The Winepress of Divine Judgment: Ripeness Precedes Treading

Isaiah's vision presents not the suffering Messiah of chapter 53, but Messiah triumphant, treading the winepress of God's wrath upon antagonistic nations. The prophet employs visceral imagery: nations flung into the press like ripe grapes, their life-blood spattering upon His garments as He stands knee-deep in the vat, fiercely trampling them to ruin. He crushes; He is not crushed.

Yet Maclaren discerns a principle often overlooked: judgment arrives only when opposition reaches ripeness—when antagonistic tendencies have borne fruit and matured fully. This is not capricious divine violence, but measured response to completion. God demonstrates "long patience" before the winepress is set. Even a cumbering tree escapes the axe until "the possibility of its bearing fruit is plainly ended." The final use God makes of anything is to burn it.

The winepress has been "realised many a time, and will be many a time still." Lesser "days of the Lord" throughout history—each a treading, each a judgment upon ripened opposition to Christ's kingdom—foreshadow the final and terrible Day. These repeated instances follow one principle: divine patience waiting for maturation, then swift execution.

Herein lies the corrective to human impatience. Christ's servants, oppressed and hard-pressed, cry "How long, O Lord?" yet fail to recognize that the very succession of historical judgments confirms the pattern. To "observe these things" is to see the final great Day not as anomaly but as inevitable analogy with all preceding divine governance. The winepress awaits only ripeness.