The Wheat and The Tares

Introduction

I know you were hoping we would start with a quiz. So that’s what we’re going to do. But it’s an easy quiz. It’s kind of like those online Facebook quizzes. The name of the quiz is How Country Are You? You can either do a show of hands or you can just kind of answer internally if you want to not be embarrassed to see how redneck you are. Let’s start here. Have you ever gone fishing? All right. If you’ve gone fishing, do you take the fish off the hook yourself? Do you bait the hook yourself? Okay. Do you use live bait when you bait that hook? All right. How about earthworms? Do you use that hook and pierce that earthworm? All right. All right. Now we’re going to start calling some of the city folk from the country folks here.

If you’ve caught fish with an earthworm that you put on the hook yourself, rather than buying the earthworms at the store, did you go get the worms yourself out of the ground? In your real country. Alright, I’m fixing to lose the rest of you here. In harvesting the worms, have you ever fiddled for worms? Oh, did I lose all of you?

Fiddling for worms. Do you know what fiddling for worms is? Here’s how you fiddle for worms. You stick a stick in the ground, and you take another stick, and you rub that stick fairly violently to cause vibrations in the ground. And for reasons unknown to me, the earthworms will make their way to the surface. And you don’t have to break the ground. You don’t have to dig for them. You can fiddle for those worms, and the worms will come to the top just asking to go into your bucket and to be placed on a hook. That’s called fiddling for worms. And just by the something scientifically about the vibrations of the ground will make the earthworms come to the surface.

Why? Why did they do that? Why does just that vibration caused by rubbing two sticks together cause, and I know you’re all over lunch going to be Googling, fiddling for worms. Take my word for it. It’s a real country thing. But why do the worms do that? I don’t know. There’s probably a good earthworm reason for that. But there’s a lot of things in life that leave this country boy asking, I don’t know why. And if I’m honest, there’s a lot of things in Christianity and a lot of things about God that leave this old country boy saying, Why? Why did God do it that way? Or why doesn’t God do it this way? Jesus told a parable. Will you turn with me in Matthew chapter 13?

Jesus told a parable about one of those why situations. There’s a lot of evil in the world. Why? Why does God allow that to exist? Why doesn’t God do what I want him to do? And that’s just strike those people dead on the spot. Go Old Testament on them and just get rid of them right now. Jesus addressed that why, and at least tried to help us to understand some of the answers to that why in a parable, not one of the most well known of the parables, but in a parable that we know as the parable of the wheat and the tares. And let’s talk about that just briefly this morning. Are you with me in Matthew chapter 13? It’s a short parable. Let’s read it together.

Matthew 13, verse 24. Another parable, another parable he put forth to them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like a man who 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 grain had sprouted and produced a crop, then the tares also appeared. So the servants of the owner came to him and said, Sir, sir, did you not sow good seed in the field? How then does it now have tares? But he said to them, An enemy has done this. The servant said to him, Do you want us to go and to gather them up? But he said, No. No, lest while you gather up the tares, you also uproot the wheat with them.

Let them both grow together until the harvest. And at the time of the harvest, I’ll say to the reapers, first gather together the tares and bind them into bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn. This is one of the few parables that Jesus will go on and give us his divine explanation to. But before we get to the divine explanation, let’s talk just a little bit about the agricultural aspects of this parable. He says that this man went and planted the seed, planted the wheat in his garden. Isn’t it interesting how many of Jesus’ parables have to do with agriculture? Have to do with growing things and planting seed. That tells us what an apt illustration that is for the Word of God.

The Word of God is the seed that is planted in our hearts and is to grow and to produce something. And that’s the way the Word of God is to work in our life. It’s to be growing, it’s to be producing something. And he blows those grows those wheat, he says, but then these tares, my translation says, your translation may say the word weed. That’s a word we’re far more familiar with. That this weed was planted. This weed or this tear, most scholars think this was something called a darnal or a bearded darnal. And if the scholars are right, this darnal or this bearded darnal was a special kind of weed, special kind of tear that in its initial growth, it looked just like wheat. When wheat is immature and this tear is immature, they look just alike.

And so you would go through the field and think it’s all wheat. It’s not until they both get mature that they begin to distinguish one from the other. And by that point it’s gotten to that dangerous point that to rip out the weed is going to risk ripping out the wheat that is there. And so the owner of the field said it is wiser for us to wait. Because if we go in now, now that they’ve both matured and grown up together, and yes, we can see the difference, there’s a risk in ripping out the weeds, because then when we rip out the weeds, we might damage and in fact rip out some wheat. And so let’s wait. And we’ll make the distinction at harvest time.

So now that we understand the agricultural aspects of it, let’s look at Jesus’ spiritual explanation of this. Stay in Matthew 13, skip down just a few verses to verse 36. Then Jesus, Matthew 13, 36, then Jesus sent the multitude away and went into the house. And his disciples came to him, saying, Explain to us the parable of the tares of the field. And he answered and said to them, He who sows the good seed is the Son of Man. The field is the world. The good seeds are the sons of the kingdom, but the tares are the sons of the wicked one. The enemy who sold them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are the angels. Therefore, as the tares are gathered and burned in the fire, so it will be in the end of this age.

1. The Reality of Evil

And so there’s his explanation. But what’s not included in that explanation is really the answer that we want. And that’s the why. But I believe the why is supplied in Scripture. And so let’s talk at least three components that we can learn from this parable. The parable of the wheat and the tares that were sown together, sown by two different sowers, but sown together, allowed to grow together, and will be harvested and separated at the time of harvest. The first lesson that we can see from this parable is the reality of evil. Evil exists.

Evil is there. It exists. And it leaves good men and women for centuries scratching their heads, saying, why? It’s even caused some people to not believe in even the existence of God. Why would a good, loving, holy God, allow evil to exist in this world. But God does. And in this parable and throughout Scripture, He gives us some answers to our inquisitive minds who want to know why. First, we need to pause and make this observation. God doesn’t have to answer our questions. God doesn’t have to give us the whys. But He does.

And if we have the choice to choose wrong, then evil has to exist. I took a philosophy class in college, and I still haven’t gotten over it. My head still hurts from that. In that philosophy class, we talked about these kind of issues, and one thought process among some philosophers is that God could have given you a choice, but all the choices were good. In other words, you could go to Baskin Robbins and all 31 flavors would have to be vanilla. Well, that’s not really choice, is it? That’s not really free will if you only get to choose one way. And so, in order to give us true freedom and free will, God had to give us the choice to choose wrong. And wrong often leads to evil.

2. The Patience of God

Really abject evil. And so the evil exists in life. That’s the reality of life. And we don’t have to like it. We might have to accept it. We might have to deal with it. We don’t have to like it, but we can use it, can’t we? We can use it to allow ourselves to be lights in the darkness. We can use it to allow us, and maybe here’s the primary point in which we can use evil. We can use it to grow within us a deep, intense longing for heaven. This world is not my home. I’m just passing through. Another lesson, and maybe the primary lesson of the parable of the wheat and the tares, is we see the patience of God. The owner of the field who had sold the good seed and wanted to reap the harvest of the wheat, says, no, no, don’t go ripping out the weeds, the tares, because if you do so, you’re going to damage the good seed, the good wheat.

In fact, you may tear it out of the field as well. And so we’ve got to wait. We’ve got to wait until the end, until the harvest. And we see God’s patience. If you’re a student of Scripture, you’ve seen God’s patience exhausted at times. But you’ve seen God’s patience demonstrated far more often than you’ve seen it exhausted. That God was patient in saying, no, now is not the time. And that’s the hardest reality sometimes for us, for me at least, as an impatient person to accept and to understand, or just to accept when I don’t understand the whys that I want to cry out to God. Why do you allow that to happen? Why don’t you stop that? Why don’t you fix that? Why don’t you punish that person right now?

Because I want it done right now. And God is speaking through this parable and saying, Ken, now is not the time. And not only does he say now is not the time, and now he’s not just saying, I am patient, you be patient, but he also gives us an answer to the why. He says, if we rip out the evil, it might damage and rip out the good. And let’s think about how that might happen. The wheat, the good people, might be damaged by the immediate judgment of the evil people. If people’s faith challenged and diminished by the existence of evil, imagine how it’s people’s faith, maybe our own faith would be diminished and challenged. If God would just zap people immediately, then we might be asking other questions otherwise.

Why? Why didn’t you give them a chance to repent, God? I just went back in the house and got my Bible. I was going to try to set up a Bible study with that person. I was trying to help them, and you didn’t give them a chance. You didn’t give me a chance, God. So my faith, me, if I view myself as one of those good seed that’s grown into a wheat, I might be ripped up by that. But here’s another way of looking at that. This doesn’t hold true in the agricultural sense of the parable, but in the spiritual sense of the parable, this might be a sense that that weed, that tear, that might be evil today, because of the grace and the mercy and the providence of God, and maybe because of its proximity to the good wheat, that weed can be changed into a wheat.

Again, that doesn’t work in agriculture, but it works in human beings, doesn’t it? And so the good wheat that might be damaged and ripped up by ripping up the tears, might be a tear that would later, if allowed to grow, and even allowed to be evil today, might later be the most productive wheat in that field.

3. The Reality and Finality of Judgment

Haven’t you seen that? Don’t you know a child of God that if God had struck them dead in their teenage or in their college years, that we would have lost a wonderful soldier in the kingdom. Maybe you can say that’s me. If on my worst day God would have struck me down when I deserved it, I wouldn’t have been allowed to be transformed into the beautiful piece of wheat that I am today. And so let’s praise God for his patience. But then we have to look at the bad side of this parable, the negative, the dark side. And that is the reality and the finality of judgment. God is patient. You know, when you think about the Old Testament as an outsider, and by outsider I mean someone who hasn’t really read it and studied it, you see God is angry.

Well, God’s just this, he’s just smiting and smoting everywhere. It’s it’s locust, it’s lightning, it’s opening up the ground, it’s fire. God’s just striking people dead all the time. God’s just this angry, impatient being. But when you really read the Old Testament, you come away with a very different estimation of God, don’t you? God was patient. Oh, yes, God got to the end of his limit, but it took him a while to get there. Much longer than we would have. And that’s the reality of this parable. There is patience, but that patience will run out. God is patient. He desires that all men come to a knowledge of the saving truth of God. But at some point, after opportunity, after providential opportunity. And that life is over.

God’s going to have to separate the tares from the wheat. And we praise God that he doesn’t do it now. That he doesn’t shatter our faith by ripping out those people that we love. And by ripping out those before they get the opportunity to repent and turn and change their character or allowing God to change their character. But we recognize that there’ll come a time in which a separation has to be made. And God will finally make all things right and declare judgment upon the wicked and the just.

Conclusion

Loves more and practices patience far more than I ever could. Is it time for you to be transformed? To allow God to change you from the most worthless, useless weed in the field to what could be the most beautiful and productive.