Kingdom Parables, Part 5
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
In Matthew 13, Jesus is telling us what the Kingdom of Heaven will be like during the church age. And He does it through the telling of seven parables. Remember, we are living in a time that was unannounced and unseen by the prophets of old, and even by the disciples themselves.
I think that must have been very difficult for the disciples to understand. Their thinking was dominated by Jewish thought. The Messiah would come and establish a kingdom. That He would have to leave after arriving and then come back to accomplish the full realization of that was difficult to grasp.
So Jesus tells them the parables recorded here in Matthew 13 to help them with that. The first thing He talks about is the soil of the heart. We looked at that last week.
And the sum conclusion of the parable is that not everyone who is exposed to the kingdom of God decides to be a part of the kingdom of God. Not everybody believes.
Now, having heard the first parable, this truth of receptive and unreceptive soil, they probably would have thought to themselves, if there are rejecters and acceptors, what happens to the rejecters?
After all, they had just heard religious leaders accuse Jesus of being sent by Satan.
What' will happen to them? After all, John the Baptist had said, “when Messiah comes, He comes with fire!” That’s a reference to judgment.
But remember, all they had was an Old Testament perspective.
They knew that when the Messiah comes, He will be the King, He will establish a kingdom, He will purge out the ungodly, purge out the rebels, rebuke the unbelievers, establish righteousness across the face of the earth, everyone will believe, everyone will walk in His law.
And so the immediate problem the disciples have is - Look, if three kinds of people in this world aren't going to believe, are You going to blow them away right on the spot? Is this the time?
This may be the very time they make the statement recorded in Acts 1:6 when they said, “Is this the time You'll restore the kingdom?” They were really asking, “Is this when You're going to blast away the unbelievers?”
So the Lord needs to explain to them what He's going to do with the unbelievers who are on the earth during this mystery form of the kingdom.
And He does that in parable number two. He is answering their question about what happens to unbelievers during the church age.
Matthew 13:24-25
So here is a farmer who sows good seed, and apparently he has an enemy who wants to ruin the other guy’s crop so he sows weeds on his land.
Did they really do that in the day? It was common enough that the Roman government had a law against it which prescribed a certain kind of punishment if you did that.
So here comes this enemy who sneaks in and does his dirty work and flees. By the way, the word there means to commit fornication. And so this became known as bastard wheat. And it’s amazing property is that you can't tell it apart from wheat. It looks exactly the same until the head finally matures.
verses 26-27
Now, they're shocked because there is so much. It wouldn’t have been a surprise to find some weeds in the crop because they were common to the area. But they were shocked because the whole thing was full of them.
verse 28-30
Now that’s a rather simple story and it’s fairly easy to understand. But what does it mean?
Verse 36
Now, note the question they asked. They identify the story, He doesn't. He doesn't give it a title, they did. So they knew that was the main feature. They knew the story was about those things that didn't belong in the field and how in the end they were going to get burned up.
So the Lord answers the question and explains to them what's going to happen to those that aren't wheat.
verse 37
Now who's the Son of man? That’s Christ. So suddenly we are now longer talking about two men with relationship problems. We’re talking about Jesus Christ and his enemies.
And the parable teaches us some lessons. For instance, we discover that
The Lord is sowing seed in His field
And you’ll notice in verse 38 the field is the world.
So, we see, then, the Lord is sowing seed in the world which belongs to Him. It's His field. It's His kingdom. He made it. He planted Adam and Eve in it. And Satan came along and usurped everything. But it's still His. He created it and He will reclaim it and it's His in the meantime. So the Son of man, the Lord Jesus Christ) sows in His own field.
Secondly notice,
The good seed are the children of the kingdom.
That means the Lord puts the children of the kingdom in the world. It’s a very simple story. You'd be amazed how complex people have made this parable. Most commentators try to make the field the church. But to teach that is to deny the simple teaching of the Lord. Verse 38 tells us the field is the world.
It’s not that difficult. Someone says, “But you have to interpret what He meant.” No you don’t. He just interpreted it for us.
First of all, the field was just a field with a guy sowing and then He said the field means the world and now you say the world means the church, somebody else might come along in the next generation and say the church means the Baptist church. And then the next generation it means the Baptist church who teaches this or that.
You can't do that. Just leave it alone. The Lord said the field is the world and He knows the word church and if He wanted to use it, He’d have used it. The field is the world.
By the way, if you make it the church, you will wind up with a mess trying to interpret the parable. Later on when the servants say, Can we pull out the tares and the Lord says, No, let them grow together, if that's the church then we have no right to church discipline.
We have no right to expose a heretic or deal with sin, and that’s contrary to what the epistles teach us.
So if you make the field the church, you've really got problems. Leave it the way Jesus interpreted it. It's the world.
So here we find a picture of the church in the world. The sons of the Kingdom are in the world, planted there by God Himself, and all around us are tares.
verse 38
There are only two kinds of people in the world, children of the kingdom, children of the wicked one. And if you're not a child of the King through your submission to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, you're a child of the devil; it's that plain and simple.
So in this parable, the Lord sows believers in the world and Satan oversows his own children. So the world, then, is co-mingled: subjects of the King, and subjects of the enemy, the devil himself.
Satan is over-sowing what God has done. And that's the history of the world. God sows good seed, and Satan sows the bad. And Jesus is telling us when we come to the mystery kingdom, it's going to be that way.
Now, what is it trying to say to us? It says we exist together. We breathe the same air, we eat the same food, we drive the same highways, we live in the same neighborhoods, we work at the same factories, we go to the same schools, we visit the same doctors, we entertain ourselves with the same entertainment, we're under the same sky, we enjoy the same warm sun, we breathe the same air, the just and the unjust are rained upon in this era because it's all commingled until the end.
And that's where we come to verse 39...very important. "The harvest is the end of the age."
Why does He say that? Because, you see, the disciples were ready to put in the sickle right now.
And I will confess to you, I get that way. Sometimes when you see the wickedness and the rejection and the unbelief and the grief that the world causes the church, and the Lord's purposes and people, you just say -God, would You just come down and wipe it out?
But here the Lord says - Don't be impatient, the harvest waits till the end of the age.
And by the way, that is a direct rebuttal to the offer of the servant to pull up the tares in verse 28.
"Do you want us to pull the weeds up?'' And the Lord says No, don't do that because if you yank out the tares, you're liable to yank out some wheat also.
What is that all about? I think He's simply saying if you go about trying to judge the world, without divine insight, you're going to wind up condemning the Christians.
That’s exactly what the church has done through the ages. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, decided to just clean out the ungodly from the world. But they wound up persecuting true believers.
You can't do that. God didn't call the church of Jesus Christ to judge the world. God doesn't want us in a position of political power, destroying unbelievers because we don't have the discernment to know what's going to go on in reality anyway.
We are not to attack the world. God hasn't given us that ministry. We're going to grow together and Satan is going to sow and oversow even in the church because he loves imitation.
But it's not for us to go ripping the tares out. And wherever in history the church became a political power, it invariably was prone to corrupt that power, to destroy quote/unquote "the apostates."
Think about the inquisition. Have you ever read FOXE'S BOOK OF MARTYRS? All of those martyrs of Christ that were slaughtered, were slaughtered by quote/unquote "Christians.
Read about the crusades, one of the most abysmal points of human history. Crusaders in the name of Jesus Christ in Europe, were going to go to take the holy places of Israel back from the Turks and in the process they massacred people all across Europe. In one village alone, they trampled with their horses three thousand Jews because they said they were apostates.
This is not the age of judgment. What was the Lord Jesus Christ's attitude toward those people? Simply ask yourself this. How did He treat publicans and sinners? With meekness, love and kindness.
How did He treat Judas? He was patient. He was loving and tender and merciful and gracious and tolerant.
And now here is the church in a world surrounded by tares, and we as the body of Crhrist , are to exhibit those same characteristics.
And far too many sanctimonious “Christians” are running around trying to pull up the tares, forgetting the fact that they were once a tare and God didn’t pull them up.
If we go out destroying everybody, we may be totally out of line with God's plan.
So Jesus says, Just wait! Harvest time is coming.
verse 39
The reapers are the angels.
That’s their job not yours and mine. Christians are called to righteous influence. We are not called to judgment. We are not called to condemn the world.
We preach against its sins. But we are to love its sinners.
So, He says to these guys in the parable - You're the sowers, I've got some other folks for reapers.
Verse 40
It shows us the tares are gathered out and burned. That's the picture.
And verse 41 explains it.
The term kingdom refers to the whole world. It's all His field.
verse 42
And so, there's coming an inevitable judgment when the Lord sends His angels, pulls all of them out of the kingdom that offend Him, and they're all thrown into a furnace of fire.
Now, fire is the most horrible death that man ever experiences. And fire is the imagery of eternal hell. It speaks of the terrible and everlasting doom of the unrighteous, the sons of Satan. It's used again and again in Scripture.
We read in the Scripture-about weeds being burned, about chaff being burned, about barren branches being burned, even in the Old Testament of trees being burned. And here we see the tares being burned.
The idea is that the ungodly will be consumed in fire. It's eternal punishment in hell. And the reaction in verse 42 is so frightening. Grinding of teeth and piercing shrieks is what it really says. That's the reaction, grinding of teeth and piercing shrieks.
People think they're going to be in hell and everything is going to be fine. They're going to be with their friends and they'll love it down there and this verse tells us that not only is hell a fire, but it tells you what your reaction is going to be: grinding teeth and piercing shrieks.
Painful, eternal, inevitable, inescapable judgment.
And the Lord is saying to the disciples. Just wait. Be patient, use your time and influence for good, co-exist while the plan is working out, and finally the judgment will fall. And after that?
Verse 43
"Then" mark that word, "Then," not now, but "Then shall the righteous shine forth,"
“Then” comes the holy glory. Then comes the anticipated kingdom. Then comes the righteous Shekinah, lighting the face of all the saints for all the ages. "They'll shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father," then.
One final thing in verse 43
He who has ears to hear, let him hear." That's the application.
What does it mean? Simply it means what I use to hear my parents and school teachers say when I was little, "You better listen." You better listen. You better listen.
If you know what’s good for you, you better listen.
If you’re a tare, you better listen to the message of salvation. This is the age of grace, but judgment is inevitable, eternal, painful. You better check and you better listen.
If you’re wheat, you better listen also. You're to coexist in this world and you're to influence the world for good. You're to be used by God to reach that tare near you that's going to either become wheat or burn in hell.
Use this opportunity God has given, not to condemn the world, not to judge the world, but to love them into the kingdom. That's a part of God’s plan for the Kingdom on this earth.
