“What sorrow for you who buy up house after house and field after field, until everyone is evicted and you live alone in the land. But I have heard the Lord of Heaven’s Armies swear a solemn oath: “Many houses will stand deserted; even beautiful mansions will be empty. Ten acres of vineyard will not produce even six gallons of wine. Ten baskets of seed will yield only one basket of grain.””
Isaiah 5:8-10 NLT
A strange picture emerges of a land with empty houses, surrounded by empty fields. A landowner has bought up farms and houses because their owners could no longer afford to live in them. Yes, the landowner lived in great splendour, but many poor people were forced into unsuitable accommodation because their family home, sometimes there in their family for several generations, had been sold. And we end up with the landowner living isolated from his immediate neighbours. A lonely existence that was never in God’s plan for the communities of Israel and Judah.
God foresaw such an eventuality when he gave Moses relevant instructions. The Year of Jubilee was instituted, as we read in Leviticus 25:13, “In the Year of Jubilee each of you may return to the land that belonged to your ancestors”. The Lord continued, “The land must never be sold on a permanent basis, for the land belongs to me. You are only foreigners and tenant farmers working for me” (Leviticus 25:23). The rest of the Leviticus chapter provides some detailed instructions regarding property, but for the farms and houses out in the countryside, the price of any purchases were calculated with an eye on the remaining years before Jubilee, at which point the property had to be returned to the original owner.
Reading on in today’s verses, we see what will become of the beautiful mansions of the wealthy landowners. Not only will the farmhouses stand empty and neglected, but, for one reason or another, so will the mansions. Such is reality for people who think they will live forever. There have been many building projects over the years that have ended up unfinished because of the owners’ premature deaths. Also, perhaps the Lord’s judgements in those unstable times created situations in which wealthy people were removed, went to live elsewhere, or faced other family calamities. God never intended that such a dysfunctional society would exist. Greed replaced the fruit that God demanded from His people.
The final verse from our verses from Isaiah 5 today describes how, all of a sudden, the yield from the farms the wealthy have acquired plummets, with insufficient crops being harvested even to replace what had been planted. What could have caused that? Well, as any farmer knows, climate problems such as drought can decimate their crops. Blight or disease was not unknown in those days either. Sadly, the Jewish people had forgotten the instructions given through Moses in Leviticus 25:18,-19, “If you want to live securely in the land, follow my decrees and obey my regulations. Then the land will yield large crops, and you will eat your fill and live securely in it”. Simple, really, I think we agree, but so often the Jews rebelled against God and abandoned His ways.
What about these verses today? Are they relevant to us pilgrims? Jesus told the story of the Rich Landowner, which we can find in Luke 12. He had a “fertile farm that produced fine crops”, and he decided to tear down all his barns, build bigger ones, and store enough crops to keep him going for many years. Then he could “take it easy [and] eat, drink and be merry”. Such a worldly perspective is common today, with certain people working hard to accumulate riches and possessions, all with a view to early retirement and a life of pleasure to follow. In the UK today, the state retirement age is 67, but many save for retirement through shrewd investments, hoping to have sufficient resources at 55 or 60. But none of us knows the time or place when we will leave this world, and all that they have accumulated will be left to someone else. We read further in the story of the Rich Landowner, “But God said to him, ‘You fool! You will die this very night. Then who will get everything you worked for?’” (Luke 12:20). Jesus was quite forthright when He said in the next verse, “Yes, a person is a fool to store up earthly wealth but not have a rich relationship with God”. I remember a man I worked with who was approaching the company retirement age, and he spent a significant amount of time planning for the day he would stop working for a living. He lived in a large house in an expensive part of Edinburgh, which he and his wife sold before buying a more modest dwelling in a more rural part of Scotland. He added equity release to his already substantial savings, and then planned his first retirement project in meticulous detail: a walking tour around Norway. So his retirement day arrived in the middle of January the following year, and he left to complete the final arrangements for the house and his project. However, we, his workmates whom he had left behind, were shocked to hear that he had suddenly experienced a massive heart attack just a few weeks later, from which he never recovered.
We never know when God will call us home. Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher and mathematician, decided that it would be better to live his life God’s way, setting aside the sinful and hedonistic lifestyles of his society, because otherwise he would have too much to lose after death. Jesus said, “Don’t store up treasures here on earth, where moths eat them and rust destroys them, and where thieves break in and steal. Store your treasures in heaven, where moths and rust cannot destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal. Wherever your treasure is, there the desires of your heart will also be” (Matthew 6:19-21). Sound advice.
Dear Father God. Sometimes we weary of the world in which we live, a world with all its evil and difficulties. We look forward to the increasing glow of Glory, appearing over the horizons of our lives, and pray that we will be ready for the day when it comes. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Being a Pilgrim 