Isaiah 5
In 2022, I decided that my word of the year would be “sow.” I was still new to Tennessee, new to my job, new to my church, and struggling with weight and health, therefore, I wanted to begin putting in the hard work and discipline in certain areas of my life to see fruit. To be more specific, I wanted to sow seeds of sharing the gospel, of becoming debt-free, of eating and exercising to help my hormones balance out and to lose weight, of opening our home to guests, and so on. Little did I know that 2022 would actually be one of the most difficult years I have had. My health caused a lot of fear and lack of trust in the Lord, we paid off the tiniest chunk of loans due to paying big expenses for a holistic doctor, I basically stopped working out, and I had some of the most challenging projects with work that I have experienced to date. I came to the end of 2022 exhausted and wrung out, feeling like a failure in the “sow” realm. What happened to my exciting and trendy word of the year? Did any seeds of discipline and hard work bloom even the tiniest bit?
Ironically I read Isaiah 5 the day I came up with the word “sow” for 2022. In this passage there is a vineyard metaphor where the Lord sowed and put in all of the hard work and the crop yielded bad fruit. You can’t make this stuff up. Now of course, this passage is about Judah and how they rejected God, but I thought the timing of reading it was funny. I know we have to keep the Bible in context, especially texts like this one, but I couldn’t help but laugh. Was God trying to send me some cryptic message about my year? Of course not… Right?
The Lord, within His character, did the sowing of seeds perfectly. He found the fertile place for the vineyard where it would thrive. He picked out all the stones so there would be nothing in the way of growth and rich fruit full of deep flavors. He built a tower where the vineyard could be watched and protected. It was the ideal place for growth. Yet when growth came, it was wrong. It was not what He had planned for. Rather than cultivated and delicious grapes, the vineyard was fully of sour, stinky, and disgusting grapes. How could this crop have come to be in such an ideal place for good growth? Isaiah 5:4 reveals a sobering question He asks in response to the bad crop that came to fruition:
What more was there to do for my vineyard, that I have not done in it? When I looked for it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?
These questions are heartbreaking. God looked out at the vineyard He tended to and questioned the sour fruit it returned. In a way it reminds me of that passage in Genesis where all of mankind completely rejected the ways of God and we get a glimpse at what He is thinking:
“The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” (Genesis 6:5-6).
While these passages aren’t inherently connected, I thought of this passage because it’s both heartbreaking and fascinating to read about the emotional side of God. In both of these passages, we are getting glimpses at the heart of God and His deep love and want for His people to be in communion with Him, to align in His ways, to be and bear the good fruit that He has for us. All of the work, love, tender care, and faithfulness He put into His people was reaped as bad, sour fruit. If you cannot picture how sad the situation was to the Father, look to verse 7 which calls His pleasant planting a bloodshed. This is a heart wrenching passage.
To go further, verses 8-30 are a woe on the people who love and practice wickedness. He calls out those who love sin and who actively despise God and His Word. Verse 20 in particular stuck out to me since it summarizes the sinful struggle of mankind for centuries. We call what is good evil, and what is evil good. We love darkness more than we love light. We love bitterness over sweetness. Whether you were raised in the Church or followed Christ at 60, there is an innate desire in all of us for sin. This is the flesh and it is influenced by the evil one. It loves evil, darkness, and bitterness and wants nothing more than for us to become sour fruit in the places that God cultivates for growth, sweetness, and life.
When I look at 2022, there were moments where I chose to be sour and reject God’s good purposes. I was angry with my health, with weight gain, with acne at 25, with imbalanced hormones, with dizziness and shakiness, with being far from my family, with my anxious thoughts, with hurt friendships, and with striving after what felt like could never be mine. Now that I look back at 2022, I have some hindsight. I see the areas where I did not sow and where I grew sour. And I also see things that He sowed that have brought forth healing, community, delight in His Word, and beautiful fruit that only He can create. Every season is an ideal place for growing towards Him, simply because He is always present, always near. We can be in the mundane of packing lunches, going to work, and feeding kids. We can be in the valley of anxiety, of miscarriage, of hurt friendships. We can be on the mountaintop of a newborn, a great Church community, or a promotion. All of these places are ideal for growth because God is gracious to grow us wherever we are, to become the fruit that He has in store for us for His glory.
