The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the seas (Isaiah 11:9).

The Old Testament is many things: long and sometimes hard to understand; divinely inspired and deeply human.  It contains some of the world’s most soaring writing, and some of the most searing.  It feels in many ways like a story in search of its completion.

It is. And that is why it is supremely a book of hope.

This week’s passage, Isaiah 11, closes out our Age to Age: The Big Story of God’s Faithfulness series.  We have visited some of the heights of the story the Old Testament tells – God’s promise to Abram to bless all the nations of the earth through Abraham and his family, the dedication of the Temple, as God fulfills his purpose to dwell in the midst of his people – and some of the depths: the fracturing of the kingdom under Solomon and his successors; the increasingly urgent prophetic warnings that, apart from true repentance and returning, Israel is headed to Exile.

Exile is the ultimate punishment for covenant-breaking.  The Land represents God’s “beachhead” in God’s purpose to rescue and redeem the whole world.  Israel, as the chosen people, represents all of humanity.  For the representatives of us all to be driven from the beachhead of God’s purpose is a catastrophe beyond words.  

This week, we back up chronologically just a bit.  Isaiah prophecies in the 8th century BCE, around a century before Jeremiah.  The rising regional superpower in Isaiah’s time was Assyria.  The Assyrians have been nibbling away at the Northern Kingdom, Israel, so deportations were common and dreaded.

Isaiah joins a host of faithful witnesses to the Lord and his word.  Idolatry always leads to injustice and immorality, and the God of justice will not harbor his anger forever.

And yet … and then, we come upon this beautiful eleventh chapter of Isaiah.  The chapter falls into three sections or scenes.  First, a depiction of one called the Branch and Root of Jesse.  Passages like this form the basis for Israel’s hope in a Messiah, an anointed king, whose rule will bring God’s justice, righteousness and peace to Israel and to the world.  Next a beautiful picture of “the peaceable kingdom”: when God finally and fully becomes king, natural enemies (lions and sheep, bears and cows, vipers and young children) are reconciled and harm one another no more.  Finally, the promise that what God will do will not only benefit Israel; the nations, too, will rally to the banner of the one called the Branch.

And in the midst, a promise: the earth will be filled with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.

The earth will be filled.  It will be filled full, filled up, overflowing with God’s faithfulness, goodness, justice, holiness, beauty and love.

What kind of people, what kind of community, ought we to be, who are inheritors of this hope?

Lord Jesus, thank you for this promise, the whole earth filled full with knowing you.  Continue working on our hard hearts, that our lives would be more fully aligned with this hope and your purposes.  Root of Jesse, root us in you!  Branch of Jesse, branch into us and bear fruit in us into the world around us!  Amen.