Criminals in the Vineyard (Part B)

What is wrong with the owner?

I would have retaliated at the first crime with unabated force, using as my platform an eye for an eye. But that's not what the story is about. The story is about the heart of God in the face of evil men. The slowness of God is due to the long suffering of God.

That's why they're getting away with it. This is Cross Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the book of Mark.

Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. Today is part two of Pastor Rick's study called Criminals in the Vineyard. He's teaching in Mark chapter 12. What does God want? God wants loyalty. He wants to be loved in return.

But it was not to be. Not by these people. It would be by the church. Peter loved, you know, they all love the Lord. I'm not trying to say Peter loved him more than the others, but Peter is in the forefront. We see Peter love him. We see him weeping bitterly because he failed the one he loved so much.

God wasn't getting that from others. We come to church. We sing songs. We love the Lord.

We raise our arms up. We weep sometimes. We just love the Lord. But there's so many people that hate him. And you want to say, do you even understand what you are hating?

Or do you just think that you can just hate indiscriminately? You can treat God the way you would never want to be treated yourself. To which they would respond, they don't believe it. What makes you think your book is right? It's a matter of interpretation. If you really want truth, if you really want God, he's going to know it and he's going to begin to work in your heart so that when you come across a Christian, you will receive.

So that is quite revealing, is it not? He continues here in verse 3, And they took him and beat him and sent him away empty-handed. Well, I guess in the parable, if you try to apply some logic to the parable, you say, well, maybe the owner of the vineyard said, well, maybe they were just drunk that day. Something just must have, you know, this is not normal. What right, what right had they to beat anyone?

None. That's what made them criminals. These were gangsters. And that's who was overseeing the people of Israel. We've had it in church history.

Almost all the pulps were gangsters. One was killed in the act of physical adultery. So this isn't something that's bizarre in the sense of history.

It's bizarre to heaven, to God it is. From the time of Moses to the time of Elijah, continuous rebellion and idolatry and apostasy occurred. Joshua said, I don't think you guys could do this. My house is going to serve the Lord, but I don't think you guys are up to it.

You say you are. He was right, largely. In the days of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zechariah, who was the last of the prophets to be martyred before the coming of John the baptizer. They were persecuted.

It was persistent persecution. These heaven-sent prophets. Matthew 23 verse 35, Jesus speaking, He says to these same people, That on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Because you weren't listening to God.

You were listening to yourselves. You were out for you in God's name as these vine dressers were. In Hebrews He says, of whom the world was not worthy. What makes them not worthy? Well, their resistance to fact and truth. Stephen, the first martyr of the church, under full-blown anointing, told them the truth about themselves and they killed him.

And this is what he said. Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? Did they miss one? He said, Stephen still speaking, and they killed those who foretold the coming of the just one. Now remember, Stephen is Jewish. He's one of them ethnically speaking, but he's not one of them spiritually speaking. Stephen then said, of whom you now have become the betrayers and murderers.

He says, of the just one whom you have become, murderers and betrayers. This stuff really happens. It's not like you watch some of these goofy movies where, you know, that never happens. If that happens, you know, you watch the explosion and they're just walking away and their hair is flowing. And it's like, yeah, the concussion would kill them. They're too close.

This really happened. Wickedness against God's messengers. Again, it's been persistent through the ages. It's now happening to us. What do we do? What do we do? We stand up to them and tell them the truth. That's what. No matter what, whether they like it or not.

Well, you get to say your little perverted notions about them. You're attacking children. The diabolical things that are happening now are unprecedented. Maybe before Noah, when the world was all huddled together. Maybe at Babel, before the tongues were split. But never globally. There the world was centralized in one area.

Everybody was there. But the globe was uninhabited. Now the globe is pretty much, there are no more frontiers.

And, I mean, you can get a steak dinner in Antarctica. It's just, people have gone everywhere and they've taken their sin with them. But the perversity that we're seeing nowadays, Sodom and Gomorrah has gone global and it has gone nuclear.

I'll come back to more of that because it, so what do we do? And it's, we stand up with the gospel. We give them our message because still within those numbers of perverted souls there are those that can be saved. Our Bibles have blood on its pages. And that's what Jesus was saying. Which of the prophets, I mean, that was Stephen, but the Lord saying, you know, from Abel to Zechariah. Blood for preaching the truth. In this parable, he is the son, as we stood and read the word, he is the son that will be killed and he knows it. That's the big difference.

He knows it. Then came John the Baptist. And when it was time for John to be martyred, the Jews really had no direct involvement in that, but they looked the other way. When he was arrested and beheaded and they could have stopped it. They could have at least protested and they did not. And now they're going to plot the death of the son of God for daring to practice what he preached.

That sounds like us today. Are we not persecuted for daring to practice what we preach? How dare you disagree with me? I can speak my perverted notions and you can't protest, but you can't speak righteous notions without severe punishment. Such is the history.

Such are the facts. Verse 4, again, he sent them another servant. And at him they threw stones, wounded him in the head, and sent him away shamefully treated. These, of course, in the parable are the prophets from generation to generation. So it's not God didn't send, okay, he sent, you know, one prophet in the days of Ahab, he sends Elijah. And that's it.

No, that's not it. He sends one for every generation. He's an unbroken witness. He always has his remnant.

He always has his voice available. And Israel knew it. And so this character here, these characters here beginning in verse 4 and throughout this parable are his prophets entrusted with God's word to be God's voice. This is a microcosm of this is in Moses. God said to Moses, you will be like God and Aaron will be like your prophet. I will speak to you, Moses, and you will tell Aaron, and Aaron will speak it.

That's how God works. He speaks from heaven to the prophet, from the prophet to the people. Exodus, chapter 7, verse 1, so Yahweh said to Moses, see, I have made you as God to Pharaoh. And Aaron your brother shall be your prophet. Now if you think that that is some sort of, you know, evolution to deity and humans, you're out of your mind.

That is not at all what's going on. Moses was not divine. Man cannot be divine. We can be Christ-like. We will be perfected and like him in heaven. But we will never be gods. That New Age nonsense is just so ridiculous.

Let's move on. I mean, if someone says, you know, they are turning into God, just ask them to hover. I mean, you're divine, you can do all sorts of stuff, hover.

They can't. And anyway, if that's childish, it's even better. Anyway, back to verse 4. To them, Christ was wrong for pointing it out. We know Isaiah says, you know, there are those that call evil good and good evil, and we're surrounded by them.

There's this infestation of them now. And today we have a planet that has available to it the printed word of God in probably every language. I mean, it's just everywhere God's word is available. And on the internet, no one has an excuse.

You haven't had an excuse for a very long time in many parts of the world. But they don't believe God's word applies to the wickedness that they are doing somehow. This madness, sin does that. Sin makes a human being crazy when they're otherwise not crazy. It makes them resent being told that they're doing the thing that they're actually doing.

As I mentioned, we have Sodom and Gomorrah everywhere. Unrestrained perversity. No help from the government on this issue.

No help from corporations. Yes, this is an element of resistance, but it is not succeeding. They are infecting everything. They are targeting our teens. They are targeting our little children.

Who does that? With perversity, with sickness, with a demonic energy that we're not used to, but we're not afraid of either. Not afraid of in the sense that we will fight back. We're afraid of it in the sense that we know it's evil like you're afraid of a bullet. I don't want to be hit by a bullet.

Even if you threw it at me, I don't want to be hit by it. Whole governments, corporations, out of their minds, their views and their agenda. What's the connection, pastor, between the parable and this perversity? This exaltation of evil. Not a righteous exaltation.

An unrighteous exaltation. Well, the connection is this. We're telling them. Just like Jesus was telling the Pharisees, you're the problem in the story. We're telling the world, you're the problem in the story. And God's going to deal with you.

And I'll revisit that again. They hate. They hated then and they hate now. Satan hates being resisted. Satan is intolerant of those who are righteous and oppose him. And he creates this blindness to fairness and to reason and decency.

And there are many who go in by it. The murderers of Jesus did not die on the day that Jesus died, on the day that they murdered him. They lived to kill again.

And Stephen is proof of that. But they eventually died. Then they were shocked and they were sentenced without appeal.

It was eternal. Not life without parole, but eternity without light. No hope. It was too late. There comes a point where it is too late.

And we get little warnings about this in this life. Verse 5, And again he sent another, and him they killed, and many others, beating some and killing some. Now you've got to read the story and say, what is wrong with this?

What is wrong with the owner? I would have retaliated at the first crime with unabated force, using as my platform an eye for an eye. But that's not what the story is about. The story is about the heart of God in the face of evil men. The slowness of God is due to the long suffering of God.

That's why they're getting away with it. Paul got away with overseeing the garments of those killing Stephen. God was long suffering with Paul. Paul writes a lot about that. He probably preached on it very often. Peter says this, The Lord is not slack concerning his promise.

Pause there. When Peter says the Lord is not slack, he has the Jesus Christ he was with for three and a half years, he has him in mind. When he says the Lord is not slack, he's my Jesus who is God the Son.

He's not slack concerning his promise, as some count slackness, but is long suffering toward us. Who is us? People. Sinners. Not willing that in he should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

So in the story God is saying, Jesus Christ is saying, there are these criminals in the vineyard. But I'm long suffering. I want to reach these guys. I don't want to just go and execute them. I'm going to give them a chance and it's going to cost my people their blood and shame. Long suffering is an experience of love.

That's where it comes from. 1 Corinthians chapter 13 verse 4, Love suffers long. Jesus is holding up before them the great mercy and long suffering of God in the face of merciless, violent people. Because sin in this life, sin in this life makes humans do things like this. And God wants us to know that evil, while it is used as a filter of God, is not who God is. God wants us to understand that he is merciful. And he brings this out early on in Israel's experience in Exodus 34. Now Yahweh descended in the cloud and stood with him there and proclaimed the name of Yahweh. And Yahweh passed before him and proclaimed Yahweh, Yahweh God.

Now pause there. That name, that covenant name, it means salvation, bottom line. It's attached to sovereignty and salvation at the same time. And he continues, we'll reread that part. And Yahweh passed before him and proclaimed Yahweh, Yahweh God, merciful and gracious, long suffering, abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgressions and sin, and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting iniquity on the fathers, upon the children, upon the children's children, to the third and fourth generation.

There's so much in that. God is saying, you've got the generation part, everybody gets stumped by that. It's not generational sin. Well, my father sinned, so I'm a sinner. Well, by that logic, Israel never would have gotten into the promised land.

Nobody would get forgiven. He's saying sin is nothing to play with, and it will spread from one generation to another generation unless there's a salt of the earth and a light of the world to deal with this. And what he is emphasizing to Moses, so that Moses can go tell the people which he did and puts it in print and the Holy Spirit preserves it to this day, is that God is merciful and gracious, long suffering, abounding in goodness and truth. And why is God insisting on this? Because God says, life is not this way. Life is vicious. Your heart will be trampled, even torn out from you from time to time. It is a brutal affair because of the curse on mankind. But there's more to this life than what you're suffering.

And I want you to understand there's more to me also. And I don't applaud these things, but I'm going to work through them nonetheless. I will not be deterred.

I will filter out from creation a people who will be a new creation and be with me in heaven. And those are the facts. We have enough of Christ and experience to be able to say, as you wish, Lord, as you will, your will be done, no matter how much it hurts. I don't have to like it.

I have to know it, I have to submit to it, or I become a rebel. Jeremiah, who was, you know, Jeremiah just suffered so much. They almost killed him a few times. If it wasn't for one Ethiopian, he would have, Ethiopian going to the king and saying, listen, we don't get him out of this mire, he's going to die.

And they hauled him out. It was just some of his experiences. He writes this, he says, but let him who glories glory in this, that he understands and knows me.

Well, what's to know about you? Well, in the New Testament Christian, we look at Jesus Christ, the only begotten son. He has revealed him.

John gets to that point early on in his gospel, the first chapter. Well, that's what Moses was saying. He who glories glory in this, that he understands and knows me. Well, what is there to know about you? That you are Yahweh, Yahweh God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, abounding in goodness, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgressions and sin, and by no means clearing the guilty. God has that balance. What is not attractive about that?

Everything is attractive about that. This is the God we want and love, Jeremiah continues, that he knows me, that I am Yahweh, exercising lovingkindness, judgment and righteousness in the earth, for in these I delight, says Yahweh. Remember, Yahweh of the Old Testament is Jesus Christ in the New Testament.

That name is a big deal, because if you mess with that name, it was a capital offense. And yet, God says in Psalm 139, I will honor my word above my name. That's the scripture. And more, because in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us.

We beheld his glory, full of grace and truth. Verse 6, now that we've got this understanding why, in the parable, the owner of the vineyard is sending more men to die, to reach these knuckleheads, it's because God is long suffering and merciful, but he's not a doormat. Because at the end of the parable, he deals with these guys. Verse 6, therefore still having one son, his beloved son, his beloved, he also sent him to them last, saying they will respect my son. Now of course, a parable is a parable. And it would have been, in fact, it would have been cruel to, you know these guys are killing everybody you send. Why would you send your son? Well, because the parable goes beyond the human experience because of the God factor.

And again, these boys knew it. So the son in the story, the son in the parable, would have known, Dad, you're sending me where they're killing everybody. But he's supposed to have clout, so the son knowingly goes into dangerous territory, just like in reality, Jesus Christ came to earth knowing that they were going to kill him to save sinners. Revelation 5, speaking of Jesus Christ, you were slain and have redeemed us to God by your blood out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation. That's how many people are going to be saved because of Christ coming to this vineyard, knowing they were going to kill him because of all the witness of the martyrs testified, they killed us, they're going to kill you.

But it's worth it. And so he shall see the transgression of his soul and be satisfied, said Isaiah. He shall see the sufferings, he will endure the suffering and the shame, and he'll be satisfied.

Why? Because of his work out of every tribe, tongue and people and nation, there are those in heaven, in glory, in light forever. That's why.

The focus then shifts. Verse 7, but those vine dressers said among themselves, this is the heir, come let us kill him and the inheritance will be ours. But those vine dressers said amongst themselves, let's kill him. This is deliberate and that's what Jesus is saying. When people behave this way, it's not because they've been out in the sun too long. It's because that's what's in their heart. Or maybe we put it this way, because of what is not in their heart. God is not in their heart, a loving, merciful, righteous God, holiness is not in them.

Deliberately and out of self-interest, which he is saying here, let's kill him so we can take the inheritance, self-interest, out of that they committed this egregious crime. It is abysmal how people treat truth when it comes to God. In the parable and in Jerusalem and in history to this day, people pull this off. Supposing that they're going to get away with it, supposing that they can exchange their view of deity for Christ or God's revelation of deity, speculation over revelation, supposing they'll be better off without him.

A tactical blunder, a typical blunder, an eternal one. And God is not going to put up with it forever. He's just going to say, you know, that's that, you've made your choice. God really, in this sense, doesn't send anyone to hell.

He just lets them go where they want to go, as far away from him as they can get, and that would be hell. Thanks for tuning in to Cross-Reference Radio for this study in the book of Mark. Cross-Reference Radio is the teaching ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia. To learn more information about this ministry, visit our website, crossreferenceradio.com. Once you're there, you'll find additional teachings from Pastor Rick. We encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. When you subscribe, you'll be notified of each new edition of Cross-Reference Radio. You can search for Cross-Reference Radio on your favorite podcast app. That's all we have time for today, but we hope you'll join us next time as Pastor Rick continues to teach through the book of Mark, right here on Cross-Reference Radio.