Christ the Cornerstone

Posted 7/28/15 by Donald Barnhouse
Theme: Parables of Rejection
 
 
SCRIPTURE
Mark 12:1-12
 
And he began to speak to them in parables. “A man planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a pit for the winepress and built a tower, and leased it to tenants and went into another country.When the season came, he sent a servant to the tenants to get from them some of the fruit of the vineyard. And they took him and beat him and sent him away empty-handed. Again he sent to them another servant, and they struck him on the head and treated him shamefully. And he sent another, and him they killed. And so with many others: some they beat, and some they killed. He had still one other, a beloved son. Finally he sent him to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But those tenants said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ And they took him and killed him and threw him out of the vineyard. What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others. Have you not read this Scripture:
 
“‘The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
this was the Lord's doing,
and it is marvelous in our eyes’?”
 
And they were seeking to arrest him but feared the people, for they perceived that he had told the parable against them. So they left him and went away.
 
LESSON
 
Here in Mark 12, Christ calls Himself the measuring stone, or, as it is translated in our Bibles, the cornerstone. The cornerstone, in the minds of most Americans, is the stone that tells that a building was erected at a certain time, when a certain person was mayor, and so on. It is merely an exaltation of man.
 
But when the Bible refers to a cornerstone, it refers to the first stone laid for the foundation. The builders would get a stone from the quarry and chisel it carefully to get as near a right angle as possible. They would measure the placement of all the other stones against that cornerstone, that first measuring stone. It was the standard by which all the walls of the building were determined.
 
When Jesus Christ is called the cornerstone, God is saying, “I measure everything by Jesus Christ.” It is easy to forget that fact. How common it is among Christians for a group to get together and say, “God has called us to be guardians of this one truth.” This is what develops schisms. Such a truth may relate to the Second Coming of Christ, the gifts of the Spirit, or a particular mode of baptism, but it is not seen properly unless it is measured against the cornerstone, Jesus Christ. The Lord Jesus Christ is the most important thing. There is no Presbyterian truth or Baptist truth or Plymouth Brethren truth or Pentecostal truth. There is only the truth of the whole Word of God for the whole body of Christ. If a believer puts the touchstone of his particular sect ahead of the great cornerstone, Jesus Christ, he is not in the will of God. There must be a willingness to put these things in their proper place, and when that happens, we begin to get nearer all other believers.
 
One of my sons used to ask me, “Daddy, what did one wall say to the other?”
 
“I don’t know, Son,” I would reply. “What did it say?” 
 
“I’ll meet you at the corner.” So it is with the Christian church. Christ is the corner. There is the Episcopalian wall, way down there, the Pentecostal wall over there, the Presbyterian wall here, and all the rest. You can get into quite a fight if you are forty feet away from Christ down that wall, and somebody else is thirty feet down another wall, and you both say, “We are the true wall.” No building was ever built that way and remained standing. Everything must be subordinate to and in line with the cornerstone.
 
STUDY QUESTIONS
  • What does Christ mean when he says he is the cornerstone? What does this teach us about the ministry of Christ?
  • If God used Christ to measure everything, how should Christians use Christ to measure their lives?

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