The Exalted Stone of Judgment

So first, verses 33 through 40, let's look at the actual parable that Jesus tells.

Jesus, again, helps give an explanation here.

This is more of an allegory as a number of the characters have direct connections with people in historical context.

This is more than just a singular point Jesus is trying to drive across, but he's wanting to tell, in some ways, the story of redemptive history up until this point.

And he does it through a parable.

And he begins to tell this parable of a landowner, this landowner who would have been wealthy because he bought a vineyard.

Now a vineyard wouldn't produce a harvest until after at least four years.

So the landowner had to have enough money that he could buy land and invest in it without seeing a return in his investment in the first four years.

And this landowner buys this land, plants a vineyard, and you notice what all he does with it.

He plants this vineyard, he puts a fence around it, he digs a wine press and builds a watchtower.

Now the chief priests and the Pharisees, as they hear this parable, their mind is going to go to a particular place in the Old Testament.

Jesus is intentional here, I think.

If you go back and you look at Isaiah 5, Isaiah 5 gives this song at the very beginning of Isaiah chapter 5, but listen to the description of what Isaiah gives in verses 1 and 2 back in Isaiah 5.

This prophet, before taken into exile in Babylon, writes this, I will sing about the one I love, a song about my loved one's vineyard.

The one I love had a vineyard on a very fertile hill.

He broke up the soil, cleared it of stones and planted it with the finest vines.

He built a tower in the middle of it and even dug out a wine press there.

He expected it to yield good grapes, but it yielded worthless grapes.

Isaiah goes on, and this is a description given as Isaiah is confronting Israel.

He's confronting them with their disobedience to God.

God had made them, he set his kingdom up in the nation of Israel, but this vine that he planted, this nation of Israel, wasn't producing good fruit, regardless of all the care that God had given.

And so it was a confrontation against Israel there in Isaiah.

And so this is what Jesus is drawing from.

He's taken this song from Isaiah and now applying it in the first century.

As we look at the different characters in this parable, some of them may be obvious to you.