Isaiah 5:13-17 – Bad Fruit: Sensuality- Part Two
God condemns this sensuality. God says,’you want to depend upon gluttony? I shall starve you. You want to depend upon drunkeness? I shall kill you with thirst. You want to enlarge your parties, to party on. Well, I will enlarge the grave.’ They sought their own glory, and so what they shall receive is shame.
God, who is holy, shall be exalted and glorified. God will not be mocked when we madly go after our pleasures, when we insanely go after our greed, when personal peace and affluence become our gods. God can be and is exalted in judgement. It glorifies God indeed to save sinners. Rejoice in that. But God is glorified in the destruction of sinners. He is glorified in judgement. Sometimes Christians recoil from this idea. Part of the problem is that we think man’s salvation and man’s good is the ultimate matter. They ae not. They are good things, otherwise God would not do them. But the ultimate goal of God, the ultimate good, is His glory. Saving many is a way that God is glorified, but God is glorified in judgement as well.
There is another picture in verse 17. It’s a picture of the godly, the lambs, who have been endangered by the wolves in their greed and sensuality. The lambs here are left in peace and prosperity. Strangers or nomads eat in the ruins. This is speaking of you who come from families and from nations that were strangers to the covenant, but are drawn in by the grace of God in Jesus Christ. As the gospel has gone out to all the earth, you who were strangers to the covenant of grace are grafted into the stock of the olive tree, as Paul speaks of in Romans 11. The bad fruit must go to destruction. But God’s people shall be preserved, protected, prospered. You shall yet see God’s hand of deliverance. So fret not, fear not. God has made you to be good fruit. God, by his indwelling Spirit, is bringing about more and more the fruit of the Spirit in your life.
Question
- What judgement does God bring?
- What gracious thing does God do for strangers?
Prayer Points
- Pray for the preaching and hearing of God’s Word tomorrow.
- Use prayer points from your congregation.
- Pray for family matters.