[BIBLE] Creator or creation?

[Lou Ruppert <lruppert@syr.edu>]

This week is on Isaiah 5:1-4:

  I will sing for the one I love a song about his vineyard:  My loved
  one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside.  He dug it up and cleared it
  of stones and planted it with the choicest of vines.  He built a
  watchtower in it and cut out a winepress as well.  Then he looked for
  a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit.  "Now you
  dwellers in Jerusalem and men of Judah, judge between me and my
  vineyard.  What more could have been done for my vineyard than I have
  done for it?  When I looked for good grapes, why did it yield only
  bad?"

God creates things for a purpose.  Just as the man planted a vineyard
for the purpose of harvesting wine, God created us for a purpose and
gives us things for that purpose.  Later in Isaiah 5 (5:5-6), God tells
us what he does with the vineyard that isn't fruitful:

  "Now I will tell you what I am going to do to my vineyard:  I will
  take away its hedge, and it will be destroyed;  I will break down its
  wall and it will be trampled.  I will make it a wasteland, neither
  pruned nor cultivated, and briers and thorns will grow there.  I will
  command the clouds not to rain on it."

Something which has a purpose and doesn't satisfy its purpose gets
destroyed.  If God gives you resources to fulfill a purpose, and you
don't fulfill that purpose, he may remove them and raise someone else
up instead.  Later in Isaiah, in more verses than I could list here, he
talks about destroying Israel because it is fruitless.  Mankind, for
instance, before the flood wasn't fulfilling their purpose and God
wiped them out.  The people at the tower of Babel weren't fulfilling
their purpose but were doing their own thing, and God destroyed what
they set their hands to.  I'm not saying that if you forget to do
something God tells you to do, that you'll get flattened by a bus when
you step out your front door tomorrow, but that it is in his character
to destroy that which doesn't meet his purpose.  Nobody meets his
purpose, and that is why grace is so precious.  The rest of Isaiah 5
talks about different people running around doing their own thing in
'God's vineyard' and how many ways God will destroy them for not doing
what they're supposed to be doing.  Be sure to be thankful for God's
grace, because without it, we'd all be trampled, flattened, devoured and
ultimately destroyed.



-Lou

-- 
Lou Ruppert - Network Systems Programmer, Syracuse University: lruppert@syr.edu
       "The Lou Ruppert home page": http://www.ucf.org/~lruppert/
"And the LORD said unto Joshua, Get thee up; wherefore liest thou thus upon
     thy face?" -Joshua 7:10  See http://www.ucf.org/God/offer.html