And the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city. –Isaiah 1:8
The Holy Spirit could have given Isaiah a lot more violent, bloody imagery, but instead opted for a hut left all alone in a field of cucumbers. And somehow that’s an image that stays with you.
Isaiah’s prophecies came true for Jerusalem with the Babylonians took it and burned it to the ground.
They will be fulfilled again.
Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers. And the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city. Isaiah 1:7-8
A lodge in a garden of cucumbers?
There are images in the Bible that stay with you forever, even if you don’t know what they mean. This is an image that has stayed with me. It’s night-time, and I see the black silhouette of a broken-down building surrounded by a measureless expanse of tangled, rioting cucumber vines…
“Lodge,” by the way, doesn’t mean a fancy building that charges you an arm and a leg to stay there. According to Strong’s Concordance, the actual Hebrew word is more accurately rendered “hut.” Maybe even something as rude and as temporary as a lean-to.
Okay, now, go ahead, tell me those verses of Isaiah don’t apply to our own country, here and now. They are a warning–a warning which Jerusalem chose not to heed, and so brought about destruction. And they did it without staging homosexual parodies of marriage, mutilating a man and insisting he’s been made a woman, forcing good people to pay for abortions, or having a national leader stand up and say “God bless Planned Parenthood!”–the folks who cut up babies while they’re still alive and sell their parts.
The Western world today, which once was known as Christendom, has wallowed in sins which ancient Jerusalem never even thought of.
God has warned us, but we haven’t listened.
Here comes trouble.