“A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.” (Isaiah 11:1 NIV)
Moving onward to Isaiah 11, the storm is past and the sun shines, but it’s a devastated landscape. The previous two chapters were colored with smoky gray haze, red iron axes, and brown stumps. In Isaiah 9, God had cut off leader and prophet from Israel, and in Isaiah 10, the invading armies of Assyria were chopped down and lopped off.
So it’s a nice surprise when Chapter 11 starts with the color green. It’s like we’ve been driving across the desert and through the night for almost two chapters. Now, in the middle of nowhere, Isaiah pulls to the side of the road, gets down on his knees, and points to a stump. From there, a small green shoot is emerging. This will grow in a few verses to encompass a practical Noah’s ark of creatures, and then the entire world.
Here in the Evergreen State, we’re used to green shoots growing from pretty much everywhere. One year when I pruned our plum tree, some branches fell straight down and I forgot to clean them up. By the next year they had taken root and started to sprout. (I’m not a very tidy gardener.) Thanks to our mild temperatures and abundant rainfall, life takes root all over.
But drier climates are harder for plants, and only certain trees will sprout from the stump. Young trees are covered with buds that sprout branches as they grow, but these buds die at maturity, never to sprout again. Some trees have a set of buds at the root collar that stay young. When the rest of the tree is lost, these buds can sprout and regenerate the tree. This is why you might see a shoot from a stump, like Isaiah talks about, on a hike some day.
Scientists studied these trees to figure out what separates the stump sprouters from the plain old stumps. The trees with these dormant buds are not the mighty ones, but the weaker ones. Not the ones with thick bark – they’re already protected – but the ones whose bark is thin. Many trees growing in well-watered environments can’t sprout from the stump, they never had to, but the stump-sprouting trees grow in drier environments, with more frequent fires and other stresses. Not the carefree trees, but the troubled ones. (https://extension.psu.edu/what-makes-some-tree-species-prolific-stump-sprouters)
The nation of Israel had never lived a carefree existence, except maybe for a few years during the reign of Solomon (and look what happened after that). This nation-tree would sway in the wind, and offered little resistance to the iron weapons of armies from the north. But God hid dormant buds inside through His word and spirit. In Isaiah, He promises that they will grow again, even when all hope seems lost.
There’s a reasonable objection to this. Trees may sprout, but people don’t. Job makes this exact point, using the same botanical words as Isaiah 11:1: “For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its tender shoots will not cease. Though its root may grow old in the earth, and its stump may die in the ground, yet at the scent of water it will bud and bring forth branches like a plant. But man dies and is laid away; indeed he breathes his last and where is he?” (14:7-10 NKJV)
Yet Job held to hope that what was impossible with nature would be possible with God: “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and He shall stand at last on the earth; and after my skin is destroyed, this I know, that in my flesh I shall see God, Whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!” (19:25-27) Job trusted God’s justice, even after death.
God gave this verse to many different groups of His people over time, who longed for justice after disaster. He gives and has given new life, turning old stumps into new shoots. One black historian named specifically how God did this for his people in the late 19th century, after centuries of oppression. (I learned of this book through Esau McCaulley.)
In 1877, William J. Simmons published a collection of 177 short biographies of black Americans titled Men of Mark. Simmons said he wrote this book to teach his students at Howard University, to list the “great names” and to scientifically “furnish the data” of all they had done. Simmons had an organized mind, like the author of the Gospel of Matthew, come to think of it, as a teacher should.
Before Simmons started with his number-one example, Frederick Douglass, he wrote a Preface that left no doubt to Whom he gave ultimate credit: “God has permitted us to triumph and through Him. He implanted in us a vigorous spiritual tree.” Then he lists examples of triumph, churches, schools, ministers, teachers, clinics. He continues, “Slavery, though long and protracted, met in our race a vigorous, vital, God-like spirituality, which like the palm tree flourishes and climbs upward through opposition.” (p.8 https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/simmons/simmons.html) I’ve never seen a palm tree sprout from their stumps. I’m guessing Simmons deliberately chose this tree to show that it was God who made his people grow, to give glory to Him.
Isaiah uses these botanical words again, later in the book, in a passage of comfort to his people. But these words are a warning to the powerful, inverting the image of the sprouting stump. In Chapter 40, Isaiah re-uses the words for “stock” and “root” to say that YHWH “brings the princes to nothing; He makes the judges of the earth useless. Scarcely shall they be planted, scarcely shall they be sown, scarcely shall their stock take root in the earth, when He will also blow on them, and they will wither, and the whirlwind will take them away like stubble.” (40:23-24)
Isaiah 40:23-24 is the opposite of Isaiah 11:1. These are the mighty, well-watered trees that look strong, but don’t know their own weakness. When the storm comes, they will be burned up, chopped down, or blown away. But the shoot from the stump, the remnant, is rooted in the good soil and there it will stand to the end of the ages.
(Image: Red maple as a stump sprouter https://extension.psu.edu/what-makes-some-tree-species-prolific-stump-sprouters)
