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Isaiah 4:1 - 5:13
Today, we’ll start a new chapter in the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 4. At the end of
Chapter 3, God described the ‘desolate’ state of Jerusalem, due to the worship
of false idols, and basically, things foreign to The Word of God. The leaders, spiritual
and political, and the deceived peoples, were causing this state of degradation by not
following The LORD. By continuing this state in Jerusalem, they will allow the ‘abomination
of desolation’ written of by Daniel to sit in the rebuilt Temple on Mount Moriah.
The last verse of that Chapter 3 of Isaiah therefore refers to a condition in the near
future. We then continue that prophecy with Isaiah Chapter 4. We ask a blessing from our
heavenly Father in Christ's Name, Amen:
Isa
4:1 And in that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, "We
will eat our own bread, and wear our own apparel: only let us be called by thy name, to
take away our reproach."
The
analogy of 'spiritual harlotry' from Isaiah 3 continues, but the analogy here is about the
true Bride of Christ, holding to "one man" as The Bridegroom, being Christ
Jesus. The key word in this verse is ‘seven women’ who eat their ‘own
bread’. This ‘bread’ is spiritual, in that it means Christ, for
He is the True Bread of Life. These seven refer in the spiritual sense to God's elect, per
the ‘seven thousand’ spoken of in I Kings 19, where Elijah was reassured
of a remnant by God. The Lord told Elijah:
I Kings
19:18 "Yet I have left Me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which
have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him."
Again, ‘women’ is used to refer to the ‘daughters of My
People’, or the elect. The part ‘We will wear our own apparel’ is
put for clothing of ‘righteousness’ in a sense, different from the clothing of
the ‘harlot’ of the last Chapter of Isaiah, which those wear who are ‘in
bed’ with Satan by following him instead of our Father through Christ Jesus. That
harlot clothing is in the spiritual sense, idolatry, or ‘spiritual adultery’
away from Christ our Lord.
You should realize who that ‘one man’ is
above in Isaiah 4:1, which the ‘seven women’ take hold of, for He is
Christ, and by His Name they are also called. Only by studying God’s Word chapter by
chapter, and verse by verse will you learn to recognize these spiritual ‘key’
words, or phrases. In this one verse we have: ‘ in that day’ to refer to
the return of Jesus Christ on earth; ‘seven women’ referring to
God’s remnant, or elect; ‘our own apparel’ put for the righteous
clothing of the elect, which is symbolic of good works here on earth (Rev. 7:9-17; 14:13);
‘bread’ is put for The Bread of Life; and ‘called by thy
name’ is put for that ‘new name’ that Christ will write upon His
elect in the eternity (Rev. 3:12).
This is how God communicates, so get used to it, sharpen up; these
Biblical ‘key’ words should get your attention immediately, knowing that they
refer to other parts of The Word. As stated before, chapter by chapter, verse by verse
study will reveal these meanings, if you have ‘eyes to see and ears to hear’. If
you’re locked into jumping around in The Word every Sunday, never covering It so that
It flows in the mind, the most important part will be missing. If your Church is not
teaching God’s Word this way, then it’s up to you to fill in the gaps.
Isa
4:2 In that day shall the Branch of the LORD be beautiful and glorious, and
the fruit of the earth shall be excellent and comely for them that are escaped of
Israel.
‘In that day’ is repeated here again, so this refers to the same time as the
previous verse, the Lord’s Day. The ‘Branch of the LORD’ is Christ.
The phrase, ‘escaped of Israel’ are the elect who ‘escape’ the
deception of Babylon, which means ‘confusion’. They ‘escape’ because
they are aware of, through our Father’s Word, that the false messiah, Satan, will
come first, before the True Messiah Jesus Christ, and these wait for the True One of
Israel. Those who are deceived wear the spiritual clothing of the ‘harlot’,
and go about ‘tinkling with their feet’ and will not wait for the True
Christ, but will believe on a false, or 'spurious' messiah, thinking he is Jesus.
Then after this great 'apostasy', the True Son of David, Jesus Christ, will return upon
this earth (see II Thess.2, and translate 'false Christs' in Matt.24:24 and Mark
13:22 using your Strong's).
Isa
4:3 And it shall come to pass, that he that is left in Zion, and he
that remaineth in Jerusalem, shall be called holy, even every one that is
written among the living in Jerusalem:
Every one whose name is written in the ‘Book of Life’, meaning to have eternal
Life, are the ones ‘left in Zion and he that remaineth in Jerusalem’ (Rev.
3:5). This didn’t happen in Isaiah’s day, and it hasn’t happened yet today.
All of this is yet future to us.
It is important to remember that when the True Christ
returns to earth, the "thousand years" reign of Christ and His elect,
called the Millennium, will begin (God’s Millennium, not man’s; see Rev.20). No
one will be blotted out of the Book of Life at that time, for it will be a time of
teaching the Word of The Lord (See the last 9 Chapters of Ezekiel; Rev.3:9). Satan will be
locked in the pit during that "thousand years", so no hindrance on his
part will be allowed to corrupt The Word (Rev. 20:2). That is when every knee shall bow to
Christ, both the good seed, and the evil seed (Rom. 14:11; Acts 24:15; Rev.3:9). At the
end of that Millennium age, Satan will be loosed out of the pit to go and deceive again,
and those who come to Christ during the Millennium will have to prove themselves against
Satan at the end of it (Rev. 20:7-15). Then the final ‘cup of God’s wrath’
will be poured out, casting Satan and his angels into the ‘lake of fire’, along
with those who follow him, which is the blotting out of those names from the Book of Life.
Our Lord is very fair. By the end of Christ’s Millennium reign upon the earth,
everyone will have had a chance to hear God’s Word, unaltered and pure, even the
wicked ‘evil seed’ (again, see Ezek.44 through end, and Acts 24:15 about the
resurrection of the "just", i.e. righteous, and the "unjust", i.e.
wicked).
Isa
4:4 When the LORD shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion,
and shall have purged the blood of Jerusalem from the midst thereof by the spirit of
judgment, and by the spirit of burning.
There’s a lot of weight in this verse. The Companion Bible helps quite a bit
in deciphering it. The ‘daughters of Zion’ are God’s people written
in that Book of Life. The word ‘purged’ is duwach in the Hebrew,
meaning to ‘cast out’. ‘Blood’ is ‘dam’ in
the Hebrew, meaning the ‘blood (as that which when shed causes death) of man or an
animal’. This means the ‘casting’ away with all the unrighteous
shedding of man’s blood, for example, by murder. The word ‘spirit’ is
Hebrew ruwach, meaning ‘blast’ or ‘blast by the
breath’.1 Essentially this verse says
The LORD in the future, will have washed the filth away, put for the ‘doing away with
all evil’, from among His children, and ‘cast out’ the ‘blood
guilt’ of Jerusalem (remember who all the righteous blood of the prophets fall upon;
see Matt. 23:35), by the ‘blast’ of judgment from His ‘breath’, (The
Word cuts both ways, like a two-edged sword, Heb. 4:12), and by the ‘blast of
burning’, for God is a ‘consuming fire’… (Heb. 12:29). 2
Thessalonians 2:8 really gets this message across:
2 Thess 2:8
And then shall that wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the
spirit of His mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of His coming:
Continuing back in Isaiah 4:
Isa
4:5 And the LORD will create upon every dwelling place of mount Zion, and upon
her assemblies, a cloud and smoke by day, and the shining of a flaming fire by night: for
upon all the glory shall be a defence.
This word ‘defence’ is ‘chuppah’ in Hebrew, which means
a ‘canopy’. Mount Zion is The LORD’s favorite place on earth. His
Holy Presence will be there in the eternity with His people (Ps. 125).
Isa
4:6 And there shall be a tabernacle for a shadow in the daytime from the heat,
and for a place of refuge, and for a covert from storm and from rain.
God
shall be our ‘Canopy’ over us in the eternity. (Also see Isa. 25:4; Ps.
27:5; Ps. 91:1, Ezek.48)
Isaiah Chapter 5
Isa
5:1 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:
I’m going to try something new for the next couple of verses that may help the
student understand how to recognize God’s ‘slang’ when it appears in verse.
I will attempt to underline ‘key words’ in verses that point to God’s
concepts referred to from other Books in The Word. It is not possible to cover them all,
but it is only to give the student an idea of what to look for. I’m not saying this
is a ‘do all’ for understanding The Word. Only that these ‘key’ words
point to analogies in God’s Word that help us form a picture in our minds, and
thereby making It come alive.
The word ‘wellbeloved’ is a term used in
the King James to refer to Christ and His people. See Mark 12:6 for Christ being referred
to as ‘the Son’ sent to the husbandmen of that parable (Also see Rom.16:5; 3
John 1:1). Christ is that ‘fruitful hill’ that the ‘vineyard’,
His people, ‘sprig’ from. It is interesting to note that this phrase, ‘fruitful
hill’, is made up of two words in the Hebrew; ‘ben’ in the
Hebrew (Strong's 1121), meaning ‘son’, and ‘shemen’,
which is ‘oil’, or ‘olive oil’ (Strong's 8081), which is
also the oil of God’s people. Put all of this together, and it means the Son of
Oil Jesus Christ, The Anointed Messiah. (Does that give us greater meaning to the
'Oil' which the ten virgins of Matthew 25 had in their lamps? It should. If you'll recall
there in Matthew 25, five virgins were foolish, and lacking in That Oil. Stay in God's
Word for yourself to get That Oil.)
Isa
5:2 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.
God
is using the analogy of a husbandman who cares for his vineyard. He starts off by
describing how He set the ‘vineyard’ up by clearing away the stones,
and then planting It, making a ‘winepress’, or vat, and He put a ‘tower’
or watchtower in the middle, which stands for Judah, because they were especially to keep
Holy unto God, receiving the promise as the Royal bloodline to rule over the rest of
Israel. This well cared for ‘vineyard’ should have produced good
‘fruit’, or ‘choice grapes’, being from the ‘choicest Vine’,
in essence, an excellent vintage of wine, that is to say, Christ. Instead, what kind of
fruit was produced? Wild grapes, or ‘sour grapes’, fit for nothing. Why?
As we’ll find out later in this chapter, many of His ‘vineyard’, or
children during Isaiah’s time, and yet to this day, are rebellious against Him and
turn away from that ‘Choice Vine’ Which is Christ, and through their ignorance
of His Word, worship something else.
Let’s break the ‘key words’ down now. ‘Stones’
refer to many things in God’s Word. They can refer to the ‘stones’
of the priest’s breastplate, which are beautiful jewels. Jesus Christ is the ‘cornerstone’
that the builders (His apostate children) rejected (see Matt.21:42; Ps. 118:22). In others
passages, these ‘stones’ represent the foundations of the wicked, as
representative of Satan’s little empire, and children, etc. That is how ‘stones’
apply in this verse of Isaiah 5:2. God clears away these bad ‘stones’
from His people, and He set up a ‘fence’ to keep out these ‘stones’,
in a spiritual sense. As long as these ‘stones’ are in the way of the
‘vine’, the vineyard can’t produce good ‘fruit’ (see Matthew 13
with the parable of the sower). God gives those that believe and trust in Him power over
Satan and his host to help us keep our ‘vineyard’ cleared of ‘stones’
(see Luke 10:19; Eph. 6).
The word ‘tower’ means a ‘watchtower’
or ‘castle’ in the Hebrew. This ‘watchtower’ is to keep watch over the
‘vineyard’ or children of God. In the spiritual sense, it means to teach
God’s people His Word and not man’s babbling, i.e., the duty is to protect the
Word of The True Vine among His people. If this is done, then there would be no room for
false worship of idols, ‘stone’ images, oak grove worship, etc., and
the ‘vineyard’ would produce ‘choice fruit’ or vintage grapes,
instead of ‘sour grapes’ (see Micah 4:8; Ps.48:12-14; Matt.21; Mark 12). This
‘winepress’ also symbolizes God’s wrath in judgment (see
Lamentations 1:15; Hosea 9; Rev.14:9; 19:15). It can also represent the good 'fruits' of
labor, pressing out the good juice of the grape to make wine. For the expression ‘wild
grapes’, see Deut. 32:32 for a description of the ‘grapes of gall’
and ‘bitter clusters’, for they are compared to Sodom and Gomorrah
(also see Deut. 29:18). If you’ll remember back in Chapter 1 of Isaiah, God was
comparing His rebellious children to Sodom and Gomorrah.
Did you notice how digging deeper into this second verse of
Chapter 5 took you to the idea of ‘wild grapes’, and researching
other passages about these ‘wild grapes’ led to Deut.32, which
brought up the subject of Sodom and Gomorrah again? This is how to study God’s Word.
If you don’t understand a particularly difficult verse, rest assured you will find
the same subject in more than one place in our Father’s Word, giving us a method for
using The Word, to verify The Word in our minds. That’s why It’s complete, and
It’s called The Living Word. (We’re in the Old Testament; the
part that many teach we don’t live in anymore!). Anyway, I hope you get the idea
about the ‘key words’. God teaches using picture symbols, and these symbols are
always natural, in other words, they are things that we can see and everyone can relate
to. These symbols ‘weave’ through His Word forming a complete
‘blanket’, a righteous covering for those who seek Him, and do their best to
follow Him, instead of mammon.
Isa
5:3 And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem, and men of Judah, judge, I pray you,
betwixt Me and My vineyard.
I
spent a bit of extra time on the last verse to illustrate some of the depth of God’s
Word. Let me caution you: if you wander too far in depth, you can miss the flow of the
chapter. Not everyone can go to that depth, and others can go even deeper in their
research. The point I'm trying to make is to stay focused on the subject and object in the
present chapter you’re studying. This is why I recommend The Companion Bible. It
is a King James Version with extensive marginal notes that help research a verse in other
parts of The Bible. Most of the time, when a key point such as the phrase ‘fruitful
hill’, meaning ‘son of oil’ in the Hebrew, might be
missed in a standard King James, The Companion Bible points it out in the margin.
This sheds more light on the Holy Scriptures helping the reader to understand God’s
Word the way He intended.
In this last verse of Isaiah 5:3, God is saying to Judah,
"I watered and pruned you, caressed you and planted you with love; I gave you The
Choice Vine for your beginnings; I set the soil (earth) in place for you. I did my part,
and now what about your part? Judge between Me and My Law, and your false ways!"
Isa
5:4 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?
God
is saying, "What more could I have done to My vineyard, to ensure it would bear good
fruit, or good grapes? How is it then, that when I looked and it brought forth
‘poison berries’?" The phrase "wild grapes" here in the
Hebrew is ‘be’ushiym’, or ‘poison-berries’
(Strong's 891). The LORD really has made things easy for His children. When we step out of
line, by not following Him, we receive punishment from our Loving Father, The Father of us
all. His 'Message' is very clear if we ask for understanding and read It.
Another analogy would be when we go out and buy an item that has to be
assembled, many times we throw away the instruction sheet. We ‘go it alone’,
puffed up in self-pride, determined that we can do the assembly without the directions.
How many times have we reached what we thought was the final stage of assembly and
discover, that we left out a part that should have been installed at the earliest step,
then we have to tear down and rebuild? That is the way our Father’s Word is also, in
the sense that those who think they’re smarter than God, try to go it alone,
assembling their lives without reading The Directions (God’s Word), and when they
reach the final assembly stage (the first tribulation false messiah who comes before
Christ Jesus), they worship Satan, the Antichrist which means ‘the instead
of Christ’ in the Greek, a spurious Messiah. The main difference, of
course is, there will be no re-assembly, no chance to add the missing part at that final
stage. What has become a beautiful invention for those who follow The Lord and read His
Word, will have become ‘poison berries’ for those that don’t; and
what does one do with ‘poison berries’? God has done His part; it’s
up to us to do ours!
Isa
5:5 And now go to; I will tell you what I will do to My vineyard: I
will take away the hedge thereof, and it shall be eaten up; and break down the
wall thereof, and it shall be trodden down:
The
phrase ‘And now go to’ means, "Now then; I’ll tell you
what...". This is our Father showing us He’s angry. The Lord is going to make
Jerusalem barren in a sense; the vineyard is going to be pillaged and trodden by what? By
animals, wild animals, or ‘beasts’. Today, it certainly is trodden, for
many of His People in Jerusalem do not recognize Christ as Savior; they are getting
set up to start animal sacrifices again, and they are also moving to rebuild the Temple of
Solomon.
This meaning of ‘beasts’, or ‘animals’, refers to
the Kenites, the sons of Cain (look up the meaning of Kenite 7014, in your Strong’s
Concordance). These Kenites have crept into our brother Judah’s holy stay, and sit in
the seat of Moses, or The Law, as Christ would tell us in Matthew 23:2. For those of you
who think this is not also true of America, and the Western Christian nations, let me ask
you this. How many Churches can you attend and honestly say that you are learning the Word
of God. How many teach just one or two verses, and then go on about man’s babbling,
never making God’s Word flow into people’s minds? Who in their right common
sense mind can look at our justice law system in America, and say these ‘beasts’
haven’t taken it over? (I’m not talking about everyone in our Law system, for
there are some good people there. But even most of the good lawyers will admit major
problems with our justice system, if they are honest.) As God caused the captivity of both
‘houses’ for turning away from Him, the ‘house of Judah’ by Babylon,
and the ‘house of Israel’ by the Assyrian, likewise, it applies today.
Isa
5:6 And I will lay it waste: it shall not be pruned, nor digged; but there
shall come up briers and thorns: I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain
upon it.
The
word ‘waste’ here is a variation of the Hebrew word battah, meaning
'desolation'. Remember the 'abomination of desolation' referred to earlier
in Isaiah? This is Satan, sitting in the Temple of God, in Jerusalem. This 'abomination
of desolation' is not a condition, for Christ would say in Mark 13:14, "...standing
where it ought not...", this word 'it' is in the third person and can
be translated 'he, she, or it', so how can a 'condition' stand in the Holy Place? It is
Satan who stands in that Holy Place as written in 2 Thessalonians 2. Notice that God
is telling us that He will allow it to happen, He is in control. The ‘vineyard’
in Jerusalem is going to be a ‘desolation’. Instead of ‘choice
grapes’, it will bear ‘briers and thorns’, which is another
reference to Satan and his offspring (see Judges 2; Joshua 23:13; Matt.7:15-23).
In Judges 9, there is a parable of the ‘bramble bush’
(Satan) that offers Judah to make him King over them, if they will come under his ‘shadow’.
The biggest problem with that ‘shadow’ is that, a ‘bramble bush’ or a
thorn bush doesn’t give much of a shadow, and therefore little protection. The idea
of the ‘shadow’ is a ‘covering’. God is a covering to His children
that follow Him. He is the True Canopy of protection.
The reference to ‘rain’ in this verse of Isaiah 5:6
means the ‘latter day rain’ of God’s Spirit of Truth. What happens during a
drought? If it lasts long enough, everyone will die of thirst. That’s exactly what is
happening today friend, in the spiritual sense. God’s people are hungry for The
Christ, The Bread of Life, and they thirst for that True Spiritual Water of God, but
they're just too busy looking everywhere else for It, and following every little fad that
the Kenites dream up to keep them distracted; man’s little ritual dramas that appear
so religious, false pagan holidays like Easter, which is mistranslated from the word pascha,
or Passover in the Greek of Acts 12:4, the Hollywood set of lies and propaganda, even
false prophets in many pulpits that teach to fly away with Satan (Ezekiel 13). So God is
saying in this verse 5: "I will bring the ‘son of perdition’ on you, and
make your ‘vineyard’ a ‘desolation’; instead of good grapes and good
fruit, your ‘vineyard’ will produce ‘briers and thorns’ of
Satan’s children amongst you. I also will cut off the ‘latter day rain’ of
the knowledge of My Word from you, and you will be trodden down by animals (Kenites) in
your midst." (See the prophecy of spiritual famine per Amos 8).
(Since the word Kenite means 'son of Cain' in Hebrew, do
you remember the 'mark' put on Cain in Gen.4? This is that same 'mark of the beast'
written in Rev.16 & 19. This is the analogy God is giving His people about 'animals',
i.e. 'beasts', that trod down the 'vineyard' of His people, not literal physical wild
animals as in some cowboy Western.)
Isa
5:7 For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of
Israel, and the men of Judah His pleasant plant: and He looked for
judgment, but behold oppression; for righteousness, but behold a cry.
This verse makes it clear that God’s message here in Isaiah is to both
‘houses’, not just Judah and Jerusalem, for the ‘house of Israel’
represents the ‘ten lost tribes’ that went into Assyrian captivity and never
returned to the land of what we call ‘modern day Israel’. This ‘cry’
is a ‘shriek’, or ‘howl’. Instead of joy, both houses yell out in a
‘shriek’ or a ‘scream’ for help.
If you have read 1 Kings 11 through 2 Kings 18, you should
understand the split of the kingdom of Israel into two kingdoms, the ‘house of
Israel’ put for ten tribes of the northern part of the promised land, with their
capital city at Samaria, and the ‘house of Judah’ put for three tribes,
Judah the royal tribe, Benjamin, and Levite the priest tribe, and their capital city of
Jerusalem. The majority of the ‘house of Israel’ went north after their
captivity by Assyria and never returned to the Holy land. They continued north, over the
Caucasus mountains, becoming known as ‘Caucasians’, settling mostly in western
Europe and Asia Minor. These two ‘houses’ are still split today. Not all of the
‘house of Judah’ even returned to Jerusalem, as written in the Books of Ezra and
Nehemiah, after their 70 year captivity from Babylon. Most people think that the modern
nation of Israel is made up of all twelve tribes. This is not true, for God said that He
would multiply Abraham’s "...seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand
which is upon the sea shore..." (Gen. 22:17). Common sense tells us that the
modern nation of Israel is not that big, so, where’s the rest? All one has to do is
look at the Christian nations and reason a little, and of course, read The Word which
informs man on all Truth.
Isa
5:8 Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field,
till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of
the earth!
We’re
now going to see some of the conditions produced by this sad state of rebelling against
God, for these ‘Woes’ are curses. It doesn’t take much to see all the
poverty and crime, and lack of the presence of God in our major cities. Even when we drive
away from the city, much of the crime is lessened as we travel further out of the city.
When people build houses so close together that they no longer have the chance to
experience the good of the land, and that peace that comes from breathing the fresh air of
the country, hearing the sounds of birds and smelling the nectar of the flowers, then many
evil things that Satan loves comes forth in that big city. I don’t have to tell you
about what goes on in cities; you see the differing amounts of the evil in degrees,
accordingly as the city starts out small, and becomes larger and larger, until the inner
parts become virtual dumps. Do you remember who built the first city? It was the offspring
of Cain, the city of Enoch (Gen.4:17). The ground was cursed for Cain, not
bearing its yield, so he couldn’t survive in farming. He had to resort to other
devices to survive, and building cities was the result (have you looked up the meaning of
Kenite yet?).
Isa
5:9 "In Mine ears" said the LORD of hosts, "Of a
truth many houses shall be desolate, even great and fair, without inhabitant.
These
‘woes’ make it difficult for even those who would follow God. Offering my
opinion, when I have traveled into many cities, being from a rural area, many places and
people were so much into ‘fads’, that I kind of stuck out like a sore thumb
amongst them, and I was looked down upon as being ‘out of fashion’, not knowing
the latest ‘slang’, etc., mainly because I had to ask a lot of questions as to
what those things meant. And many of those were absolutely blind to any real truth other
than how to get money and survive on the street. Living the moment, that’s what many
of them were doing. "How bored you must be, we have everything here in the
city," they would say. Well, God is saying here in Isaiah that their
‘houses’ are full of ‘nothings’, if they don’t follow Him, even
great and beautiful houses, built ‘house upon house’. I’m not
striking out against city people, necessarily, but you tell me. Isn’t there more
distractions and overcrowded populations, crime, and the like? Can you imagine growing up
poor in a large city and never having seen a pasture of cows or a well planted field, or
deer grazing out in the open?
Isa
5:10 Yea, ten acres of vineyard shall yield one bath, and the seed of an homer
shall yield an ephah.
A
‘bath’ here, is about 6 English gallons. A ‘homer’
is about 8 bushels, and an ‘ephah’ is around 3 pecks. For ten acres,
that ain’t much friend. Remember the curse of the ground to Cain? That’s what I
could produce on one acre, so 1/10th is all they produce for ten acres.
Isa
5:11 Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may
follow strong drink; that continue until night, till wine inflame them!
Isa
5:12 And the harp, and the viol, the tabret, and pipe, and wine, are in their
feasts: but they regard not the work of the LORD, neither consider the operation of His
hands.
Most people are aware that a little wine is good for the blood and digestive
system. However, some people are allergic to alcohol. Others have a genetic problem that
makes the want of it overtake them. You’ve probably heard some of these classified as
‘problem drinkers’. I recognize another category, the ‘solution
drinker’. This type has no genetic craving for alcohol, instead they go out on a
drinking binge because they think it’s a ‘solution’ to their problems.
I’ve even heard some say that alcohol is evil. If that bottle cap is never opened,
alcohol doesn’t have a chance at being part of the ‘solution’ to a bigger
problem. Yet there are people who over drink because they think it’s cool to get
drunk! Wise up, it’s nothing but another ‘fad’ created by the Kenite, a
‘fad’ for control of your mind! It goes in the same category with drugs, etc.
Common sense says that not all drugs are bad, for medicines help many, but we are
bombarded daily from the TV, movies, and fads that teach the misuse of these things, along
with the caress that it will make you ‘cool’, or a person others will look up
to, etc. I wish I had a nickel for every fad that Satan has sold to us (just an
expression, I’m not a money grubber). Alcohol is a big 'fad', because it’s
legal!
Isa 5:13
Therefore My People are gone into captivity, because they have
no knowledge: and their honourable men are famished, and their multitude dried up
with thirst.
The
word ‘captivity’ here, has a double meaning. God’s people are in the
captivity of the things of the world, not searching and doing our Father’s Word,
therefore, they have cut True Knowledge of The Word off from themselves. Their ‘honourable
men’, or ‘leaders’, who are responsible for knowing God’s Word,
and correcting His people, are themselves ‘famished’, a famine for
knowing the Word. ‘Blind leaders of the blind’, Jesus would say in the Gospel.
Many so-called leaders and would be teachers of God’s Word hate the idea of
expounding The Word chapter by chapter, and verse by verse. They think they’re
smarter than that, verse by verse, line by line is for children they think. You can’t
maintain the 'flock', they're told! We’re in Isaiah, in the Old Testament, and God is
giving us a warning for today! God’s Word is The Living Word, and just because
we’re in the Old Testament doesn’t mean It’s dead history!
We’ll pick up with
Isaiah 5:14 in the next lesson.
Peace be with you.
Dave Ramey.
Footnotes:
1 The
Companion Bible. Kregel Publishing, Grand Rapids, MI., 1990, p.936.
All references to
"Strong's nos." are from Strong's Exhaustive Concordance, PC Study
Bible, Biblesoft, 1993-1996.
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