Wheat and Tares: A Meditation on Matthew 13

It doesn’t take long for anyone observing the world, to conclude that it is a mess of conflict between good and evil.  There are those who attempt to walk in the light of God’s good and gracious Word, and those who choose to walk in the darkness because their deeds are evil.  Secular humanists and people of other religions can see the world is hosed up.  Unfortunately, apart from God’s Word, those people who see the brokenness of the world can only cast about despairingly for answers to why, and what should be done.  Apart from God’s objective perspective on things, people come up with many poor explanations and even worse solutions.

Jesus’ parable of the Wheat and the Tares helps shed some light on this problem.  Envisioning the whole of the universe, Jesus begins by telling His disciples that the Kingdom of Heaven is like… a field in which good and bad seed is planted.  Even the angels are confused by this, asking God if He actually used good seed in His field.  God explains to His angels (and to us) that He is not the author of this confusion and corruption—it is an enemy that has done this.  An enemy has planted bad seed in His Kingdom, and created conflict.

The angels, aghast at such devious profanation of their Lord’s Kingdom, ask if they should go out and immediately rip the bad seed out, purging the Kingdom and making it holy once again.  God tells them no, lest the good wheat be torn up with the bad tares.  Instead, God instructs His Holy Angels to wait until the time of the harvest, when the wheat and the tares can be sorted without confusion, and when each can be delivered to its proper end.  At the harvest, not one ear of wheat will be lost, and not one tare will be saved.  But in the mean time, they will be growing up together, side by side, in mortal conflict.

This vignette Jesus shares, teaches us something about God, His Kingdom, and ourselves.  When we are tempted to wonder why the world is so corrupt, He teaches us:  an enemy has done this.  That same old enemy, the devil, who tempted our first parents to Fall in the Garden, continues to sow his wicked word of rebellion, pride, malice, and hatred in the fallen hearts of mankind.  Apart from the grace of God in Christ Jesus, who sows His good seed of the Everlasting Gospel in our hearts, we would be lost to the wickedness of Satan’s lies forever.  But our Savior puts out the good seed of His Word, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, raises up children for His Kingdom.

And so we see the confusion and conflict of our hearts, where wheat and tares seem to spring up side by side as our fallen nature struggles against our new nature in Christ, written large across the landscape of the whole world.  While there are those who live by grace through faith in Christ alone, they live side by side with those who are dead in their trespasses and sins.  The world, like each human heart, is a battle ground of good versus evil, of good seed struggling against wicked seed; of the Word of God alongside the contorted words of the evil one.

But thanks be to God, that He has chosen to redeem and rescue His Kingdom!  While God did not corrupt this world, He has sent His Only Begotten Son into this world to seek and to save the lost.  He has sown His good seed—first in Creation by the power of His spoken Word, then later through the Incarnation by the power of His Word made flesh—that the devil’s corruption might not stand forever.  Our loving and saving Lord desires no one to perish, but that all might have everlasting life, and so He waits patiently for the harvest, so that every soul might hear His saving Gospel, believe, and live.  But our Lord will not suffer evil to strive against Him forever.  When the time of grace is complete, and the harvest is ready, He will send His Holy Angels to gather His people to Him, and to cast the devil’s seed into eternal fire.

It is in this way that the Christian makes sense of this messed up world. We do not blame God for anything—He made the world perfectly, sown pristinely by His Word.  We do not blame Him for the wicked one planting bad seed, because it is man who let him do it by his own free will.  And we do not blame God for the continued struggle in the world, where evil seems to continue without judgment while the saints are persecuted and slaughtered, because we know that He is suffering all this for the sake of all His people who will believe and live forever in Him. 

Rather, we give thanks to God for the good seed He has sown in our hearts, so that we might believe and live forever in Jesus.  We give thanks that He suffers patiently with us as individuals while we struggle against the wickedness that still lingers in our fallen nature, even as we thank Him for suffering patiently with our world until the full number of our brothers and sisters has been brought in.  And we thank Him for the promise that He will come again to judge the living and the dead, so that no one who puts their faith in Him shall ever be put to shame… even as no one who has despised Him and preferred fellowship with the devil will ever escape eternal condemnation.

We give thanks, that the Kingdom of God has a victorious King; and that Jesus Christ our Saving King, will keep all those who trust in Him.  Amen.