Isaiah 5:1-7, “A Wild Boar in the Vineyard of the Lord”

Isaiah’s Song of the Vineyard and the Judgment on Israel

Isaiah chapter 5 verses 1 to 7, hear the word of the Lord. Let me sing for my beloved my love song concerning his vineyard. My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug it and cleared it of stones and planted it with choice vines.

He built a watchtower in the midst of it and hewed out a wine vat in it and he looked for it to yield grapes but it yielded wild grapes. And now oh inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard.

What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it? When I look for it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes? And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard. I will remove its hedge and it shall be devoured.

I will break down its wall and it shall be trampled down. I will make it a waste. It shall be and it shall not be pruned or hoed and briars and thorns shall grow up. I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it.

For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel and the men of Judah are his pleasant planting. And he looked for justice but behold bloodshed, for righteousness but behold an outcry. May the Lord add his blessings to the reading of his holy word.

When a Carefully Prepared Vineyard Is Ruined

Well have you ever gotten things just right? Your desk, your house, your job, your family, maybe your church and you think it's perfect. I've got everything everything's right and then someone comes along and just messes it up completely.

Maybe you planted a garden and just as the crops are ripe for harvest, you're just proud of this garden. You've done everything for this garden and just as it's about to be ripe for harvesting, a deer comes in and just ravages the whole thing.

Maybe a job is spoiled by a co-worker who won't get along or a boss who won't be reasonable. Maybe a wedding reception is ruined by some clumsy guy who hogs the microphone and makes rude clumsy comments when he's supposed to be giving a toast.

Maybe a thanksgiving dinner is ruined by an awkward and you know the awkwardness of some obnoxious or overbearing relative who just has to shove his politics down everyone's throat. Maybe a peaceful church is disrupted by a pastor who won't stop offending everybody or maybe it's because they won't stop being offended and repent.

Maybe. Let's just decide. Sometimes it seems we have everything right, everything is just right, and someone comes along and disrupts it. In this passage, Isaiah, he sings a song, he says. It's left to us as a poem.

He sings it to his beloved. The beloved, as he explains in verse 7, is the Lord himself. He's the friend, the loved one who has this vineyard. The Lord has made everything just right in Israel. He compares it, compares Israel to a vineyard.

A vineyard was considered one of the most delightful possessions one could have. It's green, it's cultivated, it's neat, it's in order. There's lots of fruit, tasty grapes. The vineyard was, he says at the end of the passage, God's people.

It's the community of the Lord. Now in their day, that community was the nation of Israel. In our day, the Lord's community is the church. And this passage applies just as much to us today as it did to them.

And because Isaiah had such passionate love for God, he's the beloved, Isaiah calls him, he felt the Lord's outrage and grief at the betrayal of his people. And you know, when you really love someone, what hurts them hurts you.

What makes them happy or what makes them happy makes you happy. What makes them angry or sad makes you angry or sad. And so Isaiah took the people's unfaithfulness to the Lord personally. God expects good fruit, and when we give him bad, he is grieved.

And if we love him, we'll be grieved too. Our capacity to share God's anger can be an indicator of how much we really love him. Now here, Isaiah shows the people what the Lord has done for them. He shows it in a parable, this parable about the vineyard.

The beloved, the Lord, had a vineyard. It was on a fertile hill. In other words, it's a favorable place. The soil is just right. You can't think, well, that vineyard went bad because it didn't have good soil.

No, this had the best soil. Then he did the hard work of digging it. He cleared away the stones. They're so common in that area. So there's none of that that's getting in the way of a good harvest. He planted the best strain of grapes that he could find.

So this was a very well cultivated vineyard. Not only that, he built a watchtower in the vineyard. He didn't just settle for some temporary hut, some ramshackle, you know, thing, temporary. He built something permanent, something of a value, a watchtower.

And then he carved out, notice that, a wine vat, carved it out of the very stone, actually cut it out of stone, showing that this was, this is for the long term. He just didn't throw up, you know, something with wood that could be, it could fall down the next day.

Now this is, he was investing himself with lots of hard work in this. All the equipment necessary for an excellent vineyard was provided. No expense, no effort was spared. He worked hard to have the best.

Everything was just first class. This vineyard had all the advantages. What was the result? Not succulent, delicious grapes, but literally, it says, stinkers. Some versions have wild grapes. We would think of kind of this inedible, sour kind of things.

Maybe you walk through the forest and you see there's some kinds of fruit growing. You wouldn't want to eat it. Something that shows no signs of cultivation. And literally, the word there in Hebrew means stinking things, stinkers.

So Isaiah says in verse 3, judge between the Lord and his people. God's people have no excuse. He's done everything that he could possibly do for them. The Lord was an excellent vine dresser. He labored to cultivate his people so that they would bear good fruit, but instead they are, they're putrid.

So as punishment, the Lord will remove the hedge, you know, that keeps out ravaging, keeps out trespassers, keeps out ravaging animals. Remove the wall that protects the vineyard from roaming wildlife.

So it'd be trampled. It'd be devoured by whatever animals go through, like wild boars. God declares in verse 6 that he will make his people, his church, a waste. The Lord God Almighty here is setting himself against his own people because of their failure to bear good fruit, despite all the advantages they have.

He will even command here the forces of nature not to rain on it. So it's not gonna even, it's not even get the rain that just the grass gets. It'll dry up. It'll wither away. All the while, of course, they're thinking they're God's people.

They think God is on their side when he is actually arranging everything and nature and to come against them. They don't see that because of their sins, God himself has determined to ruin them. God has done this throughout history.

He has cultivated his church, his people. Sometimes they bear good fruit and he rewards them and protects them, but at other times they become stinkers. Despite all that he's done to cultivate a good church, they refuse to heed his word, to bear good fruit.

They refuse to be people of integrity, worshiping God in the spirit and in truth, dealing with each other in honesty and integrity, and God can wipe them out. Do you know that the church, did you know that the Turkey, Asia Minor, it used to be devoutly Christian?

Much of the Middle East used to be, almost all of it used to be Christian. God warned one church there, what we now call Turkey, that if they didn't repent, they didn't become zealous for him, if they didn't turn from their lukewarmness, he warned them that he would spit them out of his mouth.

Apparently, they didn't take the warning very seriously because God ruined those vineyards and now Turkey is one of the hardest countries in the world to the gospel. When his vineyard is bearing stinking fruit, God sends men to call them to repent.

Throughout history, he sent other men to claim back his vineyard. As Jesus' parable of the tenets, Jesus tells a similar parable about a vineyard, parable of the tenets, and sometimes the people who seem to control the Lord's vineyard become corrupt.

They lose all fear of God. They think the vineyard is theirs. They get to do with it, they think, as they want. They set it up, they set the vineyard up to bear fruit for them, right, make money for them, have a cushy career for them, provide for them with a comfortable living and perks and respect and power.

They don't want to stand up against the sins of the culture around them because that might cost them the money and the respect and the power. That disrupts the bottom line. When God raises up men to claim back his vineyard from such corrupt leaders, well, they'll reject them.

Maybe they'll kill them. They'll claim that the man upsetting their little kingdom is, he's the wild boar in their vineyard. Well, that's what they called Martin Luther. Luther was raised in a typical German family of his day.

Martin Luther, the Wild Boar, and the Reformation of the Vineyard

His family was devout, praying often to Saint Anne, the patron saint of miners. His father Hans was a miner, began as just a regular mine worker and become very successful in the mining business. He was able to send his son Martin to the university.

He wanted Martin to be a thriving lawyer, so when he and his wife got old, Martin would be able to support them. Sound like a Chinese parent, doesn't he, Hans? But on a sultry day in July 1505, as Martin was trudging over the dirt roads of Saxony on his way back to law school, traveling alone, sky became overcast.

Suddenly began to rain, and the shower turned to a crashing thunderstorm. Then a bolt of lightning struck nearby, knocking him to the ground, and he cried out in terror, Saint Anne, help me, I will become a monk.

So the man, thus the man who called upon a saint was later to repudiate prayer to saints, and the one who pledged to become a monk later would renounce monasticism, and a loyal follower of the Roman church, he was later to tear down that hedge, that wall around that vineyard.

But it took time for him to get there, about a dozen years. First he made good on his vow, he became a monk, infuriating his father Hans. Martin Luther was the kind if he was going to do anything, but he was going to do it all out, and so he didn't just become any monk, he decided to become one of the strictest kinds of monks.

He became called an Augustinian, and even though, even among those, these strict monks, he stood out as especially rigorous. Over time he became the superintendent of 11 monasteries. He said of himself as a monk, quote, I was a good monk, and I kept the rule of my order so strictly that I might say if ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery, you got to love that word, it was I.

All my brothers in the monastery who knew me will bear me out, if I had kept on any longer, I should have killed myself with vigils, prayers, reading, and other works. But he knew that he wasn't going to heaven.

Very different from people today, they don't, they're not at all strict like this, and they all think they're going to heaven, but he knew he wasn't. Despite all his efforts, and his discipline, his prayers, and his fasting, he was painfully aware of how sinful he was.

Unlike so many in our day, he had both a strong sense of his own sin, and of God's holiness and justice. And those two truths, that he was deeply sinful, and that God was completely just, those drove him to seek God more and more.

He was utterly burdened in conscience because of his sense of his own unworthiness. So on that day when he was ordained as a priest later, he felt that he might be struck down by God himself for holding in the bread and the wine what he believed were the body and blood of Christ.

And so when it came time to give his first mass, he could barely stand, just trembling with fear as he was trying to say the words he believed, you know, at that time he believed that would, those words that would turn the bread into the flesh of Christ and the wine into the blood of Christ, he trembled.

And he later said, quote, at these words I was utterly stupefied and terror-stricken. I thought to myself, with what tongue shall I address such majesty? Who am I that I should lift up mine eyes or raise my hands to the divine majesty?

The angels surround him, at his nod the earth trembles, and shall I, a miserable little pygmy, speak to the living, eternal, and true God? So he was driven both by the knowledge of his own sins and the knowledge of God's justice.

He would confess his sins for hours, sometimes spending as much of the day in the confessional in order to rid himself of those sins. He spent much time with his spiritual advisor, a man by the name of John von Staupitz.

Luther wanted to know what to do about his sins, and Staupitz, an older, wiser, kind of more mellow man, encouraged him to study the Bible. Staupitz thought that becoming a teacher of scripture at the university might be just the thing to help brother Martin overcome the agony he was feeling about his own sinfulness.

So Staupitz instructed him to study for a doctorate in the Bible and become a professor at the local university in Wittenberg, Germany. Luther obeyed. First he began teaching on the book of Psalms. Now he's a professor, first duty to teach the book of Psalms, and there in the Psalms he came across Psalm 22, in which he saw the words of Christ on the cross, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

He thought, he saw that, that sounded like something he would say, but why should Christ have known such desperation? Christ said that, why? Luther knew perfectly well why he suffered desperation. He was a sinner before a holy judge.

He was impure in the presence of absolute purity, but Christ had known no sin. Christ was not impure. Why then should he have been so desperate? The only answer must be that Christ, took to himself the iniquity of us all.

He who was without sin became sin for our sakes. So wrath and love came together on the cross, just as we saw in our psalm today, Psalm 85. Righteousness and love kiss in harmony each other. After finishing teaching the book of Psalms, his next duty was to teach the book of Romans, and here is where his life was revolutionized, and I can do no better, no use me trying to describe it, just let him speak for himself.

Here's a lengthy quote from him, this is his own words, I greatly long to understand Paul's epistle to the Romans, and nothing stood in my way but that one expression, the justice, or it could be the righteousness of God, because I took it to mean that justice whereby God is just and deals justly in punishing the unjust.

My situation was that, although an impeccable monk, I stood before God as a sinner, troubled in conscience, and I had no confidence that my merit would assuage him. Therefore, I did not love a just and angry God, but rather hated and murmured against him.

Yet I clung to the dear Paul and had a great yearning to know what he meant. Night and day I poured, I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that the just shall live by his faith.

Then I grasped that the justice of God is the righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise.

The whole of scripture took on a new meaning and whereas before the justice of God had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul became to me a gate to heaven.

Salvation by Faith Alone and the Indulgence Trade

This was the revolution that would transform the rest of his life. Now, besides being a monk and a professor, he was also the pastor of the town church in Wittenberg. In other words, he was a worker in the Lord's Vineyard.

He was cultivating the crop and that meant he had care for the souls of the people there. So these truths that he was countering now in the Bible, they weren't just kind of abstract doctrine for scholars just to debate.

There was something relevant to his own people and as he was unpacking what this experience of God's grace meant, seeing the gospel, he was confronted with a problem. A stinking fruit in the vineyard.

A traveling salesman by the name of John Tetzel came near his area. Now, Tetzel wasn't selling trinkets or spices. He was selling forgiveness. This man Tetzel, who's actually another monk also, had an official commission from Rome to sell what were called indulgences.

They were certificates that promised forgiveness of sins. If you bought the indulgence, you could have millions of years taken off your time in purgatory. Sounded like a great deal. You know, you wouldn't have to suffer so long after your death to pay for your sins you had committed.

In fact, you could even plan to commit a sin and buy the indulgence ahead of time just to pay it off before you put down your payment for it. You could get to heaven much quicker by buying this indulgence.

You could even purchase it on behalf of someone else who had already died. So, you know, think of your relatives. Maybe you have a dear, beloved you know, Uncle Fred. You liked your Uncle Fred, but you knew, you know, he had some bad habits and he's probably spending millions of years in purgatory, dear old Uncle Fred, and he's being tormented.

But you could buy an indulgence, maybe for his wife, the aunt, and get him out early. What a great Christmas gift that would be for her. Now, what decent person wouldn't want to do that for someone they loved?

Tetzel, like any good salesman, even had a jingle. Easy to remember. Whenever a coin in the coffer rings, another soul from purgatory springs. Man, what a brilliant salesman he was. So, indulgences were a great way of raising money.

You could literally buy forgiveness, but Luther had just recently seen from the Bible that salvation comes through faith alone. So, he knew that this was a fraud. He was angry that the people under his spiritual care were being cheated out of their hard-earned cash.

He was especially angry because they were being lied to about salvation. And he was, like the prophet Isaiah, feeling the indignation of God, the God whom he loved, the beloved, at this stinking fruit that was being produced.

So, on October 31st, 1517, 500 years ago, this coming Tuesday, he posted on the door, the church door there, 95 points for debate, 95 theses, attacking the idea that forgiveness can be bought like a sack of potatoes.

He expected that it was just going to be a debate among academics. He wrote it in Latin, you know, for the educated people to read. But a local printer produced copies. Soon, it was translated into other, into German, into other languages.

And in weeks, it was all over Europe. It spread like wildfire. Today, we'd say it went viral. And Luther was suddenly a celebrity. Everybody knew who he was. At first, there was no public response from Rome, the tenants of the vineyard.

Luther began to write more, applying his new biblical understanding of salvation to more and more areas of the church. What are the sacraments? How, you know, how to live as a Christian. He became a hero to some and a great villain to others.

After a while, the tenants of the vineyard, that is Rome, issued an order prohibiting him from preaching and writing. Luther just ignored it and preached against their authority to order him to stop preaching.

Finally, Rome selected a man to debate Luther, a highly respected monk and theologian by the name of John Eck, or Johann Eck, which is John. They met at another university and debated for many days. And Luther declared there, a simple layman armed with scripture is to be believed above a pope or a council without it.

For the sake of scripture, we should reject popes and councils. And Eck responded that Luther was repeating the heresy of the man we mentioned last week, of John Huss. Eck reminded them that Huss was burned to death for this very teaching that Luther was repeating.

Luther didn't really know that much about Huss, not although Luther picked it up, what he believed from Huss. He hadn't. He picked it up from the Bible. And so during a lunch break in the debate, he went to the university library there and found books by Huss and discovered in his own words, quote, Huss's views are plainly Christian and evangelical.

Over the next couple of years, Luther continued to write and to preach, pouring out just a torrent of words in so many books. And as he began to work out the implications of the gospel and the teaching of scripture, he began to attack more and more and in stronger and stronger language the keepers of the vineyard, the church based in Rome.

And finally in the year 1521, about three and a half years after he posted those theses, the pope excommunicated Luther. The official document of excommunication began by saying, quote, Arise, O Lord, and judge your cause.

A wild boar has invaded your vineyard. In a way, they were right. But what they didn't see was that the wild boar was ravaging the vineyard because the vineyard was bearing stinking fruit. God had broken down the walls so that this wild boar could ravage it.

And in reality, the wild boar was setting the vineyard back in order. Well, God had broken down the hedges, the walls that the old tenants had set up to keep out reform. They had kept John Huss from restoring the Lord's vineyard about a century before.

But now Luther was loose. He was ravaging that stinking vineyard of the old establishment. And the same can happen in our day when we forget that the church belongs to God, that it's not a social club for us to do as we will, when we forget that it's supposed to bear good fruit for God, to stand for justice, to glorify God.

When we forget that, then the Lord will, as he says here in Isaiah, he'll break down the walls. He'll bring on a drought. He'll let the world trample all over the church. They say that the church is declining in America, even particularly in the South and even in North Carolina.

Supposedly church attendance is dropping like a rock. I believe it. For a couple of centuries it failed, particularly in the South, to stand up for justice. It lived peacefully with racism and slavery and segregation.

It bore, with some exceptions, but often it bore stinking fruit. Hot-headed idealists like me, you know, it's easy for us to stand back, will say that preachers, they should have stood up and denounced the sin, stood up for what's right, for justice and for righteousness.

Now the more realistic people will say, if any preacher had dared to do that in the South, they'd just get fired. They'd be unemployed. They'd be run off. That's true. Absolutely right. Totally true. But they would be standing up for something.

They would be bearing fruit. And maybe now, today, people would know, hey, maybe the church is small, the model that it is now, but we really do stand for something. We don't just stand for our own convenience and we don't just stand up for the social order that happens to be good for us.

Maybe instead of experiencing a drought, being trampled by enemies, bearing stinkers, maybe now we would instead be bearing good succulent grapes. Well, another great reformer of Luther's time, John Calvin, about a half a generation younger than him, said, referring to this very passage, Isaiah 5, nor ought we to wonder if at the present day so many distresses threaten ruin and desolation.

Why does ruin and desolation threaten the church? He says, Calvin says, quote, for whenever calamity befalls us, whether it be that there is a deficiency of instruction, otherwise bad teaching. You ever see many TV preachers talk about bad teaching?

There's not many good ones on TV. Or are that the wicked abound? He's talking about in the church. Or that foxes and wolves creep into the church. All this must be ascribed to our ingratitude, because we have not yielded such fruit as we ought and have been unresponsive and sluggish.

In other words, when there are things in the church that weaken it, that undermine it, that impoverish our teaching and worship, when ungodly people, people with no courage or no integrity, are allowed to come into the church and just kind of bully their way, the reformer says that this passage tells us that that is all because of our ingratitude, that we have not been thankful to the Lord for all that he's done to cultivate us, that he's given us every blessing.

He's given us teachers who tell us the truth from scripture, but we got sleepy. Maybe we even scorned it. We were perhaps more interested in other things and feeling good about ourselves, be happy attitudes, that kind of stuff, rather than feeling good about the Lord.

We weren't producing the fruit of godliness. So when God takes away the protection, the blessings, when wild boars trample the vineyard, then we become poorer and weaker, and that's the judgment of God.

To the protectors of the old establishment, Martin Luther was the wild boar, ravaging the Lord's vineyard, they said. So they excommunicated him. Now in their theology, that meant he's cut off from the grace that the church gives from God, so he's not, in their theology, that meant that was supposed to scare him, that he's not going to get any grace, and so that unless he stops preaching the gospel that he was teaching, that he would go to hell without any grace.

Now instead of fearing men, he took his certificate of excommunication and publicly burned it. Now the conflict was coming to a head. Luther would not change his teaching and he wouldn't be quiet, and Charles V, the new emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, he wanted to enforce the edict from Rome.

He wanted to treat Luther like a heretic, and the penalty for heresy was being burned at the stake, just like John Hus. The princes of the empire would meet at the German city of Worms in 1521, and Charles V promised Luther a safe passage, come to Worms, we promise you that you won't be, you'll be allowed to come and go, you won't be arrested, just like they promised John Hus about 100 years earlier, but betrayed and burned him anyway.

The meeting called the Diet was held in April 1521. Officials from Rome and all over the Holy Roman Empire came to hear Luther to see if he would retract, or the official word is recant, his teachings under pressure.

Everyone knew that this could be the end of Luther. Tension was high, conflict was just thick in the air. You had the followers of Luther and their zeal, and the enemies against Luther and their zeal, just rubbing shoulders with each other, probably arguing all the time.

This was a matter of life and death, and many could just feel that they're coming to a crossroads in history. There's much ceremony and debate. Luther delayed, he asked for time to think about it. Eck, the scholar that Luther debated several years before, was there counseling the young emperor against Luther.

Finally, after a night, he was given one night to ponder the situation, to consider what he was going to do. He wrestled with God in prayer, asking if he'd been forsaken by God. He knew his life was at stake, and finally the moment came for Luther to give his final reply.

When he couldn't get away, he had to answer. Would he take back his teachings? Would he renounce the gospel that he had been preaching? Would he save his life? He wasn't just facing, you know, disapproval.

He wasn't just facing dismissal, getting fired, being unemployed. He was facing the very real threat of death. Would he speak the truth and face the same fire as John Huss? He finally had to answer and said, unless I am convinced by scripture or right reason, I cannot recant.

My conscience is held captive to the word of God. To go against conscience is neither safe nor right. Here I stand. I can do no else. God help me. Of course, God had already helped him. God had enabled him to see the truth and stand before one of the most powerful men in the world in that day and give that reply.

Here was a man who really believed. We live around so much hypocrisy today. I think we may be startled when we see someone who really believes. And because he believed, he bore good fruit. And when he wrote the words of that great hymn we sang earlier, A Mighty Fortress, he meant them.

He wrote, let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also, the body they may kill. God's truth abideth still. His kingdom is forever. He meant it. He lived it. He was prepared to die for it. He was bearing good fruit.

There he stood. There he stood. Now, where will you stand?