Isaiah 5

What were the people of Judah like during Isaiah’s lifetime? Isaiah 5 paints a vivid picture of a country filled with the blessings of God, yet unwilling to acknowledge the One who blessed them.

Background: Judah’s Sin and God’s Promise

Isaiah 1-4 sets the stage for understanding God’s relationship with Judah and Israel, exposing their sin, pride, and idolatry. Yet God still promises He will forgive, cleanse, and restore them through His Branch, the Messiah. Through the Branch, He will renew the country, filling it with righteousness, prosperity, holiness, and divine protection.

The Song for the Vineyard

Isaiah opens the chapter with a mournful song that characterizes God as a farmer and Israel as His vineyard. 

The farmer does everything right, preparing his vineyard to be fertile and getting it ready to produce wine; but instead it produces bad grapes (1-2). Likewise, Yahweh lavished care on Judah, setting it up for success through its leaders, its law, and its worship center, but Judah betrayed Yahweh and pursued its own sinful desires. Thus, Yahweh will do to Judah the same thing a farmer does to a bad vineyard: destroy it and let it lie fallow (3-6). Ultimately, like the farmer who hoped for good grapes, God hoped for his people to produce righteousness, but they acted unrighteously (7).

Seven Woes

Isaiah then lists seven woes, or complaints, that Yahweh hates about the kingdom of Judah around 700 BC.

- Greed instead of Stewardship: He condemns landowners who misused their wealth to acquire land, buying up so much that others had nowhere to live. This violated God’s law for tribal allotments and ancestral land. God promises to make their land unproductive (8-10).

- Drunkenness instead of Thankfulness: The powerful of Jerusalem drank and feasted while ignoring Yahweh’s blessings (11-12), therefore they will be exiled and the city destroyed (13-14). Through this destruction, all the powerful people will be brought down, God will be lifted up, and the land will only support sojourners and herds of animals for a time (15-17).

- Skepticism instead of Worship: The common attitude of the people toward God was an impatient insistence that God should immediately act in their presence to confirm their trust in Him (18-19).

- Warped Morality: There was a constant reversal of moral principles, renaming wicked practices as good and virtuous practices as evil (20).

- Self-Centered Wisdom: There was a common sense of conceited, self-centered wisdom (21).

- Misdirected Expertise: Men were mighty, not in a spiritual or physical sense, but as mixers of drinks (22).

- Corrupted Justice: There was a prevalence of false testimony in exchange for money, in order to remove the righteous from power (23).

These sins are the “bad grapes” that sealed Judah’s destruction. The northern kingdom of Israel has already been conquered; Judah is next. 

Judgment

To finish the chapter, Isaiah returns to the farming illustration, saying that the nation and many of its people will be destroyed like a burning plant for rejecting His word (24-25). God will call a distant nation, one that is highly disciplined, organized, and vicious, to come and seize Judah and carry off its inhabitants like a vicious lion (26-30).

When we think about Judah and Jerusalem in the time of Isaiah, we realize there are many similarities between that nation and our own. Sin takes a similar pattern, no matter the nation that practices it.

Yet God still offers the people of our nation grace, just as He did to the people of Judah. The fact that God details the sins of nations prior to judgment lets believers in those nations separate themselves by their faith and their lifestyle. His Holy Branch, Jesus Christ, died to suffer the judgment we deserve so we could be saved from God’s judgment through faith in Him. May that be our response as we consider both the judgment and the grace of God.

Pastor David