The Parable Of The Workers In The Vineyard video and FREE coloring pages for children? When it’s time to pay the workers, the foreman begins with the last workers picked. It’s interesting to note that if he’d paid the early laborers first, he probably wouldn’t have had this problem. But the whole time the foreman is passing out the standard payment for a day’s wages to the late workers, the early workers were probably thinking, “Woah! Look how much money he’s giving them, and they’ve only been here for a few hours!” They probably assumed they were going to receive so much more than the owner originally promised them.
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.”
Then . . . if the first are last and the last are first, would we not want to be like those late workers, having only to have worked one hour before receiving the same reward? The conclusion of the parable still raises uncomfortable questions. The Christian life is not uncommonly thought of as one confined by rules and restrictions. Are some of us just “unluckily” born into a life where our Christian status prohibits (or “strongly discourages”) pre-marital sex, alcohol consumption, or relationships with non-Christians?
Jesus spent a great deal of His ministry announcing the coming of God’s kingdom and overcoming first-century presumptions by teaching people to recognize that kingdom. And a lot of His parables focused on communicating valuable truths about this kingdom. One misunderstanding that Jesus needed to clarify was the idea that the Jews held a special insider relationship with God. From the very beginning, God told Abraham that all the nations of the world would be blessed through his offspring (Genesis 22:18), but as far as the Israelites were concerned, these other nations would never be as blessed as they were. See additional info on the The Parable Of The Workers In The Vineyard video on YouTube.