The Wheat and the Weeds

Over the past week we have watched the Democratic National Convention unfold right here on our doorstep at Madison Square Garden. As Bill Clinton delivered his acceptance speech on Thursday night, the television cameras on the floor of the convention zoomed in on the faces of delegates as they reacted to his speech.

You could read on their faces the hope, the excitement, the anticipation that the candidate they were nominating for the Presidency was really going to make a difference, was really going to change their country and their lives for the better.

As Bill Clinton lambasted George Bush and Dan Quayle, they cheered wildly. Where the present Administration had failed miserably, Bill Clinton claimed, he would succeed. The other guys were the problem; he was the solution. The other guys were the bad guys - villains who had sold America down the river, who had brought America to her knees; he was the good guy who would rescue the country.

The two political parties would have you believe that there are tremendous differences between them. They strive to make your choice on election day as sharp and clear as possible. And yet the two political parties are nothing more than frail human institutions made up of fallible people offering feeble human solutions to the problems of the day. In that sense, there is really no difference between them!

If we are hoping in politics to bring in a better world, we hope in vain!

But we come today to a parable of Jesus where he spoke of two groups of people that were radically different. One group had the answers; the other did not. One group had found the secret to eternal life; the other had not. One group bore fruit - they made a real difference in the world; the other did not.

This is the parable of the wheat and the weeds and it is found in Matthew 13. Because the people were familiar with farming, Jesus often used agricultural illustrations to drive home spiritual truth. The story he tells here is one that any farmer could identify with. It’s the story of a farmer whose field was sabotaged by an enemy.

The farmer had sown wheat in his field. But while he and his workers slept, an enemy crept in and sowed weeds among the wheat. That sounds to us like a rather bizarre thing to do, but in fact it was a well-known tactic in the ancient world if you wanted to ruin someone. There were specific criminal laws in the Roman Empire against doing such a thing. You would be subject to severe penalties if it could be proved that you had sowed bad seed in your neighbor’s field. In fact, to this day, in the country of India, if you wanted to threaten someone, you say “I will sow bad seed in your field.”

Now what kind of seed did the enemy sow? From the word that Jesus uses for “weeds”, we know that it was a certain kind of plant that grows in the Middle East called bearded darnel.

Bearded darnel is a type of grass that looks exactly like wheat. It’s the same color as wheat, it grows at the same rate as wheat, it even has a head on it that looks a lot like wheat. But is sure isn’t wheat! The Hebrew word for darnel means wheat gone bad.

If you were to eat the kernels of the bearded darnel, you would become sick and possibly even die. The reason for this is that the seeds of bearded darnel carry in them a type of fungus that is poisonous. It has a very bitter taste and causes dizziness and nausea. Taken in large enough quantities, it can be fatal.

For that reason, a farmer would have to be very careful about his wheat harvest. After gathering the grain, he would thresh it to separate the kernels from the husks. Then he would winnow it, by throwing it up in the air with large pans. The wind would blow away the chaff and the heavier kernels would fall back onto the pans. Now the wheat was ready to be ground into flour.

But before he took this final step, the farmer would spread his wheat out and inspect it. If he saw any dark colored kernels, he would pick them out and throw them away, because those were kernels of bearded darnel. They had gone through the whole process of growing and harvesting and threshing and winnowing along with the wheat, but they were the bad seed and they needed to be separated out and thrown away.

So now you can appreciate just how devastating it was for an enemy to go in and deliberately sow bearded darnel in a wheat field. It would potentially ruin the whole wheat harvest.

Now the workers noticed that the enemy had done this. It is possible, on close inspection, to distinguish wheat from darnel while they are still growing. But by that time, the roots of the two plants have become so intertwined that you can’t root out the darnel without also destroying the wheat.

So the master told the workers to be patient; the separation could not come until harvest time. There was nothing they could do until then. But when harvest time did come, the darnel would be rooted up and gathered in bundles to be burned.

Jesus disciples were so intrigued by this parable that they asked him to explain its meaning to them later. So he did, and we have that explanation beginning in verse 37.

There are five spiritual lessons that we can learn from this parable.

1. There is an enemy who is seeking to spoil God’s harvest.

There is a spiritual war going on between God and Satan, and this world is the battlefield. “The field is the world” Jesus says in verse 38. Sometimes, when you look at the amount of evil in this world, you think that the devil has taken over. It looks like the world belongs to him.

But this parable tells us that the field belongs to God, not to the devil. Satan is a trespasser. He trespassed in the Garden of Eden, and he’s been trespassing ever since. An old Methodist preacher once said “The devil is a squatter.” A squatter is someone who settles on land he has no right to and works it to his own advantage.

He came into the world and messed it up by sowing bad seed; the seed of evil and sin. And he did it because he hates God. There’s no benefit in it for him. An enemy who sows darnel in his neighbor’s wheat field isn’t going to get anything out of it except the perverse pleasure of ruining the harvest. Satan is like a vandal who simply wants to mess up something that is beautiful.

You need to be aware that Satan has done much, and continues to do much, to spoil God’s harvest. He raises up people who are great humanitarians, who go around doing good and serving others, but who have no allegiance to Jesus Christ.

When we were in Florida, we ran into a convention of Shriners. Satan loves organizations like the Shriners. They go around doing good, and helping crippled children, and making charitable donations, but they have nothing whatsoever to do with God’s program of righteousness through faith in Jesus Christ. They leave everyone with the impression that you can be good without God, and that is a lie of the devil. Satan wants to spoil the harvest.

Satan wants to spoil God’s harvest in your life personally. God is working hard to produce fruit in our lives.

Hebrews 12:11 God’s disciplining work in us produces a harvest of righteousness and peace

But Satan is working equally hard to spoil that harvest. He tries to spoil it by sowing seeds of discouragement, and bitterness, anger and jealousy.

Recently I heard of a pastor who boasted that he had personally baptized 1,875 people. When somebody asked him why he kept such careful track of how many people he had baptized, he explained that his father, who also was a preacher, had baptized 2,483 people in his ministry, and he wanted to beat his Daddy.

Satan sows seeds of envy and disunity in order to wreck the harvest of righteousness that God is trying to produce in your life and in the world.

2. The good seed and the bad seed grow side by side.

Jesus said “the good seed stands for the sons of the kingdom” (v.38) “and the weeds are the sons of the evil one.” They’re side by side in the field, which is the world.

Now Jesus seems to understand that, but we often don’t! We don’t like to be side by side with unbelievers. We want to get away from them. We want to go over in a corner of the field where there’s only wheat where we can just be with our own kind.

So we shut ourselves up in Christian ghettos, where we only have Christian friends and we only go to Christian events, and we only listen to Christian radio stations, and we only read Christian books. And then we wonder why we aren’t making much of an impact on the rest of the world.

If we’re going to reach non-Christians with the message of salvation, we’re going to have to be willing to get side-by-side with them in the field. And that’s not going to be by inviting them to church. We always want non-Christians to come to a place where we’re comfortable and they’re uncomfortable. But we’re going to have to be willing to be uncomfortable ourselves for Christ’s sake. We’re going to have to be willing to meet with them on their turf, not ours. We’ve got to get out in the field.

Jesus said in his high priestly prayer in John 17 that he left us in the world, not so we could be of the world, but so that we could impact the world for Him.

There’s another thing that this parable teaches us about being side by side with unbelievers. If you have wheat and weeds growing in the same field and it rains, who gets wet? Right, they both do. If you have wheat and weeds growing together in the same field and you have a hailstorm like we had on Wednesday, who gets beaten down? Only the weeds? No, the wheat gets beaten down, too.

Being side by side in the same field with unbelievers means that Christians are going to experience the same things that unbelievers do. If unbelievers experience pain, Christians will too. If unbelievers get cancer, Christians will too. If unbelievers have financial problems, and marital problems, and problems with their kids, Christians will too.

We are not immune to the problems and crises and catastrophes of life. We live in the same field as unbelievers do. We don’t have a little individual greenhouse over us. There are some teachers nowadays who are saying that Christians are immune from any negative or bad or painful things, that the wheat is protected from the storms that beat down the weeds.

God placed us in the same field as the weeds because he wants us to show the weeds how a Christian can go through hardships without losing our hope and our joy and our inner strength that comes from God.

3. While the wheat is growing side by side with the weeds, you often cannot tell them apart.

Did you notice in this parable how the servants of the master seemed to be eager to find a quick fix to the problem? They said “Do you want us to go and pull up the weeds? We don’t like this business of wheat and weeds growing together in your field. It’s not right. It’s embarrassing. What will the neighbors say? Let us take care of it right away.”

What did the master say? He said “No.” The master was much more patient than his servants. And he was willing to be patient for two reasons.

1. He knew that the problem would be sorted out in the end. That’s when you took care of the darnel seeds - in the end, as the last step of the harvest process. That’s when you separated them out, not before.

2. He knew that his servants would do more harm than good if they tried to pull out the weeds themselves. First of all, they would have trouble identifying which was wheat and which was weed. Secondly, if they did correctly identify a weed and pull it up, chances are that they would pull up some wheat in the process. Either way, they would make a mess.

You know as we see the darkness all around us, and as we see the results of the devil’s work in our world and in our nation and in our society, we have the overwhelming temptation to want to go out and start pulling up the weeds ourselves.

So we organize protest marches and action groups and demonstrations. We get petitions going and we announce boycotts of certain products and companies. We organize ourselves politically and we buy advertising time on television and radio, and we go on a big weeding campaign. And if you don’t believe that this is what is happening among Christians in America today, you should look at the mail that comes across my desk every week. There are more crusades going on now than there were in the Middle Ages!

And you know what the result of that is? Disillusionment and frustration, and a lot of people get spiritually uprooted in the process. Because we are trying to do God’s work in our own strength. We’re trying to accomplish spiritual ends with human means.

The church in America today is losing the battle against evil because today’s Christians are more ready to go to a protest march than a prayer meeting.

We are not going to change America by changing the politics, or voting in a new administration, or controlling Supreme Court nominations, or getting the right bills through Congress. We are only going to change it by changing the hearts of individual Americans one by one; by introducing them to Jesus Christ.

We don’t need an economic recovery, or a political revolution; we need spiritual revival. And that you only get by prayer.

2 Chronicles 7:14 if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

The master said “Let the wheat and the weeds grow together until the harvest.”

4. God will separate the wheat from the weeds at the harvest.

This parable tells us that a day of judgment is coming. Right now, we live side by side, cheek by jowl, with unbelievers. We share life with them. When the sun shines, it shines on us both. When the rain falls, it falls on us both. But it will not always be so. Because there is a terrible day coming when the Lord of judgment will come and give the order to separate out the weeds. Our proximity with them today will mean nothing on that day. The wheat and the weeds will have two completely different destinies.

Matthew 13:41 The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear.

One field, two plants, two destinies.

5. The fifth point of this parable is not contained in the parable itself, but suggested by it. Indeed, this final truth is given throughout the whole Bible. It is that the good news of Jesus Christ is that weeds can be turned into wheat.

2 Corinthians 5:17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!

Jesus Christ doesn’t renovate old people; he makes new people. Nicodemus was a man who was, perhaps, the best of his generation. He was a student of the Law, a member of the most religious group in society. And yet Jesus said to him “I tell you the truth, Nicodemus, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again. You must be born again.”

Weeds must be turned into wheat if they are to survive the harvest. You couldn’t take the bearded darnel plant and try to dress it up somehow to make it look exactly like wheat. The problem with bearded darnel is that there is poison in its heart - there’s that fungus that grows right in the seed of the plant that causes death.

And that is the way it is with people. No matter how good they look, or how well they behave, people without Christ are dead in trespasses and sins. They are dead because they are separated from God, the giver of life. Only by receiving Jesus Christ and what he did on the cross for them will give them life.

1 John 5:11 And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.

That is why the master has left the weeds beside the wheat. In his great love for the world, God desires that the wheat - those who have found life in Jesus Christ - share that life with the weeds so that they too might become wheat. He doesn’t want us to root up the weeds, he wants us to help Him turn the weeds into wheat.

1. There is an enemy who is seeking to spoil God’s harvest.

2. The good seed and the bad seed are growing side by side. That is the master’s will.

3. While the wheat is growing side by side with the weeds, you often cannot tell them apart.

4. God will separate the wheat from the weeds at the harvest. That is his business, not ours.

5. In the meantime, weeds can be turned into wheat. God desires that we assist him in that process.