Seize the Moment – Day 1196
The True Vine!
Good morning! This is Pastor Jerry Ingalls from New Castle First Baptist Church and today is Monday, June 26.
Agricultural imagery is rich in the Bible; it provides some of my favorite metaphors for the Christian life. As a master teacher, Jesus used agricultural imagery to connect with the Jewish peoples’ agrarian lifestyle, and to yoke His teachings with the fertile imagery of the Old Testament. An important example of this is found in Psalm 80:8-15:
You removed a vine from Egypt; You drove out the nations and planted it. You cleared the ground before it, and it took deep root and filled the land. The mountains were covered with its shadow, and the cedars of God with its boughs. It was sending out its branches to the sea and its shoots to the River. Why have You broken down its hedges, so that all who pass that way pick its fruit? A boar from the forest eats it away and whatever moves in the field feeds on it. O God of hosts, turn again now, we beseech You; Look down from heaven and see, and take care of this vine, even the shoot which Your right hand has planted, and on the son whom You have strengthened for Yourself.
We see this imagery also used in Ezekiel 15 and Isaiah 5:1-8, with Isaiah explaining the symbolism in verse 7, “For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel and the men of Judah His delightful plant.” Derek Kidner hypothesized about the Old Testament’s vine imagery, “This may well have been the chief background to our Lord’s saying, ‘I am the true vine’. What Israel had only begun to be, he wholly was and is.”[1]
Seize the moment and pray Psalm 80, meditating upon Jesus as the true vine – “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).
God bless you!
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YOUTUBE:
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FOOTNOTE:
[1] Derek Kidner, Psalms 73–150: An Introduction and Commentary, vol. 16, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1975), 321.