NOTES for Isa 5:16-25

In today's passage from the prophet Isaiah, the Lord speaks of things that were perhaps even more characteristic of the twentieth century after Christ than of the eighth century before Christ, when Isaiah recorded the Lord's words. “Let Him make speed and hasten His work, that we may see it,” the Jews said then. “Cosmonauts flew into space and did not see any God there,” we said in the last century. “Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and shrewd in their own sight,” the Lord replies. Death and destruction await a humanity that rejects the word of the Lord.

It is important to hear these words in their proper sense. This is not a threat of the kind we make to unruly children. It is a statement of a harsh truth: sin is a defect incompatible with life. The Lord tells us about the fruits of our own moral choices, which we ourselves refuse to see.