Today's Sufficient Grace

Isaiah 10-11 may be a couple of my favorite passages in the Bible. In Isaiah 10:5ff we read of God's sovereignty over the nation of Assyria; and even in though God righteously uses that wicked nation, He still judges them for their wickedness (Isa 10:12ff).

In this passage we also have a picture of God's punishment of His people by the Assyrians, but in the end the Assyrians will be cut down.  The Assyrians are portrayed as a forest that the Lord is going to cut down (“He will cut down the thickets of the forest with an axe, and Lebanon will fall by the Majestic One.” (Isaiah 10:34, ESV)).

From this picture of a raised forest -- a land of just fallen trees and stumps emerges a grand picture of the reign of the Messiah:

 “There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. 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 disputes by what his ears hear, but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist, and faithfulness the belt of his loins.” (Isaiah 11:1–5, ESV)

So compressed is Isaiah's prophecy that he anticipates the First Advent of Christ through to Christ's intended reign over all the earth, in the Final State.

“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. The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den. 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.” (Isaiah 11:6–9, ESV)

That's the point.  That's the goal. “. . . the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” (Isaiah 11:9, ESV). This is the end of why the world was created.