Well, we just have a very simple
but extraordinarily powerful parable before us this evening. It's a parable amongst a series
of parables. It's been something that I've
had on my heart for some time. When I was in India, there's
some words in verse 28 that often brought to my attention as I
walked through the streets of our town and saw things in India
which were just extraordinarily shocking. I prayed when I arrived
there that I'd never get over the shock. and I wouldn't get
used to it. I have to confess that, sadly,
after five years I did, that the words that used to come to
my mind so often as I saw things that were just horrifying, is,
an enemy has done this. And the other thing is, of course,
that in Mark's Gospel we are getting very close to the stage
where the Lord Jesus as the good seed was sown into the ground. And the remarkable news of the
Gospel is that that good seed that was sown into the ground
is a good seed that's going to, because of that sowing, bring
forth much fruit. And the remarkable story of grace is that as we
plant seeds wheat seeds and they seem dead and they're sown into
the ground. The plant that comes up extraordinary
is a wheat plant. And one of the wonderful pictures
of that seed that was sown is that at that time of the harvest,
God's children will be like the seed sown. It's a wonderful picture. Let's just read this powerful
parable. Another parable he set forth
to them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed
good seed in his field, but while men slept His enemy came and sowed tares
among the wheat, and went his way. But when the grain had sprouted
and produced a crop, then the tares also appeared. So the servants
of the owner came and said to him, Sir, did you not sow good
seed in your field? How then does it have tares? He said to them, An enemy has
done this. The servant said to him, Do you
want us then to go and gather them up? But he said, No, lest
while you gather up the tares, you also uproot the wheat with
them. Let both grow together until
the harvest. And at the time of the harvest,
I will say to the reapers, first gather the tares and bind them
in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn. Verse 36. Then Jesus sent the
multitude away and went into the house. And his disciples
came to him saying, explain to us the parable of the tares of
the field. He answered and said to them,
he who sows the good seed is the son of man. The field is
the world. The good seed are the sons of
the kingdom, but the tares are the sons of the wicked one. The
enemy who sowed them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the
age. The reapers are the angels. Therefore,
as the tares are gathered and burned in the fire, so it will
be at the end of this age. The Son of Man will send out
His angels, and they will gather out of His kingdom all things
that offend, and all who practice lawlessness, and will cast them
into the furnace of fire. There will be wailing and gnashing
of teeth. Then the righteous will shine
forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears
to hear, let him hear. Now let's read the parable again. The kingdom of heaven is like
a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while men slept,
his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat and went his
way. And when the grain had sprouted and produced a crop, then the
tares also appeared. So the servants of the owner
came to him, sir, did you not sow good seed in your field?
How then does it have tares? He said to them, an enemy has
done this. The servants said to him, do
you want us then to go and gather them up? And he said, no, lest
while you gather up the tares, you also uproot the wheat with
them. Let both grow together until
the harvest, and at the time of the harvest I will say to
the reapers, first gather the tares and bind them in bundles
to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn. The first thing I'd like us to
look at in this parable is like all of scripture, It reveals
the gospel and it reveals God in His true character. We see again that God is absolutely
sovereign. It is His field. It is His seed. It is He who is in charge of
the sowing of the seed. You see, the sovereignty of God,
as we have been seeing in Simon's messages on the eternal covenant,
the sovereignty of God and the eternal election of our God has
a beginning before the foundation of this world. They were His
seed from before the foundation of the world. He elects, He selects,
and He determines. And He's a God of sovereignty
and a God of purposefulness. He does things with a view to
the end. Verse 43, the righteous, the
good seed, will shine forth as a sun in the kingdom of their
Father. We looked at Revelation 21 and
22 a few weeks ago. It's extraordinary, isn't it? In this new creation, there shall
be no night there. There'll be no need. They need
no lamp, verse 5, nor the light of the sun. They won't need those
things. It's not saying they're not there.
For the Lord God gives them light. The light that they have is a
light that comes from God. And they shall reign forever
and ever. There's a purpose in sowing. There is a purpose in sowing
his seed into this world for a time of trouble in this world,
for this period that we are here. It's extraordinary, isn't it,
that the pictures of God's people in this world are pictures of
them as a seed planted. something that's remarkably fragile,
something that looks to the outside as if it's dead. In a sense,
life is hidden in it. And we are considered as members
of a vine, not huge oak trees. We're lands. not strong bulls
or mighty elephants. We are a little flock in this
world. But the wonderful thing is that
we are considered by our God to be a seed and a seed that
was planted. God's children are here as seeds
planted by God for this particular season, and in this particular
field, and with the tares around us that are particular for our
time. This is the time that God ordained
for each and every one of us from before the foundation of
the world. God's children love to rest in
the sovereignty of our God, that He is the sower and it's His
world. and He is sovereignly in charge
of all things. We also see the majesty of our
God, God our Savior, both in sovereignty and selection and
majesty. In verse 36, He sent the multitude
away, and He went into the house with his disciples. Always the
Lord Jesus, when there were crowds, took special occasion to take
his arm aside as in John 6 when there was that vast crowd that
came because of the miracles. And Jesus, as this parable does,
preached sovereign electing grace, preached God as God. preached Jesus as God to these
people and they flocked away offended by Him. He can gather
and He can send away. And He is a God who will have
mercy on whom He will have mercy. It is His sovereignly to reveal
and it's His sovereignly to conceal who He is and what He's doing
in this world. And again, we are reminded in
this parable that our God's grace to His people is an unchanging,
immutable grace. He is the man who has His field. He is the one who sows, and He
is the one who sends out the reapers. And He is the one, in
verse 39, who determines the end of the age. the response of natural man,
the response of so many of us. In some sense, the argument that
we have to defend is that if God is so extraordinarily sovereign
and all of his people are his planting and he's in charge of
their growing and their troubles and their harvesting, then we
can sit back and do absolutely nothing. and God will do it all. But the man who spoke these words
had come from heaven to earth. The man who spoke these words
suffered alongside his people and suffered with his people
and still suffers with his people. And we are to live in this world
with God's very being as the rock of our lives. But we live
in this world, and I think this parable is wonderfully helpful,
we live in this world where God, in his infinite wisdom and love
and mercy to us, has revealed so much of himself and his purposes
and then has deliberately concealed so much of what he is doing. Just read the parable. You see,
when the grain had sprouted and produced a crop, then the tares
also appeared. The tares and the wheat look
almost identical until it comes to harvest time. Simon spoke
about the tares some weeks ago and the plants are almost indistinguishable
and yet the tares are a dangerous and potentially poisonous crop. And one of the things that distinguishes
the tares from the wheat is that as the wheat gets riper and riper,
the grain develops and forms, and then the heads of the wheat
bow down. The tares stand proud and tall
and erect in their own strength. God created tares so that we
would learn lessons. And so you don't know they are
there. It's a humbling and a comforting
truth for God's people. It is good, according to God's
good and wise purposes, for us not to know. and it's particularly
good for us to take heed to what the Lord Jesus says in verse
30. To those who want to do things,
to those who want to separate the sheep from the goats, to
those who think they have the wisdom to work out who are the
tares and who are the wheat, God says no. No. Firstly, in verse 29, you'll
damage the wheat by trying to discern
who the tares are. And verse 30, you let them both
grow together. God will sort out the wheat from
the tares in His time and in His way and for the good of His
people. It is not for us to go to those
places where God has said He has put a veil over it. And because we believe, as the
Scriptures teach, that God in His saving mercy will come to
someone who is dead. To us they appear spiritually
dead. God comes in sovereign saving
mercy to the most hopelessly lost and dead and He gives them
life. The most unlikely man 2,000 years
ago to be converted in all the world was a zealous young Pharisee
called Saul. If you had looked around Israel
and said, which one of all of these people is the most unlikely
ever to be a recipient of the grace of God, Everyone in those
early churches would have said, this Saul is a famous enemy of
ours. He'll kill us if he can get his
hands on us. He'll destroy our families. And
yet he was marked out from before the foundation of the world to
be God's special apostle to the Gentiles. 1 Corinthians 11 says, that there
must be heresies among you, that those approved may be recognized
among you. Ultimately, there is a sense
in which God's children can determine truth from error because of the
gospel. But we have examples in the scriptures. Demas and Judas and many others
are those who proclaim the Gospel faithfully and yet were lost. That means that we defend the
Gospel and cling to the Gospel with a passion. But true Gospel
preachers are going to be like John the Baptist. They will be
continually saying, Behold the Lamb of God. You hear words from
me, from Simon, and from other men here. You hear the words
of men, but you follow the Lord Jesus. You go to Him and not
to men. Always. Any man who wants to
exalt himself will end up being seen to be a tear. We become nothing. and he becomes everything. And so we see in this parable
God's sovereign and good purposes. It is the Lord Jesus who is the
sower and his seed is good seed. There are ultimately only two
sorts of seed in this world. In Genesis 3.15 we have Satan's
seed and we have the seed of the woman. I will put enmity between you
and the woman, between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise your head. and you shall bruise his heel. We've been following the Lord
Jesus on that bruising and torturous road. But in reality, the Scriptures
make it abundantly clear that Jesus was being bruised and Satan
was being crushed. And all the covenant promises
are made to that one seed. all of the promises of God are
in that one seed, that Son of Man. So many people know John
3.16. Sometimes you wonder if we actually
went to some other 3.16s in the Scriptures. Galatians 3.16 is
a beautiful one. Beautiful Scripture. Now to Abraham
and his seed, singular, were the promises made. He does not say unto seeds, as
of many, but to one, and to your seed who is Christ. In Christ are all the promises
of God, yes and amen. He is the good seed that was
sown in the earth. As he said in John's Gospel in
chapter 12, this good seed It's going to be sown into the earth and it will produce much. Master Stuart, I say to you,
unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it
remains alone. But if it dies, if it is sown
into the ground and appears to have disappeared from human thinking,
and human sense that it could possibly be alive. Unless it
falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone. The Lord Jesus
said it's not good for man to be alone. But if it dies, and
this seed died, it produces much grain. He is the seed. He is the righteousness of God,
the righteousness that God required. He is that holy seed. He is the faithful seed. He is the seed, the son of man,
who fulfilled the law of God from his heart. And He is in
this one seed. He is the life of all of the
rest of the seed. Our lives are in His life. Our life with God is in His life
with God. We and Him are so much of one,
aren't we? Our lives are now hidden with
Christ in God. You see, the tears amongst the
wheat are for the good of the wheat. Extraordinary. They are for our good. Our lives are so wrapped up with
His life that the tares can do God's children no harm. They will only ever do God's
children good. It's good for us that things
are the way God has made them. This world, as we said earlier,
is His field. The field is the world. And He, by His obedience, by
His perfect righteousness, has earned from God the right to
rule everything and everyone in this world. You have given
him authority over all flesh, that he should give eternal life
to as many as you have given him. And this is eternal life,
that they may know you, that they may be in intimate relationship
with you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you sent. It's his field. and it's good
for us to be reminded that He is. Also, the activity in the
field happens in verse 25, while men sleep, but our God never
sleeps. He who watches over Israel neither
slumbers nor sleeps. He keeps Israel and he neither
slumbers nor sleeps. But men sleep. Men have times
in their lives where things go on as they do in our lives when
we sleep. So much is out of our control. Everything is out of our control. Sleeping is a good way of looking
at it, isn't it? This great big world and all
these billions of people are doing things outside of our control,
but not outside of the control of our God and our Saviour. Nothing surprises our God. We might be surprised, but He
never is surprised. It's interesting that the tares
are planted after the wheat has been planted, and it's always
the case. Satan doesn't preempt the activities
of God. He always follows along after
God's activities are evident, to then harass God. Just as he did to the Lord Jesus,
he came to him after he was revealed in his baptism. And then he waited
for opportune times. And he will with us, after the
wheat has been planted. They can't, nevertheless, these
tears, they can't stop the planting of the wheat, they can't stop
the growing of the wheat, they can't stop the maturing of the
wheat. They're all there growing together
for God's good purpose. And God says to us, let them,
let them both grow together. And we are to rest in what we've
been given to do and what's before us. And we leave God. In faithfulness, we trust our
God to do what is right. So much of the activities of
men in religion all of the activities of men in religion outside of
faithfulness to the Lord Jesus is just a vain activity. It is a useless activity. It is worse than useless. It is jolly, dangerous and damning. Simon and Jenny saw some activities
today which are damning to the souls of people. Playing games
with God. Playing games with God's children
is a vain and damning and dangerous activity. We wait. We proclaim the gospel. And we just wait. We trust Him
who is faithful. We trust Him who is the sower. We trust Him who owns the field. We trust Him that He's sown perfectly
good seed at a perfectly good time, and He perfectly knows
how to harvest all of His fruit from His field. The Son of Man has sown us into
this world, and the enemy, the devil, has sown his seed behind
the planting of the Lord. Verse 41 says, The Son of Man
will send out His angels, and they will gather They won't lose
one. They won't make any mistakes.
They will gather out of his kingdom all things that offend and those
who practice lawlessness. What does the Lord Jesus mean
by that? Most people would say that those
who turn their backs on the Ten Commandments and don't get a
whip out to whip God's people into line to behave themselves. You see, the fruits of lawlessness
are the fruits that are not fruit that come from the One who satisfied
the law of God. They're not fruits that come
from Jesus who did perfectly obey the law. As Romans 3 says,
do we nullify the law? By faith? By trusting God? Do we then overturn
the law? Do we actually make the law as
seem as if it's nothing? Do we make it void by trusting? This language in Romans 3.31
is extraordinarily strong. Absolutely not! And the explanation
marks need to be there. On the contrary, we establish
the law. Lawlessness is faithlessness. It is not trusting the Lord Jesus
to do as He has promised. It's not trusting the Lord Jesus
to have done as he has promised. Just let me read you a few, a
paragraph from our friend, Mr. Huntington. Paul says that he
that comes to God must believe that he is the rewarder of them
that diligently seek him. Then faith must be the rule of
his coming. We have access by faith into
this grace wherein we stand. Then faith is the rule of our
approach to God. The just shall live by his faith. Then faith is the just man, the
righteous man's rule of life. We walk by faith and not by sight. Then faith is the rule of our
walk. You stand by faith, says Paul. Then faith is the rule of the
believer's standing. Whatever you shall ask believing
you shall receive, says Christ, then faith is the rule of that
branch of worship. By faith Enoch had this testimony
that he pleased God, but without faith it is impossible to please
him. Then faith is the rule that God
approves of and is pleased with. Whatsoever is not of faith is
sin. then faith is the perfect rule
of holiness. All that believe are justified
from all things, from which you could not be justified by the
law of Moses, then faith is the rule of our righteousness. It
is by faith we overcome the world, to lay hold of eternal life.
It is to fight the good fight of faith, according to Paul.
I have fought the good fight, I have finished my course, I
have kept the faith. Then faith was the rule of his
warfare, the rule of his race, and it was the grace of God that
made Paul obedient to that rule. We have received grace and apostleship
for obedience to the faith. That is, by Christ we have received
grace to save our souls and apostleship to be of use to the Church, not
as a reward of our obedience, as many make this verse out to
be. but to furnish us with power,
to make us obedient to the faith among the nations for his name. Then faith is the rule of apostolic
obedience. because it cannot be called receiving
grace for obedience to the faith if faith be not the gracious
man's rule of obedience. These things will be cast out. What a blessed promise from our
God. There is a place for God's wheat
having been tried and tested and grown and refined by the
tears. There is a place and a time coming
for us when all those things, the things that offend and those
who practice lawlessness will be cast out. and they will be
cast into the fire, and there will be wailing and gnashing
of teeth. Then the righteous will shine
forth as a sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears
to hear, let him hear. The question that comes before
all of us before I close is what about me? Am I a wimp, see, or am I a tear? At the end of the day, God doesn't
want us, and certainly doesn't want me, to look out on any group
of people, wherever I am, and say, I know that that one is
and that one isn't. I know from the promise of God
that He will make it plain to His people. His Spirit will confirm
with our spirit that we are children of God. At the end of the day,
it is really between you and God. And this parable reminds
us that we are not to look at those who claim to be our brothers
and sisters and saying, I know your heart, I don't, God does,
you don't know mine, God does. It's a comfort, it should be
an encouragement to us and we have some things from the Word
of God that continually point us to things that happen inside
of God's children. They are born again. They have a new life. They have Jesus Christ in them. If Jesus Christ, who rules this
universe, controls all things, controls the circumstances of
your life, good, bad and otherwise, is living in you, then something
will happen in your life. It will be personal between you
and God. But Christ in you, Colossians
1.27, is the hope of glory. He is for God's children, despite what
we often remind ourselves of, of the weakness and the frailty,
the shocking, shocking sins of our flesh. He is the rock that
we are taken back to again and again. He is the root of our
joys. and we go to Him through the
perfect work of His Son. I will go to your altar, the
altar of God, Christ Jesus, to God my exceeding joy, and on
the heart I will praise you, O God, my God. And God's children will love
what we have seen in this parable about God's absolute sovereignty. We love the fact that God rules
and I don't. We love the fact that He is sovereign. We love the fact that He's sovereign
for our good even if we can't see it. He is King Jesus and
we delight in it. And we know, says 1 John 3.14,
we know that we have passed from death to life because we love
the brethren. We love the people that God loves. We love being with God's children. As the psalmist said, we love
the fact that He is the goal of our lives. We will shine like
the sun. As for me, says the psalmist,
when I will see your face in righteousness, I shall be satisfied
when I awake in your likeness. When that seed that is Christ
Jesus that's in us comes to fruition and that harvest is there, we
will awake in His likeness. He is the goal of our lives,
to be with Him and to be like Him forever. And Hebrews says
that we have, God's children, the full assurance, not of our
activities, not of the things that we can show other people
that we've done. We have the full assurance of
faith. Not the strength of our faith,
but the object of our faith. It centers on Him and not on
my activities. And we love the revelation of
God being God. We want Him to be God because
He's revealed Himself as God in our hearts and in our lives
and in our experience. Let's pray.