Who was this mighty lion of Judah?

The point of Scripture is to give us hope that evil will be totally defeated and never be a force or influence ever again. 

Scripture also gets the point across very early on in Genesis 3:15, that we are in for a battle, in which evil would cripple us humans and really mess up our lives, but “the seed of the woman,” a human being, would strike a fatal blow on evil, destroying it forever. 

The promise of that fatal blow began with Adam and Eve’s third son, Seth (4:25), whose lineage led to Noah (5:6-32), in whose lifetime evil became so awful that, if it wasn’t for Noah “walking with God,” evil would have triumphed over humanity, either in making everyone evil or causing God to destroy all humans forever (6:1-9).

Noah’s lineage through his son Shem then led to Abram (10:21-31, 11:10-26), and to Abram God promises that “all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (12:3). That blessing was passed on to Abram’s son, Isaac (26:2-3), to Isaac’s son Jacob (28:1-4), whose name God changed to “Israel” (35:10), and now through Israel God’s promise to Abraham would continue (35:11-12). God also promised Jacob he would make Israel into a great nation (46:3, 48:3-4), and Jacob then told his son Joseph that God would take them all “back to the land of their fathers (Canaan)”(48:21).

While still in Egypt and just before he died, Jacob blessed each of his twelve sons, who would later become “the twelve tribes of Israel” (49:28). It was the blessing on his fourth son, Judah, that stood out from the rest. Never from Judah would “the sceptre depart” (49:10). So Judah would always have royal authority, over both his enemies and his brothers (8), and his “ruler’s staff” – legislative and judicial rule – would continue uninterrupted “from between his feet,” meaning through his descendants. 

“Until,” that is, “he comes,” verse 10, “to whom all this rightly belongs, and the obedience of the nations is his.” Never did Judah’s descendants receive such global obedience. A taste of it, yes, in the reigns of David and Solomon, both in Judah’s lineage, but no fatal blow to evil as promised in Genesis 3:15. No lion of Judah managed that UNTIL a “Son of David” came (Matthew 21:9), later identified as Jesus in Revelation 5:5 “the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David” who “triumphed” over evil. And it’s back in Genesis 49 that Jacob sees “A world free of evil” too….(next blog)