"The branch of Jehovah" (Isaiah 4:2), the sprout of Jehovah, Messiah (Jeremiah 23:5; Jeremiah 33:15; Zechariah 3:8; Zechariah 6:12; Luke 1:78 margin). Fruit bearing, so as to "fill the face of the world with fruit" (Isaiah 27:6). He is at once a "branch" and a "root" (Isaiah 11:1; Isaiah 53:2). "The root and offspring (offshoot) of David" (Revelation 22:16), the Brother of man and the Source of manhood. Luke 2:7 shows the depressed state of David's royal line, represented by Joseph and Mary, at the time when Jesus was born "out of the stem of Jesse" (the stump cut close to the roots at that time); "a root out of a dry ground." Perfect purity and grace were wrapped up under the root's seemingly unattractive scales. Sin had dried up the life of the humanity out of which He sprang.
        Degenerate human nature, even Judaism, could never have produced Him. Though rooted in the dry ground of earth, He had a heavenly and self derived life. Believers being such "as He is in this world" (1 John 4:17) are also "branches" in Him the living vine, yielding fruit instinctively, spontaneously, naturally, their love corresponding to His (John 15), "the branch of My planting" (Isaiah 60:21). "An abominable branch," a useless sucker cut away by the husbandman; else the tree's branch on which a malefactor was hung, and which was buried with him. "They put the branch to their nose" (Ezekiel 8:17), expressing insolent security; they turn up their nose with scorn, or rather they held up a branch of tamarisk to their nose at daybreak, while singing hymns to the rising sun.