A biblical-theological survey for those whose land or labor have been stolen, whose people have been killed or enslaved, and whose dispossession and oppression has been baptized in God’s name

A necessary word before we begin: This essay is not against Jewish people, Palestinian people, white people, Israeli people, American people, European people, or any people made in the image of God. It is against satanic works: theft, murder, enslaving, deception, domination, dispossession, exploitation, racial supremacy, antisemitism, anti-Palestinian racism, and the baptizing of injustice in the name of God. The enemy is Satan. Human beings are accountable agents, victims, perpetrators, mixtures of both, and objects of Christ’s gospel call to repentance, faith, healing, sanctification, restitution, and new creation. Every people named in this essay is named because the gospel addresses them — not because they are beyond its reach. By “human allies” in the title, I do not mean any ethnicity, nationality, or people group as such. I mean all human agents, institutions, ideologies, and systems that knowingly or unknowingly participate in the works Scripture identifies with the adversary: deception, accusation, murder, theft, enslaving, domination, and the suppression of truth.

Note on Scripture quotations: Scripture quotations are the author’s translation/adaptation unless otherwise noted. Capitalization is interpretive and used for theological clarity.

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There is a parable that cuts to the heart of it.

Not the heart of some ancient religious dispute, sealed off in history and safely academic. The heart of what is happening right now — in Palestine, in the conquered and colonized lands of the Americas, in the dispossessed territories of the Global South, in every place on earth where the powerful have taken what belongs to others and called it “destiny,” called it “civilization,” called it “God’s will.”

Jesus told this parable in the Temple in Jerusalem, in the final week before His crucifixion, to the faces of the men who were about to kill Him. He knew what He was saying. He knew what it would cost Him. He said it anyway.

“There was a Master of a house who planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a winepress in it and built a tower and leased it to tenants, and went into another country.” (Matthew 21:33)

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I. The Parable That Names the Crime (21:33–46)

The parable of the wicked tenants is not primarily about Israel and the church, though it addresses that. It is not primarily about the rejection of Jesus, though it names that too. At its core, it is about the anatomy of wickedness — the specific, identifiable structure of sin that allies human power with satanic purpose to dispossess, exploit, and murder — and God’s judgment and resolution.

Read the entire pericope, in full:

“Hear another parable. There was a Master of a house who planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a winepress in it and built a tower and leased it to tenants, and went into another country. When the season for fruit drew near, He sent His servants to the tenants to get His fruit. And the tenants took His servants and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again He sent other servants, more than the first. And they did the same to them. Finally He sent His Son to them, saying, ‘They will respect My Son.’ But when the tenants saw the Son, they said to one another, ‘This is the Heir. Come, let us kill Him and have His inheritance.’ And they took Him and threw Him out of the vineyard and killed Him. When therefore the Owner of the vineyard comes, what will He do to those tenants?” They said to Him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable end and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give Him the fruits in their seasons.”

Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures: ‘The Stone that the builders rejected has become the Cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes’? Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits. And the one who falls on this Stone will be broken to pieces; and when It falls on anyone, It will crush them.”

And when the chief priests and the Pharisees heard His parables, they perceived that He was speaking about them. And although they were seeking to arrest Him, they feared the crowds, because they held Him to be a prophet. (Matthew 21:33–46)

The structure of wickedness in this parable is precise and must be named:

First: Entrusted stewardship is corrupted into claimed ownership. The tenants did not plant the vineyard. They did not build the tower or dig the winepress. The land was prepared, established, and entrusted to them. But over time — in the absence of the Owner, in the intoxication of their own power — they came to treat the vineyard as theirs by right. The tenant who forgets he is a steward and begins to act like an owner is the template for every land-theft regime in history.

Second: The servants are silenced. When the Owner sends His servants — the prophets, the messengers of justice, the voices that remind the powerful of their accountability — the tenants do not debate them. They beat them, kill them, stone them. The pattern is consistent: every system of theft and dispossession must suppress the voice that names what it is doing. The spokesperson who says this land is not yoursmust be eliminated. By extension, the journalist, the human rights worker, the pastor, and the Christians who proclaim jubilee stand in the servant-pattern of the Owner’s messengers — and they face the same risk.

Third: When the Son comes, the crime escalates to its logical terminus. “This is the Heir. Come, let us kill Him and have His inheritance.” The motive is stated openly, without shame: to eliminate the rightful Claimant so that possession becomes permanent. They throw Him out of the vineyard — out of the land — and kill Him. Dispossession and murder are not two separate crimes here. They are one crime. Land-theft and killing are the twin instruments of the same satanic agenda.

Fourth: Jesus asks the question that the powerful dare not answer honestly. “When therefore the Owner of the vineyard comes, what will He do to those tenants?” The chief priests and elders — who understand perfectly that they are the tenants in this story — answer the question themselves before they can stop themselves: “He will put those wretches to a miserable end and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give Him the fruits in their seasons.”They have pronounced their own judgment.

Fifth — and this is the pivot of the entire pericope — the Cornerstone and the Kingdom transferred (vv. 42–44). Jesus does not simply accept their verdict. He interprets it through Scripture and then delivers His own judicial sentence:

“Have you never read in the Scriptures: ‘The Stone that the builders rejected has become the Cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes’?”

The quotation is Psalm 118:22–23 — a psalm of royal vindication, sung at the great festivals, familiar to every hearer. The builders are the religious-political establishment. The rejected Stone is the Son thrown out of the vineyard and killed. But YHWH — the Owner — reverses the builders’ verdict. The rejected Stone becomes the ἀκρογωνιαῖος, the Cornerstone, the foundational stone upon which the entire new eschatological edifice rests. The builders’ rejection does not defeat God’s building project. It becomes the material out of which God constructs it.

Then Jesus delivers the sentence: “Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits.”

The kingdom — the βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ — is taken from the wicked tenants and given to ἔθνει ποιοῦντι τοὺς καρποὺς αὐτῆς: a nation, a people, producing its fruits. The singular ἔθνει is significant — not “nations” in the plural but a singular covenant people, defined not by ethnicity but by fruitfulness. This is the eschatological community of those who belong to the Son, drawn from every people and tribe and tongue and nation (Revelation 5:9–10), constituted by Spirit-imparted faith and repentance, not by bloodline or territorial claim.

And then the Stone becomes something other than a foundation — it becomes a judgment: “And the one who falls on this Stone will be broken to pieces; and when It falls on anyone, It will crush them.” The Cornerstone that saves the fruitful is the crushing weight that destroys the thief–murderers. There is no neutrality before the Son.

“When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard His parables, they perceived that He was speaking about them. And although they were seeking to arrest Him, they feared the crowds, because they held Him to be a prophet.”

They understood. They were not confused. They proceeded anyway.

Jesus’ hearers would not have missed the echo of Isaiah 5. There, YHWH plants a vineyard, protects it, and comes seeking fruit — but instead of justice (mishpat), He finds bloodshed (mispach); instead of righteousness (tsedaqah), He hears a cry (tse’aqah). The prophet’s wordplay is devastating: justice and bloodshed sound alike in Hebrew; righteousness and the cry of the oppressed sound alike. The vineyard of Israel had substituted the sound of injustice–unrighteousness for the sound of justice–righteousness, and YHWH heard the difference. Matthew 21 intensifies Isaiah’s vineyard song to its messianic crisis: the problem is now not only fruitlessness but land theft, violence, and murder. The Owner’s messengers are beaten and killed. The Son himself is murdered. The parable is Isaiah 5 brought to its appointed climax — and its appointed resolution.

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The Transfer Is Not a License: What “Taken Away” Does Not Mean

Here a critical clarification is necessary — one that the history of “Christian” empire has wickedly and catastrophically refused to make.

“The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits” (v. 43) has been read, with staggering theological distortion, as authorization for “Christian” seizure of land, displacement of peoples, and construction of empires. The Doctrine of “Discovery”; Spanish conquistadorial theology; Anglo-“Protestant” genocidal, dispossessional, and enslaving ideologies; and present-day “Christian” Zionism have all, in various registers, deployed the logic of kingdom-transfer to justify the very crime that the parable condemns.

This is a distortion so fundamental it constitutes a reversal of the text’s meaning.

First, a clarification that cannot be stated too plainly: Jesus was not issuing an ethnic condemnation of the Jewish people. He was confronting a specific religious-political leadership class — the chief priests and Pharisees, according to Matthew 21:45 — whose stewardship had become virulent, violent, and murderous. Jesus himself is Jewish: the Son of David and the Son of Abraham. The apostles are Jewish. The very first converts to Christ are Jewish. Therefore any reading of this parable that becomes antisemitic has already betrayed the Son at the center of the parable. This is not replacement theology in the crude sense. God has not abandoned His faithfulness to His promises. Romans 11 forbids Gentile boasting: Jewish branches remain beloved because of the patriarchs (Romans 11:28), and Gentile believers stand only by grace (11:20). The issue in Matthew 21 is not ethnic replacement but covenantal fruitfulness under the Messiah. The kingdom belongs to the Son, and all who belong to the Son — Jew and Gentile together — constitute His Spirit-created covenant people.

What is transferred in verse 43 is the kingdom — the βασιλεία — not real estate. Not geopolitical sovereignty. Not the right to dispossess anyone of their homes, their farms, their land, their rights, their wages, or their lives. The kingdom of God is not a territorial empire. It is the reign of God actively breaking into history through the Son, by the grace, power, and work of the Holy Spirit, constituted by those who, by saving and sanctifying faith, bear its fruits — justice, mercy, faithfulness (23:23), love of neighbor, care for the poor, and the holistic proclamation and ministry of the gospel.

The “people” to whom the kingdom is given — the ἔθνος producing its fruits — is identified throughout the New Testament with the utmost precision. It is not a “Christian” civilization. It is not a Western empire baptized in the name of Jesus. It is the multi-ethnic body of the crucified and risen Son, constituted by His gospel and the Spirit, defined by the fruits of justice–righteousness, comprising believing Jews and Gentiles from every nation in one new covenant community (Ephesians 2:11–22; Galatians 3:26–29; Romans 11:17–24).

And those from whom the kingdom is taken are identified with equal precision. Jesus was not addressing the Jewish people as an ethnic whole. He was addressing the specific religious-political establishment — the chief priests and Pharisees (Matthew 21:45) — who had corrupted their stewardship into violence, murder, and land-theft; silenced the Owner’s servants; and were about to murder His Son. The New Testament is unambiguous about who these people are in the deepest theological sense.

John 8:44: Jesus addressed His accusers — the religious establishment that was plotting His death — directly: “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth.”The children of the devil are not identified by ethnicity. They are identified by their alignment with the adversary’s agenda: murder and deception, which are also the defining acts of the wicked tenants.

Romans 2:28–29: “For no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical. But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter.” True covenant membership is constituted by the Spirit, not by bloodline. Those who bear the name without bearing the fruit are, in Paul’s precise theological language, not true Jews — not the genuine covenant people of God — regardless of their ethnic or religious credentials.

Revelation 2:9 and 3:9 must be handled with holy fear. Those texts address specific first-century opponents of persecuted churches — communities that were using covenant identity as cover for persecution of Christians. They must never be weaponized as a slur against Jewish people. The broader theological principle is this: no religious identity — Jewish, Christian, Muslim, secular, Western, Eastern, left, right, or center — gives anyone permission to persecute, deceive, dispossess, exploit, enslave, or murder. When any community claims covenantal or moral authority while doing the works of the adversary, Scripture strips away the mask. The mask-stripping is not ethnic. It is ethical.

The wicked tenants of Matthew 21, those whom Jesus addressed in John 8, those against whom the persecuted Christians of Revelation cry out: these are not ethnic categories. They are spiritual-ethical categories — the lineage of those who align themselves with the adversary’s agenda of dispossession, theft, murder, and suppression of truth. They exist in every ethnicity, in every century, in every religious tradition — including “Christianity.”

Which means that “Christian” conquistadores, “Christian” settlers, “Christian” Zionists who use the language of kingdom-transfer to oppress, exploit, dispossess, and displace are not the ἔθνος to whom the kingdom has been given. They are wicked tenants dressed in the Son’s clothing. They are the false God-worshippers of every age — claiming the name of the covenant while enacting the agenda of the adversary. The Holy Stone that they have wickedly made the banner of their conquest will, in the precise words of Jesus, fall on them and crush them (v. 44).

The transfer of the kingdom is not a transfer of real estate to “Christians.” It is the eschatological inheritance-endowment of the reign of God to those who bear its fruits — the multi-ethnic, Spirit-created, new covenant people of the crucified, risen, and already, inaugurately reigning Son. And the first fruits they are called to bear are justice, liberation, healing, and the protection of the very people that the wicked tenants have always targeted.

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II. The Vineyard Is the Whole Cosmos: Genesis 1 to Revelation 22

The parable of the wicked tenants does not float free of the larger biblical narrative. It is situated within it — the concentrated, dramatic expression of a conflict that runs from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22.

In its immediate setting, the vineyard evokes Israel and covenant stewardship — the precise image Isaiah 5 established for every hearer in that Temple court. Within the broader canon, the logic expands: the whole earth is YHWH’s (Psalm 24:1), and humanity’s vocation from creation is stewardship under the Creator.

The vineyard, read canonically, is the entire cosmos. The owner and master of the house is YHWH, the Creator and covenant Lord. The tenants are humanity — especially, those entrusted with power, with governance, with stewardship of the earth and its peoples. The servants are, in the parable’s first horizon, the prophets sent to Israel — the Owner’s spokespersons whom the wicked tenants beat, kill, and stone. By extension, they represent all truth-bearing messengers sent by God to confront wicked stewardship throughout history. The Son is Emperor–Healer Jesus Christ, the Heir of all things (Heb. 1:2).

And behind the wicked tenants — animating them, directing them, providing the ideological architecture for their crimes — is the adversary: Satan.

This is the connection that the parable implies but the broader canon makes explicit. The anatomy of wickedness in Matthew 21 — entrusted stewardship corrupted into claimed ownership, truthtellers silenced, the rightful heir murdered — is not merely a human pathology. It is the shape of satanic operation in history. It is what the enemy does through human beings who have surrendered their conscience to the logic of violence, domination, theft, and murder.

Go back to the beginning.

Genesis 1–2: The earth was created good. Humanity was given dominion — not ownership, but stewardship — over creation (Genesis 1:28). The earth was YHWH’s — and that’s eternal and unchangeable (Psalm 24:1). Humanity held it in trust. The vineyard was entrusted to the tenants.

Genesis 3: The serpent entered. His move was not random violence but structured deception — he corrupted the stewards’ relationship to the Owner, persuading humanity that they can be “like God,” that they can possess and define on their own terms what doesn’t belong to them. Read canonically, the original sin was the original act of the wicked tenant: treating what was entrusted as if it were owned, displacing the Owner’s authority with self-sovereignty. By theological extension, Adam stands as the archetypal wicked tenant — the template for every act of dispossession that follows. Satan initiated the logic that the wicked tenants will later enact on the cosmic stage of history.

Genesis 3:15: The Owner did not walk away. He declared war. The Seed of the woman will crush the serpent’s head. The vineyard will be reclaimed. The Heir will not ultimately be defeated.

The entire sweep of redemptive history — the covenants with Noah, Abraham, Moses, David; the Exodus and the conquest; the prophetic tradition of justice and judgment, grace and promise; the Exile and the return; the coming of God’s kingdom — is the story of the Owner reclaiming and fulfilling what is His, through the Son who is the Heir of all things, by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit.

Revelation 21–22: The new creation — the renewed and fulfilled vineyard, the renewed and fulfilled earth, the city of God coming down, the nations healed, the tree of life for the ethne, the river of the water of life flowing freely. No more tenants who murder. No more serpent who deceives. No more dispossession. No more enslavement. No more apartheid systems. The earth is full of the knowledge of the glory of YHWH as the waters cover the sea (Hab. 2:14). The vineyard produces its fruit at last, in the age of the Son’s consummated, uncontested reign.

This is the whole story. Matthew 21:33–46 is its concentrated dramatic center.

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III. The Protoevangelium and the War Behind History (Genesis 3:15)

Before we can understand what Christ did and does to Satan, we must understand what Satan did and does through history.

The protoevangelium — “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her Offspring; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel” (Genesis 3:15) — declares two things simultaneously: the certainty of the serpent’s defeat, and the reality of his assault on the Seed in the meantime.

The “offspring of the serpent” in the biblical narrative is not merely a metaphor for general sinfulness. It identifies a specific lineage of human actors who carry the logic of the wicked tenant into history — those who serve the adversary’s agenda of deception, dispossession, murder, enslaving, and the suppression of truth. Jesus makes this explicit in John 8:44: “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him.”

Murder and deception. These are the serpent’s primary instruments. They are also the instruments of the wicked tenants in Matthew 21. The alignment is not coincidental. The human actors who dispossess, murder, exploit, and enslave are operating — knowingly or unknowingly — in the service of the adversary’s agenda, which is to prevent the vineyard from yielding its fruit to the Owner, and to prevent the Son’s inheritance from being realized.

This is the theological framework within which we must understand the great crimes of human history. Cain murdering Abel. Empires devouring peoples. Native nations dispossessed and decimated in the Americas. Foundational Black Americans — Black Americans descended from enslaved Africans in the United States — robbed of freedom, labor, wages, family, land, safety, and inheritance. Jewish people hunted through pogroms and the Holocaust. Uyghur Muslims subjected to mass detention, forced labor, surveillance, cultural erasure, and suppression of religious practice — what numerous governments and human rights bodies have characterized as crimes against humanity. In Ukraine, the Russian invasion has produced mass civilian casualties, the forced displacement of millions, the bombing of hospitals, schools, and civilian infrastructure, and documented atrocities against Ukrainian civilians. In North Korea, an estimated 200,000 people are held in political prison camps under conditions of forced labor, starvation, torture, and execution, with the entire population subject to a totalitarian system that systematically suppresses all dissent and religious faith. In West Papua, the Indigenous Papuan people face ongoing military occupation, land seizure, resource extraction, and documented extrajudicial killings by Indonesian security forces, with international journalists largely barred from the region. In Yemen, a decade of war has produced one of the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophes, with millions facing famine, a shattered healthcare system, and mass civilian casualties from airstrikes and blockade.

In Gaza, the entire population of 2.1 million Palestinians has lived under a restrictive blockade since 2007; and in the current war, according to Gaza’s health authorities as relayed in humanitarian reporting, approximately 1.9 million people have been internally displaced, over 72,000 Palestinians have been killed, and more than 172,000 have been injured amid relentless bombardment, severe aid obstruction, and a catastrophic denial of freedom. In South America, Venezuelans have been caught under interventionist force, contested sovereignty, and a geopolitical order in which oil wealth, regime control, and foreign power are not peripheral to the story. In the Middle East, Iranians, Israelis, Arabs, migrant workers, seafarers, and surrounding peoples have been caught in a widening war-zone where oil, militarized waterways, sanctions, blockades, nuclear fear, and imperial power converge.

These are not identical events. They are not interchangeable histories. Each must be studied on its own terms. But they bear family resemblance wherever the wicked-tenant logic appears: power claims what is not its own, suppresses truth, exploits the vulnerable, baptizes violence, and treats human beings made in God’s image as obstacles to possession.

Violence, murder, and theft are not peripheral sins. They are, according to Jesus’ parable, at the heart of wicked-tenant rebellion. And based on His teachings in John 8:44 and 10:10, they are at the very core of what the enemy has been doing and continues to do in history.

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IV. “White” Conquistadorial Wickedness: The Parable Enacted on a Global Scale

By “White” conquistadorial wickedness, I do not mean every person socially classified as white. I mean a racialized ideology of conquistadorialism: the system that treated European “Christian” identity as superior, treated non-European peoples as disposable or subordinate, and used law, theology, deception, violence, theft, and commerce to convert other people’s land and labor into imperial wealth. The wicked tenants are not one ethnicity. They are a pattern. The wicked-tenant spirit can wear a Roman uniform, a Spanish cross, a British flag, a U.S. deed, an Israeli settlement charter, a Saudi rifle, an Indonesian drone, a corporate contract, or a pastor’s robe. What identifies the wicked tenant is not skin color or nationality but the logic: entrusted stewardship corrupted into claimed ownership, truth suppressed, and violence deployed to make the possession permanent.

The parable of the wicked tenants found its most systematic historical enactment in the age of European conquest — what history records as the Age of Discovery, what the conquered peoples of the earth experienced as the age of dispossession and genocide.

Beginning in the late fifteenth century, European powers — Portugal, Spain, England, France, the Netherlands — arrived on the shores of the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania and proceeded to enact, on a global scale, the logic of the wicked tenants. They encountered peoples living on land they had inhabited for millennia. They planted flags. They drew maps. They signed treaties they immediately violated. They constructed legal and theological frameworks — terra nullius, the Doctrine of “Discovery,” the papal Inter Caetera of 1493 — to transform their theft into “sovereignty” and their violence into “civilization.”

The Doctrine of “Discovery” is worth pausing on, because it is the point at which “Christianity” was conscripted into the service of the wicked tenants with the most devastating long-term consequences. The papal bull Inter Caetera, issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, granted Spain the right to claim any lands “discovered” in the western hemisphere, provided they were not already held by a “Christian” ruler. Native peoples — because they were not “Christian” — were defined as having no valid claim to their own land. The vineyard was declared “vacant.” The tenants arrived and called themselves “owners.”

Elements of this legal “inheritance” remained visible in U.S. law as recently as 2005, when the Supreme Court in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nationrelied on doctrines of long-settled “sovereignty,” “jurisdiction,” and land “title” to reject the Oneida Nation’s effort to revive sovereignty over reacquired ancestral land — a ruling that illustrates how conquest’s “legal” architecture continues to shape Native land rights today.

One influential estimate places the Native population collapse in the Americas after 1492 in the tens of millions — with disease, warfare, forced labor, displacement, and colonial disruption all contributing. The transatlantic slave trade — the forced removal of an estimated twelve to fifteen million African individuals from their homelands — was the labor system that made the stolen vineyard productive for the conquistadores. Enslavement was not an afterthought of colonialism. It was integral to it. The same logic that said this land is ours also said your body is ours too.

Truth was silenced. Bartolomé de las Casas, the Dominican friar who witnessed the genocide of the Taíno people in Hispaniola and spent his life denouncing it, was largely ignored by the conquistadorial powers he confronted. The enslaved people who resisted, the Native leaders who refused to surrender their land, the missionaries who objected — they were the servants beaten, killed, and stoned. The machine of conquistadorialism proceeded.

And the theology that undergirded it was, in the most precise sense, a satanic inversion of the gospel. It took the name of the Son — the Heir who was thrown out of the vineyard and killed — and used it to justify the throwing out and killing. It took the cross — the instrument of the worst act of unjust state violence in the New Testament — and turned it into the standard of empire. It baptized dispossession. It called the genocide of peoples the spread of “civilization.”

This is the pattern Jesus exposes in Matthew 21. Wicked tenants always claim what is not theirs, silence the truth, and secure possession through violence. And often, most blasphemously, they do it while claiming to act in the name of the Owner.

A word to those who inherit, benefit from, or remain protected by systems built through conquest and settler-colonialism, who read this as followers of Jesus: repentance is not optional. It is the first human movement of the gospel. The vineyard does not belong to you by right of conquest. The theological frameworks that legitimized that theft were satanic — quite literally, constructed in the service of the adversary’s agenda. To follow Emperor–Healer Jesus Christ is to denounce the Doctrine of “Discovery,” to support the land rights of Native peoples and reparations for Foundational Black Americans, to name what was done as what it was — theft, genocide, extortion, and enslaving — and to commit to the restorative justice that gospel repentance demands.

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V. Palestine: The Parable Continues

The logic of the wicked tenant did not end with the colonial era. It continues, in concentrated and visible form, in the land called Palestine.

The situation requires the biblical-theological honesty that Christian Zionism has largely and deceptively refused to provide.

In 1947–1948, in the events Palestinians call the *Nakba* — the Catastrophe — roughly 700,000 to 750,000 Palestinian Arabs, the majority of whom were Muslim and Christian, were displaced from their homes, villages, and land during the war that established the State of Israel. More than 400 Palestinian villages were depopulated or destroyed. Families who had lived on that land for generations — who held Ottoman-era deeds, who had farmed olive groves and grazed flocks — were expelled and prevented from returning. Their property was absorbed into the new state. The houses that were not demolished were occupied by others.

The mass displacement of Palestinians in 1947–1948 is historically well attested, though historians debate causes, military context, the degree of intentionality, and responsibility. It is documented in Israeli archives and acknowledged by Israeli historians including Benny Morris, and recorded in the testimony of those who lived it. It bears the pattern of the parable: an ideology arrived that claimed exclusive ownership, expelled hundreds of thousands of previous inhabitants, and used force to prevent their return.

The displacement has continued and deepened. In the West Bank, Israeli settlement expansion — which the International Court of Justice in its July 2024 advisory opinion, the United Nations, and the overwhelming consensus of international law conclude is unlawful under the Fourth Geneva Convention — has progressively transferred Palestinian land to Israeli settlers, encircled Palestinian communities, restricted Palestinian movement, and demolished Palestinian homes. That ICJ opinion is advisory rather than a criminal conviction, and Israel and the United States dispute its framing; nonetheless it represents the judgment of the United Nations’ principal judicial organ and cannot be dismissed. In Gaza, roughly two million people have lived under a blockade restricting the movement of people, goods, medical supplies, and building materials — conditions the United Nations has described as incompatible with human dignity, intensified catastrophically after October 2023. The siege, the bombardment campaigns, the massacre of tens of thousands of Palestinians, and the near-total displacement of Gaza’s population demand to be named.

This bears the wicked-tenant pattern: land taken, people expelled, truth silenced, and ideology constructed to justify the whole enterprise as God’s will.

That ideology — in the specific forms I am critiquing here — is “Christian” Zionism, and those forms must be confronted directly.

The forms of “Christian” Zionism I am critiquing are those that treat modern Israeli state “sovereignty” as a near-absolute theological “good,” minimize or justify Palestinian dispossession, and read Old Testament land promises in a way that bypasses their fulfillment in Christ and the new creation. Not every person who uses the label “Christian Zionist” holds every element of this. But where this theology operates — treating the “territorial” expansion of a modern nation-state as the outworking of “divine” covenant promise, regardless of the human cost to Palestinians — it must be named as a moral and theological catastrophe.

It is a catastrophe because it is exegetically indefensible. The land promises of the Abrahamic covenant find their fulfillment not in a modern ethnic-nationalist state but in Christ himself — the Seed of Abraham (Galatians 3:16) in whom all the nations of the earth are blessed (Genesis 12:3; Galatians 3:8). The inheritance of the land, in the New Testament’s own reading of the Old Testament, is universalized and eschatologized: Abraham’s true inheritance is the world (Romans 4:13), the meek will inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5), the new creation is the final fulfillment of every territorial promise (Revelation 21–22). To reduce these promises to the territorial claims of a modern nation-state is to read the Old Testament without Christ — which is to say, to misread it entirely.

It is a catastrophe because it is, in the most direct sense, the theology of the wicked tenants. It takes the vineyard — the land, the earth, the covenant promises of God — and uses them to justify the expulsion of those already living there. It does in theological argument what the tenants did in the parable: it constructs a claim to ownership that eliminates the rights of everyone else.

It is a catastrophe because it has made large segments of Western “evangelical Christianity” complicit in the ongoing dispossession and suffering of Palestinian people — including Palestinian Christians, brothers and sisters in the body of Christ, who have watched their church buildings bombed and their communities destroyed while their co-religionists in the West cheered on the government responsible.

A clear word: the gospel of Christ does not take sides between ethnic peoples. It does not privilege one ethnicity over another in the economy of God’s kingdom. “There is neither Jew nor Greek” (Galatians 3:28) — not as an erasure of ethnic identity but as a declaration that in Christ, ethnic identity confers no special political privilege; no superior claim to land, labor, or resources; no exemption from the demands of justice. Palestinian people are precious to God. Jewish people are precious to God. Both are made in the image of God. Both are the objects of the gospel’s address. Neither ethnic identity nor political alignment with a nation-state constitutes covenant standing before God.

Jewish suffering is real. The Holocaust is real. Pogroms are real. Antisemitism is real and remains a present danger, not a relic of history. Jewish fear is not imaginary, and any “Christian” treatment of this conflict that forgets or dismisses Jewish suffering is morally corrupt and biblically rebellious. Roughly 850,000 Jewish people were also displaced from Arab countries in the decades surrounding 1948 — their dispossession, too, is real, is remembered, and belongs within any honest account of this history. But suffering does not create a blank check for state violence, ethnic domination, settlement expansion, blockade, or permanent occupation. Scripture never permits the wounded to heal themselves by dispossessing another people. The gospel holds all of this.

A biblical theology of land and justice must tell the truth about overlapping wounds. Palestinian dispossession is real. Jewish suffering, exile, antisemitism, and displacement are real. Native sovereignty claims are real. Black Americans’ stolen labor and denied inheritance are real. Mexican, Tejano, Californio, and other histories of conquest and treaty violation are real. These histories are not interchangeable, and none cancels the others. The gospel does not let one wounded people heal by wounding another. It calls every people to truth, repentance, restitution, protection, and repair — and it calls those who hold power to lead in that work.

Palestinian suffering does not make Palestinian actors morally infallible. Hamas’ murder of civilians, the taking of hostages, its antisemitism, its authoritarian practices, and its use of violence against innocents must be condemned without hesitation. No oppressed people is served by becoming a mirror of the oppressor’s wickedness. The gospel does not authorize revenge-murder. It announces judgment on all murderers, and mercy to all who repent — yet without immunization from the temporal penal standards of human laws and justice. The point here is not that any party in this conflict is beyond reproach. The point is that no trauma, no history, no theology gives any state, movement, or people the right to dispossess, dehumanize, blockade, bomb, massacre, exploit, enslave, or permanently dominate another people.

The dispossession of the Palestinian people is not God’s will. It is the work of the wicked tenants. The theological frameworks that legitimize it are not the gospel. They are its inversion.

And the murdered Son — thrown out of the vineyard — is the One who will judge.

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VI. The Incarnation: The Heir Enters the Vineyard

When the Son of God took on human flesh in the womb of Mary of Nazareth — a Jewish woman living under Roman colonial occupation, in a land that had been the theater of imperial power for centuries — the event could not be understood apart from the parable.

The Heir came to the vineyard. He entered not in military power but in vulnerability — an infant, a refugee (Matthew 2:13–14), a citizen of an occupied people. He entered the very conditions of violence, theft, exploitation, dispossession that the adversary’s system produced. He lived among the colonized. He spoke to the occupied. He healed the casualties of the system.

The Gospel of John named the cosmic stakes: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). The darkness — κατέλαβεν, unable to seize or suppress it. The arrival of the Word-made-flesh was the arrival of the true Owner’s Son in the vineyard that the wicked tenants have been running as their own. The confrontation was inevitable.

The apostle John stated the mission with precision: “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). The works of the devil — the specific, identifiable works — include theft, exploitation, enslaving, and murder. They include the suppression of the truth. They include the construction of ideological frameworks that baptize exploitation and dispossession. They include the silencing of the displaced. Jesus came to undo all of it.

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VII. The Wilderness: The Second Adam Refuses the Satanic Deal (Matthew 4:1–11)

Before his public ministry began, Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness where Satan made his offer explicit.

In Luke 4:5–7, Satan showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time and said: “To You I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If You, then, will worship me, it will all be Yours.”

That was the satanic offer of empire. Comprehensive authority over the kingdoms of the world, delivered without the cross, on the condition of worship–allegiance to the adversary. It was the offer that every wicked tenant has implicitly accepted: sovereignty, territory, power — in exchange for alignment with the adversary’s logic of violence, domination, exploitation, and dispossession.

Every conquistadorial empire accepted this deal. Every regime that has seized land and called it destiny has accepted this deal. The invader–thieves who planted the cross in soil they watered with blood accepted this deal. The ideologues who construct theological justifications for ongoing oppression, violence, and dispossession have accepted this deal.

Jesus refused. “It is written: ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only shall you serve’” (Luke 4:8). The kingdoms of the world are not to be received on satanic terms. The Heir will receive His inheritance — but through the cross, not around it. Through the crushing of the serpent’s head, not through worship–alliance with the serpent.

This refusal defines the posture of God’s kingdom toward all empire. Christians who accept the satanic offer — power, violence, conquest, territory, cultural dominance, in exchange for silence on injustice — have done what Jesus refused to do in the wilderness. They have become tenants in service of the adversary.

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VIII. The Exorcisms and the Mission of the Seventy-Two: The Vineyard Repossessed

When Jesus began His public ministry, the confrontation with demons was immediate. In the synagogue at Capernaum (Mark 1:21–28), in the country of the Gerasenes (Mark 5:1–20), throughout Galilee — He encountered the demonized and delivered them. Each exorcism was a territorial repossession: a human being returned from the adversary’s domain to the Owner of the vineyard.

His interpretation of the exorcism ministry in Matthew 12:29 was explicit: “How can someone enter the house of the strong and plunder his goods, unless they first bind the strong? Then indeed they may plunder his house.” Jesus was — and is eternally — the One stronger than the strong. He entered the occupied vineyard and plundered the adversary’s possessions — the captive human beings — one by one.

The mission of the seventy-two in Luke 10:1–24 extended this repossession through his sent ones. As they proclaimed, healed, and exorcised, Jesus watched the spiritual consequences: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (10:18). The mission of sincere Christians — every act of proclamation, healing, justice-work, and liberation done in the name of Jesus — is a blow to the adversary’s claim on the vineyard. It is the gradual, Spirit-empowered, historically extended repossession of what belongs to the Owner.

And the authority delegated to the disciples is comprehensive: “I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you” (10:19). All the power of the enemy — including the power of the wicked tenant, including the power of empire, violence, murder, genocide, dispossession, enslaving, and ideological deception. No jurisdiction of the adversary falls outside the scope of the authority of Christ. The promise “nothing shall hurt you” does not mean Christ’s servants cannot be beaten, displaced, imprisoned, or killed — Jesus himself was killed, and the apostles after Him. It means the enemy cannot finally destroy those whose names are written in heaven. Satan can wound the heel. He cannot own the inheritance.

The disciples are reoriented in their joy: “Do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20). For the displaced, the dispossessed, the enslaved, the exploited, the oppressed, and the ones whose names have been erased from the civic record, who have been united or are being united to Jesus by the Spirit through faith — your name is written in heaven. It was written there before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4). No conquistadorial power, no settler government, no wicked tenant, no demonic forces can expunge it.

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IX. The Cross: The Heir Thrown Out of the Vineyard — and Vindicated

The parable of the wicked tenants predicted the cross: “They took Him and threw Him out of the vineyard and killed Him.” Jesus told this parable knowing what was coming. Within days, He was arrested, tried on false charges, handed over to the imperial power, and executed outside the city walls — thrown out of the vineyard.

The cross was the moment when the wicked tenants appeared to have won. The Heir was dead. The inheritance seemed secured. The Truth was silenced.

But the parable already announced what the resurrection would confirm: the Owner would come. The tenants will not get away with it.

Colossians 2:13–15: At the cross, the record of debt — the legal indictment of human sin, the χειρόγραφον that gave the accuser his instrument of power — was nailed to the cross and canceled. The rulers and authorities (ἀρχαὶ καὶ ἐξουσίαι) — the demonic powers behind every evil empire — were publicly stripped and shamed, marched as captives in the Victor’s triumph. The cross was the decisive cancelation of debts and the decisive disarmament of every power that has ever used religion, law, or ideology to justify oppression, exploitation, dispossession, and murder.

Hebrews 2:14–15: Through death, the Son destroyed the one who held the power of death — the devil — and delivered those who were held in lifelong slavery through the fear of it. The fear of death is the most powerful instrument of oppression and subjugation available to the powerful. Threaten a people’s existence and you can control, exploit, enslave, displace, and/or silence them. Christ’s victory over death dismantles this instrument. Those who have Spirit-imparted faith in His atonement and resurrection cannot finally be controlled by the threat of death.

John 12:31–33: “Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out.” The ruler of this world — the strong behind the wicked tenants, the adversary who has been directing the logic of violence and domination — is cast out at the cross. The Owner’s judgment on the wicked tenant system falls precisely at the moment when it appears to have triumphed.

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X. The Resurrection and Ascension: The Cornerstone Takes His Place

The Stone that the builders rejected has become the Cornerstone. Thrown out of the vineyard, killed — and raised on the third day.

The resurrection was not a consolation prize. It was the decisive vindication of the Heir’s claim to everything. Death could not hold Him because the cross was not a defeat — it was the decisive blow against the adversary. The serpent struck the Son’s heel; His heel crushed his head.

Matthew 28:18: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me.” Πᾶσα ἐξουσία — all authority. The authority that Satan offered in the wilderness and Jesus refused on satanic terms — He has now received from the Father on resurrection terms. Every empire, every colonial power, every ideological framework that has claimed divine sanction for dispossession, enslaving, and apartheid is now subordinated to the authority of the One they thought they had permanently silenced.

Ephesians 1:19–22: The ascended Christ is seated far above all rule, authority, power, and dominion — the entire hierarchy of spiritual powers that animate earthly wickedness. All things are under His feet. And His cosmic lordship is exercised on behalf of the believing church — the community of the new tenants, who will produce the fruits of God’s kingdom in their seasons.

Philippians 2:9–11: At the name of Jesus, every knee will bow — in heaven, on earth, and under the earth. Including the knees of every wicked tenant. Every conquistadorial empire. Every ideological system that baptizes dispossession, slavery, and/or apartheid. Every ruler who takes what is not theirs and calls it God’s will. They will bow to the One they are marginalizing, oppressing, enslaving, expelling, and/or murdering (Matthew 25:31–46).

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XI. The Present Age: The New Tenants in Action

We live in the tension of the already and the not yet. The Heir has been crucified, raised and enthroned. The vineyard belongs to Him. And the wicked tenant system — with its logic of dispossession, murder, enslaving, apartheid, and truth-silencing — continues to operate in history, though under the sentence of a judgment already declared.

Christians are called to be the new tenants — the ἔθνος producing the fruits of God’s kingdom in their seasons. And the fruits are not abstract. They are specified throughout the ministry of Christ Himself, and the calling of His people in the present age is precisely to extend that ministry into every corner of the vineyard that the adversary has corrupted.

This is the Christian vocation. It has four dimensions.

1. Healing

Christ healed the sick, restored sight to the blind, cleansed lepers, raised the dead, and declared that the woman bent double for eighteen years had been bound by Satan and was being set free (Luke 13:16). His healing ministry was not merely compassionate social service. It was the repossession of human bodies from the adversary’s domain — the visible sign that the reign of God had arrived and that the works of the devil were being undone.

The new tenants are called to continue this. James 5:14–16: church elders pray over the sick, and the Lord raises them up. Matthew 10:8: “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons.” Christians differ on how the sign-gifts operate today. But no faithful Christian may deny this: the church is called to pray for healing, resist demonic bondage, care for bodies, confront systems that destroy health, and bear witness to the atoning death and resurrection life of Christ. Healing — physical, psychological, societal, ecological — is a gospel act. It is what faithful stewards of the vineyard do.

In concrete terms: this means praying for the sick — that the Spirit would heal them supernaturally and/or through medical science. It means supporting and helping build clinics in Black communities the wicked tenants have left medically abandoned. It means advocating for healthcare access for Native communities whose health systems were deliberately destroyed by conquistadorial policy. It means standing with Gaza’s physicians trying to treat the wounded under bombardment, with the medical infrastructure demolished around them. It means addressing the diseases of oppression and those of displacement — because oppression and displacement itself are pathologies that the gospel is divinely unleashed to heal.

2. Liberating

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18–19)

Jesus read this text from Isaiah 61 in the synagogue at Nazareth and announced: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). The liberation program of the Jubilee — release of the captive, cancellation of debt, return of the dispossessed to their land — is inaugurated in His person and ministry.

The new tenants are called to extend this proclamation. Liberation from demonic bondage through the authority of the name of Jesus (Luke 10:17–19). Liberation from the ideological captivity of systems that tell the oppressed that their oppression is natural, deserved, or divinely ordained. Liberation from the legal and political structures that the wicked tenants have constructed to make their oppression and dispossession permanent. Proclamation that the vineyard belongs to the Owner — which means that the oppressed and/or dispossessed have a claim that no conquistadorial legal framework can legitimately extinguish.

Concretely: this means praying for those in bondage to evil spirits, vices, addictions, etc. — that the Holy Spirit would liberate them supernaturally and/or through medical science. It means supporting the moral obligation of restitution and repair for Black and Native communities — a gospel imperative grounded in truth, repentance, and justice. Sincere Christians may disagree about specific policy mechanisms — the precise forms of reparations legislation, land-back arrangements, and sovereignty protections — but none may deny the underlying obligation: what was stolen must be returned, what was destroyed must be repaired, and the voices of those most affected must lead the process. It means advocating for Palestinian freedom, safety, dignity, self-determination, and equal human rights — because biblical justice forbids the theft of land, the oppression of the native inhabitant, collective punishment, and the permanent domination of one people by another. It means dismantling the forms of “Christian” Zionist theology that have provided ideological cover for ongoing dispossession and apartheid, not with political argument alone but with biblical-exegetical precision and prophetic courage. It means standing in the tradition of Bartolomé de las Casas — willing to be unpopular, willing to name what is happening, willing to spend the years required to confront a system that has the power to suppress the truth.

3. Protecting

The mission of the seventy-two in Luke 10 ends with a promise: “nothing shall hurt you” (v. 19). This promise is eschatological in its ultimate reference — the enemy cannot finally destroy those who belong to Christ. But it also defines the posture of the community of the new tenants toward one another and toward the vulnerable in the vineyard.

The new tenants protect the targeted. They stand between the wicked tenant and his victims. This is what Numbers 35 legislated in the cities of refuge — places where those targeted by the logic of power and vengeance could find sanctuary. This is what the early church enacted in its care for widows, orphans, and immigrants — the three categories of persons that the wicked tenant system most reliably destroys.

Concretely: this means providing sanctuary to refugees and asylum seekers displaced by the systems of conquest, occupation, and oppression. It means the physical presence of internationals in areas of conflict — witness that makes atrocity more costly. It means legal defense for Native communities whose land rights are being litigated against by state power, and for Foundational Black Americans whose reparation rights are being systemically, “legally,” and politically roadblocked by “White” people and their allies. It means being the kind of community that the targeted know they can run to — because the King who owns the vineyard is the same One who told His servants to welcome the immigrant (Matthew 25:35) and who Himself was a refugee in Egypt (2:13–14).

4. Reconstructing

The promise of Isaiah 61 — which Jesus announces as his own mission text in Luke 4 — does not end with liberation. It continues: “They shall build up the ancient ruins; they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations” (Isaiah 61:4). The work of the new tenants is not only proclamation and protection. It is reconstruction.

This is the long, material, unglamorous work of restoring what the wicked tenants have destroyed. Rebuilding communities whose infrastructure was demolished. Restoring agricultural land — the olive groves of Palestine uprooted by settler–thieves, the Native lands degraded by extractive colonial economies — to productive fruitfulness. Reconstructing the educational systems, the health systems, the cultural institutions that the wicked tenant ideology targeted because they sustained the identity and resilience of the oppressed and the dispossessed.

The new creation of Revelation 21–22 — the city of God, the tree of life, the river of the water of life, the healing of the nations — does not arrive without historical anticipation. The repentant Christians’ reconstruction work in the present age is the foretaste, the first-fruits, the visible sign of the vineyard restored. Every house rebuilt in a community that was demolished, every clinic opened in a medically abandoned village, every legal victory that returns stolen land and advances the just demand for reparations — these are Gospel acts, fruits of the new tenants, signs of the Owner’s coming.

The wicked-tenant system is not geographically contained. It operates globally, across empires, states, militias, corporations, religious institutions, and ideological movements. Wherever human beings made in God’s image are detained, displaced, enslaved, bombed, starved, trafficked, silenced, exploited, or treated as disposable, the Owner sees. The Son who was thrown out and killed acts now through His repentant people, and He will return to judge every system that treats people as property, collateral, or obstacles to possession.

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Revelation 12:10–11 describes the warfare beneath all of this: “They have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death.” The blood of the Lamb — the cross, applied through faith and proclamation — and the word of testimony: the proclamation of the gospel of Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and reign. Applied to everyday-people situations, that testimony names what is happening, refuses to be silenced, speaks the Owner’s claim over the vineyard even when the wicked tenants have every instrument of suppression at their disposal.

Suffering Christians do not fight for victory. They fight from victory. The ground has already been taken. The Heir has been crucified, raised, enthroned, and inaugurately reigning. The Cornerstone is in place. The task is to hold the good news, to proclaim it, to heal, liberate, protect, and reconstruct — until the Owner comes and the vineyard is fully, finally, and eternally restored and fulfilled.

Ephesians 6:10–18: “Stand firm therefore.” The imperative is not to achieve victory but to occupy the ground the King has taken. The weapons are truth, justice–righteousness, peace–wellbeing, faith–trust, salvation–healing, and God’s word. And none of these weapons are merely spiritual in the detached, disembodied sense. Truth proclaims Christ’s life, death, resurrection, victory, ownership, and reign; and names what is happening to the oppressed and the dispossessed. Justice–righteousness demands restitution. Peace–wellbeing is not the absence of conflict but the presence of justice — shalom, the wholeness of the community restored. Faith–trust holds the Owner’s redemptive accomplishment and His promise for the oppressed and against the apparent permanence of the wicked tenant’s grip. Salvation–healing is the rescue, liberation, cure, mending, renewal, and restoration that Christ accomplished. God’s word — wielded as Jesus wielded it in the wilderness — is more than sufficient to set the oppressed free and to defeat every ideological system the adversary has constructed to make his occupation look like “destiny.”

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XII. The End: The Vineyard Restored (Revelation 20–22)

The Owner will return. The judgment that the wicked tenants pronounced on themselves in Matthew 21:41 will be divinely enforced.

Revelation 20:1–3: An angel will bind the serpent — “that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan” — and will throw him into the bottomless pit. The adversary who animated the entire history of wickedness, who taught the wicked tenant’s logic to every empire and ideological system that ever lived by it, will be bound and sealed away.

But the binding is not yet the end. Revelation 20:7–9 tells us what happens when the Millennium is completed: Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations once more — Gog and Magog — gathering them from the four corners of the earth for one final assault. Their number will be like the sand of the sea. They will march across the breadth of the earth and surround the camp of Christ’s believers–followers and the “beloved city” (20:9). It will be the last great enactment of the wicked tenant’s logic: one final attempt to seize the vineyard by surrounding and destroying those who belong to the Owner. And then — fire from heaven. It will come down and consume them. Not a prolonged battle. Not a negotiated settlement. The final assault of every wicked-tenant system, every satanic ideology, every empire that ever dispossessed and murdered in the name of destiny — consumed. In a moment. By God’s fire.

This is the ultimate answer to every generation that has asked: How long, O Lord? Will the systems of violence never end? Will the wicked tenants always win? The answer is no. Their final mobilization is also their final destruction. The camp of the saints — the displaced, the dispossessed, the persecuted, the remnant who believe–follow Jesus from every nation — will be surrounded. And then delivered. Not by their own power. By the Owner who comes.

Revelation 20:10: The devil will be thrown into the lake of fire. The serpent’s head, struck at the cross, will be crushed finally and absolutely. The protoevangelium of Genesis 3:15 will reach its terminus.

And then Revelation 21–22: The new creation. The vineyard renewed. The holy city will come down from heaven. The nations — the ethne, God’s believing people from every language and ethnicity who were colonized, dispossessed, enslaved, oppressed, and/or marginalized in the old order — will walk in its light (Rev. 21:24). The tree of life, whose leaves will be for the healing of the nations (Revelation 22:2). The river of the water of life will flow freely to all.

No more wicked tenants. No more Doctrine of Discovery. No more Nakba. No more blockade and bombardment. No more stolen land. No more slavery. No more oppression. No more apartheid. No more silence enforced on truth. No more death.

“Behold, I am making all things new.” (Revelation 21:5)

The vineyard belongs to the Son. And in the age of His consummated, uncontested reign, all who belong to Him — from every people, nation, language, and tribe — will dwell in it in peace.

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A Word to You

To the oppressed: The One who was oppressed, thrown out of the vineyard, and killed knows your experience from the inside. He was oppressed, expelled, and murdered. He was the victim of the same logic that has operated against you. And He rose again. The Owner vindicated Him. The inheritance is His. And yours, in Him, by faith. Your displacement, enslavement, and/or oppression is not the final word. Native nations are the original peoples and sovereign stewards of these lands. Foundational Black Americans carry the history of stolen labor, coerced wealth-production, and denied inheritance. Mexican, Tejano, Californio, and other communities in lands incorporated into the United States carry histories of conquest, treaty violation, and dispossession. These histories are distinct, but they converge in one demand that the gospel makes non-negotiable: truth, repair, and justice. Your dignity and your name — the Owner has not forgotten them.

To those suffering in Palestine: The God of justice has seen the Nakba. He has heard the cry of the expelled. He sees the demolished homes, the uprooted olive trees, the checkpoints, the siege. He sees Gaza and hears the cries of those whose loved ones have been massacred. He does not forget. And the One who reigns at the right hand of God the Father is the same One who said: “Whatever you did to the least of these My sisters, siblings, and brothers, you did to Me”(Matthew 25:40). The judgment of the wicked tenant is real, and it falls.

To the Native peoples of the Americas and beyond: The Doctrine of “Discovery” was a lie from the beginning. The theological frameworks that baptized your dispossession were not the gospel — they were its inversion, the theology of the adversary dressed in the clothes of the Son. The Son himself was the victim of this logic. He paid for our sins, and condemned evil on the cross. He condemns it still. And the inheritance of the earth belongs to the meek (Matthew 5:5) — which the colonial powers never were.

To the powerful who have built their prosperity on the logic of the wicked tenant: The Owner is coming. The question Jesus asked in Matthew 21:40 is addressed to you: “When therefore the Owner of the vineyard comes, what will He do to those tenants?”You have already answered it. Repentance is available. The gospel extends even to wicked tenants — Saul who became the Apostle Paul is a proof. But repentance that does not include the restitution of what was taken is not repentance. It is theatrics. Zacchaeus shows what genuine repentance looks like when theft has been sanctified by the system:

“Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold” (Luke 19:8).

Jesus does not call that gesture “wokeness.” He calls it salvation arriving at the house (v. 9).

To professing “Christians” who have confused the gospel with empire: The cross judges you first. The Son was not a conquistador. He was the One the conquistadores killed in the persons of those they destroyed (Matthew 25:31–46). Recovering the gospel means recovering this: Christ came to liberate the captives, to proclaim good news to the poor, to set free those who are oppressed (Luke 4:18). Not to bless their oppressors.

The Son died to pay for sins, rose again, and reigns eternal. The vineyard belongs to the Son. The serpent’s head is crushed. The new tenants — those who produce the gospel’s fruits in their seasons, who hold the earth in faithful stewardship before its Owner — are being gathered from every people and nation, and they will not be moved.

“Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our siblings has been thrown down.”(Revelation 12:10)

Stand in it.

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Holy Spirit of Emperor–Healer Jesus Christ, be merciful to us, anoint us, lead us, and help us.

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Glem Melo is an imperfect, repentant evangelical missionary.

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With research and composition assistance from multiple AI tools.

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Source Notes

Biblical texts: This essay draws especially on Matthew 21:33–46; Isaiah 5:1–7; Genesis 1–3; Psalm 2; Psalm 24; Psalm 72; Psalm 110; Psalm 118; Daniel 7; Luke 4:1–21; Luke 10:1–24; Luke 19:1–10; John 1:1–14; John 8:31–47; John 12:31–33; Romans 2:28–29; Romans 4:13; Romans 11; Galatians 3; Ephesians 1–6; Colossians 1–2; Hebrews 1–2; Revelation 2:9; 3:9; 12; 20–22.

On the Doctrine of “Discovery”: The Vatican’s joint statement (March 30, 2023) formally repudiated the “doctrine of discovery” as not part of Catholic teaching and acknowledged that the papal bulls failed to adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of Indigenous peoples. On the ongoing legal legacy in U.S. law, see City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation, 544 U.S. 197 (2005).

On the Indigenous population collapse in the Americas: Estimates vary significantly among scholars. One influential study (Koch et al., “Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492,” Quaternary Science Reviews, 2019) estimates population loss in the tens of millions over the century following 1492. The precise figures remain subject to scholarly debate.

On the transatlantic slave trade: UNESCO’s Slave Route Project documents the trafficking of millions of African women, men, and children — predominantly from West Africa to the Americas — as the labor foundation of colonial wealth extraction, accompanied by racial inferiority ideologies constructed to justify it.

On post-slavery violence, injustice, and apartheid against Black Americans: The end of formal slavery in 1865 did not end the wicked tenant’s logic against Black Americans. Reconstruction was followed by the systematic reimposition of racial subjugation through Black Codes, convict leasing, sharecropping, and the terror of lynching — documented by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) as more than 4,400 racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950, with EJI’s later Reconstruction-era research raising the total to nearly 6,500 when the 1865–1876 period is included. The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 destroyed the prosperous Greenwood District (“Black Wall Street”), killing hundreds and displacing thousands, with land subsequently seized and never returned. Redlining — the federally sanctioned denial of mortgage lending in Black neighborhoods, documented in Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law (2017) — systematically prevented Black wealth-building across the twentieth century. Mass incarceration has functioned as a continuation of racialized control, documented extensively by Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow (2010). These are not ancient history. Their compounding economic, political, and social effects are present-moment realities.

On the Nakba and Palestinian village depopulation: For primary documentation, see Walid Khalidi, ed., All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies). For the broader historical record, see Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

On the war in Gaza, mass killing, displacement, and humanitarian catastrophe: Since October 7, 2023, the Gaza Strip has experienced one of the most intense military campaigns of the twenty-first century. By 2026, Palestinian health authorities and UN humanitarian reporting were citing tens of thousands of Palestinian casualties, including large numbers of women and children, along with the near-total displacement of Gaza’s approximately 2.1 million inhabitants, the destruction of hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, churches, and residential neighborhoods, and the systematic obstruction of humanitarian aid. Simultaneously, Hamas’ October 7 attack killed approximately 1,200 people in Israel, mostly civilians, and took over 240 hostages — atrocities condemned without reservation in this essay. The OCHA, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), and major human rights organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have described or argued that conditions in Gaza constitute collective punishment of a civilian population. The ICJ’s interim measures orders (January and May 2024) called for prevention of acts under the Genocide Convention and for unimpeded humanitarian access. OCHA notes that figures not yet verified by the UN are attributed to their reporting sources; casualty figures cited in OCHA materials are provided by Gaza’s Ministry of Health and Israeli authorities.

On the ICJ advisory opinion: The International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion on July 19, 2024, concluding that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful and that settlement expansion violates international law. The opinion is advisory rather than a binding criminal judgment; Israel and the United States dispute its framing. It represents the considered judgment of the United Nations’ principal judicial organ.

On present-moment global violence and oppression: For documentation of the Uyghur situation in Xinjiang, see reports by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (August 2022) and Human Rights Watch. On Russian atrocities in Ukraine, see the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine and ICC arrest warrants issued in 2023. On North Korea’s prison camp system, see the UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the DPRK (2014) and subsequent annual UN Special Rapporteur reports. On West Papua, see Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reporting on Indonesian military operations and land dispossession. On Yemen, see OCHA humanitarian situation reports and the UN Panel of Experts on Yemen. On Iran, see the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran and Amnesty International annual reports. On Lebanon, see OCHA and UNHCR documentation on displacement and humanitarian conditions.

On Venezuela, intervention, and oil: For the Venezuela reference, see Reuters reporting from January 2026 on the U.S. capture of Nicolás Maduro, President Trump’s statement that the United States would “run” Venezuela during a transition, the administration’s stated plans to work with remaining Venezuelan officials and overhaul the oil industry, and Trump’s statements that U.S. oil companies were prepared to invest billions to restore Venezuelan crude production. See also Reuters reporting on Trump administration discussions with oil executives, plans to boost Venezuelan production, and subsequent Venezuelan oil-sector efforts to attract foreign investment and revise hydrocarbons rules after Maduro’s ouster. This essay cites Venezuela as an example of contested sovereignty, interventionist force, and the entanglement of regime control with resource politics — not as a claim that oil is the only factor.

On Iran, oil, sanctions, and maritime chokepoints:For the Iran reference, see Reuters reporting from 2026 on U.S. sanctions targeting Iran’s financial and oil-transport networks, Iranian petroleum and petrochemical shipments, shadow-fleet vessels, and Iranian oil shipments to China. See also Reuters reporting on shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz falling to near-standstill levels or remaining severely restricted; tanker disruptions and ship seizures; U.S. blockade measures affecting Iranian oil cargoes; and the Strait of Hormuz’s role as a major oil-and-gas transit chokepoint. This essay cites Iran and the surrounding region as an example of how oil, sanctions, militarized waterways, blockade logic, nuclear fear, and regional power converge — not as a claim that oil is the only cause of the conflict.

These situations are cited as contemporary instances of the wicked-tenant pattern analyzed in this essay; this is not an exhaustive global survey.