Isaiah 11:2

Isaiah 11:2

This is Isaiah's description of the Spirit of Whitsuntide, the royal Spirit which was to descend, and did descend without measure, on the ideal and perfect King, even on Jesus Christ our Lord, the only-begotten Son of God.

I. That Spirit is the Spirit of God, and therefore the Spirit of Christ. He is the Spirit of love. For God is love, and He is the Spirit of God. But the text describes Him as the Spirit of wisdom. Experience will show us that the Spirit of love is the same as the Spirit of wisdom; that if any man wishes to be truly wise and prudent, his best way I may say his only way is to be loving and charitable.

II. The text describes the Spirit as the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, i.e.as the knowledge of human nature, the understanding of men and their ways. If we do not understand our fellow-creatures, we shall never love them. But it is equally true that if we do not love them, we shall never understand them. Want of charity, want of sympathy, want of good-feeling and fellow-feeling,- -what does it, what can it, breed but endless mistakes and ignorances, both of men's characters and men's circumstances?

III. This royal Spirit is described as the Spirit of counsel and might, that is, the Spirit of prudence and practical power; the Spirit which sees how to deal with human beings, and has the practical power of making them obey. Now that power, again, can only be got by loving human beings. There is nothing so blind as hardness, nothing so weak as violence.

IV. This Spirit is also "the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord." They, indeed, both begin in love and end in love. (1) If you wish for knowledge, you must begin by loving knowledge for its own sake. And if this be true of things earthly and temporal, how much more of things heavenly and eternal? We must begin by loving them with a sort of child's love, without understanding them; by that simple instinct and longing after what is good and beautiful and true, which is indeed the inspiration of the Spirit of God. (2) The spirit of the fear of the Lord must be the spirit of love, not only to God, but to our fellow-creatures.

C. Kingsley, Westminster Sermons,p. 25.

Reference: Isaiah 11:3. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. iv., p. 225.