The Patient Zeal of God

Introduction

Good morning and welcome to Dishman Baptist Church. Please take your Bibles and turn with me to Mark 12, Mark 12. We felt that it was necessary to return to the online format this week and we are thankful to all of you who are joining with us this morning through the virtual medium. If this is your first time with us this morning know that we have been meeting in person for the last three months and that next Sunday you are welcome to join us in our building for worship. Also if you’re joining us for the first time please take a moment to fill out a contact card so that we can know you visited and, if you desire, we will contact you and share a little more about our church with you.

When I served in the Navy there were a lot of acronyms that you had to get used to using. But there were two that you never wanted to have connected to your name if at all possible. One was BCD - we called it a Big Chicken Dinner - but the real meaning was a bad conduct discharge. It was the type of discharge recieved for violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice of the highest magnitude and the warning that was always given was that accompanied with the BCD was a code on your discharge papers, your DD-214, that signaled to any employer that you were basically unemployable. Especially if they took any sort of stipend or benefit from the government. You wouldn’t even be able to find a job at MacDonalds with that code was the story told to frighten young sailors in boot camp.

The other acronym that you wanted to avoid was DFC. This was only possible for a select group of people - those who had risen through the ranks to have authority or charge over people. In the Navy most DFC’s were reserved for officers or chief petty officers or above. DFC means Detached For Cause. Meaning that the work center or division that you were responsible for was failing spectacularly or that you had experienced some form of moral or ethical failure and your superiors no longer had confidence in your ability to lead.

If there were ever an entire group of men who deserved a DFC it was the religious leaders of Israel. Over the last few weeks we have seen how they had turned the worship of God into a money making enterprise, a commodity that could be bought, sold and all at a tidy profit that left them comfortable. Last week we were present as they accosted Jesus over who had ultimate authority in the temple or over the conduct of worship within the temple and they clearly thought that it was themselves. And yet in both cases Jesus condemns them or reveals their lack of fitness for the positions that they held. This morning we’re going to continue through this confrontation as we are going to look at a parable that Jesus tells to the interested onlookers who had just watched the exchange over authority. But in so doing we’re not only going to see the further or continued condemnation of the religious elite by Jesus but we’re also going to witness the revelation of two of God’s most beautiful, but also most under-emphasized, attributes.

Mark 12:1–12 CSB

He began to speak to them in parables: “A man planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug out a pit for a winepress, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenant farmers and went away. At harvest time he sent a servant to the farmers to collect some of the fruit of the vineyard from them. But they took him, beat him, and sent him away empty-handed. Again he sent another servant to them, and they hit him on the head and treated him shamefully. Then he sent another, and they killed that one. He also sent many others; some they beat, and others they killed. He still had one to send, a beloved son. Finally he sent him to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But those tenant farmers said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ So they seized him, killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard. What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and kill the farmers and give the vineyard to others. Haven’t you read this Scripture: The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This came about from the Lord and is wonderful in our eyes?” They were looking for a way to arrest him but feared the crowd because they knew he had spoken this parable against them. So they left him and went away.

Having just humiliated the religious elite in front of the crowds in the Temple and eviscerating their claims to authority in the worship of the Lord, Jesus continues the confrontation now turning to the crowds with a parable. It would be no hard task to take this parable as only a rejection for the religious leaders of Israel and to cast about the church today with a dire warning for the direction of the church and those leaders who have led it astray. Remember that the leaders Jesus spoke to and of on this day were not simply the Priests but the Pharisees and the Sadduccees as well - so to take this as a warning only to those in the pastorate and not to any who are in spiritual leadership over areas of the church would be a grave error. But to do so would also to be miss the subtle and significant truths contained within. Let’s look at the parable and then dig a bit deeper to see what else this parable stands to teach us.

An Old Story Made New

Jesus starts out the parable making reference to the planting of a vineyard by a man who owned the land. The imagery of a vineyard was one that was often applied to Israel but this particular description would have immediately caught the crowd’s, and certainly the religious scholar’s, interest. The description that Jesus gives of the vineyard is a near word for word repetition of the vineyard that is described, and was described this morning in our Scripture reading, in Isaiah’s prophecy regarding the apostate condition of the nation of Israel.

Isaiah 5:1–7 CSB

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 winepress there. He expected it to yield good grapes, but it yielded worthless grapes. So now, residents of Jerusalem and men of Judah, please judge between me and my vineyard. What more could I have done for my vineyard than I did? Why, when I expected a yield of good grapes, did it yield worthless grapes? Now I will tell you what I am about to do to my vineyard: I will remove its hedge, and it will be consumed; I will tear down its wall, and it will be trampled. I will make it a wasteland. It will not be pruned or weeded; thorns and briers will grow up. I will also give orders to the clouds that rain should not fall on it. For the vineyard of the Lord of Armies is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah, the plant he delighted in. He expected justice but saw injustice; he expected righteousness but heard cries of despair.

Jesus adjusts the parable a bit - but does so in such a way as to continue to trap the religious elite into condemning themselves. Much the same way the Nathan the prophet had trapped David with his parable about the poor man’s ewe lamb, Jesus lays this tale out slowly allowing the crowd and the leaders outrage to build until he set the hook.

Tenant farming was common in Israel at the time and so the description of the scenario would have been one that the people would have been easily familiar with. The man would have planted the vineyard and then turned it over to the tenants with the expectation that when the vineyard started to produce that he would receive his share of the profits. The time that it would normally take for a farm such as this one to begin to produce a profit would have been about five years.

But these tenants were wicked and the telling of their wickedness would have begun to raise the ire in the crowd. Their righteous indignation at the evil of the tenants would be piqued as Christ tells them that one is beaten and another is dishonored and hit on the head. Still the man sends other servants and some are killed, some are beaten but all are refused and sent away empty handed. In the words of C.H. Dodd these tenants “Pay their rent in blows.” This is exactly how the nation of Israel had treated the prophets that God had sent them. The word servant is often applied to the office of prophet in the Old Testament. In Jeremiah 7:25-26

Jeremiah 7:25–26 CSB

Since the day your ancestors came out of the land of Egypt until today, I have sent all my servants the prophets to you time and time again. However, my people wouldn’t listen to me or pay attention but became obstinate; they did more evil than their ancestors.

Jesus refers to the murder of the prophet Zechariah and lays his blood at the feet of the Pharisees in His condemnation of them that Matthew records for us in Matthew 23.

Matthew 23:29–35 CSB

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous, and you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we wouldn’t have taken part with them in shedding the prophets’ blood.’ So you testify against yourselves that you are descendants of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your ancestors’ sins! “Snakes! Brood of vipers! How can you escape being condemned to hell? This is why I am sending you prophets, sages, and scribes. Some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. So all the righteous blood shed on the earth will be charged to you, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar.

Whether they were killed or beaten as Jeremiah was when he was put in stocks and beaten or when he was later dropped into a well, the prophets were rejected and mistreated by Israel just as these servants were mistreated by the tenants. And in most cased, just as in the case of Zechariah, the mistreatment came not at the hands of the common people but at the hands of the priests or the religious leaders. The people were complicit in that they followed the priest’s lead rather than submitting to the prophets call for repentance and a return to God, but it was the priests that set the tone.

So the man in the parable determines that he will send his son - surely these tenants will respect the heir. And yet we see that they do not. It is possible that the tenants in the story believed that if the son himself were coming that it meant that the man had died and so if they killed the young man that the land would lay unclaimed. After a period of three years in such a state the land could then be claimed and they would have continued to work it and would stand ready to lay claim.

This murder of the son would be extremely onerous to the listeners. Not only did the dishonest tenants kill the son, they refused to even give him a decent burial - a practice unheard of in ancient Israel at the time - instead casting his body out of the vineyard to be fed upon by carrion. Of course we have the privilege of knowing that Jesus is referring to Himself, that He is the beloved son - a term used only two other times in the book of Mark. Both at Christ’s baptism and His transfiguration a voice from Heaven, the voice of the Father, refers to Christ as a “Beloved Son”.

The bait has been taken and now it is time to set the hook. Christ asks what is seemingly a rhetorical question - what then will the owner of the vineyard do? But there is a subtle change to this question from the beginning of His parable. Notice that at the beginning it is a man, the Greek word here is anthropos from which we get our current word anthropology or the study of man, but now as He reaches the end of the story the word changes. To owner in our translation. Most modern translations have it translated this way. The King James Version is actually helpful here as it translated the word Lord. The word is kyrios and in 717 of the 746 times this word is used in the New Testament it is used as a reference to God.

This changes things a bit. It seems that Jesus isn’t just telling some story now to raise the crowds ire, He instead is bringing an indictment against the current religious leadership of the nation using a familiar Old Testament allegory as a backdrop. Now the stinging accusation - Haven’t you read this Scripture? Jesus drives home the point referring back to Psalm 118 and identifying Himself as the cornerstone that the builders were rejecting. Jesus, who had come to Jerusalem with the accolades of the crowd - who even sang and chanted portions of this Psalm

Psalm 118:25–26 CSB

Lord, save us! Lord, please grant us success! He who comes in the name of the Lord is blessed. From the house of the Lord we bless you.

as He rode into Jerusalem, would be challenged and rejected by the religious authorities. The ultimate rejection remained still a few days away but in their hearts they had already rejected Him and had lost their place just as the tenant farmers in the parable would be cast out and the vineyard given to others. In the case of the religious future of the people of Israel it would be given to the men standing there with Jesus as His disciples. This scene must have played through the minds of both Peter and the Sanhedrin when he stood before them later with these words

Acts 4:11 CSB

This Jesus is the stone rejected by you builders, which has become the cornerstone.

The leaders came away from Jesus parable with no illusions of who was meant. There is a massive warning in this passage for anyone who aspires to leadership in the church and to responsibility over His vineyard, over His church. We are merely caretakers of the bride of Christ and we have a great responsibility to present her to Him in pristine condition and to remember who gets the glory for her growth and prospering. We should take care in our ministry practices that we do not reject the cornerstone but instead build on it as Paul wrote in Ephesians 2. But again if that is all that we read from this parable there is much that we miss.

There is a great revelation of the character of God that is found in these verses - first that He is a patient kyrios, then that He is a zealous kyrios and finally or maybe all encompassing that He is a sovereign kyrios.

A Patient Kyrios

In one of His first self-revelations in Scripture God proclaims as one of His attributes His patience

Exodus 34:6–7 CSB

The Lord passed in front of him and proclaimed: The Lord—the Lord is a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in faithful love and truth, maintaining faithful love to a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity, rebellion, and sin. But he will not leave the guilty unpunished, bringing the consequences of the fathers’ iniquity on the children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generation.

But do you ever sit back and contemplate the enormity of God’s patience? Paul would later write in his epistle to the Romans

Romans 2:4 CSB

Or do you despise the riches of his kindness, restraint, and patience, not recognizing that God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance?

You could substitute the word patience in place of kindness to read “not recognizing that God’s patience is intended to lead you to repentance.”

This is one of those sections of a sermon where some of you are thinking “so and so needs to hear this. If ever there was someone who needed to hear about God’s patience it is that person.” But if that is what we are thinking our eyes, our focus is in the wrong place. The first thought that should cross our minds is the immensity, the shockingness of God’s patience with us. In all of creation, in all of the universe, in all of time, it is only humans that are the recipients and benefactors of God’s patience. The earth - plants and animals, water, weather patterns, dirt - none of these receive God’s patience. None of them require it.

“Patience is an expression of God’s moral perfection which is shown only to those who are provoking God by their sin.”

Oswald Winslow said this of the study of God’s patience.

“There is no study of God that presents the infinity of His nature more impressively than the study of His perfections; and among those perfections nothing, perhaps, more strikingly illustrates that infinity than His patience.”

So God is patient with us - because we are always provoking Him with our sin. Just as He patiently endured the treatment of His prophets by the people of Israel. As the owner of the vineyard patiently endures the treatment of his servants - think of it. Put yourself in his place. We wouldn’t have endured that kind of treatment to one of our servants. We would have had the police there or if we had retainers such as this man probably does we would have come ourselves to exact justice. But he patiently sends servant after servant to give the tenants a chance to repent.

This is the picture of the patient God that we were - or are in the case of most of the world - in rebellion against and even now still provoke with our sinful ways. And we are, all of us, constantly provoking Him. This is another measure of His patience.

We will often lose our temper, lose our patience with just one person. Someone who cuts us off on the road or maybe is driving under the speed limit or, often even more infuriating, just at the speed limit. Someone who has a huge cart of groceries and we have only a couple of items but they don’t have the courtesy to turn and look and let us go in front of them. And then the people we live with - you know the one’s - who breath too loud, or squeeze the toothpaste from the middle of the tube. Or the one that I don’t really understand but those who prefer the toilet paper to come off the bottom of the roll, or the top. We are provoked by one person and we lose our patience.

God is provoked by all of mankind - constantly - and yet He still keeps His patience and tolerates all of our slights to His character and His holiness. Even to the point that we may come to suspect that He actually isn’t there at all and that we are free to do as we please. That we’ve actually succeeded in taking over the vineyard and making it ours. Or the flipside of that - we come to complain that He is taking too long. “How much longer Lord. Why do you yet tarry?” we piously ask in our prayers forgetting what Peter wrote

2 Peter 3:8–10 CSB

Dear friends, don’t overlook this one fact: With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day. The Lord does not delay his promise, as some understand delay, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish but all to come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief; on that day the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, the elements will burn and be dissolved, and the earth and the works on it will be disclosed.

Peter actually encompasses all of this point in one succinct sentence - but he also offers the promise that is our next point. And it is one that we should be wary of as we prevail upon His patience. There will be a day, just as Peter says and the one thing we need to remember is that we also have a zealous kyrios.

A Zealous Kyrios

The picture we get from the parable is telling. After all of His patience. After sending servant after servant only to have them mistreated. Even after sending His own son to have him killed. The owner comes and kills the farmers and gives the vineyard to others. Now know this - this is not the result of a provocation from the farmers to the owner. This is not like we would see things - as a revenge killing or the owner had finally hit the end of his patience with the farmers. Even as he approaches the farm knowing what he intends to do, his patience still remains intact. But his zeal for his property, his zeal for his name must be defended.

Also notice from the parable where his zeal is directed - it is not at the vineyard itself. Even though the people of Israel had failed to produce good fruit through the temple system - to the point that they would be condemned in the near future as the temple would be destroyed in 70 AD - the zeal of the owner, the zeal of the Lord is directed at those who were charged with tending the land.

Another way of thinking of the zeal of the Lord is to think of the jealousy He has for His own name and the character of His people. This jealousy is an inherent part of the character of God and is not something that arises sinfully as we so often think of jealousy. His jealousy for His name and the worship attached to His name are revealed in the first commandment

Exodus 20:2–5 CSB

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the place of slavery. Do not have other gods besides me. Do not make an idol for yourself, whether in the shape of anything in the heavens above or on the earth below or in the waters under the earth. Do not bow in worship to them, and do not serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, bringing the consequences of the fathers’ iniquity on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me,

These verses also reveal the thing that arouses God’s jealousy - the introduction of idolatry into the worship that is meant for Him alone. God will not share His glory with another and He will not allow His holiness to be tarnished by worship given both to Him and to another. He will not tolerate His holiness being brought low - and this is where we should take warning as we so often seek to do just that. We are willing to worship God but often it is on our own terms or when it is convenient for us and, borrowing back to the last point, we presume upon His patience thinking that we will be okay.

Yet it is important for us to understand where His zeal comes from. It is an indication of His love for us that He is zealous for us.

John Newton, writer of the hymn Amazing Grace, said this regarding the zeal of God

Zeal is that pure heavenly flame, the fire of love supplies.

Expressing the same sentiment, Charles Spurgeon said

They that love not have no hate, no jealousy but where there is an intense, an infinite love like that which glows in the bosom of God, there must be jealousy.

God’s zeal is most perfectly demonstrated in His own Son. For the holiness of His name and to provide for Himself a people, God sent His own Son to pay the price that no one else could pay. The price demanded by His holiness, the price that is forestalled by His patience but the price that satisfies the requirements of His zeal and His jealousy for His own holiness and the holiness of the people who would bear His name. And in so doing God demonstrates again that He is a sovereign kyrios.

A Sovereign Kyrios

Can you imagine the scene. The father in the parable looks at his only son, his beloved son and sends him off to do what must be done. As He crafts this allegorical tale, Christ is predicting His own death at the hands of so many who are listening. The father in the parable may not have known but the real Father knew. He knew in sending His Son that He would be beaten and killed. We must not allow ourselves to gain a picture of weakness from the father in the story. He is not a weak man. He has the power of life and death. He demonstrates that as he exercises that power after his son is killed. He could have done that before - when the first of his servants returned beaten or surely when the first one was killed - but definitely before his own son had to die.

But not God. The Father knew that the plan that had been worked out between the trinity in Heaven, that had been in motion for four thousand years, had to happen the way that they He had determined that it should. He demonstrates His sovereignty over all events and knows what will happen. Standing there in the temple courts that day Christ predicts His own death but doesn’t leave it at that. He predicts that the stone the builders reject, that the Son that would be killed, would become the cornerstone of the greatest salvation story of the ages - and how did this come about? This came about from the Lord - from His sovereign design

Galatians 4:4 CSB

When the time came to completion, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law,

But it wasn’t enough that He was born, He had to fulfill the purpose for which He was sent

Acts 2:22–23 CSB

“Fellow Israelites, listen to these words: This Jesus of Nazareth was a man attested to you by God with miracles, wonders, and signs that God did among you through him, just as you yourselves know. Though he was delivered up according to God’s determined plan and foreknowledge, you used lawless people to nail him to a cross and kill him.

But all of this took place according to the design of a sovereign God who even now is ordering the universe to accomplish His desires. Our patient, zealous, sovereign kyrios.

Conclusion

Today that leaves us with a question - are you submitted to Him? Are you somehow prevailing on His patience? Living with some pet sin in your life that you are nursing, counting on His tolerance of you when the time comes? Have you been lulled into complacency thinking that His patient demonstration over the last 2000 years means that His zeal is still far off, that the release of His zeal will not come upon us like a thief in the night. Do you provoke His zeal or jealousy by your actions as Paul asks in 1 Corinthians 10?

1 Corinthians 10:22 CSB

Or are we provoking the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he?

Have we forgotten His sovereignty over the world, over our nation, over our state, over a virus, over our church, over our very own lives? The religious leaders had the opportunity for repentance and coldly chose to harden their hearts and reject the Son, reject the cornerstone. These were men who had been in the temple their whole lives and yet missed the truth. Could we be in danger of the same? A.B. Simpson wrote a hymn with words that I will leave you with this morning

Jesus is standing in Pilates hall

Friendless, forsaken, betrayed by all

Hearken! what meaneth the sudden call

What will you do with Jesus

What will you do with Jesus?

Neutral you cannot be;

Some day your heart will be asking

What will He do with me?

This passage this morning is a call to ask just that - what will the patient, zealous, sovereign kyrios do with me? How are you answering that question this morning?