Israel As God's Vineyard

by G. Prasher, Manchester, England | Category: Gleanings From Isaiah | Feb 1996

In Isaiah chapter 5 the nation of Israel is likened to a vineyard:

My well beloved had a vineyard in a very fruitful l... and He looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes... What could have been done more to My vineyard, that I have done in it?... and now... I will tell you what I will do to My vineyard: I will take away the hedge ... I will break down the fence ... I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it.

The prophet then comments:

The vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah His pleasant plant: and He looked for judgement, but behold oppression; for righteousness, but behold a cry.

Israel were God's chosen people 'whose is the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God' and the promises' (Rom. 9:4). But they had tragically failed to yield the spiritual fruits God rightly expected from them. They were as a result chastened by God through wastage of their country and their being scattered among the nations. Isaiah warned that this judgement was approaching. As he told king Hezekiah:

Behold, the days come, that all that is in thine house, and that which thy fathers have laid up in store... shall be carried to Babylon: nothing shall be left, saith the LORD (39:6),

a prophecy which was fulfilled in 70 years of Jewish captivity in Babylon.

History repeated itself when the restored nation of Israel rejected the Messiah and asked that He be crucified. Their nation was destroyed by the Romans and scattered among the Gentile peoples. For the time being they are set aside as God pursues His great purposes through the gospel during this present age of grace. Isaiah spoke also of this vast purpose of God towards the Gentiles in chapter 49:6:

It is too light a thing that Thou shouldest be My Servant ... to restore the preserved of Israel: I will also give Thee for a Light to the Gentiles, that Thou mayest be My salvation to the end of the earth,

a prophecy which finds on-going fulfilment to this day.

Had God then cast off His people Israel? By no means. Throughout the present age a minority has believed the gospel and shared the glorious privilege of membership of the Body of Christ. Paul describes such Jewish believers as 'a remnant according to the election of grace'. But we under-stand from the prophetic Scriptures that the time is coming when Israel as a nation will again come into the fulness of God's promised covenant blessings, at the time appointed to restore to them the kingdom.

Isaiah's prophecy is rich in references to this future restoration to God of the Israel nation. He insists that His ancient covenant people will never be forgotten:

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, these may forget, yet will not I forget thee (49:15).

Also in a later chapter he says again:

For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but My kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall My covenant of peace be removed, saith the LORD that hath mercy on thee (54:10).

As century followed century after the Jewish dispersion in AD 70, many godly Jews must have read these assurances in Isaiah's prophecy and longed for God's working in their favour. They would also wonder how and when the words of Isaiah 43:5,6 would be realized:

I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west; I will say to the north, Give up; and to the south, Keep not back; bring My sons from far, and My daughters from the end of the earth.

But in recent times we have seen Israel recognized again as an independent nation, and the gathering back to their own land of millions from the dispersion. The great process of regathering has begun; one of many indications that the world scene is being prepared by God towards the great crisis of the return of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Prophetic scriptures outline developments now to be expected. First the return of Christ to the air for His Church; then the time of the end, dominated by Antichrist, and including the final period of the great Tribulation before the coming to earth of the Son of Man with power and great glory. That dramatic event will introduce the millennial reign of Christ.

Isaiah' foretells the Jewish nation's reaction to the advent of the Messiah for their deliverance. In Romans 11:26, the apostle Paul quotes from Isaiah 59:

There shall come out of Zion the Deliverer; He shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob.

A Deliverer indeed! For Israel's national resistance to Antichrist at the time of the end will have been virtually overcome. Daniel 12:7 states that 'when they have made an end of breaking in pieces the power of the holy people, all these things shall be finished'. In Isaiah 52 we are given a vivid impression of the joy and relief brought to the defenders of Jerusalem by the advent of their glorious Deliverer:

The voice of thy watchmen! they lift up the voice, together do they sing; for they shall see, eye to eye, when the LORD returneth to Zion. Break forth into joy, sing together (vv.8,9).

There will follow of course the realization that their Deliverer is the once rejected Jesus of Nazareth. Ecstatic joy at deliverance is turned to national mourning for Israel's age-long refusal to accept the witness of God to the Person of His Son. Chapter 53 is in its context Israel's expression of repentance, her wondering realization that the One they despised had borne the judgement for their sin as the Lamb of God. So in verses 4 and 5 they confess and acknowledge:

we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities. How much we can learn, as believers in Christ today, from Israel's sad experiences of backsliding, rejection of Christ and present regathering to the land! God is watching over His Word to perform it. We are witnessing today the fulfilment of so much foretold by Isaiah and other prophetic writers, reminding us of our Master's words:

When ye see all these things, know ye that He is nigh, even at the doors (Mat. 24:33).

G. Prasher, Manchester, England | Feb 1996
Gleanings From Isaiah