A Showdown in a Vineyard

Listen Online:

Watch Online:

Transcript:

All right, well, there’s some confusion about how the parables of Jesus work. When I was growing up, we were told, well, Jesus taught in parables in order to use everyday items and everyday situations that people found themselves in. He would use these parables to make spiritual truths accessible, to tell deep truths in a way that people could understand.

I can see that.

in more recent years I’ve heard people say no no no that’s wrong I mean they’ll write entire articles and books about how that’s wrong Jesus taught in parables to conceal the truth as a judgment as he was teaching those who had eyes to see and ears to hear the the parables were used as a judgment to conceal the truth from those who had already rejected it and didn’t get anymore and so they’ll they’ll argue that point and go back and forth no the the parables are there to reveal the truth no the parables are there to conceal the truth and I think we’ve missed the point because it’s it’s both I think of the little guy I haven’t seen commercials in years we were just talking about this I don’t know if this is still on but I think of the little girl in the the commercial for the taco shells and the people in the village are arguing we want crispy tacos no we want soft tacos, we want crispy tacos, we want soft tacos.

And the little girl says, por que no las dos? You know, why not both? It’s both things.

Jesus used the parables at various times for various purposes, sometimes to make deep spiritual truth plain in a way that people could understand, and sometimes as a way to teach his disciples without tipping his hand to some of the Pharisees and others of things that they were not supposed to be privy to. And we can see both things happen. Tonight we’re going to look at a parable that Jesus told in explanation of some of what we discussed this morning.

A parable that he told in dealing with this issue of authority and dealing really with the issue of them rejecting his authority. If you were here this morning, we talked about how they asked Jesus in Mark chapter 11, by what authority do you teach these things? And really the answer was mine.

What more authority did he need? And yet he refused to come right out and answer the question. He said, I’m going to ask you a question first, and if you answer it, then I’ll tell you by what authority I do these things.

And they couldn’t answer the question. Not because they didn’t know the answer, but because they refused to acknowledge the answer. They had already decided to reject the truth.

And so he refused to explain the truth to them, because they were just going to reject it. He goes on in this parable in Mark chapter 12 to explain a little bit more about what it looks like that they’ve rejected the truth. And so we’re going to look at that in Mark chapter 12 tonight.

If you haven’t turned there with me yet, if you would, we’ll be there in Mark chapter 12. And if you don’t have your Bibles or can’t find it, it’ll be on the screen back here behind me. Once you find it, if you’ll stand with me as we read together from God’s Word.

I’ve heard this parable called by different names. The parable of the wicked vine dressers, although many translations don’t say vine dressers, that word can mean farmers. I’ve heard the parable of the wicked farmers, parable of the wicked tenants, it’s all the same thing.

Okay, so we’re going to look at verses 1 through 12 of chapter 12 tonight. It says, then he began to speak to them in parables. A man planted a vineyard and set a hedge around it, dug a place for the wine vat and a tower, and built a tower.

And he leased it to vine dressers and went into a far country. Now at vintage time, he sent a servant to the vine dressers that he might receive some of the fruit of the vineyard from the vine dressers. Now this is a common practice at that time.

If a landowner had a field that he was not using, he would rent it out to other farmers as kind of a sharecropping situation. And they would come and work the land. They would give him a percentage of the fruits and keep the rest for themselves and made a little extra produce for the landowner, for the use of his land, and gave them the opportunity to farm and raise support for themselves when they didn’t have any.

And so we see that he does this very understandable thing, sending a servant back to get his portion of the fruits. Verse 3 says, And they took him and beat him and sent him away empty-handed. Again, he sent them another servant, And at him they threw stones, wounded him in the head, and sent him away shamefully treated.

And again he sent another, and him they killed, and many others, beating some and killing some. Therefore, still having one son, his beloved, he also sent him to them last, saying, They will respect my son. But those bind dressers said among themselves, This is the heir.

Come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours. So they took him and killed him and cast him out of the vineyard. Therefore, what will the owner of the vineyard do?

He will come and destroy the vine dressers and give the vineyard to others. Have you not even read this scripture? The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.

This was the Lord’s doing, and it was marvelous in our eyes. And they sought to lay hands on him, but feared the multitude, for they knew he had spoken the parable against them. So they left and went away.

You may be seated. so here he tells a story that is meant to convey spiritual truth and it did not pass over the heads of the pharisees and and the other religious leaders who were gathered there as a matter of fact it they were jesus was right over the target with this one it it had the desired impact because it it disturbed them so much it upset them so much that they wanted to do him physical harm It says in verse 12, the last part that we read, they knew that he had spoken the parable about them. They may not have accepted everything that he was teaching, but they got the message.

And so we need to understand that this parable was another representation of Israel’s spiritual condition. He is still making the case that he’s been making through his whole time in Jerusalem that something is not right in Jerusalem. Something is not right with the spiritual condition of the people in that city, especially the religious leaders.

There’s something wrong. And in previous sections of the text, the Sanhedrin leaders made it clear that they were rejecting Jesus. We saw that this morning in chapter 11 and his refusal to answer them.

It was because they had refused to accept and acknowledge what they knew to be true. They were rejecting Jesus. We see it after this.

we get to the end of this week, which won’t be this week in our time, but the end of this week that we’re looking at, and they are going to reject him. They are going to turn him over to Gentiles after beating him themselves. They are going to turn him over on trumped up charges to be beaten and executed.

I mean, they’re going to reject him in the most explicit way they know how. And so Jesus uses this moment to point out the spiritual corruption in Jerusalem. And when he does that he’s following the same theme, as I said, that he’s been on.

When he cleaned out the temple, he was exposing their spiritual corruption because they were set up in the court of the Gentiles with their little marketplace, making this place of worship that for some people that was their only place to come and worship the God of Israel because they were not Jews themselves, made it inaccessible. So they were throwing up obstacles to keep people away from God. He was on this same theme when he cursed the fig tree.

And his reason for cursing the fig tree, as we looked at last Sunday night, was the fact that it was advertising that it bore fruit and it really didn’t. It might as well have been dead. It appeared to be alive, but it was bearing no fruit.

That was a picture of Israel. And we know that this parable dealt with their relationship with God because the members of the Sanhedrin acknowledge this themselves when it says in verse 12, they perceived he was speaking of them. They were so convinced of it, they took it personally.

They were intent on harming him, intent on killing him. And so this is how we know that he got them right between the eyes. This whole story deals with Israel’s spiritual condition.

Now, we need to be careful in the way we look at parables because we, as important as it is to dig in and understand the details of the text we’re studying, with parables, it’s really easy to go overboard with this. It’s easy to get so bogged down in what we might call the worm’s eye view, looking at every detail there on the ground, that we miss the overall point. We miss the bird’s eye view.

I think with parables, it’s usually a good idea to step back and take the bird’s eye view, look at it from up in the air, and see what really jumps out at us. Usually the context of the passage will point us to what the most important thing is about this. What is the point that Jesus is trying to make with this parable?

And then we go back and look at the details and say what details are necessary to making that point. Because sometimes things are just elements of the story. Sometimes they are just things that are needed to move the story along.

I have heard teaching where you get into, my favorite example is the parable of the lost coin. And people will get so bogged down in the little details. Well, the coin represents this.

I think you can make that case. The woman sweeping the house represents this. I think you can make a case for what it represents.

The broom that she uses represents this. Okay, I think we’re going a little further than what the scriptures warrant here. The dust that she sweeps out of the house represents this.

The doorway represents this. The house itself represents that. And you can read meaning into every extraneous detail of the story that sometimes that meaning is not meant to be there.

Or you can step back and you can look at the story. What is the point that Jesus is making in context of the story of the parable of the lost coin? The Pharisees, once again, are mad that Jesus is eating with sinners.

He’s spending time with people that they consider unworthy, Jesus tells this story about a woman who swept her whole house clean in order to find a coin she lost and was so excited she celebrated when she found it. The context of him dealing with the Pharisees and then telling that story tells us that the lost coin story is about the joy of somebody being lost and then being found. So in that story, I think the coin represents those who are lost, those who have wandered away from God, and he finds them and brings them back.

And I think the woman represents Jesus. And that’s really as far as we need to go to understand that story. So I tell you that so we can be careful looking at this, because as I’ve studied what this parable means, I’ve seen where I think people go too far in trying to nail down what every detail of the story is.

You know, they look at the three groups of servants and some have said, you know, the first group is an early group of prophets like the Elijahs and the Elisha’s, the second group of prophets is a later group of prophets, the Jeremiah’s and the Isaiah’s. The problem is you kind of run out of Scripture at that point. And so they say, well, the third group, that’s the Maccabees.

And if you were here on Wednesday night a few weeks ago, we talked about them during the time in between the Testaments. But if you start trying to line it up with who got beaten, who got stoned, who got killed, it doesn’t necessarily work. I think the point of the servants here, and we’ll get to this in a minute, is that God sent His servants, God sent the prophets to Israel, and they were rejected.

They were mistreated and they were ignored. I don’t think we, maybe I’m wrong in this, but I don’t think we have to nail down every detail represents this. This is why I say I think it’s safer to step back, take the big picture, and then zoom back in.

So I think the parable’s characters represent the foretold rejection of the Messiah. That’s what he’s talking about here. That eventually God was going to fulfill his promises.

Eventually God was going to send his son to Israel and Israel was going to reject God’s son just like Israel had rejected and ignored the prophets. So in this case, I think that the landowner represents the father. I think you can make a pretty solid case that he’s the one that keeps sending these representatives to the nation of Israel.

They were lent the use of his vineyard, just like God had given gifts and and even given the promised land to the Israelites to live on and to use for His glory. And He sent servants to call the tenants to offer fruit to the landowner. And these represent the prophets who were sent by the Father to call Israel up to offer the fruits of repentance.

And it says in verses 2 and 3 that the first servant was beaten. It says in verse 4 that the second servant was stoned. It says in verse 5 that the third servant was killed.

It says in verse 5 that there were others even after that. That this wasn’t just a one-time thing. And I believe this points to, again, I don’t want to nail down, well, this person represents this person.

But I think overall it shows us the whole history of Israel. That as God would send them people to draw them back to Him. Now, were they always beaten?

Were they always stoned? Were they always killed? No, some of them were horrendously mistreated.

Jeremiah was locked up Elijah was constantly in fear of his life but even those who weren’t in physical peril they were rejected and they were ignored time after time God sent his messengers to call Israel back to him to call Israel back to repentance and time after time they rejected these prophets and their message time after time Israel had rejected God to go its own way and by the way lest any of this sound like it’s anti-Israel it’s not this is human nature this is not Israel nature this is human nature you want to take a stab in the dark at why he’s talking about Israel here why does he single them out they’re his people but I think there’s an even simpler reason they’re the ones he’s talking to sorry I always tell you it’s not a trick question maybe that maybe that’s why you’re afraid to answer they’re the ones he’s talking to they’re the ones he’s dealing with he’s not going and talking about the the Romans to them or the Greeks or the Tibetans or the Cherokee.

They wouldn’t know who the Tibetans and Cherokees were probably, but he’s talking to them about them. And yes, there is the issue of them being his chosen people that in spite of the relationship they are supposed to have. So you weren’t wrong.

I was just looking for an even simpler answer. There is that added detail of them being his chosen people. And if anybody should have listened to him and his prophets, it should have been them.

But this could easily reflect any one of us, because how often does God tell Americans what to do, and we reject it. So he sends over and over the prophets to deal with Israel, just like the landowner over and over sends his servants to collect and calls them to do what they agreed to do. The matter culminates when the landowner sends his son, who was murdered by these tenant farmers out of envy.

Now, one place here that we need to be careful about not trying to make a one-to-one comparison about everything, the landowner, the human landowner in the story says, oh, they’ll respect my son. Don’t get the impression from that that the father was somehow confused how this was going to go down when he sent Jesus. I think that’s an element to move the story along.

Keep in mind, the main point is their rejection of those that the father sent. So he sends his son, and because they were jealous of him being the heir because they were jealous of his relationship with the landowner, they murdered him. And the son represents the Messiah.

The son represents Jesus, the son of God the Father. And we know this and that we’re not reading too much into this because Jesus in describing what happened to the son of the landowner, he goes back and he quotes from the book of Psalms and passages that deal with the Messiah. The Messiah being the stone that the builders rejected that has become the chief cornerstone.

Meaning even though the people would reject the Messiah, they would toss him away like he was worthless. Ultimately, his worth would be proven. It was the Lord’s doing.

By the way, he’s not confused by, as I said, he was not caught off guard by any of this. He was under no illusions. The Father was under no illusions that they were going to accept Jesus.

As a matter of fact, it was part of his plan that they would reject Jesus. It was the Lord’s doing and it was marvelous in his sight. For all that we want to criticize them for rejecting Jesus, if they hadn’t, the plan wouldn’t have been fulfilled.

So best case scenario, well, best case scenario is we never fell in sin in the Garden of Eden in the first place. The best case scenario in the world we live in is that they reject Jesus and then they come back and repent and trust Jesus. Some of them did, many of them did not.

The killing of the son here points to how they would reject Jesus and how they would crucify him. So he’s not only nailing their spiritual condition, He’s not only looking at them and nailing the diagnosis of what’s really going on in their hearts, he’s also foretelling his death. Now again, this is on Tuesday.

They don’t crucify him until about Friday. I say about because some people say Wednesday or Thursday. We can get into that later if you really want to.

I still think it was Friday. But ultimately, I think if it was all that important what the exact date was, I think he would have told us. But in just a few days’ time, they’re going to reject him to the point of crucifying him.

And so he’s giving one more evidence of who he really is, who it is that they’re rejecting. And all of this shows us that despite Israel’s religious activities, they were not right with God. They were the fig tree that we talked about last week.

With all the leaves and all the appearance of life and vitality, but when you get right down to it, there was no fruit. There was no evidence there of a relationship with God. And he went into the temple, and it was teeming with life and teeming with business, And yet there was not worship going on in the sense that it was supposed to be.

And so he’s pointing to the religious leaders again and saying, you appear to be doing all the things you’re supposed to be doing, but let me tell you what your relationship with God really is. It’s this history of rejection. It’s just like these tenant farmers not bearing the fruit for the father that you’re supposed to.

It’s ignoring the warnings of the prophets. It’s rejecting the promised Messiah. It’s everything that God told you to do, not doing.

everything that God promised, you rejecting when He sends it to you. It’s you ignoring all that He’s done for you and then claiming to be His people. And somebody asked me last week, if they rejected Jesus, if Israel rejected Jesus, then what’s the point of being His chosen people?

And if you’re not getting into heaven anyway, what is the point of being chosen? And I think it’s a good question. I think it’s a question some of you may be curious about.

And I’m not sure I’m 100% comfortable with the answer, but I’ll take a stab at it. For them to reject Him, for them to reject the Messiah, for them to reject what God was doing, and for us then to say, well, you know, them being His chosen people, that doesn’t matter in this context. First of all, they were chosen to be the vessel that brought the Messiah into the world, for the world.

And there’s something incredibly worthy of honor about that. But also, there is a new covenant. And things are different.

Under this new covenant, there’s no longer a unique access to God. That’s what it meant that they were God’s chosen people. That under the old covenant, they had a unique relationship with God.

And if you wanted to come to God, you came the way that was revealed to Israel. Now there is a new covenant that is not unique to Israel in the sense of you don’t have to be part of Israel, part of physical Israel to have access to God. But I still think there’s something important to be said about Israel being God’s chosen people.

Because we read on and we see how God sent His prophets and apostles even after Jesus, and they continued to plead with Israel to be saved. They continued to contend with Israel. Paul said, if I could be cursed and Israel be saved, I would take that deal. He said his heart’s desire and prayer for Israel is that they would be saved.

And so God continued to chase after Israel. You look at the book of Revelation and you see that God is not finished with Israel. God will not be finished with Israel until there is an awakening.

Until thousands of people from Israel come to know the Messiah that was given to them. God’s not finished with them. And so we can say, well, what’s the point of them being the chosen people if they rejected the Messiah?

Part of being the chosen people is that God’s plan for them extends far beyond that rejection. That even after that rejection, God continues to work in Israel’s midst. But at this point, at this point in time when Jesus is dealing with them, Israel is not right with God. So we see that they’ve rejected him.

And that’s what he’s calling out, saying you’ve rejected the prophets and you’re about to reject me in the most spectacular way possible. But this is where the good news comes from. This is where the good news comes incidentally for us, is that through Israel’s rejection of the Messiah, Jesus opened the Father’s vineyard to the whole world.

We look at verses 9 through 11 and it says, Therefore, what will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the vinedressers and give the vineyard to others. There are others who could never have been part of the old covenant, who now have the same access to the Father that Israel had all along.

And actually more to those in Israel who believe. They have more access, they have greater access to the Father through Jesus Christ than they ever had through the law of Moses. But the point of Jesus saying this is that just because Israel rejected the Messiah didn’t mean that the Messiah was worthless.

Because through him, the vineyard was going to be opened up to others, to the Gentiles, to those who never had a shot at knowing God. That’s where he says, the cornerstone that the builders rejected. These master builders, these experts, these expert craftsmen, they took this stone and they threw it away, not realizing what they had.

But he was put to other use and became the chief cornerstone. And he says, it’s marvelous in our eyes what the So he’s telling about their rejection. He’s talking about what he’s about to go through, his own death.

But he’s helping them understand and laying the groundwork for us to understand that through his rejection is where salvation comes to the whole world. To the Jews and the Gentiles alike. That’s why Paul said later on in Romans chapter 1, I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God’s salvation to everyone who believes.

To the Jew first, but also to the Gentile. It’s only because the son is killed that the vineyard is opened up to the others. And you and I have hope.

All the nations of the world, Jews and Gentiles alike, have hope tonight because the son was killed, because the Messiah was rejected and cut off so that he could fulfill the will of the Father. We’ll spend more time talking about that in the coming weeks, what that looks like. Things that you’ve probably heard your whole lives, things that I’ve studied my entire life, but when I began to look at the gospel side by side and take the stories in order, my goodness, it just gives you goosebumps what Jesus did and what he went through and what it means for us.