A Shoot from the Stump

Zedekiah, the last king of Jerusalem, was given a name that meant the LORD is my righteousness. He held the throne eleven years, until the Babylonians caught him fleeing, killed his sons in front of him, put out his eyes, and led him in chains to Babylon (2 Kings 25:7). The name went dark with him.

The throne promised never to end was a stump in a burned field. Jeremiah, who watched the axe come down, is handed this: I will raise up for David a righteous Branch (Jeremiah 23:5).

Branch is a small, green, stubborn word. Cut certain trees to the ground and they do not die — they throw up a shoot from the old root. Foresters call it coppice. The dynasty was not cleared away. It was coppiced.

Zedekiah's name and the Branch's are built from the same Hebrew word for righteousness, tsedeq. Zedekiah's claimed it as his own: the LORD is my righteousness. The Branch's hands it to the whole people: ‘The LORD is our righteousness’ (Jeremiah 23:6).

My had become our.

Zedekiah wore the claim; no king could make it true. Neither can we. We keep a record of our own — the work, the children, the decency we are sure of — and would lose our eyes before letting it go.

Centuries on, a son of David made it true: God made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21). He did not only execute justice — he stood where the unjust should have stood. That same King will set the land right; that half is still waiting.

Jeremiah says the name again, over the people themselves (Jeremiah 33:16). When the accuser is right about us — and he often is — the heart’s one defense is Christ’s righteousness credited to us.¹ Credited is not pretence: it is ours, because we are really his.²

God grew his King out of the wreck and gave that King’s name to the people who had earned the axe. Where there should have been ash, a green shoot — and, hidden inside the King’s name, our own.