Isaiah 5:2

Isaiah 5:2

To us God says, as to Israel of old, "What more could I do to My vineyard that I have not done? Why, then, when I looked for grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?"

Is not this indictment true? No true patriot, much less Christian, can look without grave anxiety on the tastes and tendencies of the times in which we live. Wild grapes, offensive to God, mischievous to others, and ruinous to us, are being produced on every hand. The husbandman describes some of them.

I. The excessive greed of gain the oppressive selfishness that tramples under foot the claims of brotherhood and the rights of men.

II. The crying sin of intemperance.

III. The headstrong rush after pleasure; the follies and frivolities of the tens of thousands whose whole time and tastes and talents are wickedly laid at the shrine of sensual delights.

IV. Sensuality in its grosser and fouler shapes.

V. Infidelity. "Woe unto them that regard not the work of the Lord, neither consider the operations of His hands."

VI. Fraud, falsehood, and dishonesty. "Woe to them that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter," etc.

Such are some of the elements of moral mischief which threaten the ruin of our beloved land. If England lives on, and grows in lustre as she lives, it must be because the King Immanuel is undisputed monarch of the national heart, uncontrolled director of the national policy and the national will.

J. Jackson Wray, Light from the Old Lamp,p. 241.

I. Consider the distinguishing features which, in God's allegory, separate the grape from the wild grape. (1) The good grape is not in a state of nature; the wild grape is. Either it has had no culture, or it has not responded to its culture. Therefore it is wild. The secret of its state lies in that one word "wild." (2) The wild grape does not grow or ripen into use. It springs, it hangs on the bough, and it falls, for itself. No man is the better for it. None gather strength or refreshment or delight there. (3) The wild grape has not the sweetness of the true. It is harsh and sour, because (4) the wild grape has never been grafted.

II. The first thing of all, without which everything else in religion is only a blank, is, and must be, a real living union with the Lord Jesus Christ. By that union, the life which was unchanged, selfish, tasteless or bitter, and without Christ, becomes a new, expansive, loving, Christlike life, and the wild grape in the desert is turned into the true grape of paradise.

J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,4th series, p. 95.