This Very Stone

BEAT ONE– figurative of any number of the early prophets who were faithful, but the people received them, sometimes by the “flagging of the skin,” or whipping.

KILLED ANOTHER– Amos is believed to have been killed

by the use of a club. Isaiah’s martyrdom took place under the evil king Manasseh who sawed the prophet in two.

STONED ANOTHER– Tradition says that Jeremiah was

killed by stoning.

As Jesus spins out the parable, the priests and people are beginning to recognize that they are the tenants who persecuted the past prophets of God.

They know that the Nazerene has claimed to be the Son

of God... and in several passages from the Bible we are

told that they want to stone Jesus for that claim!

Jesus continues with His parable as He turns their

attention to the Son of the Vineyard. Mark’s Gospel points to the “son’s” preexistence when Mark writes, “He had yet one, a beloved son.”

God so loved the world that He sent His one and only Son. Did the tenants– the rulers of Israel– recognize that Jesus was the Son of God? The suggestion here is that they DID! So why did they crucify Him? Why do people continue to crucify Christ today through their sins that put Him on the cross!

Many don’t want the King’s Son! They don’t want the Lord of Life to be the lord of their lives!

We continue to live in a public square where the wants of the individual are valued to the exclusion of moral decency and justice according to God’s bill of rights. An increasing number of our leaders want Jesus and His followers out of the way, so that we can build America according to a godless standard.

–> A federal judge has ruled that a tiny fish on the official municipal seal of Republic, Montana, is unconstitutional because it indicates Christianity as the city’s religion.

–> A film entitled It’s Elementary is being used

extensively in public schools to promote unbiblical lifestyles, while at the same time making jabs at Christianity.

–> Of course, then there is the first grader in Philadelphia whose parents have gone to court because his teacher would not let him read a favorite story from the Bible to the class, or put up a picture he drew of Jesus to place with other pictures capturing something for which the students are thankful. The Bible cannot come into public classrooms, but students can bring in copies of Hitler’s "Mein Kompf" without any problem.

The Son of God is daily being rejected by our culture. And yet, note what Newsweek admitted in a March issue, and I quote:

“... by any secular standard, Jesus is also the dominant figure of Western culture. Like the millennium itself, much of what we now think of as Western ideas, inventions and values finds its source or inspiration in the religion that worships God in his name. Art and science, the self and society, politics and economics, marriage and the family, right and wrong, body and soul– all have been touched and often radically transformed by Christian influence.” (End of quote)

Like the Jewish leaders standing before Jesus as he told this parable, a growing number of our leaders, like Gov. Ventura who called organized religion a “sham” and a “crutch,” want to get Christ out of the way.