We'll be reading today from Isaiah 5, looking at verses 8 through 10. Please turn there with me. Isaiah 5, beginning the reading at verse 1. Let's hear God's Word. Now let me sing to my well-beloved a song of my beloved regarding his vineyard. My well-beloved has a vineyard on a very fruitful hill. He dug it up and cleared out its stones and planted it with the choicest vine. He built a tower in its midst and also made a wine press in it. So he expected it to bring forth good grapes, but it brought forth wild grapes. And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, judge please between me and my vineyard. What more could have been done to my vineyard that I have not done in it? Why then, when I expected it to bring forth good grapes, did it bring forth wild grapes? And now, please let me tell you what I will do to my vineyard. I will take away its hedge, and it shall be burned, and break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down. I will lay it waste. It shall not be pruned or dug, but there shall come up briars and thorns. I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain on it. For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are his pleasant plant. He looked for justice, but behold, oppression, for righteousness, but behold, a cry for help. Woe to those who join house to house. They add field to field till there is no place where they may dwell alone in the midst of the land. In my hearing the Lord of Hosts said, Truly, many houses shall be desolate, great and beautiful ones, without inhabitants. For ten acres of vineyard shall yield one bath, and an elmer of seed shall yield one ephah. Woe to those who rise early in the morning that they may follow intoxicating drink, who continue until night to wine inflames them. The harp and the strings, the tambourine and flute, and wine are in their feasts, but they do not regard the work of the Lord, nor consider the operation of his hands. Therefore my people have gone into captivity, because they have no knowledge. Their honorable men are famished, and their multitude dried up with thirst. Therefore Sheol has enlarged itself, and opened its mouth beyond measure. Their glory, and their multitude, and their pomp, and he who is jubilant shall descend into it. People shall be brought down, each man shall be humbled, and the eyes of the lofty shall be humbled. But the Lord of hosts shall be exalted in judgment, and God who is holy shall be hallowed in righteousness. Then the lambs shall feed in their pasture, and in the waste places of the fat ones strangers shall eat. Woe to those who draw iniquity with cords of vanity, and sin as if with a cart-rope, that say, let him make speed and hasten his work that we may see it, and let the counsel of the Holy One of Israel draw near and 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 prudent in their own sight. Woe to men mighty at drinking wine, Woe to men valiant for mixing intoxicating drink, who justify the wicked for a bribe, and take away justice from the righteous man. Therefore, as the fire devours the stubble, and the flame consumes the chaff, so their root will be as rottenness, and their blossom will ascend like dust, because they have rejected the law of the Lord of hosts, and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel. Therefore the anger of the Lord is aroused against His people. He has stretched out His hand against them and stricken them, and the hills trembled. Their carcasses were as refuse in the midst of the streets. For all this, His anger is not turned away, but His hand is stretched out still. He will lift up a banner to the nations from afar and will whistle to them from the end of the earth. Surely they shall come with speed swiftly. No one will be weary or stumble among them. No one will slumber or sleep, nor will the belt on their loins be loosed, nor the strap of their sandals be broken, whose arrows are sharp and all their bows bent. Their horses' hooves will seem like flint, and their wheels like a whirlwind. Their roaring will be like a lion. They will roar like young lions. Yes, they will roar and lay hold of the prey. carried away safely, and no one will deliver. In that day there will roar against them like the roaring of the sea, and if one looks to the land, behold darkness and sorrow, and the light is darkened by the clouds. May God bless to us his word today. Just last week we looked at this parable of the vineyard and the unexpected bad fruit. A lot of you children don't have much experience with bad fruit. You maybe have more than city kids. You kids have either grown up in little towns or out in the country. And some of you either have now or in the past, well you have the families now, but you have grown fruit in your own place. And you maybe know about bad fruit, but a lot of city kids don't. They go to the local supermarket and everything is just almost perfect. The pick of the trees. The pick of the vines. The choice of stuff is all there. Anything that is bad never gets seen. Or, well, I shouldn't say never. Every once in a while stuff will get packaged up and it's at the bottom. But normally you don't see bad fruit. When you have, let's say, your own fruit trees, or you have your own strawberry patch, or any kind of berry patch, or you have your own grape vines, you know about bad fruit. We have vines in our backyard. And when it's coming along late in the summer, Sometimes someone in our family will try a grape to see, well, if things are really ripe. They've turned color. They're not green anymore. But this person will pop it, pop a grape into the mouth, and you should see the face on this family member when it's not ripe yet. A bit, well, part. It is not good. We can also look and see grapes this year with much of the summer being droughty. We had a lot of grapes that were bad because they'd been attacked by wasps looking for something to drink and they could have the juice out of there. Attacked by birds. Thankfully there were some good grapes, enough to make, as I mentioned in a sermon a few weeks ago, 31 jars of jelly. But there were an awful lot that were spoiled by one thing or another. Bad fruit. It doesn't look good. Often it is not good for you to eat because it has germs in it or fungus in it. It's bad for you and it tastes nasty too. That's the way bad fruit is. Now we're going to look at some bad fruit over the next few weeks. God looked for good fruit from his vineyard, but all he got was bad fruit. And look here, we have, not like apples that grow individually on a tree, we have a cluster here of bad fruit. Just like a cluster of grapes on a vine. You may have noticed in the couple or three weeks that we have been going through this chapter here that there are a number of woes pronounced. And we're going to look at each of these as the bad fruit that were found in the people of God and sadly are often found in those who profess to be the people of God in all ages. The first bad fruit that we shall look at we find in verses 8-10 here of Isaiah 5. It is the bad fruit of greed. Let me read this again. Woe to those who join house to house, they add field to field, till there is no place where they may dwell alone in the midst of the land. In my hearing the Lord of hosts said, Truly many houses shall be desolate, great and beautiful ones, without inhabitant. For ten acres of vineyard shall yield one bath, and an elmer of seed shall yield one aphon. The rest of this chapter then, after dealing with this parable, this song of the well-beloved in his vineyard, is a specification of the bad fruit that we saw coming from the vineyard and God's judgment upon it. If Israel, and particularly Judah and Jerusalem, were truly the people of God, they would have brought forth fruit pleasing to God. And we should be thinking of that passage from Malachi. What does the Lord require thee but to do... Oh dear, it's not in my notes and I shouldn't have gotten it if I were going to mess up like this. Well, in any case, there are many fruits I can appeal to Galatians chapter 5, the fruit of the spirit there. The fruit that comes forth shows what a people are. The fruit, in fact, that comes from individual people's lives show what the root of their faith is. Is it a living one or is it a dead one? Does it bring forth fruit meat for repentance or does it bring forth evil fruit? The fruit that came forth from this vineyard, the fruit that came forth, the spiritual fruit from Judah and Jerusalem, showed that much that professed to be Israel was not of the true Israel of God, such as Paul later writes about in Romans chapter 9 verse 6, and in fact speaks of quite extensively in all of chapter 9 and in chapter 10 and in chapter 11 of his letter to the Romans. Let's remember that when God is speaking of Israel here, and is speaking of Judah and Jerusalem, that this does refer to Israel in Isaiah's time, but it does not refer to them alone. It refers to the people of God in all times. And if the shoe fits, we are to wear it. For it spoke very clearly to the Jews in the time of Jesus, and it speaks to those who profess to be the people of God in our own time too. Now Isaiah was made a prophet to the people of God, was called to that office in a time of great outward prosperity for the people of Judah and Jerusalem. It was a time of great material prosperity. When he first began his work, the people were well off. They were pretty rich financially, and pretty powerful too, in a military sense. You will remember perhaps when, a long time ago, we went through the covenant history series. When we looked at Judah, at the time that Isaiah at least began doing his work of prophecy, Judah was strong under King Uzziah. Very strong indeed. All seemed to be going well. It was a day of tremendous wealth and prosperity, and people who were so enriched were living largely, as we would say today. But in this day, God threatens them with woe, with sadness, with grief, with trouble, and with judgment. I dare say there would be people who would say, oh, this can't happen. This can't happen. We are too well off. We are too strong. Why, these things could never happen to us. I remember a Christian economist saying some few years ago, we can't have a stock market crash ever again. We can't. And they were living largely in deed. That's what we read about here. Despite the commands of God in Leviticus 25, and you can read the chapter at your leisure today, to keep the land in family, in clan, and in tribe, Despite the commands of God, they're also, in Leviticus 25, to give the land its rest, and at the Jubilee year, in the 49th and 50th year, to return the land to those whose it was by inheritance. These things have been ignored. In fact, for many, many years they were ignored. This is why, as we read at the end of 2 Chronicles, in chapter 36, verses 20 to 21, one reason why the land was left desolate, with only a few people in it, during the Babylonian captivity, was that so all the accumulated missed or ignored or intentionally flouted, Sabbaths of the land could be caught up. There were 70 of these years where it had never happened. What's 70 times 7? Why, it was nearly 500 years that they'd gone since God had commanded this and they'd ignored it. So God said, alright, we will catch you up on The land grab here is very much a picture and an example of greed which Paul calls idolatry in Colossians 3 verse 5. Now do you children know the word greed or being greedy? Do you know what that means? It means you want everything. You want everything. And you don't want others to have anything. You want it all. Do you see something you want and someone else has it? You try to take it from them because you are greedy. And anything that you already have, you're not about to let go. It's yours. And so your motto seems to be, what's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine also. That is the heart of greediness. Paul calls it idolatry because the greedy person sets his heart and sets his joy upon not his maker, not his God, well, the living and true God. His God becomes things. And he has to have more and more and more and more. Now, your little children will probably not have heard of a famous man called Alexander the Great. He was a great king a long, long time ago, even before Jesus. He was a fairly young man when he decided he was going to go to war with his kingdom and try to get as much as he could. Now, he died not terribly old. In fact, a lot of you people here are older than Alexander ever got. He was only 32, I believe, when he died. But he conquered every part of the earth that he knew about. And he got into a pout. You know, your own parents, I imagine, tell you to stop pouting. Stop whining, right? If you can't get your way, grow up. But he got into a pout because there weren't more worlds for him to conquer. He always wanted more, more, more. It reminds me, children, of a boy who asked his father how much was enough money. Was $100 enough money? No. Was $1,000 enough money for people? No, said his father. How about $10,000? $100,000? $1,000,000? Or more dollars? Isn't that enough for people? The boy's wise father said, no. The boy said, well then, how much is enough? His father said, Whatever you have, it's always a little more. That is the greedy person. He begrudges anything to anyone else, and that's what was really going on here. It wasn't only Isaiah who was speaking of that, who was led by the Lord. At the same time, there was another prophet in Judah who was speaking. whose words we have in scripture too, the prophet Micah. And you can look at your leisure in Micah chapter 2 verse 2 to see the same bitter, sour, nasty, tooth grating, bad fruit of greed being mentioned as being in the land of Judah. Sadly, such greed so often characterizes that which professes to be the people of God today. It characterizes many of the people of God today. Perhaps not in all lands, but certainly in our land today. Is it bad to be rich? I'm not saying that. Scripture certainly does not say that. But all that we have is to be used for the glory of God. We are to receive it as a blessing from God and to be used for His glory. If we have many, many possessions, and we have great, great wealth, that in itself is not wicked by no means. It gives far wider opportunity for blessing the rest of the Church of Jesus Christ. It gives far greater opportunity to bring glory to Jesus Christ, and it gives far greater responsibility to do that. For to whom much is given, much is expected. Trouble is, the attitude of so many believers, or professed believers anyway, in our own land, and many other places, is not that at all. Their attitude is a rather greedy one. If they're true believers, they are kept from it being so bad that it truly characterizes their life. But they can get pretty far along, sadly. Look, friends, at your TV and so-called Christian channels. Listen to Christian radio stations, at least some of them. You will hear good ministries, but you will hear some that are just a pretense for greed. Money is grubbed for, and leaders, people, and congregations lust for richness. We have people who seem to think that their ministry is only validated when they have huge congregations, huge buildings, wide spending, and that sort of thing, and that those who are smaller are therefore inferior. That is part of this attitude here. We even have so-called health and wealth gospels around. Once again, the greedy worship things. They seek their fulfillment in things, in possessions, and they wickedly steal from others, denying God's providence for them, and God's providence for others. And they make their own wills and their own desires, not the will and desire and glory of God, to be sovereign. No wonder in the time of Isaiah God called this bad fruit. No wonder he still hates this today. Greed is exactly the opposite. along with a lot of these other bad fruit. Well, I should say all of these bad fruit. Exactly the opposite of the fruit that God demands. Once again, from Galatians 5, love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, and temperance. Well, what's God going to do about this? This bad fruit of greed that we see described there in verse 8. Well, first of all, he's going to condemn it. He's going to condemn it. To judge it. We see this in verse 9. In my hearing, the Lord of hosts said, truly many houses should be desolate, great and beautiful ones, without inhabitants. Despite the size, the richness, And the power that their lives and their possessions seem to show, God is not amused. God is not amused at all. Now we have a slight paraphrase here, it seems to me, in the beginning here. In my hearing, the Lord of Hosts said. Literally in the Hebrew it is, in my ear. Now on the other hand, this clarifies the meaning a little bit better. Because some have thought that perhaps it was God whispering in the ear. And that is not so much what Isaiah is trying to get across. No, it is that God has made it perfectly clear, and he could hear it clearly, what God had said. He says that despite the appearance of these people in the world, desolation awaits them. I don't know how many of you people have seen great and glorious mansions and estates of people who were wealthy at one time and who were ruined. I haven't spoken of this for a long time. Maybe it's been long enough that all you people will have forgotten it. But when I was in seminary in Philadelphia, I used to have to go down one road in the suburbs, actually it was within Philadelphia itself, to go someplace, I'm not remembering where. But I had to go down this road, and when you were heading southwest on it, you would look off to the right at one point, and here was this huge mansion. I mean, gigantous. The place was a palace. I wonder how many of you have seen, I know there are some here, the Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice movie, not the latest one, but the one that goes back in the late 1980s or so. And you will remember the big, big mansion. I've watched this once and I can't even remember the characters' names. I've never read the book. But the main guy, Mr. Darcy, that's it. His big mansion in the movie. And it was a big place. It was very like this, this place in Philadelphia. In fact, there was this Ornate, beautiful, gigantic, gateway onto the estate. With a special gatehouse there and everything. But interestingly enough, the gatehouse had been turned into somebody's dwelling place, and inside the gateway was this subdivision. Were these servants' quarters or something of the sort? No, by no means. Whoever it was that had built all this had never finished it. For a crash had happened in the stock market in 1929 and they'd lost nearly everything. The outer shell of his grand palace was built But it had never had much of anything there done since. And here it was, 50 years later, 1979. In fact, a lot of the land on the estate had to be sold off and some developers bought it and put in houses. This guy had been rich and powerful and he did not hesitate to show off this wealth and power with this grand palatial estate and it had come to nothing. Who would have thought in 1928 that such could have happened? Perhaps none of his friends would have imagined what a year would bring. Perhaps he himself could not have imagined what a year would bring. He had his projects, he had his plans, he had his grandeur, he had his riches, he had his power, but God said, no, that's not the way it's going to be, and destroyed him. So it is with those who profess to be God's people, but are greedy, but are greedy. And of course, this was not the only sin of God's people. For as I said, we're not dealing with a bad apple here, we're dealing with a bad cluster of grapes. And so there were other sins as well that characterized those who professed to be God's people at the time. But because of this sin and others, the wealth and the power of the nation were badly crippled. during Isaiah's own days, by the invasion from Assyria. They were destroyed by the Babylonians. God graciously brought them back. God graciously restored to them much of what they had before. But they rejected His anointed ones. They greedily wanted to hold on to their own power, their own possessions, their own place in the world. And so they were overwhelmed by the Romans never to rise again. Houses of grandeur became ruins. Homes filled with the laughter of children were empty. And the only sound to be heard there, or sounds, the wind whistling through cracks, the shuddering of broken windows, the flapping, perhaps, of torn curtains, the drip, drip, drip of a decaying roof, and perhaps the scratching of rats, the flapping of birds within, the splat of their dirt hitting the floor. These are the only sounds that would be heard within. Riches, friends, could not keep these who profess to be God's people. Riches cannot keep you in the day of God's judgment. Where is your trust placed, friends? And it would be well for us to think, where is the trust of our nation placed? I've been saying this for seven years now. It worried me. It worried me after September 11th. The demand of them is that God bless America. For too many people, folks, it seemed to me anyway that it was a demand that God bless America. Not a prayer that God and grace bless America. I've seen too many bumper stickers talking about the power of pride. There's been too much reliance upon our wealth as a nation. Too much reliance and thinking we are too powerful financially and militarily, nothing, nothing can do us in. While we've gone ahead with sin after sin after sin, and now sadly it appears that the greed of many of our leaders, greed for money, greed for political power, has landed us in a very, very difficult situation. What shall happen to our land? I don't know. I don't know. God may yet graciously deliver us, or he might not. What I do know is that you who are his people, if you have succumbed to some extent, you cannot finally do so of course, if you have succumbed to this to some degree, To this sin of greed, God will purify you. God will make you more godly and will transform this bad fruit in your life, make it whole, make it sweet, or should I say, make you sweet and whole and delightful too. It may be through trial, it may be through difficulty, but do it for you he shall. You and all your brothers and sisters may be brought through hard times, but you shall not be stuck in the hard times. You shall not perish ever and ever in the hard times. You shall get through. You shall be brought through the hard times. And when you are through, you will be delightful to Him. Sadly, this is not the case for those who will not turn. They may profess Jesus Christ, but they will be shown for what they are. We see here in verse 10, appropriate fruit for them. Because they are bad fruit, Because they have brought forth bad spiritual fruit, and particularly this one of greed, God judges appropriately. For ten acres of vineyard shall yield one baff, and an omer of seed shall yield one ephah. Now children, I've got to tell you something here. A baff here is not getting into the tub and turning on the warm water and getting cleaned up. No, this is a kind of measurement. I want you children to think. Doesn't your mother, when she's cooking, measure with like teaspoons and tablespoons and cups? And don't you have a quart of cider? A quart bottle? Or a gallon of cider? Okay, all these things are measurements. And that's what this word bath means here. It's not cleaning up something, it's a measurement. And depending on who you read, some scholars think that this is about five gallons, five gallon jugs of milk or cider or something like that. Some people think it's about half again that much, about seven and a half gallons. That's a fair bit of liquid, isn't it? For one row of grapes. Ten acres of vines only yielding this. That's a tiny, tiny bit. God had lavished such care upon his people. And it had gotten so very little good fruit from them. How appropriate that God and his judgment would give them so very little. The yield would be horrible. And the greedy and grasping ones would be ending up bringing forth bad fruit. They grasp for everything and they get nothing. We see here also, not so much dealing with a vineyard, but now a grain field. We have a homer of seed. is roughly a donkey load. An amount of seed that a donkey could carry fairly comfortably. And you'd plant it, and normally in those days you'd get roughly 30 times as much. 30 times as much in a good harvest as you would plant. You'd plant maybe a homer of seed, you would get 30 homers by harvest time, roughly, if it's a good year. But here, they're only going to get one ephah. It takes 10 ephahs to make one hummer. So instead of at harvest time having 30 times what you planted, and you save back one, and you have 29 to eat, you're only down to one-tenth of what you had starting out. I don't know if you children understand this, but you adults do, and you older kids do. There's not enough to live on here, let alone plant the next year. This is how sin and trust in anything else but the triune God comes to at the end. Sin and false gods promise wealth, power, beauty. They promise you will be as gods. But what really comes? Ruin, silence, sterility, death. People of God, don't be seduced by the world. When times are flush, Do not put your trust in wealth. When finances are being flushed, do not fear that somehow you cannot be delivered. Look to God in Christ, for there and there alone is deliverance. Do not trust, as we sometimes sing from Psalm 146, in wealth or in princes. whether they be Republican or Democrat, Libertarian, Constitutional, Whig, whatever. Put no trust in princes, nor in wealth of man depend. These things, as we sing from Psalm 146, shall perish, and their purposes shall end. Look to God in Christ. And worldlings, is there any such here? There may be among those who listen to this. Take warning. All your wealth and power could disappear overnight. Judgment could come upon you swiftly. Take warning! And surrender to Jesus. Only He can make you acceptable. If you should come to Him, He shall make you acceptable. Come to Him. Believe upon Him. Repent of your sin. He shall make you whole. He shall deliver you. For the end of the bad fruit, the end of the greed, is destruction. Life is found alone in Jesus Christ. Amen. I'm going to sing again now from Psalm 49. The opening part said, basically, pay attention to what I'm about to tell you. And God please deliver me from the wicked. Now we're going to be speaking of a particular sort of wicked person. The greedy ones here in portion B, Psalm 49B, what is going to happen, what the greedy are like and what will happen to them. So let's sing this now with discernment, let's sing this with the understanding, let's sing this in Jesus, Psalm 49B.