Dancing With Wolves

Everybody wants peace. Well, almost everyone. We all know people who are never happier then when they’re in the middle of a crisis, and of course there are terrorists and other people who try to get what they want by violence. But even those would probably say that they too want peace. It’s just that they want it on their terms, and are prepared to kill to achieve their objectives. Others - like Patrick Henry with his famous “Give me liberty, or give me death” speech - find the price of peace to be too high. But most people just want to be left alone to live their lives without fear - or interference. And since people also want to believe that what they want is possible, they’ll follow almost anyone who’ll promise them peace.

WWI was called “The War to End All Wars.” It was one of the most appalling ever fought, with over 8 million killed, over 21 million wounded and nearly 8 million more prisoners or missing, on both sides. The Geneva Conventions banning poison gas and biological warfare hadn’t been ratified yet. Woodrow Wilson’s dream project, The League of Nations, was supposed to substitute talking for fighting, but the US never ratified it, and it never really accomplished much. WWII came along all too soon.

And yet throughout the intervening 20 years, a mood of almost militant pacifism reigned. No one wanted to believe that such a thing could ever happen again, and so we were taken by surprise. But with the advent of nuclear weapons, it finally seemed as though humanity had learned that war was simply too dangerous - and so practically anybody who was anybody joined the United Nations and we began the Cold War, where talking and “Mutually Assured Destruction,” also known as MAD, kept us all from killing each other in anything like the numbers of the previous wars. Well, of course there were Korea and Vietnam and the killing fields of Cambodia and Angola and Afghanistan... and so on down the alphabet - but still the lid was sort of kept on by fear of worse. And as soon as the Berlin Wall fell, we all breathed this huge sigh of relief, declared a peace dividend, and started planning for a peaceful, democratic, prosperous etc. world where wolves would indeed lie down with lambs. After all, if France and Germany can kiss and make up, can’t everyone? The great nonsense poet Ogden Nash once wrote,

“The Frenches do not like the Germans, who call them names in hymns and sermons.

The Germans do not like the Frenches, who like to shoot at them from trenches.

Let’s hope that all this fuss and commotion stays where it started - across the ocean!”

Yes, peace is a universal dream, and every now and then it seems to swim tantalizingly close. In Isaiah’s day, the big threat was Assyria. The northern kingdom of Israel had been conquered and its people put to the sword or sold into slavery, and yet the people of Judea still wanted to believe that, somehow, they’d escape the gathering threat. Isaiah didn’t offer them much comfort, though. Although the Assyrians did withdraw after King Hezekiah listened to Isaiah’s advice and trusted God instead of foreign alliances to save them, Isaiah and anyone who was really listening knew that this was only a temporary reprieve. But he did hold out hope for the future.

Some day in the future, a descendant of King David’s father Jesse would come onto the scene. And this is the first clue they missed. It wasn’t a shoot from the stump of David, the warrior king, it was a shoot from the stump of Jesse - the peaceful Bethlehem sheepherder. The way to peace would no longer be through war. The other clue that they wouldn’t get - until after Jerusalem fell 150 years later - was that the royal line would be all but wiped out. Israel would no longer be the flourishing vineyard that God had planted, but instead a field of burned-out stumps.

Into this desolate scene will come someone completely different. Isaiah goes on to describe the coming rescuer as someone who will not only be “a man after God’s own heart” as David was, but he will actually rule “with wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.” [v. 2] King David, as we know, had loved and feared God, but he was a little short on wisdom, understanding and counsel, as is obvious the minute we look at his home life. As a husband and father he left a lot to be desired. At any rate, this promised rescuer would be the kind of person who not only knew what was right, not only desire what was right, he would also have the authority to make it happen. And yet he isn’t going to achieve it by military power. Instead, his words will carry the clout that will change things. “He shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,” proclaimed Isaiah, “and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.” [v. 4]