Isaiah Chapter 5:1-5
Those of you that have pets that live in the house know what I am talking about. You love Fluffy the cat so much! But the price you pay is the litter box smell that you get used to, but, when folks come to call they enter your house with squinted eyes and a few wrinkles in their nose.
Isaiah 5:1-5 is a sad love song. Isaiah is telling about the Lord who Isaiah claims as him own beloved friend. Isaiah explains how the Lord, his own beloved friend, prepared nuture and support for the Hebrew Nation. The Hebrew Nation was the Lord’s chosen people. In this love song Isaiah tells how the Lord fenced his garden and planted it with the choicest vine. That vine was Israel, the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem. Verse two explains how God prepared the garden to be an optimal environment to bring forth desirable grapes.
On we go to verse four, where we find out that God’s chosen people brought forth “wild grapes” despite all of the nurture provided by their loving father’s garden. Pause for a second and consider wild grapes. The Hebrew word used to indicate wild grapes actually denotes a bad or sour grape that would be mushy and would also have an unpleasant smell. So here are the Israelites in this beautiful garden* and they are stinking it up to high heaven. They apparently didn’t even smell the stink around them and had grown quite used to it.
Isaiah Chapter three verses sixteen and seventeen say, “Moreover the Lord saith, because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making tinkling with their feet, therefore the Lord will smite with a scab the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will discover their secret parts.”
There is great application here for those of us who love and follow Christ as His Chose People. Self examination can bring us closer to Christ and ground us in our faith and purpose. Check out your garden. Has the smell from rotten fruit been creeping in unnoticed? Are you so used to the smell that it no longer bothers you?
Isaiah Chapter One verse sixteen says, “wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil”.
*(Remember, this chapter is like a a parable, so not literally a garden but the garden represents all that God had provided for the Israelites)