To Encourage You

Matthew 21:33-39 “Hear another parable. There was a master of a house who planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a winepress in it and built a tower and leased it to tenants, and went into another country. When the season for fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to get his fruit. And the tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other servants, more than the first. And they did the same to them. Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and have his inheritance.’ And they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.”

The fact that God has done all that is necessary to reconcile to Himself a world that hates Him is an incredible thing. It’s almost impossible to put into words the love that God has shown to men who have universally been at war with Him and who have demonstrated that hatred by their disobedience to His laws since the beginning of human history (Colossians 1:21).  To think that He would send His own Son to die for the very sins that wretched sinners have committed against Him is beyond comprehension. Then to think that Jesus, from the cross, as men hurled their hate filled words at Him, mocked Him, and tortured Him to death, asked His Father to forgive them! How can a love like that be explained?! That’s one of the reasons God’s love is described as something that is beyond the three-dimensional world in which we live and move and have our being, for this love has “breadth and length and height and depth” (Ephesians 3:18).  As such, God’s love is of such a nature that it “surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:19).  The wonderful hymn, The Love of God, puts it this way in its incredible last verse: “Could we with ink the ocean fill, And were the skies of parchment made; Were every stalk on earth a quill, And every man a scribe by trade; To write the love of God above Would drain the ocean dry; Nor could the scroll contain the whole, Though stretched from sky to sky.” 

Yes, it took an infinite God to tell us about such infinite love, and He did this by way of the message of the Bible. It is this truth that God is telling us about in the parable above from Matthew 21. Here, He is drawing a word picture about how, over the centuries, He has kept sending, one after another, His prophets, to tell the world of His great love and warn those who would reject it of their calamitous end. Yet, what did they do? They killed the prophets!   And so, even more incredibly, in these last days God sent His own Son! And what did they do with Him? They killed Him too! 

So now what? Astoundingly, He keeps sending others to tell the world of His love and of the reconciliation that is possible if they will just receive His gospel and believe.  Yet, man, in his breathtaking defiance, continues to oppose this message. Many men and women get angry when we tell them that there is a way of salvation, for this implies that they are sinners and need to be saved.  And then they tell us that it is offensive to think that there is only one way to be saved, blindly turning against that incredible mercy of God that He would provide any way at all!  

Everywhere we turn we see opposition to the gospel.  It’s rejected in the laws promulgated by all levels of government all over the world.  We see Christians in many places in the world facing persecution and even death as they make efforts to act as God’s messengers to preach the gospel to every creature. As Jesus said in Matthew 7:13-14 “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”

So, are you with the many or the few?  If you are one of the few, may God give you the boldness and love for others who have not yet believed to just keep sharing the truth, come what may. But if you are one of the “many,” may God open your eyes to the folly of the road you are on, for to reject the message of reconciliation that God has given us, is to only remain an enemy of the only omnipotent One. And to oppose someone Who is omnipotent is nothing more than to absolutely assure that we will lose our fight in the end.