Sunday Devotional - The Vineyard
Matthew 21:33-46
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Greetings church! I can’t believe this is now the 5th Sunday that we haven’t been able to meet together. I miss seeing everyone and hope that very soon we can again resume meeting. I want us to look at a parable Jesus taught, in the timeline of where we had last left off chronologically in the life of Christ, before we were stopped from meeting together. The passage is in Matthew 21:33-46. Go ahead and pause, and read the passage, Matthew 21:33-46, and then let’s talk about it.
Here Jesus is bouncing off of an old testament passage from Isaiah 5, where Isaiah was speaking the words of the Lord to Israel, who was at that time in a similar situation concerning their relationship with God. Put a bookmark in Matthew, and flip over with me to Isaiah 5.
Here, starting in verse 1 of chapter 5, (Isaiah 5:1-7) Isaiah talks about all the effort God put into building a vineyard, it was built on a fertile hill, stones dug out, the best vines planted, a watch tower constructed in the middle- all these elements taking massive amounts of time, energy, and expense. A wine vat was built, most likely carved out of stone- look at this picture of a wine vat from biblical times- you can imagine the tremendous amount of time and labor put into the wine vat alone when you think about it being made out of stone. Every detail was done, nothing was done hap hazard, everything was prepared to ensure that the best grapes were grown, and the best tasting wine could be produced.
God, through the prophet Isaiah, is obviously drawing attention to how much care and diligence He did in cultivating the vineyard of His people- Israel, doing all that needed to be done to ensure that they produced the good fruit of Godly justice and righteousness. In verse 4 of Isaiah chapter 5 God asks “What more was there to do for My vineyard that I have not done in it? Why, when I expected it to produce good grapes did it produce worthless ones?” Logically, it made no sense. If you use the right amount of good flour, eggs, sugar, butter, and chocolate chips to make cookies- when you pull them out of the oven at the right time, you would expect really yummy tasting chocolate chip cookies. If the ingredients are right and the process is done correctly, you won’t go wrong. But God is saying here that He followed the recipe exactly, used the best ingredients, and when He looked in the oven at just the right time, when one would expect to find rich, soft on the inside, crunchy on the outside, delicious, chocolate chip cookies-(ding) instead He found tasteless, worthless, cardboard tasting cookies.
So, what is God going to do about it? In the verses that follow, God says He is done. He’s going to break down the walls and let the vineyard go to waste. He’s going to allow briars and thorns to come up, and tell the clouds to stop sending rain. And the passage ends in verse 7 with God reminding the people that the vineyard is Israel, the people are His plant (the grapevine), and the fruit He looked for was justice and righteousness, but instead He found the bad fruit of
bloodshed and a cry of distress.
Turn with me now back to Matthew 21. The passage from Isaiah would have begun playing in the minds of the religious leaders, the moment Jesus uttered the words of Matthew 21 verse 33. They knew the book of Isaiah that well. In verse 33, Jesus started out citing Isaiah 5:1, and the religious leaders, and many of the other Jewish men, knew the storyline of the verses that followed.
And Jesus, through this parable, adds new details to Isaiah’s storyline, that show the message of Isaiah 5 to be just as applicable at that time, as it was in Isaiah’s time, if not even more so during the current situation surrounding Jesus.
Like Isaiah, Jesus here- starting in verse 33- outlines the careful details in building the vineyard, he lists all the ingredients used to make His good chocolate chip cookies and then says He sent workers to get them out of the oven for a taste. But the workers were beaten, killed, and stoned. Jesus is referring to the prophets God sent over the course of time to Israel, prophets like Isaiah- who was sawed in half. Like Ezekiel, killed by the Jewish leaders because of a rebuke for worshipping idols. Like Jeremiah, who was beaten and later stoned. Like Habakkuk, who was stoned. And ultimately, just over 2000 years ago, God sent His own son Jesus, and God had every reason to believe that His son would be respected, but instead- just a few days from Jesus speaking these very words, He would be taken outside the walls of Jerusalem, and killed on a cross.
Jesus then asks the crowd in verse 40, what did they believe the owner of the vineyard should do under such terrible treatment from these vineyard laborers? In Isaiah 5 God judges Israel and pronounces what He is going to do (letting it go to waste), but here Jesus allows the people to judge and decide on what should be done in order to bring justice to this situation for the vineyard owner. And the people respond in verse 41 “He will bring those wretches to a wretched end, and will rent out the vineyard to other vine-growers who will pay him the proceeds at the proper seasons.” The people realized the situation was completely unfair, and they wanted justice too. But then Jesus, in the following verse 42, quoting a verse from Psalm 118, clues them in on the fact that He is the son of the owner, the son whose life is being sought by them- which then leads them to realize that the vine-growers from the parable represent them. They are the vine-growers wanting to kill the son of the owner. They are the ones wanting the vineyard for themselves.
And as they are realizing this truth, Jesus basically says, God is going to react in the way that you yourselves said that He should act- Verse 43 “Therefore I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people, producing the fruit of it.” Now this is interesting that Jesus is now referring to the kingdom of God (not the nation of Israel) as the vineyard. The scope of the parable has been broadened. Israel’s not going to be given to another people who will produce fruit, but the more important Kingdom of God- Heaven, Paradise- was being given to a people who would produce Kingdom of God, Heaven, Paradise type fruit.
This is an incredible concept. You know who those people are, right? You and I- gentiles, non-Jewish folk. What I want you to walk away with today, is the understanding of just how much God labored and toiled, and endured, for massive amounts of time- time spanning from His work in the Garden with Adam and Eve, through Noah and the Ark, through Abraham, His work on the vineyard with Joseph, Moses, the Passover and His rescue from the land of Egypt. The years in the wilderness, His Levitical law, the time of the judges, the time of the prophets, His work through the judgement of His people and them being exiled from Israel to Babylon. His work bringing the people back to Israel, the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the temple, the work of softening peoples’ hearts, readying them for the Messiah through the words of the Prophets, then that Messiah coming as Jesus, birthed to Mary and Joseph. God’s work through Jesus and all the teaching and miracles, Jesus’ death and resurrection, the treasure of the book of Acts, Paul’s letters, insight into future events through the book of Revelation- all this labor of digging out stones, working soil to make it fertile, planting the best crop, building a watchtower, slowly etching out of rock a large wine vat- massive amounts of time, work, hardship, history, blood, sweat, and tears- and now this finished product, because Israel rejected it, has been neatly packaged, and dropped off at your doorstep. Do you realize how incredible this is?
The keys, to the most magnificent car in the world, that took 6,000 years to design and put together, have been given to you. You have inherited this amazing plot of land that took 1,000s of years to develop and place infrastructure on, so that you could yield tremendous produce and profits- and the question now is- do you really understand what you have been given? The people who were waiting on that car to be built for them for over 6000 years, decided in the end they didn’t like the color. And the manufacturer said ok, someone else will like the color. The question for us is, do we really understand all that went into the building of that car- do we treasure so great a gift of which so much work and time was put into it, do we humbly accept that car with gratitude and spend time driving it and using it in our daily lives, or does it sit in the garage, collecting dust like the Bible on our bookshelf? Do we take this magnificent 6,000 year old vineyard and work it, maintaining it, taking care of it- and produce amazing grapes, juice, wine- or do we neglect it and let weeds over take it? Will we give God opportunity to take this gift away to give it to someone else who will appreciate it and use it? May it not be so. Realize the awesome treasure the Bible is to us, the amazing opportunity to be a part of a church family, the incredible responsibility of being a laborer in His vineyard. Grasp just how blessed we are to have been given the Kingdom of God and may you and I produce it’s fruit in amazing ways.