Isa10

I have observed that when you have a negative person, when they look upon a situation they ignore the ten good things and focus on the one questionable thing. It's like that with Scripture. People come to the Old Testament and focus on acts of ‘judgment' and ignore everything else. My plea is for balance in reading. I say this in the light of this song that we now find in Isaiah 5. Isaiah sings this song: “I will sing for the one I love.” (5:1a). He expresses his love towards God. “A song about his vineyard.” In his song Isaiah pictures God's people as a vineyard. He pictures his “loved one”, the Lord, as a vineyard owner: “My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside.” (5:1b)

Indeed, there could be no complaint from Israel on that score, the Lord had put them in a land that was described by God as follows: “I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” (Ex 3:8) When, eventually, Israel 's spies went into the land, they came back: “bearing a single cluster of grapes. Two of them carried it on a pole between them, along with some pomegranates and figs.” (Num 13:23) as a token of the good provision of the land, and they testified, “We went into the land to which you sent us, and it does flow with milk and honey! Here is its fruit.” (Num 13:27). Oh no, it had been a land of plenty.

Listen to what the Lord did to it: “He dug it up and cleared it of stones and planted it with the choicest vines. He built a watchtower in it and cut out a winepress as well.” (5:2) In other words He did everything necessary to produce a good working vineyard, one that would produce much wine – for that is the purpose of a vineyard. He tended it well He had every expectation of it. He had done all He could for it. But to no avail: “Then he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit.” How tragic! What a waste of time and effort! Have you ever had the experience of going to a garden centre and buying a plant, taking it home and carefully planting it, only for it to fail to grow or grow distorted? It's a very disappointing experience, especially when you put fertilizer in the well prepared ground and carefully tended the plant. Your expectations come to nothing!

It is then, within this song, that Isaiah has the vineyard owner asking His people to judge between Him and His vineyard: “Now you dwellers in Jerusalem and men of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard.” (5:3) and so we come to his question in our verse today: “What more could have been done for my vineyard than I have done for it?” (5:4). It is a valid question. The challenge of verse 3 needs to be heard: Judge between God and Israel . Are you going to blame God for what happens to Israel ? Did God make Israel sin? No, of course not! Did God weigh the balances against Israel ? No, of course not! The Lord had done all He could do for them, to set them up to give them a good future and had promised them blessing upon blessing if they stayed close to Him.

Listen to the simple requirement for major blessing: “If you fully obey the LORD your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come upon you and accompany you if you obey the LORD your God” (Deut 28:1,2). God hadn't come waving a big stick; He had come with the promise of blessings: “You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country. The fruit of your womb will be blessed, and the crops of your land and the young of your livestock--the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks.” (Deut 28:3,4) That's how the promise of blessing started and it carried on for the first 14 verses of that chapter. Yes, there were warnings to follow, but only after all the promises of good were laid out.

The critics tend to forget all of this when they peer into the Old Testament. The Lord came to Israel with a simple requirement: they followed His design-rules for living (the Law) so that they would be blessed as they lived according to His design, the way He had designed human beings to live. There was nothing onerous about this, they weren't being put in chains, they were simply shown how to live in peace and harmony, and when they did that, it would enable the Lord to bless their activity and make it even more wonderful. Yes, at the heart of those design-rules were the reminder to keep the Lord at the forefront of their thinking, but there was nothing egotistical about the Lord in requiring that. He simply knew that Israel needed a focus or origin to refer back to and that was to be Him. He wanted a relationship with His people. Love wants to relate!

Why, some might ask, if God who knows everything and knows the future, did He form Israel , knowing they would fail. Two answers. First, there were always some who didn't fail. Merely because many turned from Him, it didn't mean that they ALL turned away. The Lord always had some who held to the plan. Second, in the eternal plan, no one can ever say they were not given a chance. God's desire is that every single person finds Him and comes back into the original design place, but for those who do not, they will never be able to say, you didn't give me a chance. The Lord will have always been there for every single person doing what He can, without over-ruling their free will, to bring them to Himself. Yet there will always be ‘Pharaoh's' who will harden their hearts against Him and refuse His overtures, but they will never be able to say on judgment day, you didn't give me a chance, because He did!