The Sons of the Kingdom of God in Christ Jesus

There is no problem with the Sower, His Seed, or His Field.  These are all very good.  But now there is a problem in His Field because, while His men were sleeping, His enemy was at work, prowling around, sowing seeds of lawlessness in the Sower’s Field.  So, now there are weeds among the wheat.  What shall the Lord and Master of the Field do about it?  What should He do?

What would you do?  If you were the Lord, how would you respond?  Would you exterminate the weeds by whatever means or force necessary?  Would you rip them out and throw them away?

Well, how often do you think and act as though you actually were God?  When someone gets in your way, you remove them.  When someone does something you don’t like, you push back as hard as you’re able.  When someone encroaches on your space, steals your thunder, takes your stuff, messes with your plans, or otherwise cramps your style, you retaliate in order to have your way.

If you’ve worked hard on a project and someone messes it up, how do you respond?  With anger and revenge, or with patience and forgiveness?  And as for those things outside of your control — things you don’t understand, which cause you pain and suffering, grief and disappointment — how do you deal with those things?  Do you aim to force the situation and fix it for yourself, as though you could?  Or do you rail against the Lord and question His wisdom, as though you knew better?

But the true and only God does not think the way you think.  And, Christ be praised, He does not act the way you act.  His ways are not your ways, and His thoughts are not your thoughts.  As you have heard, He does not pull the weeds at once, nor does He permit His servants to do so, because He has mercy.  He is patient and long-suffering.  He would preserve and protect His wheat from all harm and danger.  And so, for the sake of His wheat, He will not destroy the weeds before the harvest.  He knows the wheat would not survive the weeding, and He would save it from the fire.

As with the Parable of the Sower last Sunday, so also with this Parable today, the Lord Jesus is not  offering a lesson in earthly farming or agriculture.  He is teaching the Mysteries of His Kingdom, not the science and savvy of this world and its kingdoms.  And with that in mind, understand that His enemy, the devil, is not capable of creating any plants of his own.  The seeds the devil sows, those of the weeds, are not some new plant alongside the wheat, but a perversion of God’s good creation.  The devil is no creator.  He can only attack and abuse what God has done and given.  So the weeds cannot be separated from the wheat, because they are actually a perversion of the wheat.

Don’t look around the congregation or cast about in your mind concerning your other neighbors, trying to figure out who the weeds are.  Consider your own heart.  Look at your own life.  Listen to your own words.  Examine your thoughts and attitudes in the light of the Ten Commandments.

Don’t look at your neighbor to find where the weeds are.  Rather, look within yourself and groan; not with despair, but in repentance — and with hope for the mercy of God, because He is merciful.

The fact of the matter is, the weeds are not simply planted alongside you in the rows.  They are planted in your own heart and in your flesh.  They are entangled about your roots.  And they have you in their grips, bearing their lawless fruits in your thoughts, in your words, and in your actions.

And all of that is already bad enough.  But there is an even bigger problem, namely, the fact that you can’t tell the difference.  In the Parable at hand, the particular weeds that Jesus describes are indistinguishable from wheat, especially early on.  The Lord thereby underscores the perversity of sin, which prevents you from distinguishing between the weeds and the wheat.

You can’t read your neighbor’s heart, no matter how hard you try and assume that you can.  But neither do you really know your own sinful heart.  You don’t know the depths of your perversity, your sinfulness and guile.  You actually think of yourself, most of the time, as being pretty good.

The most deadly and dangerous thing of all is that you do not know the Sower.  You do not know His Seed, and you do not know the Fruits that He would harvest.  You know none of these things, except by the Word and Spirit of God, who must teach you and must help you in your weakness.

It’s not simply that you and your neighbors are sinful, duplicitous and hypocritical, deceptive and deceived.  It’s not only that you and your neighbors are hiding yourselves from each other, playing at charades, and practicing subterfuge in your dealings with each other, as though life were a big game.  It’s worse than that.  Not only do you not know the weeds from the wheat, but you don’t even realize that you don’t know the weeds from the wheat!  Consequently, you call evil, “good,” and you call good, “evil.”  And you have no idea how greatly mistaken you are.

All of which means that, when you set out to weed your fields, what you rip up and throw away are the fruits of grace, mercy, and peace.  And the very things you cultivate, as though they were your crop, are the weeds of pride and envy, selfishness and greed.  And still you do not recognize or understand what you are doing.  In your judgment of others, and in your own self-righteousness, you imagine that you are pious and faithful, and that by your wicked works you are reaping life.

But, no, if there are to be any sons of the Kingdom in the final harvest, then it must be the Son of Man who shall sow them, raise them up, and harvest them unto Himself in His Righteousness — by His judgment of forgiveness.  The Lord knows that none of His wheat will survive otherwise.

The wheat cannot live choked out by the weeds.  But the wheat cannot survive a weeding, either.  It will die either way, if the Lord does not act.  He alone is God, the King and Redeemer of Israel.  And He sends no creature to save His Field, but He Himself comes and does it all by His grace.

And here is how He goes about it:

He hides Himself in the Field.  He hides Himself in the Field.  He comes unpretentiously, small and feeble, seemingly helpless.  And He plants Himself in the ground, like the smallest of seeds, easily lost among all of those weeds.  In fact, He allows Himself to become entangled in your weeds, to be completely overgrown by your weeds, until it seems as though He were utterly lost.  He is choked, and He is strangled.  He is crucified, put to death, and buried in the ground.

And then what?  His Tree bears good Fruit.  He rises from the dead.  He has died, but, lo, He lives!  He has overcome all of the devastating consequences of sin and the devil’s perversion of God’s good creation, all the weeds in your heart and life, and all the weeds in the world around you.  And as such, His Word of the Cross is the good Seed of His Gospel.  He proclaims the forgiveness of sins.  He proclaims the free gift of Life and Salvation.  And this He does throughout the world, even to the ends of the earth.  He sows the entire Field with the Seed He has borne by His Cross.

He does not uproot the weeds and burn them.  On the contrary, what He does do is remarkable.  He cares for the weeds along with the wheat for now.  He waters both with His Word and Holy Spirit.  He shines the sunshine of His love on both the evil and the good.  He cultivates the whole Field by the preaching of repentance for the forgiveness of sins in His Name.  He proclaims the Gospel to all the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, without partiality or prejudice — with grace, mercy, and peace for those who have no grace, mercy, or peace.  He preserves both weeds and wheat together in His Field.  And He thereby plunders His enemy of any produce whatsoever.

The Lord takes it all in hand, and rather than exterminating the weeds, He cares for the Field.  His Seed-bearing Fruit of the Cross gives new birth to the sons of God — the sons of the Kingdom, His brothers by grace — because His Cross has made Atonement for the curse.  God’s cursing of the soil, the thorns and thistles that it bears around the world, and all the consequences of the Fall into sin, the Cross of Christ has made Atonement for all of it.  And the Blood which Christ has shed does not cry out for vengeance, because it has cleansed, redeemed, and sanctified His Field.

His own crucified and risen Body is the First Fruits of a New Creation, wherein and whereby the weed-infested wheat is not lost — neither strangled by the weeds nor pulled up with the weeds — but it is rescued, justified, and made holy.  The wheat is saved for the Lord’s great harvest at the last, as surely as the great Weed of His Cross has actually become the new and greater Tree of Life.

Now, to be sure, there will come the consummation of all things and the final harvest, when the Lord shall come in glory with power and great might to judge the living and the dead.  Then all those weeds which still remain shall be purged and removed from the presence of God into the fire.

So, do not ever become comfortable or complacent with any other planting than that of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Pay no heed to any other word than His Word.  And do not fall asleep, but be sober and watchful.  Do not abuse the Lord’s mercy and long-suffering patience as an excuse to cultivate weeds in your life instead of wheat.  Do not mock and despise the Son of Man by disparaging the Fruits of His Cross and serving His enemy.  For all the ways in which you have done so, repent.

But in repenting, take heart, and have patience, that even those weeds which still remain for now — those that you produce in sin and shame within your body and life, and those that threaten to choke you and destroy you with suffering and sorrow, despair and death — the Lord, by His Cross, is using even these weeds to be working His work in you unto daily repentance, faith, and life.

By that which you suffer, by those weeds that beleaguer you day and night, He is calling you daily to repentance — to turn you from the sowing of the devil to the Lord’s own sowing of the Gospel.  He disciplines you now, in both body and soul, not to hurt or harm you, but because He loves you; and by His discipline and His preaching, He is working to harvest you into His Kingdom forever.

He does not uproot you and remove you from His Field with all of your own weeds; nor does He remove all of the weeds that harass and hurt you in this old world of sin and death.  But, by His Word of the Cross, He strengthens and sustains you, protects and preserves you, nurtures you with His forgiveness of your sins, and nourishes you with His Body given and His Blood poured out.

His Cross remains an accomplished fact, the Lord’s perfection of His good Creation, and it renders the weeds impotent against you.  He forces even the weeds to serve His wheat, thereby forming you in His own crucified image and likeness.  Therefore, even though you die, yet shall you live and abide forever with God in both body and soul.  And even now, in your weakness, overgrown and hidden by weeds within and without, the Spirit of Christ intercedes for you and helps you.

Just think of that.  God Himself is praying for you!  Though that may seem strange, He does so that you might stand fast.  He prays for you according to His good and gracious Will for your salvation; and even in His praying He is already acting to save you.  As He speaks, so He does.  It is true.

What now appears to be futile and fatal, He has made into a sure and certain hope — not yet seen, but already accomplished in the Body of Christ Jesus.  It has not yet appeared what you shall be.  What you see and feel in yourself for now, in this dying world, is nothing but weeds, and no wheat.  But when the Lord appears in all His glory, you shall see Him as He is, and you shall be like Him.

In your death and in your resurrection at the last, unto the Life everlasting, all the weeds shall be purged and removed forevermore from your heart, mind, body, soul, and spirit; and having thus been purified, as gold and silver are purified by fire, you shall nevermore be plagued by the threat of sin, the assaults and accusations of the devil, or the fear of death, but shall live in perfect peace and joy in the presence of God, in the Light of His countenance, and in the warmth of His Love.

Then the Righteousness of Christ — by which, in His mercy, He has declared you to be righteous by the Gospel — shall shine forth in you like the very Son Himself.  And all the sufferings and sorrows, all the sin and shame of this present evil age, shall be gone and forgotten forever like a dream that is past.  And so shall you abide in the Kingdom of your own dear God and Father.

In the Name + of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.