Isaiah 65:11,12

That prepare a table for that troop

Luck and Fortune

Among Orientals the planets Jupiter and Venus were worshipped as the Larger and the Lesser Luck.

They were worshipped as Merodach and Istar among the Babylonians. Merodach was worshipped for prosperity. It may be Merodach and Istar to whom are here given the names Gad (or Luck) and Meni, or Fate, Fortune. There was in the Babylonian Pantheon a “ Manu the Great, who presided over fate.” (Prof. G. A. Smith, D. D.)

The “lectisternia”:

The rites described are the lectisternia, well known throughout the ancient world, in which a table was spread, furnished with meats and drinks as a meal for the gods. (Prof. J. Skinner, D. D.)

God or chance?

Let us give the passage its true rendering, and it may convey to us a very solemn lesson. It is, “ That as for you that forsake His service, that prepare a table for fortune, and pour out the wine for destiny, I have destined you for the slaughter. Behold, My servants shall eat; but ye who prepare a table for fortune shall be hungry. Behold, My servants shall drink; but ye who pour out libations to destiny shall be thirsty. Behold, My servants shall rejoice; but ye who believe in luck shall be ashamed. Ye shall leave your name for a curse. My servants shall bless themselves, and shall swear by the God of Amen--that is, the God of verity and of faithfulness. The apostate Jews were beginning to trust in the gods of the nations, to make banquets to the planet Jupiter, which they regarded as the star of fortune, and to pour libations to the planet Venus, which they regarded as the star of luck. Therefore God tells them that not these stars, not these idols, not these imaginary entities; but that He would be their destiny, and that He would deliver them, because fortune and destiny which they worshipped could guide them only to hunger and thirst, and ruin; but His servants, they who trusted in Him, should never be ashamed; they should find Him to be their God, a God of blessing, a God of amen--yea, a faithful witness. (F. W. Farrar, D. D.)

The temptation to ignore God

Have we no similar temptation? The passage is full of the deepest lessons. It touches upon the very first commandment - “Thou shalt have none other gods but Me.” It emphasizes the very first chapter o Genesis - “It is God that hath mad us, and not we ourselves.” It is nothing short of a whole philosophy of history and a whole philosophy of life. The terms, “accident,” “fortune,” “luck,” play a vast part in the customs and literature of the world, but no part at all in Scripture. The very word “chance,” properly speaking, is entirely absent alike from the Old and New Testament. It is, I suppose, belief in chance that gives its terrible fascination to that pestilent folly of gambling which has ruined so many thousands of Englishmen. But let us look at this subject of the supposed government of life by chance from far wider points of view than these.

1. For instance, it very closely affects our human history. The ancient nations believed in chance. They called it “chance,” or “fortune, if one man got a crown as the prize of his wickedness and the other got a gibblet; they called it “chance” if a battle lost, which raised one ruler from a dungeon to a throne, cut down another form the throne to a dungeon. In this way they, as the prophet says, raised a table to fortune. Do you look at the history of mankind in this way or not? What is history to you? Is it a mere ghastly phantasmagoria of human passions struggling together, or is it the unfolding of a great Divine drama to a merciful issue? Neither in national life nor individual life can we pretend to understand the dealings of God. We cannot tell why the career of a great man is cut short just when he might seem to have been most able to save his country, and why the life of a villain is not cut short before he has done thousands into misery and ruin. We are like a deaf man watching the angers of the harpist as they dance over the strings.

2. But now, turning from history in general to the individual lives of each of us, I can hardly exaggerate the difference which it will make to us whether we regard our lives as being guided by God or as being guided by accident. Nominally, I suppose, we all profess that it is God who is weaving the pattern of our little clay; but do we truly believe it, and do we behave as if we did? Take, for instance, the events of which we habitually speak as the accidents of life. If we can think that these things happen simply by chance, what misery it may cause us! How do men and women thus painfully stricken sometimes curse the day of their life I But what a difference when they have the grace to recognize that this may be in their own life but bitter aloes from the gentle hand of God! As this thought, that it is God and not chance who “shapes our ends,” touches even the most imperfect characters with the glory of resignation, how may it give to the whole course of our daily, life the grace of contentment! (F. W.Farrar, D. D.)

I wish to emphasize the prophet’s warning against the counter sin of pouring out spiced wine for destiny--in other words, of regarding all life as though we were the helpless victims of blind necessity, of irreversible laws, of passionless and adamantine forces, which we can neither modify nor resist. The forms taken by this view of destiny are sometimes religious and sometimes irreligious.

1. One of them pro-Ceases to be very religious indeed--it is Calvinism.

2. Another form of this worship of destiny is fatalism--the notion that as God has decreed everything in this life, nothing will happen except what He has decreed, and therefore that it is quite useless for men to stir. When, in the conquest of Mexico, the unhappy emperor, Montezuma, was crushed with blow after blow of disaster, he made use of this proverb, “We are born; let that come which must come.” Fatalism, like Calvinism, is founded on misapprehended truths, and issues in deplorable results; and it, too, must be flung away as being, for all practical purposes, absurd and false.

3. But there is one more form of “preparing a table for fortune, and pouring out spiced wine for destiny.” It is materialism, which denies the existence of God altogether, or treats Him, at the best, as an unproved hypothesis. It makes its God of science, of nature, of material laws, of man himself. It makes man a mere machine. It destroys at a touch all responsibility. It makes suicide a perfectly permissible resource. It says, to quote its own votaries, that nothing is worthy our efforts, our struggles, or our energies--that the world is a bankrupt in all quarters, and life a business which does not pay its expenses, and annihilation preferable to existence, and the world fundamentally something which ought not to exist. Well, as long as there is such a thing as Christianity, we must brand the insolent, aspiring brow of these spurious notions. (F. W.Farrar, D. D.)