And now go to; I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard: I will take away the hedge thereof, and it shall be eaten up; [and] break down the wall thereof, and it shall be trodden down:
Ver. 5. And now go to, I will tell you, &c.] God loveth to foresignify, to warn ere he woundeth, and to foretell a judgment ere he inflicteth it. This he doth that he may be prevented. Amo 4:12 Prolata est sententia ut non fiat. Well might the Lord say, "Fury is not in me." Isa 27:3
I will take away the hedge thereof.] Hedge and wall shall be taken away at once from an ungrateful people, and all laid open to the wrath of God and rage of enemies; it shall be next indeed. Psa 80:12-13 And what may be reasonably pleaded against God at such a time, when he may say to men, as Reuben did to his brethren, "Did not I warn you, saying, Sin not?"
It shall be eaten up, it shall be trodden down.] All shall run to ruin, as it did at Jerusalem by the Babylonians, but especially by the Romans; and as it did in Christendom about six hundred years after Christ's incarnation, when religion was become a matter of form, yea, of scorn; then the Saracens in the east, and the barbarous nations in the west, broke in and bore down all before them.