

Jesus never needed to rule a country. That was hustling backwards.

A century after his crucifixion, another Jewish preacher emerged to claim the mantle of Isaiah. His name was Simon bar Kokhba. Every historian of the time period knew his name. The Jewish people gathered around his banner and rose up against Rome for 3 years, creating an independent Jewish state.

But what was the result of the heroism of Simon and his followers? Rome crushed their rebellion, just as they had crushed a different one 40 years before. There would not be another. The Romans burned Israel to the ground and ethnically cleansed the whole area. There would not be a significant Jewish presence in the region again for almost 2,000 years.

And for what? An independent Jewish state had already been tried before. It hadn’t worked. The people had rebelled against God and been just as evil as any of their neighbors. They couldn’t handle the power that had been given to them. There was no reason to think it would be any different this time around.

The political class of Israel, just like it has been in most places and times in human history, was broken and filled with people who pretended to love God but were really just in it for themselves. Jesus criticized the Pharisees more than he ever did the Romans. The last thing he was going to do was launch a rebellion to help them gain power.

It was as Isaiah said. Why spend your life trying to grow a tree when it was going to get cut down anyway? All nations have a life span. Judea. Assyria. Babylon. Rome. Israel. The United States. Political power always has an expiration date.

Jesus had all the power in the world and he gave it away. It doesn’t mean anything. There are better ways to change the world.

In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: 

Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. 

And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death -- even death on a cross!  

- Philippians 2:5-8