Matthew 13:34 Commentary and Bible Study

This marks the point at which Christ finishes speaking to the multitude and dismisses them. What follows up until Matthew 13:53 is presented by Matthew as being delivered soon afterwards, but privately to the disciples. It includes the explanation of the parable of the tares, and several other short parables, as well as further instruction on how the disciples should use such parables. This agrees with Mark 4:34 which also speaks of Christ explaining the parables privately to his disciples.Matthew draws attention to Christ’s teaching method in using parables, and explains it as a fulfilment of Psalm 78:2. Just as Asaph in that psalm spoke parables, so Christ in a yet more wonderful way is speaking of the kingdom of heaven through these parable lessons. What Asaph related in Psalm 78 was a rehearsal of key elements of Israel’s early history and how God blessed them. They were a typical people, many of them not being truly converted, but being led through various experiences designed by God to illustrate his ways in salvation. Their history was a living parable illustrating God’s dealings with the church, and also with mankind in general. What they experienced in their physical walk through this world was designed by God to be analogous to the experience of the individual believer, and of the church as a whole. Israel in its unbelief was also a picture of the world, and they came under judgment for it. The psalm records God’s judgments on Egypt which led to the exodus, the Lord’s provision for Israel. He refers to the dividing of the sea, the cloudy and fiery pillar to guide them, the manna, the water from the rock. It also records their tempting God by requiring flesh to eat, his judgment of them, their lying to him, his compassion towards them, their forgetting what he had done for them in Egypt, their ongoing idolatry, God’s handing them over to their enemies, and his subsequent rejection of Ephraim in the north, and choosing of Judah. All these things ‘were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope’ (Romans 15:4), Paul tells us. They were lessons inscribed into Israel’s history, as only God could do, which illustrate vital elements of God’s dealings with men and women in all ages in the spiritual realm.But Christ also used the same method of instruction when he spoke in parables. He spoke of hidden things, which the world does not know, which it could not teach, and which it does not understand even when they are explained. The gospel is hidden as far as the world is concerned, and it has been hidden from the beginning of human history. As the officers sent to arrest Jesus said, ‘Never man spake like this man’ (John 7:46). Following the fall, man became a mere natural creature without spiritual life. ‘The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned’ (1 Corinthians 2:14). Parables are dark saying. They are dark not because they contain no light, but because the one who does not understand them sees nothing. What is dark to one is light to another. The use of parables illustrates how the Lord, at one and the same time, through the same message, has ‘mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth’ (Romans 9:18). Without the enlightening work of the Holy Spirit, the mind remains in darkness.