Isaiah 5

Wednesday, March 21, 2013

Isaiah 5

It's a very depressing book of the Bible, full of judgment and anger and threats of invasion and destruction of an entire nation.  It's hard, in a word, to see it as talking about just one incident.  It seems like the kind of thing that just keeps happening.

Which seems to connect, in my mind, to the start of the chapter, which is a parable about a man who did everything he was supposed to! to make his vineyard produce good grapes, but wild grapes grew instead.  So he gets furious that it didn't work - that what should have worked didn't, that everything he had been told to do didn't change the way the world worked - and burns the vineyard to the ground.

And yes, this is a parable about how God gives us everything we need and still we rebel.

But I also think - man has not conquered the natural world, just as God chooses not to conquer our wills.  We don't (and the people writing this certainly didn't) understand all the laws of the natural world and why they work.  Complaining that you've done everything you were supposed to do and that still everything went wrong - well, it's very familiar but it's not very surprising, right?

There are things about the world and ourselves that we do not understand any more than the vineyard owner in the story understands the way the natural world works.  And I think we often end up making lists and rules and procedures for how we will live successful or sinless or both lives.  We have paths that we set children on, rigidly enforced with the threat of college admission, and we get upset when following all these rules doesn't lead to happiness.

Perhaps what the vines needed was something totally different.  Perhaps what he was always working with were wild grapes and he should have worked with what he had.  Perhaps there's no sense to this crazy world we live in - at least not one that would let us make it bend to our will - and we have to just do the best we can in it.

We would choose to break the will of the natural world if we could, I think.  So it would stop hurting us and frustrating what we want for ourselves and it.  We are trying all the time to do so.

How much God loves us that He does not break our wills to have His vineyard produce good fruit.