Take time to reflect on how God has intervened in your life to make the best preparations for your fruitfulness in Christian living.

Be mindful of the fact that God is not responsible for our disobedience or the consequences of it, we are.

God wants us to be like He is in our personal behavior as well as the way we behave toward others. This is what He regards as “good grapes”.

God’s people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge of God’s Word, nothing else.

Two things Almighty God cannot do – make us obey, and at times fix the consequences of our disobedience.

• My Well-beloved – Jehovah – vs. 7
• ‘and also’ – there was difficulty in this!
• ‘made’ vs 2 – Deut. 6:11 ‘wells’; Deut. 8:9 ‘mining’
• ‘expected’ – He had done everything such that bearing good fruit was a reasonable expectation.
• ‘good’ grapes – note italics in NKJV
• Wild grapes – ‘poison berries’
• ‘what more could I have done . . .’

• The law of gravity – if someone jumps off of a building, who is responsible for the consequences?

A nation whom you have not known shall eat the fruit of your land and the produce of your labor, and you shall be only oppressed and crushed continually.

• Divided kingdom – not God’s will

He has shown you, O man, what is good; And what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?

• Consequence – Sheol “enlarged”

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being priest for Me; Because you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.

• The concern God expresses in these verses is again the lack of personal virtue.
• Verse 19 – men start making fun of God

• The captivity of Israel, the northern kingdom, by Syria, started in 722 BC.
• The Babylonian captivity really began in 606 BC.