What More Could I Have Done?

”I will sing about the one I love, a song about my loved one’s vineyard: The one I love had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He broke up the soil, cleared it of stones, and planted it with the finest vines. He built a tower in the middle of it and even dug out a winepress there. He expected it to yield good grapes, but it yielded worthless grapes. So now, residents of Jerusalem and men of Judah, please judge between Me and My vineyard. What more could I have done for My vineyard than I did? Why, when I expected a yield of good grapes, did it yield worthless grapes? Now I will tell you what I am about to do to My vineyard: I will remove its hedge, and it will be consumed; I will tear down its wall, and it will be trampled. I will make it a wasteland. It will not be pruned or weeded; thorns and briers will grow up. I will also give orders to the clouds that rain should not fall on it. For the vineyard of the Lord of Hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah, the plant He delighted in. He looked for justice but saw injustice, for righteousness, but heard cries of wretchedness.“ (Isaiah 5:1-7 HCSB)

The power of grace does not lie in spiritual moderation but in deep, repeated gulps of the Spirit. And that kind of excess does not dull our minds; it sharpens our awareness, so that God becomes real to us. – R. Kent Hughes

Key verse: ”What more could I have done for My vineyard than I did? Why, when I expected a yield of good grapes, did it yield worthless grapes?“ (Isaiah 5:4 HCSB)

Let me begin this week with an apology. I’m sorry that I failed to get last week’s message posted to our web site. In some ways, the excuses I tell myself for my failure line up well this week’s lesson – I’ll share more on that, in a bit. Sometimes we let life get in the way of the best that God wants for us. I work each week from a deadline. To be honest, I tend to work best that way. I know when I MUST be done as I slowly work towards the end result. If you haven’t figured it out by now, I write these words as a means to bring my studies, my prayers, my thoughts and my hopes for my church and its individual members into a cohesive and productive way of delivering my Sunday morning message to them.

While I may have failed to get it posted for your reading pleasure, I did finish getting it “assembled” in my thoughts (and I’ll post what I did get written a bit later). As I mentioned above, I work from a deadline and the hard and fast deadline each week is 10:45 am each Sunday morning. However, in reality, I give myself several other deadlines in this process that I strive to meet each week. Most pastors have a sermon preparation schedule that they try to follow. For many, that means setting aside time each week to study, pray and prepare over the course of several days as they also try to keep up with the demands and needs of ministering to their people.

As I stated, my hard deadline is 10:45 am each Sunday morning as our worship service begins. I must be ready, at that time, to deliver the message that God has given to me to share with those lovely folks sitting in the pews and watching online. The words I share with you each week in this post are just a step in a longer process. Because I tend to preach a series of sermons through an entire book of the Bible, I know in advance what my text will be each week. That gives me the chance to “chew on” or, to use a more spiritual term, to meditate on the passage long before I begin to study, pray and write. The writing process is, for me, the work needed to bring my thoughts into a more cohesive and logical presentation that I can deliver orally each Sunday morning.

While I have that hard deadline each week, in reality, I tend to set additional intermediate deadlines. For example, I rise early on Friday mornings and begin to work around 6:30 am and try to have my background study of the passage completed in 3-4 hours. As I study, I make notes of my thoughts and ideas lest I forget them. Then I spend some additional time meditating and praying and sometimes that is occurring simultaneously even as I gather my thoughts and begin writing. The house is usually quiet and I try to minimize potential distractions so that I can finish writing by early Friday afternoon. However, my plan doesn’t always work out. Sometimes, life gets in the way and causes my plans to get pushed aside and last week is the perfect example.

So, am I telling you all of this just to explain why I didn’t get my work posted last week? No, not really. I’m telling you this because it fits really well with this week’s focal passage and God’s desire and intent for us. I only noted the first seven verses of Isaiah 5 above for brevity but you should go and read the entire chapter. Isaiah begins the passage with a song about love. It seems as though his prophetic message is not being heeded, so he plays the part of a bard and presents his message in the form of a song. Perhaps he is singing his message as he strums an instrument and walks among the people. They aren’t listening to the prophet but perhaps they will listen to the minstrel as he sings, walking among them as they raise their glasses, toast to good health, long life and God’s blessings and enjoy each other’s company.

As Isaiah sings his song about someone he deeply loves, the song morphs into a parable about a vineyard on a very fertile hill. The beloved one had plowed the soil, cleared the rocks and planted the best grape vines that existed. The owner then uses the stones to build a tower and a fence to protect it and then dug out a wine press and a wine vat for processing the expected harvest. But while he expected it to produce the finest grapes, it only produced worthless, bitter or “stinky” grapes.

By now, he seems to have the people’s attention as they listen to his song so his tenor changes and Isaiah speaks the words of God: “So now, residents of Jerusalem and men of Judah, please judge between Me and My vineyard. What more could I have done for My vineyard than I did? Why, when I expected a yield of good grapes, did it yield worthless grapes?” This question is no longer a part of the song or the parable about the vineyard, but is a direct and piercing question from God: “What more could I have done?”

Since we began our study in Isaiah, I’ve been emphasizing that God’s judgment is never intended to destroy but to redeem and restore. But what happens when we refuse to listen to God and we turn away from His grace? That’s precisely where we are in this passage. All of God’s efforts at restoration have been rejected and His deep, deep love for them has been rebuffed. Through the love song, God calls for the people to judge for themselves what He should do when they simply refuse to listen to His Word and obey Him.

God tells them, “I will tear down its wall, and it will be trampled. I will make it a wasteland. It will not be pruned or weeded; thorns and briers will grow up. I will also give orders to the clouds that rain should not fall on it. For the vineyard of the Lord of Hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah, the plant He delighted in. He looked for just but saw injustice, for righteousness, but heard cries of wretchedness (vs. 5b-7).”

There is a play on words here that is difficult to catch in the English translation. The words translated as justice/injustice and translated righteousness/wretchedness sound similar and rhyme in Hebrew. It is as though God is looking and longing for His people to give their very best and the people have instead substituted something that sounds adequate but is entirely inappropriate and the opposite of what God desires in them. In many ways, we tend to do the same in our relationship with God. He only wants the best in us, for us and from us and we settle with a cheap, knock-off substitute. He demands and deserves our absolute highest love and we give Him the least we can get by with.

No doubt, the men of Judah stepped back as Isaiah finished his bold song and pronouncement of God’s impending judgment. I can just hear them, “How dare you! How can you speak like that about us!” (Perhaps some of you were offended when I suggested that we tend to give God cheap substitutes when He demands and deserves our absolute love.) But that’s exactly why he must speak to them, like that.

In the verses that follow, Isaiah details six “woes” that describe the specific failures of “the men of Judah” and the House of Israel. Some of these woes will not be surprising because we’ve already encountered them in previous lessons, but a few may catch us off guard. The word “woe” is both a warning and a lament. It is a warning to the hearers and an expression of lament from God’s heart. “They do not perceive the Lord’s actions, and they do not see the work of His hands (v. 12b).” Each of the “woes” or groups of them is followed by a “therefore” statement that details how God will respond.

Woes one and two:

1. Woe to those who add house to house and join field to field.

2. Woe to those who rise early to drink and linger into the evening inflamed by wine.

Their appetite for more and more as they seek to expand their estates and party from sun up to sun down cannot be quenched. You might be a bit surprised by that first woe or condemnation. We have a tendency to view their resourcefulness in “adding house to house and joining field to field” as a great move. But the culture that God wanted in the lives of the Israelites was not one of the “rich getting richer” at the expense of the poor.

God knows our tendencies and those things in our hearts that go against His will. The family inheritance of the parcel of land that was given to each tribe was to be handed down from father to son, generation to generation. There are provisions in the Jewish law to prevent the loss of these ancestral lands to land grabbing, money hungry men who take advantage of others.

Their appetite (open mouths and insatiable appetite) for more and more wealth, land and houses coupled with their appetite for more wine and partying will result in Sheol, the place/land of the dead, enlarging its throat and opening its enormous jaws to swallow them up. Instead of standing in pride at all they had amassed, they will be brought down and humbled and God exacts justice against them. Instead of vast green fields and palatial homes, lambs will graze in their homes and strangers will eat among the ruins of the rich.

Woes three, four, five and six:

3. Woe to those who drag wickedness with cords of deceit and pull sin along with cart ropes.

4. Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness, who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.

5. Woe to those who are wise in their own opinion and clever in their own sight.

6. Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine, who are fearless at mixing beer, who acquit the guilty for a bribe and deprive the innocent of justice.

Humans have a tendency to believe that they are truly free when they are able to make their own choices and are not expected to follow and obey God’s commandments. Free to be whomever they want and free to do whatever they please. But scripture tells us that sin is a taskmaster and we become slaves when we pursue it. The deceiver (ha Satan) tells us that he only wants the best for us and that God is lying to us and holding out on us. But Jesus tells us that the deceiver came to steal, kill and destroy us and that the truth (about God, about ourselves and about our sin) will actually set us free.

In these woes, we are told in Old Testament terms exactly what Jesus tells us in the New Testament: God and His truth will set us free, but sin deceives us, binds us and destroys us and life as God meant for it to be. There’s an old saying, sin takes you further than you want to go and keeps you longer than you want to stay. That’s the central truth coming through in these woes.

First, notice that you get tied to wickedness initially through a cord of deceit. Then once it has you bound to itself with lies, the cords get twisted together into ropes that keep you from breaking free from your sin. Nobody becomes a drug addict by looking at the life of an addict and saying, “Oh, I think I want to be like that guy!” We get tied to it through deceit, then the lies weave themselves into ropes that become impossible to break in our own strength.

Next, we become so deceived and bound up by our sin that we begin to call evil things good, and good things evil. We then take undeniable, absolute God-based truths, like the difference between light and darkness, and we begin to declare that these absolute truths are no longer true. Light now becomes darkness and darkness becomes light. Once we’ve broken that dependence upon absolute truth, we can begin to apply these same deceitful principles to our personal choices and tastes, bitter becomes sweet and sweet becomes bitter. We can now determine define our existence and our lives by ourselves. We no longer need God.

Then, we begin to see ourselves as wise enough and powerful enough to define, declare and determine our own future. Nothing can hold us back. We have broken free from the constraints of human limitations and we determine our own destiny. We no longer need [the existence or even the idea of] God or the limits that belief in Him places upon us. But watch what happens next…

Finally, without the restraints that belief in and dependence upon God places upon us and our lives we are free to do act as we please. The results are described in woe number six: our heroes are those who excel at drinking wine and are fearless at making beer. Our leaders are those who acquit the guilty for a bribe and who deprive the innocent of justice. We come full circle when we begin to realize that this outdated concept of sin that we abandoned a while back still infects our heroes, guides our leaders and corrupts our court systems. Those things we thought old fashioned and outdated have reared their ugly heads to show us that they didn’t quite die when we sacrificed them on the altar of self-sufficiency.

So God declares a final “therefore” in verses 24 and 25: “just as a fire consumes straw and dry grass shrivels in the flame, so their roots will rot and their blossoms will blow away like dust, for they have rejected the instruction of the LORD of Hosts, they have despised the word of the Holy One of Israel. Therefore the LORD’s anger burns against His people.” In the verses that follow, God raises a signal flag and whistles and calls for Assyria to come quickly and bring His judgment upon them. The people have rejected His word and called good evil and evil good, they have declared light to be darkness and darkness to be light, bitter to be sweet and sweet to be bitter and now they will know clearly the distinct difference between them.

This parable of the vineyard was a means for Isaiah to convey to the people what they refuse to hear when he confronts them directly. Like King David in the story of Bathsheba, they refuse to see their sin the way God sees it. And like King David, they are confronted by the prophet of God with a story that cuts to the very heart of the matter. In 2 Samuel 11, we find that story of how David saw what he wanted, Bathsheba, and how he subsequently lost all sense of right and wrong and justified the murder of her husband to satisfy his sinful desires.

With those choices, David turned a deaf ear to God’s Spirit and the call of humility, grace and repentance and became hardened in his willful sin. It wasn’t until Nathan confronted him with the story of a rich man who stole a poor man’s lamb to serve as a meal at the rich man’s table for a traveling guest. King David was infuriated at the rich man’s audacity and willful flaunting of his wealth and power over the poor man’s life. In that moment, the truth of God’s word penetrated the guarded heart of the king as God spoke through Nathan: “You, oh king, are that man!”

In this passage, God’s people must hear what He is saying to us. If we refuse to listen, His judgment will come and it will come quickly and destroy completely that which stands in opposition to Him. In what ways are we guilty of these woes that God pronounces upon His people? Are we guilty of being only interested in building up our own kingdom instead of His? We probably don’t see ourselves as being money hungry, land grabbing tyrants who join house to house and field to field and oppress the poor, but do we contribute to this tendency in our culture by supporting those who do?

Are our lives consumed by chasing after recreation, pleasure and entertainment, night after night, weekend after weekend?

Are we believing the lies that we hear and tying ourselves to sinful choices? These cords just get twisted tighter and form into ropes that become harder and harder to break free of.

Are we beginning to fall into the trap of calling good evil and evil good? As we do, we abandon the absolute truth of God’s Word and we develop our own version of truth – that’s your truth, here’s mine.

Do we consider ourselves so wise that mankind has the understanding, intelligence and ability to solve all of our own problems? If not now, at least in the future. Right?

Have we so indulged ourselves in a culture of recreation and entertainment that our heroes and our leaders only lead us into a life of excess and debauchery? Has our view of what’s right and just become so corrupt that we no longer believe in it or pursue it?

The people of God are called to be a people who not only believe in the one, true God but who also pursue living life in relation to Him as we live in relation with each other. The commandments of God are 40% about living in right relation with Him and 60% about living in right relation with each other. Jesus said, ”My Father is glorified by this: that you produce much fruit and prove to be My disciples.“ (John 15:8 HCSB)

And in his first letter to the church at Corinth, Paul says: ”Working together with Him, we also appeal to you, “Don’t receive God’s grace in vain.” (2 Corinthians 6:1 HCSB)

How do you receive God’s grace in vain? God’s grace exists all around us, every day. God demonstrates His grace in you with each breath that you take. He shows His grace with each sunrise and sunset you see. He demonstrates His grace in your life when you work hard and that hard work results in being able to put a roof over your family’s heads and food on your table to share with them. Those things and many, many others are demonstrations of God’s general grace in this world. But He also demonstrated His love and grace for you, in particular, when He sent Jesus to come, live and die in order to save each of us from our sin.

Jesus reminds us not only of God’s general grace (meant to point all men to Him) but also His specific grace (meant to point you, specifically, to Him) when He tells the story of the lost sheep. The shepherd leaves the 99 safe and goes looking for that one who’s lost. He’s looking for you… He’s calling to you… He died for you… He came to rescue you. Don’t receive His grace in vain. You’re on a deadline. Don’t miss it!

What more could I have done?

– God