His Perfect Love

Guest (Male): Today on His Perfect Love we look at the Old Testament scriptures preserved for us that it might be an example we can learn from. This is his perfect love. The word goes out. It's what real love looks like in truth and grace. This is his perfect love.

Welcome again to His Perfect Love. Pastor Matt VanderVen will be along shortly to continue his series in Isaiah. And today we'll focus our time and attention on chapters 4 and 5. We'll take a look at a passage that not only applies to the children of Israel in Isaiah's day, but certainly has great application for us today.

We live in a world very much like Judah of years gone by where people are greedy and turned to controlled substances like alcohol. But history shows us what happens when people go in that direction, and it's not pretty. Here's Pastor Matt.

Matt VanderVen: This is his perfect love.

If you look at verse 1 of chapter 4 in the book of Isaiah, and in that day seven women—if you remember I read this last week, but I'm just going to pick up from there. He was talking about just how difficult it was going to be. He's going to take all sorts of pride away that way, all the false adornments, everything that would be worshipped. Between the things the ladies were wearing, it's going to come to the point where a woman is going to look to even be married.

There's going to be hardly any men left because of the invasion that's going to come, because of the judgment. And so it says in that day seven women shall take hold of one man. That's all that's going to be left because of the judgment that's coming, saying, "We will eat our own food and wear our own apparel. You don't have to support us. We'll take care of ourselves," the women are going to say. "Just marry us so we can have your name so we can be associated."

It just shows you the depravity. "Only let us be called by your name to take away our reproach." That's how bad things are going to get. God is bringing them to the point of this is how bad it's going to get. And then in verse 2, he's going to jump into the Kingdom Age again and to the Millennial Reign, and he's going to say, "Look, the best is yet to come."

In that day, the branch of the Lord shall be beautiful and glorious, talking of Jesus. And the fruit of the earth shall be excellent and appealing for those of Israel who have escaped. He's talking about the Jews, the survivors at that time in the Great Tribulation. On Sundays, we're in the book of Revelation, so this goes hand in hand with where we've been studying.

We understand the depth of the judgment that's going to come to the Great Tribulation. But throughout the book that we've been reading, we've been watching God put these momentary pauses in there. He sends witnesses, he sends a group of people that they might get the gospel and get saved even during the Great Tribulation and the judgment that's coming, because the church isn't given under wrath.

The church will not be here. And so he's talking about Israel and he's saying, "Look, in that time, those who do survive..." Because again, if we use current numbers right now, you're talking about roughly a population of 8.2 billion people. We looked at it together. If you're with us on Sundays, just in the first year to year and a half of the Great Tribulation, half of the world's population is dead.

This is between the cosmic disturbances, between the judgment that comes from the seals, and then the trumpet judgments. And then the fact that the oxygen, the water, everything around earth as we would know it today is tainted or destroyed in some capacity, not being able to sustain life the way it does today. And so he says for those in Israel who escape, there's no guarantee.

This isn't something that anybody wants to gamble with, to say, "Well, maybe I can make it in the Great Tribulation." You don't need to. Call upon the name of Jesus Christ and be saved today. Because he's saying for those in Israel who have survived, who are survivors of this Great Tribulation, it shall come to pass that he who is left in Zion—shouldn't those words concern you, those who are left?

That's a little bit shocking to me. And remain in Jerusalem will be called holy. Everyone who is recorded among the living in Jerusalem, when the Lord has washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion and purged the blood of Jerusalem from her midst by the spirit of judgment and by the spirit of burning. Then the Lord will create above every dwelling place of Mount Zion, and above her assemblies, a cloud and a smoke by day and the shining in flaming fire by night.

That's familiar, isn't it? We read about that in the early books of the Old Testament when the Jews would follow God through the wilderness. For overall glory, there will be a covering and there will be a tabernacle for shade in the daytime from the heat, and a place of refuge and for a shelter from the storm and the rain. You see, he's pointing out at the second coming the vast difference.

At the time of Isaiah when this is being written to the people of Judah, none of these things are going to be true for them because of the tribulation they're going to go through because of their sin and depravity. Assyria is going to come in. Not so much under Uzziah—we're going to read about Uzziah when we get to chapter 6—but it's Uzziah's son. Do you remember who Uzziah's son is? Hezekiah.

Hezekiah is going to have a time where Assyria is going to come in and that army will have already destroyed the ten tribes of the north. All that's going to be left is Jerusalem and Judah with the surrounding area. And what's going to happen is Assyria is going to make their way down and they're going to destroy the rest of Judah. The only inhabitants that will be left will be Jerusalem. That will be it.

If it wasn't for the Lord, because the Lord intervenes at that time, even Jerusalem and those that were in Jerusalem at the time would all be dead. But it was God staying in a promise of a remnant that he would leave. But he's contrasting that from what it's going to be like and what's coming because of the severity of idolatry and the judgment that's coming to Judah and to Jerusalem in contrast to what it's going to be like for those who are obedient.

For those who don't reject Jesus Christ as Lord, for those who don't reject God's commandments, statutes, and judgments, they are going to inherit the kingdom of God. They're going to be heirs and co-heirs with Jesus. And he looks forward for them and he says, "Look, right now, you're not going to have a place of refuge. There's not going to be a place to get out of the sun when it beats down upon you."

Remember we looked at it in Revelation about how the sun's going to be so strong and it's not even going to have any ability to protect the people. They're going to burn up and have tons of rashes, UV light, all the kind of radiation and things that are going to be going on during the Great Tribulation. He says, "Now contrast that for my Millennial Reign where I'm going to provide shade for you. I'm going to provide a place where you'll be with me."

"You won't have to worry, I'll protect you. I'm going to keep you, I'm going to shelter you from the storm and the rain." And you want that. Doesn't everybody want that, to be sheltered from the storms and the rain of this life and the circumstances of that? Well, then he goes into chapter 5. He's basically saying it's all going to be fixed in the second coming here. So he's bringing them to the place of understanding that we need the fullness of God's peace.

Chapter 5. Now, and this should be a very familiar imagery to most of us here after reading the gospels, he's going to use something that we don't actually see in the gospel this way, but we're familiar with parables. We've read parables in the gospel, yes? But tonight what we're going to read is something that we have not seen, and that's a parable to music or a song, a singing parable.

It's very unique that we have this right here. This is one of the few places in all of scripture where we have a parable that is sung. So let's look at this together. "Now let me sing to my well-beloved a song of my well-beloved regarding his vineyard." So that should immediately clue us in to the fact that God loves the vineyard. Israel's the vineyard. God loves Israel.

So he says, "Let me sing a song." Now, clearly this is Isaiah. Isaiah's just the mouthpiece, but God is bringing this through Isaiah here. And he's being told to speak this parable to Israel. "A song of my well-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 winepress in it."

So he—circle this in your Bibles, please—he expected. It's the rational expectation. It's what we read in Romans, your reasonable service. He expected it to bring forth good grapes. He's describing this as a rational thought. He says, "I've given this area, this vineyard, I've poured into it, I've worked the ground, I've given it everything it needs to be fruitful, to multiply, to be prosperous that way."

He says naturally you would expect because of all that favor that good grapes should come from that, good fruit, not rotten fruit. He expected it, he being God the Father, to bring forth good grapes, but it brought forth wild grapes. Now when you think of wild grapes, I want you to think of what that would be. Have you ever had a grape that when you eat it, it's just sour or bitter?

You expect the grape most of the time when you eat it to be sweet. It's got a pleasant sweet taste, sweet aroma. Can you imagine you go and even your senses get a little bit confused initially because you open your mouth, you put the grape, you take a bite, and you're expecting a nice sweet taste and all of a sudden you're trying to push it out. "What is this?" It's bitter.

The whole point of a grape, its intention is to be sweet. However, when the grape is wild, it's sour. And not only is it sour, it becomes bitter. There's a little bit of difference from sour. Sour's the initial taste. Bitter is when it leaves that lasting taste in your mouth that you just can't get rid of. Have you ever had a Sour Patch Kid or one of those candies where someone says, "Oh, try one of these!"

And they don't tell you and you put that thing in and your whole senses react. What is this? Because God's provided, the Father's provided so much favor. I mean, he provided everything. The idea here is, friends, tonight, think about it. Has God not done that in your life and my life? Has he not provided everything that we need? And he has every right to expect good fruit.

He's saying, "Think about it." Verse 3: "And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, judge, please, between me and my vineyard." Isn't that interesting? God the Father looks and says, "You be the judge now." Now, this is something he chose because the illustration he used is one that they were very familiar with, because they were very much a society where you would plant and you'd have vineyards.

So they knew this all too well. He used something that was so common and natural for them that it's beyond contestation to argue about it. They know that every time you plant a good vineyard, you do everything right, you till the ground up, you plant the vineyard, you do the whole thing, you plant the grapes, everything comes up, you prune them, you keep everything just right, you're going to get a beautiful sweet grape.

And he said, "So what would happen if you had a vineyard, and for whatever reason those grapes coming up were just sour, maybe they were becoming putrefied? Would you not rip it out and replant? Would you regard that not as a good vine? Would you think there's something wrong with that vine?" So he's like, "You judge between me and my vineyard." And he's making sure they understand it's his vineyard.

God is saying, "It's my vineyard. It's not your vineyard. It's never been your vineyard. You're my children, you're my creation. You're my chosen people, Israel. What more could have been done to my vineyard?" He's then asked another question. He says, "You judge, what more could I have done? I have done everything and given everything possible." I think that's a great and fair question, don't you?

And they could say nothing. There's no response here. "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." Now, I imagine everyone's perked in their attention at this point. He says, "I will take away its hedge." If it's not going to produce good fruit, I'm going to recycle it.

I'll simply remove it. And what is he talking about? His blessings, his favor. "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 briers and thorns. I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain on it." Because why am I going to continue to bring rain on something that is wild and not producing fruit that I intended?

He says, "No, that's not the intention. Why continue to bring rain so that it continues to grow up and be more and more wild? That's not good. That's not right. For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts," the Lord of the angel armies, "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."

So now we're going to move into this next section. He's basically laid out the foundation and he's given the accusation to Judah at this point. He said, "You were a choice vineyard. You are God's chosen people. Out of you, obviously, we know the Davidic covenant, out of Judah is going to come the future Messiah. So out of you should be goodness and holiness and righteousness."

And he likened it to a plant or a vineyard where he says, "But you're not producing good fruit. You're not doing these things. So then why am I going to continue to bring blessing and favor to this when you're not producing good fruit? If anything, I'm just enabling this bad behavior, this disobedience at this point." Are you all with me on that?

Some of you have children here. As parents, do you agree that there's times when we're parenting that when our children may not be necessarily in obedience, we can actually do things by enabling the behavior, by continually giving favor and blessing upon something that may not be right? And doing so, does the child know they're doing anything wrong?

Or does the child think, "Well, this is great! I'm just going to keep doing what I want to do because this is working out very well for me." I think it's just a simple example that we all relate to individually and personally. And so he's relating that back to them. He's saying, "No, that's not how a righteous father's going to act. He's not going to enable his kids."

"He's not going to give in to the whims and the desires of his kids if it's contrary to the scriptures." And so he says no, because what you're going to get is oppression. Instead of crying out for righteousness, you're going to cry out for help because you're going to say, "I need help!" Well, turn to righteousness.

So he's going to, in verse 8 and on, introduce these six woes that he's going to bring. And these are specifically speaking of sins that were going on in Jerusalem and Judah and their characteristics. Also it ties back to that idea of the sour grape and the fruitlessness or the lack of good fruit. See, he's going to continue this and he's going to speak very specifically to Jerusalem and Judah.

Exactly where is your sin? Because I imagine that probably Judah, as they were gathered hearing this from the prophet Isaiah, going, "Isaiah, what are you talking about? What are we doing? We're not doing anything wrong, Isaiah." Because what had they done? They had compromised and they were doing what was right in their own eyes. So they couldn't see the very sin right in front of them.

They had actually self-deceived themselves so aggressively that they were unable to realize that they were so far away from the will of God. Do you think that can happen today? Do you think that can happen in the Christian's life today? Yeah, I think so too. So let's look and maybe we can learn from some of these things. Maybe some of these things are vying at our lives.

Maybe some of these things are what we're struggling with. Maybe there's circumstances going on in our life and we don't know why, and we're not looking to the sin issue in our lives. Seek the Holy Spirit on these things. But certainly I know that 1 Corinthians 10 where the apostle Paul says, "Look, the things in the Old Testament scriptures are preserved for you that they may be examples."

You and I can learn from them as children of God, that we can come and pour over the Old Testament scriptures so that we can learn from past error. He starts in verse 8: "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 a vineyard shall yield one bath and one homer of seed shall yield an ephah." What's he giving? Well, first of all, that word "woe" in the Hebrew actually means "warning" as a direct translation. So he's really saying, "Here's your first warning." What was he against? He was against the greed of Jerusalem and Judah. They were expanding, they keep buying houses, they're doing all these other things, and it was all this greed.

There's nothing wrong with having finances. God uses all of that. That's not the problem. It was what was the motive of the heart and what they were doing with it. It was all about collecting and storing and building their own little kingdoms for themselves. But what about the less fortunate, the poor? Have you ever heard that saying, "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer"?

This is what he was talking about. He says, "You're in the land, you see all these things going on, and you've turned a blind eye to the people in need because you're so concerned with building your own kingdoms on earth." And he says, "Because that's become your priority, I'm going to put it so far out of your reach that you financially will not be able to recover."

God's not saying don't be a capitalist. He's not frowning upon capitalism. What he's saying is, don't do it with greed in your heart. If you're going to be blessed, bless others. I've never found a situation where I was blessed and I tried to bless somebody else that God didn't bless my socks off. Like, I can't out-give God. Have you ever tried to do that? You can't out-give God. And that's the right motive of heart.

So let's go on. Greed's the first one. Woe, warning. Watch the greed. It's a real problem, he's saying. You think that's a problem today? Yeah. Verse 11: "Woe to those who rise early in the morning." My kids love this passage. "See, Dad? Sleep in until 11! This is awesome!" No, let's continue reading.

"Woe to those who rise early in the morning that they may follow intoxicating drink. Who continue until night till wine inflames them." What is he condemning here? He's condemning the idea of who do you want to be controlled by. Do you want to be controlled by the Holy Spirit, or do you want to be controlled by another substance? In this case, he happens to be calling out alcohol.

But it's no different. You could put drugs in there. In the days we're living, we know drugs are rampant. I know during the hippie movement in the '70s and even some of the '80s, there were drugs. But the stuff that you see today—we're hearing and we're seeing it on our news. Drugs are never a good idea no matter how you look at it.

But now it's being tainted with this stuff that literally you try to get high one time and you're dead. You go into cardiac arrest because they're putting fentanyl in it. Who in their right mind would want to do drugs today? Nobody in their right mind should ever want to do drugs. But who would in their right mind want to do drugs today with what we're talking about? It's terrible.

But this is what they were seeking after. They wanted to escape their reality. So they would wake up very early to get a head start. And so what would they do? They'd pop the pill, they'd start with the alcohol, they'll be taking the drugs, anything that could alter the mind to create an alternate reality so they could cope with the day.

Guest (Male): There is a lot of that going on today, isn't there? This is His Perfect Love. Pastor Matt VanderVen is leading us study of Isaiah right now, and if you enjoyed today's message, we'd like to know. Email us at our website, hisperfectlove.org. Be sure to include your prayer requests. And while you're there, you'll notice a place to listen to Pastor Matt's sermons, including all of Isaiah. That's hisperfectlove.org.

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His Perfect Love is brought to you by Calvary Chapel Harrisburg West Shore. Let the word go out. The perfect love of Christ to shine. Our lives will shout: I am my beloved's and he is mine. Every heart is in his hands. We'll never stop reaching out. This is his perfect love. The word goes out. This is what real love looks like in truth and grace. This is his perfect love.