Isaiah 5

In the first four chapters of the Book of Isaiah, the prophet lays out why the Assyrian army invading Judah was an instrument God was using to judge His people. There were spiritual undertones to the invasion. The Jewish people had walked away from their Creator and ignored His commands, and He was punishing them for their rebellion, just as He promised when He initially gave them the Promised Land.

It was a harsh punishment, which is why Isaiah made a point to remind his people about the goodness of God in spite of what was happening around them. To further illustrate that point, he introduces the parable of the vineyard. Like Jesus, he understood that people could see things more clearly when a new context was put around a familiar story:

I will sing for the one I love a song about his vineyard: My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside. He dug it up and cleared it of stones and planted it with the choicest vines. He built a watchtower in it and cut out a winepress as well. Then he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit.

- Isaiah 5:1-2 

As Isaiah goes on to explain, Judah is the vineyard, the Promised Land is the fertile hillside, and God is the one who planted it. The good grapes were righteousness, and the bad fruit was sin. God’s creation had gone bad so He was going to tear it up and start over:

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.

- Isaiah 5:4 

The key to understanding this parable is to look it at from the point of view of the vines. Why should they have to produce good fruit? Don’t they have the right to do what they want? Who is God to tell them what is or is not bad fruit?

The answer to those questions is where Christianity conflicts with the way most Americans view the world. Our culture places a huge emphasis on independence. No one can tell us what to do or what to think. We determine the course of our own lives. Anthony Kennedy, the recently retired Supreme Court justice, summed it up in one of his most famous opinions:

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

For the most part, God agrees with Kennedy. He doesn’t make us obey Him. He has given us the gift of free will. We are free to believe anything that we want about this world. The difference is that He doesn’t leave open the question of what the right answer is.

It comes back to first principles. If the universe is the product of random chance, and humans are nothing more than self-aware animals with the same value as any other creature on Earth, than there is no point to our brief existence other than what we make of it. Conversely, if the universe has a Creator, and human beings are created in His image, than the point of our lives is to know and experience Him. If you start with that belief, than good and evil are not things we can define for ourselves.

“Woe to those who quarrel with their Maker, those who are nothing but potsherds among the potsherds on the ground. Does the clay say to the potter, ‘What are you making?’ Does your work say, ‘The potter has no hands?’

This is what the Lord says -- the Holy One of Israel, and its Maker: Concerning the things to come, do you question me about my children, or give me orders about the work of my hands?

It is I who made the earth and created mankind on it. My own hands stretched out the heavens; I marshalled their starry hosts.

- Isaiah 45:9-12 

I have lived both sides of this question. I didn’t grow up as a Christian. My parents raised me in the Unitarian Universalist church. The UU church is the combination of two radical branches of the Protestant Revolution -- The Unitarians believed in the unity of God (i.e. not the Trinity and that therefore Jesus was just a human being) while the Universalists believed that God would save all of mankind regardless of whether or not they believed in Jesus. They eventually merged into a religion whose primary tenet is that we are free to believe anything as long as our beliefs don’t harm anyone else. It is a church for people who want church without religion.

We took comparative religion classes in Sunday School. The New York Times was our Bible. This was our version of the Lord’s Prayer:

Love is the doctrine of our church.
The quest for truth is its sacrament. [Emphasis added]
And service is its prayer.
To dwell together in peace.
To seek knowledge in freedom.
To serve humanity in fellowship.
Thus do we declare. 

The quest for truth is like the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence. The implication of searching for something is that you haven’t already found it. Just like the Founding Fathers couldn’t promise happiness to the citizens of their new nation, the UU church fathers didn’t promise truth to their parishioners.

In my experience, what happens when people are left to search for meaning in the world is that they find it other people. Everyone needs answers about themselves and their purpose in life. We all need to identify as something. Either we get that answer from a supernatural belief system or we look for one in the natural world. Without God, the best way to know how to think about myself is to see what other people think of me.

Here's the problem. If you get your identity from what other people think of you, then impressing those people becomes the most important thing in your life. The result is that nothing you do matters unless other people see you doing it:

Most Americans are Unitarian Universalists. They just don't know it. The actual religion, with its buildings, doctrines, and ministers, is a vestigial structure. (The classic example is the appendix, an organ that still exists within our bodies even though it no longer serves its original purpose.) That's the reason why only 12.5% of kids raised in the UU church stay in as adults. The religion already exists all around them. It is the default option in American life. Going on Sundays isn't necessary to believe in it.

The only way to actually leave is to opt out and join a different religion, one that gives answers about the world and about your own identity that exist outside of what other people think about you. In my experience, the most powerful part of becoming a Christian is learning that my identity comes God. I don’t have to impress anyone. I have value beyond my place in society. God loves me and died for me on the cross.

The flip side is that He decides what is right and wrong, not me. I don’t have all the answers. No Christian does. Those answers have been handed down to us for thousands of years. The choice that everyone is given in this life is to either believe in an objective Truth or go searching for a subjective one.

“You are a king, then!” said Pilate.

Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me."

“What is truth?” retorted Pilate.

- John 18:33-34 

Just because you don’t believe in Good and Evil doesn’t mean those things don’t exist. That’s what Isaiah was trying to tell his people all those years ago. There is objectively good and bad fruit in this world. Go to a supermarket if you don’t believe me. No one is going to plant a vineyard and live with bad fruit forever. It may seem cruel to the vines to tear them out of the ground. But they were created for a reason.