Isaiah 27

The chapter opens where the whole vision has been heading: the final reckoning with the deepest enemy of all. In that day the LORD with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea (v. 1). Leviathan is one of the Bible's great pictures. Elsewhere it is a sea-monster of terrible power that no one can master - in the book of Job, a creature beside which a man is helpless; in the Psalms, a thing the LORD alone can break. Here Isaiah uses it as the image of the cosmic enemy itself: the coiled, chaotic power that sets itself against the good order God has made, the serpent that twists and resists and threatens. The piling-up of words is deliberate - the piercing serpent, that crooked serpent, the dragon that is in the sea - as if to gather under one name every shape the ancient enemy takes. And against all of it stands a single sword, sore and great and strong. The point is not a zoology lesson; it is a verdict. Whatever the serpent is, whatever chaos it embodies, in that day it does not merely retreat - it is slain. The enemy that has seemed unbeatable since the world began meets a stronger hand at last.¹

From the slain dragon the vision turns, without pause, to a vineyard - and the turn is the heart of the chapter. In that day sing ye unto her, A vineyard of red wine (v. 2). To anyone who has read Isaiah 5, the words land with a shock of recognition. There the LORD had sung of a vineyard He planted on a fruitful hill, dug and cleared and stocked with the choicest vine, fenced and watched and waited over - and it brought forth only wild grapes. So He sang the bitter end of it: He would take away its hedge, break down its wall, and let it be eaten up and trodden down, a waste where briers and thorns grew. That was the song of judgment. This is its answer. The same image - the LORD's vineyard, His own people - is sung again, but now the song is one of red wine, of fruitfulness restored. The ruined vineyard has become a kept vineyard. What was given up to be trampled is now sung over with delight. The first vineyard song ended in thorns; this one will end in a people who fill the face of the world with fruit. Between the two songs stands everything the gospel of God means by redemption: the very thing that failed and was judged is taken up again and made to flourish.

What makes the difference in the second vineyard is named at once, and it is not the vineyard's own strength but its keeper. I the LORD do keep it; I will water it every moment: lest any hurt it, I will keep it night and day (v. 3). Every phrase presses the same tireless care. I will water it every moment - not now and then, not when He remembers, but continuously, a watching that never lapses. Lest any hurt it - the keeping is guarding as well as nourishing; nothing is allowed to reach the vineyard to harm it without passing the keeper first. I will keep it night and day - through the dark hours as much as the light, with no shift left unwatched. The repetition of keep frames the whole verse: the LORD is not an absentee owner who plants and walks away, but a gardener who never leaves the garden. The reason the second vineyard flourishes where the first one failed is simply this: in Isaiah 5 the LORD took His protecting hand away, and here He keeps it firmly upon them. A people are not finally safe because they are strong or fruitful in themselves. They are safe because the One who keeps them does not sleep.

The keeper now speaks of His own disposition toward the vineyard, and the line is one to dwell on: Fury is not in me (v. 4). After three chapters in which the LORD has emptied the earth and shaken its foundations, the reader might expect Him to stand over His people with stored-up wrath. Instead He says the opposite. Toward the vineyard there is no fury in Him. The judgment that fell elsewhere is not the temper of His heart toward His own. What remains, He says, is readiness to defend: who would set the briers and thorns against me in battle? I would go through them, I would burn them together. The briers and thorns are exactly what overran the abandoned vineyard of Isaiah 5 - the choking growth of a place left to ruin. Now the LORD turns that very picture around: if anything like that should rise up against His vineyard, He would march straight through it and burn it away. The same fire that judges is, for the vineyard, a fire of defense. And then comes one of the most surprising invitations in the prophets: even the briers and thorns, even what set itself against Him, may yet be spared. The LORD's posture toward His vineyard is not rage but keeping - and His posture even toward His enemies leaves a door open.

That open door is verse 5, and it is astonishing in its mildness. Or let him take hold of my strength, that he may make peace with me; and he shall make peace with me. The LORD has just spoken of going through the briers and thorns to burn them; now, in the same breath, He offers them another way. Rather than be consumed, let the very thing that opposed Him take hold of my strength - lay hold of Him, cling to the One it had set itself against - that he may make peace with me. And the promise is doubled, as if to leave no doubt: and he shall make peace with me. Whoever will stop fighting and grasp the LORD instead will not be turned away; peace is certain for the one who seeks it. There is great tenderness here. The God who wields the sword against the dragon does not wield it eagerly against the briers; He would far rather make peace. The way out of judgment is not to grow strong enough to resist Him - no brier withstands the fire - but to lay hold of His strength and be reconciled. The same hand that could burn is held out to be grasped.

The first movement ends with a promise that reaches far past Israel's own borders: He shall cause them that come of Jacob to take root: Israel shall blossom and bud, and fill the face of the world with fruit (v. 6). The vineyard imagery now grows into its full meaning. A vine that takes root, blossoms, buds, and bears - that is the picture of a people brought all the way from ruin to flourishing. But the last phrase opens onto something larger than the nation: the fruit will fill the face of the world. The vineyard kept by the LORD does not merely survive for its own sake; its fruitfulness spreads until the whole earth is touched by it. What began as one planted hill becomes a blessing wide as the world. This is the ancient promise to Abraham surfacing again in vineyard form - that through his seed all the families of the earth would be blessed. The people the LORD keeps and waters are meant to be fruitful for everyone's sake, a vine whose harvest is for the nations. The chapter that opened by slaying the world's great enemy now shows the world's great hope: a redeemed people, rooted and watered by God, filling the earth with fruit.

The vineyard song gives way to a quieter, more searching question about how the LORD has dealt with His people: Hath he smitten him, as he smote those that smote him? or is he slain according to the slaughter of them that are slain by him? (v. 7). The phrasing is dense, but the point is a comfort. It asks whether the LORD has struck His own people the same way He struck their enemies - and the implied answer is no. The blow that fell on Israel was not the blow that fell on those who oppressed Israel. The nations were struck to be destroyed; Israel was struck to be corrected. There is a world of difference between the two, and the verse means us to feel it. A surgeon's cut and an executioner's stroke may both draw blood, but they are not the same act, and they do not have the same end in view. The LORD's hand upon His vineyard, even when it wounds, is never the hand of an enemy. It is the hand of the keeper. This is the very thing the previous verses prepared us for - fury is not in me. Whatever discipline His people have known, it was measured by love and aimed at healing, not by wrath aimed at ruin.

Verse 8 makes the restraint explicit, and the keyword is small but vital: In measure, the LORD deals with His people. In measure, when it shooteth forth, thou wilt debate with it: he stayeth his rough wind in the day of the east wind. The east wind in this land was the scorching desert blast that withered everything before it - the very picture of a destroying force. But the LORD, the verse says, stayeth his rough wind in the day of the east wind: He holds it back, He moderates it, He does not let the full fury of the storm fall. The correction comes in measure - weighed out, limited, never more than the purpose requires. This is one of the quiet mercies woven all through Scripture: that the LORD knows the frame of those He corrects and does not break them. He could send the unrestrained east wind; instead He stays it. He chastens enough to purge, and not one degree past what love intends. For a people who have felt the weight of His hand, this verse is a gift: the storm was real, but it was held; the wind blew, but it was measured; and behind the measuring stood a keeper who never meant to destroy what He was pruning.

Now the purpose of the whole measured dealing is laid bare: By this therefore shall the iniquity of Jacob be purged; and this is all the fruit to take away his sin (v. 9). The chastening was never an end in itself; it was aimed at something - the purging away of guilt, the lifting off of sin. And notice the striking phrase: this is all the fruit. The whole point of the correction, its entire harvest, is to take away his sin. The LORD's discipline is gardener's work; what it grows is a cleansed people. And the verse shows what that cleansing looks like on the ground: when he maketh all the stones of the altar as chalkstones that are beaten in sunder, the groves and images shall not stand up. The fruit of true purging is the end of idolatry. The altars built to false gods are ground to powder like soft chalk; the carved poles and images that drew the people's hearts away no longer stand. This is how you know the chastening has done its work - not by mere suffering endured, but by idols abandoned. The east wind was stayed, the wound was measured, and the harvest of it all is a people who have put away the things that ruined them. Judgment that purges is, in the end, an act of rescue.

Against the kept vineyard the chapter now sets a different picture - the fortified city left to ruin. Yet the defenced city shall be desolate, and the habitation forsaken, and left like a wilderness: there shall the calf feed, and there shall he lie down, and consume the branches thereof (v. 10). Throughout these four chapters Isaiah has held two cities in view: the city of God that endures, and the proud, self-secured city that falls. Here that second city appears one last time. Its very strength - defenced, walled, fortified - cannot save it; it becomes a wilderness where cattle graze among the rubble and lie down where households once lived. The image is the exact opposite of the vineyard. The vineyard is watered every moment and guarded night and day; this city is forsaken, left, abandoned to wither. The difference between them is not their walls or their wealth - the city had more of both. The difference is the keeper. What the LORD keeps flourishes though it seemed lost; what trusts in its own defenses falls though it seemed secure. The fortified city and the kept vineyard are the two destinies the whole vision has set before us, and here they stand side by side: one consumed, one cared for.

Verse 11 presses the ruin further and names its root: When the boughs thereof are withered, they shall be broken off: the women come, and set them on fire: for it is a people of no understanding. The withered branches - once the wood of a living thing - are now only dry sticks, snapped off and gathered for kindling. And the cause is stated plainly: it is a people of no understanding. This is the heart of the matter. The fortified city falls not merely because it is judged but because it would not understand - would not see, would not turn, would not lay hold of the LORD's strength when it was offered in verse 5. And so the sober conclusion: therefore he that made them will not have mercy on them, and he that formed them will shew them no favour. The words are heavy, and they are meant to be. The same God who is the vineyard's tireless keeper withholds His favour from those who persist in refusing Him. This is the solemn other side of the chapter's mercy. The door of verse 5 was wide open - let him take hold of my strength… and he shall make peace with me - but a door offered and never entered is, in the end, a door passed by. The tragedy is not that mercy was unavailable; it is that a people of no understanding would not take it.

The whole vision now comes to rest on its last and tenderest image - a gathering. And it shall come to pass in that day, that the LORD shall beat off from the channel of the river unto the stream of Egypt, and ye shall be gathered one by one, O ye children of Israel (v. 12). The picture of beating off is drawn from the harvest: the olive tree was beaten so its fruit would fall and be collected, none left clinging and lost. So the LORD, from the great river in the north to the brook of Egypt in the south - that is, across the whole sweep of the lands where His people had been scattered - gathers His own as a harvester gathers every last olive. And the phrase to linger over is one by one. The exiles are not swept up in a faceless mass; they are gathered individually, counted, each one sought and found. There is no crowd so large in God's sight that the single person disappears into it. The same care that kept the vineyard every moment now gathers its people one by one - the keeping and the gathering are the same love at work. After all the emptying of these chapters, the vision ends not with a remnant accidentally surviving but with a people deliberately collected, each name accounted for, none of the LORD's own left behind in the far country.

And the signal for the gathering is a sound - the last great image of Isaiah's Apocalypse. And it shall come to pass in that day, that the great trumpet shall be blown, and they shall come which were ready to perish in the land of Assyria, and the outcasts in the land of Egypt, and shall worship the LORD in the holy mount at Jerusalem (v. 13). The trumpet was Israel's summons - the sound that called the scattered tribes together, that announced the day of release, that gathered the people for worship. Here it is the great trumpet, sounding over the whole earth, and those it summons are described with deliberate pathos: not the strong and the secure, but they… which were ready to perish and the outcasts - the ones at the end of their strength, the ones cast out, the ones with nothing left. These are exactly the people the trumpet calls home. And notice where it brings them and what it brings them to do: not merely back to safety, but to worship the LORD in the holy mount at Jerusalem. The whole vast vision - the earth emptied, the dragon slain, the vineyard kept, the scattered gathered - arrives at last not at a fortress or a feast but at an act of worship. The end of the story is a redeemed people, brought from the edges of perishing, standing together on the holy mountain to worship the God who kept them. That is what the trumpet is for.