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“Now will I sing to my wellbeloved a song of my beloved touching his vineyard. My wellbeloved hath a vineyard in a very fruitful hill:
2 And he fenced it, and gathered out the stones thereof, and planted it with the choicest vine, 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.
3 And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem, and men of Judah, judge, I pray you, betwixt me and my vineyard.
4 What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it? wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes? (Isa 5:1-4 KJV)
Can we believe our eyes?
This is not the language of the God of traditional theology! He is distant, aloof, indeed out of time and consequently out of our ability to feel the weight of prophetic lament.
If you wait just a bit longer, and read the passage again you just might feel that the stirring of hope. Hope that the sound of pain and lament in our own hearts is indeed a synchronous wave of God’s own. A Pulse really, that suffuses the universe. For all that it has become is marked by selfishness.
If you value the truthfulness of Scripture and have not adopted the escapisms of higher criticism then you have a right to believe that the prophet Isaiah’s experience as prophet of the Lord has been profoundly affected, humbled and cleaned by exposure to the Heart of God.
In this passage we are presented, in a song of lament, sung by the Lord Himself, with a God who invested deeply in the nation of Israel at great personal cost to reap the fruit of benevolence but was sorely disappointed.
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source: W Scott Taylor (ideoamnostoutheou).
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