Spiritual Wasteland — E.A. Johnston

Self-Reliance, Sin, and Spiritual Wasteland

I have a very solemn message for us today, friends, regarding how a people, a nation, can begin well with God and then through self-reliance and sin end very badly with God against them. My message today is entitled Spiritual Wasteland, and my text is found in the book of Isaiah.

Isaiah's Vineyard Parable and God's Care

You can turn in your Bibles there now, friends. We will be in chapter 5 and in verses 1 through 7. Here the prophet Isaiah makes use of the striking imagery of a parable of the vineyard. The vineyard, of course, refers to the people of Israel for whom God, as the divine tiller of the soil, has exercised such great care over, as seen beginning in verse 1.

Now will I sing to my well-beloved a song of my beloved, touching his vineyard, my well-beloved, hath a vineyard in a very fruitful hill, and he fenced it, and gathered out the stones thereof, and planted it with the choices fine, and built a tower in the midst of it, and also made a winepress therein, and he looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes.

Let me pause here, friends, to say that we see the great care exercised here by Almighty God over his chosen people, as he spares no expense to make the vineyard productive. He plants it with the choices fine, built a tower to watch over it and protect it, and even places a winepress there.

God's Expectations and Israel's Wild Grapes

All the preparations have been made, and our text says, and he looked, that it should bring forth grapes. So not only did he exercise great care over the vineyard, he has great expectations for it. In verse 4 he mentions he went above board and beyond all to make the vineyard a success.

What could have been done more to my vineyard that I have not done in it? God now looks for the expected fruit of the harvest, but he looks in vain. Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes.

Israel's Rebellion and Spiritual Stench

The great care and great expectation turns into great disappointment. All one has to do is spend time reading Isaiah chapter 1 to see how great his disappointment with the Jews really was. His lament of a sinful nation that had forsaken the Lord as they had gone away backward, meaning they had turned their backs on God through rebellion, self-reliance, and grievous sin.

God speaks of Israel in chapter 1 as a putrefying sore, where from the head to their foot there's no soundness in them. And when God declares he looked for grapes from his vineyard and all that was produced were wild grapes, this again is a reference to the people's rottenness as wild grapes literally means stinking things.

Israel by her self-reliance and provoking sins had become a stench in the holy nostrils of Almighty God. Listen friends, this can happen to a nation. When I look at the once Christian nations of England and America, I see two countries that each began well with God, but like King Solomon ended badly.

England's Decline After Christian Blessings

God favored England with printing the Bible. He blessed them with choice ministers like the Puritans. God made England powerful with a Royal Navy to rule the seas, and he allowed her a great missionary enterprise.

And God gave England Wesleyan Whitefield to shake the continent in revival. What more could he have done? But today pagan England is now the cocaine capital of the world, and you'd be hard-pressed to find more than 20 people sitting in one of her decaying churches.

America's Spiritual and Moral Collapse

America, like England, was mildly favored by God, and it was plain to the world that God blessed America. He made it a land of spiritual awakening with gifts to the church with men like Jonathan Edwards and David Brainerd.

Harvard, Yale, Princeton were birthed to train up ministers to promote the Bible in foreign lands. But today godless homosexual America is the capital of pornography, and its moral cesspool has polluted the entire planet.

Judgment When the Protective Hedge Is Removed

When we look in our text today from Isaiah, we see how God's great disappointment in the Jews turned into a great judgment upon the Jews. In verses 5 and 6, we see a spiritual wasteland stand before us in its starkness.

And now go to, I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard. I will take away the hedge thereof, and it shall be eaten up, and break down the wall thereof, and it shall be trodden down, and I will lay it waste.

It shall not be pruned, nor digged, but there shall come up briars and thorns. I will stop there, friends, when God removes his protective hedge off a nation, then there will be hell to pay. England and America, once bright beacons for almighty God, have dimmed their influence through God-provoking sins, and now the hedge is off these spiritual wastelands, and there will be hell to pay.