Isaiah 5:1-7
Let’s hear the word of the living
God, Isaiah five, one through seven. Let me sing for my beloved,
my love song concerning his vineyard. My beloved had a vineyard on
a very fertile hill. He dug it and cleared it of stones
and planted it with choice vines. He built a watchtower in the
midst of it and hewed out a wine vat in it. And he looked for
it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes. And now, O inhabitants
of Jerusalem and men of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. What more was there to do for
my vineyard that I have not done in it? When I look for it to
yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes? And now I will tell
you what I will do to my vineyard. I will remove its hedge, and
it shall be devoured. I will break down its wall, and
it shall be trampled down. I will make it a waste. It shall
not be pruned or hoed. and briars and thorns shall grow
up. I will also command the clouds
that they rain no rain upon it. For the vineyard of the Lord
of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are his
pleasant planting. And he looked for justice, but
behold, bloodshed, for righteousness, but behold, an outcry.” Amen,
the word of the living God. I’ve always been daunted by the
book of Isaiah. So I’m glad that we are picking
our way through it over the next, uh, probably years worth of,
of weeks, I guess it has 60 some chapters. So divide that by 52
weeks, you know, maybe we split a chapter up or do a bigger chunk
at a time. That’s a little better than a
year, but in the book of Isaiah, you get all kinds of, uh, types
of literature. You get poetry, you get parables
such as this, you get, pronouncements of judgment. You get condemnations
and woes and terrifying things. But then you get wonderful pictures
of Jesus, such as the suffering servant songs that are in the
latter part of the book. Tonight, we get a little parable
on Israel as God’s vineyard. We get this parable that speaks
of how God gave Israel everything he could have given them. And
yet he finds no fruit in their lives. The way this passage goes,
and maybe you noticed it as we read through it, perhaps I should
have mentioned it before we read it. God tricks the people of
Judah into answering a question he gives that is really self
condemning once they give the answer. It’s sort of like when
Nathan the prophet came to David after he had taken Bathsheba.
Remember, he saw Bathsheba, he sent for Bathsheba, he took Bathsheba,
he committed adultery with Bathsheba, he produced a child with Bathsheba. In order to cover it up, he brought
the husband home. from war, he refused to go home
to her. And so try as he might, David
could not get him to lie with his wife in order that he could
be blamed or responsible for the pregnancy. And so he had
to resort to murder. He had to have Uriah the Hittite
murdered. So he had Joab put him near the
front lines where it was sure that he would be struck down
in battle. And so later on, David’s probably
thinking, I’ve gotten away with this. Nobody knows about it.
Life is good. And Nathan, the prophet comes to him and tells
him a story about two men that lived in the same town. And one
was rich and one was poor. And basically the rich man exploited
the poor man. And David gets so worked up,
so exercised. that he says, this man ought
to die. And you remember Nathan’s words to David, thou art the
man. And David was then convicted
of his sin. And that’s in a sense, the same
literary technique that, uh, that Isaiah uses, or God uses
here to speak for Israel. And he begins by telling the
story. Let me sing for my beloved Isaiah,
speaking of God, Yahweh, my love song concerning his vineyard. My beloved, that’s God. He had
a vineyard on a very fertile hill. If you get into vineyard
work, say you strike it rich and you know, you want to be
one of those people that in your retirement days or your wealth
growing days, you wouldn’t be a wine connoisseur or whatever. You pick a sunny spot. And so
in mountainous Israel, God picked a very fertile hill. It faced
the sun. It goes on to say, he dug it
and he cleared it of stones and he planted it with choice vines. You know, we have a man in our
church who was a wine distributor for about 15 years, and he knows
everything there is to know about wines. And he says that you can
taste a wine and tell from what part of the world or what part
of the country it came, how the grapes were produced. And supposedly
that’s a true thing. And of course, at the end here,
we see God who knows exactly where his grapes are coming from.
He says they’re wild grapes, they’re sour grapes, or literally
he says it’s stinking fruit. It’s no good to be used for wine. Well, God picks a fertile hill. He digs it, he removes the rocks
and he chooses the choicest vines. Over in my neighborhood, I’ve
got some folks who. they have roses. And we got one
lady, she has wild roses. They’re all over the place. And
she goes to Lowe’s and buys a little rose feed and puts it on. And
her roses look just as good as everybody else’s. But everybody
else’s are from this high-end rose place over in Durham. You
probably see their trucks, Witherspoon Gardens. And you can tell if
you’ve made it in the world if you have somebody driving from
Durham to keep up your roses. We went to this rose garden one
time in Durham and everybody picked out a little rose plant
that was sort of their personality, their color. And if you look
for them in our yard, they don’t look so great. The vineyard dresser’s
not doing a great job. But each of these rose species
or types has a name. And the name describes what it
is. And it’s pretty neat to see all
the different hybrids they’ve come up with of roses. And in
a sense here, when we read verse two, where it says he planted
it with a choice vine, some of the Bible translators say there
is a very specific name in the Hebrew language for this type
of grape. You know, sometimes we Go to
the doctor’s office and there’s like a wine connoisseur magazine.
We don’t know anything about it, but you suppose somebody
that does could enjoy it or people make weekend trips to vineyards.
That’s not me. I don’t know these things, but
when you mention a certain grape. A certain vineyard, a certain
vintage, people get really excited. And what God did in choosing
Israel and preparing the mountainside and preparing the soil and choosing
the choicest of vines is something that would get people into that
sort of wine thing really, really excited. Well, that passage goes
on to say, God built a watchtower. Nobody, no enemy is going to
come in and hurt my crop. And he began to get excited about
the pressing of the grapes into a good choice, wonderful, tasty
wine. And so he hewed out of a rock
a wine vat. One of the neat things about
going over to Israel is you’ll see the big vats where they pressed
olives or they pressed out wine. And so when Jesus, for example,
gives a speech about judgment, about the grapes of wrath and
how they’ll be trampled and all that. You see that all over the
agricultural world of antiquity over there. They knew what it
meant to press out olives and get the oil or to press out the
grapes and to get the wine. Well, our passage tells us that
Jesus looked for his vineyard. God looked for his vineyard to
yield grapes. but it yielded wild grapes. It yielded stinky fruit. Now
we’ve been thinking about the fruit of the spirit. The fruit
of the spirit is that fruit that comes from us because we are
saved through faith in Jesus Christ. We are born again from
above. And as we have died to sin and
been raised to new life in Jesus Christ, we live the new creation
life. studied this well, I think under
the last Sunday school series, under the life and teaching of
the apostle Paul, you heard some of his wonderful themes about
all that we are and all that we have in Jesus Christ. And
if you boil it all down, you can say this, God wants an obedient
people. What does a fruit bearing Christian
look like? Well, it looks like love, joy,
peace, patience, kindness, Faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. It
looks like a whole bunch of other things, maybe the words from
the Beatitudes. But boil it down. God is looking
for obedient servants. He’s looking for fruit bearing
people. That was the message of John
the Baptist when he baptized in the River Jordan. He would
say to people, bear fruit in keeping with repentance. You’ve
turned from your life, your past of sin and wickedness. Now that
you’ve turned, you’ve U-turned. walk in obedience to almighty
God, let your life show forth the fruit. The book of James
will go on to say, uh, you show me your faith. I’ll show you
my works. And the argument being made is
a lively faith, uh, is a, is a, is a life full of good works. It was mentioned tonight that
we ought to live lives of gratitude. I heard that in our prayer time,
I think of the, Heidelberg catechism and its order. It goes through
guilt, what we’ve done, sin and misery. It goes through grace,
what God has done for us in Christ. And then it goes through gratitude.
We obey the 10 commandments. We bear the fruit of the spirit.
We live the sermon on the mount. We live out the kingdom values. Well, God did everything he could
for his beloved vineyard. And what did he get in return?
Stinky fruit. You know, sometimes we get a
little busy. We go to the grocery store with
big intentions, so we buy some strawberries. And we get a little
busy, and a couple days later, we haven’t put any in our yogurt
or on our cereal, and what do we find? We find moldy strawberries. And some of you may be of the
mindset, I’ll just rinse it off. It won’t kill you. A little penicillin
won’t hurt. But some of us are the mindset, we probably ought
to throw it away and not eat the mold. What can you do with
moldy fruit? What can you do with rotten fruit?
What can you do with stinky fruit? Well, I suppose you could blend
it up into a smoothie, but that probably wouldn’t, wouldn’t,
wouldn’t be good. The point here is God says, I
can’t do anything with you. You’re useless. You’re worthless.
You’re stinking fruit. And he, and he, he comes to a
climax in verse three. Now, Oh, inhabitants of Jerusalem. Now, men of Judah judge between
me and my vineyard. It’s a courtroom scene. God is
suing the vineyard, if you will. I gave you everything you could
have had in order to grow and bear fruit and you didn’t do
it. Verse four is rather interesting.
What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done
in it? I mean, he picked the choicest
hill, he hoed it and he cut out all the rocks and he planted
it with choice vines. What more could I have done?
that I have not done in it when I look for it to yield grapes?
Why did it yield wild grapes? From time to time, we’ll think
about one of our old cars. You get a car that’s got a bunch
of zeros behind the mileage, and it’s just always in the shop. And you get that conundrum, that
dilemma. Do I put more money into it,
or is it time to junk it? Is it time to trade it? And you
weigh the cost of repairing it and the cost of maybe getting
something a little better. And so sometimes we make a decision,
I’m going to junk the car. It’s not, well, it’s not worth
something to me. Maybe it’ll be worth something
to somebody else, parts or whatever. It’s okay to quit on a car, isn’t
it? But do we ever quit on people? Do we ever quit on those who
aren’t bearing fruit and say, you know, it’s time to trade
you in? It’s time to junk it. It’s time to leave it alone. Well, God, as he looks on his
vineyard and sees that it’s not bearing fruit, he says, what,
what, what shall I do? And we’ll come to that part,
but he lets his people wallow. He lets them suffer for their
wickedness. We’ll, we’ll see that in a moment, but he gave
them everything he could give them. Doesn’t this remind you
of the story of Adam and Eve? God made the world and everything
in it. He took what was formless and void and he formed it and
he filled it. And he made Adam out of the dust of the ground.
He breathed life into his nostrils. He put him in the garden of Eden,
a place of glory and beauty and wonder and perfection. And he
visited with them. He taught him his law. He gave
him a wife. He had work to do, success in
his labors. And he said, one thing you must
not do, and that’s eat. From the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil in the day you eat of it, you will surely die.
God could not have given Adam any more than he had. You begin
to see the same picture, don’t you? How about ourselves? We’ve come to Jesus Christ and
we’ve received the forgiveness of all our sins, past and present
and future. We’ve come to faith in Jesus
and we want to live a life of obedience and fruit bearing.
What more could God give us? Ephesians chapter one says that
in Christ Jesus, we have been raised up with him and seated
in the heavenly places. All the riches of heaven are
at our disposal for our spiritual life. And I know I’m preaching
to the choir here. I’m preaching to the Sunday nighters.
But we are such a rich people in our day and age with worship
and with scriptures and study Bibles and opportunities, a land
that’s free, that lets us worship. And you hear statistics, church
attendance is down, down, down. We see it among our own where
another trip to the mountains, another weekend away, it won’t
hurt. And before you know it, 15, 20 weeks out of church, and it can’t
help us. It can’t grow us. God has given
it all to his people, not just the vineyard and Judah, not just
Adam and Eve in Eden, but he’s given it to us. Though we are
exiled in this earthly Babylon, we still have so much at our
disposal. And so the question is what fit
return to quote the psalmist, what fit return can we make to
God for all his goodness? What would be a life that’s fruitful,
a life that’s obedient? That’s what God expects. But notice as you move on through
the psalm or through the passage here from Isaiah, verse five,
he says, now I will tell you, here’s what I’ll do. Here’s what
I’ll do to my vineyard. Now just pause for a second.
Remember what Jesus says, I’ll cut off the trees or the branches
that don’t do anything. They’ll be thrown into the fire.
God here says, I will remove its hedge and it shall be devoured. You know, they didn’t have loaves
back then. You didn’t go buy lumber. You
didn’t call Alamance Fence and get a chain link fence put up
with barbed wire. You didn’t go to a tractor supply
and buy post and an auger for your tractor. You built up a
hedge and the hedge kept the beast out of the vineyard. And when he says, I’ll remove
its hedge, all the beast can come in and they can trample
it. Quite a mess. Some of you will remember the
story of Martin Luther when he began to teach the scriptures
and he began to teach things that were contrary to the Roman
Catholic church. He was teaching the Bible, they
were teaching tradition. The Pope issued a papal bull. That basically means you’re dead
meat in Catholic terms. And when the Pope issued this
papal bull against Martin Luther, quoted Psalm 80, I believe it
is, a boar is loose in the vineyard of God’s people. Can you imagine
a boar loose in a vineyard? It would trample. It would eat
everything. Maybe you’ve come home and you’re, you know, you,
you put the dog in the laundry room. And usually they’re pretty
good, but you come home and somebody left a towel out or, you know,
something, and you come home and it’s shredded and they’re
just kind of looking at you a little sad. But can you imagine a wild
boar? Dogs, I think, have a conscience. At least some do. At least they
get one after they know they’ve been bad. But can you imagine
a wild beast trampling your vineyard? Your hedges are down. That’s
the picture God gives. And Babylon will come. They will
destroy and they will trample God’s heritage, especially Jerusalem. That’s when Jeremiah will weep
over Jerusalem. He will pin his lamentations.
He goes on to say, I’ll break down its wall and it shall be
trampled down. Marauders can come in. I’ll make it a waste. And then
it will not be pruned. It will not be hoed. Briars and
thorns shall grow up. the wrath of God will be poured
out. We’ve lived in our house now, I think nine years this
spring. And I can remember the very first time after we bought
the house that I mowed the grass and every inch of that yard that
I rolled over was, was new to me. I’d never cut that yard before.
And so I could remember making, as I do, I’m neurotic about these
things, a mental set of notes. I need to plant grass here. I
need to dig up that stump there. I need to fertilize that neglected
bush. This needs trimming. That needs
fixing or repairing. Or wouldn’t this look good there? The yard had been neglected.
The person that owned our house had not lived there in about
a year. They had lawn service that kind
of basically kept it up. But the natural areas were not. cultivated and hoed and pruned
and worked on. And so it took a summer to get
it. Well, probably it’s taken nine
years to get it the way you like it. You get the picture, right?
Neglect of a garden brings wildness. And sometimes when a garden gets
so wild, all you can do is bring in a bulldozer and all you can
do is mow it down and start from scratch. And God then, gives
his last big judgment there at the end of verse six, he shows
his supernatural power. And if you doubt this is God
speaking as, as some do, I don’t know why they doubt God is speaking.
It’s his word. And it’s obvious that he’s the
God of Israel, God of the vineyard, but only God can command the
clouds and they rain no rain upon it. Do you ever, stand in
all of God, all that he is, all that you are, all that he has
provided, what you now are in Jesus, and why we barely give
him any time, why we commit ourselves so much to the world and not
to him. This God is able to make our
lives a wonderful blessing, a fruit bearing life. If we cultivate
our faith, if we cultivate our walk with him, but he can also
dry it up. He can remove the fences and
we can have things, sin and temptations and Satan and destructive things
enter our lives. And so it’s a terrible thing,
I think. to fall into the hands of a God
that leaves us to ourselves and we become stinking fruit. Well,
the last of the psalm, the last of the psalm is, is an interesting
statement. Verse seven, the vineyard of
the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel. The vineyard is his
people, the men of Judah. They are his pleasant planting.
It’s amazing after all he’s just said, you’re stinking fruit.
He still says you’re his pleasant planting. He looked for justice,
but bloodshed. He looked for righteous, but
outcry. We’ve looked at the first four
chapters and we’ve seen that Israel has fallen into really
bad times all around, all people, all classes, but he looked for
justice. He looked for Christlikeness.
He looked for people that are different from the rest of the
world. But when he looked in Israel as his nation, they were
no different than the Philistines, no different than the Canaanites,
no different than the other wicked people, Egypt, Babylon, Assyria,
and others. No justice, but bloodshed. No
righteousness, but an outcry. Now, We could end here and say, ooh,
don’t mess with God. He’s a wrathful and vengeful
God. Yes, that’s true. He’s a God of justice, a God
of wrath. He has to make right things right and wrong things.
He has to punish. But there’s a future for Israel.
If you were to skip ahead in Isaiah to chapter 27, the vineyard
is going to come up again. And God is going to say of his
people, my vineyard I will keep. That’s a word that reminds us
of what Adam was to do in the garden. He was to work the land,
make it fruitful, and he was to keep it, which is a guard
and a protect word. He should have chopped off the
head of the serpent when it slithered in. But in chapter 27, God says,
I’ll keep my garden and its fruit will fill the world. What a wonderful picture that
is. Even though Israel will have
a rotten history of rotten leaders, You know, you reading through
the Bible in the course of the year, checking all your boxes
on your little Bible reading sheet and you start reading the
Kings and the Samuel Kings and Chronicles. And it’s this one
did what was wicked in God’s sight. This one did what was
wicked in God’s sight. This one did what was wicked over and
over and over wicked people. And they ran off the prophets.
They stoned them. They killed them, whatever they
could do. And yet still a little stump, a little shoot will come
up from Israel and it will bear fruit and that fruit will spread
around the world. And that’s the wonderful picture
I think we’ve been getting both from Isaiah and Galatians chapter
five, the fruit of the spirit, our Christ likeness. as it gives
off a fragrance, as it shows people the difference that Jesus
can make in our lives. You know, so often we say, come
to Jesus and you won’t go to hell. Coming to Jesus, yeah,
it is a life with Him forever in glory, and there’s way much
more than that than a get-out-of-hell-free card. But all that God does for
us in this life, as new creations, as resurrected beings, is so
wonderful. And it’s such a stark contrast
to the rest of the world. So here’s the challenge. As you
seek to please the Lord, what fit return can you make? Don’t
be the moldy strawberries. Don’t be the sour grapes. Don’t
be the stinking fruit. But as God is at work in you,
be a fragrant vine, a producing vine, and be a sweetness to the
world around you through Jesus our Lord. Let’s do pray. Lord,
we thank you that the fruit of the fathers from of old, even
though they were few and far between who were righteous and
faithful in this world, we count ourselves downstream from them.
We thank you that we are children of Adam and Abraham and Isaac
and Jacob and Joseph and Moses and David and Solomon. And we
think of all from the history of your people who received your
spirit at Pentecost and went from Jerusalem to Judea, to Samaria,
to the ends of the earth, they found us in North Carolina and
other places where we were born and raised and converted to faith
in Jesus. Thank you that we are the fruit
that will fill this world. So help us not to lose heart.
When there’s all kinds of stinking fruit around us, help us to be
a good fruit. Bless us we pray with your spirit
and ask it in Jesus mighty name. Amen.