Isaiah 5:8-17 - Rotten Juice 1

8 Woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no more room, and you are made to dwell alone in the midst of the land. 9 The Lord of hosts has sworn in my hearing: “Surely many houses shall be desolate, large and beautiful houses, without inhabitant. 10 For ten acres of vineyard shall yield but one bath, and a homer of seed shall yield but an ephah.” 11 Woe to those who rise early in the morning, that they may run after strong drink, who tarry late into the evening as wine inflames them! 12 They have lyre and harp, tambourine and flute and wine at their feasts, but they do not regard the deeds of the Lord, or see the work of his hands. 13 Therefore my people go into exile for lack of knowledge; their honored men go hungry, and their multitude is parched with thirst.14 Therefore Sheol has enlarged its appetite and opened its mouth beyond measure, and the nobility of Jerusalem and her multitude will go down, her revelers and he who exults in her. 15 Man is humbled, and each one is brought low, and the eyes of the haughty are brought low. 16 But the Lord of hosts is exalted in justice, and the Holy God shows himself holy in righteousness. 17 Then shall the lambs graze as in their pasture, and nomads shall eat among the ruins of the rich.

Target Date: Sunday, 19 November 2023

Word Study/ Translation Notes:

8 – woe - הוֹי hôwy – alas. The opposite of “blessed”.

9 – surely – לֹה lôh – “if not” – the beginning of a Jewish oath or swear.

He likewise makes use of an oath; for the expression If not is a form of swearing that frequently occurs in the Scriptures.

17 – lambs - גָּרִ֥ים Then the lambs will graze as in their pasture, And strangers will eat in the waste places of the wealthy.

The Hebrew reads “aliens” rather than “kids.” This reading is the result of a scribal error where the scribe confused two Hebrew letters that look alike.

This does seem to fit with the verb (translated “graze”) that means simply “eat” or “devour”.

Thoughts on the Passage:

We err if we take away from this that we shall be wealthy if we are not greedy or covetous. If we truly had escaped from these sins, we should not be interested in wealth at all. God wasn’t taking these things away because they had not been sought or used properly; He is judging these things because they had captured his people’s hearts.

8 - The land, moreover, shall not be sold permanently, for the land is Mine; for you are but aliens and sojourners with Me. – Leviticus 25:23

8 - Hence the beautiful observation of Chrysostom, that “covetous men, if they could, would willingly take the sun from the poor,” for they envy their brethren the common elements, and would gladly swallow them up; not that they might enjoy them, but because such is the madness to which their greed carries them.

He therefore accuses covetous and ambitious men of such folly that they would wish to have other men removed from the earth, that they might possess it alone; and consequently they set no limit to their desire of gain.

8 – The most common title used by the government today for those who were born in the US is not citizen – it is consumer.

One of the great tragedies of our economic blessings from God is that we become consumers in our hearts rather than stewards.

9 - Though you have built houses of well-hewn stone, Yet you will not live in them; You have planted pleasant vineyards, yet you will not drink their wine. – Amos 5:11

11 - And do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit, - Ephesians 5:18

In this passage, dissipation is the word ἀσωτία (asōtia). It may be related to the word “to save”, but seems more directly the adjectivization of the noun ἄσωτος (asōtos) which means a hopeless or abandoned man.

Thus in this context, the word would carry the idea of removing yourself from safety in becoming drunk.

Safety of exercising your God-given facilities.

Safety of exercising your God-given restraint.

Safety of your person.

All for the sake of a high, communion with others who will not remember it, or a moment of escape from something that will be there when you come to your senses.

Contra George MacDonald - …while I regard the smallest sin as infinitely loathsome, I do not believe that any being, never good enough to see the essential ugliness of sin, could sin so as to deserve such punishment. I am not now, however, dealing with the question of the duration of punishment, but with the idea of punishment itself; and would only say in passing, that the notion that a creature born imperfect, nay, born with impulses to evil not of his own generating, and which he could not help having, a creature to whom the true face of God was never presented, and by whom it never could have been seen, should be thus condemned, is as loathsome a lie against God as could find place in heart too undeveloped to understand what justice is, and too low to look up into the face of Jesus. - From ‘’Justice’’ in Unspoken Sermons Series III (1889)

Sermon Text:

We return this morning to the fifth chapter of the book of Isaiah.

The passage we will be looking at this morning follows the famous parable of the vineyard in verses 1-7.

And you may remember the point of that song was to explain why God had removed His protection from His people.

And it came down to the fact that when they should have been producing good fruit, they were producing rotten, worthless fruit.

And after a long period of time, God, the master, owner, and builder of the vineyard in the song, God had had enough.

His patience came to an end.

Now that was just as unpopular a message in Isaiah’s day as it is in our day.

God’s patience running out?

God exhibiting wrath toward men and women who called themselves by His name?

In Isaiah’s day, they comforted themselves with false comforts by reminding each other that they had the temple of God and the Ark of the Covenant.

And their false prophets, who always vastly outnumber God’s true prophets, proclaimed peace and God’s victory over their enemies.

In our day, they proclaim that in some way Jesus changed God’s attitude toward sin.

That God has mellowed a bit since Jesus came, becoming more loving than He appeared to be in the Old Testament.

I came across a quote from a rather famous theologian from the late 19th Century, George MacDonald (no relation).

…while I regard the smallest sin as infinitely loathsome, I do not believe that any being, never good enough to see the essential ugliness of sin, could sin so as to deserve such punishment. I am not now, however, dealing with the question of the duration of punishment, but with the idea of punishment itself; and would only say in passing, that the notion that a creature born imperfect, nay, born with impulses to evil not of his own generating, and which he could not help having, a creature to whom the true face of God was never presented, and by whom it never could have been seen, should be thus condemned, is as loathsome a lie against God as could find place in heart too undeveloped to understand what justice is, and too low to look up into the face of Jesus.

Without diving too deeply into history, this idea that God is too loving to judge men or to punish sin is a legacy of that false revival of the nineteenth century we know as the “Second Great Awakening”.

It was a counterfeit revival that birthed many of the abominations in religion we face today.

The Mormon church,

Jehovah’s Witnesses,

Christian Science,

And the spirit of the age that infected even otherwise Bible-believing churches.

And their common thread, the common strand for each of them is the rejection of God’s right to judge His creatures.

Each of these, and other movements as well, agrees on one core doctrine – the rejection of the idea of God’s judgment.

And so, if a man (or in those sketchy groups, a woman) got up and tried to preach on this passage today, there would have to be a great deal of re-definition of the passage.

Because it IS a passage about God’s judgment.

It IS about God’s anger at the people He had set aside for Himself.

It IS about the vanity they had brought to His name.

Even the most hopeful verse in the passage, verse 16, is an indictment of God’s people:

But the Lord of hosts is exalted in justice, and the Holy God shows himself holy in righteousness.

After beginning his list of the indictments on Judah and Jerusalem, we come to this passage about God.

More specifically we come to a verse telling us what it means to exalt God – how He is exalted by His people,

And how they can be right with Him.

He is EXALTED in justice:

You want to praise God?

You want to please Him?

Conduct yourself with justice.

This isn’t about sitting on a jury and making a verdict.

No – YOU are the one who is on trial.

Not God.

Not the world.

You.

Isaiah was saying this to his hearers, but he is saying it to us as well.

DO Justice.

The prophet Micah was preaching at the same time as Isaiah, and he put it this way:

He has told you, O man, what is good; And what does the Lord require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God? – Micah 6:8

Doing justice is mostly about doing to others as you would want them to do to you.

Love your neighbor as yourself – that is the way our Lord put it.

And we see in the first of the two “woes” we will look at today what happens when we aren’t doing justice.

I think I mentioned a few weeks ago that the sins of Judah look an awful lot like the sins of our nation today.

And in the six “woes” in this chapter, each is more than relevant for us today.

We will look at the first two “woes” today, and leave the last four for the next time we take up this passage.

First, let’s look, though, at what God means when He pronounces “Woe”.

This is certainly not the only place we see it.

The noun “woe” means “great distress” or “great sadness” or troubles.

And so we can gather that when the word is used, as here, as an interjection, it carries with it the same meaning.

But there is even more to it when it is in this form.

It is a cry, intensified by being the introduction to an announcement of judgment.

It is stronger, more urgent.

Like when someone is riding a bus and they are coming up to their stop.

They can use the noun to tell the driver “This is my stop”,

Or they can scream “STOP!”.

I hope that if they use the second one, everyone is holding on.

That’s the difference with woe.

God could have said “You will have woes”, and people might have shrugged their shoulders.

But here He says “WOE!”

And this is something you need to listen with all your heart to.

You may recall that this is not the only place that “woes” are pronounced in Scripture.

Among other places, we see our Lord Jesus Christ saying this in Matthew 23:

Eight times in that chapter, Jesus declares:

woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites

Eight indictments that have earned them the judgment of God.

Because they wore the name of God in vain, declaring their own rules and prestige rather than God’s.

And then in the book of the Revelation, we see this verse:

Then I looked, and I heard an eagle flying in midheaven, saying with a loud voice, “Woe, woe, woe to those who dwell on the earth, because of the remaining blasts of the trumpet of the three angels who are about to sound!” – Revelation 8:13

And three woes, three judgments of God through His angels, follow this pronouncement.

Woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no more room, and you are made to dwell alone in the midst of the land.

Now some of you might be thinking “This is the thing he leads with? It sounds like he is condemning buying real estate.”

Surely, some might say, he should have led off with one of the Ten Commandments at least.

Like “Woe to you who commit adultery” or “woe to those who murder”.

But “woe to those who keep buying land?”

But I want to remind you of a couple of things.

1. The land of Israel had been promised and allocated by God to the people of Israel.

In Leviticus 25, we read this morning about how the Promised Land was to be maintained after the conquest.

Recall that the land was distributed to all the people by lot after the conquest under Joshua was completed.

And there were very specific rules about the land being sold.

In effect, if someone bought land from another Israelite, the transfer would only be valid until the fiftieth year, the Jubilee Year.

All land transactions (and slave contracts) were effectively leases that all expired across the nation on that year of celebration.

The land, moreover, shall not be sold permanently, for the land is Mine; for you are but aliens and sojourners with Me. – Leviticus 25:23

2. The separation of a man from his land would give him few options for livelihood – typically being a slave or hired worker, or being a beggar.

That is why, in the Law of God, the man was never severed from his land – at least according to the law.

But the wealthy and greedy had bought up the plots around them, taking advantage of mistakes or misfortunes of their neighbors to enlarge their holdings.

So we find in this first woe a commandment being broken – the tenth – Do not covet.

For many people, we really don’t respect that one as much as the others.

Murder, adultery, false witness, stealing, even dishonoring parents have some tangible action.

Covetousness is quiet, hidden.

It is even more socially acceptable than the others.

I have said it before, but I think it bears repeating often:

Covet is THE American sin.

It is the sin that many of us don’t recognize or really battle against.

We like acquiring things, nice things.

We like being comfortable.

Even our governments recognize this national obsession with covetousness.

Have you noticed how you are referred to in government reports and releases?

Are you called a “citizen”?

Perhaps in highly formal cases.

But most of the time, and in most of the reports, you are called a “consumer”.

You are expected to consume.

You are doing your job when you are spending and acquiring.

It is the American way, the American Dream.

Buy more, own more.

And while we may be generous, particularly at this time of year when we consider the “less fortunate”,

Do we really go out of our way to seek out people in need?

Or do we simply wait for them to come and ask, to cross our path?

Calvin mentions a quote by Chrysostom about this:

covetous men, if they could, would willingly take the sun from the poor,” for they envy their brethren the common elements, and would gladly swallow them up; not that they might enjoy them, but because such is the madness to which their greed carries them.

Maybe you defend yourself thinking “I wouldn’t do that” or “I don’t feel that way”.

But are you guilty of expanding your stuff?

Justifying your acquisition while giving no thought at all to the reason God gave you the means that enabled you to do it.

Did He really give you that extra money so you could buy a new toy?

And I know it is a terrible thing to say at the beginning of Thanksgiving week, but did He give you all that food so you could make a glutton of yourself?

The point of this sin of covetousness is twofold:

1. The poor are oppressed and taken advantage of.

When we fall into this sin, we find our hearts less compassionate toward our brother, toward our neighbor.

We classify all the stuff we possess as “ours”, and, more importantly “not theirs”.

Does this sound like the church or the world?

And the congregation of those who believed were of one heart and soul; and not one of them claimed that anything belonging to him was his own, but all things were common property to them. – Acts 4:32

This can extend even toward places you might least expect.

Giveaways, drawings, and sweepstakes seem innocent – but those things are paid for by higher prices.

Which is more valuable to you: the remote chance of a free vacation to Hawaii or lower prices so the poor can afford those necessities?

2. The covetous never ask themselves properly “How much is enough?”

Or if they do, the sad answer is likely “Just a little more”.

How much money is enough for you?

Perhaps you may think immediately “I need everything I have and earn.”

And that may well be the case.

But we have brothers and sisters all over the world who are forced to get by on much less.

Is there nothing in what God has given us that He intended for us to pass along, whether to someone we know or through some trusted agency?

How much house is enough?

How much land is enough?

How much food is enough?

Look at the things you might collect or accumulate: do you have enough?

And if not, how much IS enough?

That is the way to tell if these things have captured your heart.

Because that is the sin God is judging here.

Because greed and covetousness and gluttony are all based in the search for something OTHER than God to make us happy, to complete our joy.

And all the things He describes – the land not producing, the houses lying empty – all tell us this:

He will prove to us the emptiness and hollowness of the things around us.

We will know they cannot be trusted.

We will realize they cannot bring happiness.

Those things can’t love us.

They can’t fill us.

They can’t even satisfy us.

They can’t save us.

They are dumb idols, and the kindest and most loving thing God can do is to separate us from them and destroy them.

We will be humbled; we will be brought low.

We might even be sad to see those things we thought we needed go.

But what do you have that you need more than the love and peace of the Almighty God?