The Promise of Peace

Thank you for reading this sermon from Christ Fellowship. I hope and pray that this sermon will be a blessing of grace and truth to you. With that said, let me encourage you not to use this sermon as a replacement for your local church. Christ Jesus did not establish his Church simply for us to consume content. Instead, He calls us to be part of a real, covenant family.

Advent is the time when we reflect on the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. One of the great themes of Advent is “peace”. Christ is our Peace.

I think now is a good time to reflect on Peace.  There is no peace for Ole Miss fans this morning, as our coach appears to be leaving in the worst way possible. But that situation has highlighted for me, over the past several weeks, why peace is so important.

It’s not just a feeling of tranquility. Peace is the absence of chaos and the presence of stability. It’s the feeling, the knowledge, and the experience we have when things are working the way they were intended to work.

When that’s not true, it creates anxiety or fear. Peace, then, is the calming answer to our “what if” questions. What if our coach leaves in the middle of a playoff run to take the job at our biggest rival?

That one’s petty in the grand scheme of things… But what if the market crashes? What if AI takes all the jobs? What if we start a war with Venezuela? What if my marriage fails? What if how I feel now is as good as it gets?

And for those questions, God has a clear answer. We start our Advent journey in Isaiah 11.

¹ There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.

Sometimes, when you cut down a tree, new shoots will try to grow up from the stump. That’s the illustration here. The line of David has been cut down, but it’s not dead yet. And so, right here in the very first verse, we already have Gospel imagery. Life from death.

This tree is pruned back but not abandoned. If the roots are still alive, the tree is not yet dead. This is a great place to begin our Advent meditation together. You might look at your life, your career, your marriage… and all you see is a stump. The “what if” questions are drowning out any hope of peace. But God brings dead things back to life.

² 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.

This new branch is a man, but He’s a man upon whom the Spirit of the Lord rests. There are also seven nouns attached to the blessing of the Spirit in this verse. Seven is the number of perfection, so He’s describing the perfect King.

³ And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.
He shall not judge by what his eyes see,
or decide disputes by what his ears hear,

This is a King who will love what God loves. He will make decisions based on truth and evidence, not based on bias or prejudice.

This is important because it means He will see the people no one else sees and hear the voices of people no one else hears. And that’s exactly what the next verse says:

⁴ but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,
and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;

This King will advocate for the people who can’t advocate for themselves. This is someone with power and wealth using His position to care for the poor and the meek. And that’s not at all how the world typically works, is it?

and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.

 Justice cuts both ways. This King will do the right thing, using His power to help the needy, but He will also punish the wicked.

⁵ Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist,
and faithfulness the belt of his loins.

A belt in the Bible is not an accessory. It’s an essential garment that holds everything else together. In this case, the character of the King is what holds everything together.

And now we come to the great promise of Isaiah 11. What is God going to accomplish through this great King? Let’s find out.

 ⁶ The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together;
and a little child shall lead them.

I remember being fascinated by this verse as a child. You’ve got animals that are natural enemies living together. And in the middle of it all is the surprising vulnerability of a small child.

In what kind of universe does something like this exist? Predators and prey living in peaceful harmony? A child leading wild animals? It’s like the Chronicles of Narnia!

There’s nothing else like this, not even in Scripture. What does it mean?

It means that Jesus will bring a kind of peace to the world that otherwise seems impossible. And there’s more:

⁷ The cow and the bear shall graze;
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

This new kingdom will be a place where the violent instincts of our world will come to an end. No more bloodshed. No more fear. Look at verse 8!

⁸ The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra,
and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den.

Even the most vulnerable creatures will be safe around the most dangerous creatures.

How is such a reality possible? Look at verse 9.

⁹ They shall not hurt or destroy
in all my holy mountain;
for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.

Why will there be peace on earth, which will include the end of violence and the absence of fear? Because the earth will be saturated with the knowledge of the Lord. Peace will be achieved by knowledge of the Lord.

Who or what does that phrase refer to? Verse 10 answers that question and closes out this prophecy.

¹⁰ In that day the root of Jesse, who shall stand as a signal for the peoples—of him shall the nations inquire, and his resting place shall be glorious.

Verse 9 says that knowledge of the Lord will saturate the earth as the waters cover the sea. Then verse 10 says the nations will inquire of the King, the root of Jesse. In other words, knowledge of the Lord will spread to the whole earth by the Word of this King. This, of course, is Jesus.

In John 17, Jesus says in prayer to the Father:

³ This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.

What is eternal life? It’s a life without fear of death. It’s a life of peace, stability, and assurance.

The Bible consistently teaches that this kind of peace is the direct fruit of knowing God, and the lack of peace is the direct fruit of not knowing Him. In the Messiah’s kingdom, the earth is full of the knowledge of the LORD—and therefore full of peace.

And so, we can confidently say that this life of peace that God promises in Isaiah 11 is a life found only in the knowledge of God, which is most visibly displayed for us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We can also confidently say that there is no hope for peace apart from the knowledge of God in Christ. The forces that contribute to the current state of the world – the fear, the violence, the uncertainty, the power struggle, things like racism, classism – these things will NOT end because of human effort.

The world has more knowledge at its fingertips than we have ever had before. Right now, around the world, 100 zettabytes of information is being stored on computers.

To help you visualize that, just one zettabyte would fill over a trillion books cover to cover… 30 billion 4k movies… or for us older folks, if you stored all of that on DVDs and stacked them up, the stack would reach past the moon.

All that knowledge and we’re still fighting wars over land and money. All that knowledge and we’re still living in fear. And you might say, give it time. It’s going to get better.

I don’t think so. Not without the knowledge of the Lord. In fact, the 20^th century was history’s bloodiest century by far and most of that violence was caused by political powers that explicitly rejected Christ and embraced humanism.

The leaders of those violent regimes were well-educated men. Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, and Mao were all highly intelligent men. They were all avid readers.

All four of them claimed, loudly and repeatedly, to be concerned for the poor, the oppressed, and the common man. They promised liberation, equity, and peace. But millions of people followed them into starvation and war. The used the poor and then destroyed them.

Knowledge is not the answer to the world’s problems when there’s an absence of character. In fact, knowledge in the wrong hands has historically led to more oppression and violence.

It’s the character of King Jesus in Isaiah’s prophecy that sets him apart from the rest of us. This is a King who refuses to manipulate people to get what He wants. This is a King whose concern for people is genuine and effective.

The false saviors of this world promise us everything and give us nothing. And that’s not just wicked politicians… it really is a universal human problem.

Listen to how Jeremiah 6 describes us:

¹³ “For from the least to the greatest of them,
everyone is greedy for unjust gain;
and from prophet to priest,
everyone deals falsely.

¹⁴ They have healed the wound of my people lightly,
saying, ‘Peace, peace,’
when there is no peace.

According to God, corruption is universal and no one is going to bring peace to this world except for Him. Talking about peace isn’t the same thing as providing it.

And that is the real wake-up-call of Isaiah 11. It’s a call to repentance. Stop attaching your hopes and fears to temporary saviors.

Everyone in this room, including me, has those “What if” questions swirling around in our head at times. On a scale of 1 to 10 how much peace are you experiencing right now in your daily life? And we keep searching the Internet or refreshing our feed looking for answers. Why doesn’t it work?

Think about the wolf and the lamb or the calf and the lion from Isaiah 11. We have wolves and lions at the Memphis Zoo, right? We get to watch them safely from behind glass or on the other side of a fence. And they seem peaceful. Wild animals in captivity always seem peaceful.

But would you send your young child over the fence? Of course not. What’s going to happen if you drop a lamb in the enclosure with the lions? We all know what would happen.

The world keeps trying to build better fences – laws, reforms, education. These things matter, but none of them can change the nature of wild animals. Wolves and lions are still dangerous.

There’s only one King who can change the nature of wild animals. And God dropped him like a lamb into an enclosure with hungry lions. They ripped him to shreds, but His death brought peace with God.

The only way you are ever going to experience lasting peace in a world like this is if Christ is your peace, first with God and then with everything else.