“ What do you suppose the owner of the vineyard will do?” Jesus asked.“ I’ll tell you— he will come and kill those farmers and lease the vineyard to others.

这样，葡萄园的主人要怎么办呢？他要来除灭那些园户，将葡萄园转给别人。

这样，葡萄园主要怎么做呢？他要来除灭那些园户，将葡萄园转给别人。

这样，葡萄园主要怎么做呢？他要来除灭那些园户，将葡萄园转给别人。

那么，园主会采取什么行动呢？他必定会来杀掉这些佃户，把葡萄园转给别人。

这样，葡萄园的主人要怎么办呢？他要来除掉那些佃户，把葡萄园租给别人。

“那么，葡萄园的主人会做什么呢？他会来除灭那些农夫，把葡萄园交给别人。

這樣，葡萄園的主人要怎麼辦呢？他要來除滅那些園戶，將葡萄園轉給別人。

這樣，葡萄園主要怎麼做呢？他要來除滅那些園戶，將葡萄園轉給別人。

這樣，葡萄園主要怎麼做呢？他要來除滅那些園戶，將葡萄園轉給別人。

那麼，園主會採取什麼行動呢？他必定會來殺掉這些佃戶，把葡萄園轉給別人。

這樣，葡萄園的主人要怎麼辦呢？他要來除掉那些佃戶，把葡萄園租給別人。

這樣，葡萄園主要怎樣辦呢？他必來，殺滅園工，將葡萄園給別人。經上說：

「那麼，葡萄園的主人會做什麼呢？他會來除滅那些農夫，把葡萄園交給別人。

園主將何為、必至滅此農夫、以園付他人焉、

園主將何以處此、必至而滅農夫、以園托他人焉、

園主將何為、必至而滅園夫、以園轉租他人、

園主將何以處此？惟有嚴懲園戶、以園別租耳。

“ What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others.

“ What will the owner of the vineyard do then? He will come and kill those renters. He will give the vineyard to others.

What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others.

What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and kill the farmers and give the vineyard to others.

What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and put the vine growers to death, and give the vineyard to others.

“ Therefore what will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the vinedressers, and give the vineyard to others.

What therefore will the lord of the vineyard do? he will come and destroy the husbandmen, and will give the vineyard unto others.

“ Therefore, what will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the farmers and give the vineyard to others.

What shall therefore the lord of the vineyard do? he will come and destroy the husbandmen, and will give the vineyard unto others.

What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others.

What therefore will the lord of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the farmers, and will give the vineyard to others.

I tell you, the Kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation that will produce the proper fruit.

And as for these enemies of mine who didn’t want me to be their king— bring them in and execute them right here in front of me.’”

Don’t just say to each other,‘ We’re safe, for we are descendants of Abraham.’ That means nothing, for I tell you, God can create children of Abraham from these very stones.Even now the ax of God’s judgment is poised, ready to sever the roots of the trees. Yes, every tree that does not produce good fruit will be chopped down and thrown into the fire.“ I baptize with water those who repent of their sins and turn to God. But someone is coming soon who is greater than I am— so much greater that I’m not worthy even to be his slave and carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.He is ready to separate the chaff from the wheat with his winnowing fork. Then he will clean up the threshing area, gathering the wheat into his barn but burning the chaff with never ending fire.”

“ But if you refuse to listen to the Lord your God and do not obey all the commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come and overwhelm you:Your towns and your fields will be cursed.Your fruit baskets and breadboards will be cursed.Your children and your crops will be cursed. The offspring of your herds and flocks will be cursed.Wherever you go and whatever you do, you will be cursed.“ The Lord himself will send on you curses, confusion, and frustration in everything you do, until at last you are completely destroyed for doing evil and abandoning me.The Lord will afflict you with diseases until none of you are left in the land you are about to enter and occupy.The Lord will strike you with wasting diseases, fever, and inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, and with blight and mildew. These disasters will pursue you until you die.The skies above will be as unyielding as bronze, and the earth beneath will be as hard as iron.The Lord will change the rain that falls on your land into powder, and dust will pour down from the sky until you are destroyed.“ The Lord will cause you to be defeated by your enemies. You will attack your enemies from one direction, but you will scatter from them in seven! You will be an object of horror to all the kingdoms of the earth.Your corpses will be food for all the scavenging birds and wild animals, and no one will be there to chase them away.“ The Lord will afflict you with the boils of Egypt and with tumors, scurvy, and the itch, from which you cannot be cured.The Lord will strike you with madness, blindness, and panic.You will grope around in broad daylight like a blind person groping in the darkness, but you will not find your way. You will be oppressed and robbed continually, and no one will come to save you.“ You will be engaged to a woman, but another man will sleep with her. You will build a house, but someone else will live in it. You will plant a vineyard, but you will never enjoy its fruit.Your ox will be butchered before your eyes, but you will not eat a single bite of the meat. Your donkey will be taken from you, never to be returned. Your sheep and goats will be given to your enemies, and no one will be there to help you.You will watch as your sons and daughters are taken away as slaves. Your heart will break for them, but you won’t be able to help them.A foreign nation you have never heard about will eat the crops you worked so hard to grow. You will suffer under constant oppression and harsh treatment.You will go mad because of all the tragedy you see around you.The Lord will cover your knees and legs with incurable boils. In fact, you will be covered from head to foot.“ The Lord will exile you and your king to a nation unknown to you and your ancestors. There in exile you will worship gods of wood and stone!You will become an object of horror, ridicule, and mockery among all the nations to which the Lord sends you.“ You will plant much but harvest little, for locusts will eat your crops.You will plant vineyards and care for them, but you will not drink the wine or eat the grapes, for worms will destroy the vines.You will grow olive trees throughout your land, but you will never use the olive oil, for the fruit will drop before it ripens.You will have sons and daughters, but you will lose them, for they will be led away into captivity.Swarms of insects will destroy your trees and crops.“ The foreigners living among you will become stronger and stronger, while you become weaker and weaker.They will lend money to you, but you will not lend to them. They will be the head, and you will be the tail!“ If you refuse to listen to the Lord your God and to obey the commands and decrees he has given you, all these curses will pursue and overtake you until you are destroyed.These horrors will serve as a sign and warning among you and your descendants forever.If you do not serve the Lord your God with joy and enthusiasm for the abundant benefits you have received,you will serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you. You will be left hungry, thirsty, naked, and lacking in everything. The Lord will put an iron yoke on your neck, oppressing you harshly until he has destroyed you.“ The Lord will bring a distant nation against you from the end of the earth, and it will swoop down on you like a vulture. It is a nation whose language you do not understand,a fierce and heartless nation that shows no respect for the old and no pity for the young.Its armies will devour your livestock and crops, and you will be destroyed. They will leave you no grain, new wine, olive oil, calves, or lambs, and you will starve to death.They will attack your cities until all the fortified walls in your land— the walls you trusted to protect you— are knocked down. They will attack all the towns in the land the Lord your God has given you.“ The siege and terrible distress of the enemy’s attack will be so severe that you will eat the flesh of your own sons and daughters, whom the Lord your God has given you.The most tenderhearted man among you will have no compassion for his own brother, his beloved wife, and his surviving children.He will refuse to share with them the flesh he is devouring— the flesh of one of his own children— because he has nothing else to eat during the siege and terrible distress that your enemy will inflict on all your towns.The most tender and delicate woman among you— so delicate she would not so much as touch the ground with her foot— will be selfish toward the husband she loves and toward her own son or daughter.She will hide from them the afterbirth and the new baby she has borne, so that she herself can secretly eat them. She will have nothing else to eat during the siege and terrible distress that your enemy will inflict on all your towns.“ If you refuse to obey all the words of instruction that are written in this book, and if you do not fear the glorious and awesome name of the Lord your God,then the Lord will overwhelm you and your children with indescribable plagues. These plagues will be intense and without relief, making you miserable and unbearably sick.He will afflict you with all the diseases of Egypt that you feared so much, and you will have no relief.The Lord will afflict you with every sickness and plague there is, even those not mentioned in this Book of Instruction, until you are destroyed.Though you become as numerous as the stars in the sky, few of you will be left because you would not listen to the Lord your God.“ Just as the Lord has found great pleasure in causing you to prosper and multiply, the Lord will find pleasure in destroying you. You will be torn from the land you are about to enter and occupy.For the Lord will scatter you among all the nations from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship foreign gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, gods made of wood and stone!There among those nations you will find no peace or place to rest. And the Lord will cause your heart to tremble, your eyesight to fail, and your soul to despair.Your life will constantly hang in the balance. You will live night and day in fear, unsure if you will survive.In the morning you will say,‘ If only it were night!’ And in the evening you will say,‘ If only it were morning!’ For you will be terrified by the awful horrors you see around you.Then the Lord will send you back to Egypt in ships, to a destination I promised you would never see again. There you will offer to sell yourselves to your enemies as slaves, but no one will buy you.”

“ The king was furious, and he sent out his army to destroy the murderers and burn their town.

So they dragged him out of the vineyard and murdered him.“ What do you suppose the owner of the vineyard will do to them?” Jesus asked.“ I’ll tell you— he will come and kill those farmers and lease the vineyard to others.”“ How terrible that such a thing should ever happen,” his listeners protested.

Soon— and it will not be very long— the forests of Lebanon will become a fertile field, and the fertile field will yield bountiful crops.

“ When the owner of the vineyard returns,” Jesus asked,“ what do you think he will do to those farmers?”The religious leaders replied,“ He will put the wicked men to a horrible death and lease the vineyard to others who will give him his share of the crop after each harvest.”

Then the spirit finds seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they all enter the person and live there. And so that person is worse off than before. That will be the experience of this evil generation.”

But as he came closer to Jerusalem and saw the city ahead, he began to weep.“ How I wish today that you of all people would understand the way to peace. But now it is too late, and peace is hidden from your eyes.Before long your enemies will build ramparts against your walls and encircle you and close in on you from every side.They will crush you into the ground, and your children with you. Your enemies will not leave a single stone in place, because you did not recognize it when God visited you.”

So a time was set, and on that day a large number of people came to Paul’s lodging. He explained and testified about the Kingdom of God and tried to persuade them about Jesus from the Scriptures. Using the law of Moses and the books of the prophets, he spoke to them from morning until evening.Some were persuaded by the things he said, but others did not believe.And after they had argued back and forth among themselves, they left with this final word from Paul:“ The Holy Spirit was right when he said to your ancestors through Isaiah the prophet,‘ Go and say to this people: When you hear what I say, you will not understand. When you see what I do, you will not comprehend.For the hearts of these people are hardened, and their ears cannot hear, and they have closed their eyes— so their eyes cannot see, and their ears cannot hear, and their hearts cannot understand, and they cannot turn to me and let me heal them.’So I want you to know that this salvation from God has also been offered to the Gentiles, and they will accept it.”

Now let me tell you what I will do to my vineyard: I will tear down its hedges and let it be destroyed. I will break down its walls and let the animals trample it.I will make it a wild place where the vines are not pruned and the ground is not hoed, a place overgrown with briers and thorns. I will command the clouds to drop no rain on it.The nation of Israel is the vineyard of the Lord of Heaven’s Armies. The people of Judah are his pleasant garden. He expected a crop of justice, but instead he found oppression. He expected to find righteousness, but instead he heard cries of violence.

“ Today I call on heaven and earth as witnesses against you. If you break my covenant, you will quickly disappear from the land you are crossing the Jordan to occupy. You will live there only a short time; then you will be utterly destroyed.For the Lord will scatter you among the nations, where only a few of you will survive.

“ After this period of sixty two sets of seven, the Anointed One will be killed, appearing to have accomplished nothing, and a ruler will arise whose armies will destroy the city and the Temple. The end will come with a flood, and war and its miseries are decreed from that time to the very end.The ruler will make a treaty with the people for a period of one set of seven, but after half this time, he will put an end to the sacrifices and offerings. And as a climax to all his terrible deeds, he will set up a sacrilegious object that causes desecration, until the fate decreed for this defiler is finally poured out on him.”

“ I called you so often, but you wouldn’t come. I reached out to you, but you paid no attention.You ignored my advice and rejected the correction I offered.So I will laugh when you are in trouble! I will mock you when disaster overtakes you—when calamity overtakes you like a storm, when disaster engulfs you like a cyclone, and anguish and distress overwhelm you.“ When they cry for help, I will not answer. Though they anxiously search for me, they will not find me.For they hated knowledge and chose not to fear the Lord.They rejected my advice and paid no attention when I corrected them.Therefore, they must eat the bitter fruit of living their own way, choking on their own schemes.

“ If in spite of all this you still refuse to listen and still remain hostile toward me,then I will give full vent to my hostility. I myself will punish you seven times over for your sins.

But as surely as the Lord your God has given you the good things he promised, he will also bring disaster on you if you disobey him. He will completely destroy you from this good land he has given you.

But my name is honored by people of other nations from morning till night. All around the world they offer sweet incense and pure offerings in honor of my name. For my name is great among the nations,” says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies.

“ Therefore, I am sending you prophets and wise men and teachers of religious law. But you will kill some by crucifixion, and you will flog others with whips in your synagogues, chasing them from city to city.As a result, you will be held responsible for the murder of all godly people of all time— from the murder of righteous Abel to the murder of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you killed in the Temple between the sanctuary and the altar.I tell you the truth, this judgment will fall on this very generation.“ O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones God’s messengers! How often I have wanted to gather your children together as a hen protects her chicks beneath her wings, but you wouldn’t let me.And now, look, your house is abandoned and desolate.

Then Paul and Barnabas spoke out boldly and declared,“ It was necessary that we first preach the word of God to you Jews. But since you have rejected it and judged yourselves unworthy of eternal life, we will offer it to the Gentiles.For the Lord gave us this command when he said,‘ I have made you a light to the Gentiles, to bring salvation to the farthest corners of the earth.’”When the Gentiles heard this, they were very glad and thanked the Lord for his message; and all who were chosen for eternal life became believers.

So I will hand over my holy mountain— along with all your wealth and treasures and your pagan shrines— as plunder to your enemies, for sin runs rampant in your land.

“ Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, the man who is my partner,” says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies.“ Strike down the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered, and I will turn against the lambs.Two thirds of the people in the land will be cut off and die,” says the Lord.“ But one third will be left in the land.I will bring that group through the fire and make them pure. I will refine them like silver and purify them like gold. They will call on my name, and I will answer them. I will say,‘ These are my people,’ and they will say,‘ The Lord is our God.’”

Your name will be a curse word among my people, for the Sovereign Lord will destroy you and will call his true servants by another name.

“ And if you fail to learn the lesson and continue your hostility toward me,then I myself will be hostile toward you. I will personally strike you with calamity seven times over for your sins.

And later Isaiah spoke boldly for God, saying,“ I was found by people who were not looking for me. I showed myself to those who were not asking for me.”But regarding Israel, God said,“ All day long I opened my arms to them, but they were disobedient and rebellious.”I ask, then, has God rejected his own people, the nation of Israel? Of course not! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham and a member of the tribe of Benjamin.No, God has not rejected his own people, whom he chose from the very beginning. Do you realize what the Scriptures say about this? Elijah the prophet complained to God about the people of Israel and said,“ Lord, they have killed your prophets and torn down your altars. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me, too.”And do you remember God’s reply? He said,“ No, I have 7,000 others who have never bowed down to Baal!”It is the same today, for a few of the people of Israel have remained faithful because of God’s grace— his undeserved kindness in choosing them.And since it is through God’s kindness, then it is not by their good works. For in that case, God’s grace would not be what it really is— free and undeserved.So this is the situation: Most of the people of Israel have not found the favor of God they are looking for so earnestly. A few have— the ones God has chosen— but the hearts of the rest were hardened.As the Scriptures say,“ God has put them into a deep sleep. To this day he has shut their eyes so they do not see, and closed their ears so they do not hear.”Likewise, David said,“ Let their bountiful table become a snare, a trap that makes them think all is well. Let their blessings cause them to stumble, and let them get what they deserve.Let their eyes go blind so they cannot see, and let their backs be bent forever.”Did God’s people stumble and fall beyond recovery? Of course not! They were disobedient, so God made salvation available to the Gentiles. But he wanted his own people to become jealous and claim it for themselves.Now if the Gentiles were enriched because the people of Israel turned down God’s offer of salvation, think how much greater a blessing the world will share when they finally accept it.

until at last the Spirit is poured out on us from heaven. Then the wilderness will become a fertile field, and the fertile field will yield bountiful crops.Justice will rule in the wilderness and righteousness in the fertile field.

and if you break my covenant by rejecting my decrees, treating my regulations with contempt, and refusing to obey my commands,I will punish you. I will bring sudden terrors upon you— wasting diseases and burning fevers that will cause your eyes to fail and your life to ebb away. You will plant your crops in vain because your enemies will eat them.I will turn against you, and you will be defeated by your enemies. Those who hate you will rule over you, and you will run even when no one is chasing you!“ And if, in spite of all this, you still disobey me, I will punish you seven times over for your sins.

What does all this mean? Even though the Gentiles were not trying to follow God’s standards, they were made right with God. And it was by faith that this took place.But the people of Israel, who tried so hard to get right with God by keeping the law, never succeeded.Why not? Because they were trying to get right with God by keeping the law instead of by trusting in him. They stumbled over the great rock in their path.God warned them of this in the Scriptures when he said,“ I am placing a stone in Jerusalem that makes people stumble, a rock that makes them fall. But anyone who trusts in him will never be disgraced.”

And I tell you this, that many Gentiles will come from all over the world— from east and west— and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob at the feast in the Kingdom of Heaven.But many Israelites— those for whom the Kingdom was prepared— will be thrown into outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”Then Jesus said to the Roman officer,“ Go back home. Because you believed, it has happened.” And the young servant was healed that same hour.