“A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.  The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord—and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.”  Isaiah 11:1 – 3

As we read of how the Children of Israel turned their backs on God himself the situation grows more and more hopeless. The split that occurred after King Solomon’s reign set the nation against itself. The slope downward after that marks the history of the Jews.  They were plagued with division, with a hankering after the blessing of the local gods. The north was worse than the south, but both were doomed. Any hope of recapturing the vision of King David crumbled in the face of reality. And any hope that they might have had to be a strong nation again vanished as mighty neighbors were poised to pounce on them, Assyria and Babylon.

The Word of God came through the prophet Isaiah. There is hope because a deliverer will come, the Messiah, who will spring forth from the stump of the mighty felled tree, the sons of Israel. We have all gazed at trunks of fallen trees, lifeless but with a glorious history, now dead. Like the Jews. Once alive and productive, now hopeless.

We hear the cry of Zechariah, another prophet, “Return to your fortress, you prisoners of hope.”  I have thought long and hard about that amazing phrase, prisoners of hope.  We might say, we are bound to hope because the Spirit of God is in us to hope!  What do you think?

But it is not an unsupported hope. In Job 14:7 we read. “For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease.”  But how can that happen?

Surprise.  “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.  The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him.”  Our hope is not in hope itself, but it is hope that the Spirit of the Lord is on Jesus Christ.   We are imprisoned by that hope, so to speak.

We need to hear this word today as much as ever. We sing, correctly, a song, “My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.”  That sums it up.