Isaiah 5:7 For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah his pleasant plant: and he looked for judgment, but behold oppression; for righteousness, but behold a cry.
Every summer my wife loves to plant flowers. She plants gorgeous flowers all around our house, particularly in the front yard and on the front porch. Alas, this fall we have been traveling like crazy, so back in September she had to decide if she was going to ask someone to help her keep those flowers alive or let the flowers die. Flowers only do well as long as someone is cultivating, watering, and taking care of them. Weeds, on the other hand, do quite well by themselves.
In Isaiah 5:7 we find that Israel is God’s husbandry, God’s vineyard. It says, “For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel.” We have a picture of what God wished to cultivate in His people. Now, let me hasten to add, you may not be Jewish, but in the New Testament the Bible says of believers, “Ye are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building.” God wants to cultivate His grace in us.
In the first few verses of Isaiah 5 God talks about all that He had put into this garden. He fenced it. He had built a hedge around it. He had worked on it attentively, but it had gone wild. Israel had grown wild grapes, and they had gone sour. In verse 4 God says, “What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it?” God said, “What more could I do? I’ve done everything.”
So, in verse 6 God decided to waste what He had planted. Verse 6 says, “And I will lay it waste.” How did God do that? He answered his own question in the same sentence by saying, “It shall not be pruned.” In other words, God was just going to let them go their way. He was going to open the gate, break down the wall, and not prune the vineyard. What happens when a garden is left to itself? Verse 17 has a picture of sheep grazing wildly over waste places that once had been the city. The bottom line is this: let God cultivate what He wants to grow.
In verse 7 and following we find all the things that grew up like weeds in Israel because of their rejection of God. Each one is prefaced by a woe, bad news. God says, “Woe unto them,” and then gives several things that described Israel because they were not being cultivated by God.
Let God grow what He wants to grow in your life through both the hard things and the easy things. He wants to grow things like discernment. We need that. Let God grow that in you. In verse 20 God says, “Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil.” We are living in a day where evil is not only accepted, it is foisted on us as a virtue. May God’s people have the courage to know the truth and acknowledge that they know it instead of pleading ignorance as an alibi!
How about humility? We need that. Israel was not humble. Verse 21 says, “Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight…which justify the wicked.”
God wants to grow a teachable spirit. Are you teachable? None of us are perfect so the question is, “Are any of us teachable?”
How about compassion? The people who were oppressing their own in Israel were later oppressed by those who had initially brought them prosperity. The oppressors became the oppressed. I don’t know about you, but I want God to grow His graces in my life. That requires a deliberate decision to be aware of what God is doing and be teachable, to change where need be. Most of all, it means to be dependent upon the God Who will enable those who are obedient.