James Nisbet's Church Pulpit Commentary
Isaiah 17:11
THE HARVEST OF A GODLESS LIFE
‘The harvest shall be a heap in the day of grief and of desperate sorrow.’
The original application of these words is to Judah’s alliance with Damascus, which Isaiah resolutely opposed. We may take it in a more general way as containing large truths which affect the life of every one of us.
I. The sin of a godless life.
(a) The sin charged. Merely negative—forgetting a very common sin.
(b) The implied criminality of it.
(c) The implied absurdity of it.
II. The busy effort and apparent success of a godless life.
(a) If the soul is not satisfied in God, there are hungry desires. This is the explanation of the feverish activity of much of our life.
(b) Such work is far harder than the work of serving God.
(c) Such work has sometimes quick, present success.
III. The end of it all.
(a) How poor the fruit of a God-forgetting life! ‘One heap’ from all the long struggle.
(b) A terrible, inevitable consummation. ‘Put in the sickle.’
(c) A sad ‘harvest home’ to some. Terrible words, ‘grief and desperate sorrow.’ We dare not dilate on it. How different from returning with joy, bringing our sheaves with us!
Illustration
‘The prophet says, “In the day of judgment, which is itself just at the same time the day of harvest, the produce of harvest is there in heaps.” But this harvest day is “a day of grief and of desperate sorrow.” Being such, the harvest is a bad one, and the heaps signify heaped up misfortune. Therefore the prophet says that the fruit of that planting shall be a harvest that shall come in on the day of grief and incurable pain, thus itself shall have the form of grief and incurable pain.’