262 The Tenant's Choice
A Story of Covenant, Curse, and the Cry That Brings Restoration
Good morning and hello friends,
A story has been shaping on my heart over these past few weeks and this article is but another branch of that story.
Check out the following links as they are but smaller threads of the same story.
So, I think…😳👀
My mind is on a story. Not my story. A much older one. The only story, really. It’s the story of an agreement. A covenant. Between a Master and His tenants. Between Yahuah and the sons of Jacob.
You know the setup. A master plants a vineyard. He puts a fence around it. He digs a winepress. He builds a tower. He does all the work, invests all the capital, prepares the land for abundance. Then He leases it. He goes to another country. The tenants are to tend it. Their job is simple: care for the Master’s property and give Him His fruit when He sends for it.
This is the agreement.
The terms are clear from the beginning. They are not hidden mystery. They are proclaimed from the mountains, written on stone, seared into the fabric of creation itself. Yahuah, the Master, laid it out. “And if you faithfully obey the voice of the LORD your God, being careful to do all his commandments that I command you today, the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth.”
This is the Master’s side of the lease. If you obey, if you tend the vineyard according to His instructions, the yield will be miraculous. “Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the field. Blessed shall be the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground and the fruit of your cattle.” The blessings are comprehensive. They are a tidal wave of goodness. Security. Victory. “The LORD will cause your enemies who rise against you to be defeated before you. They shall come out against you one way and flee before you seven ways.” Prosperity. “You shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow.” Honor. “The LORD will establish you as a people holy to himself.”
You will be the head, not the tail. You will only go up, not down. This is the life of a faithful tenant in the Master’s well-planted vineyard. It is a life of peace under the protection of the Owner.
But a lease has two sides. The tenant has responsibilities. The Master is clear: this abundance is contingent on one thing. “If you obey the commandments of the LORD your God, which I command you today, being careful to do them, and if you do not turn aside from any of the words that I command you today, to the right hand or to the left, to go after other gods to serve them.”
There it is. The single, non-negotiable term. Obedience. Exclusive loyalty. No other gods. The vineyard belongs to the Master. You do not get to worship the tools, admire the fence, or bow to the god of the harvest you did not plant. You serve Him. You listen to His voice. You give Him His fruit.
And the Master is not unclear about what happens if you violate the lease. He spells it out in painful, exhaustive detail. It is the curse. It is the eviction notice.
“But if you will not obey the voice of the LORD your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes that I command you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you.”
The mirror flips. Everything that was a blessing becomes a curse. “Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the field.” The fruit will fail. “Cursed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl.” Your labor will be futile. “You shall carry much seed into the field and shall gather in little, for the locust shall consume it.” You will build a house, but you shall not dwell in it. You will plant a vineyard, but you shall not enjoy its fruit.
Worse follows. Confusion. Madness. Defeat. “The LORD will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You shall go out one way against them and flee seven ways before them.” You will become a spectacle. “And you shall be a horror, a proverb, and a byword among all the peoples where the LORD will lead you away.”
Then, the ultimate consequence. The scattering. The end of the tenancy on the land. “And the LORD will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other, and there you shall serve other gods of wood and stone, which neither you nor your fathers have known.”
You will be a slave in a foreign land. You will offer yourselves for sale, but there will be no buyer. You will have no rest. “And among these nations you shall find no respite, and there shall be no resting place for the sole of your foot, but the LORD will give you there a trembling heart and failing eyes and a languishing soul. Your life shall hang in doubt before you.”
This was the agreement. Blessing for faithfulness. A comprehensive, terrifying curse for rebellion. The tenants heard it. They agreed to it. They said, “All that Yahuah has spoken we will do.”
And then the Master left for another country.
The story of the sons of Jacob is the story of the wicked tenants.
The Master was patient. Incredibly patient. He freed them from Egypt, a display of power no other god could match. He delivered all their enemies into their hands. He gave them the land, the vineyard, that was promised to their father Jacob. He did it all by His own glory and might. He sent His servants, the prophets, to collect His fruit, to call His people back to the terms of the covenant.
And what did the tenants do?
They beat one. They killed another. They stoned another.
They rejected the servants. They ignored the warnings. They looked at the fertile land, the secure walls, the abundant harvest, and said, “This is ours. We will do with it as we please. Who is this Master to tell us how to live?”
They forgot they were tenants. They began to act like owners. They chased other gods. They embraced the practices of the nations around them. They violated every single term of the lease. They were not careful to do His commandments. They turned aside, to the right and to the left.
And still, the Master was patient. He sent more servants. They treated them the same.
Finally, as the parable tells us, the Master had one last recourse. “They will respect my son,” He said.
He sent His only begotten son. His heir. Yahusha.
The tenants saw the son and said to themselves, “This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and have his inheritance.”
They saw the son not as the rightful representative of the Owner, but as the final obstacle to their claim of ownership. If they could eliminate the heir, they thought, the vineyard would be theirs forever.
We know what they did.
“Now at the feast the governor was accustomed to release for the crowd any one prisoner whom they wanted. And they had then a notorious prisoner called Barabbas.”
Pilate, the representative of the foreign power that now policed the Master’s vineyard, gave them a choice. A gift of grace, even in his confusion. He presented the Son, Yahusha, who is called Christ, and the violent rebel, Barabbas.
The choice was the ultimate test of the tenant’s heart. Who do you want? The Prince of Peace sent by the Owner, or the man of violence and insurrection?
The chief priests and elders persuaded the crowd. They chose Barabbas.
Pilate asked, “Then what shall I do with Jesus who is called Christ?”
They all said, “Let him be crucified!”
Pilate washed his hands. He declared his moral innocence. And the people, the tenants, speaking for the whole nation, accepted the full weight of the deed. They shouted, “His blood be on us and on our children!”
They chose the rebel over the son. They ratified their rejection of the Master’s authority. They invoked a curse upon themselves.
And so the Master acted. He did what He said He would do. The curse, detailed so meticulously in the agreement, began to unfold. It was not a spiteful act. It was the fulfillment of the terms they had agreed to. They had forsaken Him. Therefore, He would forsake them to the consequences.
The siege came. “The LORD will bring a nation against you from far away, from the end of the earth, swooping down like the eagle, a nation whose language you do not understand.” Jerusalem fell. The temple was destroyed. The people were slaughtered or led away in chains.
And then, the scattering. “And the LORD will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other.”
The vineyard was taken from them.
For two thousand years, the curse has been the lived experience of the sons of Jacob. They were scattered to the four corners of the world. And wherever they went, the terms of the curse followed them. “The sojourner who is among you shall rise higher and higher above you, and you shall come down lower and lower. He shall lend to you, and you shall not lend to him. He shall be the head, and you shall be the tail.”
In every nation, in every empire, they became the lowest class. The perpetually foreign. The perpetually vulnerable. They represented the poor, the servants, the disadvantaged. They were oppressed and robbed continually, and there was no one to help them. Their history was erased and rewritten by their captors. They were given new names, new identities. They no longer knew the names of their own ancestors. They forgot the language of the covenant. They served gods of wood and stone in the lands of their exile, just as the curse had said.
They were a horror, a proverb, and a byword. A people whose very existence was a mystery and a warning. Their life hung in doubt before them. Night and day they were in dread. “In the morning you shall say, ‘If only it were evening!’ and at evening you shall say, ‘If only it were morning!’”
This was the vineyard after the tenants killed the son. Barren. Desolate. The tenants cast out, wandering, with no title to any land, no claim to any inheritance.
But a Master who plants a vineyard does so for a purpose. He desires fruit. The story does not end with the tenants homeless.
The prophets spoke of a time after the storm. After the eviction. Yahuah said through Ezekiel, “I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak.”
Why? For the sake of the wicked tenants? No. For the sake of His holy name. “It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name.” The Master would uphold the honor of His own name. He would remember the promises He swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
He promised restoration. “And they shall know that I am the LORD, when I break the bars of their yoke, and deliver them from the hand of those who enslaved them. They shall no more be a prey to the nations, nor shall the beasts of the land devour them. They shall dwell securely, and none shall make them afraid.”
He promised a new covenant. A covenant of peace. “I will make with them a covenant of peace and banish wild beasts from the land, so that they may dwell securely in the wilderness and sleep in the woods.” He would be their God, and they would be His people. He would set up one shepherd, His servant David, to feed them. He would be their shepherd.
And the mountains of Israel, left desolate and possessed by the enemy, would hear a new word. “O mountains of Israel, hear the word of the LORD. Thus says the Lord GOD: Because the enemy said of you, ‘Aha!’ and, ‘The ancient heights have become our possession,’ therefore prophesy, and say, Thus says the Lord GOD: Precisely because they made you desolate and crushed you from all sides… therefore, O mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Lord GOD.”
The land itself would be restored for the sake of the people who would return. A people who had finally remembered.
And that is the turn. After much suffering, after the full weight of the curse had done its work of breaking the prideful spirit, the chosen eventually began to remember. Faint echoes at first. A song. A prayer. A name. Yahuah.
In the dust of their exile, they slowly and gradually began to call out to their God. Not to the gods of wood and stone they had served in their captivity, but to the God of the covenant. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They began to confess. They began to repent. For their idolatry. For their rebellion. For denying and killing His only begotten son.
They looked at the history written by their conquerors and saw the lies. They looked at their own condition, the tail and not the head in every nation, and understood it was the curse. They remembered the terms. They remembered their choice. Barabbas.
And they cried out. From the four corners of the earth, a groan went up. A groan of recognition. A groan of repentance.
And their God began to hear their cries.
He always hears the cry of the contrite. The Master had been waiting. Not with wrath, but with a father’s aching heart. The punishment was complete. The lesson was learned. The tenant finally understood he was a tenant, not an owner. That the vineyard, his life, his identity, belonged to Another.
And Yahuah moved to redeem. Not just the original tenants, the sons of Jacob according to the flesh, but also the grafted branches. The wild olive shoots from every nation that had come to know Yahuah and His son Yahusha, the Messiah, whom their ancestors had condemned to the cross. Both would be brought into one flock under one shepherd.
The Master would return to His vineyard. He would restore the tenants who had finally learned to honor the Son. He would welcome the new tenants who had always honored the Son. He would judge between the sheep, between the fat and the lean, between those who served themselves and those who served Him.
The vineyard after the storm would be more beautiful than before. Because the tenants now knew the cost of rebellion and lawlessness. They knew the mercy of the Master. They knew the worth of the Son, Yahusha the Messiah.
The inheritance would not be seized. It would be given. To the obedient. To the faithful. To those who recognize the Son and give the Father (Yahuah) His fruit.
This is the story. It is not a parable. It is history. It is prophecy. It is the present reality for many, and the future hope for all who will hear.
The agreement stands. The choice remains. Blessing or curse. Life or death.
The Master is still looking for His fruit. The Son stands at the door.
What will the tenants do?
That is all, and thank you for reading.
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Shashue Monrauch