16.
When Do You Give Up?
So, you’re a good parent. (I tend to believe the best in people until
they prove themselves otherwise. So let me also jump to this assumption about
you the reader, if you don’t mind.) Yet, despite your best efforts, your
child is not – well, he’s not as obedient to your teaching as he should
be. In fact, just for the sake of the argument, let’s say that your child is
downright disobedient –
At
what point do you give up on him?
In
the book of Matthew, Jesus references this situation as it applies to
the Trinity and its “disobedient children” in the Parable of the Vineyard
Owner, in chapter 21, verses 33-40:
“Listen
to another parable: There was a man, a landowner, who planted a vineyard, put a
fence around it, dug a winepress in it, and built a watchtower. He leased it to
tenant farmers and went away. When the grape harvest drew near, he sent his
slaves to the farmers to collect his fruit. But the farmers took his slaves,
beat one, killed another, and stoned a third. Again, he sent other slaves, more
than the first group, and they did the same to them. Finally, he sent his son
to them. ‘They will respect my son,’ he said. But when the tenant
farmers saw the son, they said among themselves, ‘This is the heir.
Come, let’s kill him and take his inheritance!’ So they seized him,
threw him out of the vineyard, killed him. Therefore, when the owner of the
vineyard comes… what will he do to those
farmers?”
In case you’re not one of the elect and don’t
understand all the analogies within our Lord’s parables: “the man” represents God the Father; the “slaves” he sent
were His various prophets who warned
Israel throughout the Old Testament of her blatant sin and the penance that was
forthcoming if they didn’t change their ways; “his fruit” is the saved; and “his son” is…, well, His Son. Christ was telling the
Pharisees and chief priests – the very people He meant by the “tenant farmers” charged with caring
for His elect – that they had killed his prophets, would soon kill even Him
(doesn’t that take juevos?), and asked
them, point blank, “What will God do with you?”
The
Pharisees’ answer was clear and concise, not to mention precisely what they would have done.
“He will completely destroy
those terrible men,” they told Him, “and lease his vineyard to other farmers
who will give him the produce at the harvest.” (Matthew 21:41)
And
that would undoubtedly be our
reaction too, wouldn’t it? The Pharisees – or
at least the smart and cognizant ones who had put the puzzle pieces together – had
to know that what Jesus was threatening (or at least predicting) was their complete and utter
destruction were they to go through with the killing of this Man that they
knew, deep down, really was the Christ (they even go so far as to admit in verse 46 that they at least
believed Him a prophet).
Their
conclusion didn’t differ terribly much from His own, except in the critical distinction
that the Lord considered the earthly death of Jesus a necessity for building
the new covenant (“Jesus said to them,
‘Have you never read in the Scriptures, The
stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.’ (v. 42a)”),
and more importantly, the Pharisees were NOT His true children:
39They answered him, “Abraham is our
father.” Jesus said to them, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works
Abraham did, 40but now you seek to kill Me, a Man who has told
you the truth that I heard from God. This is not what Abraham did. 41You are doing the works your father did.” They said to him, “We were not born of sexual
immorality. We have one Father—even God.” 42Jesus said to them, “If God were your
Father, you would love Me, for I came from God and I am here. I came not of My
own accord, but He sent Me. 43Why do you not understand what I say? It is because
you cannot bear to hear My word.
44You are of your father the
devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the
beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him.
When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the
father of lies. 45But because I tell the truth, you do not believe Me.” (John
8:39-45)
As He did
throughout the Old Testament, God showed a remarkable lack of caring about the
life or death of those peoples and cultures which weren’t part of His Family:
“Therefore
I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a
nation producing its fruit. Whoever falls on this stone will be broken to
pieces; but on whoever it falls, it will grind him to powder!”
(v. 43-44)
So,
yes, our Father was completely ready
to give up on the leaders of Israel. But by this point, He had expanded
His grand design beyond the Jew – the primary purpose of Jesus’ ministry on
earth (and more crucially, that of His disciples after Him) was to expand the
reach of the “God of the Hebrews” beyond the city limits of Jerusalem,
to “all Judea and Samaria, and to the
ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8 – Jesus’ final earthbound words to His
disciples). God was taking earthly control of the Kingdom of God – His elect – from control of the
Pharisees and the Sadducees and the dead-as-the-Dead-Sea
priestly class who had long ago lost their way with Him, and turning it over to
the Gentile “nation” which could better “produce
His fruit”.
What’s
the moral of this parable, and this story and chapter? When did God the
Father give up on His children?
Never.
And He never will.
Even
when He has to cast Adam and Eve
from the Garden of Eden…He clothed them and protected them, and saved them
from eating of the tree of eternal life which would have doomed them to an
eternal life of sin, rather than allowing Him to provide the opportunity
for heaven beyond our earthly death.
Even
when sin had so enslaved the
world because of this first attempt that it seemed certain that Satan would win
before the battle was even engaged…He saved the one family He knew
could best preserve the essence of His Image, of the Holy Spark which He had
imbued His creation, while flooding the rest of the world and allowing Noah and
his family to make a fresh start of it.
Even
when Israel and Judea had so
abandoned Him that Baal reigned freely in His temples, in His land, in the
very places that He promised to Abram those many generations ago, that He had
led the Twelve Tribes to…He didn’t destroy them. He didn’t allow anyone else
to destroy them, either, or even to disperse them beyond recollection. Rather,
He gave them a “cooling-off” period
in other nations, time to realize the error of their ways, and then allowed
them to return to Israel and make another go of it.
Even
when they killed God the Son,
though many of His elect were still wise and pure enough to recognize their
deity when they met Him on the road (unlike
the classic instruction to Buddhists), and He allowed Rome to completely
demolish all apparent signs of the Jewish faith, and with it the fledgling
Christian faith as well…He never let
either spark die. The Christians were preserved primarily by the teachings
of Paul, the former Pharisee superstar student of Gameliel who Jesus converted
on the road to Damascus from the greatest persecutor of Christians in
the known world into the greatest Christian missionary in history. His
teachings started dozens of blossoming churches throughout Asia Minor on into
Rome, where three hundred years later Christianity became the dominant religion
of the dominant empire on the planet. And as for the Jewish faithful? Despite
the most blatant pattern of persecution any one group of people has ever faced
for the longest period of time possible – literally since its inception, but
for our purposes here certainly since “they killed our Messiah!” became the
rallying cry of the newly dominant Christian religion seventeen hundred years
ago, climaxing (hopefully) in the Nazi Holocaust of the 1940’s – the
Jewish people not only survived, but somehow, divinely, re-created their homeland nation and language into
modern-day Israel.
[Side note: Mark Twain was once asked how he
knew God existed. His answer was, “Because the Jew still exists”.]
God will never give up on His children.
And as our
role model, we must learn from His example.
There
will be a time…when your son will
want to run away from home, and you’ll be more than glad to let him.
There
will be a time…when your daughter will scream in your face how you’re the worst
mom or dad in the entire world, and you’ll feel like it, and wonder
if it wouldn’t be possible to simply start fresh with a new child (and perhaps
an owner’s manual this time!).
There
will be a time…when you discover drugs in your son’s bedroom, and you
realize you’re going to have to confront him with it, and sooner rather than
later – and you pray for God to take the problem away from you because you know
you can’t possibly handle it like a parent should.
There
will be a time…when your daughter brings home “the love of her life”, and
you take a few moments to decide whether it’s the skull tattoos, the smell of
bad cigarettes, or the fifteen-year age difference that scares you the most.
There
will be a time…when your son lands in jail, and you find yourself trying to
decide what length of time is most constructive for helping him learn his
lessons before you go to bail him out – again.
There
will be a time…when the Prodigal Son of Luke 15:11-32 leaves your home, vowing never to return to the ‘prison’ you’ve created
for him (or her); and weeks, months, or even years later, he might show up on
your doorstep again, begging for another chance. And even though Christ told us
that every time one of His flock returns to the fold, there is a celebration in
heaven, you don’t feel like celebrating. You are tempted to lean more
towards the feelings that he hurt when he left. You are tempted to say
something along the lines of “you made your bed; now sleep in it”.
No matter what the Lord has told us
to do, the temptation will be there.
It will always be there.
Don’t give in.
God didn’t give up on us. And
He won’t.
Don’t
you give up, child of God.
No comments:
Post a Comment