Isaiah's vision of God putting the world to rights

The following is an excerpt of Tom Wright's recent sermon on Isaiah 11.1–10; Acts 17.22–32.

I find the first paragraph amusing - abstract thoughts of a theologian! But the following comments on Isaiah's vision are profound. We have messed up God's creation, but God is in the process of putting it to rights by transforming it. May that be our vision too!

(Click here for the whole sermon.)

"The theologian tells the time by looking at the future and the past and discerning where we are in relation to both of them. And a great deal of the trouble in today’s world is caused by people who think we’re living in the past, on the one hand, and by people who think we’re living in the future, on the other hand. You and I are called to live in the present, in appropriate relation to past and future, but in a realistic appraisal of the differences between present and past and present and future.

Now that’s horribly abstract, so let me at once jump to something solid, concrete, and actually stunningly beautiful. Here is the vision of the future we heard a few minutes ago, one of the most evocative passages in all poetry:

The wolf shall live with the lamb
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling 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 asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain;
for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea.

Isaiah’s vision of a world put to rights: not only put to rights, but transformed, made to be more fully and gloriously itself, discovering at last what the Garden of Eden might have become if only we hadn’t messed it up. " (Emphasis added)