O ROOT OF
JESSE, who stands for an ensign of the people, before whom kings shall keep
silence and to whom the Gentiles shall make their supplication:
Come, and deliver us and tarry not.
Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.
The Israelites looked forward to the coming of a Messiah who
would restore them to a time of peace and prosperity. Their thoughts naturally drifted to the
nations's glory days: the time of the rule of King David. The Book of First Samuel chronicles the
emergence of David as a national figure and then king, first of Judah for seven
years, then of all Israel for a total of forty.
David ruled wisely (for the most part) slew the Philistine giant
Goliath, fought the battles of Yahweh, and kept the nation together in the face
of tremendous outside threats. A people
that had later lived under the crushing heel of the Syrians, the Assyrians, the
Babylonians, Greece and Rome longed for independence, peace and prosperity. That was the understanding of most of the
people who anticipated the coming of God's Messiah.
So intense was this desire that Israel even came to believe
that the Messiah would be a part of David's family tree. As David was a sprig off the root of his
father Jesse, so must the Messiah have David's blood in his own veins.
Isaiah, Chapter 11, Verses 1–3 read:
And there shall come forth a shoot
from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. 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 by what his ears hear;
In this season, we remember that the Infancy Narratives of
Matthew and Luke have Jesus being born not simply in the “town of Bethlehem,”
but in a population center known as “The city of David.”
It is not about wishful thinking; it is about hope.
The peace of the Lord be with you.
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