“A stone that causes men to stumble…”

They are everywhere, far as the eye can see.  You can’t walk without stepping on them, or climb without causing a little gravel slide on a steep hillside.  Rocks and stones dot Israel like the paper on the sidewalks after a ticker-tape parade in New York City.  Just ask the custodians there if you’re not sure.

Knowing the way that God designed a physical world that frequently illustrates the spiritual, and the way the Lord Jesus used metaphors, symbols and parables of earthly things to picture the heavenly, we shouldn’t be surprised that he chose stones and rocks to describe himself.  Especially since they are so ubiquitous in Israel.  In both Old and New Testaments it is the same.  We even get the English word, lithography, the process of printing on a flat surface from a smooth stone (originally), from the Greek lithos.

Throughout Scripture we see the use of stones and rocks employed in numerous ways to describe not only God and his Son, but also us.  That’s what Peter did in the second chapter of his first letter.  He starts in verse four by first describing Jesus as “the living Stone”.  In the next verse he says that we are “like living stones” too, “being built into a spiritual house…”  Then (v. 6) he quotes Isaiah 28:16, which describes Jesus as “a chosen and precious cornerstone…”  It was this connection with Jesus being the cornerstone that this passage hangs.  This cornerstone has its impact on both believers and unbelievers.  (It is not the scope of this devotional to consider in depth the significance of the cornerstone.  See that focus under its heading.)  To believers, Peter says (v. 7) “this stone is precious”.  Not so with unbelievers.  They have trouble with this stone.  They “do not believe”.  So to them it becomes “a stone that causes men to stumble…”

Isaiah was the first to write about this kind of stumbling. In his day the southern kingdom of Judah struggled against the kingdoms of Israel and Assyria, along with national religious apathy and corruption.  Judah had made a pact with the pagan Syrians, an ill-advised step.  Amid this kind of confusion, God told Isaiah, “…do not fear what [the people] fear, do not dread it.  The Lord Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy, he is the one you are to fear, he is the one you are to dread, and he will be a sanctuary…” (vs. 12-14a).  In other words, to Isaiah and anyone else who would turn to God, God would be their safe place, their calm in the eye of the storm.  But not to those in “both houses of Israel” (Israel and Judah).  To them “he will be a stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall…a trap and a snare” (v. 14b).  We may pause to consider this, that the Lord would actually become the stone that stumbles, a trap and a snare.  Almost sounds like the devil, not the Lord, doesn’t it?  But when we remember that the Jews were a covenant people in whose hands the Lord entrusted his word, his mission, his witness, and to some extent, a picture of his glory, these descriptions of him confirm how seriously he took his part of the covenant.  The litany of curses in Deuteronomy 28 likewise shows how far God went to warn them.

Jesus clearly had all this in mind when he spoke to Israel’s religious leaders in Matthew 21.  He told them the parable of the tenets of the vineyard, which at first rejected and later killed the servants of the vineyard’s owner.  Then he sent his son to receive the harvest.  Him they also killed.  When Jesus asked his audience what the vineyard owner will do, they answered (v. 41), “He will bring those wretches to a wretched end…”  Ah, out of their own mouths!  Jesus not only confirmed but expanded on their answer: “He who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed” (v. 44).  When pottery falls on a large stone it breaks, but when the stone falls on it, it is reduced to powder.  Ouch! Peter says (v. 8), “They stumble because they disobey their message.”  That was their unfortunate choice.

He also describes believers as those whom the stone has “broken”— broken of our pride, our radical independence, and our stubborn will.  The result is two-fold: (1) to us he is precious, as in “precious stones” (v. 7; see 1 Cor. 3:12) and (2) he is building us “into a spiritual house…offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God…” (v. 5).  Your sacrifices show just how precious, or valuable, he is to you.  They point others to the stone path of stumbling. Do they see your sacrifices (v. 12)? Can they see where you’re going?