BEHIND HISTORY: Copyright @ 1976
by Ray C. Stedman. All rights reserved. No part of this book may
be reproduced in any form, except for brief quotations in reviews,
without the written permission of the publisher.
Quotations from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright
1946, 1956, and 1971 (renewed 1973), by the Division of Christian
Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the
U. S. A. Used by permission.
Discovery Books are published by Word Books, Publishers in cooperation with Discovery Foundation, Palo Alto, California. Library of Congress catalog card number: 75-36181 Printed in the United States of America
By Ray C. Stedman
Contents
2. THE CASE OF THE LAVISH FARMER
3. THE CASE OF THE MYSTERIOUS HARVEST
4. THE CASE OF THE AMBITIOUS SEED
5. THE CASE OF THE SNEAKY HOUSEWIFE
6. THE CASE OF THE BURIED TREASURE
7. THE CASE OF THE VALUABLE PEARL
8. THE CASE OF THE GREAT DRAGNET
Within two years of the close of the Book of Acts, a great fire broke out in Rome for which the Christians were blamed, bringing on the first widespread persecution of Christians by the Roman empire. And within eight years came that terrible, troublous time in Palestine when the Jews rebelled against the authority of Rome and a Roman army under Titus subjected Jerusalem to probably the most dreadful siege in all history. Thousands and thousands of Jews died within the city, with many starving to death in a great famine caused by the siege. Eventually the city was captured as Jesus had predicted it would be. The temple was invaded and burned to the ground, with every stone overturned so that "not one stone was left standing upon another." If you visit Rome today, you can still see the great Arch of Titus, erected in commemoration of that conquest. Most people are of the opinion that the close of Acts is the end of the inspired record of church history and that in the Bible we have no hint of the developments that were to arise in history after the events recorded in Acts. But we are not left without help in this area. Many Bible scholars find that there are several major passages of Scripture which deal in a sweeping, broad way with what was to follow in human history after Acts. One of these passages is in the opening chapters of the Book of Revelation, where we have the letters to the seven churches of Asia from the hand of John, written as he received them in a vision of Jesus Christ. Although these letters were written to actual churches which existed in the Roman empire at that time, nevertheless, many feel, and I agree, that these are also predictive of certain stages through which the church would pass. As history has unfolded itself, we have found that those letters have indeed accurately predicted what has happened within the church throughout the ages that have followed. Two other well-known passages of this nature occur in Matthew. One of these, with corresponding passages in Mark and Luke, is the "Olivet Discourse," the sermon delivered by Jesus on the Mount of Olives just before his crucifixion. As he sat there with his disciples and looked out over the city of Jerusalem, he knew that his death was near. And in the most amazing terms he described what would happen in the centuries that followed, when nation would rise against nation, and wars, famines, and earthquakes would characterize the whole period. Eventually, he said, a world government would develop, headed by a great leader who would exalt himself as God and the world would follow after him. Then God would bring about a time of great trouble such as the world had never seen from its beginning till its end. At the end of that time Jesus would appear again for all the earth to see and establish his kingdom. You can find that well-known passage in Matthew 24 and 25.
But I want to turn now to the other passage which occurs earlier in the Gospel of Matthew. We might call it the "Sermon by the Sea." Jesus gave three great messages which are recorded in Matthew: the Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5 through 7); the Sermon by the Sea (chapter 13), and the Olivet Discourse (chapters 24 and 25). The passage in Matthew 13, less well known than the Olivet Discourse, consists of seven parables which our Lord told all in one day. In them he traces not the events of history but the principles which affect all of human life during what we call the present age, the age between his comings.
I propose that we study these great parables very carefully, relating them to their corresponding fulfillments in history. We are going to look at history in the light of what Jesus has revealed will be the governing factors of human life during this period. We will see history, therefore, as God sees it. All of us are familiar with history as man sees it--the rather meaningless jumble of kings and empires, presidents and wars, discoveries, betrayals and exploitations, which constitute what we call the record of history. That is at best a very twisted and distorted view. But in these seven parables we want to look behind the scenes of history, through the eyes of Jesus Christ, at the forces which are at work in human lives to bring about the events that are recorded in our newspapers and history books. This is God's view of history.
This series of parables began on a very eventful day when Jesus had been teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum. Matthew tells us,
That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. And great crowds gathered about him, so that he got into a boat and sat there; and the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables (Matthew 13:1-3).
Notice the very beautiful natural setting that Matthew records for us. It is on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee, not very far from the scene of our Lord's first great message, the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus has come out of the synagogue at Capernaum and gone down to the beach, and great crowds have gathered--Matthew does not tell us how many people, but it must have been well into the thousands. They are drawn by the power that our Lord has displayed and by the wisdom of his words, and they are ready to see and hear more. In order to be able to address them he pushes out from shore in a boat and there he begins to teach this great crowd of people.
A MOST UNUSUAL DAY
Before we come to the parables themselves, I want to take time to look at the context of this most remarkable day in our Lord's life. There is a puzzling new development here in the ministry and teaching of Jesus which we ought to note. To understand it fully, we need to go back to chapter 12, where the record of this day begins. Jesus was teaching in the synagogue, and he began by quoting a most unusual passages from Isaiah, a prophecy that the message of God would go out to the Gentiles. Throughout the early part of our Lord's ministry, he emphasized that he had come to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. He seldom said anything about the Gentiles, but now he quotes this passage from Isaiah:
Behold, my servant whom I have chosen,
my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased.
I will put my Spirit upon him,
and he shall proclaim justice to the Gentiles.
He will not wrangle or cry aloud,
nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets;
he will not break a bruised reed
or quench a smoldering wick,
till he brings justice to victory;
and in his name will the Gentiles hope (Matthew 12:18-21).
And on that strange note he went on to say some very solemn words to Israel. He warned them about the possibility of committing the unpardonable sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (vs. 32). He said to them, "Either make the tree good, and its fruit good; or make the tree bad, and its fruit bad; for the tree is known by its fruit" (vs. 33). That is, "Come out into the open and stop being hypocritical!" And then, in response to the Pharisees' insistence on a sign, Jesus announced to this great crowd of Jews in the synagogue,
...no sign shall be givenexcept the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth (vss. 39-40).
In other words, the resurrection is to be the sign to Israel that God is behind the whole enterprise of sending Jesus and that he is indeed their promised Messiah. Then he went on to warn them about the danger of being reinhabited by demons after they had once been cleansed. Finally, at the close of chapter 12, he spoke of the priority of spiritual relationships over natural ones:
While he was still speaking to the people, behold, his mother and his brothers stood outside, asking to speak to him. But he replied to the man who told him, "Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?" And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother" (Matthew 12:46-50).
And having said those unusual words, Jesus went out that same day and sat beside the sea and began to teach the crowds these parables. That bit of background is necessary in order to understand that something strange is happening here in these parables. A corner has been turned. Jesus is unfolding truth that he has never revealed before. Furthermore, he begins to employ a new method of teaching, one that he hasn't used before. As far as we can tell by comparing the record of the Gospels, this is the first time that Jesus ever spoke in parables. It is true that he often employed metaphors and similes, and he was constantly referring to pictures drawn from life around him. But this is the first time that he ever spoke in stories containing a hidden spiritual message. So the disciples are struck by this, and Matthew records their reaction:
Then the disciples came and said to him, "Why do you speak to them in parables?" And he answered them, "To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to him who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah which says:
'You shall indeed hear but never understand,
and you shall indeed see but never perceive.
For this people's heart has grown dull,
and their ears are heavy of hearing,
and their eyes they have closed.
lest they should perceive with their eyes,
and hear with their ears,
and understand with their heart,
and turn for me to heal them.'
But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. Truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous men longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it" (Matthew 13:10-17).
That is undoubtedly one of the most important and revealing paragraphs in the whole Bible. It contains what might well be called "the key to history," the great principle upon which God acts to determine human events. What Jesus is setting before us in this series of parables is all based upon the great principle which he declares in the midst of this paragraph. You will never understand what is happening in current events nor in the whole scope of history unless you understand this principle. It is not only the principle by which God judges nations and determines the course of international events but it is also the principle by which he governs what happens to individuals.
So before we study the parables we want to look at this interlude in which Jesus answers his disciples' question. I want to examine four things with you in this section. First, we want to look more closely at the question the disciples asked, and at our Lord's answer to them. Next, I want to pull out this central principle on which all of history turns. We will see, thirdly, how this principle is illustrated by the nation Israel, and finally, we want to understand the unique privilege enjoyed by these disciples which we now share in hearing these things. Now, look once more at the question with me:
Then the disciples came and said to him, "Why do you speak to them in parables?" And he answered them, "To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given" (vss. 10-11).
I am sure that it was curiosity which prompted these disciples to question Jesus. They had never heard our Lord talk this way before, and they could not understand it. It is clear that they did not understand the meaning of the stories, since Jesus had to explain some of them. And neither did they understand why he used this approach. So, puzzled and curious, they came to him and said, "Why are you doing this?"
SHARING SECRETS
His answer must have pleased them greatly, because he said, "Well, to you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given." The word translated "secrets" means, literally, "mysteries." In Scripture a mystery is a truth which cannot be known by the normal exercise of human wisdom and knowledge. It is a truth concerning life which God must tell us about if we are to know it, because it could never be discovered by the exercise of human intelligence. That is why these secrets, these mysteries about the kingdom of heaven, and therefore about life, will never be found in science or literature or history or any other discipline of human knowledge or investigation. They are simply not there, and yet they are essential to the understanding of life. But they must be disclosed to us by God.
This is why man's wisdom is never enough. We can discover many things about life, and we can invent a lot of useful implements and gadgets. But we will never, never explain or fulfill human life on those terms. We must know more, and only God can tell us. That is why these mysteries are of great importance. The gospel itself is one of these mysteries. Its great secret, Paul says, is "Christ in you, the hope of glory." And Paul announced in several of his letters that it was given to the apostles to unfold these great mysteries of the kingdom of heaven. But the unfolding began with Jesus.
These disciples must have been pleased as punch when Jesus said to them, "To you it has been given to know, but not to them." That made them feel like a special "in" group, the privileged few. That is a great feeling, isn't it? We all like that wonderful feeling when somebody gathers us in close and says, "Come here, I want to tell you something. Don't tell anyone else; this is only for you." What a delicious morsel to chew on! We are instantly all ears. It only confirms what we have suspected about ourselves all along--that we are superior people with a special ability which others do not have, therefore, we have a right to know things which are hidden from others.
You can imagine the pride these disciples must have felt. But our Lord pricks that balloon of pride instantly. He goes on to tell them the basis upon which they were chosen and not someone else; it is simply this: "For to him who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away" (vs. 12). That is a basic, fundamental law of life. It is the great principle upon which God operates to govern human lives and human history. "To him who has will more be givenbut from him who has not, even what he has [or as Luke says, 'even what he thinks he has'] will be taken away." Now, what does that mean? It is so fundamental that it applies to everything in life, to every realm of existence. It is even true on the physical level. Suppose you deliberately refuse to use one of the muscles of your body? You will find that soon it will begin to weaken and atrophy, and that what you have is taken away. All you need to do to render your arm useless is to simply tie it up and not use it for a few months. Soon you will find you have lost the ability to use it. All of life operates on this principle.
REJECTED TRUTH IS LOST
Reduced to its simplest terms, the principle means this: Truth must be acted upon in order to be retained. Truth rejected or unused is lost. God is constantly confronting men with truth about everything at every level of life. Man is so constructed that he is made to act upon truth. But if he doesn't, he loses the truth which has already been given to him. That is a very vital and important principle in understanding human life. It is the basis upon which God determines advance or regression either in individuals or in nations.
This fantastically important statement explains, for example, why the disciples were called. When the Lord saw them--simple fishermen, tax collectors, ordinary men--he saw in the heart of each one a willingness to act on truth. When they saw the truth and knew it to be truth, they acted on it. The proof of that is the way they responded when he called them. The moment he said to them, "Come, follow me," they rose and followed him. They acted on truth, and Jesus had perceived that in them. That is why it was given to them to know the secrets while to others it was hidden. Their willingness to act on the truth they knew qualified them for more truth.
I once heard about a young man whose sweater a friend admired. The young man had recently become a Christian. He was reading Scripture daily and growing in the Lord. When his friend complimented him on his sweater, the young man paused a moment, took his sweater off and handed it to his friend, and said, "Here, you take it." Astonished, the friend asked him why he was giving his sweater away. He replied, "Because I've been reading the Bible and I learned there that Christians are to be generous with their possessions. So I want to start practicing that, and I want you to have this sweater."
Since I heard about that, I've been admiring quite a few things, but I must say that the degree of obedience to this truth has been discouragingly slight! But that is a beautiful illustration of just exactly what Jesus meant--a willingness to act on truth, not to say that it applies to someone else--not to procrastinate, but to begin immediately to act upon it, to risk, to lose, if necessary, in order to step out on truth that is learned. That, he says, is the secret of advance and growth in Christian life.
One of the wonderfully encouraging aspects of life today is the tremendous spiritual growth we are seeing in young people who are coming to Christ out of the despair and emptiness of existential rationalism. These young men and women are hearing truth, and when they hear it, they act on it. That is why some of them are advancing to maturity with such leaps and bounds that they are putting to shame many who have been Christians for years. They are ready to act on what they know. That explains their rapid progress in the gospel.
The truths to which they are responding have been there in the Scriptures for centuries. They have been taught in churches in every section of the land. But for some reason, very few seem to want to take them seriously, to obey them. If any church or individual would experience the blessing of God, they must become simple enough to believe and obey what God has said. Try it, and you will find immediately that to those who have, more will be given, and they shall have in abundance.
FALLEN EMPIRES
But the contrary is also true. If you don't obey truth, it is taken away from you. This great principle is visible in international affairs. Why, for instance, has Great Britain lost its empire and been reduced to a second-rate power after being the leading nation of the world for so many decades? The answer is that the English people knew truth which they failed to act on. They did not incorporate into their economic and national life the truth which they admitted widely as a people. They were false to principles they knew to be true, and as a result, their scepter of power has been removed and they have sunk into relative obscurity. There is no other explanation for it. You can talk about economics, about politics, and other such things, but those are merely the processes by which this principle is worked out.
Why did the Roman empire fall before the barbarian hordes after it had been queen of the world for centuries? The answer is that when its paganism was confronted with the truth of the cross of Christ, it rejected that truth and fought back with fire and sword and wild beasts and cruel tortures. And the empire crumbled from within. All the wisdom of the Roman senate and all the experience garnered in centuries of world dominion were unable to hold that empire together.
Why are the Russian people now deprived of the right to worship, of freedom of speech and of the press, and forbidden to travel abroad or even to read of other cultures? Because when the truth of the gospel was widespread in Russia, as once it was, it was canonized and ritualized and emptied of its content until it became a hollow shell of pretense and religious hypocrisy. When that happened, the nation was rendered ripe for revolution.
What do you think is happening in the United States today? This nation is facing exactly that same possibility. The open rejection of the truth about Jesus Christ on the part of the American people, truth which they have known and seen, and the hollow pretense of obeying it when they really do not believe it, is dimming the light in this land and removing the barriers to savagery and violenceand the barbarians are at the doors again. And evangelicals can be as guilty as anyone else in this respect.
This, then, is the great principle upon which God determines history. It is illustrated in Israel, as Jesus goes on to show: "This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand" (vs. 13).
And then he quotes Isaiah, saying that 725 years previously Isaiah had predicted that this would be the case--that when this people heard and saw the truth, they would not understand it nor receive it: "With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah which says: 'You shall indeed hear but never understand, and you shall indeed see but never perceive'" (vs. 14).
What does Jesus mean? Well, the fact that he spoke in parables was the beginning of the process of taking away the truth from a people who would not receive it. They had it, but they did not act on it. Jesus spoke very plainly to them at the beginning. They knew he spoke the truth--they even said so: "Never man spake like this man. Where has this man received this wisdom? Why is it that he teaches us not as the scribes and Pharisees but with authority?" They watched him and listened to his matchless words. Crowds were greatly attracted to him and followed wherever he went. But only a relative handful did anything about it.
VEILED TRUTH
And so the time came when he began to veil the truth. That is what a parable is--a veiled, hidden truth. It is truth being removed, taken away. Jesus says, "This is why I am speaking to them in parables--because they will not see. They have the truth set before them and they will not act. They will not understand, just as Isaiah said." Then he quotes Isaiah further: "'For this people's heart has grown dull, and their ears are heavy of hearing, and their. eyes they have closed'"
Do you notice who did this? It does not say that God dulled this people's heart and stopped their ears and closed their eyes. They did it. Their eyes they closed, their heart they have made to grow dull, their ears they have stopped up. Why? Well, as Isaiah said, "'lest they should perceive with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn for me to heal them'" (vs. 15).
In other words, they understood what he was after, and they sensed deep inside that he could do what he said he would do. He could heal this nation, heal its hurt, its sickness and weakness, its darkness and slavery. But the amazing thing is that these people did not want what God wanted to give them. They didn't want to be healed. They sensed that in the coming of Jesus, God was reaching out to them to restore them, to make them whole. And in the terrible perversity of their hearts they didn't want it. They preferred their own evil, weakness, and folly because to be healed meant to confess and to acknowledge that they were wrong. Their pride had to be humbled, and they weren't ready to pay that price. This is the terrible judgment that our Lord brings down upon history. He said, "Light has come into the world and men love darkness rather than light. That is the condemnation. "And because of that," he says, "I am going to speak to them in parables. I will still tell them the truth, because I am truth. I cannot speak anything else but truth. But they will not hear it nor understand it. Only those who are prepared to act upon what they hear will understand it." That is the great lesson which forms the background of these parables.
TWICE BLESSED
But then in contrast Jesus said to his disciples, "How happy you are, how privileged you are!" "Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear" (vs. 16). That is, "You are ready to act, and thank God for that. And what a blessing this will bring to you, because you can get more truth!" They were twice blessed, he said, because: "Truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous men longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it" (vs. 17).
Here he is thinking back across the whole range of the Old Testament, thinking of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Daniel, Elijah and Elisha and Samuel, of David and Moses, and all the others. He is saying that the Spirit of God, speaking through them, showed them there would be a revelation of truth the like of which man had never seen before. It would be in the coming of a person who would speak and perform the ultimate unfolding of truth. Nothing that the mind of man in its present capacity could ever grasp would be omitted in that unfolding. And he says, "You are those people. How happy you are! How carefully you ought to listen to this because this is the final, ultimate revelation of truth the way God sees it, the hidden answer to all the problems and confusion of life. You are so fortunate because you are seeing what men have longed to see for centuries."
We stand with those disciples today. These words are addressed to us because we can see what they saw. We can hear what they heard, and, like them, we are truly blessed. We have set before us the unfolding of the secrets of life. If we don't hear it, if we don't grasp it, if we don't heed it, we have only ourselves to blame. God has given to us not only the life that comes from Jesus Christ but also the promise that he will unfold to us all the understanding we need to meet any difficult problem or circumstance of life and to see it as God sees it--if we but give ourselves to the study and understanding of his Word. As Paul says, "In Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge" (Colossians 2:3)
PREPARE TO ACT
As you look around at life today, it is very obvious that something is terribly lacking in the understanding of men. We have vast technological ability and can construct all kinds of useful machines and improve the physical standard of our lives, but something is still missing. We do not know how to enable people to live in harmony with one another. We do not know how to remove the frictions, the hostilities, the guilt of man. We do not know how to heal his hurt. And yet those secrets are given to us, but only to those prepared to act upon them. That is the key.
This is why it is so terribly important that when God teaches you something, you do not delay acting on it. Do not just put it up on your wall and say, "I learned a great truth today. It blessed my heart. There it is; you can read it for yourself." No, act on it!
This means that when you read in the Scriptures that Christians are to practice hospitality without grudging, you should go home, open your door, and invite somebody in--use your home without grudging, without partiality, for the benefit of those who are in need. This means that when the Lord, through Paul, says, "Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you," if you have a grudge in your heart against somebody--you are resentful and have been trying to hurt them, or you have excluded them or turned your back on them--then go and deal with that situation, heal that relationship. Act upon the truth. If you don't, you are committing yourself to blindness, and you will find that the truth which would have delivered you will be taken away. All you will have left is a hollow shell of words, with no content whatever.
Our Lord is putting his finger right on the great mystery of history, the secret of human life. How desperately we need to understand this and to follow it. As we go into this passage in succeeding chapters, we will study these mysteries, these parables one by one. And each will unveil something to us. May God grant that our hearts will be prepared to listen and to act, because it is as we act, that new truth is given and we begin to unfold like a flower before the rising sun as God causes our life to blossom with an abundance of fruit and knowledge.
Prayer: Our Lord Jesus, we wait before you, awed and humbled by these words. We know that in you are hidden great and marvelous truths which man has never grasped and which we desperately need to know. Our happiness depends upon it. We pray that you will make us willing to act upon what you do show us. Save us from the folly of sitting back in scornful skepticism, waiting to have everything unveiled to us before we will act on it. Help us to act upon those bits and pieces of truth which come to us, Lord, and which we know are true. For then, according to your promise: "To him who has will more be given, and he will have abundance." And help us to take seriously this warning: "But from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away." We ask it in your name, Amen.
The parables, Jesus said, are hidden to those who do not pay attention, who do not listen, but are open to those who do. His constant warning throughout is, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear." So we are invited to give close attention to these parables through which we can understand the times in which we live.
Like a mystery novel, each parable contains certain clues that are given to guide us to its meaning. Our Lord began by interpreting the first two parables for the disciples, thus giving them the pattern of interpretation-the process to follow in discovering what the other parables mean. Then he left them on their own, as he does us, with a little additional help on the last parable. Therefore, each of these parables challenges us to think through what our Lord means by it and each contains a great revelation which is essential for us to understand. So as we go through them, I hope the desire will grow in you to pick up all the clues that God has given and to understand what he is saying in these unusual stories about the secrets of the kingdom of heaven.
HERE, THERE, EVERYWHERE
The first story is about a farmer who broadcasts his seed with a lavish hand, flinging it about with no concern for where it falls:
And he told them many things in parables, saying, "A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they had not much soil, and immediately they sprang up, since they had no depth of soil, but when the sun rose they were scorched; and since they had no root they withered away. Other seeds fell upon thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. He who has ears, let him hear" (Matthew 13:3-9).
It is very likely that when our Lord was telling this story, the whole scene was being enacted right before the eyes of these people. This was springtime, and from where they stood on the beach, they could probably look up on the hillside and see a sower going forth to sow. They could see a path which had been beaten across the field and the birds picking up the seeds right behind the sower. They could see the rocky ground, and the thorns and thistles growing up, and the good soil of the field. This was the way Jesus taught. He often picked up something that was happening right around his hearers and used it as an illustration of the great truth he wanted to convey.
But when he finished, there must have been many puzzled looks on the faces of people in this crowd. They were waiting, of course, for an explanation. He told a story; it was being enacted right in front of them--but what did it mean? It was at this point, Matthew tells us, that the disciples came to him. Evidently the people waited and waited, and the pause became so embarrassing that the disciples finally came and said to him, "Why do you speak to them in parables?"
Our Lord's explanation, which we have already examined, is that God is operating on the fundamental principle that to him who has, more will be given; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away. That seems most unfair, doesn't it? But we must understand that when the Lord says, "To him who has," he is speaking about the possession of truth--truth which is acted on. You never have truth when you merely have it in your head. You have truth only when you have acted on it, when it has affected you and changed you. So Jesus is really saying, "He who acts on truth will be given more; but he who has it and doesn't act on it will lose it. And what is more, he will lose the very capacity to receive truth." This is his warning. And he said to the disciples, "To you it has been given to know," because they were the kind of people who acted on truth. So he starts to explain this parable to them:
"Hear then the parable of the sower. When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in his heart; this is what was sown along the path" (Matthew 13:18-19).
Each of the elements of the story has an explanation, a corresponding truth connected with it. Our Lord begins to explain it section by section--the way he wants us to study all these parables. He begins with the seed. You notice that he does not say anything specific about who the sower is, although in the next parable he does. The important thing to notice here is what the seed is. Jesus says it is "the word of the kingdom," that is, the word about the existence of an invisible spiritual kingdom all around us which is very essential to us and from which all our lives are governed and to which they all must relate.
That is the great truth which God wants us to know--that all of life is not contained in what you can see and touch and taste and hear and smell. Those senses open up a certain range of experience to you, but there is more to life than that. There is an invisible kingdom beyond what you can apprehend with your five senses. It is very real--as real as anything you can see or touch. And in that kingdom are hidden all the answers to the problems with which we wrestle. It is essential, therefore, that we understand this kingdom exists. But more than that, the word of the kingdom is that from this source, invisible and unseen, comes all which man desperately needs and is searching for in life. That is the good news of the gospel. The word of the kingdom, then, is the gospel.
MIGHTIER THAN ROME
When the Apostle Paul wrote to the Romans, he told them how eager he was to come to their city. He hungered to come and declare the gospel to them. Despite the might, power, and influence centered in Rome at that time, Paul said, "I am not ashamed of the gospel." And well he might not have been ashamed, for in it, as he says, are the two things men need most desperately: the power of God, and the righteousness of God (Romans 1:16-17).
Power is the ability to do, to accomplish. Every person in the world today is seeking that kind of power--the secret of adequacy, the ability to be and do what you would like to be and do, the ability to cope with life, to handle whatever life throws at you. The most fundamental, urgent cry of any human heart, anywhere, is somehow to find the secret of this power.
Righteousness is the freedom to do. It means that the individual has all his internal problems solved. He is released, no longer hung up with problems and inhibitions, limitations and barriers within. These are solved and removed. He is no longer under the burden of guilt nor defeated by self-loathing. He is free to be and to accomplish what God wants. So, both the ability and the freedom to accomplish God's will in our lives are available in the gospel.
That is the seed being sown during the whole course of this age. This is the age of sowing the seed of the word of promise of the power and the righteousness of God. That wonderful, attractive, powerful seed is being dropped into human hearts everywhere, and the sowing started with Jesus. He was the first great Sower who went out with this word, but millions have followed him since, sowing this seed wherever they go. It may be in the form of a simple Christian testimony. It may be in an elaborate sermon or in a book that someone reads. It may be just a word, a single phrase dropped into a conversation, which takes root and changes that whole life. Perhaps you are one of many who can testify that the thing which arrested you and turned you around and changed you was just a phrase which somebody uttered. This seed is powerful.
The crux of the parable concerns the condition of the soils
into which this seed is dropped. This is what our Lord wants us
to comprehend. There are various kinds of soils, he says, upon
which the Word can fall. The soil, of course, is the human heart.
Wherever the Word is sown four kinds of soil are usually present,
four conditions of the human heart to which this Word speaks.
Our Lord wants us to see what they are.
JUST A PASSING THOUGHT
What is the trouble with this first heart? Jesus says, "When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes [the birds are a symbol of the evil one] and snatches away what is sown in his heart; this is what was sown along the path" (Matthew 13:19). This first kind of individual has a heart which is hard and narrow like a path trodden down by the traffic of human feet crossing a field. In his explanation, Jesus focuses upon what causes this condition. The word comes, he says, but they do not understand it. The idea is not that they could not understand, but that they do not try. They don't take the time to understand. Now, what kind of a heart is this? You can see that this is what we might call the materialistic heart, the kind of person who does not want to be bothered with thinking about anything beyond what he can see and hear and smell and touch and taste. This is the humanistic heart, the liberal heart, or even the atheistic heart.
Here is a man who has been rendered momentarily thoughtful by the word of the kingdom. Something has challenged him for the moment to think about God and about life. And for a moment he wonders, "Maybe there is something to this." He has received a passing impression, but it requires more thought, more self-evaluation--and he does not want to be bothered. So he shrugs it off. And immediately our Lord says, the enemy comes--Satan, the evil one--and snatches away the thought from his heart, and it never comes back again. So he goes on untroubled, thinking that the world remains the way he has conceived it to be.
There are many people like this who live on these terms. C. S. Lewis, in his book The Screwtape Letters, describes a man who goes into the British Museum and sits down to read certain books that are there. Something he reads suggests to him a thought about God, and he is inspired to think of him. For a moment it looks as though he is really going to think this idea through. But then Screwtape manages to divert him with the thought that it is time for lunch and that he would be in much better shape to tackle this important subject after he has eaten. Screwtape goes on to say,
Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man's head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of 'real life' (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all 'that sort of thing' just couldn't be true.
That is the kind of soil Jesus is talking about. The devil takes care of him, brainwashes him. The thought is snatched away if it is not dealt with then--and it never returns again. There are many like that. They have settled for a world bounded on the north by their work, on the south by their family, on the east by taxes, and on the west by death. That is the whole of life to them. They have been described in the little jingle that goes,
Into this world to eat and to sleep,
And to know no reason why he was born
Save to consume the corn,
Devour the cattle, flock, and fish,
And leave behind an empty dish.
And that's it. That's all. That's life. When the word of the kingdom falls upon that kind of heart, it causes a momentary impression. But it is immediately shrugged off because it is different, it is challenging, it awakens the possibility of an entire world he has never thought of. But he is comfortable where he is, so he divests himself of it and the enemy comes and takes it away and it is gone.
And yet, remarkably enough, it was this very verse that reached
John Bunyan and led him to Christ. That blasphemous tinker of
Bedford was known as the most godless man in his village. He was
regarded as so hardhearted and committed to godlessness that no
Christian had any hope for him at all. But he heard this story
of the sower, and these very words seized upon his heart. And
he said to himself, "Even the devil knows that if a man believes
the Word he'll be saved!" So he believed it and he was saved.
He became the author of Pilgrim's Progress and a tremendous
testimony for God in his age.
SEASONAL PEOPLE
Let's look now at the second heart condition our Lord describes:
As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is he who hears
the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet he has no root
in himself, but endures for a while, and when tribulation or persecution
arises on account of the word, immediately he falls away (Matthew
13:20-21).
What is the matter with this heart? The ground is described as rocky, but that doesn't mean soil containing a lot of rocks. The idea here is that there are a few inches of earth on top of a broad shelf of bed rock. In other words this is shallow soil, thinly spread over a ledge of bedrock. The key our Lord gives us here is that "he has no root in himself." This is what we would call a shallow life, one that flits from one experience to another, never content with anything for very long. This heart is always on the prowl, restless, searching, groping. You have met people like that--faddists, enthusiasts for the gospel this week ("Oh, what a wonderful thing this is!") and next week it is Geritol, or vitamin Z that has taken their fancy. The word our Lord uses to describe this kind of person is, literally, "seasonal"; they believe the gospel when it's in season.
Many people like that are being reached right now. For example, among the tens of thousands of young people who are turning to Christ in our day there are a lot who will drop out when the season changes. They will not continue because they live on the surface; there is no depth in their life, nothing goes deep into their heart. When the gospel reaches people like this, they receive it with joy. As long as it is a warm, glorious day for the word, they are enthusiastic. But when the season turns cold and stormy, and tribulation and persecution come, immediately they are gone. They wither and die.
Thus our Lord illustrates the terrible danger of a shallow heart. The devil took care of the first kind of man, but the flesh takes care of this one. Because he never allows the word to take root, never learns to depend on the power of Christ in him, the emotional trials and seasons of testing will easily uproot him.
NOT ENOUGH ROOM
Now here is the third type of heart:
As for what was sown among thorns, this is he who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the delight in riches choke the word, and it proves unfruitful (Matthew 13:22).
Here is the typical American businessman and his wife. What is the trouble? Busyness, that's all. It is not that he is uninterested; on the contrary, he is interested in the gospel. It is not that he is shallow; he isn't. He is very capable of thinking in depth and analyzing issues. He does it in business; she does it in her social life. The trouble is that he wants it all. He wants the fruitfulness of life that comes from the gospel, but with it he also wants everything else. He wants the so-called "finer things" of life. We describe him as trying to keep up with the Joneses. (That means buying things you don't need with money you don't have to impress people you don't even like.) He wants a color TV set and a swimming pool and a fine home and two beautiful cars and a full social life. The result is that he has no time to think about the Word, no time to receive it and meditate. He is too wrapped up with the cares of this world and the pursuit of things.
When my daughters were younger, one of them used to like to go riding with me in the car, but she always wanted to take all her "friends." I don't mean the neighborhood children. Her friends were her teddy bear and her stuffed rabbit and her dolls and some other toys. When I'd ask her to go, she would run and grab the bear and the rabbit and three dolls and several other kinds of toys, and with her arms filled, she would try to get into the car. But there wasn't room for them all, and so she had to choose between me and her friends. I guess I won most of the time, but she was too intent upon taking everything with her.
That is what is happening with people today. They want it all. They want everything that the world can offer and everything God can offer. But the remarkable thing about the Word is that God will never settle on those terms. He is always saying, "seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well" (Matthew 6:33); and "what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?" (Matthew 16:26).
THE FRUITFUL LIFE
At last we come to the fourth soil, which is the good soil:
As for what was sown on good soil, this is he who hears the word and understands it; he indeed bears fruit, and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty (Matthew 13:23).
Notice the qualities of this type of person. Here is a heart that is neither hard and narrow nor flippant. He understands the Word; he thinks about it, ponders over it. He receives it gladly, but his life is not shallow. He bears fruit. The seed remains long enough to sprout and grow and to come to fruition. Finally, his fruit is not lost in a jumble of things, the thorns and thistles of life, but he brings forth varying amounts. The seed comes to fruition with varying degrees of harvest, depending on differing circumstances, times, and seasons. However, in any case the fruit is there.
SOWING IS NOT SALVATION
The key point of this whole parable is that the only one of these four hearts which is genuinely Christian is the fourth one. The sowing is not salvation. Nor is the hearing of the Word. Many hear, but they are not Christians. Even the sprouting of the seed is not salvation--that is important to note. The enthusiasm, the joy with which it is received, the immediate results in the life, are not yet salvation. Isn't that startling? There are many who profess in this way, Jesus said, but they are not Christians. Salvation is seen when the fruit appears. This happens when the will is genuinely yielded to the lordship of Christ, when the Word is welcomed and nourished and acted on and allowed to grow to fruition.
But we need to note here that our Lord is describing hearts, not lives. He is not saying that once a man is like a certain kind of soil he is unchangeable, that his life is forever like this. His heart may be like this, but hearts change. Hearts are altered by the circumstances of our life. And it is quite possible that a single individual can pass through all four of these conditions. Probably all of us do. What Jesus is asking us is, "What is your heart like when it hears the Word? What are you like when the Word of the kingdom, with its promise of power and of righteousness, falls on your heart? What is your heart like then?"
If your heart is in any of these unsatisfactory conditions--hard or shallow or distracted or resistant in any way--it is possible for your heart to be brought to God because God is able to change it, whatever its condition. He is the Creator. He is able to break up the hard heart, just as he did with John Bunyan. He is able to deepen the shallow life. He is able to slow up the over-busy life so that the wonderful, living, life-producing Word may take root in your heart and change you and introduce you to the power and the righteousness of God.
What a picture this is of our age! The sowing has been going on constantly throughout the age, but the enemies of the gospel--the world, the flesh, and the devil-have been at work as well, as this parable illustrates. The devil is the one who lies to us, who tells us that life consists only of what we can detect with our senses and that nothing lies beyond that. That is the devil at work to deceive and destroy us. The flesh is that tendency in us to relate only to the passing moment, to the changing scene, to the surface of life, involving our emotions in such a way that all we are concerned about is how we are feeling at the moment, Our mood forms the basis for our decisions. That is the destructive principle of the flesh at work. The world is that which engages us in busyness, in trying to amass riches, involving us with the cares of this life, with the preservation of possessions. Our attention becomes centered upon things instead of people, upon material wealth instead of personal fellowship and spiritual relationship. This is the world at work to destroy us.
But as the Word of God falls upon us, the question each of
us must ask is, "What is my heart like now?" And with
that our Lord leaves this parable with us, for us to answer that
question in the depths of our own hearts.
Prayer: Heavenly Father, we ask that you will take our
hearts, whatever they are like right at this moment, and make
them good soil, responsive, ready to listen, ready to think, ready
to pay attention. Let your word remain in our hearts. Let us ponder
what we have heard, think more deeply than we ever have before,
and ask ourselves, "What does this Word mean? How does it
affect me?" The Word must be constantly received. It continually
drops upon us, continually seeks to bear fruit. Lord, take our
hearts and make them into good soil for the Word. We ask it in
Jesus' name, Amen.
One of the issues which has been debated for centuries concerning our world and the course of this age is the question: Is the world getting better or is it getting worse? And, depending on when you asked that question, you would find a majority of voices raised on one side or the other. At the beginning of this century you would have been laughed almost to scorn if you had suggested that the world is getting worse instead of better. Today it is the other way around. Now it is almost ridiculous to suggest that the world is getting better, although there are some who still hold this view. The other day I ran across a rather humorous statement of it:
Now granddad, viewing earth's worn cogs,
Said, "Things were going to the dogs."
His granddad, in his house of logs,
Said, "Things were going to the dogs."
And his granddad, in the Flemish bogs,
Said, "Things were going to the dogs."
And his granddad, in his old skin togs,
Said, "Things were going to the dogs."
There's one thing I have to state:
The dogs have had a good long wait.
That is the philosophy which suggests that the world, if not improving, is at least not getting any worse. But our Lord has given us a key to the understanding of that great question in this parable of the wheat and the weeds; it is one of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven. The parable begins:
Another parable he put before them, saying, "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the householder came and said to him, 'Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then has it weeds?' He said to them, 'An enemy has done this.' The servants said to him, 'Then do you want us to go and gather them?' But he said, 'No; lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn'" (Matthew 13:24-30).
In this story are hidden some wonderfully helpful clues to
the understanding of the age in which we live. As Matthew goes
on to tell us, Jesus spoke two more parables and then there came
a break (probably a coffee break). He left the crowds and went
into the house, and there his disciples came and asked him about
the meaning of the parable. Beginning with verse 36 we have our
Lord's explanation. So let's go back over the parable section
by section and examine it in the light of the explanation.
ANOTHER KIND OF SEED
You notice that this too is a parable of sowing. But the sowing
is quite different from that in the first parable. There, you
remember, the seed was the Word of God, and the sowing was to
go on throughout the entire age. Wherever the Word of God was
to be sown it would fall on four different kinds of soils, four
kinds of hearts, and in one it would take root and grow up. That
has been happening now for twenty centuries. But in this parable
the seed is not the Word of God. It is what Jesus in his explanation
calls "the sons of the kingdom":
Then he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples
came to him, saying, "Explain to us the parable of the weeds
of the field." He answered, "He who sows the good seed
is the Son of man [Jesus himself]; the field is the world, and
the good seed means the sons of the kingdom; the weeds are the
sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil"
(Matthew 13:36-39).
So the seed sown here is not ideas, not the Word of Scripture, not the word of the gospel, but people. However, this does link up with the first parable. The ones which were produced by the good seed of the Word in the first parable are now in turn taken by the Lord and scattered throughout the world. That is the picture we have here. But this is a quite different sowing. The first one goes on continuously; this one only once, at the beginning of the age. Yet it reproduces itself all through this age. In the first parable we were looking at the soils; here we are looking at the whole field which Jesus says is the world.
It is important to notice how the Lord begins this parable. Do not, as many do in reading this series of parables, make the mistake of taking the very first thing he relates to the kingdom as being the entire comparison. No, it is the whole picture that he has in view. The kingdom of heaven is not like a man who sowed good seed in his field. Rather, the whole story must be included to be a picture of the kingdom of heaven. God's work and God's operations in the world of our day is the kingdom of heaven. The Greek text here literally means the kingdom of heaven "has become like" this. The Word had already been sown in the hearts of individuals, as Jesus described in the first parable. Some of the seed fell on good ground and brought forth fruit and transformed those individuals so that they became sons of the kingdom. Then, in this parable, Jesus says he now takes these sons of the kingdom and scatters them throughout the world. He is predicting what will happen in the course of history as God is at work in human events.
We find the historical fulfillment of this in the Book of Acts. This is how he began this age. You remember that at the close of the Gospels Jesus gathered with his disciples and said to them, "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age" (Matthew 28:19-20). That "great commission" was the beginning of the scattering of these sons of the kingdom throughout the world. As you read on in the Book of Acts, on the day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit came and empowered the waiting disciples, filling them with himself. Then, a little later on, persecution arose and the disciples were scattered everywhere, preaching the Word. That is the sowing our Lord is talking about here; he scattered them throughout the world. And Paul, in his letter to the Colossians, recognizes this. In the first chapter he says,
Of this you have heard before in the word of the truth, the gospel which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and growing... (Colossians 1:5-6)
THE FIELD IS THE WORLD
In this parable, it is essential to notice that the field represents not the church, but the world. These sons of the kingdom are put where God wants them--in the world. Wherever you are, as a child of God, as a son of the kingdom by faith in Jesus Christ, you have been put there by the Lord Jesus. It is so important to understand that he has sown you and put you where you are. The church is to gather together for worship, for instruction, and for mutual fellowship, but then it is to go out. There is a kind of a rhythm of life within the church--it comes together, then goes out again, scattered out into the world. And wherever you are out there is where the word of witness is given, where the truth of the Word is promulgated. That is what the Lord has in mind here. The field, therefore, is the world, the human race, society, as we normally term it. In that world of humanity the Lord Jesus has scattered his own.
Now into that same field, Jesus says, there came an enemy. He came right at the beginning of this age, and he came while men were sleeping, unaware of what was happening. Out of sheer malice and hatred he sowed a crop of his own which the Revised Standard Version calls "weeds." Literally, it is the plant which today is called "darnel," a poisonous weed which looks very much like wheat. In fact, when it first begins to grow even an expert cannot distinguish it from wheat. But as it grows, it begins to change. And, finally, when it comes to harvest, even a child can tell that it is not wheat. The Jews called it "degenerate wheat" or, literally, "bastard wheat," because it appears to be wheat but it is not. That is the figure that our Lord employs. These are also persons that are sown. They are what Jesus calls "the sons of the evil one." They, too, have been scattered throughout the human race by the enemy--and especially among the wheat. We will see more about that in a moment.
TEACHERS OF EVIL
I know that there is a sense in which the whole world, as the Scriptures tell us, is under the control of satanic philosophy and thought. Jesus referred to the devil as the ruler of this world because he governs the thinking of people. But in the light of this parable I think it is wrong to think of everybody in the world--men, women, and children alike--as "sons of the evil one." Jesus never called anybody a son of the devil except the Pharisees who were teachers of evil in the name of righteousness. He used the term to refer to someone who pretended to be religiously correct but was actually disseminating error.
It is true that we are all members of a fallen race. We are all born into this world tainted with Adam's sin so that we all tend toward evil naturally. No one has to teach you how to lie. Did you ever go to school to learn that? Do you have a diploma to show that you have successfully accomplished training in how to be selfish? No, you learn all this naturally. You never have to be trained in how to be dishonest, how to cheat, how to be a hypocrite. We are all natural hypocrites, and experts at it, because we are members of a fallen race. But babies could hardly be called "sons of the evil one" in the sense our Lord intends here.
I remember that Dr. H. A. Ironside once described a rather stern and austere pastor who went to see a woman. She was showing him her baby, holding the infant up so he could see how beautiful it was. This pastor drew a long face and said to her, "Madam, what a pity that this little one should be a child of the devil!" Well, that is hardly the way to make a hit with the mother--nor is it theologically correct. It is true that the child is in a world dominated by satanic thought and that as he grows, he will probably become more and more possessed with wrong ideas and concepts. Because he may be totally unaware they are wrong he may gradually become committed to these evil principles, but it is only at that point that he might be called a "son of the evil one." But what Jesus evidently has in mind here are the teachers of evil under the guise of religion.
Let's pull this first part of the parable together now: Jesus thinks of the whole human race as a field, bleak and lifeless. At the beginning he scattered in it men committed to him, men and women in whom the truth of the Word had taken root and had come alive. He thrust them out into the field, scattering them here and there in order that they might reproduce themselves and yield men committed to him. Then Satan came and did the same thing, deliberately scattering certain evil teachers who appear to be religious and righteous. Jesus began by scattering men committed to the word of truth in order to produce more like himself. Satan began by scattering men committed to the lie in order to produce more like himself. And so both grow together now until the harvest. See how they grow; Jesus said,
So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the householder came and said to him, 'Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then has it weeds?' He said to them, 'An enemy has done this' (Matthew 13:26-28).
He implies here that those who are his servants will become troubled by the sight of these weeds in the field because they will be growing among the wheat. It is important that you see that. Our Lord said that these weeds would be sown not just in the world in general but among the wheat, that is, in the church, and that they would grow up within the church. So the wheat are true believers, and the weeds are those who appear to be true believers but who are actually false. The two are so intermingled that at first you can't tell them apart--until the fruit begins to appear. Remember when the Apostle Paul was speaking to the elders of the church at Ephesus, he told them,
I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them (Acts 20:29-30, emphasis mine).
That is the sowing our Lord is talking about here, and Paul's words fit the historical picture exactly. In the early centuries of this age it was very difficult to tell true Christians from false. If you read the writings of the early church fathers from the first two or three centuries, you find them hard to classify. Many of them were obviously godly, genuinely, born-again, and regenerate men who loved God. And yet they sometimes taught errors and heresies right along with the truth, and they were just as strong for the error as they were for the truth. It is rather disconcerting to read these men. You would think we might find a pure fountain of truth in the early centuries, but we do not.
Gradually the great central truths of the faith began to be debated and there was a great deal of doctrinal controversy. But as the truth grew, it gradually became apparent that the heresies were leading men astray while the truth was establishing them. Gradually the weeds began to emerge in their true form, becoming recognizable as weeds-teachers of error. It was then that the truths of the church were crystallized into the creeds that are familiar to many today--the Nicean Creed, the Apostles' Creed--these are statements of the truth devised in order to counteract the heresy that was rampant within the church.
LEAVE THE WEEDS ALONE
Then during the so-called Dark Ages you find the next step described by our Lord:
The servants said to him, "Then do you want us to go and gather them?" But he said, "No; lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest" (Matthew 13:28-29).
"Let both grow together until the harvest." That is our Lord's word. It is amazing how many Christians ignore these words of Jesus and are constantly trying to purify the church in ways unwarranted by the Scriptures. In the great awakening we are seeing today many young people are making this mistake again. They say they are going to go off and start their own church, and it is going to be a true church, a pure church. There will be no heresy in it. And so you find splinter groups calling themselves the "True Church," the "One Way," the "Only Way," and so forth. They say they have the truth and no one else does. But that is impossible. Jesus said that you cannot do it that way. You cannot separate evil from the church. You cannot even drive it out. It is going to be there in some form. This doesn't mean that we are not to expose it and meet it positively with the teaching of the truth. We are. Nor are we to allow those who exhibit clear forms of error to take leadership within the church. Other Scripture helps us here. But what our Lord wants us to understand is that no human effort is going to eliminate error from the church. "Let them both grow together," he said.
In order to realize how completely intermingled error is with truth, just look into your own heart. No one person is completely true and pure and perfect. I even have a little error in myself. I don't see itbut my wife does, and it breaks in upon my own astonished gaze from time to time. It is there, so how are you going to get rid of it in the church? That's just it; Jesus says you cannot get rid of it. You will find that it is there, and it is going to stay there, and no human effort will be able to eliminate it. Therefore, all the efforts to try to form a pure church, or a pure council of churches, are doomed to failure before they begin, as Jesus has pointed out.
Many such attempts to purify the church have happened in history. In the fourth and fifth century there were godly men who honestly advocated the overthrow of heretics with the sword and with fire. And yet notice in the parable how our Lord restrains his true servants. He told them not to do anything like this. But throughout the Middle Ages, when both truth and error in this form were growing together, evil in the name of religion became more and more apparent. Finally, its true nature began to be very evident to people when thousands were perishing at the hands of evil in the name of religion. That is what finally caused the Protestant Reformation.
But even honest servants of God at that time wondered if perhaps they should in turn kill those who had persecuted Christians in the name of religion. Luther once said to one of the Catholic emissaries, Emser, "If heretics have deserved the stake, then you and the Pope should be killed a thousand times. Nevertheless, I do not want it to be done." You can see how the Spirit of Christ within him restrained him from going over into this error. Unfortunately, such was not always the case. John Calvin ultimately consented to the burning of a heretic named Servetus, and Protestants in general have dealt wrongly with heretics from time to time.
What is the Lord's plan for handling this problem? He says, "Let them both grow together until the harvest." That is, "Don't worry about it, I'll take care of it. I've got my own plan for handling this and nothing you can do will eliminate the problem (as has proven true in history). But don't worry about it. Keep your message positive, preach the Word, teach the truth, deal with it in your own hearts, exclude it from leadership, but don't try to eliminate error. Don't launch a crusade that exists only for the purpose of trying to wipe out evil or error, particularly religious error, because you won't succeed."
This is the mistake made by many of the separatist movements of our day. Billy Graham is often under attack from them because he recognizes that there is error in the churches and he does not have the ability to distinguish whether a man is genuinely a Christian or not. So until he can see this clearly by his fruit, he accepts him at face value. There are some who attack him viciously because of this, pretending that they have the ability to make this distinction, while the Lord said that no one could.
COUNTERFEIT APOSTLES
There are sons of the evil one in every church. There are some who claim to be Christian, who talk like Christians, who act like Christians outwardly, but who have never yielded their lives to the Lord Jesus Christ. They are representatives of the doctrines of demons, seducing spirits, as the Apostle Paul calls them, teaching wrong ideas that have infiltrated society. A major point of this parable is to give us a clue to the way the enemy works most successfully. It is by imitation, by counterfeit. How simple it would be if evil people would only look evil. Wouldn't that help a lot? If hypocrites would only snarl and growl a little, it would help so much. But they always look so pleasant and talk so sweetly. They are such nice people that we easily go along with their ideas. We cannot believe that such nice people could be so far wrong. And unless we use the Word of God to evaluate their teachings we can be deceived by the niceness of people who are imitation, counterfeit apostles, as the Word of God calls them.
Now look at the way the Lord plans to deal with them: "'at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn'" (Matthew 13:30). He explains that, beginning in verse 39:
the harvest is the close of the age, and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the close of the age. The Son of man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear (Matthew 13:39-43).
Our Lord here is looking ahead to his return in power and glory at the close of this age. In Matthew 24 and 25 you have the--great message our Lord gave about what it will be like at the end of the age. It is a time of great tribulation, of terrible judgment on the earth. Many Bible scholars deduce from the Book of Daniel that it probably will be about seven years in length. It is the time covered by the greater part of the Book of Revelation. Each visitation of judgment in Revelation is like a swing of an angel's scythe as he goes through the harvest field, reaping the harvest of earth. In fact, the Book of Revelation employs that very imagery, saying, "The hour to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is fully ripe" (Revelation 14:15).
When Jesus sends forth his angels it will not be something visible. Angelic activity goes on behind the scenes, so there will not be a sudden appearance of angels in the presence of men. He is describing here the activities that will take place in human affairs for which men will not be able to account, for which they will not have any explanation.
The Lord said that the reapers would go forth and bind the weeds into bundles, literally, "with a view toward burning." That is, the burning is not to take place immediately when the binding does. It is to come at the end, at the close of the age. What our Lord is saying will happen is that as we near the close of the age, we will see men of evil gathering themselves together into great associations of evil. That is the work of angels. They are binding the weeds together into bundles for the time of burning, the time of judgment that is to follow. And there are many, looking at our age, who say that this is where we are today, that we are seeing a great clumping together of those of like mind who hold to evil principles and tendencies (especially those who do so in the name of religion), and that as we near the time of the end of the age, there seems to be a growing tendency toward the association of evil persons who will ultimately be swept away in judgment.
THE FATHER'S BARN
But the wheat is to be gathered into the Father's barn. Now, there is no time schedule in this parable. You cannot tell when this is to happen in relation to other events. It is simply mentioned and left there. But that is the destiny of the wheat. And Jesus says, "Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father" (Matthew 13:43). In the Book of Revelation John sees a great multitude from every tribe and nation standing before God and appearing to shine as the sun in the kingdom of the Father. They have come out of the great tribulation, the harvest of the earth--men and women who had laid down their lives during that time. And all through this age this is what has been happening. Men and women have been laying down their lives in death--but not necessarily violent death. Jesus' word to all Christians is "Be faithful unto death." That simply means you are to remain true to him until you die. This is the sign that you really belong to him.
Then at last, as John goes on to say, the kingdom of the world will become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ. Then will come the time to which all the prophets have looked forward, when the earth will blossom like the rose and men win beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, and there will be no more war across the face of the earth. But that kind of peace cannot be worked out by men; it awaits the solution of God.
BETTER AND WORSE
Now let's return to answer the question with which we began. Is the world getting better or is it getting worse? The answer our Lord gives is clearly, "Both!" Good men are getting better, more powerful, more constructive, and evil men are getting worse, more powerful, more destructive. The two sowings are growing up to a harvest side by side. If evil is getting worse, God is matching it with a demonstration of his power and with the increase of good. That is why I think it is logical to expect that as we near the end of the age, and increasingly see evil amassing itself and breaking out in tremendous authority and power, we will also see the Spirit of God breaking out in authority and power among groups of people. An awakening will occur right along with the deepening decline into darkness and evil. That is what is happening in our own day, and Jesus says it will go on until the harvest. And when the harvest of earth comes at the end of the age God will begin to reap--the good to be his, the evil to be destroyed.
Now, where do you stand? Is the seed of the Word of God growing in your heart? Are you a son of the kingdom, and, therefore, an influence for good throughout the earth? Or are you a son of the evil one, beginning to spread lies, deceptive concepts, and to spread abroad the destructive philosophies that are so widespread in the world today. It is a lie of Satan that man can live by himself, that he is self-sufficient, that he is able to carryon his own affairs, that he can run his own life and, therefore, does not need God. That is the great lie which always marks the philosophy of the devil. Or are you one of the sons of the kingdom whom God is using in this day to bring this great harvest to fruition and produce that which will glorify and delight his heart throughout all time?
Prayer: Our heavenly Father, we thank you for your truth. How it searches us out! How it sets our age into perspective and makes us see life as it really is. Teach us, Lord, to value the truth as it is in Jesus, the truth revealed to us by that One who loved us enough to give himself for us. We can trust the One who died for our sakes and who lives to live within us. We thank you for that. We pray that we may be sons of the kingdom today, teachers of truth, openers of eyes, helping men out of their darkness. For the glory of the gospel is that even those who are becoming sons of the evil one can be changed into sons of the kingdom. And you have come to make this dividing mark in history. Help us, Lord, to see ourselves as we are in relation to it. In Jesus' name, Amen.
Now we come to the third of the remarkable parables which our Lord called the secrets, the mysteries, of the kingdom of heaven. In this third parable we have another story of a sowing and of its results in human history: Another parable he put before them, saying,
"The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed
which a man took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of
all seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs
and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make
nests in its branches" (Matthew 13:31-32).
I want to stress again that these seven parables are all part
of one message. Our Lord interpreted the first two for us as a
guide to our own interpretation of the rest. He gave us a start,
and he expects us to continue in the same direction. It is clear
from the first two that every element in the story has significance.
Each is symbolic of some factor or movement in history. As he
unfolded the meanings to us, we saw what the seed meant, what
the sowing was, what the soils were, what the wheat and weeds
stood for, and who the reapers were. All of these became clear
as he interpreted them. This is the first parable of the series
which does not have an interpretation from our Lord's lips. So
he expects us, obviously, to go on applying the same principles
he gave in the first two, and to understand the others from the
symbols he employed there as well as from other symbols in Scripture.
CONSISTENT SYMBOLS
One of the basic laws in reading the Bible is that Scripture never uses a symbol in two conflicting ways; they are used consistently throughout. This is very important for you to know. Learn how Scripture uses a symbol and then employs it the same way wherever it appears. Then you will come out with a clear understanding of what the Scripture is teaching. We must do that here. Men have wasted their lives trying to accomplish what they call "bringing in the kingdom" by a false interpretation of this very parable and of the one that follows it, the parable of the leaven. They have misjudged the whole movement of history because by a mistaken use of the symbols they have misunderstood what our Lord is saying. So it is important that we view each parable here in its context and allow the Lord's interpretation to guide us.
In this parable you will notice that five symbols are used. There is the sower again, the field in which he sowed, and the seed that is sown, which in this case is mustard seed. There is the tree which grows from it and the birds that make their nests in its branches. As with the other parables, Jesus intends that we understand what these symbols mean in terms of what has been happening in the world since that day. So we will look at it with that in mind.
It is easy to interpret the first two symbols. The sower obviously is our Lord himself. In each of these parables he has been sowing, and in the second parable he told us, "The sower is the son of man." He sowed in the field, that is, he planted the seed in the world; the field is the world, society, the whole of mankind.
This is the third sowing which occurs in these parables, and in each one a different seed is sown. The use of these various seeds is our Lord's way of indicating various aspects of the great message which he turned loose in the world. He sowed a fantastic, revolutionary, radical, word in human society. In one case it is like wheat which, if received in good soil, will grow up to a true harvest. In another case it is actually people, "the sons of the kingdom." It is an incarnation, the Word become flesh, and these people are placed here and there throughout the world wherever the Lord wants them. But in this case the Word is like a mustard seed.
THE QUALITIES OF MUSTARD
Why mustard seed? Our Lord employed a symbol here which he expected these people to understand. Mustard is a peculiar kind of seed. It has an unusual quality, and this is what our Lord wanted them to catch. What do you think was the first thing these disciples thought of when they heard this symbol employed? Very likely, they thought of mustard in the same way we do. Mustard has the quality of pungency; it is biting, irritating, and disturbing.
When I was a boy growing up in Montana, we lived in a little town forty-two miles from the nearest doctor. We didn't have any electricity or plumbing, but we were quite happy without all the modem conveniences. However, when we got sick, we couldn't call for a doctor. There wasn't even a drugstore in town. We had to rely upon what we called "home remedies." If you got a cough or pneumonia or chest congestion, there was a standard remedy to apply. We used what we called a "mustard plaster," which is a gooey mixture of mustard and water smeared on a cloth and placed right on the chest. After it has been there about five minutes, you can feel it begin to bum, and you start itching and squirming. The contest is to see which will wear out first, the mustard plaster or you. You are supposed to hold it on until your skin turns as red as a berry. I don't think it ever cured anything, but it made you forget what was wrong.
That quality of mustard has been well known from the very earliest times. It was known to be an irritant, something fiery and biting, stirring up the blood. When Darius, the king of the Persians, invaded Europe with a great army, he was met by Alexander the Great. Darius sent Alexander a bag of sesame seed as a kind of taunt, indicating by the number of these small seeds the vast multitude of soldiers he had at his command. When Alexander received it, he sent back by the same messenger a bag of mustard seed by way of saying, "You may be many, but we're tough and biting and pungent. We can handle you." And they did. That is the character of mustard and these people knew that. So our Lord is using a very apt symbol by which he indicates that the message of the kingdom of God is intended to be arousing, irritating, and disturbing among men. Turn it loose and it will get a whole community excited, stirred up, either negatively or positively, as we see it working so beautifully today.
In a nearby city there is a church which I have been watching
with great interest. For all its history, some seventy years or
more, this church had been liberally oriented. It had never taught
the Bible, never believed in the supernatural. Its members had
never understood the great gospel message. They had been concerned
with social problems and moral standards and that sort of thing,
but had never known anything of the power of God. But a year or
so ago, through an unusual chain of circumstances, the pastor
became a real Christian and he started preaching the gospel. It
is most interesting to watch what is happening in the congregation.
He is making a lot of people uncomfortable. They are beginning
to squirm and itch--you can see the mustard working on them. Others
are being healed and rejoicing in it. The pastor is doing a very
gracious, loving job of proclaiming this great message, but its
quality is obvious--it is pungent and biting and burning.
A PROVERB OF SMALLNESS
Our Lord calls particular attention to another property of mustard. It is, he says, the smallest of all seeds. If you have seen a mustard seed you know that although it is small, it is obviously not the smallest of all seeds. There are seeds smaller than mustard seeds, and these were present even in Palestine in our Lord's day. Many have been disturbed by this, wondering how our Lord could understand so little about agriculture. But here, if we put ourselves back into those times, we learn that there was a common proverb which used the mustard seed as a symbol of smallness or insignificance. "Small as a mustard seed," they would say. We do the same today. We say something is "as small as a flea." Certainly there are smaller things than fleas, but that is a proverb which expresses smallness. Our Lord employs the mustard seed in this way.
Proverbially, it is the smallest of all seeds. Here, he is evidently stressing the apparent insignificance of the gospel. It does not look like much. It does not sound like much. When you proclaim, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved," it does not sound very impressive to many people. It is so simple that you can teach it to children. Even people who can be taught little else can understand, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ." So the world is not very excited about it or very much impressed with it. The world does not regard it as a tremendous, earth-shaking philosophy. You do not find chairs of philosophy in the universities dedicated to the study of the gospel in its simplicity. It is insignificant, it is despised. But let someone actually believe it and see what happens. Let him really trust Christ and invite him into his life and it is the most transforming, the most revolutionary thing that can occur to him. It is the beginning of a radical change in his whole life.
A young law student, troubled with intellectual problems about Christianity, once came to see me. As we discussed some of the intellectual barriers he was struggling with, I could sense that underneath he had a tremendous hunger. He had been impressed by the radiance and beauty of life that he had seen in a number of Christians. I soon realized that his trouble was not intellectual at all; it was simply that he thought this was the way to find God, that he had to think it all through and answer all the questions before he could become a Christian.
As well as I could, I tried to help him see that God would reach him and meet him right where he was on the basis of a venture of faith, that if he responded to the promise of God he could put God to the test. Either God would come through and fulfill his promise or he would not, one or the other, and then he would know. So this young man made the venture. He received the Lord Jesus into his heart. Simply, quietly, he asked him to come in. And almost immediately he broke into tears of relief, and a joy filled his heart. He was radiant, and said, "What a difference!" He called up a friend and the first thing he said was, "I'm a Christian! And the best thing is, Jesus keeps talking to me all the time from within." Just like that his life was transformed! That was the greatest thing that ever happened to him. Nothing will be the same again, forever. What a simple message, and yet how mighty it is! This is the seed our Lord is talking about. This message of the kingdom is like a seed of mustard with fantastic power and pungency planted in the midst of society.
NO SUCH TREE
But now look at the tree that grows out of it. Our Lord said, "but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches" (Matthew 13:32). Now here is the key to this parable. Did you ever see a mustard tree? In California we have fields of mustard every spring. You can see acres of the yellow flowers. But none of them ever grows into a tree; mustard is not a tree. It is an annual that dies every year. It is impossible for it to grow into a tree.
When I was in Israel a number of years ago, I was taken out by the side of the Sea of Galilee and shown a "mustard tree." It was a small tree about ten or twelve feet high with a little berry on it which the guide opened and showed us was filled with a black powder which he called mustard seed. The grains were very tiny, and he said that this is what Jesus meant--the smallest of all seeds. I still have some of this powder in my desk. But I checked up on it later and found out that it isn't a seed at all; it is just black powder, and it will never grow into a tree. And that wasn't a mustard tree, either. It was another kind of tree. But the tourist agency has come up with something which matches this parable, and they have labeled it a mustard tree. (One of the things you learn in touring Israel is to take everything with a heavy dose of salt.)
No, mustard is not a tree; it does not grow into a tree. Then why did Jesus say it did? Right there is the heart of the parable. Our Lord obviously intended to teach that this growth is unnatural growth. It is not normal, not what you would expect from mustard seed. It is something different than is to be expected. He is surely teaching that in this age there is to be an unnatural, unusual growth. Instead of the lowly, humble plant you would expect from a mustard seed there would be a huge, abnormal, ungainly growth into a tree.
What is the meaning of that? Well, what is the normal result that you expect when the gospel comes into a human heart? What kind of character does it produce? From the Scriptures and from experience we know that it produces lowliness of heart. It takes away pride, destroys egotism and self-centeredness and renders a person humble and lowly of mind, meek and gentle toward others, ready to serve. Jesus said, "He that is greatest in the kingdom of heaven must become the least of all. If any would become great among you, let him become the servant of all" (Mark 9:35). That is the normal, natural, usual result of the mustard seed's growth. So what would unnatural growth be? It would be loftiness, pride, ambition, domination of others, concern for self. That is unnatural growth from this kind of seed.
When a tree is used symbolically in Scripture, it always stands for authority and power and dominion. In the Book of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar is symbolized by a tree. Pharaoh, in Exodus, is symbolized by a tree. These were men of power and authority. And what do we find has happened in the world in these last twenty centuries? Christendom, which began to spread among men in the simplicity recounted in the Book of Acts--like a humble, lowly plant, but pungent and biting in its effects--has grown into a huge, ungainly, abnormal tree, concerned with power and pride and domination, wanting to be served instead of to serve. Isn't that true? Probably the blackest day in the history of the Christian church was that day in the fourth century when the emperor Constantine made Christianity the state religion of the Roman empire and elevated the church to a position of worldly power from whence it went on to claim rule even over emperors and to dictate terms to kings--the false greatness of external position and power which became like a great tree in the midst of society.
Protestants tend to say that applies to the Roman Catholic Church, but it isn't the Catholic Church alone that has experienced unnatural growth. That church has its elements of both the pungency of the true mustard seed and an unnatural growth into a great tree of towering pomposity and power, but so has Protestantism. We are just as guilty. We have built our great, imposing church buildings and even in evangelical circles have been concerned with our prestige, our status in the community, and our image and have sought the patronage and the admiration of the world. We have advertised ourselves, have found every way that we can to publicize ourselves and keep ourselves before the eyes of the world.
THE CHURCH DOESN'T SAVE ANYBODY
But God never intended the church to do that. The church, as Paul says in Ephesians 4, is to come with lowliness and gentleness and meekness of character, not talking about itself. The early Christians never went around talking about the church. In the Book of Acts you never see a word about the church as part of the proclamation of the gospel. The church doesn't save anybody; the Lord does. The church doesn't help anyone; it is the Lord who helps. Wherever these early Christians went they never mentioned the church until after a person joined the family of God. They talked about the Lord.
A number of years ago I heard a story about Dr. Osward J. Smith, the great missionary preacher from Toronto. He was in Brazil and was being shown through one of the great Protestant cathedrals there. It was a very impressive building with high Gothic arches and beautiful stained-glass windows--very expensive. He went through in silence, never saying a word, because his concern, his heartbeat, had always been for missions. When they finished the tour, he said to the guide, "How many missionaries does this church support?" The guide was nonplussed and said, "I'm sorry, Sir, I don't know. I'll ask the pastor. He's standing right here." And the pastor said, "Well, we have two missionaries." Dr. Smith looked around at this expensive building and said, "You support two missionaries? This church is a stench in the nostrils of God!" I don't know what kind of hit that made with the pastor, but it does point up the very thing our Lord is getting at here.
And you know, we can find the same tendency in our own attitudes. We are sometimes not content to be humble and little-known--busy proclaiming the burning, pungent message of Christ. We often crave a degree of prominence and position. Like James and John we covet a position at the right hand of the Lord. We want to be seen and known and admired of men. But when we are quite content not to say a word about the church we belong to, we have a wide-open door of opportunity and service by which to magnify the Lord Jesus. When we maintain a low profile in the community, there is almost nothing we can't do. But the minute we begin to attract some notoriety and publicity, then our influence begins to ebb. This is right in line with what our Lord has said.
Notice also that this tree was to have many great branches. We are not pressing the symbol too far to see this as a prediction of the many divisions and denominations of Christendom. In each town or community to which they went the apostles always organized churches which were independent of one another governmentally but were united together in the love and fellowship of the Spirit. They were bound together by mutual interests, but never organizationally. But eventually human wisdom began to intervene and these separate groups were incorporated into associations, and in comparatively recent times great divisions and denominational distinctions of Christendom have emerged. How like a tree they are. And yet, despite this abnormal growth we must remember that the seed our Lord planted was his seed and the mustard nature is still present even though it is obscured and difficult to see behind the towering pride and elevated position of much of the great tree.
NESTS FOR VULTURES
Finally, what is the significance of the birds which come and make their nests in the branches? We do not have to look very far for the understanding of that. Right in this very series of parables our Lord tells us what the birds mean. In the first parable he said that when the seed of the Word falls upon a hardened human heart, the birds come and snatch it away. And in his interpretation he said that the birds represented the evil one, the enemy, whose evil powers and forces are at work upon men's lives.
If the Lord had not said that, we might have read a different meaning into this parable. There is an interpretation of this parable which says that this is a picture of the gospel going out to all the world and growing up into an impressive church and that the birds are songbirds--robins and bluebirds and others which come and make their nests, which are symbols of beautiful things which happen in the church. But that would be exactly opposite to the way our Lord uses this symbol. These are not songbirds; they are vultures and buzzards, birds of prey--apt symbols of evil persons and evil ideas which make their home right in God's church.
This is confirmed in the Book of Revelation. The false church is symbolized there by the great harlot and the mystery city called "Babylon the Great." When it is overthrown, an angel announces that "Babylon the Great is fallen, and has become the habitation of demons, and the haunt of every foul spirit, and of every unclean and hateful bird" (Revelation 18:2).
How visibly this has been demonstrated in our day when from the pulpits and the spokesmen of the church has come a flood of stupid, crazy, mixed-up ideas evil concepts which have blasted and blighted and ruined the hearts and minds of people, just as our Lord said. These things have only occurred since the tree has become fully grown and branched out, as we near the end of the age. It was only a comparatively short time ago that the great denominations of our day, though they represented unnatural and abnormal development, still were basically true to the faith and stood solidly on the authority of the Bible and proclaimed a true gospel. But then along came German rationalization and higher critical theories and socialistic philosophies. The Bible was overthrown. Another gospel was substituted and supernatural faith was denied; in many places the birds of prey moved right into the pulpits. One by one men of true faith were driven out. And it is still happening today. No wonder that when the youth of today look at the part of the church which is like that they say, "It is strictly for the birds!"
But what a comfort it is that our Lord had no delusions about this age! How clearly he foresaw all that has happened. How precisely he unfolds it to us here so we might not be deluded either. How shall we apply this to our lives? Well, obviously, it is important that we retain the nature of the mustard seed, that we be fiery and active and pungent and burning, without doing anything to abet the unnatural growth of this mustard tree.
We are to seek to be low-profile wherever we work, not calling attention to ourselves, not seeking to publicize and aggrandize ourselves, but to open our hearts to God and let him take care of the rest. We are to permit nothing in our individual lives of loftiness and pride and ambition and desire for prominence and power and position within the church. We must not struggle and be rivals to one another. Where that is evidenced it always means that people do not yet understand how the church operates, because there is no need for rivalry in the church of Jesus Christ. Everyone has his own gift and his own ministry, and in fulfilling it he is always to work in cooperation with everyone else. We are called to have faith like a grain of mustard seed, our Lord said in another place, that will grow and increase in pungency and power and impact until it completely stirs up a community, arouses it, awakens it, makes it realize what is happening, and heals it.
One of these days, the Scripture says, our Lord is going to say to this great, ungainly tree, this unnatural growth, "Be thou rooted up and cast into the midst of the sea," and it shall be done. But in the meantime, we must search our own hearts to see how much of this unnatural growth is present in us, even as Christians. How much are we reflecting that which is false and unnatural, rather than that which is true and right? How much do we embody that wonderful quality of mustard which cannot be ignored, which always stirs anyone with whom we come in contact, yet which does not seek to grow into position and prominence?
Prayer: Our Father, we ask you to make clear to us what is in our own lives and hearts. You who are truth, you who are light, reveal to us who we are and what we are. Help us to be honest and faithful and to know that you have already dealt with the problems in our lives. If we will but admit them and confess them and forsake them we can enter into the value of your forgiveness and your love, and go on where we ought to go. In Jesus' name, Amen.
The fourth parable which Jesus used to continue his one-day marathon of teaching about the kingdom of heaven is contained in a single verse:
He told them another parable. "The kingdom of heaven is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till it was all leavened" (Matthew 13:33).
I have entitled this study "The Case of the Sneaky Housewife," not because I am trying for a tricky title but because that undoubtedly reflects the reaction of the disciples when they heard this little story. Our Lord brought them up short and shocked them somewhat with this parable. When he told them that there was a woman who hid leaven in three measures of meal, they must immediately have thought, "What a dirty trick! What a sneaky thing to do!" If it does not strike us that way, it is because we are not in their shoes. We do not understand the symbols as Jesus used them. So against we must put ourselves back in their place and hear this story as they heard it.
This is one of those parables which has been greatly misinterpreted. Its meaning has been grossly distorted into something entirely different from what our Lord intended. Most of the major commentators on this passage seem to throw all principles of interpretation to the winds to take no notice of how Scripture uses these symbols in other places. So they arrive at a meaning which is simply a result of their own wishful thinking.
POPULAR AND WRONG
The usual interpretation is that the leaven is the gospel and the woman is the church. The church is to take the gospel and put it into the world of humanity, which is represented by the three measures of meal. The gospel quietly but surely will work away like leaven, like yeast in bread, until all of humanity is reached by the gospel and the whole world is changed. Then, finally, the kingdom of heaven will come in. Though that is far and away the most popular interpretation of this parable it is absolutely wrong! On the basis of that interpretation men have thought at various times and places that the church was going to introduce the millennium to the world, that it would bring in the kingdom, that the gospel would so permeate the affairs and the thinking of men that the outlook and insights and moral standards of Christianity would be universally accepted all over the world.
This was the fundamental philosophy of the time around the turn of this century. Men actually thought that we were right on the verge of the Golden Age. This was back in the days when William Jennings Bryan was the great spokesman for Christendom in the United States. Under his leadership many people of that time wore little golden plowshares in their lapels to symbolize the hope that this was the day in which men would beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks and would learn war no more.
The twentieth century began with this note of tremendous optimism. The thinking was that Christian teaching had so permeated life that we no longer would have strife between capital and labor, there no longer would be any poverty or violence among mankind, and that surely wars had been brought to an end. And this interpretation of this parable was widely proclaimed as proof that our Lord had said this would come about. The church would transform the world and put an end to war and strife and injustice and all such terrible things among men. That kind of interpretation sounds almost ludicrous to us today. Yet I can remember, as a boy growing up in the twenties and thirties that this was still very much the thought of the hour even after World War I had brought its terrible devastation.
But if I were convinced that this is the true meaning of this parable, I would be greatly tempted to throw away my Bible and give up the ministry. If this is the correct interpretation, then Jesus Christ was mistaken. For here we are, two thousand years after our Lord told this story, and there are outstanding, increasingly significant signs, from day to day almost, which indicate that we are nearing the time which our Lord at the end of this series of parables called the "close of the age." If that is the correct interpretation, then we should see the world almost completely leavened by the gospel, almost entirely Christian.
But what are the actual facts. Well, you know as well as I that never in all of history has there been more hatred, more crime, more violence, more injustice, more wretchedness, more vicious evil, among mankind than there is in our day. Of all the centuries, historians agree, the twentieth is the bloodiest. There has been more persecution of Christians in the twentieth century than ever before, including the first century. The world is a hundred times more pagan today than it was in the days of the Apostle Paul. In fifty years a godless, materialistic philosophy called communism has grown from just a handful of men to spread over half the earth. More than a billion people are under the control of this completely atheistic system. Even in our own so-called Christian country a poll taken not long ago rated the birth of Christ fourteenth in a list of important events in history. Though more Bibles are being sold than ever before, still fifty percent of the people of this country cannot name even one of the Gospels. Either Christ has failed or something has gone desperately wrong with his program if the common interpretation of this parable is to be accepted.
But if we will listen and react to this story as that crowd did, we will recognize the true interpretation of this parable. Our Lord did not interpret this parable to his disciples because he evidently expected them to know what the meaning was. In fact, a little later, when they were in the house, he asked them if they knew what these parables meant and they said they did.
Jesus is using here a very common picture from any Hebrew household, and everyone present knew he meant that this woman was doing an evil, sneaky thing when she hid this leaven in the meal. So we want to look at this as they would have with their background and their understanding of what these symbols mean. Let's begin with the meal. It is the central element in this story. The woman and the leaven both did something to the three measures of meal. That is what our Lord is trying to get across to us. So the central question is: "What does the meal represent?"
THE MEAL OFFERING
This crowd of Jews would know instantly what he had in mind. With their Judaistic background and training in the Old Testament their minds would flash back immediately to one of the most common offerings in Israel--the meal offering, consisting of three measures of meal carefully prescribed to be unleavened, without any yeast in it at all.
Very likely many of them would think back to the very first time the phrase "three measures of meal" appears in the Scriptures. It is in Genesis 18. Abraham was in his tent by the oaks of Mamre one day, and he looked out the door and saw three strangers approaching. He went to meet them, for strangers were an uncommon sight in those days and anyone passing by was offered hospitality. He welcomed them and offered them three measures of meal which Sarah baked into bread while they were visiting together out under the trees. During their conversation it suddenly broke upon Abraham's astonished intelligence that God himself was visiting him, accompanied by two angels. That was the beginning of the use of the three measures of meal as a symbol. What did it mean?
It is clear that it became a symbol of the fellowship of God with his people and their fellowship with one another. Meal is a beautiful picture of commonality of life. In the Bible it is always a picture of humanity, a humanity which is all alike. Just as each grain of cereal or meal is like all the other grains, people are alike and share in the same quality and nature. And they blend together to make up something valuable. So, very early in the life of the Jewish people the three measures of meal became a picture of the people of God sharing the life and the fellowship of God. When the Old Testament people offered the three measures of meal, they were describing in beautifully picturesque language what was very precious in God's sight--the oneness of God with his family, God with his people, the life they shared with each other under the Fatherhood of God.
Later on, in the Book of Judges, when Gideon was suddenly confronted with the angel of God, he brought him an offering of three measures of unleavened meal. When Hannah, the mother of Samuel, went to worship God in the temple she took with her an offering of three measures of meal, unleavened. So this is a common symbol throughout the Old Testament, and it was familiar to these Jews to whom Jesus spoke. They knew instantly what he meant.
In I Corinthians, Paul said to the church at Corinth that the key thing about their lives as Christians was that they were called into the fellowship of God: "God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord" (1 Corinthians 1:9). This is the key to that great letter. That is what Christianity is all about. It is the sharing of the life of Jesus together. We share his life and all that he is. And when John opens his first letter he says,
that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us; and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ (1 John 1:3).
So there is the meaning of the three measures of meal, the unleavened bread of sincerity, honesty, and truth. It is very precious to God that his people become honest and open and acceptant toward one another, with nothing hidden between them. They are to understand one another, bear one another's burdens, uphold one another, and share together the life of God in their midst, the life of a living Lord. That is what our Lord introduced into the world by bringing the gospel-this marvelous seed dropped into the heart of humanity which produces a willingness to be open and to stop hiding behind facades and to be honest in sharing the forgiving grace of Jesus Christ.
SYMBOL OF EVIL
Now let's look at the leaven. The disciples would quickly recognize its meaning. It is used all through the Old Testament, and always the same way. Never once is leaven used as a symbol of anything good. Everyone in this crowd knew that this woman had no business putting leaven into the three measures of meal. That would destroy the very meaning of this significant offering, for Scripture had taught them that the three measures of meal were to be unleavened. You remember that in Egypt, before the Jews ate the first Passover, God sent them all through their houses with candles and lamps looking for leaven. They were to clear every bit of it out of the house lest any of it get into the three measures of meal for the Passover feast and destroy the beauty of the symbolism. They were to search meticulously, to look in corners, on shelves, and in the closets. (Perhaps this is where the custom of spring house cleaning began because Passover is in the spring.) The Jewish people still do this today as a result of that teaching way back in the time of Moses.
In the New Testament you find five distinct references to leaven, and they all mean something bad. Never, ever in the Scriptures does leaven symbolize something good; it is always a type of something evil.
Jesus frequently spoke of leaven. He said to his disciples, "Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees." And, lest we misunderstand what he meant, Luke adds: "The leaven of the Pharisees is hypocrisy," pretending to be something you are not, pretending to a status before God which you don't actually possess, being phony, putting on an outward appearance of religiosity but inwardly still having the same old evil thoughts and angry moods and bitter attitudes. That is the leaven of the Pharisees--hypocrisy.
Then Jesus spoke of the leaven of the Sadducees. That is rationalism--the idea that life consists only of what you can taste and see and touch and smell and hear and think about, that there is nothing beyond that, no supernatural activity of God in life, no resurrection, no angels, no life after death.
And he spoke of the leaven of the Herodians, the followers of King Herod. Their leaven was materialism. They taught that the great value of life is to be powerful and wealthy. If you can acquire wealth and power, then you have the secret of life. Many today are following the philosophy of the Herodians, holding the attitude that what makes life worthwhile is the possession of things. That is evil, Jesus says. That is not the way you properly measure manhood or the value of a life.
In his Epistles the Apostle Paul spoke of leaven. In 1 Corinthians 5 he cites the case of a man who was actually living in incest with his father's wife, and Paul says that sexual immorality is leaven within the church, destroying its fellowship. He goes on to say,
Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens [ferments] the whole lump [of dough]? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump [fresh dough], as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us, therefore, celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth (1 Corinthians 5:6-8).
That is what the bread stood for: sincerity, honesty, truth and openness--a recognition of each other's value and a transparency before each other. Anything which wrecks or ruins that or distorts it and puffs it up is leaven.
Finally in the Book of Galatians Paul again speaks of leaven, this time in connection with legalism. There were false teachers who tried to put people under the law under a set of rules by which to live expecting them to have the power to obey simply by their own effort. The very heart of the gospel is that Christ has come to set us free from that. The world has been trying to live on that basis for centuries, and it has never been successful. Every effort to obey a rule and thus to satisfy God even with external obedience, let alone internal, is doomed to failure before it begins if you are depending upon yourself for the necessary power. That way of life is called leaven. It, too, destroys the fellowship of God's people.
So leaven, obviously, is anything which disintegrates, breaks
up, and corrupts, or causes a puffed up, swollen condition--destroying
honesty and obscuring reality. That is what yeast does when you
put it into bread. The housewife says that it lightens the bread
because it puffs it up, swells it up. At a certain point she arrests
the action of the yeast by baking the bread in the oven. But leavened
bread will spoil far more quickly than unleavened. Leaven is disruptive
and corrupting.
WHODUNNIT?
Now we come to the last symbol and the key question. Here we have these two elements: (1) the fellowship of God's people which, as Jesus looked down the age, he saw as a very precious and important way of life which he had introduced into society, and (2) something which corrupts that by introducing this fivefold evil of leaven into the fellowship. Who does this? Who is this woman? The French, you know, have a little saying they use whenever trouble arises: "Cherchez la femme," "look for the woman." I don't know but what this may be the origin of that saying.
Some of the commentators have tried to identify the woman in this parable with a specific woman in history, and it is amazing what they have come up with. Some suggest it is Joan of Arc, who is supposed to have destroyed the fellowship of the church by introducing false doctrines. Others have said, no, it is Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. And I remember meeting some people back in the forties who identified her with Eleanor Roosevelt, of an people. It may be that some today are tempted to say that it is the Women's Liberation Movement that is introducing these evils.
But when a woman is used symbolically in Scripture it always means the same thing--some religious authority either out of place or doing the wrong thing, some misuse of a relationship with God. It is clear that the woman belongs in the story. A woman is an authority in the home--one who had the right to prepare the bread of fellowship. This woman was in her rightful place, in her kitchen. It was her job to prepare the bread. But she had no right to hide leaven in it. And the very fact that she hides it indicates sneaky motives; she is trying to get away with something she knows is wrong.
Now bring the picture together. Our Lord is looking down the centuries to follow and he sees the thing which is most precious to God about the work which he himself has begun among mankind. This is the fellowship of God with his people, the sharing of life with each other and with God, the family of God, the oneness of the body of Christ--with all the members sharing life in openness and honesty together under the love and forgiveness of the Father. And into that wonderful fellowship these false, evil principles are introduced by those who had the right and the authority to preserve this fellowship, that is, the leaders of the church. It is they who introduce the leaven into it, who permit it to come in and do not exclude it as they should. Those who are charged with the responsibility of developing the fellowship of God's people, nevertheless allow hypocrisy, formalism ritualism rationalism, m