As Christians, we are a people of hope. We have a hope that there is more to this life and more beyond this life. Our hopes are fueled by the promises God has made to us and the proof that God has kept His promises. The promises God made to Adam and Eve, Abraham, and David were all fulfilled.
God made King David a promise, “When your days are over and you rest with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, your own flesh and blood, and I will establish his kingdom. He is the one who will build a house for my Name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. ... Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever” (2 Samuel 7:12-16 NIV). It was to be everlasting dynasty, a lineage of his own blood that would rule forever.
David’s son, Solomon, inherited the throne from him. That must be the start of this promised lineage, right? Not quite. When Solomon’s son, Rehoboam inherited the throne, the country was split in a civil war. God’s people had rebelled, so He passed judgment on them. He sent prophet after prophet to tell them to turn back and follow Him again. When they did not, He allowed them to be conquered, as He had promised.
However, the judgement of God was not the end of all hope. God sent the prophet Isaiah to tell the people that. That hope would come from the birth of a child. “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14 NIV). Isaiah promised them that then “there will be no more gloom for those who were in distress… He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever” (Isaiah 9:1-7 NIV). God’s judgment did not erase His promises. He did not forget the promise He made to David. The dynasty seemed to have ended, but God had plans to restore it.
Isaiah told them that at the end of this judgment, Israel would seem like a dry, decimated stump where once there had been a towering tree. It would feel like the tree was dead. However, he said, “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit” (Isaiah 11:1 NIV). The bloodline of David’s father, Jesse, was no longer in power. It might have seemed dead at the time, but when things were darkest for Israel, they would find that it was still alive.
He went on, “In that day the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples; the nations will rally to him” (Isaiah 11:10 NIV). God wasn’t just using this situation to give Israel hope again; He was using it to give hope to the whole world. The eternal King that He had promised would come from David’s line was meant to bless everyone on earth.
At the end of the second book of Kings, there are a couple of verses that don’t seem very important at first glance: “In the thirty-seventh year of the exile of King Jehoiachin of Judah, Evil-merodach ascended to the Babylonian throne. He was kind to Jehoiachin and released him from prison on April 2 of that year. He spoke kindly to Jehoiachin and gave him a higher place than all the other exiled kings in Babylon. He supplied Jehoiachin with new clothes to replace his prison garb and allowed him to dine in the king’s presence for the rest of his life” (2 Kings 25:27-29 NLT).
Jehoiachin had been the next-to-last king of Judah, the one who ruled before his uncle Zedekiah took over. As these verses reveal, he had been kept in safety in Babylon all that time. The line of kings that appeared dead was still alive. What had seemed like a cut off stump still had a living branch. Soon, a baby would be born to King David’s descendants. That baby was Jesus, and He will establish a kingdom that will live forever, just as God had promised David. When hope had seemed lost, God made it so that hope could be greater than ever for more people than ever.
