GOD'S CARE FOR HIS VINEYARD. This piece may be called a companion picture to Isaiah 5:1-7, or a joy-song to be set over against that dirge. In both the figure of the vineyard is employed to express the people of God, and God is "the Lord of the vineyard."
But whereas, on the former occasion, all was wrath and fury, menace and judgment, here all is mercy and loving-kindness, protection and promise. The difference is, no doubt, not with God, "with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning" (James 1:17), but with the vineyard, which is either not the same, or, if the same, then differently circumstanced.
The vineyard of Isaiah 5:1-30. is beyond all doubt the Jewish Church in the time of Isaiah, or in the times shortly after. The vineyard of the present place is either the Christian Church, or the Jewish Church reformed and purified by suffering.
It is not the Church triumphant in heaven, since there are still "briars and thorns" in it, and there are still those belonging to it who have to "make their peace with God." The prophet has come back from his investigations of the remote future and the supra-mundane sphere to something which belongs to earth, and perhaps not to a very distant period.
His second "song of the vineyard" may well comfort the Church through all her earthly struggles.