A Translation & Sermon by Nate Wilson for Christ the Redeemer Church, Manhattan, KS, 30 July 2006
1. Let me sing of my beloved, a song of my beloved for His vineyard:
There was a vineyard belonging to my beloved in a rich promontory.
2. And He dug it
and de-stoned it
and planted gourmet-vines
and built a tower in the middle of it
and also hewed a winepress in it,
and He anticipated for it to make grapes,
but it made sour-grapes.
3. And now, inhabitant of Jerusalem and man of Judah, please judge between me and my vineyard:
4. What more is to be done for my vineyard that I have not done with it?
Why have I anticipated for it to make grapes and it has made sour-grapes?
5. And now let me make known to you what I am doing to my vineyard:
to remove its hedge so it will be for feed,
to pull down its wall so it will be for a run-down place.
6. I will put an end to it;
it will not be pruned or hoed, and briers and thorns will grow up,
and I will prohibit the clouds from raining rain upon it.
7. For the vineyard of Jehovah of Hosts is the house of Israel,
and the man of Judah is His pleasing plant,
and He anticipated for there to be justice but look, juicing,
and for there to be righteousness but look, crying!
8. Woe, those who extend house with house, they adjoin field with field until there is no more place,
and you are made to dwell alone in the inner part of the land.
9. Jehovah of Hosts is swearing in my hearing,
“Many houses will become a desolation,
and good houses without inhabitant.
10. For 10 acres of vineyard will (only) make one tub,
and 10 bushels of seed will (only) make a bushel.”
11. Woe to those who, early in the morning, pursue alcohol; after dusk wine inflames them.
12. There is a guitar and a harp, a tambourine and flutes and wine at their parties,
but they do not pay attention to the work of Jehovah or see the doing of His hands.
13. Therefore my people go into exile without knowledge,
its glory, hungry men, and its multitude, parched with thirst.
14. Therefore Sheol has enlarged its appetite
and opened the mouth wide beyond measure,
and her glory will go down and her multitude and her noise
and the one who exults in her.
15. And man is humbled and each is brought low,
and the exalted eyes will be brought low.
16. But Jehovah of Hosts will be exalted in judgment
and the Holy God sanctified in righteousness.
17. And rams will pasture as is their manner,
and the nomads will eat of the wastelands of the rich.
18. Woe to those who draw iniquity, with cords of vanity and sin, with cart ropes.
19. who say, “Let Him speed, let Him hasten His deed, in order that we may see!
“et the counsel of the Holy One of Israel come - and come near - so we may know it!”
20. Woe to those who say to evil, “Good!” and to good, “Evil!”
setting darkness for light and light for darkness,
setting bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.
21. Woe those who are wise in their eyes and in front of their faces consider themselves intelligent.
22. Woe, those who are champions for drinking wine and men of valor for mixing alcohol.
23. those who make righteous the wicked in order to gain a bribe,
and they turn away the right of the righteous from him!
24. Therefore, as a tongue of fire consumes stubble and flame withers the dry grass,
their root will be like rottenness, and their flower will go up like dust,
for they have rejected the law of Jehovah of Hosts
and the word of the Holy One of Israel they have despised.
25. Therefore, the anger of Jehovah burned with His people
and He stretched out His hand against it and struck it, and the mountains quaked,
and it came to pass that their carcasses were as refuse in the midst of streets.
In all this His anger was not turned aside, and still He is stretching out His hand.
26. And He will raise a signal to faraway nations and whistle for him from the ends of the earth,
and look, fast and light they come!
27. None is weary and none stumbles with him.
He is not drowsy nor does he sleep,
and the belt of his loins is not loose, nor is a lace of his shoe torn.
28. His arrows are sharpened, all his bows strung.
The hooves of his horses are considered as flint, and his wheels like the whirlwind.
29. His growl is like a lion, like young lions he growls.
He roars and seizes pray; he brings to seclusion, and there is none deliverer.
30. He will roar over it on that day, like the roaring of the sea.
And he looks to the land, and look, darkness – distress and light.
It has become dark in its clouds.
When I was a boy growing up in Alabama, in the Summertime we would eat Chilton County peaches. The best peaches come from Chilton County, right on the Georgia border. Those peaches are bigger and sweeter than anything I’ve ever had anywhere else in the U.S. I remember looking forward to that time of the year when we would be able to get a big box of those peaches and I could sink my teeth into the juicy sweetness; it’s just delicious fruit! Have you ever had that experience, just biting into a piece of fruit that is just so sweet, and the flavor bursts into your mouth? It’s just wonderful!
Have any of you tasted an unripe persimmon before? You’ve got to try the experience just once in your life. It is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. It’s just got an incredible pucker. I don’t know what the chemicals are in there, but when that persimmon is unripe it will turn your mouth inside out!
Here we have in Isaiah Five a parable about God planting a vineyard and expecting it to grow good fruit, but it produces bad fruit. Instead of producing that luscious fruit that tastes so good and is so refreshing, it’s producing something like an unripe persimmon. It’s disgusting and something that you can’t stand to eat.
The parable of the vineyard in Isaiah Five is explained in verse seven: “Israel is my vineyard: the vineyard of the Lord of Hosts is the house of Israel.” The gourmet grapevines, the good plants in the vineyard are symbolic of the men of Judah. God expects this vineyard to grow good fruit. But instead it produced bitter fruit. It didn’t produce gourmet grapes after all (v. 2). He looked for it to yield grapes and it yielded wild grapes instead of good grapes.
And in verse seven we have an explanation of the bad grapes: God says “I look for justice, but behold oppression; I looked for righteousness, but instead there was an outcry.” The fruit that God was looking for when He planted His people was justice and righteousness (Isa 56:1). That’s the literal meaning of that God was looking for in the figure of the vineyard. And just as the vineyard owner in the parable found bad fruit, so God is saying, “I’m looking at my people here, and I’m looking for them to give me good fruit—justice and righteousness—but instead they’re giving me bad fruit—they’re giving me oppression or bloodshed and an outcry of people that are being oppressed and hurt.” That’s not what God wants.
In John Chapter 15, God calls us His branches. Jesus extends the same parable beyond Israel to us. He says: “I am the true vine, my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit He takes away, and every branch that bears fruit He prunes it so that it bears more fruit.” Christians are supposed to be abiding in Christ and bearing fruit that God wants to eat.
In the rest of Isaiah Five, we have the six woes, and I see them as six of these kinds of bad fruit. Let’s look at these six kinds of bad fruit and then ask the question, “What is the good fruit that would correspond with what God actually wants, instead of this bad fruit that he is proclaiming woes against?”
We can learn from this what God wants of us.
The first woe starts in verse eight: “Woe to those who add house to house and join field to field, Until there is no more room, So that you have to live alone in the midst of the land!” This is speaking of materialism; people who are greedy for wealth and trying to get more and more gain for themselves.
These people are buying up houses and buying up land until there’s nothing left for anyone else. Kind of an ironic ending there, that once you’ve bought up all the land, you won’t have any neighbors because you own it all, and no one can live next to you anymore!
Then God proclaims His judgment, He says: “I will make your houses desolate, and make your houses without inhabitants.” This was fulfilled in the Babylonian captivity: all the rich people then were carried into Babylon as captives and their houses were left abandoned.
Now, if greed and materialism is the bad fruit, what is the good fruit that Jesus wants? Let’s jump over to another passage that talks about the fruit that God wants, and that’s Galatians Five. You may have memorized this passage - the Fruits of the Spirit. Here God talks about the bad fruit that He doesn’t like; the fruits of the flesh, and then the fruit that He does like; the fruits of the spirit.
Galatians five: “Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, of which I forewarn you, just as I have forewarned you, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.” (NASB)
Here’s a list in the New Testament of fruit God hates and the fruit God loves - the fruits of the Spirit. In the following chart, I tried to take the nine fruits of the Spirit and correspond them to the six woes in Isaiah Five. Some of them are not a perfect fit, but I think you’ll at least get the idea as you look across and compare them.
By the way the you’ll also notice I brought a comparison of the book of Habakkuk. It’s interesting that Habakkuk deals in reverse order with the same themes in Isaiah. It’s really fascinating. It was written pretty close after the time that Isaiah was writing about the same thing.
So this first woe of greed and materialism is for people are buying land and houses and try to take everything for themselves. The opposite of greed and materialism is kindness and love - caring about other people instead of selfishly taking for yourself. Love is giving of yourself to someone else. Jesus said: “Greater love has no man than this: that he laid out his life for his friends.” That is the response of love: to give and to be concerned with other people.
God wants us to have the fruit of love and kindness in our hearts. And when we see in our hearts the selfishness, the desire to grab things for ourselves, we need to recognize that as a fleshly fruit, not the fruit of the Spirit. When you recognize that you are grabbing things for yourself and being greedy, you need to say, “God, I’m sorry, that is wrong, that’s bad fruit. Please forgive me for that and help me love.”
The second woe starts in verse eleven: “Woe to those who rise early in the morning that they may pursue strong drink, who stay up late in the evening that wine may inflame them! Their banquets are accompanied by lyre and harp, by tambourine and flute, and by wine at their feet; but they do not pay attention to the deeds of Jehovah, nor do they consider the work of His hands.”
Here is the second woe, of idolatry of food and drink. Verse eleven is focusing on the drink, verse twelve is focusing on the feast. The issue is not so much what is at their feast, but what is not at their feast. They’ve got food and drink and music at their feast. There’s nothing wrong with guitars and harps and tambourines, and I would contend that there’s nothing wrong with wine either, but what is wrong is that they are lacking in regard for the Lord. They have everything but the Lord at their feast. They’re not regarding the work of the Lord or looking to the Lord and the works of His hands. They were partying without regard for the Lord.
These musical instruments - the harp, lyre, and flute – were all part of the worship of God at the temple. They’re supposed to bring glory to God, not merely entertainment to man. Likewise the wine was used in the temple as well in worship. Wine in itself is not bad if used to the glory of God. Of the 175 times that wine is mentioned in the Bible, half the time it is a positive thing, and half the time it is a negative thing. The problem was not the drink but the selfish pursuit of it from early morning until evening.
Morning and evening are naturally worship times in the rhythm of daily life; it’s what you do before you go to work and after work. The things you do every morning and evening paint a pretty good picture of what you worship. For some people, they listen to certain TV or radio shows every morning and evening, for the people in this woe of Isaiah, they were drinking booze every morning and evening, but the Bible calls for the worship of God every morning and evening. (Leviticus 6:20; 2 Kings 16:15; 1 Chronicles 16:40; 2 Chronicles 2:4; 13:11; 31:3; Ezra 3:3).
Habakkuk 2:5 & 15-17 describes the idolatry of drink in a similar way to Isaiah: "Furthermore, wine betrays the haughty man so that he does not stay at home. He enlarges his appetite like Sheol, and he is like death, never satisfied. He also gathers to himself all nations and collects to himself all peoples… Woe to you who make your neighbors drink, who mix in your venom even to make them drunk, so as to look on their nakedness! You will be filled with disgrace rather than honor. Now you yourself drink and expose your own nakedness. The cup in the LORD'S right hand will come around to you, and utter disgrace will come upon your glory. For the violence done to Lebanon will overwhelm you, aAnd the devastation of its beasts by which you terrified them, because of human bloodshed and violence done to the land, to the town and all its inhabitants.” (NASB)
God pronounces the judgment for this idolatry of food and drink in Isaiah 5:13 “Therefore my people go into exile without knowledge, its glory will be hungry men, and its multitude parched with thirst” (No more food and drinks!) That’s exactly what happened when the Chaldean army besieged the city of Jerusalem until they were starving to death, then breached the wall and carried them off into exile in Babylon. Verse 17 paints a picture of what Jerusalem will be like after it is emptied of its inhabitants by the Chaldean army – it will be a no-man’s-land which nomads will use to graze sheep on as they pass through Palestine. The judgment goes on past exile into death. Their unrestrained appetite for alcohol results in being consumed by Sheol, sinking and sliding down from their haughty heights into the grave.
God is just in judging His vineyard, as verses 4 & 7 show. By punishing sin rather than tolerating it, He shows righteousness, as verse 16 asserts. Even in the sinking down of His people, God is exalted. The opposite of the idolatry of food and drink (or of anything else) is the worship of God! God wants us to exalt Him every morning and evening.
“Woe to those who draw iniquity with cords of vanity and sin, with cart ropes.” The picture here is of a person pulling on a rope/cord that is attached to a heavy object. They are trying to carry the object along with them, but don’t actually want to be close to that object and actually pick it up and carry it in their hands. The burden they are bearing is actually their own sin. Thinking they are in charge of the situation, they are actually becoming beasts of burden for their own sin and it is driving them! But they don’t realize that, for they are hypocrites. They are acting as if they are godly and keeping a “safe” distance from sin, but really they are lying and promoting sin. They say, (v.19) “God, hurry up and do Your work, please come and be near and give us wisdom,” but they don’t mean a word of it. In fact they may be mocking God in their hearts thinking there is no God who would ever show up on the scene and judge them.
This woe corresponds to the woes Jesus pronounced upon the hypocritical religious leaders of His day in Matthew 23:25-33 "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside they are full of robbery and self-indulgence. 26 You blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and of the dish, so that the outside of it may become clean also. 27 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. 28 So you, too, outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. 29 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, 30 and say, 'If we had been living in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.' 31 So you testify against yourselves, that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. 32 Fill up, then, the measure of the guilt of your fathers. 33 You serpents, you brood of vipers, how will you escape the sentence of hell?”
The fruit of the Spirit opposite hypocrisy is faithfulness. God wants us to be faithful, trusting Him and obeying Him rather than mocking Him and trying to get away with evil.
The fourth woe is in v.20 “Woe to those who say to evil, ‘Good!’ and to good, ‘Evil!’ setting darkness for light and light for darkness, setting bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.”
We get confused when we loose our standard for deciding what is good and what is bad. If there is no objective, universal standard that says what is good and what is bad, then it’s everybody’s best guess which is which, and what’s bad for you might be good for me! When you forget God, this happens. Only when you recognize that you are not God, but that your Creator has expressed opinions on what He finds right and wrong, only when you bow your proud heart before Him and accept Him as the standard-setter, will you ever be able to get it right. Only when our country is willing to acknowledge God as the ultimate lawgiver and judge will we be able to agree on universal standards of right and wrong. Until then we’re going to see lots of perversion in our justice system, just like the Jews had when they forsook God. Abortion and homosexuality are wrong because God says they are, and no number of decisions by judges can change that. I remember as a kid growing up in school when the word “bad” was considered a positive word, “Hey man, that’s a BAD car!” meaning that it was worthy of notice, it was cool, striking in appearance, and powerful. That’s a perversion of the meaning of words.
In Matthew 23:16-24, Jesus told the leaders of His day, “Woe to you, blind guides, who say, 'Whoever swears by the temple, that is nothing; but whoever swears by the gold of the temple is obligated.' 17 You fools and blind men! Which is more important, the gold or the temple that sanctified the gold? 18 And, 'Whoever swears by the altar, that is nothing, but whoever swears by the offering on it, he is obligated.' 19 You blind men, which is more important, the offering, or the altar that sanctifies the offering? 20 Therefore, whoever swears by the altar, swears both by the altar and by everything on it. 21 And whoever swears by the temple, swears both by the temple and by Him who dwells within it. 22 And whoever swears by heaven, swears both by the throne of God and by Him who sits upon it. 23 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness; but these are the things you should have done without neglecting the others. 24 You blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!”
The fruit of the Spirit opposite perversion is goodness. We must recognizing that God defines what is Good and reveals it to us in the Bible, and then we must uphold what God says is Good. Don’t say something is o.k. just because other people want you to. Don’t say something is “cool” or “awesome” just because someone else thinks it is; make sure you speak the truth and call things what they truly are!
The fifth woe is in v.21 “Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and intelligent in front of their faces.” When you forget God, you loose your moorings in ethics (the discernment of right from wrong) and you also loose your moorings for epistemology (knowing how to know whether something is true or false).
Once again, God defines what is true and what is false. If you take God out of your thinking, you tend to start thinking that you can tell whether something is true or false by your own logic and intelligence. That’s what the people of Isaiah’s day were thinking, and that’s what most people in America are thinking today.
Just because somebody said it on the news doesn’t mean it’s true. I remember reading a newspaper article that claimed that the country of Yemen was so poor because they had so many babies. They were being wise in their own eyes, reinterpreting history according to their own assumptions of what made America prosperous. To them it was a simple matter of having fewer babies. God says that’s not true: Psalm 127:3 “…children are a gift of the LORD, The fruit of the womb is (a source of poverty? NO!) a reward… How blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them...” The truth is that the recent decline of fertility in the United States today is merely a short-term measure to preserve wealth from a previous generation by concentrating that wealth among fewer people. It won’t help the next generation. There are many other things which we do to use human reason to decide things, looking to our own opinions or the opinions of others for explanations about the world around us without reference to God. It’s all too easy to be wise in our own eyes. God says elsewhere in Proverbs 3:7 “Do not be wise in your own eyes; Fear the LORD and turn away from evil.”
The fruit of the spirit that might be best opposite being wise in our own eyes is patience: the willingness to submit to someone else’s control of the situation, to patiently wait on God to reveal what is right, to do what He says should be done rather than impetuously deciding for ourselves what is smartest and running with our foolish human ideas. Isaiah supports this in 49:23c "…Those who hopefully wait for Me will not be put to shame.”
v.22. “Woe, those who are champions for drinking wine and men of valor for mixing alcohol, 23. those who make righteous the wicked in order to gain a bribe, and they turn away the right of the righteous from him!”
I’ve seen a few lawyer movies where the cute young attourney presents a case so slick that his client gets off clean and everybody celebrates his “victory” in court afterwards at the beer party. He becomes a hero of sorts who gets all kinds of interesting cases because he is a smooth talker who can help criminals avoid punishment. But does the ability to manipulate justice and con people with your words make you a hero?
I’ve also seen the beer commercials. The famous athlete runs down the field with a football under his arm crosses the touchdown line, grabs a conveniently-located can of beer and quaffs it while a bevy of young women in cheerleader outfits look on adoringly. But, does running around with a pigskin and drinking Budweiser make you a hero?? We all-too-easily acclaim the wrong sorts of activity!
The fruit of the Spirit opposite such misplaced heroism and injustice would be gentleness and self control. True heroism is denying yourself and helping the helpless and upholding justice. True heroes are men like
· John Bunyan who dared to preach the Gospel in the open fields when it was against the law and got thrown in jail for it, but undaunted wrote the greatest work of Christian literature in history from his jail cell – the book called Pilgrim’s Progress.
· Eric Liddell who won the quarter mile race in the Olympics and then gave his life as a missionary in a communist labor camp in China because the Chinese needed to hear of salvation from sin through Jesus Christ.
· A more modern example is Chief Justice Roy Moore who had the guts to risk losing his prestigious job and stand up to the supreme court with the truth that all just laws are based in the 10 Commandments of God.
These are the kind of actions that constitute true heroism. These are the kind of biographies we need to be reading so that we are not tempted to find a counterfeit heroism alluring!
Verses 24 through the end describe in detail God’s sentence of judgment upon the people of Isaiah’s day who indulged in these six vices:
· Their city would be burned (v.24)
· God would be angry at them and strike them (v.25)
· God would raise up a well-disciplined foreign army to capture and carry off the people of Jerusalem, it says in vs. 26-29, as indeed happened when the Chaldean army under Nebuchadnezzar captured the city of Jerusalem and took its inhabitants into exile in Babylon.
· V.30 talks about “distress and light” then “dark” - probably indicating that the story of the Jews would be one of alternating oppression and hope, from the Assyrian threat of Isaiah’s time to the Babylonian captivity over a century later, then the Persian reconstruction under Ezra and Nehemiah after 70 years, then the wars with the Samaritans and Greeks and Romans during the intertestamental times, the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in 70 A.D., and now continuing wars with the Arabs.
The root of all the woes listed above: materialism, idolatry, hypocrisy, perversion of the truth, humanistic pride, false heroism & injustice – is a rejection of God and His word. That’s what it says at the end of v. 24 “they have rejected the law of Jehovah of Hosts, and the speech of the Holy One they have despised.” As long as we reject God and His word, we will experience a topsy-turvy history. We will be under the hand of God’s judgment.
The bottom line is summarized at the end of the book of Ecclesiastes (12:13) “Fear God and keep His commandments!” The first step is to fear, respect, honor God for who He really is. He is the one who made you. He is the one who has revealed the truth to you in the Bible. He is the one who decides what is right and wrong. He is the one for whom we should devote our lives in worship. And He is the one who devoted the life of His Son, Jesus, to die on a cross and suffer the punishment we deserve for our rejection of God and His word, and make a way of reconciliation between us and God. If we will accept all of this as true, it will be natural to wrap our lives around these truths and to obey God’s commandments. If we believe all this, God promises that His Spirit will live inside of us and grow the kind of gourmet fruit He loves – fruit better than any Chilton County peach – the fruit of “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.”
|
Isaiah 5 reference |
Description |
Matthew |
Habakkuk |
Opposites |
|
v. 1-7 |
Parable of vineyard that produced bad fruit |
Matt 21:33ff – parable of vineyard tenants |
Hab. 3:17ff “vines produce no fruit… high places” |
John 15 “I am the Vine…” Col 1:6 “bearing fruit in every good work” |
|
v. 5-6 |
Destruction of vineyard |
Matt. 21:40ff
|
Jer 5:10 Ezek 19:10-14 |
Zeph. 3:17 “he will rejoice over you with shouts of joy” |
|
v. 8-10 |
First Woe: Greed, Materialism |
Matt. 23:14,38 “Woe to you… devour widow’s houses… houses will be left desolate” |
Hab. 2:6, 9-11 “Woe to him who increases what is not his… set nest on high” |
Gal 5:19-23 Fruit of Spirit: kindness, love |
|
v. 11-17 |
Second Woe: Idolatry of food and drink |
|
Hab. 2:5,15 “Woe to you who make your neighbors drink…” |
self control, peace, joy |
|
v. 18-19 |
Third Woe: Hypocrites |
Matt. 23:25-30 “Woe…whitewashed tombs… hypocrites” |
Jer. 5:11-17 2 Pet. 3:3-7 “Mockers… Where is the promise of His coming?” |
Patience |
|
v. 20 |
Fourth Woe: Lying, Evil Judges |
Matt. 23:16-24 “Woe… blind guides… tithe mint… but neglect weightier matters…” |
Hab. 1:4 “justice comes out perverted” |
Goodness |
|
v. 21 |
Fifth Woe: Proud Humanists |
|
Prov 3:7 “do not be wise in your own eyes; fear God” |
Faithfulness |
|
v. 22 |
Sixth Woe: Misplaced Heroism, misplaced justice |
Matt. 23:15 “Woe… you make your disciples… more a son of hell than yourselves. |
Hab. 1:4 “justice is never upheld, the wicked surround the righteous” |
Gentleness |
|
v. 24-25 |
Review: Sentence, Root problem, and past judgment |
Matt 22:36-37 “Great commandment… Love the Lord your God…” |
Eccl. 12:13 “fear God and keep His commandments” |
|
|
v. 26-30 |
Punishment: Invasion by foreign army |
Matt. 23:38;24:2ff |
Hab. 1:6-10 |
Canticles 4:16 “Let my beloved come and eat the choice fruit of my garden!” |