Notes
on Isaiah 5 David H. Linden
5:1-7 The song of a
vineyard Jesus gave a parable related to a vineyard in
Matthew 21:33-46. So when He did, it was not the first time the Jewish people
heard that kind of parable. (A parable is an extended metaphor.) I think this one in Isaiah 5 was in their
minds already. The illustration is very simple: God made a vineyard that He
cared for but it yielded only bad fruit. He would destroy it in a way that
sounds very much like 1:7-9. God would remove the wall; invaders would trample
it.
The
song is one more angle to speak of the sin of His people. What is poignant
about this one is that it addresses how much attention and care God had given
them. For all this, the Lord their God received no gratitude. Gratitude is
shown by obedience. God was looking for justice and righteousness.
Notice
Matthew 21:33, “ …There was a landowner who planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a winepress in
it and built a watchtower …” This setting is very close to Isaiah 5. In
both texts the Lord is denied the fruit He deserves; the result was judgment.
The rejection of Jesus as Messiah was related to His healing on the Sabbath in
John 5:18 and to healing Lazarus in John 11:45-53. But we should not miss that
those who heard the Lord speak of a vineyard caught on that He was speaking
“against them” the same way Isaiah was, so they looked for a way to arrest Him
(Mark 12:12). The motive was that they might kill Him. God was still not
receiving good fruit from His vineyard. After giving such a parable, notice
that the Lord did something else parallel to Isaiah 5.
In the same time frame, between the Triumphal Entry and His crucifixion, He gave
a list of woes in Matthew 23.
Maybe something else the Lord Jesus said has its background in
Isaiah 5. Jesus calls Himself the true vine in John 15. Obviously
The Six Woes, 5:8-25
1) The first woe is about stealing land, and the land will not produce. An ephah is one tenth
of a homer. It is terrible when the
farmer gets a crop that is far less than the seed he sowed. Note Isaiah reports
that the Lord spoke in his hearing (v.9). Every time one claims “God told me
such and such” that person is making a claim to being a prophet. (I hope you do
not claim to be a prophet.)
2) Pleasure seekers.
The wealthy in their mansions live in indulgence. Scripture condemns
neither wine nor music, yet any gift can be exalted above the Lord. Their
interest and priority was pleasure; they find none in the Lord. We should note
that it is clearly a sin not to have an interest in His deeds. The Lord’s past
deeds include creation; His present work is His providence over all, and His
special work is His saving sinners, a theme that will open up in beautiful
detail in Isaiah. It is important to make note of what interests us and what
bores us; these reveal our true affections. One terrible way to have no regard
for the work of the Lord is to give no attention to the record of history He
has left us, and to pay no attention to reports of His current work in bringing
the nations to Christ. Some professing Christians know who the movie stars are
yet have never read Genesis. This is a sickness described in Isaiah 5 as
lacking understanding.
This
is the first but not the last time in Isaiah that the grave is personified in
receiving the dead. (See 14:9-20.) The humbling of man and the exaltation of
God first seen in chapter 2 is repeated here. The justice and righteousness
sought, but not found in
3) The insolent The sin must be a
large load if it takes a cart to pull it, or it may mean that the sin has such
a connection to them or grip on them that it is like a cart linked to an
animal. The specific sin here is arrogance toward God. When the godly claim
that God will bring judgment, the careless respond arrogantly that they don’t
see any judgment yet, and therefore there must not be any. (Note 2 Peter
3:1-9.) It is insolent to tell God what He must show us or to hurry up and do
it in order for man to believe. Note that this is a case of refusing to believe
what God says until man as judge can make a judgment of God. It is all very
backwards. We are to live under God’s scrutiny, not Him under ours. Without
faith it is impossible to please God (Hebrews 11:6).
Woes 4) 5)
6) All these woes are because some virtue has
been overturned: calling good evil, calling their
thinking wisdom, inferring God’s words are not wise (v.24). One can be quite
sure this is what is meant when we see the stress on wisdom in the rest of this
book. (Isaiah’s procedure is to introduce a theme and to return to it later.)
Jesus used a series of woes in Matthew
23. There He was speaking in human flesh just as
He had spoken 700 years before through His prophet Isaiah, when the prophet
pronounced similar woes on
Judgment
is again shown as fire, v.24. The verse comes close to saying that all men are
like grass (40:6-8). Spurning, as in 1:4, returns; there it was the Lord
spurned and here it is His word; there is no difference. Judgment by ‘shaking’
also returns. (Note Hebrews 12:28,29.) Bodies piled in the streets is a image used here for the
first time. We are also introduced in v.25 to the repeated mention of a hand
raised to strike. It will reappear in 9:12, 17, 21 & 10:4. That shows that chapters
1-12 are a unit, yet while the theme of judgment is continued, interspersed are
prophecies of salvation and Christ.
A foreign army, 5:26-30 We all know that