How does it make you feel when you see someone squander an opportunity that you would love to have? I get frustrated at times when I see a professional athlete squander his or her talent. I played a lot of sports growing up, and I dreamed of going pro in all of them at one time or another, but it became clear in high school that pro sports were not in my future. So when I read headlines about an athlete that has been suspended for drug use, or someone who just hasn’t put in the effort to reach their potential, I get just a little bit frustrated because of those childhood dreams that still have a small place in my heart.
How about you? What sort of opportunities have you longed for in your life? Maybe you have always wanted to be in a certain profession, like acting. Perhaps you have dreamed of owning a ranch somewhere in the Rockies, or house on some secluded island. Maybe you’ve just found yourself thinking, “If I had the money, I would…”—you can fill in the blank. So how does it make you feel when someone squanders that opportunity that you have desired?
Now, let’s put ourselves on the other side of that question for a moment. How do you think God feels when we squander the opportunities He gives us by making sinful choices; when we look at all the blessings He has given us, and we shrug our shoulders and say, “I’d rather have this thing that you hate?”
According to 2 Peter 1:3, “[God’s] divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness.” 2 Timothy 3:16-17 says that the Scriptures can make us “equipped for every good work.” God has clearly given us everything we need to thrive in His mission for us as His ambassadors in this world. So how do you think God feels when we squander all of this by embracing sin instead?
Fortunately for us, we have the opportunity today to learn from those who had a calling from God in the past, and we can gain wisdom from God’s interaction with them. As we look at Isaiah 5 this morning, we should learn that:
We must not squander God’s blessings by indulging sinful appetites and attitudes.
1. The people’s poor return on God’s blessings (5:1-7)
In the first part of this chapter, we find a well-crafted metaphor that is used to make a well-deserved indictment against the people of Judah. Follow with me as I read [READ vv. 1-2]. The significance of the word “wild” is that these grapes were not what the landowner was expecting, and they were in fact worthless for his intended purposes. The fruit bore no indication that it had been cultivated at all.
[READ vv. 3-7]. The metaphor is ultimately wielded to pierce through to the heart of the matter—the men of Judah had not produced the righteous fruit that God desired from them. God had given them every blessing and opportunity that they needed to carry out His commands, but they had offered Him instead a poor imitation of true obedience.
There is a word play in v. 7 that I think is important for me to point out. The Hebrew says that God looked for mishpat but discovered mispah; He looked for tsedaqah but discovered tseaqah. These two pairs of words sound so similar, but their meaning is drastically different.
I think this word play is meant to emphasize that the people had offered God something that looked so similar to the real thing, but the substance was very different. Remember—these people were a religious people. They hadn’t thrown off every semblance of worshipping God. In chapter 1 we learned that they were very faithful in performing the required sacrifices and feasts, but the problem was that they did not offer God sincere worship and obedience. Sure—as Isaiah’s song said—they produced grapes, but they were wild grapes, worthless grapes, because they did not come from God’s cultivation of their hearts.
Thus, God stated that He was about to remove His protection from the nation. This statement found its fulfillment a short time later when the Babylonian Empire conquered the kingdom of Judah and took the people out of their land to re-settle them elsewhere.
So what kind of fruit had grown in the people’s lives? How had they evoked such stern displeasure from God? Isaiah gives an instructive description of their sins in the rest of the chapter.
2. The sinful appetites of the people (5:8-17)
a. An appetite for possessions (property and homes; vv. 8- 10)
Isaiah begins v. 8 by saying, “woe.” This word expresses the same thought as the sidewalk preacher who carries a sign that reads “The End is Near!” [READ vv. 8]. Now what was Isaiah condemning in this verse? He may have had in mind some wealthy persons who were exploiting the poor and taking their land, but even if there was no exploitation taking place in these land deals, the persons involved were not handling the land the way that God desired.
Under the Law of Moses, all of the land in Israel belonged to God, and the people were basically taking care of it for Him. By His command, land was not to be permanently sold—it could be sold temporarily, but every 50 years it was to go back into the possession of the family whose ancestors had originally settled there. The idea was that each family would have the chance to provide for themselves from their own land.
Thus, the nation wasn’t supposed to have land barons or real estate moguls, but some of the people at least were clearly disregarding God’s desire for the land by accumulating large estates for themselves. But we see in vv. 9-10 that God was planning to foreclose by means of a famine [READ vv. 9-10]. The Holman Christian Standard Bible updates these measurements for us. It reads, “A ten-acre vineyard will yield only six gallons, and 10 bushels of seed will yield only one bushel.” Thus, the people would not prosper from their property because of their disregard of God’s desires.
The people were presently getting some return from their vineyards, however, because they had…
b. An appetite for drunken partying (vv. 11-17)
[READ vv. 11-12] Sadly, as the people were chasing a good time, they missed the signs of the times that would have revealed God’s displeasure over their lifestyles. Now, we could spend an entire sermon talking about drunkenness, but let me simply say this—I don’t believe the Bible gives us a complete prohibition against drinking alcohol, but virtually all we read about it in Scripture is that it can consume us and lead us into foolish, sinful choices. Let us all make sure that we take that warning to heart.
Unfortunately, the people did not take God’s warnings to heart, and thus we read in v. 13 [READ v. 13]. Notice the irony here—Isaiah had just pronounced doom on the people for drinking too much, and their consequence would be to suffer from thirst. [READ v. 14]. There is even more irony here. The people were driven by an insatiable appetite for alcohol, and as a consequence, they will be given to satisfy the appetite of the grave. This message is a sobering one, indeed, and Isaiah gives a fitting summary of God’s actions in vv. 15-17 [READ vv. 15-17]. With this coming act of judgment in which God would allow His people to be conquered and taken into exile, a clear distinction would be seen between God and mankind. As the people are laid low, God will be lifted up, and in this act of justice His holiness will be on full display. If we are tempted to think that God is overreacting to sin, here is our reminder that wrath is simply the fitting and deserved reaction of God’s holiness when it encounters sin.
When the Lord looked at the people of Judah, He saw not only that they had sinful appetites, but that they also had sinful attitudes.
3. The sinful attitudes of the people (vv. 18-30)
a. An attitude of disbelief toward God’s warnings (vv. 18-19)
Let’s read v. 18 [READ v. 18]. Here the people are pictured as being tied to their sins, and not just tied to them, but almost unknowingly subservient to them. The people are like servants who pull around the sin which has mastered them everywhere they go. Yet they are still disbelieving toward God’s warnings of judgment through the prophets [READ v. 19].
How many times have you and I said in our lives, “It will never happen to me?” We do that in our daily routine all the time. Perhaps we ride around in the car with no seatbelt on, because even though we’ve seen other people in life-threatening accidents, we still just don’t think it will ever happen to us!
We often respond the same way toward our sins. We have all seen people deal with the life-altering consequences of sin, yet we keep ourselves bound to it and say, “It will never happen to me!” Ecclesiastes 8:11 says, “Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil.” When we think we are getting away with sin, we become emboldened to wallow in it all the more. But we must never mistake God’s patience for inaction. We will always face consequences for our sins, whether they come today or when we stand before Jesus to hear His assessment of our lives. Let us never ignore His warnings about sin!
b. An attitude of arrogance toward God’s standards (vv. 20-21)
Ever since Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, mankind has struggled with the temptation to think that we know better than God. It really comes down to the pride that is described in v. 21—we are wise in our own eyes. We consider ourselves to be capable of setting the standards for what is right and what is wrong, and if we encounter a moral standard in the Bible that doesn’t conform to our opinions, we explain it away with some kind of interpretive slight-of-hand.
Now it is very easy for us to sit here and condemn various groups in our society who are guilty of this sinful attitude, but we must understand that we are guilty of this attitude every time we choose to sin. Every time we choose to sin, we convince ourselves somehow that our behavior was right and acceptable, and if God’s Word says otherwise, we convince ourselves that we were in special circumstances, or we qualify His command with 1,000 man-made rules that allow us to get ourselves off the hook.
Sure, we can point to many people in our world who are guilty of this attitude—but sometimes, we are among them!
c. An attitude of indifference toward God’s desires (vv. 22-23)
[READ vv. 22-23] Isaiah has spoken about drunkenness already, but now he focuses on those who are in a position of authority in the nation. He seems to be talking about judges here, and we can see that these judges had aced the bar exam, but unfortunately it was the wrong kind of bar! They were devoting themselves to their sinful appetites rather than the pursuit of justice that God desired from them.
We read back in v. 7 that God was looking for justice from His people. The authorities, however, were setting a very poor example for the people, and their example was probably encouraging even greater injustice. If people know that they’re not going to receive justice from their authorities, they may be much more inclined to carry out their own brand of so-called “justice.”
Now you and I may not have an official responsibility to carry out justice in our nation, but we all have a moral and personal responsibility to treat others in a just and fair manner in our relationships with them. It isn’t only judges who have to think about justice; many of our dealings with each other will never be played out in a courtroom. God is looking for justice from you and I as well, and we don’t want to give Him a cheap imitation.
For these appetites and attitudes that the people had embraced without repentance, God was going to do exactly what He had told them in Deuteronomy—He was going to allow their enemies to defeat them and carry them into exile [READ vv. 24-30].
So, my friends, I ask you again—how do you think God feels when we squander the blessings and opportunities that He has given us? As Israel was God’s vineyard in the days of Isaiah, so we are like God’s vineyard today. He has loving cared for us and has given us everything that we need to bear the fruit of godly character in our lives. But will we allow the weeds of sinful appetites and attitudes to keep us from bearing that fruit? I pray that we will learn from those who have gone before us, and thus choose to follow a different path.
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