So how, then, does God search for man? God
could as it were parachute His Truth right into
the lap of people. But He always prefers to
work through a mechanism. His “hand”, His
way of operation, is through His Son. And the
Lord Jesus in turn has a “body”, through whom
He operates on earth. And so it is through us
that the search is made. The Lord Jesus is as
the owner of the vineyard who goes out look-
ing for workers. And He gets so desperate that
He lowers the bar as time goes on, and will
take those whom nobody else has hired at
harvest time. The lazy, handicapped, elderly,
weak, those with a reputation as no good…
and is willing to pay them a day’s pay if they
at least come and do
something for Him.
He is so desperate to
have His harvest
reaped, for other-
wise it will spoil;
there were a few
days during which
the right moisture
content and weather
meant that it was
critical to make the
harvest, and the
parable is set during
one of those days. Likewise the Lord Jesus is
as the steward who goes out to find and com-
pel men to come in to the marriage supper. As
time goes on, He will take anyone. Such is the
urgency and tragedy of the rejection of the
Kingdom by those for whom it was primarily
intended.
When we take the Gospel to people, we are
part of God’s desperate search for man. He is
eagerly seeking to empower our witness, and
willing there to be response. But He never
forces against human freewill. Every rejection
of our message is felt harder by Him than it is
even by us. But He is with us, to the end of
the world, as we make that witness, because
we are searching on His behalf. Anyone who’s
done any amount of preaching work will tes-
tify to the simple truth - that we feel His pres-
ence so deeply with us. Even in the times of
rejection of the message.
God in Need of Man
God’s need for man - as it were - is brought
out by the parable of the lost coin. It’s been
suggested that the lost coin was one of the
woman’s dowry coins, and thus the story
speaks of how every lost person is a personal
and deeply felt loss to God. However, this view
has been criticized in that a drachma, which
had the same value as a silver denarius, was
the wage paid to a worker for one day’s field
work (Mt. 20:1-16). It was far less than the
dowry coins. It could be that instead we have
here a reference to a desperately poor
housewife - who certainly had no dowry
money left. The poor
were so poor in Pales-
tine at the time of
Christ that they were
selling their land, and
many had become
landless labourers.
They worked for
money with which
they bought food. The
husband went far
and wide searching
for work; the Lord’s
parable pictures lab-
ourers waiting around for work. It’s been calcu-
lated that on the basis of one denarius / day as
wage, even if the worker worked 300 days /
year, and had four children and a wife plus
himself to support, this income would only
enable them to buy enough bread to provide
1400 calories / family member / day (These
calculations are made in W. Schottroff and W.
Stegemann, God Of The Lowly pp. 129-135).
This isn’t enough to sustain a person’s ability
to do manual work. Therefore mothers and
children faced malnutrition, and the women
tried to grow crops on waste land and did
anything for money in order to buy bread. The
smiling, full cheeked, charming Mediterranean
woman with dowry coins around her forehead
(beloved of those Sunday School books about
Bible background) - just wasn’t the scene that
the Lord had grown up in. The woman who’d
lost her coin was searching desperately for it,
~ continued ...
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Editorial | God in Search of Man