New Tenants
“Listen to another parable: There was a landowner who planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a winepress in it and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and went away on a journey.
When the harvest time approached, he sent his servants to the tenants to collect his fruit.
“The tenants seized his servants; they beat one, killed another, and stoned a third.
Then he sent other servants to them, more than the first time, and the tenants treated them the same way.
Last of all, he sent his son to them. ‘They will respect my son,’ he said.
“But when the tenants saw the son, they said to each other, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him and take his inheritance.’
So they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.
“Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”
“He will bring those wretches to a wretched end,” they replied, “and he will rent the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him his share of the crop at harvest time.”
Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures: “ ‘The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone; the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes’ ?
“Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.
He who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed.”
When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard Jesus’ parables, they knew he was talking about them.
They looked for a way to arrest him, but they were afraid of the crowd because the people held that he was a prophet.
Matthew 21:33-46
Here Jesus uses a simple parable to illustrate for the people of his day what was to happen and has happened as we know today.
Matthew records,
“When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard Jesus’ parables, they knew he was talking about them.
They looked for a way to arrest him, but they were afraid of the crowd because the people held that he was a prophet.”
Jesus came to give salvation to the Jews first. They knew the one true living God. Therefor it was only right that God would send his One and Only Son to the Jews first.
That being said the religious leadership refused to recognize who Jesus was although it is evident from what is said here the people held that he was at least a prophet.
John writes,
“He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.
He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.
Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.”
John 1:10-13.
Had the Jews and particularly the Jewish religious leadership accepted Jesus in the first place the church would have started from there however they rejected Jesus and with the help of the Roman governor, a gentile, had him put to death.
They completely rejected the teachings of Jesus.
I believe it was God’s intentions from the beginning of the world to take the news of Salvation through faith to all the world.
Unfortunately the Jew did not do it. Thus Jesus was sent. He in turn sent his apostles who started a movement that to date has reached 2.2 billion (2,200,000,000) people in every part of the world.
God did not just love the Jews although they were and are his chosen people and I firmly believe that nations and individuals will be judged in part by how they treat God’s chosen people.
Still it is the Christians that have taken the love of God to all nations.
History records that by the end of the second century the church was almost entirely made up of none Jews.
It is only in recent times that a concerted effort has been launched by Christians to reach God’s chosen people the Jews with the news that Jesus is indeed the suffering Messiah mentioned in Isaiah. And that he will one day return to his people as a conquering messiah.
Think about it.
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