God’s Lavished Grace Tragically Rendered Fruitless

They have deceived themselves, but they are enslaved to sin, as though they are beasts of burden serving sin and they cannot escape it. Yet they mock God, question God, challenge God, defy God. They arrogantly demand that God carry out his plan on their timetable.

Long before the postmodern assertion that everything is relative, people have questioned truth and sought to redefine it. God alone is the absolute standard of good and evil, and the ultimate evil is to deny him his glory, to fail to love him with all our hearts. Lesser evils come when people call actions “good” that God has called “evil” and call actions “evil” that God has called “good.” This is the evidence of a depraved and arrogant mind.

In the garden of Eden, Eve perceived that the fruit was good for making her wise and she ate it. This kind of wisdom is rooted in self-worship, the ultimate form of idolatry. In the same way, the Israelites of Isaiah’s day were truly impressed with themselves. Technology, achievement, and affluence tend to make us wise in our own eyes, forgetting the immeasurable wisdom that God displayed in creating the universe to begin with.

One of the fundamental functions of government is to assure justice for all its citizens, that neither the rich nor the poor will get any preferential treatment but that everyone will be judged fairly. The symbol of this for the United States Supreme Court is Lady Justice personified, a blindfolded woman carrying scales and a sword, representing fair trial and justice meted out with authority, irrespective of persons. In Isaiah’s day judges loved the lush life, were champion wine drinkers, and sold their services to the highest bidder.

So there we have a sixfold woe, six clusters of bad grapes—a detailed and comprehensive description of the harvest of sins that breaks the heart of God.

Isaiah 5:13-17,24-30

Each of the woes describes a horrendous sin pattern on the part of God’s people, and each of them results in a “therefore”—a corresponding judgment from our reasonable and righteous God. In verses 9-10 God swears that luxurious homes of the economic empire builders will become desolate and their vineyards will experience massive crop failure. In verses 13-15 God makes it plain that the pleasure-loving drunkards will either die or go into exile to starve. In verses 24-25 God describes the fiery indignation of his wrath consuming the people who have despised and rejected his holy Word, and it is terrifying: the ground shaking and corpses filling the streets. It is very clear from verses 26-30 that the primary means of judging this people will be an invasion by a highly skilled and magnificently equipped army from distant Gentile nations (the Assyrians and the Babylonians, and then a series of Gentile invaders after them).

Isaiah 5:15-17

God does not delight in bringing these judgments on his people, but he does delight in the outcome described in verses 15-17: arrogant humanity is humbled, God alone is exalted by his justice and righteousness, and sheep may graze peacefully in the ruins of the rich. God’s judgments are designed to bring about final salvation for his elect, and the focus of their eternal joy will be the radiant attributes of God so plainly put on display throughout redemptive history.

Let us return to the question of this chapter: What more could he have done? God’s grace lavished on Israel is astonishing, and the advantages they enjoyed as God’s people were vast. One thing, however, was lacking: the internal transformation of their hearts by the sovereign grace of God. Without that transformation, all those external blessings would only corrupt them and harden their hearts. Their hearts of stone needed to be removed and hearts of flesh given instead; God’s Spirit could have been poured out on them from on high, moving them (indeed, compelling them by his sovereign power) to follow his statutes and ordinances (Ezek 36:26-27). The experience of Israel in history puts plainly on display two types of grace: that which can be resisted and turned to judgment and that which cannot. The second type of grace is sometimes called “irresistible,” but it is better to call it “effectual.” It is a grace that cannot be “received in vain”:

Isaiah 5 and the whole experience of Israel in the old covenant stands as a warning to the church in the new covenant. We have been given far greater privileges through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ than Israel experienced under the law of Moses. And this chapter stands as a warning to all nations in which the gospel has long flourished, not to take lightly the many blessings of the Christian faith that have surrounded them for centuries. Isaiah 5 speaks a word of warning to the American evangelical church, for no church in history has had as many spiritual advantages as Christians in America: Bibles in a variety of translations; good seminaries teaching the truths of the Word of God; publishers, book distributors, Internet resources; good preaching in tapes, CDs, digital downloads, and streaming; godly role models, men and women openly living for Christ; opportunities to serve the Lord in short- and long-term missions; good, Bible-believing churches.

And yet, for all the avalanche of God’s grace, it is amazing to many observers how little fruit is being produced here. We must be warned not to receive these graces from God in vain but live to display his holiness in an increasingly corrupt age and to spread the name of Jesus from shore to shore. “From everyone who has been given much, much will be required” (Luke 12:48).

We should learn to love God as passionately as Isaiah did (v. 1) and to grieve over what breaks God’s heart. We should look at the sins listed in Isaiah 5 and see roots of those same sins in our own hearts. We should look to the cross of Christ as our only righteousness and to the empty tomb of Christ as the only power for new life by the Spirit. We should proclaim the coming wrath of God, for the exact same sins that plagued Isaiah’s society plague our own. We should expose the moral relativism of postmodernism by the light of verse 20 and courageously call what is evil to be evil and what is good to be good. Finally, we should long for the societal righteousness that Isaiah yearned for, in which the poor and needy are not deprived of justice.