This is probably the shortest chapter in the book of Ezekiel. But as Ezekiel is looking at the circumstances around Israel and their lack of faithfulness to God, and he’s talking to them about not only the need to turn back to the Lord, but also the promises that God has in store for them, the Lord gives Ezekiel a message, another parable, if you would, a parable of the fruitless vine.
I thought it was interesting as I read this chapter that Jesus used a very similar parable about us in our Christian walk. And there’s a parallel between the two. And so we’re going to be taking a look at the fruitless vine this afternoon that Ezekiel speaks of.
And the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, 2 Son of man, What is the vine tree more than any tree, or than a branch which is among the trees of the forest? 3 Shall wood be taken thereof to do any work? or will men take a pin of it to hang any vessel thereon? 4 Behold, it is cast into the fire for fuel; the fire devoureth both the ends of it, and the midst of it is burned. Is it meet for any work? 5 Behold, when it was whole, it was meet for no work: how much less shall it be meet yet for any work, when the fire hath devoured it, and it is burned?
6 Therefore thus saith the Lord God; As the vine tree among the trees of the forest, which I have given to the fire for fuel, so will I give the inhabitants of Jerusalem. 7 And I will set my face against them; they shall go out from one fire, and another fire shall devour them; and ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I set my face against them. 8 And I will make the land desolate, because they have committed a trespass, saith the Lord God. Ezekiel 15:1-8
Let’s just bow in prayer. Dear Heavenly Father, as we come before you this afternoon, speak to us through your word as we look at the vine tree. Lord, I pray that you would just help us to understand that in and of ourselves we have no use, but you can use us in spite of ourselves. And Lord, I pray that you would just speak to us through your word this afternoon. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
As you look at this, as I mentioned, the nation of Israel was really not useful to God because they had been doing everything to rebel against Him. While those that were back in Jerusalem that hadn’t been taken into captivity, it seemed the more the judgment came through Nebuchadnezzar attacking Jerusalem and the city and the temple, that the people became more and more ungodly. I was sharing with some this morning that we studied in the book of Jeremiah that it seemed as if the people kept saying we want to follow God, but when it came to choices, they continually chose to go the other way. Even when the city was ready to be destroyed and they asked Jeremiah to call on the Lord, we remember when we studied that book, they didn’t listen to God’s counsel.
They said they wanted it, but they didn’t want it. And God told them if they stayed in the land, He’d preserve them. But instead, the minute Jeremiah told them that, they said, no, we want to go to Egypt.
We want to trust in the world. We want to look to the world for answers. Well, nothing had changed much during the time of Ezekiel.
And Ezekiel was coming and he’s sharing this about how useful is a vine tree. And in and of itself, it has no use at all, except to be cast into the fire. And really what the example of the vine tree is, he was making is, it doesn’t bear a fruit, by itself.
It isn’t even strong enough to take and use to hold things up to hang on it, because it will break. And so the vine tree really has no use but to cut down, chop up into pieces and throw in the fire that it can burn. And even if it is burned, you can’t use the ashes or you can’t use what’s left of the vine that is burned that way either.
And he’s comparing this to the nation of Israel. And God is telling Israel, you’re like the vine tree. It is worthless because you say that you are mine but you can’t bear any fruit because you don’t trust in me.
Well, I think in order to understand exactly, specifically some of the things that Ezekiel is saying with Israel, as I mentioned, I want to go back to the words of Jesus in John chapter 15. So if you want to keep your finger in Ezekiel, we’ll come back to it in a little bit. But let’s go to John chapter 15.
And Jesus is speaking to the disciples and he is talking about faithfulness. And he uses a similar example, except he’s talking about where does the vine draw its strength from? And so let’s just take a look at John chapter 15 and then go back to Ezekiel chapter 15. I am the true vine and my father is the husband.
In every branch in me that beareth not fruit, he taketh away. In every branch that beareth fruit, he purchases it that it may bring forth more fruit. Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.
Abide in me and I in you. And a branch cannot bear fruit of itself except it abide in the vine, no more than ye except ye abide in me. I am the vine and ye are the branches.
He that abideth in me and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit. For without me he can do nothing. If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch and is withered, and the men gather them and cast them into the fire and they are burned.
If ye abide in me and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you. Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit, so that ye be my disciples. As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you.
Continue in my love. If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love, even as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things have I spoken unto you that my joy might remain in you and that your joy might be full.
Jesus is talking to his disciples and he’s using a similar explanation of how do you bear fruit. Now, the vine tree didn’t bear any fruit. It wasn’t attached to anything, but it was a vine tree.
And the example was that it had no relationship to God in the book of Ezekiel. Jesus is telling us the same thing here. How do we bear fruit? Well, except he talks about the fact that he is the vine here and we are the branches of the vine.
And if you’ve ever seen a grape vine, the branches come off and the grapes grow on the branches and it bears the fruit. But if you take the branch off the vine, all of a sudden the branch dies and there is no fruit. It can’t bear fruit.
If there was fruit there, the fruit withers and dies away. Well, Jesus is talking about the fact how do we be fruitful? It’s through our faithfulness and it’s through our ability to walk with God and abide in him and look to him for our strength, understanding we cannot do anything in and of ourselves. Now, when Jesus is saying these things to the disciples and you go back to chapter 15 in the book of Ezekiel, you see that Ezekiel is talking to a faithless crowd.
He’s talking to a group of people who say, well, we’re descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, so God should be able to work through us. We can’t understand why we’re in captivity. And he’s telling them, the reason you’re in captivity is you can’t bear fruit.
You’re a worthless vine because you’re not attached to that which enables you to bear fruit. And if you look at what they did, everything they did was directly opposite of what God wanted them to do. They didn’t trust in the words of the Lord.
They didn’t trust in the law. They didn’t put forth the sacrificial system to honor God and to look to the Messiah. None of these things were what the people did when they were in Jerusalem and they did the exact opposite.
Every example that God gave them that should have opened their eyes to the truth, they turned from it and only went deeper into rebellion. And so how could they bear fruit? And the same result is seen in Ezekiel’s parable as in Jesus’ parable. In Jesus’ parable he refers to a branch.
Here Ezekiel refers to the whole vine which has no attachment to God. And both of them are cut down and cast into fire as worthless. And they can’t do anything.
What good is a vine tree if it can’t bear fruit and if it can’t even hold up something that you would hang on it because it’s so brittle and has no life. Let’s take a look back at Ezekiel 3. So wood be taken of it to do any work. And what he’s saying is even the wood itself is worthless.
Or will men take a pin of it to hang any vessel thereon? You can’t even take the little piece of this vine to hang because it’s so brittle and worthless. There’s no life in it. If you’ve ever gone out and done yard work and maybe you’re going to go out and do some trimming on your trees and get rid of the dead branches.
And you go out there and you have a branch that doesn’t look like it’s alive but you begin to pick it up and you try and bend it to break it and it won’t break, it bends. It shows that there’s still life in that branch. But if you go out there and you have another branch that may look very similar but you pull it up and you take it in your hands and it just snaps relatively easy and breaks apart because there is no life in it.
What Ezekiel is telling the Jewish people there is no life in you. There is nothing there. Behold, it is cast into the fire for fuel and the fire devolves both ends of it and the midst of it is burned.
Is it meat for any work? Is there anything you can do with something that’s just only good to be burned? And the answer is not much except burn it. And so this is a real warning to the Jewish people of God telling them this is your condition before me. There is no good in you because you don’t want me and I’m the one that will give you life.
I’m the one that will enable you to bear fruit. Yet you don’t want me and if you don’t want me there is no good for you. No good in you.
We were talking this morning and again I was talking to someone this morning and they were talking about the circumstances in the world and the thing is the people of this world apart from God there is no good that they can do. And what happens is when you align yourself with Satan the opposite of God it results in not being able to bear any good fruit in your life even though sometimes the world may say it’s good but when you look at the real motivation behind it it is really destructive and evil. And that’s where the Jewish people were that had turned their back on God.
He goes on and he says in verse 5 Behold when it was whole it was meat for no work how much less shall it meet yet for any work when the fire hath devoured it and it was burned. He’s saying when this branch before it was still appeared to have life in it and was whole you couldn’t do anything with it because it had no ability to no strength and it had no ability to bear fruit. People that may appear to have everything going for them in this world still ultimately have no real fruit that they’re bearing if they’re not believers in Christ.
And what they are is they’re meat for no good they’re meat for nothing. They can’t be used for good if they don’t know God. And Ezekiel goes on and he says therefore Thus saith the Lord God As a vine tree among the trees of the forest which I have given to the fire for fuel so will I give the inhabitants of Jerusalem.
Now it’s interesting if you look at when you think of a vine tree in the forest one thinks of you go down south and they have different vines that grow on trees down there and they’re really good for nothing except to suck the life out of the tree that has life. And I’m just trying to think of an example of one of those vines mistletoe I think is one of them that grows on other trees and sucks the life out of the tree yet it really doesn’t give you anything except an ornamental decoration but really you can’t eat it you can’t do anything with it but it will take the life out of that which has life. And that’s exactly what these people would do is those Jews that were trusting in the Lord they would try to get them to go their direction and really suck the life out of them so they wouldn’t look to God as well.
Ezekiel is telling the people of the city of Jerusalem that what they have done is that they have become like this vine. And if you look at what God had intended for Jerusalem, and what He intended for the Jewish people, they were to be a light to the world. They were to reveal His strength, His glory, and His power to the whole world. They were to be used by God for that purpose.
God had created them as a nation for that purpose. He had given them the Scriptures. He had given them the temple worship. He had given them the sacrificial system—all pointing to the Messiah. They were to be the hope of the world, showing the world the true and living God. They were to be, if you will, evangelists to the world, telling them of the reality of God’s existence.
But instead, they would rather be part of the world. And when they did that, it could only result in death. Their message became one of death instead of life.
He says in verse 7:
“And I will set My face against them; they shall go out from one fire, and another fire shall devour them; and ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I set My face against them.”
God says when judgment comes, then you’re going to realize that He is God, and your belief system is not going to help you.
“And I will make the land desolate, because they have committed a trespass, saith the Lord.”
And again, here you see that they are tied to the land.
Now, I’d like to go one other place in Scripture where it talks about vines and branches, and about that which can and cannot be used. If you go with me to the book of Romans—Romans chapter 11—Paul is addressing those who would claim what we might call the replacement theologians of his day: those who said that the Church had replaced Israel, and that God was done with Israel.
But God says, no—He is not done.
Paul gives the example in Romans 11 that we are the unnatural olive branch, and we have been grafted in. It is a similar illustration to what Ezekiel is using here, a picture of grafting in for the purpose of bearing fruit.
If you’ve ever seen apple trees, sometimes you’ll see a tree where they take one type of apple tree and graft in a branch from another. The tree itself will cause that grafted branch to bear its own kind of fruit.
Paul is speaking to Christians who had become proud and arrogant. They were saying, “God is done with the Jews. He doesn’t have anything to do with them anymore.” And that is one of the main themes of the day in which we live.
One of the passages people will often use to support that idea is Ezekiel chapter 15, where God says, “You are like a vine—good for nothing.” But Ezekiel is talking about a specific time in history: the nation of Judah and the city of Jerusalem. He is not saying that God is done with the Jews forever.
We will see later in Ezekiel, when we come to the later chapters, that God gives them tremendous promises and tremendous hope. He is not finished with them.
Paul is addressing those replacement theologians of his day who claimed God had no further use for the Jews. And he says, in essence, “What use did God have for you?” You were an unnatural branch. You were from a wild olive tree. A wild olive tree cannot bear good fruit; the fruit it bears is worthless. Yet God took this wild olive branch and grafted it into a good olive tree, enabling it to bear fruit.
Then Paul says, how much easier is it for God to take the natural branch—the one that belonged there by nature—and graft it back into its own tree?
God can do that far more easily than taking a wild branch and grafting it in.
And he warns them to be careful of their attitude, lest God cut them off, because they had become proud and arrogant. They viewed Israel as a branch that had been cut off because of unbelief, but Paul says they will be grafted back in when they believe.
And God will use them tremendously.
We see that again when we go to the book of Revelation, where it speaks of people seeking out the Jews to be taught the Word of God—exactly what God had intended for them to do all along.
So in closing, as we look at Ezekiel, this is a very stern warning to the Jewish people living in Jerusalem: “You are worthless in the condition you are in. You cannot bear fruit. You cannot even be used for anything useful. You are only good to be cast into the fire.”
The fire represents judgment. You are only good for judgment. You are not good for being used by God unless you change—unless you are transformed.
But God can take them and graft them back in, and make them into something that can bear fruit.
And we need to understand that we should not be anti-Semitic, nor should we be replacement theologians. Rather, we should seek to share the Gospel with unbelieving Jewish people, because they are the natural branch, and we are the unnatural branch.
God called us out of darkness—those who knew nothing—and into His marvelous light. The Jews have been given everything, and how much easier it is for Him to reveal the light in their lives.
Let’s close in prayer.
Father, I pray that You would help us to understand this. Help us to understand the stern warning that Ezekiel was giving to the nation of Israel about their condition. Their condition apart from You was like a worthless vine.
And Lord, I pray that You would help us to understand that we can be a worthless branch as well. Help us to draw our strength from You, and our hope from You. Help us to look to You.
This we ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.