SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 4/3/2023 11:41 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-2 “The Participants in Kingdom
Equality”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
19:30-20:7
Message of the verses: “30 “But many who
are first will be last; and the last, first.
1
"For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the
morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. 2 “When he had agreed with the
laborers for a denarius for the day, he sent them into his vineyard. 3 “And he
went out about the third hour and saw others standing idle in the market place;
4 and to those he said, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and whatever is right I
will give you.’ And so they went. 5 “Again he went out about the sixth
and the ninth hour, and did the same thing. 6 “And about the eleventh hour
he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why
have you been standing here idle all day long?’ 7 “They said to him, ‘Because
no one hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You go into the vineyard too.’”
What we know about this landowner is that he had a
very large vineyard that needed work to be done to it, but we are not told whether
he was planting a new vineyard, or getting grapes from a large vineyard that
was ready to have the grapes picked. A
little bit about vineyards in Israel, and that is that they were generally
planted on terraced hillsides, most of which were stony. MacArthur “Preparing the terraces involved
digging out the tiers and using the stones to build small retaining walls on
the outside edges. Then the terraced
areas had to be filled with good soil, most of which often had to be carried a
considerable distance up the slopes from more fertile ground below.” This sounds like a great deal of work to me,
not like using the tractors and other things like we have today.
Jesus
talks about vines and branches in the 15th chapter of John’s gospel,
and the part that is difficult, and I say this because true believers are
branches in that story and they need to be pruned from time to time in order to
produce better fruit. Looking at this
from our verses in Matthew 20 we can see that there is a lot of work to be done
and that is why the owner is hiring many people. Now as far as the harvesting of grapes this
was done in late September and in Israel the temperatures can still be very
warm (see verse 12) “saying, ‘These last men have
worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne
the burden and the scorching heat of the day.’”
The
jobs that we are talking about here are what are called “seasonable jobs.” Workers would gather in the market place and
see if they could get hired, and most of the time the workers would not get
much pay, but this land owner was giving them a denarius, which was a day’s
wage for more skilled workers, so this was more than they would usually
get. Now according to different passages
in the Old Testament the workers were to get their wages at the end of the day,
as this was all they had to have to buy food and other things necessities of
life.
The
Jewish workday began at 6:00 AM and so the land owner would have to be up early
to get his crew together for work.
Looking further at this passage the owner went back at nine, the third
hour to get more workers. Not really
sure why there were still workers there, but it may have been because they came
later. Lord willing we will finish this
section in our next SD by continuing to talk more about these workers.
4/3/2023 12:09 PM
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