Mark 12:1-12 - The Consequence of Rejection

If you’re anything like me, you hate rejection.

If you don’t know what it’s like to be rejected, you’ve never been a teenage boy.

The notion of walking into a room thinking you’re going to be rejected is crippling.

I have a tendency to try to get ahead of rejection.

If I think there’s a slight possibility to be rejected, I have a really hard time trying to do what I wanted to do.

Jesus isn’t that way.

It’s absolutely amazing that our God came down to this earth incarnate.

He became truly man and truly God.

Knowing He was going to be rejected.

Context:

The Pharisees elders came to Jesus and asked “Who do you think you are.”

They’ve been continually rejecting this notion that Jesus is the Messiah who has come to save His people from their sins.

Fear of man crippled the Pharisees and their own partial recognition of who Jesus is led them reject Him.

They rejected Jesus’s authority as the sovereign Son of God.

Big Idea: Reject the Cornerstone and you will be rejected.

Jesus responds to their rejection of Him in a parable.

Earthly story-heavenly meaning.

Made up story to reveal God’s Kingdom in a way we can understand.

Stand to read

Mark 12:1–2 ESV

1 And he began to speak to them in parables. “A man planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a pit for the winepress and built a tower, and leased it to tenants and went into another country. 2 When the season came, he sent a servant to the tenants to get from them some of the fruit of the vineyard.

Leader: This is God’s Word

Everyone: Thanks be to God.

Jesus reminds the chief priests of Isaiah 5, where the vineyard represents the people of God.

God had taken exquisite care of this vineyard.

He planted it in the best soil

He dug out all the rocks

He built a watchtower

“what more was there to do for my vineyard, that I have not done to it” (Isa. 5:4)

But the vineyard grew wild grapes.

These were nasty, despite how good God’s care was.

Isaiah’s point was the Israel cannot say, “It’s your fault we ended up this way, because you neglected us.

It’s their fault, because they had rejected God.

It had been this way since that garden of Eden.

God had created everything perfectly, yet Adam and Eve took the fruit that God had commanded them not to.

They were convinced that God owed them that tree.

The consequences of Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God have trickled down through history to us.

God has given us exceedingly good gifts.

We want the gifts, but we don’t want God.

Jesus gives us a twist in the story

Isaiah’s story was a condemnation of the people as a whole, but Jesus’s is an attack on the religious leaders.

He doesn’t point to the vineyard, but those who were to care for the vineyard.

He had given His people everything.

He provided the vineyard, the winepress, the tower.

He leased out this beautiful place, and the tenants began to believe that they now owned it.

When the Owner wants some of the fruit, they respond with wickedness.

Mark 12:2–5 (ESV)

2 When the season came, he sent a servant to the tenants to get from them some of the fruit of the vineyard. 3 And they took him and beat him and sent him away empty-handed. 4 Again he sent to them another servant, and they struck him on the head and treated him shamefully. 5 And he sent another, and him they killed. And so with many others: some they beat, and some they killed.

The owner created this beautiful vineyard and sent servants to collect just a small percentage of its fruit.

Those who had leased this vineyard began to believe that the vineyard was theirs.

What Jesus is showing us is God’s pattern of patience and our pattern of wickedness.

Throughout the Old Testament, God had sent prophets to call the people to repentance.

They were murdered one-by-one.

Isaiah was sawn in two

Jeremiah was stoned to death

Amos was beaten to death

The list goes on and on.

God had this grand salvation for His chosen people, but they stopped listening to God.

They rejected God’s Word and His messengers.

This warns us that:

Rejecting God begins when we stop listening.

Our culture immerses us in this belief that “If it feels good, I should do it.” or “follow your heart.”

When that type of philosophy combats God’s Word, we always have a leaning to listen to our feelings more than we listen to Truth.

We grow father from God because we reject His Word.

God has given us His Word to reveal Himself to us.

God wrote a book. That reality blows me away every time I stop to think about it. Pages and pages of God. His thoughts, His words, His heart. Right there, just a few inches away.

John Piper

In the Bible, we find the words of eternal life—This is an intense gift to us.

God has given us such a great salvation in Jesus Christ, yet we reject it because we’ve stopped listening to God.

Friends, we must Stand on the Word and walk by the Spirit.

The tenants would not hear from the messengers.

Their wickedness only deepened.

Not only did they not listen, they beaten. Then they murdered.

Over and over again, God sent messengers and they killed them.

Mark 12:6 ESV

6 He had still one other, a beloved son. Finally he sent him to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’

There was no one greater to send.

This pattern of patience extends even to sending His Son.

The tenants should respect the authority of the Owner’s Son.

They actually double down on their wickedness.

Mark 12:7–8 ESV

7 But those tenants said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ 8 And they took him and killed him and threw him out of the vineyard.

This is calculated wickedness.

This parable isn’t to show the naivety of the father, but the wicked entitlement of the tenants.

They confused patience with weakness.

They regarded him as soft and powerless to do anything about their rebellion.

They believed they deserved the inheritance and the owner would do absolutely nothing about it.

Entitlement is the belief that you are owed something.

“I deserve this. I have a right to this. It’s mine.”

If we eliminate the son, it will be ours.

The owner had been so patient with them, and they took it for granted.

They rejected the owner because they believe they deserved the vineyard.

This teaches us that:

Rejecting God intensifies with our entitlement

We do this exact same thing with Jesus.

I want the blessings of heaven, but I want nothing to do with God.

We justify it by believing that we aren’t that bad.

Entitlement is when we fail to see that what we deserve is hell.

This rejection of God begins when we think we deserve more than hell.

God has given us patience and mercy. “Of course, He has. I deserve it. Of course God is going to forgive us. We’re His people.”

We’ve bought into this universal forgiveness that is profoundly unbiblical.

We’ve treated God as a second-rate genie that’s here to give us whatever we want when we pray to Him.

We functionally reject the idea that we’re supposed to be changed by following Jesus.

The tenants were complete morons! They believed that if they get rid of the son, they can still have the vineyard.

They mistaken his patience for weakness.

Mark 12:9 ESV

9 What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others.

He was patient, until that patience gave out.

They had rejected him in their entitlement, even to the point of rejecting his son by murdering him.

We have rejected the beautiful life that God called us to live in Christ.

He gave us good gifts—He didn’t cheap out on us.

We have this mischaracterization that God is this gigantic fun-sponge.

“You have to obey all the rules or the cosmic-kill joy will smite you.”

This is such a stupid idea of who God is.

The Lord gives good gifts

God’s Kingdom is a beautiful garden filled with endless that the Lord has provided through Jesus Christ.

In our entitlement, we believe we deserve it.

“I deserve it and God is in my way of happiness.”

The tenants rejected the owners son, and they didn’t get the vineyard.

When you reject the Son of God, you don’t get the Kingdom.

What we see is that:

Rejecting God ends with our own rejection.

In our sin, we’ve taken the good things of God and distorted them because we want the vineyard, not the owner.

“I’ll take it for myself”

The Lord has been patient with us.

We take this patient mercy for granted, foolishly thinking that God is weak.

Gospel presentation

We need God to be patient and gracious toward us!

God is holy and must reject sin!

We’re sinners, so the only natural response God should have toward us is rejection!

But this is why He sent His Son!

Jesus came and was totally rejected!

On the cross, Jesus stepped in as our substitute to be despised and rejected so that you and I could be loved and accepted by God!

Jesus took your rejection!

Jesus took your eternal punishment!

Jesus took your guilt and shame to the cross, and killed it there!

The full weight of the wrath and rejection of God was poured out on Jesus so that you and I could be forgiven of our sins totally by faith in Jesus.

The Son of God came to be rejected and die so that the inheritance promised by the Father would be given to others (v. 9)

God’s chosen people rejected the salvation that God promised, but now it is given to those who trust in Jesus!

Will you put your trust in Jesus?!

Will you receive or reject Him?!

It’s only through the blood of Jesus you can be forgiven!

It’s only through the life of Jesus that we can be set free from the slavery that our sin has us in!

The destruction of our sin and the resurrection of the Son of God promises us eternal life with God!

If you’re not a Christian: Don’t reject the grace that’s been given to us in Jesus!

You can be forgiven of your sins now!

Recognize that you deserve hell and judgement is coming, but God has shown you mercy!

Believe that Jesus died for your sins and you can be saved!

I’d love to talk with you about this.

If you’re a Christian: Don’t reject the call to take the next step.

The initial plan of the owner was to get some fruit.

God desires for the gospel to produce fruit in our lives and begin growing us.

We won’t be perfect, but we’ll begin to change!

The fruit of a tree never sprouts large! It must grow!

Similarly with our love for God and becoming more like Jesus.

Jesus reveals to us that this has been God’s desire all along.

Jesus reminded them of Psalm 118.

Mark 12:10–12 ESV

10 Have you not read this Scripture: “ ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; 11 this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes’?” 12 And they were seeking to arrest him but feared the people, for they perceived that he had told the parable against them. So they left him and went away.

Jesus changes the metaphor to a building.

The stone is a symbol of the Messiah that God’s people would reject.

They threw the stone away as worthless.

God takes what was rejected by man and makes it the cornerstone.

The most important stone to the whole structure.

It is the foundation.

The rejection, humiliation, and crucifixion of Jesus was tragic, but God will use it for a greater reality: The salvation of His people.

Something so great that “it is marvelous in our eyes.”

We can either identify with the rejectors or the rejected.

How will you respond to the Lord’s patience? Is the gospel marvelous in your eyes?

Will you reject the Son or Present fruit to the King?

Everyone has a next step and it all begins right here.

Receive the gospel, don’t reject it.

Pray the gospel over yourself.

You deserve hell, but Jesus came to save you from your sins.

Trust in Christ and commit to following Him!

Commit to studying the Bible with other people.

Turn to Jesus in repentance daily.

No one who ever came to Jesus for forgiveness has been denied.