New Testament : The Parable Of The Workers In The Vineyard? But Jesus challenges that expectation. The special inheritance that Israel believes to be hers is going to be extended—in full—to other nations. It’s not that the Hebrews were against God extending blessings to other nations. They just always assumed that God would value those nations below Israel. In response to the kingdom of God, Israel would make the same argument as the early laborers, “you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work.”
Jesus often uses parables to reveal what the kingdom of heaven is like. He portrays how one enters the kingdom and who the different characters are. In this Parable of the Laborers or Workers in the Vineyard, there are things that He tells the disciples and us about the grace of God and that God is always more than fair. Here is a discussion on this parable and what Jesus means in giving it.
The master of the house would seem to be God and the vineyard is the place where those servants who have been called to work for the master as laborers will enter into the work. The laborers are those who have been called and saved by God. They enter into the work or their calling by God under the guidance of the master, which is Jesus Christ. In another place in the Scriptures, Jesus uses this symbolism of believers being used by God to labor for the Lord as in Matthew 9:37-38 where He says “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”
But such an interpretation raises more questions. Are we free to knowingly live a life of sin, as long as we make that last confession before death? The parable seems to support an odd loophole to salvation, that getting into heaven is decided by a technicality of whether your sins have been forgiven rather than that you love God and want to spend eternity with Him.
Jesus’s teaching regularly challenged this idea and never as overtly as in the parable of the workers. For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard. About nine in the morning he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. He told them, “You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.” So they went. He went out again about noon and about three in the afternoon and did the same thing. About five in the afternoon he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, “Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?” See more information with the The Parable Of The Workers In The Vineyard video on YouTube.