Isaiah 5:4-6

What could have been done more to My vineyard that I have not done in it?

Human responsibility and Divine grace

I. In any attempt at the interpretation of the story and the exhibition of its moral and religions uses, its NATIONAL APPLICATION should be considered first. (Isaiah 5:7.)

1. There is a sense in which it may almost be said that Israel was Jehovah’s vineyard as no other race or nation has ever been. Selected from an ancient stock which certainly does not seem to have greatly distinguished itself before, it had been preserved and cherished century after century; and in its most marvellous history are to be found the purest revelations of God in antiquity, leading up to the “unspeakable gift” in which men have life. That history proves that the nation had enjoyed every condition of blessedness, every opportunity of fruitfulness and service.

2. The kind of career it chose is sufficiently indicated in this fifth chapter, in the latter part of which the vices seem almost to run riot. But it is even more significant of the state of the nation, that these lurid paragraphs are not perhaps quite an adequate representation. For, threatened with an attack from an alliance of the neighbouring tribes, Ahaz sought the aid of the King of Assyria; and to secure it, he actually consented to govern his country as an Assyrian province. Then followed one of the most dismal periods of Jewish history. The weak king became infatuated with his oppressor, and nothing would satisfy him except the introduction of Assyrian manners and morals and worship into Jerusalem. The example of the court infected the nobles and the priests; and at length, in the beautiful valley of Hinnom, amongst the groves that were kept green by the fountains of Siloah, an altar to Moloch was erected. That was the sort of “wild grape” this choice vine was yielding,--idolatry of the most cruel and savage kind, varied with sensuality and the oppression of the poor.

3. That such a result should disappoint the Owner of the vineyard was only natural; and accordingly this little story represents Him next as trying to find out the cause, or rather, as appearing to the men of Judah to acknowledge what He and they well knew. He sets them up for the moment as judges, and confronts reason and conscience with the question, “What could have been done more to My vineyard, that I have not done in it?” Everything that could be done and yet leave them free to sin and capable of righteousness had been done.

4. A nation convicted and self-convicted of the most gross offences against God and against morals, offences the entire responsibility of which rests upon itself--what will become of that nation? There are other parts of the Bible, not quite so stern as this, which indicate that further opportunities may be given it, and the final punishment withheld for a time. But it is also true that, in regard of nations as well as of men, the patience of God may be exhausted. We have accordingly, in this song and story, the outline of the history of Judah. God’s consideration, first of all, with every kind of gracious help and opportunity,--all wasted through the neglect or wilfulness of the nation itself, until it became fruitless and hopelessly corrupt; and then the fulfilment of the Divine words: “Go to; I will tell you what I will do to My vineyard: I will lay it waste: it shall not be pruned nor digged; but there shall come up briers and thorns: I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it.” Judah, in its origins and early career, is a sufficient illustration of the preliminary stages: Judah, in its dispersion and miseries, is a standing witness to the certainty with which national calamity overtakes national contempt of God. A nation that ignores its past, and just surrenders itself to sin, is manifestly good for nothing, filling no worthy function, but cumbering the earth.

II. BUT NO NATIONAL INTERPRETATION OF THIS PARABLE SEEMS QUITE SUFFICIENT. The way in which the Bible insists upon the truth that national responsibility does not obliterate but only gathers together and, as it were, organises personal responsibility, has some important bearings upon current modes of speech and thought. There is a disposition sometimes to speak of the conscience of a nation, to imagine that the phrase stands for something that is entirely separate and apart from ourselves, and to regard it as a power outside of a man, to which he may add or from which he may withhold his own influence. At times it has proved a convenient generalisation; but it is well that an exact meaning should be given it. It must denote, not something apart from any man, but either the average personal conscience, or the aggregate of all the consciences; and an average or an aggregate is a figure upon which every unit tells. All morality, indeed, must always be, in its essence and in its appeals, personal, lifting up a nation by lifting up the individuals that constitute it; exposing it to the wrath of God because the individuals expose themselves. The most effective social movements are found to be accordingly those which address themselves in the name of God to individuals, and persuade them one by one to aim more resolutely at the fulfilment of righteousness.

1. If then this passage be taken personally, no one who recalls his past life, and remembers the way in which God has dealt with him, is likely to object to its symbolism. Every one of us has been and is a vineyard of the Lord; and He does for us all that a God can do.

2. What has been the result of it all? Wild grapes in abundance--weakness and bad temper and almost every kind of fault we can show, but little else.

3. The reason of such failure is not far to seek. That God can be blamed for it, is impossible; for there has been no defect of grace or help on His part. Temperament and circumstance might be pleaded, aptitudes we have inherited, and hindrances amidst which we have found ourselves, but for the obvious reply that, whilst these things may involve effort and strain, they never involve defeat. The man who is most embarrassed by his own disposition and surroundings, but for his own fault might be a better man than he is.

4. The consequences of continuing in fruitlessness are shown by the passage to be fatal and hopeless. To waste Divine grace is to run the risk of losing it altogether. That point, however, has not been reached by anyone who retains any aspiration after God, or any desire to be a better man. In Christ there is power for all to shake off every habit of sin, to reverse tendencies to neglect and waste, to evolve in righteousness and peace. (R. Waddy Moss.)

God and men

I. THE DEALINGS OF GOD WITH US.

II. OUR CONDUCT TOWARDS HIM. (A. Roberts, M. A.)

Divine disappointment

It may seem irreverent to speak of a Divine disappointment, but this is by no means the only passage of Scripture which in its obvious meaning conveys this idea, Perhaps we may have to leave the explanation of such words till we obtain fuller light in higher worlds upon the great mystery of the relation of Divine foreknowledge to human freedom; but clearly such words are spoken to us after the manner of men, in order that we may the better discern the intensity of desire and the warmth of loving interest with which the God from whom we all proceed seeks to raise us to our true functions and our proper place in His universe, and the sorrow and regret with which He witnesses the failure of His gracious purposes concerning us. (W. Hay Aitken, M. A.)

The moral limits of the Divine resources

1. Perhaps it may occur to you to object, this lamentation and apparent disappointment? Surely, this is a confession of impotence on the part of the Omnipotent. If God be really what we call Him--Almighty--why should He waste words in futile expostulations! Surely, He who makes the vine put forth her tender grapes and prepares the autumn vintage the wide world over, could, if He pleased, by the mere exercise of His superior power, constrain men to bring forth the fruit that He desires to see brought forth. Why did He not increase the pressure of His power on Israel until He had constrained the disobedient nation to become obedient, and had practically forced them to bring forth their fruit? Our answer to this very natural difficulty is simply this--that the suggestion involves a contradiction. This will be sufficiently obvious as soon as we begin to ask,

What is the special fruit that God seeks at the hand of man? The proper fruit of humanity, the fruit that God seeks in human character and life, is the reproduction of the Divine nature. God’s purpose in man is answered when He sees in man His own moral likeness formed. But now, inasmuch as God is a free agent, it is only by the possession of a similar moral faculty, and of the capacity of exercising it, and only by its exercise in the highest and best manner, that man can ever be conformed into the Divine image; for no two things are more essentially unlike than an automaton and a free agent. Indeed. I think we might venture to say that even a free agent who uses his freedom badly is morally more like God, just because he is free, than the most perfect automaton--perfect, I mean, in every other particular you can name--could ever hope to become, seeing that he is not, and can never hope to be, free. No doubt God could have arranged that man should be a very different being, and bring forth very different fruit; but then in doing so He would have had to abandon the specific purpose emphatically announced when man was just about to be called into existence--“Let us make man in our image, after our own likeness.” St. Paul teaches us that the “gifts and calling of God are without repentance,” and we see this illustrated all through the natural world. God does not alter the functions of particular organisms, and make them produce something totally distinct from their own proper type. Were He to do so He would be admitting failure and inconsistency. And as in the material so in the spiritual world. Man has been originally designed to occupy a certain unique position there, and to exercise certain definite functions, and to bring forth a particular kind of fruit to the glory of God, and therefore we may be quite sure that God will not transform him into a being of another order altogether, just to make him do and be what he in his free manhood wills not to do or to be.

2. But it might still be urged, Would not God be acting a kinder part if He withdrew this faculty of free will which has caused us so much trouble, and sin and sorrow--if He were so completely to override it by His own superior power, and so control it that it should be able to exercise no appreciable influence incur conduct, but that He Himself should always have His way? To this we answer, God loves man too much to do anything of the kind. Man’s capacity of rising to his proper destiny is involved in his possession and exercise of this faculty of volition. Take it away, and we must needs turn our backs forever upon the thought of rising to the prize of our high calling in Christ Jesus; for it is by the use of these wills of ours, and by their voluntary subordination, that we are to be trained, and developed, and educated, and fitted for enjoying that wondrous relation to the Son of God which is spoken of as the spiritual Bridal and Union of Christ and His Church. No; man must remain free, or else his own proper fruit can never be brought forth; and hence there is really and actually moral limit to the Divine resources.

3. Bearing in mind, then, these necessary limitations of the Divine resources, let us each face the inquiry, What more would we have God do for us than He has actually done! I do not my that all are equally privileged, and I can believe that some, in answer to such a challenge, might demand the enjoyment of higher privileges such as others possess. But don’t you see that, whatever privileges might thus be secured, the necessity for the action of the will would not and could not be evaded! And so long as this were so, what guarantee would you have that your increased privileges might not mean only enhanced condemnation! Others, who occupy the very position of privilege that you might demand, have only turned their privileges into a curse by sinning against them; and who shall say that it would not be the same with you? Nay, is it not even more than probable that it would be so; for does not our Lord Himself teach us that “he that is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much: and he that is unrighteous in a very little is unrighteous also in much”! Here we have laid down one of the great laws of the moral world. (W. Hay Aitken, M. A.)

God employs various means in dealing with men

He does not exhaust all the means that He is capable of employing without any inconsistency all at once. Just as He dealt in different ways with Israel of old, sometimes sending a miracle-working prophet like Elijah, and sometimes a man of mighty eloquence such as Isaiah; sometimes raising up a saintly hierarch like Samuel, and sometimes a philosophic moralist like Solomon; sometimes speaking in pestilence, defeat, disaster, and sometimes in prosperity and deliverance, even so He employs first one means and then another in dealing with us. But each of these, when it fails to bring about the end for which it was designed, represents the exhaustion of yet another resource; and when the last which the Holy Ghost can righteously and consistently have recourse to has been exhausted, the soul is lost. (W. HayAitken, M. A.)

Thankfulness for past mercies the way to obtain future blessings

I. THE FORM AND MANNER OF THE COMPLAINT. It runs in a pathetic, interrogatory exclamation; which way of expression naturally and amongst men importing in it surprise and a kind of confusion in the thoughts of him who utters it, must needs be grounded upon that which is the foundation of all surprise, which I conceive is reducible to these two heads--

1. The strangeness;

2. The indignity of anything, when it first occurs to our apprehensions.

II. THE COMPLAINT ITSELF; for which there are these things to be considered.

1. The Person complaining, who was God Himself.

2. The persons complained of, which were His peculiar Church and people.

3. The ground of this complaint; which was their unworthy and unsuitable returns made to the dealings of God with them.

4. The issue and consequent of it; which was the confusion and destruction of the persons so graciously dealt with and so justly complained of. (R. South, D. D.)

God’s vineyard

With ill men nothing is more common than to accuse Almighty God of partiality and injustice, as if it were in His nature to be austere and cruel, and expect more than can reasonably be done by them in their circumstances. When the earth is unprofitable, and its productions are fit only to be burned in the fire, the fault is neither in the sun nor yet in the clouds, but in those whose business it is to prepare the earth for the influences of the heavens. In like manner, and with equal justice, may God appeal to His people: and this is the purport of the question, “What could have been done more for My vineyard, that I have not none in it?”

1. The vineyard, with all the circumstances relating to it, is thus described by the prophet (Isaiah 5:1).

2. If Christians should at last fall away, the justice of God may then appeal to them, “What could have been done more for My vineyard, that I have not done in it?”

3. As true religion brings with it the blessing of God upon any nation, and this blessing is the source of inward peace, wisdom, health, plenty, and prosperity; so the decay of Christianity must bring such evils upon us as were brought on the impenitent Jews. (W. Jones, M. A.)

The impenitent inexcusable

There is something very affecting, very startling, in the assertion that as much had been done as could be done in order to produce from the ancient Church the “fruits of righteousness.” And, if you only ponder the arrangements of the Gospel, you will feel forced to assent to the reproachful truth which is conveyed in the question of the text. There is a wonderful variety in the arguments and appeals which are addressed in Scripture to the thoughtless and obdurate. At one time they are attacked with terrors, at another acted upon by the loving kindness of God, and allured by the free mercies of the Gospel. In our text there is nothing alleged but the greatness of what God has done for us--a greatness such that nothing more can be done, consistently, at least, with that moral accountableness which must regulate the amount of influence which God brings to bear upon man. Of course, if this be so, then, if we are not convinced and renewed under the existing instrumentality, there is nothing that can avert from us utter destruction.

I. This is the first way of vindicating the question of our text--atheism has a far better apology for resisting the evidences of a God which are spread over creation, than worldly-mindedness for manifesting insensibility to redemption through Christ. It is not, we think, too bold a thing to say, that in redeeming us, God exhausted Himself. He gave Himself; what greater gift could remain unbestowed! Therefore it is the fact that nothing more could have been done for the vineyard, which proves the utter ruin which must follow neglect of the proffered salvation. Having shown yourselves too hard to be softened by that into which Deity has thrown all His strength, too proud to be humbled by that which involved the humiliation of God, too grovelling to be attracted by that which unites the human and the Divine, too cold to be warmed by that which burns with all the compassions of that Infinite One, whose very essence is love,--may we not argue that you thus prove to yourselves that there is no possible arrangement by which you could be saved?

II. Consider more in detail what has been done for the vineyard, in order to bring out, in all its reproachfulness, the question before us.

1. As much has been done as could have been done because of the agency through which redemption was effected. The Author of our redemption was none other than the eternal Son of God, who had covenanted from all eternity to become the surety and substitute for the fallen. So far as we have the power of ascertaining, no being but a Divine taking to Himself flesh, could have satisfied justice in the stead of fallen man. But this is precisely the arrangement which has been made on our behalf.

2. As much has been done as could have been done for the “vineyard,” regard being had to the completeness and fullness of the work as well as to the greatness of its Author. The sins of the whole race were laid upon Christ; and such was the value which the Divinity gave to the endurances of the humanity, that the whole race might be pardoned if the whole race would put faith in the Mediator as punished in their stead. The scheme of redemption not only provides for our pardon, so that punishment may be avoided; it provides also for our acceptance, so that happiness may be obtained. Not only is there full provision for every want, but there is the Holy Spirit to apply the provision, and make it effectual in the individual case.

3. There is yet one more method of showing that so much has been done for the “vineyard” that there remains nothing more which the Owner can do. In the teachings of the Redeemer we have such clear information as to our living under a retributive government,--a government whose recompenses shall be accurately dealt out in another state of being,--that ignorance can be no man’s excuse if he live as though God took no note of human actions. And we reckon that much of what has been done for the “vineyard” consists in the greatness of the reward which the Gospel proposes to righteousness, and the greatness of the punishment which it denounces on impenitence. (H. Melvill, B. D.)

The Lord’s vineyard

I. THE ADVANTAGES.

II. THE SINS.

III. THE PUNISHMENT of the elder Church. (G. J. Cornish, M. A.)

Christmas thoughts

I. The solemnity of the present season calls upon us to commemorate in an especial manner THE MERCIES OF GOD IN THE REDEMPTION OF THE WORLD, the last and most gracious of all His dispensations. The preceding vouchsafements were preparatory to this, which is therefore to be considered as the completion of the others. Wherefore, if those other dispensations had so much grace in them as to warrant the prophet’s expostulation in the text and context, the argument will be so much the stronger, and our obligation so much the greater, as the grace in which we stand is more abounding and the advantage of our situation more favourable and auspicious to us. This whole matter will appear in a stronger light to us if we turn our thoughts to those three great periods of religion under one or other of which the Church of God and His Christ hath all along subsisted. In each of these we shall have occasion to reflect upon the merciful care of providence and the shameful negligence and ingratitude of mankind in their returns to it.

1. The patriarchal;

2. The Jewish;

3. The Christian, marked by the personal appearance of Christ, our blessed Mediator, who had all along transacted the great affairs of the Church under the two preceding economies.

The two main ends which were here consulted were--

(1) The atonement of past offences.

(2) The prevention of future offences.

II. THE RETURNS WHICH HAVE BEEN MADE to all this tender indulgence of our merciful Father. (N. Marshall, D. D.)

National wickedness in danger of provoking national judgments

I. WHAT GOD HATH DONE FOR US AND WHAT RETURNS WE HAVE MADE.

1. In early ages, when we were overrun with heathenism and idolatry, it pleased God to plant the Christian religion among us; a religion every way worthy of the Divine dispensation, and suited to the exigencies of mankind. When this religion had flourished many centuries in its unalloyed purity, in a very dark age it became adulterated with impure doctrines, and quite overgrown with a heap of monstrous absurdities: but it pleased God, by the ministry of His faithful servants, to re-enlighten this land with the beams of truth; to restore Christianity to its original simplicity and sincerity.

2. A thorough disregard to Christianity has prevailed.

II. WHAT WE MAY EXPECT AS THE CONSEQUENCE OF OUR INGRATITUDE AND IMPIETY. Vice, when diffused through a kingdom, must have a fatal influence over the whole community, and at last accomplish the destruction of it. In its universal progress it must be attended with idleness and immoderate expense, the natural parents of poverty. Honest poverty would cast about for honest and unthought of expedients for supporting itself and bettering its condition, but poverty, contracted by the profligate courses of drunkenness, lewdness, and debauchery, takes quite another turn, and preys upon the little industry that is left to the nation, and thereby gives a check to that very industry; for the less secure men grow in their properties the less will they labour to improve them. Hence will it come to pass that among those of higher condition, self-interest will be made the ruling principle. And among the meanest of the people what power can we suppose will the voice of human laws have against the louder calls of poverty, set free from the barrier of conscience, and thereby at liberty to relieve itself by all the methods that wickedness can suggest! In proportion as the hands of the government grow weak will the hearts of its enemies he strengthened, and greater force must still be provided for its support, and the maintenance of that must again fall on the public; and general burdens of that kind, should they ever he felt, would be followed by a general discontent. And this will give a great temptation to our foreign enemies to take the advantage of such fatal opportunities and try to make us no more a nation. In the ordinary course of things then, vice, when it becomes epidemical, is not only the reproach, but bids fair for the ruin of any people. National wickedness never failed, sooner or later, to provoke the Almighty to a national vengeance.

III. THE PROPER MEANS WHEREBY WE MAY HOPE TO AVERT GOD’S DISPLEASURE. (Jeremiah 18:7.) As we make a part of the nation, our sins must make a part of the national guilt; and consequently none of us can think ourselves unconcerned in the important work of a national reformation. (J. Seed, M. A.)