Isaiah 11:6-10 Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke
God’s Zoo Summer Worship Series Sunday, September 5, 2021 “Peaceful Animals”
There are predators and there are prey. Among the animals that we see in the world around us, there are some that attack and fight and capture and kill and eat other animals, and there are animals that are in danger of being captured and killed and eaten. That is why some zoos can have petting areas where families can feed and touch animals that are not likely to do them any harm, while other animals need to be carefully separated from people and each other by cages or enclosures. There are predators and prey. Some animals at the zoo would be fed with hay and oats and alfalfa and other plants, and some require the flesh of other animals. Perhaps even in some cases the zookeepers need to provide live animals that these animals can capture for food. In the past few weeks, I have also seen several online posts about neighborhood dogs being attacked in their own yards. A coyote or a bobcat would jump into an enclosed yard and snatch the small dog to take it away and eat it. A few of the neighbors who mentioned something like this were able to chase the predator away and save their pet, but others were not that fortunate. This is the reality in the world. There are predators and prey, so there are animals that we simply don’t expect to get along or to coexist peacefully in a single area. And that’s what is so surprising about what we read in Isaiah chapter 11. A wolf and a lamb, a leopard and a young goat, a young lion with a fattened calf. These are pairings that under normal circumstances we would expect to turn out very badly. We would expect that one of the animals in each pair would, well, be ripped to shreds by the other. We would expect the kind of scene that nature documentaries show with all the gruesome results. But that is not what Isaiah describes. He talks about these animals living a lying down together. He talks about a little child leading them and young children playing near venomous serpents. He talks about some of the most ferocious meat-eating creatures dining on grass and hay. He is talking about peaceful animals, animals without a predator-prey relationship. He is talking about animals that do no harm to each other or to people anywhere. This is what it looks like on what God describes as his holy mountain. So where is this particularly unique zoo that the prophet describes? Actually, we aren’t looking for a particular place to find this. We are really asking, “What exactly does the prophet describe? Is this a real thing that we are going to see in animals?” And the answer is no. We aren’t looking for animals that we are used to seeing as enemies to suddenly become friends. The prophet, inspired by God is describing a situation or a condition, one that involves peace and security, one that does away with or reverses the effects of sin. Think about it. In the perfect Garden of Eden, animals would not have eaten one another. They would not have threatened people. Everything lived in perfect harmony. It is a result of sin that animals kill and eat other animals. In a perfect world there is no death. But there has been death in our world, for people and for animals, for a long time. Sin entered into the world when our ancestors Adam and Eve gave into the devil’s temptation, and both sin and death affect us all our lives. But Isaiah says that this will be undone. He is talking about the work of the Messiah. He is talking about the work of the one promised long ago who has now come and done this work, Jesus our Savior. When Isaiah describes these peaceful animals, he is describing the messianic kingdom. He is describing what happens because Jesus lived and died for us and because the Holy Spirit has brought us to trust in his sacrifice. If we would have started our reading at the very beginning of the chapter, we would have heard about a shoot that comes up from the stump of Jesse. That shoot is Jesus, a descendant of Jesse and his famous son, King David. We sometimes use those verses around Christmas, to discuss how in God’s perfect timing he sent his Son Jesus to be the world’s Savior. The famous kings of Israel had been long past and gone. But a perfect Savior, a perfect man who was also God himself, out of the line of kings came to be King of the