Then, having dismissed the crowds, he went into the house; and his disciples came to him, saying, Expound to us the parable of the darnel of the field.
The four parables spoken from the boat are finished, and Jesus goes back indoors without the crowd. From this verse on, He teaches only the people who came and asked Him.
The first half of Matthew 13 describes what anyone can see of the kingdom in the world. Sending the crowd away marks that subject as closed.
In verse 36 the Lord sent the crowd away and returned to the house (compare v. 1). In those four parables He has finished His treatment of the public character of the present kingdom. What follows is instruction for disciples: the explanation of the parable of the wheat and tares, and the last three parables. The world can know nothing of it today. It deals with God's counsels about the kingdom, not with the kingdom as it appears in the present age.
Earlier in the chapter Jesus had gone out of the house and sat by the sea. That first house stood for Judaism. The house He now re-enters means something else.
The Lord gives the last three parables — making up the third division — and the explanation of the three before them, in the privacy of the house, after He has sent the multitudes away. The house here does not represent Judaism, as it does in verse 1. It shows instead that the teaching about the three earlier parables, and about the three closing ones, could only be understood by those in relation to God when withdrawn from the world.
The disciples do not pretend to understand. Their question is itself a mark of what they believed about the One they were asking.
The disciples ask Him, "Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field." They might be ignorant, but they still had confidence in their Lord. They trusted that what He had spoken He was willing to explain.
The explanation given indoors is not a repetition. It carries the story past the point where the public version stopped.
But in the house the Lord goes beyond the bounds of the present age, and we get a glimpse into the future one. There is the binding of the weeds, the gathering of the wheat, the closing scenes of this age. But the curtain lifts, and we see the terrible result of the judgment of the weeds: the weeping and gnashing of teeth. On the other side, we see the righteous shining as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. They are not established in the spoiled kingdom. They shine in the kingdom of their Father. That is why there is no question of purging the field.
In the parable the weeds are left standing until the harvest. That decision shapes what Christians may and may not do about evil now.
It is a plain declaration that the efforts of Christians will not take the evil away. The evil is to remain until the day of judgment: "Let both grow together until the harvest." … We must remember that now, in God's dealings with us and by us, we have to do with grace and not with judgment. We are not to judge the world. Even if we could say with certainty of someone that he is a child of the devil, that is the very reason he is outside our jurisdiction; it is a weed. We have to do with grace. We cannot lay a hand on the evil which Satan has produced. But we can act as instruments of grace, for God permits us to sow good seed.
The pattern of this verse holds across Scripture: the explanation comes to those who withdraw and ask.
This teaching may be regarded as exclusive, entrusted in this way to these chosen witnesses, so that after the Lord's ascension it might be spread throughout the world. Even so, the general truth matters: God makes His ways known in the hush of the sanctuary, not in the noise of the camp. The warning of the coming destruction of the cities of the plain did not go to Lot in the busy streets of Sodom. It went to Abraham in the quiet of a hot noon at his own tent door. … So the Prophet of Jehovah revealed the truth about the special character of the coming kingdom — not to the surging crowds by the Galilean lake, but to the disciples who came to Him as He was alone in the house.
- Outside — the four parables by the sea show the kingdom's public face, what any observer can see of it in the world.
- Inside — the house marks a change of audience; what He says there belongs to those withdrawn from the world with Him.
- Asked — the disciples came with confidence, not with understanding, and He was willing to explain.
- Further — the indoor explanation lifts the curtain past this age, to the weeping and gnashing of teeth, and to the righteous shining in their Father's kingdom.
- Meanwhile — since the weeds stay till harvest, our work is not judgment but grace: we sow good seed and leave the reaping to God.
But he answering said, He that sows the good seed is the Son of man,
The disciples heard the story of the wheat and the weeds in public. Now they are alone with Jesus in the house, and they ask what it means. His first word of explanation is about Himself. Everything else in the parable — the field, the harvest, the enemy — follows from who the sower is.
Jesus does not leave the meaning to us. He explains it Himself, piece by piece.
Again we are not left to search for an interpretation. After He had spoken two other parables, our Lord answers His disciples' question and tells them what He meant by it. We must turn to this perfect interpretation by the divine Speaker to find the correct and far-reaching meaning of this second parable.
He does not call Himself "the Messiah" here. Writers tie that choice to His rejection by Israel.
A quick look is enough to show us that the Lord took up this title because the people of Israel did not accept the kingdom of God which He proclaimed. Instead, they met Him with personal hatred... All the passages agree in marking out this title. It is wider in meaning than "Messiah," and the Lord took it because the chosen nation He came to had rejected Him.
Sowing means breaking new ground. That marks a change from the way God had worked with Israel.
But Israel had been His vineyard, planted, fenced and cared for long ago, according to His own words at another time (Matt. 21:33). From it He had looked for fruit — not as a fresh field to sow for a harvest. So He had to "go out" from Israel to somewhere else. He carried that "word of the kingdom," which they had already rejected, to get fruit for Himself in the field of the world at large. For "the field is the world," as He Himself explains to us — not a chosen nation, but the whole earth.
In the earlier parable of the sower the seed is the word. Here the Lord means something else.
Here the seed is not strictly the word. It is the children of the kingdom, whom Christ brings into the world. They have their life — their moral existence — from Him. We sow the word. But the great fact here is that the Son of Man brings His own into the world. It is a work which He begins.
Later servants take up the same work in a lesser way.
Afterwards the apostles, in their ministry of the truth, became sowers themselves in a secondary sense. For example, Paul used this figure when writing to the Corinthians: "If we have sown spiritual things among you, is it too much if we reap material things from you?" (1 Cor. 9:11).
The parable sets another person opposite the Sower.
The Son of Man and the wicked one, it has been well observed, are set over against each other... Scripture presents Satan as always acting as the great personal opponent of the Son. The Son of God appeared "to destroy the works of the devil."
Some readers take this field to be the church. The Lord's own words rule that out.
Notice how absurd it is to think, as some do, that this passage speaks of the church. The Son of man comes to sow the gospel, the word of God, in the world — not in the church. The church has already received it. The church is made up of those who, either in profession or in reality, have already received the good seed.
If the work started with Him, the outcome is not in doubt.
That is a beginning which must produce an abundant harvest. It is important to grasp that a Divine Person set the beginning of Christianity in motion, and what He does is good. So the harvest must be for His glory. Much that is marked by failure has come in, but what He began will not fail.
- The Sower — Jesus names Himself as the one who sows, and He explains the parable Himself. Nothing is left to guesswork.
- The title — He sows as "Son of Man," a name of wider reach than Messiah, taken up in view of His rejection by the nation He came to.
- The field — not the vineyard of Israel where He looked for fruit, but the world, where He starts fresh. It is not the church.
- The seed — people, children of the kingdom, whom Christ brings into the world to live by life received from Him. His servants sow the word after Him in a lesser way.
- The outcome — the enemy stands against the Sower, but a work begun by a Divine Person must end in an abundant harvest for His glory.
and the field is the world; and the good seed, these are the sons of the kingdom, but the darnel are the sons of the evil [one];
Here the Lord stops speaking in pictures. He hands His disciples the key and names each part of the parable of the weeds. Two of those definitions carry the whole chapter: the field is the world, and the two crops growing in it are two families of people.
The word translated "world" here is not the same word used a few verses later for the end of the age. One writer warns against flattening the two together:
If we treated these words as having the same meaning, we would miss the thought in some of the passages. For instance, in Matthew 13:38, "The field is the world" means the material world with people living in it. In Matthew 13:40, "The end of the world" is really "the end of the age" — the period that will close when the Lord appears.
In the first parable of the chapter the seed was the word. Here the seed is people, planted in the world by Christ — and the enemy copies His work:
Here the seed is not strictly the word. It is the children of the kingdom, brought into the world by Christ. They have their life — their moral existence — from Him. We sow the word. But here the great fact is that the Son of Man brings His own into the world. It is a work which He begins… When He has done that, Satan does the same, active in evil on the ground where good has been done.
The title itself carries a promise. It also marks off one kind of person from another:
In the parable of the tares, Scripture calls saints "sons of the kingdom" (Matt. 13:38), for they will certainly inherit it. Mere men of the world it calls "sons of this world" (Luke 16:8), who in their generation are "wiser than the sons of light."
Israel held the title only as a nation. Once the King was present on earth, it became real in individuals:
The King was truly on earth, gathering souls around Himself by the word of the kingdom, the seed the sower spread abroad. All who heard and received His word became in reality what Israel was only as a nation: true sons of the kingdom.
The weeds are not everyone in the world who is evil. They are a narrower group, planted right where the wheat is:
The tares mean, not all the children of the wicked one, but only those sown among the wheat, as counterfeit and false plants. They are hypocrites — people of every kind who falsely claim to be Christians, whether they know it or not.
Behind the two seeds stand two persons, deliberately set against each other:
The Son of Man and the wicked one, as others have well remarked, are opposed to each other… Scripture always shows Satan acting as the great personal opponent of the Son. The Son of God has come "that He might destroy the works of the devil." The devil uses the world to entangle people and to stir up the flesh, working on the heart's natural liking for present honour and ease.
The Lord said "world," not "church." So this parable gives no ground for tolerating open evil in a congregation:
In His wonderful discourse in Matthew 13, our Lord teaches that the wheat and the tares are to grow together. Yes — but where? In the church? No. They grow "in the field," and He tells us that "the field is the world." To confuse these two is to falsify the whole Christian position and to do away with all godly discipline in the assembly.
That leaves one thing forbidden and another commanded:
They were not to be rooted out of the field. The church was to put them out when they showed themselves to be wicked persons. The church and the kingdom are quite distinct, though the one may be said to be inside the other. The limits of the kingdom stretch far beyond the limits of the true church of God… The tares are to be put away from the Lord's table, but not rooted out of the field. The church was not to use worldly punishments in dealing with offenders. But the very thing the Lord is here guarding His disciples against came to pass, as the long list of martyrs so painfully shows.
Commentators differ on how far "sons of the kingdom" reaches. Most read it as true believers. F. W. Grant argues the phrase is broader, pointing out that the same words in Matthew 8:12 describe people cast into outer darkness — so, he says, the term "is not interchangeable with those born again."
- Field. The Lord defines it Himself: the inhabited world, not the church, and not the end of the age.
- Seed. The first parable sowed the word; here that word stands up as people. Christ brings His own into the world, and they draw their life from Him.
- Sons. The title marks out heirs. Israel held it only as a nation; now it belongs to all who hear and receive the word of the kingdom.
- Counterfeits. The weeds are people, not ideas. They look like wheat, and the personal enemy of the Son of Man planted them.
- Restraint. The field is the world, so believers do not uproot. The church is not the field, so they still put away open evil.
and the enemy who has sowed it is the devil; and the harvest is [the] completion of [the] age, and the harvestmen are angels.
Here the Lord explains His own parable. In one verse He names three things: who sowed the weeds, when the field is cleared, and who clears it. Each answer takes away a comfort we might want. The evil was deliberate, the cure waits, and the hands that bring it are not ours.
The enemy had a motive and a method. One writer traces how he worked — not by open attack, but by copying:
The devil is the enemy, and the sowing of the weeds was his countermove. He could not stop the kingdom of heaven from being set up in the world where he was the prince. So he went to work at once, with great cunning, to oppose it and spoil it. He opposed it by imitating it.
Two different words stand behind "world" in verse 38 and "the end of the age" here. Mixing them up changes the whole picture:
"The world" in verse 38 must not be confused with "the world" in verse 39. They are totally distinct words and things. "The world" in verse 39 means the age. It is a course of time, and not a geographical sphere. Verse 38 means the sphere, the place where the gospel goes out. Verse 39 means the span of time in which the gospel is either advancing or held back by the enemy's power. The harvest is the completion of the age, that is, of the present era. It is the time while the Lord is absent and the gospel goes out over the earth... The Lord shows here that an end will come to the present sending out of the word of the kingdom, and that a day is coming when the effects of Satan's work must be fully developed and judged.
Older English versions read "the end of the world" here. Commentators call that a mistranslation, and point to the context: the Lord cleans the field, He does not destroy it:
I repeat that the end of the age is not the end of the world. The phrase "end of the world" in Matthew 13:39 is a clear error of translation... Far from being the end of the world, the very context proves the contrary. The Lord sends His angels and clears out of the field or world what is offensive to Him. The evil is judged, the scandals removed... So this is far from being the end of the "world". The harvest that closes this age will be the start of the world going on in blessing under the displayed kingdom of the Son of Man.
The servants in the parable wanted to do this work themselves. Naming the reapers as angels answers them, and settles what a disciple may do about evil in the meantime:
The servant wished to do the reapers' (the angels') work. Not so; the angels are the executioners of God's wrath. So this teaches us that the work of judgment is not the business of Christ's disciples while He is absent and rejected. We are not told to root out heresy and evil men by the strong arm of the sword. To do so is to leave the proper place of the Christian. We are to bear testimony to Christ and against the evil, most certainly. But we are to leave judgment in the hands of God, in the hands of Jesus.
The clearing waits for the end of the age, so the mixture stands. Can the damage be repaired in the meantime, and the first order of things set up again?
The Lord settles this question plainly and with authority, and His answer is no. He tells us that nothing will remedy the evil for the whole length of this age. The time of harvest — that is, the judgment — will root it out, and until then the evil goes on. Remember, though: separating from the evil, and enjoying the presence of Christ with the "two or three," is quite a different thing from claiming to set that order up again now that the evil has come in.
What men's hands were unfit to do, angels will do at a stroke. The same moment that removes the weeds also secures the wheat:
Men's hands are declared unfit for this separation. It is left to angels' hands, in the day of the harvest of Christendom. They are the reapers then. The field is to be cleared of wheat and weeds alike. At one moment the order goes out to gather the weeds in bundles to be burned, and to gather the wheat into the barn. So solemnly the day of Christian profession ends.
- Enemy. The weeds were not an accident of soil or weather. A person sowed them, and the Lord names him: the devil, working by imitation, not by open attack.
- Age. The harvest comes at the end of the age — a stretch of time, not a place. It is the span while the Lord is absent and the gospel goes out.
- Not extinction. This is not the world's destruction. The Lord clears out of the field what offends Him, so the world can go on in blessing under the reign of the Son of Man.
- Reapers. The clearing belongs to angels, not to disciples. Our part is testimony against evil. We leave the sword and the sentence to Christ.
- Meanwhile. Nothing will remedy the evil before the harvest, so the mixture stands. Separation from evil is a duty; rebuilding what has been spoiled is not on offer.