Today’s reading: Jeremiah 16; Matthew 21
We can choose to reject the truth God has revealed to us, but that doesn’t mean we get to define truth on our own, it only means we are denying reality…
In Matthew 21 Jesus tells the parable of the vineyard owner leasing his vineyard out to tenants who didn’t want to pay him the rent they owed (a portion of the produce of the vineyard). They beat and killed the man’s servants, and when he eventually sends his son, they say, “This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and have his inheritance,” so they kill him as well. How absolutely ludicrous is this story? A tenant refusing to pay the land owner? Sure, that happens all the time. But thinking that by killing the heir, they can just have his inheritance themselves? Nobody would ever think that! That’s just not how the world works…
And this was exactly Jesus’ point. No matter how much the tenants didn’t like their arrangement with the owner, and no matter how much they wanted to just have the vineyard for themselves, murdering the owner’s son would never accomplish that. It is absolutely absurd! But it is also exactly what the Jewish leaders were doing. Jesus was performing every sign and fulfilling every prophecy that was written about the Messiah in the Jewish Scriptures. He wasn’t just claiming to be someone important, but was backing up His words and His teachings by an absolute flood of miracles. And yet, despite all the evidence Jesus was giving them for who He was, they rejected Him and would ultimately kill Him. Why? Because they didn’t like what He was teaching about them, and the people were flocking to Him instead of them. They were the tenants who were supposed to be watching over the vineyard, preparing for the arrival of the Son, but when He showed up, they didn’t want to hand over their authority and decided to kill Him instead.
While it looks a little different than this now, we see people doing this same thing all the time today. People don’t like what God has to say about some aspect of their life or identity, and so they choose to reject Him for it. The assumption is that their thoughts, feelings, or desires obviously can’t be wrong or misguided, so clearly there can be no truth behind the idea of a God who would dare say something to the contrary. Either God is not there at all, or someone just lied about Him somewhere along the way, and He never really called the thing they want to hold onto wrong or sinful. The reasonable approach to hearing that the creator God of all the Universe might take issue with how you are living your life would be to actually consider the evidence for Him and then, if it seems like He is there, consider what He has to say as more authoritative than your feelings, but that is not how people approach the question. At the first indication that God doesn’t agree with everything they think or desire, they decide He must be false or misrepresented and reject Him without another thought.
But the owner of the vineyard is coming…
We may be able to reject God here and now and feel like there are no real consequences, but there will be a day when we are all standing before Him and answering for what we have done in this life. Whether we die, or whether we are alive when Jesus returns, we will all stand before Him in judgement. At that point, whose truth is going to win out? If we reject the Lord’s truth because we don’t like it or because it’s inconvenient, that doesn’t make it untrue, and we will be answering for that rejection in eternity.
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