Matthew 13:30 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Matthew 13:30

Comments

The solution is an imaginative and unexpected one. The servants must not attempt to solve the problem immediately by removing the tares there and then, but to let them both grow to maturity. The difficulty of pulling up the tares immediately is compared to the difficulty that a farmer would have in going through an entire field and removing every single individual weed. That would not be possible. It would take him too long, he would inevitably trample on the crop, and in pulling up the weeds some of the good plants would be uprooted also, because the roots of the weeds are intertwined with the roots of the wheat. The physical force in removing one is certain to pull up the other. So the solution does not work. Instead they should solve the problem by letting the two grow alongside each other. This has the disadvantage of having a field which is temporarily full of both good and bad, but the outcome will be better. The solution to the whole problem will come at the end when the wheat and the tares are separated at the harvest. Then it will not matter that the wheat is uprooted, for the wheat will be fully grown. The final outcome will achieve all that the farmer originally intended in planting his crop, and the action of the enemy will turn out to have done no permanent harm. At that time the tares can be gathered together and bound in bundles to be burnt, destroyed. The farmer’s solution succeeds in not losing a single grain of the crop, and not allowing a single tare to be mixed up with his precious harvest. The wheat will be brought safely into the barn.

Application

Man is critical of God for allowing evil to persist in the world, but he does not look at the big picture. The purpose of God is to populate heaven with a people forever. Those who are given a place in heaven will have experienced the evil of this world and been redeemed from it. They will know deep within themselves that the alternative to God’s standards, to righteousness and holiness, is something utterly horrific which they want nothing to do with. They will have seen for themselves the consequences of disobedience. The responsibility for evil is placed squarely with the enemy who tried to disrupt the plan of God. Satan will suffer an eternal punishment for his attempt to ruin God’s harvest, but he will not succeed in damaging even one of God’s elect in the slightest degree.

Questions

God is not to be understood by this analogy as unable to solve this problem because of the hardness of the task of separating the two – he is unlimited in skill and power. He is omnipotent and he is sovereign over all things, and the world is what it is because he has allowed it to be so. We cannot abandon our belief in the omnipotence of God in order to solve the problem of the existence of evil. Our God does know what he is going to do to remove evil from his creation, but he is simply telling us here that he is not going to do it straight away. The parable means that his wisdom has found a better way. ‘What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory’ (Romans 9:22-23).

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Introduction

Matthew 13:30 Commentary and Bible Study