CHRIST THE BRANCH
Jesus is referred to as many things in the Bible, employing different metaphors to emphasize different aspects of His life and work. He is our wonderful friend and Savior Jesus.
One can study and meditate on Him and His work for us for the rest of their life and never fully exhaust all there is to know. To know Him better is to love Him more. We strive to learn more about Him because it helps us to love Him and serve Him and appreciate Him. And this is what life is all about: loving Jesus.
In the Old Testament there are prophecies concerning Jesus that refer to Him as “The Branch.” As with all direct references to Jesus in the Bible, The Branch highlights many wonderful things about our Lord. Let us consider this and see what we can learn.
The Old Testament predicted that Jesus would come and bring hope and restoration to the spirits and lives of God’s people. Jesus would be God’s Messiah—Hebrew for “anointed one,” equivalent to the Greek word Christ.
Zachariah, Isaiah and Jeremiah all employed this description of The Branch to refer to the coming anointed one of God whom we know as Jesus Christ.
The Branch refers to a new king whom God would raise up to reign and rule over His people. God would put life into the seemingly lifeless stump of the royal line of David and bring into the world the greatest and most significant man who ever lived.
All of the prophecies surrounding this Branch refer to aspects of the great work of Christ on our behalf. The entire Bible is about Jesus and we learn many things from the Old Testament about Him and His work.
The Branch prophecies pointed to the true and real fulfillment of God’s covenant promises made to Abraham (Gen. 12:1-3). They also spoke of a king from the lineage of David and His rule in the kingdom of God. They prophesied the fact that this Branch would cleanse the people of God from their sins forever. And that He would be the one to build the real “Temple of God” which would be a spiritual temple. We know it today as the body of Christ, the church.
A branch seems like a lowly and insignificant thing. And a branch coming from the root of Jesse, the father of King David, would have been, from a human standpoint, an unusual way to speak of the most important person to ever live on this planet.
But God does not see things from a human standpoint. And Jesus’s rise from the line of David as the Branch makes us aware of the humility He took upon Himself to come into this world as a lowly servant who rose to be glorified at the right hand of God because of the perfect work which He did.
The prophecies of God’s Branch, Jesus Christ, coming into the world seem to always occur when the people of God were at their lowest point. Which means that the Son of God is the message of hope for the world.
Christ is hope personified. And it is when we are at our lowest, in the darkness and valleys of life, that He comes to us, bringing not only salvation when we repent of our sins with a contrite heart, but also an abundant life lived in close fellowship and communion with our God.
Isaiah said, “A branch will come up from the stump of Jesse.” A living organism would grow out of a stump that was dead. The Spirit of the Lord would be upon this Branch (Isa. 11:1-2). God “quickens the dead and calls those things that be not as though they were” (Rom. 4:17)—bringing life from death, in other words. He has made us alive in Christ, even though we were dead in our sins (Eph. 2:1).
Jeremiah prophesied of a “righteous Branch” who would be a descendent of David and always do what is right on the earth (Jer. 33:15). To people living amid the horrors of exile, this came as a most refreshing reassurance that God’s promise to develop a king from the line of David (2 Sam. 7:12-16) had not been forgotten. God never fails to keep His promises. No matter how things appeared, those promises would “sprout up” in the person of the Messiah.
And no matter how things appear in our lives, no matter how dark the journey might get, the promises of God are always still in effect. God is always with us because Jesus is Immanuel, “God with us” (Matt. 1:23). The presence and power of God are always close to us because of Christ.
All of the kings and priests in the Old Testament pointed to Jesus. They were types of Christ. Zechariah the prophet made this known when he described the coming Messiah as “the Branch.” His prophecy spoke to the fact that Jesus would be our King and our Priest in the same person at the same time.
In Zechariah 6:12–13, God promised through the prophet that “the one whose name is the Branch” would “construct the temple of the Lord” and “possess the honor of royalty.” This is fulfilled in Jesus completely and finally.
Christ is the Priest who represents us and He is the King who rules and reigns in our hearts. Because He did “what was right on the earth,” living a perfectly sinless life, He can represent us to the Father as our Priest (Heb. 4:14-16), and represent the Father to us as our King (Rev. 1:5; 1 Tim. 6:15). He is the “one mediator between God and man” (1 Timothy 2:5).
The Temple of God had reference to the saved people in the Body of Christ. We know this because this is how the New Testament interprets prophecies such as these (1 Corinthians 3:16; 6:19). The “building” of God is the church (1 Cor. 3:9; 1 Peter. 2:5). Zachariah was talking about a spiritual temple, which is far more glorious, important and impressive than any physical edifice could ever be.
When we consider the bottom line to these prophecies of Jesus as The Branch, we see that they were foretelling the humanity and divinity of Christ Jesus. These references are fulfilled in the fact that “God became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14). Everything pointed to Jesus and everything is fulfilled in Jesus. Because Jesus is everything!
Because Jesus is an actual human descendent from King David, He is called the “Branch from the root of Jesse.” But Isaiah calls Him “the Branch of the Lord” (Isa. 4:2) because He is the eternal God. He is human and divine. He is God in a human body.
All of this is important because the work of Christ was to redeem humanity from our sins and to bring God near to us. So near that, he can actually dwell in us as his temple. He bore our sins in his own body on the cross first Peter 2:24 to bring us to God (1 Pet. 3:18).
What the message of Jesus as The Branch will always refer to is the fact that God comes to us when we do not deserve it. He comes to us when we are down and out. He brings us spiritual life when we are spiritually dead. He rescues us from condemnation. Jesus, the Branch of the Lord, has done everything for us.
Bryan Dewayne Dunaway
