the Third Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Day by Day Devotional - Year 3 of 5
Isaiah 5:1-17
A moving parable illustrates the care of the LORD for His people. Israel is the vine of the Well-beloved of God. Planted, then prepared and cared for with the most loving attention, it has finally produced nothing but wild, inedible, worthless grapes. In His parable of the wicked husbandmen, the Lord expresses the complete disappointment in His vine, Israel, felt by the Well-beloved who had every right over them (Luke 20:9-16).
But these verses also make us aware of our own ingratitude. It is as if the Lord, after having made us reckon up all the favours received since our childhood, was sadly asking each one among us: "What is still to be done for you that I have not done? Am I not entitled to expect some good fruit from you? And yet you have produced nothing for Me!" We know how to bear fruit. It is by abiding in the "true Vine". Now that Israel, the unfruitful vine, has been cast aside, Christ has become this true Vine and His Father is the husbandman (John 15:1).
In v. 8, Isaiah begins a series of "woes"; they reveal to us the sad results, for Israel as well as for mankind as a whole, of refusing to obey God.
