The Wheat and the Tares

“Another parable put He forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field: But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way. But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also.”  Matthew 13:24-26

Jesus was sitting by the seaside, but the crowd grew so large that He entered a ship just offshore and began to speak to them in parables.  He told them about the sower who sowed seed in four different areas of his field.  I did blogs on this parable on 3/27/22 and 3/28/22, “A Seed of Truth”.  After teaching about this parable, He told another parable about a sower who only sowed good seed, but his enemy came overnight and sowed some tares in his field.  Tares are harmful weeds.  After a few weeks, both the wheat seed and the tare seed sprouted and grew, making it easy for the discerning eye to distinguish the difference.  The man’s servants came to him and desired to know how all those tares were mixed in with the wheat.  The man knew that it was his enemy who had done this, and the servants asked if they should go out into the field and pull up the tares.  He said, “No” fearing that the wheat would also be rooted up.  He said to wait until the harvest, and he would order the reapers to first pull up the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them, and then gather the wheat and put it in his barn.

Jesus informs us first that the parable is about the kingdom of heaven which is sometimes used interchangeably with the kingdom of God, but they don’t always mean the same thing.  The kingdom of God represents all those who have been born again through repentance and faith in Christ and will spend eternity with Him in heaven.  The kingdom of heaven, as used in this parable, represents God’s sovereign rule over the earth and includes every person, the saved and the unsaved, until the time of Christ’s return.  After Jesus told this parable and two others, the parables of the grain of mustard seed and of leaven hidden in some meal, He left the ship and returned to a house in which I suppose He had been staying, and His disciples asked Him to explain the parable of the wheat and tares.

Jesus began by identifying Himself as the Sower.  The field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom, those who worship and honor Him through the redemptive saving grace provided by God in the death and resurrection of His only Son, Jesus Christ.  It was God’s intention all along to call out a people to Himself, “Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth” (I Timothy 2:4).  Everything sounds good, so far.  However, the children of the kingdom, the good seed, are not alone in the field.  The tares are the children of the “wicked one”.  We might think of them as people like Hitler, Stalin, or Osama Bin Laden, but they are also the ones that we work alongside, those with whom we stand in line at Walmart, those we pass by on the highway, even some we sit nearby at church, neighbors, and some of our kinfolks.  The enemy that sowed these tares is Satan.  These tares owe their allegiance to him even though most are unaware of his control over them.  The harvest, that is, the time when all hearts will be revealed and the truth will be made known, is the end of the world.  The reapers are God’s angels who will gather the tares from among the wheat, bundle them together, and burn them in the fire of God’s everlasting punishment.

Jesus continued by stating that the enemy came in and sowed the tares while those responsible for watching over the field slept.  We wonder where the church was when Hitler was allowed to exterminate millions of Jews in the holocaust of the 1930’s or when our Supreme Court legalized the heinous act of abortion or enabled same-sex marriage, all extreme violations of God’s word.  A quick look at any newscast on television or online would convince us that the church is still asleep today while all sorts of ungodliness run rampant across our nation and the world and even in the church itself with the recent revelations of sex crimes that have been covered up for years.  Sin is bad enough, but the cover-up makes it worse.  There are some churches that are fighting the good fight, but the voices of opposition and indifference are becoming louder and louder.  For the time being, it seems that the tares are winning.

None of this has taken God by surprise.  He said, “Vengeance is Mine; I will repay, saith the LORD” (Deuteronomy 32:35).  God is deadly serious concerning sin and the consequences of rejecting His saving grace.  Those who obey the will of the Father will be blessed for all eternity.  Those who reject God’s only way of salvation, Jesus Christ, are without excuse (Romans 1:19) and will suffer everlasting punishment.  Jesus said, “Who hath ears to hear, let him hear”.  Are we listening?