Isaiah 5:8-30, Woes and Therefores

Isaiah’s Woes Against Greed, Drunkenness, and Moral Reversal

We're in Isaiah chapter 5, starting with verse 8, to the end of the chapter. Hear the word of the Lord. Woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no more room, and you are made to dwell alone in the midst of the land.

The Lord of hosts has sworn in my hearing, surely many houses shall be desolate, large and beautiful houses without inhabitant. For ten acres of vineyard shall yield but one bath, and a homer of seed shall yield but an ephah.

Woe to those who rise early in the morning, that they may run after strong drink, who tarry late into the evening as wine inflames them. They have lyre and harp, tambourine and flute and wine at their feast, but they do not regard the deeds of the Lord, or see the work of his hands.

Therefore my people shall go into exile for lack of knowledge. Their honored men go hungry, and their multitude is parched with thirst. Therefore Sheol has enlarged its appetite and opened its mouth beyond measure.

And the nobility of Jerusalem and her multitude shall go down, her revelers and he who exalts in her. Man is humbled, and each one is brought low, and the eyes of the haughty are brought low. But the Lord of hosts is exalted in justice, and the holy God shows himself holy in righteousness.

Then shall the lambs graze as in their pasture, and nomads shall eat among the ruins of the rich. Woe to those who draw iniquity with cords of falsehood, who draw sin as with cart ropes, who say, Let him be quick, let him speed his work, that we may see it, that the counsel of the Holy One of Israel draw near, and let it come, that we may know it.

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and shrewd in their own sight.

Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine, and valiant men in mixing strong drink, who acquit the guilty for a bribe, and deprive the innocent of his right. Therefore, as the tongue of fire devours the stubble, and as dry grass sinks down in the flame, so their root will be as rottenness, and their blossom go up like dust, for they have rejected the law of the Lord of hosts, and have despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.

Therefore, the anger of the Lord has kindled against his people, and he stretched out his hand against them, and struck them, and the mountains quaked, and their corpses were as refuse in the midst of the streets.

For all this, his anger has not turned away, and his hand is stretched out still. He will raise a signal for nations far away, and whistle for them from the ends of the earth, and behold, quickly, speedily, they come.

None is weary, none stumbles, none slumbers or sleeps, not a waistband is loose, not a sandal strap broken, their arrows are sharp, all their bows bent, their horses' hooves seem like flint, and their wheels like the whirlwind, their roaring is like a lion, their young lions, like young lions, they roar, they growl and seize their prey, they carry it off, and none can rescue.

They will growl over it on that day, like the growling of the sea, and if one looks to the land, behold, darkness and distress, and the light is darkened by its clouds. May the Lord add his blessings to the reading of his holy word.

Judgment in the Psalms and the Absence of Judgment in Modern Hymnody

Well, I've had a problem with our songs today, although, you know, pick a Luther song, that helps, but being that time of year, but I obviously try to choose songs that are relevant to the passage, so it all kind of integrates.

The problem is the passage today, as we just read, is about judgment, a very harsh judgment. It's hard to find songs on judgment. Just think of all the songs you know. What songs do you know on judgment?

For example, here is a hymnal, this hymnal here, that we often use for our psalms. Our rendition of Psalm 86 today comes from this. It's the Psalter Hymnal. It's produced by the Christian Reformed Church denomination.

The first 150 hymns, we call them hymns or songs, and the first 150 of them are psalms, you know, one hymn or paraphrase for one psalm, all 150 at a time, and this hymnal, and then after that comes a section on Bible songs with other scriptures set to music, and then after that is kind of your traditional hymnal with songs that people have written from time to time.

At the end, like most hymnals, it has a topical index. Here's the topical index. You can look up songs. You know, like if I'm doing a passage like today from judgment, I look for under judgment. Okay, what psalms, what hymns fit?

Well, here's the section on judgment, and there are, well, first it has joy, okay, obviously in alphabetical order, then judge, God and Christ as judge, and there are 15 songs in that section, God as judge, nine of which, of the 15 songs, nine of them are psalms from those first 150 psalms.

Two of them are Bible songs, and those sections of scripture set to music, which leaves only four, if I'm doing my math right, that are from the other hymns. The traditional hymns, and then, and the next section on this Psalter hymnal is the section on judgment, and in that section, there are 29 songs, 29 songs in judgment, and you're thinking, what did you have such a hard time for?

There's so many. Well, of the 29, only 27, or I should say, not only 27, 27 of them are from the psalms, got it? 29 on judgment, 27 of them are from that first 150 renditions of the psalms. In other words, according to this hymnal, 27 out of 150 psalms are about judgment, so about 15 of psalms are about judgment.

We also have this hymnal, you may be familiar with this, sometimes we call it the green hymnal, we use it on Wednesday nights, it's the Baptist hymnal. It fairly, I think it fairly, I think it's a good hymnal, I like this hymnal, it fairly represents the kinds of hymns and songs that evangelical Christians have been singing over the past century, and if you turn to the, I know you don't have one, we have pews with one in the back, sorry you can't do that, but it has a topical index two in the back, page 761, and there, just like alphabetical order, right, there's a section on joy, this one had on joy, there's a lot of songs on joy, man, a lot of songs on joy.

Next comes judgment, remember this one doesn't have a bunch of psalms in it, like this one does. Next on judgment, oh, it's just a one little note there, in parentheses, says see, eternal life, Jesus Christ return.

Means it has no song, and if you turn there, it's just songs about the second coming, there's no songs in this on judgment.

Zero.

Absolutely none. Now, I'm not putting it down, what I mean is to show us something about our modern spirituality, something we just take for granted. Think about it, if we only sang, and some reformed churches do, but if we only sang from God's inspired song book, from the book of Psalms, otherwise we spend all our time in the first 150 hymns here, we only sang that, we would be singing about God's judgment about once out of every six songs, and so that means since we sing five songs per service, we would be singing about God's judgment two out of the three, two out of every three services, at least.

Sometimes maybe we get five in a row, all judgment songs. But, if we only follow the product of the last 100 years or so, we will never sing about God's judgment. Now, something a little off kilter here, something a little out of balance.

What does this say about us? Well, people today like positive affirming messages. There's even a radio station that always advertises itself positive and affirming. Someone is encouraging and nothing uplifting.

That's just what we're, that's almost like, that's spirituality,.

That's maturity,.

That's what you need, that's good all the time. The idea has gotten deep in our culture that if you want people to do well, you flatter them, you just tell them how good they are, you tell your kid how smart he is or how talented he or she is, and the idea is that if you're praised, you're so smart, you're so talented, you're so good.

We will rise to achieve the level of our praise, right? We will stuff our minds with how great we are and we will achieve to the level of how great we think we are. The reality, though, is often the opposite.

If we think we're smart or talented but then success doesn't come right away, we don't get good grades, we're cut from the team, we lose the game, we don't get the job, flattered people tend to give up and then blame someone else.

You know, I didn't get good grades, I'm smart, I've been told all my life, I don't get good grades, must be the teacher's problem, not my problem, I'm smart,.

That's what they told me, right?

It goes on like that. I must be a very talented basketball player, even if they cut me from the team, they must have something against me, it's the coach's problem and it goes on like that. They expect success to be handed to them.

Soft words create hard people. They're hardened by the idea that they deserve whatever they want and if they don't get it, someone has something against them, someone is cheating them, whatever. I think Nick Saban, the coach of the Alabama football team, seems to understand this.

He recently told the sports media.

That all their praise.

About how good his football team is, he said, it's poison. He complained to the sports media, you're poisoning my team by saying how good they are, always they are. He didn't want them to hear that about how good they are, right?

Hard words, on the other hand, soft words create hard people. Hard words create soft people. People who aren't willful and stubborn, who don't think they're so great that they just deserve everything handed to them and so they won't rebel and get offended at correction.

They know they need correction.

Because they've got a lot of hard words.

Telling them how much they need it. People who will repent and work hard to change. So just so, God doesn't flatter or coddle, does he? He disciplines every child he receives, we're told. Here we see in Isaiah chapter 5, we just heard the kind of message the Holy Spirit inspires.

Some hard words there, isn't it? Soft words create hard people. Hard words create soft people. What kind of people do you think we're creating with all our soft words, our constant encouraging, our skipping over God's hard words of judgment?

The Six Woes and the Two Therefores in Isaiah 5

Well, in this passage, there are some very hard words, particularly around six woes. Six times there's this statement, you notice that?

Woe.

And then a description of the sins that bring the woe. Woe to those who are like this. Now, woe is something often said at a funeral. It's a word of mourning or grief or over some expressing just kind of amazement at what people are currently suffering or maybe are soon going to suffer for the condition they're in.

Something dreadful is coming.

Woe.

So the prophet is, in a way, mourning over these people. He's mourning because it's so sad what they've come to. And then there are two,.

There's the woes.

And then there's two therefore sections. Actually, one of the therefores is repeated twice. Therefore means because of that. Because you are like that, you're doing these woes,.

Therefore the following.

Will be done to you. Therefore, here's the consequences. Because of this woe, therefore you're getting this. Six woes, two therefores. The first therefore section comes in verses 13 to 17. It comes after the first two woes and then there are four more woes in verses 18 to 23 followed by the final, kind of longer, therefore section.

It takes us into the chapter. It's the description of what God will bring on His people because of their woes because they won't repent. First in verse 8, the Lord says,.

Woe to those.

Who join house to house. That sounds odd, doesn't it? What's wrong with expanding your house? What's wrong with growing your estate? Well, these people only wanted to get more property. They wanted a bigger house, a bigger estate.

No matter what, if it deprived the poor of fields to grow, the poor need fields to grow their crops in so they can eat.

They don't care.

They want bigger estates. The more they have, the more power they have. It's all about their own impressiveness, how much they possess. These are materialists. These are consumerists. They're individualists.

They only care about themselves. They don't care about the impact of their life on other people around them. They're laying up their treasures on earth. Woe to those who live as if their life only consisted in what they own and didn't have any care on the impact of their life on others around them.

Now certainly this problem is with us today as much as ever. We may have advanced in technology, but we haven't advanced in morality and spirituality. In fact, we often use our technology just to produce more things that we feel we simply have to have in order to be happy.

I need an apple tin.

Whoa, whoa. So we say, wow, but we got to have that new thing. We should mourn like at a funeral if we've just been living for stuff because it's very sad for a human being to live as if it's just money.

It's all that matters. I don't care about hearing the word of God. I got to just have to run the business all the time. They got to make more money so I can get a bigger house. You know, I don't care if I have to keep people out of church.

That just drives them. People were created, though, for so much more. So what do we say about people who are just living for things,.

About getting more money,.

Keeping the business going all the time, work, work, work, because that's all that life is about, they think.

We say, whoa.

They're living so far below what they were intended for. There's nothing wrong with working,.

Nothing wrong with running.

A successful business, nothing wrong with wanting to advance in life, give your children more.

But whoa to you.

That's all that matters.

And that goes for the party animals, too. Whoa to them, in verses 11 and 12. Notice that these people are party all the time.

There's not just.

A little recreation on the weekend after a hard week's work. These people, you know, rise up early in the morning, chase after liquor. They have beer for breakfast, I guess. Pour it over their cornflakes.

They stay up late, getting drunk, hanging out in the bars, and they always got to have their tunes, in case we think that's a new thing.

Everybody's got.

Their earphones on now. In those days, they didn't have earphones, but they could have a band. The band's got to always be playing. And in verse 12,.

Notice that.

They got to listen to their music. They always got to be listening to that, just like people today.

They always got to be.

Listening to something, but they don't care about listening to God. They'll spend hour after hour partying, but they cannot spare time to consider God's ways. Even if they come to church, if the service goes past noon, they'll get agitated.

What's going on?

What's going on? The pregame show is about to begin. I want to go see it. They have plenty of time for sports. For recreation. Plenty of patience for their music, for their pastimes, for their fun and games.

But as it says at the end of verse 12, they do not regard.

In other words,.

They don't even think about it. It's not something they spend any time considering or talking about.

The deeds of the Lord.

Are the work of His hands. They don't spend any time.

With that.

They don't care.

They're not interested.

They party all the time, but they cannot spare the time to consider God's ways,.

Hear His word.

There are really.

Two issues there.

First is the excesses.

Of those chasing after a good time. And there's nothing wrong with a little recreation. I mean, he mentions musical instruments, the lyres, the tambourines. And it's not as though those are sinful. In the book of Psalms, we're told to praise God with those things.

There's nothing wrong with a little recreation, but these people have no self-control, no restraints on their appetite. But the second problem,.

And this is really.

The cause of that first problem, the cause of their excesses, their spending their life for the beer, for the liquor. The second problem is more serious, and that is what they lack. They lack an appetite for God.

They are not hungering and thirsting.

The reason why.

They're always after the best restaurant, the best food,.

The best liquor.

Is because they don't have an appetite for the Lord. They're not hungering and thirsting for righteousness. There's nothing in them to keep them from living for what their bodies hunger and thirst for.

And this is sad because this should cause us to mourn for them.

Say, whoa,.

They're living like an animal. As Paul talks about in Philippians, their God is their belly. It's always about what you can eat, the newest delicacy, or maybe what you can drink. They're living so far below what they were intended for.

Now, we church people assume, well, this doesn't apply to us. After all, here we are. We're not in a bar right now. We're not just now rolling out of bed with a heavy hangover, going to the fridge to indulge ourselves as we plan to spend the rest of the day in front of the TV.

Perhaps none of us, right at this moment, fall into that first problem, the excesses, the intemperance of living for physical desires. But we can still be sitting here looking respectable and still be falling prey to the second problem, really the root problem of not having an appetite, not having a craving for the Lord, for God, for every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord that Jesus said man should live by.

You know, we set up a booth for years now at the Yanceyville Hodown, probably about nine or ten years now, and they used to have the spring fling here, and on other occasions set up a table and we offer Christian materials.

And what strikes me about now, it's so obvious now, is how few people are really interested in the things of God.

I mean, just very rarely.

Has anyone come up just interested in what we're offering.

Just total, you know,.

No desire for it. I bet if we all had materials there,.

Books, DVDs,.

On Duke or Tar Heels basketball, actually that stuff would get snapped up, man. And, of course, the Wolf Pack, too. Just last Tuesday we were at Main Street in Danville giving out,.

We gave out probably.

Over five, six hundred little packets with a card in it about the gospel and in the bag.

And, of course,.

You've got to have candy to go along with it. Five hundred, six hundred of those went out. We'd just hand them out. It took us less than an hour to give about five to six hundred out. So you imagine how many were just constantly handing them out.

Now, I bet if we only gave out information about the Reformation, about the gospel, with no candy in it, I bet you we could hardly get anybody to take that. They wouldn't care.

Look at this.

No, I want candy. I don't want a card about the Reformation. There's an appetite for candy.

Or for basketball,.

But not for God. And some people criticize the church.

You know, it really.

Isn't any different. Maybe we'll go through the motions with a short sermon and a few songs that we're interested in the things of God, but really what's all about it being a social club. And you can tell what we're really interested in by what we talk about before or after the services.

And we often don't talk.

About the Lord, do we? Do we?

About the sermon? About anything edifying? Instead, we talk about our teams, maybe about what's for lunch next. Even from the pulpit, in many places, they talk more about politics than they do the Bible.

That really gets people energized if we start talking politics. But let's strive here to be a church where we're so consumed with a passion to regard, think about, consider.

The deeds of the Lord,.

To see the work of His hands, that people see our hunger and thirst for Him and hear it from us. Woe to us if we do not. But if we do not, we'll not just be left to ourselves, left to our woes, because we call ourselves by His name, we call ourselves Christians, we claim to be His people.

God will not just leave us to kind of suffer the bad consequences of our bad choices. He will take action against us. He will discipline us. He says so right here in these hard words we read. This is what the therefore section tells us.

Therefore, He says it in verse 13,.

Woe, because you only care.

About your house, your property, your success,.

Your money,.

Your bank account, growing your business. That's all you care about.

Woe, woe. Also,.

Because you only care about your recreation, your party, your liquor, your delicacies, your drinking.

Woe to you,.

Therefore,.

In verse 13, my people are exiled,.

He says.

Exiled means to be taken away by the enemy. They're so materialistic, all they care about was land grabbing, real estate. So God brings foreign forces to drag them away from the land that they grabbed.

They'll be taken away in exile. They won't have any more property.

To live for.

Because they won't have any more property, period.

Why?

He says it in verse 13. He says for lack of knowledge. Hence, we see that the source of all our calamities is that we do not allow ourselves to be taught the word of God. We don't really care about it because we don't care about it.

We don't learn it. We don't learn it. We have lack of knowledge and the results in exile. When we do not live by every word that comes from the mouth of God, we are taken into exile. The word of God doesn't transform our thinking.

That means then we are conformed to the world. We become just like the world. Our children then start living just like the world. For money, for relations, it's not good enough just to be conservative.

We're not rooted in the word of God.

We don't care.

We have lack of knowledge. That communicates to our children. They're taken away by the world. They start living for the money, for the relationships, for the vacations. They start living in sex, out of marriage.

We're taken away.

All the things.

That we replaced God with, things that often are not bad in themselves, but we replace God with them, those things are taken away from us after we've allowed them to take us away from God. So amazingly, God judges.

He disciplines. We can cut all the judgment out of our all hymnals, but He's still going to do it. God sees our sin. He says, whoa, and then therefore, therefore, because of the sin, here's the consequences.

We live for land.

We get dragged off the land.

We live for food.

We go hungry. We live for drink. We go thirsty. We live for money. We go bankrupt. We live for the relationship. We get divorced, all because we wouldn't listen to God, because we had no appetite for Him, but God says in verse 14 that death itself will enlarge its appetite.

It's going to grow more and more hungry and consume more of you and its appetite for us. That's what happened to Judah when the first and the Assyrians and later the Babylonians came in and killed and destroyed and took them literally into exile, and it can happen to us today.

So he humbles his people, especially the haughty, the self-righteous. They're so sure they did the religious works. They're so sure they think they are moral people who wouldn't seek correction from his word.

In the end, God, he says here, he will be glorified, and he'll be glorified in justice. He should be glorified in our doing justice, but if that doesn't happen and we don't do justice and seek righteousness, he will be glorified in him doing justice to us.

We either glorify him by living his way righteously for justice, not just for us, for my money, for what I can get out of it, because of the poor. He will either be glorified that way as we live righteously for justice, or he will glorify himself.

He will glorify himself, he says in verse 16, by displaying his justice. So if we will not glorify him by living righteously, he will glorify himself by treating us righteously as we deserve. Last July, our family got to go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and there we saw the field.

There's woods on one side, a ridge on another, and about a mile between there's this open field. And the southern forces fighting for, I don't care what they say, they're fighting for slavery, injustice, thought they could march across that field and win the war.

They got slaughtered. God was glorified in doing justice to those who would be unjust. Then there is another set of woes starting in verse 18. Isaiah there pictures the people, he says they're harnessed to sin, like horses are harnessed to a buggy.

In other words,.

There they are,.

And they're dragging sin behind them. And what ties them to their sin is lies, is falsehoods. Now people always lie to justify their sin. They pull sin behind them with ropes of lies. And you can just go through and think of any sin and the way people lie to themselves to justify continuing in this sin.

One way you can tell that they are harnessed to sin is they're scoffing. They scoff when they are warned that God will judge them. They are derisive here, even sarcastic, daring God to do what he said.

You're kind of like a spoiled child never really been disciplined, and then he's threatened, and he just, yeah, yeah, it's not going to happen. He knows better. What's substitute teaching? I remember some girl just being disruptive, talking too much.

I said, okay, off. Only I'm a substitute teacher. There's not much I can do. But wrote a note to the office.

Off you go.

Go to the office. And she said, kind of started taking it. They won't do anything. They'll just send me back. And sure enough, about five minutes later,.

She comes back.

What am I supposed to do? But that's the way. In this culture with hardly any discipline, and that's the way people are. They get derisive. They think, oh, you know what? That'll never happen to us. What are you talking about?

We're too smart.

We're too good. We're too blessed. There's not any real judgment coming. They cut out all the judgment hymns from their hymnal. Soft words make them hard people. So they scoff at it. And so they dare God in verse 19.

This is the way I interpret these words. They're daring sarcastically God. Let him be quick. Oh, you say he's coming to judge us?

Okay, let him do it now.

Speed it up.

We may see it.

The council of the Holy One of Israel.

Let it draw near.

Sure.

What do you say, Isaiah? This judgment's coming. Let's see it. Enough talk. Do it. And we may know they're teasing God. They've heard it all before. So many times before. And they didn't repent and nothing seemed to happen.

So they just they just scoff now.

We don't care.

They don't believe it.

But we know that the warnings did come true. We know God made good on them. They were dragged off into exile. Their dead bodies were strewn on the ground. Like you look by the highway, see litter. Imagine the dead bodies there instead.

That's what it was like. And so we have no excuse. Do we? For them, maybe you can understand. They hadn't seen it happen yet. We know it's happened in the past. God has done it. How much so? How much more seriously are we to take these warnings?

Think of that when we come to the Lord's Supper. The Apostle Paul told the Corinthians that because some of them came to the Lord's Supper, kind of a self-indulgent, they would come and they would, you know, they had wine for the for their instead of juice that for the to represent the blood.

And they would just drink a lot of it. So much they could get drunk on it. Self-indulgent, they're inconsiderate. They're not thinking about others. They just consume it. And some some of the Corinthians church members were slaves and they couldn't get off work in time to get there.

But they didn't care.

They would eat it all.

It's all only about me, myself, divisive in a divisive way, not thinking about the body of Christ, not thinking of the church. Paul said, you know, some of you are sick. God's judging you. And some of you have even died as a result of God's judgment.

So Paul said, you better take it seriously. And we had better take it seriously. We certainly we had certainly better not scoff at his warnings. We know that he could be very patient, but there comes a time and sometimes it comes quickly because he's doing nothing.

And then all of a sudden. And when he is a time when he makes good on his warnings. And so when we come to the Lord's table in a little while, we need to ask ourselves whether we have promoted breaches in our community, whether we have been materialistic like like these people here in Isaiah five or self-indulgent or uncaring about justice.

We use the we often use the church covenant as a way to summarize a lot of biblical teaching about how to live together as a church for that very purpose. So we wouldn't just rush into it with no thought about our how we've been living.

But really anything from scripture, even Isaiah five can convict us, can get us to say, whoa, about ourselves. And Paul says that if we first judge ourselves, say, whoa, for ourself first. Then we will not come under judgment.

Moral Relativism, Self-Righteousness, and Upside-Down Justice

And that's good news. Then in verse 20, another woe is moaned out for those who take morality, who make morality relative. Here's a woe for the moral relativist. They call what is really bitter, sweet.

And they think that just because they call it that, it makes it so. The new morality. It's not so new after all, is it? Isaiah's time, they call what is really evil, a legitimate lifestyle choice. Biblical convictions, they call hate or intolerance, bigotry.

People love to justify themselves. And so instead of submitting themselves to God's standard, they'll take the way they are or what they feel, what they do, and they'll make that the standard. And if God's standards go against it, well, God's standards must be wrong.