Transcript

Grab your Bibles and let’s go to Luke 20 this morning. If you’re visiting with us, we’re going through the Gospel of Luke. We come to this final week in the earthly life of our Lord and he has been being confronted as he enters Jerusalem by the religious authorities of the day and this parable picks up in the middle, if you will, of part of his intercourse back and forth with his enemies who are confronting him and it’s very interesting what he does. He tells a parable here. We begin in chapter 20, in verse 9.

9 And He began to tell the people this parable: “A man planted a vineyard and rented it out to vine-growers, and went on a journey for a long time. 10 At the harvest time he sent a slave to the vine-growers, so that they would give him some of the produce of the vineyard; but the vine-growers beat him and sent him away empty-handed. 11 And he proceeded to send another slave; and they beat him also and treated him shamefully and sent him away empty-handed. 12 And he proceeded to send a third; and this one also they wounded and cast out. 13 The owner of the vineyard said, ‘What shall I do? I will send my beloved son; perhaps they will respect him.’ 14 But when the vine-growers saw him, they reasoned with one another, saying, ‘This is the heir; let us kill him so that the inheritance will be ours.’ 15 So they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. What, then, will the owner of the vineyard do to them? 16 He will come and destroy these vine-growers and will give the vineyard to others.” When they heard it, they said, “May it never be!” 17 But Jesus looked at them and said, “What then is this that is written: ‘The stone which the builders rejected, this became the chief cornerstone’? 18 Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces; but on whomever it falls, it will scatter him like dust.”

Context is everything when determining the proper interpretation of a text of Scripture and its application or its many applications. So what’s the context here? Well, first of all, Jesus is again publicly refuting, exposing and condemning his enemies. That’s why he’s telling this parable. It’s a public, again, exposure, refutation and condemnation of the religious authorities who are his enemies. Secondly, by giving this parable, the Lord is again proclaiming that he is the one, true, promised, prophesied Savior. The true Messiah, the Savior of Israel has come and he is he. Thirdly, he’s giving this parable to edify his disciples. Not only are the religious authorities listening, of course, the people are listening and many of them are genuine seekers or have become true disciples. He wants these disciples to understand the rank, brash hypocrisy of the religious authorities of the day. He also wants to strengthen their faith in himself that he is indeed the true Christ and he is preparing them for his soon coming suffering and death. So all that is going on here and that’s the context of what we’re looking at.

So, first of all, let’s look at the setting in this text here. We see in verse 9 it says, “And He began to tell the people this parable.” You could almost says, “He began again,” because he’s been teaching and preaching and then as you know in the previous text, he was rudely interrupted by the religious authorities because they wanted to know, “By what authority are you saying these things and by what authority are you doing all these things that you are doing?” Again, their point was not that they were concerned about truth and the holiness of the church of Israel, they were concerned about their own power and control that he was stealing away from them as the people increasingly began to give attention to Christ and to his teaching.

Now, over and over and over again as we have gone through Luke, we find him resoundingly defeating these religious authorities. They publicly challenge him, he publicly embarrasses, exposes and denounces them and then, once again, on this occasion, he’s already completely obliterated their argument, embarrassed them again publicly and then on the heels of that, he gives a parable that does it yet again. Again, I told you one time, watching Christ publicly, if you will, slam these guys over and over reminds me of a pile-driver that I saw at the beach one time as they were putting in great foundation piles to build a condo upon and all day long that great crane would have that driver wham, wham, wham, keep driving those huge steel beams into the ground. That’s what Jesus does to these religious authorities. Over and over and over, he just keeps hammering away on them. He keeps putting them down.

It’s a challenge to me as a pastor that we have to in our age be faithful agents of Christ and constantly be exposing and putting down the error that comes against the church in our age. It gets tiring to be sure, and sometimes you may get tired of even thinking about it or thinking of the responsibility we have to expose and refute error even in a public way, but if we follow the example of our Lord, now we can’t do it just like him because he’s Jesus, yet the principle remains the same. So here he is again like that pile-driver, again exposing these guys, showing the hypocrisy of their error and, indeed, their guilt.

Now, it says here he is teaching and he’s telling the people, which means he’s teaching everyone but he’s teaching about these religious authorities and even what they’re about to do to him through this parable. You know, it’s interesting as you think about these people in this day, no other people had the privileges and the warnings that this generation received. They sat under the preaching of the Lord Jesus Christ himself. Notice again how many of them stayed in blind unbelief, which means their guilt at the judgment will be far greater than many others because the light they rejected was so far greater than many others.

Well, here’s the parable. We begin in verse 9. He began teaching them and he talks about a man and, of course, the man here in the parable is God. He says, “A man planted a vineyard.” Now, planting the vineyard speaks of Israel. Israel was God’s doing. He owned Israel. He planted Israel. He formed Israel through the calling of Abraham. Now, while God’s grace and mercy extended to many, even Gentiles in the Old Testament era, we know for a fact, the Scripture makes it very clear, he cast his special favor and special calling upon elect Israel. No other nation received the prophets and the fathers and the priesthood and the temple sacrifice. All the things God gave Israel as a blessing and as a guide to expose himself and reveal himself to them. He didn’t do that for any other nation. They were the objects of his special favor. They were his. He planted them. So the man is God planting a vineyard that’s Israel.

Then verse 9 says this man rented out the vineyard, the land, to some vine-growers. These would be tenant farmers. So these tenant farmers were to take the possessions owned by another man and they were to produce a crop on it, and like all tenant farmers, the understanding, the responsibility is when the crop comes in, you keep a portion but the landowner gets a portion also because it’s not yours. You’re just renting. You just have a stewardship entrusted to you. So Israel, primarily the kings, the priests, the prophets, had been given this vineyard. That is, God’s Old Testament church, God’s nation of Israel and he had given it to them and he had given them explicit instructions concerning his vineyard: how it’s to function; what are you to do with it; the profits I expect out of it.

So that’s I. That’s the setting. Jesus is speaking. He has been interrupted by these religious authorities. He has refuted them resoundingly. Then he goes into this parable and begins to set the setting of this parable. “A man had a vineyard and he has rented it out to some vine-growers.” II. The evil vine-growers. Can I back up just a moment? I have on the screen and in my notes this title to this message, “The Parable of the Evil Vine Growers.” But once again, that’s tradition. I really think it misses the point. The real point of the parable is not what the vine-growers do but what God does so perhaps, though it’s not wrong, but perhaps a better title would be “The Parable of the Patient Yet Demanding Vineyard Owner.” The parable of the patient yet demanding vineyard owner. Just put both of them down and pick the one you like the best, alright?

II. The evil vine-growers. We see them in verses 10-15, the first part of verse 15. Verse 10 says so this owner of the vineyard, “At the harvest time he sent a slave to the vine- growers, so that they would give him some of the produce of the vineyard.” So he sends a slave to his land that he owns, he planted it, it’s his, to retrieve what was properly his own and the little practical note of application for us, listen to me: God may expect out of you a harvest at any time. In the morning, at noontime, Monday morning, Thursday afternoon. God looks at your life and expects a product, a production out of you because, listen to me, he owns you. He is rightfully owner of you and everything you think you own. You rightfully are to yield to him. You rightfully are to honor him. You rightly are to be in subjection to him. What you have, what you own, what you do, is under him.

So at any moment of time as this man did, he sends his slave to his land, to those he has rented our his vineyard to and he expects some produce out of it, but the Bible says in verse 10, “but the vine-growers beat him and sent him away empty-handed.” Now, this is a brash, calloused and evil picture we see here of these vine-growers looking at the man to whom they owe everything, who gave them the privilege of earning a living by tending the vineyard and producing a product, and yet instead of honoring him and serving him and producing for him and, again, the parallel spiritually to Israel is instead of honoring God, they turn to idolatry, to sinful indulgence and to rebellion. I mean, let’s say for example you hired a man and you asked him to plant and till your land and then you return to him later and you ask him for a produce, a production out of the land, and he just beats up your servants and the only thing he present to you is bramble and briars and stubble instead of a profitable harvest.

The Bible says here that they beat him. They didn’t just deny not giving him what he deserved, they were mean and evil spirited toward the owner’s representative here. They add insult to injury. They attacked and persecuted, if you will, the bearers of mercy and that’s what Israel had done over and over again as God would send his slaves. God would send his servants to Israel and they were to proclaim the truth. They would insult them and offend them which is, again, an insult and an offense to God and, in effect, Israel disowned the Lord and their Maker and by disowning the Lord and disowning their maker, they also give up title to the vineyard. You see, they were to be God’s servants to establish and build God’s work in the earth, but they failed and lost title to that work.

Look at verse 11, “And he proceeded to send another slave; and they beat him also and treated him shamefully and sent him away empty-handed.” Now, again, the parallel truth here is that in mercy God gave them chance after chance after chance. He gave Israel more than sufficient warnings. He kept sending prophets. He kept sending preachers. But despite the obstinate refusal and rebellion of his subjects, I think one thing we need to always recognize and this parable teaches this, God never relented on giving up on or shrinking back on one speck of what was owed him by his subjects. He didn’t pull back and say, “Okay, if you’ll just give me half of what I expected, that will be okay.” No, he keeps sending slaves, he keeps demanding what’s rightfully his and they keep killing those slaves or beating those slaves and refusing to give back anything. Nehemiah 9:26, “But they became disobedient and rebelled against You, And cast Your law behind their backs And killed Your prophets who had admonished them So that they might return to You, And they committed great blasphemies.” The Bible says in verse 11, they treated the servant who came shamefully and sent him away. This speaks of a continual and wanton cruelty and pride in their hearts. This is a parading of insulting outrage that they always were presenting before God.

Now look at verse 12, “And he proceeded to send a third,” this is the third one in a row, “and this one also they wounded and cast out.” One of the things we’re reminded of, that this indeed, as I said would be a good title is a patient landowner. He sends one. They beat him up. They refuse to give him anything. He sends another one, the same thing again. He sends a third one. The point is and Jesus in this parable is illustrating that Israel has become so hardened and so perverse they openly condemn the faithful preachers and prophets that God sent to them. They even considered, Israel considered themselves as self-appointed and self-established leaders of the work and of the religion. So much so that when God sent a true preacher, our God sent a true prophet, they would call him the evil one and the troublemaker. They called good evil and evil good. Perverse. It’s upside down. Does that remind you of any country you know in the world today? Where there’s just a pattern of applauding and celebrating and commending what is clearly evil in the word of God and then they put down and call evil what God calls good? That’s what Israel had begun doing.

Many a modern day pastor has come into a church and attempted these kind of reformations and have the powers that be attack him and accuse him of “troubling the church.” Young pastors must live right and must have clean hearts and they must know this: if you preach the reproofs and corrections of Scripture faithfully, you will likely suffer greatly. That’s what happened in the Old Testament era as God sent faithful preachers to Israel; that’s what will happen also in the New Testament era as faithful preachers come to carnal and backslidden churches. In the Old Testament the chief officer in the temple had godly Jeremiah the prophet beaten and had him put into prison. Isaiah was sawn in two by King Manasseh. And the Old Testament records numerous mockings and killings of the faithful prophets that God would send to Israel.

So one servant was sent. The next servant was sent. The next servant was sent. Great patience and mercy God keeps extending. Then we come to verse 13. Jesus continues in the parable language, “The owner of the vineyard said, ‘What shall I do? I will send my beloved son; perhaps they will respect him.'” Now, again, an enormous statement of the great, great longsuffering of God. “What shall I do?” The loving patience of God continually seemingly displayed toward Israel. Exodus 34:6, “Then the LORD passed by in front of him and proclaimed, ‘The LORD, the LORD God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth.'” So he said, “I’m going to go so far beyond what would be expected.”

The landowner, the vineyard owner said, “I’m going to go way far beyond what anybody would possibly think I should do. I will send my unique and one and only son and perhaps they’ll respect him.” Hebrews 3:5-6 shows us the difference between the faithful slaves God sent to Israel and then God sending his Son to Israel. Hebrews 3:5-6 says Moses was a faithful servant of the house but Jesus was the faithful Son of the house. Jesus was the Father’s servant, but he was far, far, far more than a servant; he was the unique and one and only Son of God. This gesture to send his Son at this point to hopefully receive what is rightfully his instead of sending his wrath, reveals the great depth of heaven’s love toward sinners. Dear sir, if you’ve pushed God off, if you’ve made your own empire, if you’re serving as your own lord, you haven’t yielded your heart in brokenness to a holy God through his Son, Jesus Christ, I want to tell you God’s love toward you ever extends in Jesus Christ. God even sent his Son to Israel, yet by sending his Son not only does it show heaven’s deep love, it also shows the deep, deep culpability and guilt of Israel and it shows the deep, deep culpability and guilt of all of us who have yet to bow the knee to Jesus Christ.

No more important person can come than God’s Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. All the others that were sent before Jesus came as faithful servants, but Jesus comes as the Son, the heir apparent of all that belongs to God and all that God has. The others spoke as servants, Jesus comes and speaks as the Son. He’s different and while here, after servant, after servant, after priest, after priest, after prophet, after prophet, after preacher, after preacher warned, warned, warned Israel to repent, turn to God, give him what is due him, you owe him your honor and allegiance and service and then God sends his faithful Son to them and says, “Perhaps they will respect him.” But even while Jesus, the Son of God, God incarnate, is teaching before them, they are presently plotting his death. Oh, the black, black depravity of the human heart.

Jesus in the parable says in verse 13, “Well, if the owner of the vineyard sends his son, well, maybe they will respect him.” So after the countless generations of brash, unfaithfulness and wickedness, the Lord still extends an offer of mercy. He extends amazing grace in his offer to reconcile through his Son. He offers Israel unconditional love. He offers Israel unconditional mercy and forgiveness. He offers Israel an unconditional grant of forgiveness and eternal life. But it’s important to note here, again, in all of God’s great longsuffering and all of God’s great love, he never in the slightest measure, now listen, relents on his demand to receive what he is owed. In other words, we owe him all love, all honor and all obedience. God has never looked at man and said, “Okay, okay, you’re important too. You have your ideas and I, God, have my ideas. You have your views and I, God, have my views. You have your values and I have my values so I’ll tell you what, I’m a good old God, we’ll just agree to disagree. You have your morals and I have my morals. You have your standards, I have my standards. We’ll just get along together and you don’t have to be loyal to my doctrine and to my righteousness and my precepts.” Absolutely not! No! Never would God do that! He still sends someone and demands what is rightfully his. Now listen to me: God can’t lower the requirement. God can’t lower the standard. God can’t lower the values. God cannot lower the morals because these things that are set up for our conduct are the expressions of his very being. He wants us to be true because he’s always true. He wants us to be loving because he’s always loving. He wants men and women to call marriage the relationship of a man and woman because he designed it to be that way out of the character and moral ethic purity of his very nature. So he can’t lower it and say, “Okay, you’ve got your way and I’ve got my way. We’ll just kind of have an agreement to disagree.” Hogwash and slop and baloney. What foolishness. What foolishness.

At the end of God’s long patience, there is the requirement of full repentance and a full yielding and a full honoring of God as God. Not that God comes down some and meets us halfway. No! That God through Christ brings us up to be righteous to his standard, but we never bring God down to make us feel better about ourselves. He’s absolutely Lord or it’s no deal. It’s not deal. All owe God all. Listen, friend, payment will be made. Are you hearing me? Everything you owe God which is to love him with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength, all the time, God is going to get payment. Now you listen, in one of two ways: he’ll get payment through his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, on your behalf. He’ll take all the justice due you for your failure and place it on Jesus and that payment will be made that way or he will send you to the eternal fires of hell and for eternity you will justly satisfy the justice that was against you for violating the standard of not honoring and owing and paying God all you owe him. One of the two ways: through Christ or an eternal wrath in hell.

Let’s move on in verse 14, “But when the vine-growers saw him,” that’s saw the unique and one and only son, “they reasoned with one another, saying, ‘This is the heir; let us kill him so that the inheritance will be ours.'” It’s astonishing the perverse thinking of these guys. They actually intend to gain the inheritance of God by murdering God’s Son. Now, trying to gain an inheritance by murder is nothing new, is it? We hear of siblings murdering another sibling trying to get the family inheritance. We hear of one spouse plotting the murder of another spouse wanting some inheritance. We hear of children plotting or carrying out the murder of parents because they want the inheritance. So this isn’t unusual to us. I mean, there is deep depravity in men’s hearts. These religious leaders had indeed cast Jesus out of their hearts already and now they intend to cast him out of Israel and take Israel, God’s inheritance, as their own.

Verse 14, they are saying, “Let’s kill him.” Of course, the parallel truth, spiritual truth here, is in their plotting of the greatest evil and unrighteousness. God is performing the greatest act of righteousness. As they plot to destroy the Son of God, God will perform through his Son’s death the imputation of divine righteousness into his very children. In their vastly unfathomable wickedness and unrighteousness, God achieves his infinite and true righteousness for his children. They could have never figured that out. God knows what he’s doing. Never in the annals of history has a deeper, more heinous evil been committed than the heads of Israel saying, “This is the Messiah. Let’s kill him and take what belongs to him and make it our own.” This was more than a crime of quick passion. This was a thoroughly plotted and planned evil event. It was hammered out in the counsels of the Sanhedrin in Israel. The measure of their sin and guilt is filled up to the last drop.

In verse 14 they said, “He’s the son. He’s the heir. Let’s kill him, then it will be ours.” Actually, for generations, they tried to take what was God’s and pervert it and twist it to fit them and make it theirs. You see, that’s why and I’m going to say this again: folks, we can’t make church what we want it to be. We’ve got to ask God to change our hearts so that we will treasure and enjoy in church as he wants it to be. If we do, what we’re saying is we’re casting out Jesus and making it our own. No, no, no, we have thrown Jesus in his church. We honor the precepts and the values and the truths of his word for his church and we ask God, “Change our hearts to joy in what you want in your church.” Then the world looks at us and says, “Why do you all like that?” You say, “I don’t know. My heart changed. Jesus made me like what he likes.” I begin to rejoice in what he rejoices in. I begin to value what he values. Not perfect yet, we’re in the progressive sanctification, amen? But there is something in me that started and I’m beginning to joy in what God wants church to be and this twisting and perverting of God’s ordained goals and methods for his church so that people will be happier is absolutely wrong. It’s wrong. It has been going on for a long, long time.

Did you see in the paper this weekend about the relic that the Catholic church had sent to Chicago? They brought in a glass casket of the corpse of an 11 year old Italian girl who is supposed to be a saint. It’s actually superstitious and magical kind of stuff. They took her old bones and they put wax all over her and they put her in this glass case and they would come up and kneel and touch the case. Do you know what’s in that case? The bones of a dead little girl and some wax. It’s just vile, silly, superstition. It’s the twisting of religion to play to, now listen to me, the base primitive superstitions of man’s fallen heart and these poor, poor Catholics all over the world trusting in this kind of nonsense. Nothing new.

We Baptists aren’t much better, now. Hold on. We’ve developed all kinds of little gimmicks and fads and systems and structures. Meant well and I’m sure good men meant well, but have led a lot of people to trust in a superstitious hoop jump or going through the motions instead of from the heart learning to faith Christ and put their whole trust in Christ. So we all have to fight, don’t we? And wrestle and struggle that we don’t become like these Pharisees, these religious authorities, to where they twisted through the generations and distorted the Mosaic doctrine that God had given through Moses and they twisted and distorted it beyond prescribed limits so that they crossed over to become usurpers of God’s very kingdom and God’s very land and God’s very country. Having dispatched all the former prophets, now they think, “If we can just get rid of the Son, we will have it all. We can abide forever as masters of the Jewish church.”

Verse 15, Jesus continues with the parable with all these deep, deep, rich spiritual truths. “So they threw him out of the vineyard,” that’s the son, “threw him out and killed him. What, then, will the owner of the vineyard do to them?” First of all, let’s think about “they threw him out.” What happened to Jesus? They threw him out. You realize Calvary was on the outside of the gate. They said, “That’s where you belong. You don’t belong in sacred, holy Israel. It’s not proper for you to be in here. You don’t fit. We’re putting you outside.” Hebrews 13:12, “Therefore Jesus also, that He might sanctify the people through His own blood, suffered outside the gate.” It was the common practice in Israel, the Old Testament prescribed it even, that lepers and all who were considered vile and unclean were thus put outside the gate. They were cut off from God’s people.

My first trip to London, I went to Bunhill Cemetery. Bunhill Cemetery was a cemetery for the non-conformists or the dissenters. Bunhill Cemetery had a lot of Baptist and other non-Anglican ministers buried there, and do you know why they were buried there? Because Bunhill Cemetery was outside the gate. It was outside of England proper, rather London proper. In other words, they were saying, “You Baptists and you others who won’t accept the sprinkling of your babies into the Anglican church and to the state of England, you’re considered unworthy of proper burial in holy England. You’re a dissenter. You’ve got to go outside to be buried.”

That’s the way they considered Jesus and they killed him; cast him out and then killed him. Acts 2:23, Peter is preaching and he says, ” this Man,” Jesus, “delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God,” in other words, God was behind every bit of this though the evil men were performing it, “you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men and put Him to death.”

III. The owner’s retribution. We see this beginning in verse 15, the last part, “What, then, will the owner of the vineyard do to them?” Again, he’s already extended to them over and over this great patience, longsuffering and love and at the end, they refute all of his efforts so what’s going to happen? There is going to be divine retribution cast against them. As a matter of fact, it should be on your screen but Isaiah prophesied of this exactly and our Lord must be indeed thinking of this as he is preaching to these people in this day. Isaiah 5, ” Let me sing now for my well-beloved A song of my beloved concerning His vineyard. My well-beloved had a vineyard on a fertile hill. He dug it all around, removed its stones, And planted it with the choicest vine. And He built a tower in the middle of it And also hewed out a wine vat in it; Then He expected it to produce good grapes, But it produced only worthless ones. And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, Judge between Me and My vineyard. 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? So now let Me tell you what I am going to do to My vineyard: I will remove its hedge and it will be consumed; I will break down its wall and it will become trampled ground. I will lay it waste; It will not be pruned or hoed, But briars and thorns will come up I will also charge the clouds to rain no rain on it.” In other words, I think as Jesus is giving this parable and he refers to this prophesy in Isaiah he’s saying to Israel, “You’ve got a little bit of time left to repent. My patience is running short with Israel.”

Verse 16, he says, “Here’s what I’ll do.” Back to our text in Luke 20:16, “He will come and destroy these vine-growers and will give the vineyard to others.” Now, that’s interesting. He’s not giving up on his enterprise, not at all. He’s not stopping his plan to have for himself a people who will love him and will be with him and he will have them for time and for eternity. He’s not giving up on that at all. He’s just going to take it from national Israel and he’s going to give it to the apostles. What was previously promised to Israel is now transferred over to the apostles and even, God forbid from a Jewish mindset, it’s being given to the Gentiles. Israel, cut off. Israel, cast away. Israel, the promise is muted for you now. It is canceled out. It’s going to someone else. They refused the light God had sent them so now God is removing their candlestick. He makes it very, very clear there what he’s going to do to them as he talks about how he’s going to destroy them in verse 16, “He will come and destroy these vine-growers and will give the vineyard to others.”

Friends, listen to me, I so despise the perversity of the culture who will take a little truth and twist it. The truth of the age right now is that God has been exceedingly longsuffering concerning the wickedness and the sin of our culture in this world so they think, “God must think we’re doing okay.” God waited and waited and waited and waited and waited, sent prophet, after prophet, after preacher, after preacher, then sent his Son, but at the end, he demanded everything he expected and he said, “Okay, my justice will be met by pouring out wrath on the vine-growers who failed me.” Well, the application hits the target. Jesus is giving this parable, he’s giving it to address perhaps even primarily the religious authorities and notice what we see in the last part of verse 16, “When they heard it, they said, ‘May it never be!'” So we see the religious leaders’ response, A. in our outline is anger and denial. This can’t happen. May it never be. Now, in their anger and denial, this is not repentance. This is like, “We’ll always be in charge. We’ll always have it this way. It will always be in our hands. Our children’s children will run this thing for God.” Not knowing that God had removed his Spirit and his blessing from them. So this is not repentance at all, this is a brazen defiance.

Then Jesus response, B. Jesus said, “No, this is what the prophet said was going to happen. This is exactly what’s happening.” His response is, “Prophesy is being fulfilled.” Verse 17, “But Jesus looked at them,” that’s the religious authorities, “and said, ‘What then is this that is written: “The stone which the builders rejected became the chief cornerstone”?'” Who is the stone? It’s Jesus. “I’m the stone,” he’s saying, “and you were God’s builders. He called you to be his builders but you’ve rejected and you rejected the one who is the chief cornerstone.”

Now, when he says “the builders” here, of course, that’s the religious leaders. In building God’s Israel and in a figure of speech you could say, God’s church of the Old Testament, these builders considered Christ as useless in their building. I can take you to many a Baptist church and many an evangelical church today and you can listen to their teaching and preaching for many weeks and almost determine that Christ in the truth of who he has revealed himself to be in the Scriptures is useless to them. They just have very little use for the Christ of Scripture.

They give some lip service to Jesus but they’re not preaching the doctrine of Christ as revealed in the Scripture and so they consider him useless and that’s what Israel did. When God sent the Son, the key one, the key item, if you will, in the building of his church and his work, they said, “We don’t have any use for him.” So they cast him away as useless but he would not stay cast away. Three days after they cast him down, he would rise from the dead, securing the church’s justification and become the cornerstone of God’s true church which will be built upon himself.

Look at verse 18, Jesus says further, “Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces.” That means, “I’m here teaching you. You’ve heard my truth. You’ve heard the truth and if you don’t receive it but stumble over it, it’s going to shatter your life.” But they killed the son and not only sealed their guilt and it sealed their doom and in his death, Jesus secured the inheritance not for national Israel anymore, they’re cut off, but for his church. So he warns all, C. in our outline, in verse 18, “Don’t stumble over me. You will ruin your life.”

Then he adds in verse 18 further, “but on whomever it falls, it will scatter them like dust.” Have you ever had a real dusty table in your house or somewhere and somebody took a heavy book and the dust flew? In other words, Jesus says, “When I return again in absolute judgment, those who do not embrace me as the cornerstone will be blasted like dust flies when a heavy object lands on a table.” Today, the stone is at rest in the Gospel and men observe it and can believe on him, but when the stone returns, he’s going to return as the judging stone. Revelation 6:15-16, “Then the kings of the earth and the great men and the commanders and the rich and the strong and every slave and free man,” that’s everybody, isn’t it? “Hid themselves.” In other words, forget what the secular progressives say that European descendants are evil, it doesn’t matter to God, they’re all lumped together here: the rich, the strong, the slave, the free. They hid themselves “in caves and among the rocks of the mountains; and they said to the mountains and to the rocks, ‘Fall on us and hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb.” Then Psalm 2:7-9, “I will surely tell of the decree of the LORD : He said to Me, ‘You are My Son, Today I have begotten You. Ask of Me, and I will surely give the nations as Your inheritance, And the very ends of the earth as Your possession.” In other words, Jesus is the cornerstone. Everything is his and everything is built on him. And when he returns, verse 9 of Psalm 2, “You shall break them with a rod of iron, You shall shatter them like earthenware.” Now, if you know Christ, you’re in God’s new true church, his new building and then you’re safe from every flood, every wind, every storm. But if you are not, God’s stone is going to come and fall on you and crush you into oblivion.

So in this parable God says, God took took the building permit. He took the building tools. He took the building materials, even the chief cornerstone away from the builders in Israel and he entrusted it to the apostles 2,000 years ago and they’ve begun to build and the apostles wrote the canon of the New Testament under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and they have handed it down to us. We’ll look at Ephesians 2:19-20 and we’re done. “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens,” in other words, at one time they said you Gentiles were outside of God’s house but no longer are you strangers and aliens, “but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God’s household, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the corner stone.”

So God says to Israel explicitly in this parable, “Because of your refusal of my prophets and finally my Son, I take the building permit, the building tools, the building materials out of your hand and I give it to the apostles.” Now listen, God anointed those apostles to pen for us sacred Scripture. We have the completed New Testament. That’s why the Bible says we’re built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets. You say, “Wait a minute, I thought we were built on the foundation of Jesus?” Well, he’s the cornerstone which the apostles and prophets built off of. Now, a chief cornerstone had to be perfectly square because when you build a stone building, you start with that corner and if that cornerstone is right, the vertical walls, the horizontal walls, everything is straight and good. But if the cornerstone is bad, everything is bad. There is only one cornerstone in God’s work, Jesus Christ, and that’s why we have to be very, very careful that we continue to build according to the square of the chief cornerstone, following his lines, his truth and his precepts.

And all of God’s people said, amen. Let’s stand together in prayer.