The Tenants Who Acted as Owners

Let me start by praying. Father God, we come before you asking that you would speak to us through your word. Lord, we thank you for the truth that is your word. And, Lord, I pray that you might be with me as I speak from your word.

And, Lord, please humble me, and at the same time, I pray that you will give me clarity and wisdom in my words, and that the cold that I seem to be coming down with won't come into effect here. So, Lord, bless this congregation as we learn together from what you teach us. Amen. So I'm speaking today from Matthew. So Matthew chapter 21 starting from verse 33.

So I'll start by reading the passage out. So starting from verse 33, hear another parable. There was a master of a vineyard who planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a wine press in it and built a tower and leased it to tenants and went into another country. When the season for fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to get his fruit. And the tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another and stoned another. Again, he sent other servants more than the first and they did the same to them.

Finally, he sent his son to them saying, they will respect my son. But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, this is the heir. Come, let us kill him and have his inheritance. And they took him and they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. When therefore the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?

They said to him, he will put those wretches to a miserable death and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons. Jesus said to them, have you never read in the scriptures? The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This was the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes. Therefore, I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits.

And the one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him. When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they perceived that he was speaking about them. And although they were seeking to arrest him, they feared the crowds because they held him to be a prophet. Now this passage, it's probably the clearest picture of Jesus speaking of his own death that we see in the gospels. And the reality is it paints a clear picture of the judgment of God, but yet also the loving mercy of God, and it's in the person of Jesus that we see those both meet.

And that's what we're here to talk about today. So I wanted to start by sharing a little bit of myself and share a bit about how this parable is linked to my own life, and then we'll be able to apply it to ourselves and see what the Lord is actually guiding us to. And in my life, there's a couple of rocks of significance. So as a kid, I grew up in a suburb of Sydney, and in my yard, there was a large rock, and my dad told me that when they bought the block of land, the plan was to build the house where that rock was. It would simply just be removed.

And after designing the home, they quickly found out that this rock could not be moved and could not be broken. It simply had to stay there. And for the rest of my childhood, I had a great big rock as the centrepiece of my backyard, and that made football games extremely interesting. And but the reality is there was another rock in my life that I could not run around, and I could not avoid, and that rock was Jesus. And for most of my life, I tried to get around and avoid this rock.

And in this parable we're looking at today, Jesus paints himself, portrays himself as the rock that ultimately nobody can get around. All must reckon with him. All must come before this rock, and they either fall broken upon him or they're crushed by him. And this is the picture that we see of our Lord Jesus Christ. So the question remains for all of us, who is Jesus to you?

For me, Jesus was my stumbling block for most of my life. As a young child, I may have had fond memories of my backyard, but by the age of 11 and 12, I found myself the victim of multiple forms of abuse, and this was at the hands of family members and also in the context of a church. So by the age of 13 and 14, I did not want anything to do with that family, nor with the church, and nor with the God that I believe that church served. So Jesus was the stumbling block for me, and I believe I had every justification in the world not to follow him because look what he allowed to happen in my life. He allowed things to happen that I could not escape, and even crying out to him for help, he did not deliver me.

In my eyes, this God had failed. In my eyes, Jesus was not someone that I should be following. Now later in life, I found that my stumbling block was really my firm foundation, and my stumbling block turned out to be my rock of salvation. So when I lived the lifestyle that basically turned me into the very abuser that I hated as a child, and I found myself in prison for multiple drug offences and for gang activities. So I was facing a very long prison sentence.

And it was in prison that I met the Jesus of the Bible. Not the Jesus that loved me and had a plan for my life, but the Jesus who God loved and had a plan for His life. And I found that if I believed in him, that my life was not what my God looked at. He looked at the life of His son with whom He was well pleased. And that brings us to this parable.

Jesus begins by saying, listen to another parable. He'd been speaking parables for, you know, for the past couple of days, and this was in the week where he'd just arrived into Jerusalem. Now we know now that Jesus knew what was going to happen to him, and this parable speaks very clearly about what was going to take place only a few days after he spoke this. So I'm going to begin by talking about the owner and his vineyard. So in this parable, the owner of the vineyard, you could almost say he was foolish.

The owner of the vineyard will unpack who the vineyard refers to, but the owner. What a foolish man must he have been. He had the tenants that were meant to honour him and give him what was his, and even when they didn't, he persisted in sending people time after time after time. And that rejection only led him to send his own son. Now for the hearer, back then, you would hear this and say, what an idiot.

Who would do this? And the culture that they were in was it was well known that if you were a tenant and had a crop sharing agreement and you did not pay your landlord, you would have an assassin come and wipe you and your family out. That was how they did things. The idea of a tenant not paying their landlord for the not giving the fruits to the owner of the vineyard was not acceptable, and that's why later in the parable, the chief priests and the Pharisees knew exactly what the answer was. This is not acceptable and must be punished.

So God is the sovereign God. He is the owner of everything. Jesus says, hear another parable. There's an owner, a landowner, and this is matching other parables that he'd already spoken about God being the landlord, about God being the owner, not just of one place, but of all creation. Do we know this owner, and how do we respond to him?

Now in this passage, Israel is referred to as the vineyard. In Isaiah chapter five, we see a very similar parable which the prophet Isaiah spoke, and he refers in that parable, he actually says explicitly this is Israel. Israel is the vineyard. So feel free to look at Isaiah chapter five. It actually starts in exactly the same way as this parable.

There was an owner who planted a vineyard, and in that vineyard, he set up a winepress, and he set up a watchtower. The Lord provided, protected, and gave purpose to His people. So when Jesus started his parable in exactly the same way, the people knew. The people knew what he was talking about, and they knew this was going to be a parable of judgment because that's how it was spoken originally. It was judgment upon the house of Israel.

Now this is when it gets interesting for us. If this parable is only about Israel, why are we reading it today? We, of course, know that Jesus was the true Israel. Jesus came and took the place of as the true Son of God and took the place of God's people and faced judgment on their behalf. And through doing that, Israel was now no longer the holder of God's kingdom.

Jesus was. Before, as we heard before, before every knee will bow before him and every tongue will confess. Now the church, this is what it has to do with us. In Romans 11, so if you wanted to look through to Romans 11, now I'm not reading the passages out, but I just wanted to have you guys kind of look at these passages. So I'm giving the Mike Eastman version of some of these, but Romans 11 talks about the church being us, being grafted in to Israel.

So we are not naturally Israel. Now I know I'm not by birth Jewish, and I don't know if anyone here is, but there was a time when if you weren't, it was highly likely that you were not in the kingdom of God. And what a blessing it is, and that's not the case now. And for that, we thank Jesus. He was the one that opened and brought his kingdom to the world of which we are a part.

So the church, us, we've been grafted in to Israel. This applies to us, this parable. So as we read through this parable, how can we see ourselves in here? The vineyard enjoys the provision and protection of the owner. We enjoy the provision and the protection of our God.

He provides everything necessary for us to honour and obey him. He gives us his creation to enjoy. He gives us his word to teach and to learn from, and he protects us. His very Spirit dwells with his people. We have the presence of God, which is our protection, and this is for a purpose.

The purpose is to bear fruit for God, and this is the vineyard. We are in the vineyard. Israel was the vineyard. We are the vineyard. We owe fruit to God.

He doesn't just deserve fruit, he demands it. Are we bearing fruit for God? Now, Israel, who were referred to in this parable, had obviously not. So these tenants failed to produce fruit for God. These tenants had nothing to offer but sour grapes.

And as Isaiah five mentioned, sour grapes were all that the tenants of the vineyard could offer, and for that, they would lose what they thought they had. So the tenants in this parable are referring to the people Jesus is speaking to, to the chief priests and to the Pharisees. But this parable is a reflection of human life, isn't it? As I shared a little bit about myself, we can see all of human life can be related to this. I rejected God and thought that I could do things my way, only to find myself broken and empty and needing him and falling upon him.

And that's true of the world we're in, isn't it? We all want the fruit for ourselves. We all want the vineyard. We don't give back to God what is his. In that sense, we are the wicked tenants of the parable.

And if we look at all of human history, even from Adam, from the very beginning, from creation, Adam proved to be a wicked tenant. He took the fruit that God said he couldn't. He took what belonged to God and took it for himself. And ever since, mankind has been doing the same thing. But how does God respond?

He has continually sent his messengers. He's continually reached out to his people. He's reached out to his creation and warned them and given them a way back. This parable we see reflects what has happened throughout history. The messengers are the prophets ever since Cain killed Abel.

The first murder in the Bible we see. Abel was a prophet of God. Later in Hebrews, he's referred to as that. But he was killed by his own brother. Why?

Because he wanted he tried to offer to God what belonged to God, and Cain didn't. Then we have prophets through history. The prophet Isaiah, who we've read from, was known to be sawn in half. The history books say that he was sawn in half. That's how he died.

The prophet Jeremiah after him rotted away and wasted away in a pit and was persecuted by the people he came to speak to. Multiple prophets after that point stoned, bashed, deprived from food and housing. Some killed. And then famously, you have John the Baptist who actually heralded the way for Jesus, and he had his head cut off for the privilege. Then of course, we come to the son.

How has the son been treated in human history? Well, we see it written on the wall here, don't we? God loved the world so much that he sent his only son. In the face of rejection, a loving and merciful God sent His own son so that His people would have a way back, so that they wouldn't face the judgment that they truly deserve, so I wouldn't face the judgment that I truly deserve. So this parable points us to the work of Christ on the cross.

He was the son who would be kicked out of his own vineyard. He would be expelled from Jerusalem and left to die. And we know only a few days later, Jesus was kicked out of his own city, and he was hung on a tree, and he died. Now these tenants and the chief being the chief priest and the Pharisees that Jesus was talking to, they condemned themselves, didn't they? If we look at verse 41, they themselves say what should happen.

What should happen to these people who didn't give the landlord what was his? They didn't give the fruit to God, and they killed his son. Listen to their response. He will put those wretches to a miserable death and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons. So who are the other tenants?

Well, the other tenants are us. We're the people who have been given the vineyard, and we're the people who now have that purpose of bearing fruit for God. We are the people who must give him the fruits in their season, so let us not fall into the error, the same error that they did. Which brings us to the ultimate question, who is Jesus to you? In this parable, Jesus is pictured as the rock, as the stone who has become the cornerstone.

And this stone will either prove to be a stumbling block for those who reject him, or he will be the rock of salvation, the firm and sure foundation for those who build on him. Now there is nothing that can remain that isn't built on Jesus. He is the cornerstone, and just like it would be stupid for a builder to ignore the cornerstone, it would be just as silly for a tenant to ignore the son of the owner. In both cases, the outcome would be one of loss, and in our case, to ignore the son and to not build on the cornerstone results in eternal judgment. And that's what this parable is telling us.

But why the stone? See, the stone the builders rejected is from the Psalms. And when we look at Psalm 118, we see how this stone is the cornerstone and capstone of our faith. And for Jesus to come to these Psalms, to this Psalm in particular, for Jesus to refer to himself as the stone the builders rejected has a little bit of a kicker. Now I don't I haven't studied Hebrew at Bible College.

I've only got through Greek, and that was hard enough. But one thing I have worked out is that Hebrew, the word son and stone is so similar that they are often understood to be the other. Ben, eben. Ben, eben. That's the two words.

So many commentators, in fact, Jewish commentators of the Bible. There's some commentaries that were written by Jews who rejected Jesus, who actually have interpreted that passage as saying the son that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. And that's what Jesus is saying. He's the son who was rejected, but he has become the cornerstone upon which all of the kingdom of God is built. Jesus is also the first fruits of the kingdom.

So while Jesus is this firm foundation that is built upon, we also look at it in the term of fruit. So in one Corinthians chapter 15 from verse 20 to 25, we read. I'll start from 19 actually. If in Christ we have hope, in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied, but we don't. The hope in Christ is for eternity.

Starting from verse 20, but in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who were fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order, Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ, then comes the end when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power for he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The first fruits.

The fruit that God demands from his vineyard, Jesus delivers. Jesus is the first fruits of our faith, and if he is risen, and if he has pleased the Father, then our hope is sure. Our foundation is true. Whatever is built upon Jesus will remain. How can we bear fruit for God?

It's one thing for Jesus to be the fruit himself, but how do we, as the church, how do we bear fruit? How do I bear fruit as someone who spent most of my life not only rejecting God, but doing things that he detests. I deserve death. If I revealed to you even a quarter of the things that I have done in my life, you would be utterly shocked. I deserve to be killed, but Jesus was killed on my behalf.

And that should be true of all of us. The judgment we deserve, we don't face because the son of the vineyard paid the price that we deserve, and he now reigns. And whatever is built upon him will remain and will endure and I pray that's us. Bearing fruit for God, the son must be honoured for he's the one who bears fruit. Do we honour the son?

Do we respect the son that God sent? Israel didn't. The chief priest and the Pharisees didn't. For a time, I didn't. Do we, today, honour the son?

And how do we honour the son? How do we bear fruit? Whereas we said, Jesus is the fruit. You could say that Jesus is the perfect tenant. Paul refers to Jesus as the second Adam.

The perfect Adam, the one that Adam was meant to be. So while in Adam all die, in Christ all live. And you've got this picture here of wicked tenants and then Jesus being the perfect tenant of his own creation. God made his world for Jesus, through Jesus, and all things must come to Jesus. He is the cornerstone, not only of our faith, but he's the cornerstone of all of creation.

And there will be a new creation one day when sin will come to an end, where the things I've done will be wiped away, where the things everyone has done will either be judged with eternal judgment or be shown to be paid for by Jesus. That day is coming. And when that day comes, there's a new creation, a new vineyard, and that vineyard Jesus reigns. The son is the perfect tenant of God's vineyard. Are we in him?

Now John chapter 15 talks about being in Christ. We cannot we cannot bear fruit outside of him. Jesus is the vine, and his Father is the vine dresser. We must remain in him. Jesus says, abide in me and I will abide in you.

Outside of me, you cannot bear fruit. And that's the warning for the church today. That's what we need to hear. We need to do all things in Christ for all of life. And when we do that, we bear fruit.

I lead a ministry that ministers to people that were just like me. They need Jesus, and that's what we give them. And when that ministry bears fruit, we can say, it's not our fruit. It all belongs to the son. It's his fruit.

And we can only do that which he empowers us to do and equips us to do with his Spirit. Are you in Christ? Is he your stumbling block, or is he your firm foundation? Let me pray. Father, thank you that you have given us Jesus and that in him we have such a firm foundation.

And Lord, I pray that the words that I've spoken this morning will be received well, and Lord that you will do your work through your Spirit, not only here at Open House and amongst these people, but Lord in your church in Australia and in the world. Lord, we realise that we are in a vineyard and we also realise that we have not always offered to you the fruit you deserve. So, Lord, we pray that you will forgive us for rejecting you in the ways that we have. And, Lord, that you would give us your Spirit so that we would continue to build and to serve and to bear fruit for you. Thank you that in your word, we have freedom and we have truth.

And that by sharing this truth and this gospel of peace and reconciliation to you. Lord, we bear fruit for you. So Father, be with all of us this morning, we pray, and into the rest of the week. Lord, we also pray for anyone here this morning that does not know you. I pray, Lord, that you will convict them even now of their need to have Jesus as their foundation.

And we ask this in His name. Amen.