Without attempting to trace or estimate the conduct of man, the Jew, as under law, from Sinai to the cross, we will briefly consider it as set forth by the Lord Himself in His parable of the householder.
" Hear another parable: There was a certain householder which planted a vineyard, and hedged it round about, and digged a winepress in it, and built a tower, and let it out to husband-men, and went into a far country. And when the time of fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the husbandmen, that they might receive the fruits of it. And the husbandmen took his servants, and beat one, and killed another, and stoned another." Here the Lord draws a picture of the love that has been shown, and the care that has been taken, in Jehovah's dealings with Israel. But, alas! man utterly fails; God is dishonored in every way-in His law, His authority, and His grace. It is Adam and Eve over again; the same old story of human responsibility ending in total ruin. The parable of our Lord answers perfectly to the song of the prophet in Isa. 5, where he sings of the goodness of God, and the transgressions of His people. Moses also, in his magnificent song (Deut. 32), celebrates the riches of God's sovereign grace in blessing to His people Israel, and their sins and ingratitude, for which they would be sorely punished, but afterward restored to their own land, and all the nations rejoicing with them. We turn for a moment to the lovely song of Isaiah.
" Now will I sing to my well-beloved a song of my beloved touching his vineyard. My well-beloved hath a vineyard in a very fruitful hill: and he fenced it, and gathered out the stones thereof, and planted it with the choicest vine, and built a tower in the midst of it, and also made a winepress therein: and he looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes." This was God's tender care of Israel. He had blessed them with all temporal blessings in a pleasant land, the Lord separated them to Himself, surrounded them with His favors, gave them His law, or, as the apostle says, " To them pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises." Nothing was lacking on God's part; but the nation, as a whole, had departed from Him, transgressed the covenant, and wholly corrupted their ways. And now the appeal of Jehovah to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the men of Judah is full of the most melting grace and tenderness. " Judge, I pray you, betwixt me and my vineyard. What could have been done more to my vineyard that I have not done in it? Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes." But there was no fruit meet for God under the law; with man on the ground of responsibility there is nothing but failure, and as law must take its course, judgment follows. "And now go to; I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard: I will take away the hedge thereof, and it shall be eaten up; and break down the wall thereof, and it shall be trodden down; and I will lay it waste." The sad song, or lamentation, of all the prophets is man's sin and God's judgment.
But dark though the picture of the prophet be, and unrelieved by one ray of grateful love, there are deeper and darker lines in the one drawn by the blessed Lord. He has to portray His own death as man's answer to God for all the favors and blessings He had lavished upon him since the day he fell in Eden. He has to refer to one servant after another being sent in the patience of God, and all meeting with the same treatment from the husbandmen. Every possible means had been tried to obtain fruit from the vineyard, but all in vain. Only one solitary hope remained. " They will reverence my son." All know what happened, and what followed. " But when the husbandmen saw the son, they said among themselves, This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance. And they caught him, and cast him out of the vineyard, and slew him."
This was more than withholding the fruit of the vineyard-more than robbing God of His dues-more than resisting Moses, or stoning the prophets; it was " the fullest outbreak of rebellious hatred, when tested by the presence of the Son of God in their midst. Probation is over; the question of man's state, and of God's efforts to get fruit from His vineyard is at an end..... Thus the death of Christ is viewed in this parable, not as the groundwork of the counsels of God, but as the climax of man's sin, and the closing scene of his responsibility."
Such was man, man under law, the holy law of God. Provoked by the restraints which the law put on his self-will, the evil that was there and at work manifested itself in the most open, daring, contempt for God's authority. The truth of man's moral state was now fully revealed, the law entered that the offense might abound. Do we not see many around us daily, but especially on the Lord's day, sinning with a high hand-sinning openly, unblushingly, in trading, in seeking their own pleasure, on the first day of the week? and that, not in ignorance, but in contempt of the known and acknowledged authority of God? But the law was given that men might know the truth about himself and about the claims of God in righteousness; both have been fully discussed, and all is in evidence now. Insensible as the Jews were to their sad condition, they condemn the husbandmen, and thus bear witness against themselves. " When the Lord, therefore, of the vineyard cometh, what will he do unto those husbandmen? They say unto him, He will miserably destroy those wicked men, a. lid will let out his vineyard to other husbandmen, who shall render him the fruits in their season."