The Parable of the Wheat and the Tares


Sermon by David Strain on March 31, 2014 Matthew 13:24-43

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Now let me invite you please to take your copies of God’s Word in your hands and turn with me to the gospel according to Matthew, chapter 13.  Matthew chapter 13, which you’ll find on page 818 and 819 in the church Bibles.  Before we read, let’s go to God together in prayer.  Let’s pray together.

 

Father, would You please help us to understand the truth, and as we hear it proclaimed, help us to hear the voice of our Savior. Give us ears to hear and hearing to believe and to receive and rest, perhaps for the first time or anew, to receive and rest on Jesus as He is offered to us in the Gospel.  In His name we pray, amen.

 

Matthew chapter 13. We are reading from verse 24.  This is the Word of Almighty God:

 

“He (that is, Jesus) put another parable before them, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his 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 master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field?  How then does it have weeds?’  He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’  So 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.’’

 

He put another parable before them, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.’

 

He told them another parable.  ‘The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.’

 

All these things Jesus said to the crowds in parables; indeed, he said nothing to them without a parable.  This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet:  ‘I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world.’

 

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, ‘The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man.  The field is the world, and the good seed is the sons of the kingdom.  The weeds are the sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil.  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 law-breakers, and throw them into the fiery furnace.  In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.  Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.  He who has ears, let him hear.”

 

Amen, and we praise God that He has spoken in His holy and inerrant Word.  May He write its eternal truth upon all our hearts.

 

The Parable of the Weeds: Cosmic Separation between Believers and the World

Well this morning we are continuing in our series of studies in Matthew’s gospel, chapter 13, in the parables of the kingdom that we find here.  We’ve learned that Jesus’ objective in the lives of His disciples for these parables is that they might be trained for kingdom living.  As we saw last time, however, His objective in the lives of those who rejected Him is quite different.  To them who deny Him and repudiate His lordship, the same parables judge them, obscure the message, and shut them out so that a great separation takes place in the preaching of the Word of God between those who respond in faith and those who do not.  And that theme of a separation between those who respond in faith and those who do not is something that Jesus picks up in the next parable in the chapter.  Continuing with the agricultural theme that He has used in the Parable of the Sower, Jesus now tells us the Parable of the Weeds, or perhaps you know it as the wheat and the tares.  You can read the parable itself in 24 to 30 and then His explanation, as the disciples come to Him privately later in 36 to 43.  This parable takes up that theme of a cosmic and ultimate separation between those who respond in faith and those who do not, between believers and the world, and makes it now the major focus of the parable.  And we can get at the message of the parable in the most simplest of ways by recognizing the three pairs around which it is structured.  There are two seeds – I’m sorry, two sowers, two seeds, and two responses to the seeds sown.  Two sowers, two seeds, and two responses to the seed sown. 

 

I. Two Sowers

 

Let’s think first of all about the two sowers.  In the parable there is a man who sows good seed in his field, verse 25.  While his hard workers are sleeping, the man’s enemy comes and sows right in among the wheat, weeds.  And if you look down at verse 37 and down further to verse 39 you’ll see Jesus identifies for us who those two sowers are – the one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man, the Lord Jesus, and the one who sows the weeds is of course the devil, the enemy.  That tells us that the kingdom of Jesus Christ, planted into the world, doesn’t go unopposed.  The apostle Paul speaks about that same reality.  He uses the language not of horticulture but of warfare.  “We wrestle not,” he says, “against principalities and powers but against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”  The Christian life is lived in a warzone.  If you’re a believer in Jesus you are in the trenches; there is real spiritual conflict. 

 

And Jesus is getting at that same idea.  There’s conflict, opposition, hostility in this parable but the horticultural, agricultural theme is designed now to highlight one very narrow and specific dimension of that ongoing conflict.  Notice in the parable that the enemy who sows the weeds does so with no other agenda than simply to spoil the harvest.  He does it to ruin the master’s work.  He does it in an act of sheer vandalism defacing the master’s property.  The only objective of which is to make the master look bad.  And it’s a pretty effective strategy.  Verse 27 – when harvest time rolls around and the servants are now able at last to recognize that right in among the wheat there are also weeds, tares, they ask the master, “Didn’t you sow good seed in your field?  Look at all the weeds!  What were you thinking?  You’ve obviously not been careful enough, not competent, inept.”  That’s what they’re thinking.  They’re questioning the credibility of the farmer. 

 

Satan: The Great Destroyer and Defamer

It is a classic ploy of the enemy.  It is one he has deployed again and again really since Eden.  Remember how Satan came against our first fathers in the Garden, tempting Eve and asking, “Did God really say that you shall not eat from any tree in the Garden?”  There he’s suggesting that God is unjustly restrictive in His prohibitions, needlessly narrow-minded and legalistic.  And when Eve responds, “No, God has given us that prohibition; in fact, He’s given us that prohibition upon pain of death,” Satan comes and says, “You will not surely die!  You can’t trust God.  He’s not credible; He doesn’t mean what He says.  His word is not reliable; don’t listen to Him.”  He’s doing what he’s doing here in the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares.  He’s undermining the credibility of the Lord.  The real target in all of the devil’s schemes is the honor of God and the reputation of God and the glory of God.  That is what he aims to undermine and defame and destroy. 

 

The parable of the weeds is teaching us that Satan is doing what he can to ruin my witness and your witness to bring our comforts under question, to shatter our assurance, to render us despicable and to be dismissed in the eyes of the world.  He’ll do all of that not simply to injure us and trouble us and shatter our peace and wreck our comforts; he does all that he does wreaking havoc in our private lives, perhaps in our congregational life, with a bigger agenda in mind.  He does it all so he can make Jesus look bad.  He wants people looking at your life and at my life and saying, “Well if that’s the difference Jesus makes I want no part in Him.”  Satan’s final goal in all his hateful schemes is to rob the Lord Jesus Christ of His glory.  He wants people looking at the seeds Jesus sows, His church planted in the world, and finding among them only weeds.  He wants the world noticing the weeds more than the wheat, seeing hypocrites and frauds and saying one thing on Sunday and another thing on Monday and noticing, “These people are no different from the rest of us.  Jesus must be a terribly useless thing if claiming to follow Him does nothing at all to change your life.  Why, as far as I can tell,” Satan wants the world to say, “the church looks just like the rest of us.  Who needs Jesus for that?”  That’s what he’s trying to do.  He’s trying to bring the name of Jesus into disrepute, to defame our Savior by sowing among the seed of the kingdom, the sons of the kingdom, the tares of counterfeit Christianity.  Which means that the honor of the Son of Man who sowed the seed, the Lord Jesus Christ, is at stake in the faithfulness and reality of our Christian lives.  The honor of the Son of Man is at stake in the faithfulness and reality of our Christian lives. 

 

Christ: The Great Sower and Triumphant Son of Man

But notice too that even though Satan seeks to vandalize the Master’s work, it is still the Son of Man that sows the seed.  That is to say the Son of Man plants Christians in the world.  If you are a Christian you are one because Jesus Christ has made you.  You are the fruit of His labor and the work of His hands.  That title, the Son of Man, as you may know comes from the prophecy of Daniel chapter 7 verses 13 and 14 where the prophet Daniel “sees one like a Son of Man coming to the Ancient of Days,” that is, God the Father.  And from the Ancient of Days the Son of Man receives dominion and authority and a kingdom that shall never be destroyed.  And it is this Son of Man, this sovereign, reigning, mighty, conquering Son of Man, Jesus says, who, in the face of the malice of the enemy and his best attempts to undermine the sovereignty of God and defame the name and glory of God, it is this Son of Man who nevertheless plants His church into the world and it does bear fruit in the end.  There is a harvest at the end nevertheless.  Despite Satan’s best attempts to ruin the harvest, the harvest comes for all that.  The church is not destroyed; the church prospers.  The malice of Satan cannot derail the designs of the Son of Man for the salvation of sinners. Jesus makes Christians.  What good news that is!  That tells us all our confidence, all our hopes for ourselves, for our church, for our future, for our world, must look to and rest on Him, not me, not whoever occupies this pulpit, not in one another, not in whoever occupies the White House nor whoever leads us in our communities but in Jesus.  Jesus saves.  Jesus is the hope of the nations.  Jesus is the only deliverer and redeemer of God’s elect.  I can’t save you, you can’t save me, but Jesus saves to the uttermost all who come to God by Him.  The late Edmund Clowney once said that you can summarize the message of the whole Bible in a single phrase – “Salvation belongs to the Lord.”  Jesus makes Christians.

 

And so by all means, let’s be warned and solemnized by the reminder that Jesus gives us here of the malice of the devil but we ought not to lose heart.  This parable is teaching us that Jesus Christ plants seed into such a context and that seed still bears wonderful fruit.  “Though this world by devils filled should threaten to undo us, we shall not fear for God hath willed His truth to triumph through us.  The prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for him; his rage we can endure, for lo, his doom is sure.  One little Word shall fell him.”  That Word is the Gospel of grace that says and offers to us not a method, not a mechanism for salvation, but a Man, the Son of Man, who alone can rescue us.  And the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares is saying salvation belongs to the Lord.  It is Jesus you need.  It is Jesus you need.  Trust Him.  Cling to Him.  Run to Him.  Two sowers.

 

II. Two Kinds of Seed

 

Then notice there are two kinds of seed that are sown.  The good seed are called, verse 38, the sons of the kingdom, and the bad seed, the weeds, the sons of the evil one.  And putting it that way, of course, continues this theme of spiritual opposition and conflict.  That language echoes Genesis 3:15.  After the fall of our first parents, God pronounces judgments upon Satan, upon the serpent, and tells him, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and her seed” so that from that day on there would be these two great lines running throughout humanity – those who receive the Word of God and trust in Him alone, the people of God, the church, the seed of the sons of the kingdom, and the sons of the evil one, the seed of the serpent.  And they are set and locked in opposition.  It’s interesting to notice, however, or to learn that we can identify with reasonable certainty precisely what kind of weeds it is that the evil one sows in this parable.  They were darnel.  That is, a kind of weed that is distinguished by being almost identical looking to wheat all the way through its course until, only until the head of grain appears on the wheat.  Now you can identify which is the wheat and which are the weeds.  But for most of its life, the wheat and the darnel are indistinguishable – the weeds and the real thing.  So verse 26, it is only when the wheat bears grain that the weeds are identified.  Then the weeds also appeared, we learn. 

 

A Counterfeit Christian

The point Jesus is making is this one – a counterfeit Christian looks identical to the real thing in every respect except when it comes to bearing fruit.  A counterfeit Christian looks identical to the real thing, in every respect, except when it comes to bearing fruit.  That’s a message Jesus emphasizes with some force in Matthew’s gospel.  So for example, back in chapter 7 verses 15 to 20, again using this horticultural and agricultural metaphor, Jesus said, “You will recognize them by their fruit. Every healthy tree bears good fruit; diseased trees bear bad fruit.  A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, neither can a diseased tree bear good fruit.  Every tree that does not bear fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.  You will recognize them by their fruit.”  Good seed, sown as the church planted in the field of the world, can be identified, distinguished from the weeds, by its fruit.

 

 Do you feel the force of that?  Do you feel the challenge of that?  The books that you’ve read and the language you use and the doctrine you quote and your familiarity with “church speak” – your ability to give ten reasons why you’re not a Baptist – that is not what distinguishes you as wheat rather than darnel, weeds. Weeds look just like wheat for the most part.  They know the vocabulary.  They can make good arguments.  The words they say sound like the words we say. 

 

A Fruitful Believer

What separates you from the weeds if you’re a believer in Jesus is that you bear good fruit.  That is to say you love Jesus – you love His people, you love His Word, you love the Lord’s Day, you love service, you keep short accounts with God and with one another, you’re quick to forgive, you fight your lusts with the promises of the Gospel, you silence your inner lawyer–apologies to lawyers–but your inner lawyer who’s constantly trying to get you off the hook for your own sin.  Instead, you own your sin and you flee often and regularly with it to the cross for pardon and peace and cleansing and assurance.  You’re generous; you’re ready to serve.  You would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of the Lord than dwell a day in tents of sin.  You bear fruit.  When the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also – you can identify them; you will know them by their fruit.  Is your Christianity a matter of words or can it be seen in fruitful living that makes you look increasingly like the Master who sowed the seed in the first place? 

 

III. Two Responses to the Seed that is Sown

 

Two sowers, two seed, finally notice two responses to the seed that is sown. 

 

One Response: A Warning against Judgmentalism

The first response is that of the servants in verse 28. When they found the weeds growing among the wheat notice how zealous they are to take action; they’re quick to volunteer when they know an enemy has done this.  “Do you want us to go and gather them?” they ask.  Zealous in their responses, they want to put it right but their zeal is not according to knowledge.  They’re being hasty and so the master of the field prohibits them.  Verse 29 – “No,” he says, “lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them.  Let both grow together until the harvest.”  In the visible church, right in amongst the good seed, there are always weeds to be found.  The problem is that the servants of the sower can’t always distinguish.  We can’t always distinguish between the wheat and the tares so that if we act hastily, if we rush to judgment, along with the weeds some of the wheat is needlessly uprooted.  The point is this – only the Son of Man can see the heart.  Only the Son of Man can see the heart and it’s not our place to determine whether someone is finally saved or not.  Only Jesus can safely make that determination and when we try, more often than not, we do damage to the wheat, to tender believers, than we do remove the tares.  This is a warning against judgmentalism, isn’t it, to the prideful assessment of other people’s sin rather than the humble recognition of our own. 

 

A Second Response: Warning of Certain, Coming Judgment

But then there’s another response to the two kinds of seed sown in this field.  The warning here against a rush to judgment does not mean that judgment is not rushing towards us.  Look at verses 39 to 43.  “The harvest is the end 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 law-breakers, and throw them into the fiery furnace where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”  On Friday at our regular minister’s meeting I was asking the ministers to pray for me as I prepared for today.  And Brister Ware jokingly said one way I could be certain to make sure that today would go really badly for me would be to preach a sermon entitled “Hell, and Those Who Go There.”  What he didn’t know was that I was preaching on the Parable of the Weeds, and if you look at the text that is sort of the point, isn’t it?  We may not be able, infallibly, to determine who is and who is not born again, but the Son of Man can.  And at Judgment Day, the reality that the metaphor of a fiery furnace points us to, that is something even worse than the metaphor.  That reality will engulf everyone, whoever much they may look like wheat, that remains at the end of the age, nevertheless, still a weed, a counterfeit, sown among the sons of the kingdom.

A Hell to Shun and a Heaven to Gain

Matthew Henry comments on that expression, “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” he says that it describes, “comfortless sorrow; an incurable indignation at God themselves and one another which will be the endless torture of the damned souls.”  It’s a terrible picture and it’s one that we can’t avoid.  Actually, no one taught the doctrine of hell so vividly or frequently as did our Lord Jesus and that really ought not to surprise us when we think about it.  It makes perfect sense that someone who would go to the extremity of the horror of the cross to save sinners would do so because He knew better than anyone the horrors of hell from which His sufferings would rescue us. 

 

There is a hell to shun, Jesus says, but there is also – and this passage makes this point – there is also wonderfully a heaven to gain.  What a glorious thing it will be to be wheat gathered into the barn of the Son of Man at the final harvest.  Verse 43 – listen to the beautiful language.  “Then the righteous shall shine like the sun in the kingdom of their father.”  They will be radiant and beautiful and breathtaking in reflected glory like their elder brother, the only begotten Son of the Father who has been our Redeemer, shining with His own radiance now adorning them, reflected in their character. 

 

A Question and a Choice

So when Jesus says at the end there, “He who has ears let him hear,” isn’t He simply saying, “Which will you choose?  Which destiny will be yours?  Don’t you understand that the Son of Man who will dismiss the tares to the furnace of eternal judgment has Himself already endured the furnace of divine wrath at Calvary that no one need ever go there if all you would do is trust Him?”  None of us need ever face the fearful future that waits for the weeds sown by the devil because Jesus has borne in His body on the tree the just condemnation of sinners.  You need not face the destiny of the tares sown among the sons of the kingdom.  You can shine like the sun in the kingdom of your Father if you will but cling to Christ.  So Jesus asks you, “Which will be your destiny?  Are you darnel, counterfeit – on the surface terribly like a Christian but not truly born again?  Or are you one of the sons of the kingdom, wheat that bears fruit, increasingly like the Christ who has redeemed you, and will yours be a future where you will be radiant with His own glory in the kingdom of His Father and your Father?”  Will you pray with me?

 

O Lord, we bless You for the Lord Jesus who is a perfect Redeemer and we pray, O Lord, that You would teach us to trust Him, to rest upon and cling to Him, and doing so help us to be sure that our destiny will not be the furnace of divine wrath but joy in the presence of the brilliant radiance of the Son of Your love whose character we will be made fully to reflect on the great and final day.  In Jesus’ name, amen.

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