David Bahn – Reflections

To be taken behind the wood shed, barn, garage, or house was in past times not where a son would want to be taken. A whipping was sure to await him there. But Jesus describes salvation as being gathered with God’s people by the reapers and taken into his barn. The image here is about both the final place of God’s people and the in-the-mean-time reality of life in a fallen world.

Matthew 13:24-30

²⁴He put another parable before them, saying,  “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, ²⁵but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. ²⁶So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. ²⁷And 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?’ ²⁸He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ ²⁹But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. ³⁰Let 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.’”

Weeds and wheat growing along side each other are difficult to distinguish. The same is true of true believers and hypocrites. But God knows who are his. He will bring his own safely into his presence.

We see the weeds-in-the-wheat pretenders (we suppose) all around us. Hypocrites. Loveless. Tw0-faced. They steal the nourishment that belongs to the true believers. They are not producing a harvest; they just take up space, or worse yet, they produce more weeds!

Sometimes we may be quite certain who belongs and who does not belong to the family of God. Sometimes we may be more than ready to get rid of the interlopers. But Jesus calls for restraint. He tells us two important things about this judging process:

1. The true believers (wheat) are important to him; he does not want any true believers destroyed by an over-zealous purifying process. There is a graver danger to the wheat and a greater loss to the farmer in being uprooted by poorly-timed weeding than by the presence of weeds among the wheat.
2. The end will come. Angels will be sent. The ungodly will be sent to be burned. The true believers will be brought into God’s storehouse. The ungodly pretenders will be removed from the company of the elect. Often we want to take care of that business before that time has come.

Our calling is to seek more to produce a harvest of love and righteousness than figuring out who should be removed from our fellowship.