The vine spoken of in the Old Testament is the nation of Israel.  They are God's chosen people, and as such, the Lord provided them everything they needed to succeed.  He provided Israel with great things so that they would be protected and prosper.  The Lord planted Israel "on a fertile hillside;" a land flowing with milk and honey.  He fenced them in and cleared away all the stones of reproach from the nations, and placed them under the strong tower of His protection.  He built them a winepress through which the wine would never cease to flow.  The Lord had been good to His people Israel and planted them to be a fruitful vineyard.  Instead, they defiled His land with their sin, and rather than produce the fruit that He expected, they produced nothing but wild grapes.  "Then He looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit" (v. 2b).

Rather than faithfully tending to the vineyard of the Lord, His people Israel had rejected the goodness and blessings of God and aroused His anger.  The winepress of His blessing would now be used for the treading of the fury of His wrath (Revelation 19:15b).  The Lord had looked for a harvest of justice and righteousness, but instead the people disobeyed God's holy law and yielded a crop of wickedness and oppression, so now He would lay His sickle to the field and they would suffer His hand of judgment.  "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" (Isaiah 5:5-6).  When the Lord plants His people He intends for them to bring forth the fruit He has purposed.  A good tree will produce good fruit, but a bad tree will only produce bad fruit (Matthew 7:17).  We are known by the fruit that we produce (v.20).  Our fruit reveals our nature, and our nature is to be the same as Christ. This afternoon let us take some time to take stock of where the Lord has planted us and what He has planted within us, and then look for the evidences of the kind of fruit that is being produced in our life.  Let us repent of anything that is coming out of our lives that doesn't bring glory to the Vine in which we are meant to abide.  May the Lord find reason to bless us more with Himself so we can be a blessing to others.
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