Again, the kingdom of the heavens is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls;
This short parable of the merchant turns on one question. Who is doing the seeking? The answer decides whether the story is about a sinner searching for Christ, or about Christ searching for us.
The familiar reading makes the merchant a sinner hunting for salvation. Commentators reject it. No lost person, they say, ever went looking for fine pearls.
Now is it not harsh in the extreme to infer that lost sinners are compared to a man in quest of fine pearls? It is not even true of the rare case of the rich young ruler. His conduct was blameless, yet he clung to his wealth. He gave up treasure in heaven and left Christ full of sorrow. He never knew his ruin and did not even seek to be saved. And there is no greater mistake than to say that Saul of Tarsus matches the merchant — "determined, discriminating, unremitting." By his own word he was "chief of sinners," and, like everyone else, saved in sovereign grace.
The second objection is about currency. A buyer must have something to pay with.
The usual thought is that the merchant is the sinner seeking salvation, and that salvation is the pearl. Some take Christ to be the pearl instead. Either way, it is far from the truth; far from God's thought. The sinner giving up all that he has to buy salvation — to buy Christ?! What has he to buy with but his sins. Is this the gospel of the grace of God?
Turn it around, and the merchant is Christ. He knows what He is looking for, and He alone can value it.
It is Christ then who really seeks and buys. He alone has the perfect discernment of the moral beauty He saw and prized above all. Beyond dispute, He alone of men understood and sought fine pearls. And this one pearl of great price He saw, in God's purposes, to be saints like Himself, holy and blameless in love. Yes, one with Him — the glorious church, which He will present to Himself, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing.
The parable just before this one speaks of treasure hidden in a field. The pearl adds what treasure alone could not say.
The parable of the hidden treasure did not fully show what the saints are to Christ. For the treasure might consist of a hundred thousand pieces of gold and silver. And how would this mark the blessedness and beauty of the Church? The merchant finds "one pearl of great price." The Lord does not only see how precious the saints are. He sees the unity and heavenly beauty of the assembly. Every saint is precious to Christ; but "He loved the church and gave Himself up for her." That is what we see here. I have no doubt that its spirit may be applied to every Christian. But I believe it is meant to set out the loveliness of the Church in the eyes of Christ.
Writers work the same contrast from the side of the materials themselves. A treasure chest can hold a dozen unlike things; a pearl cannot.
The term "treasure" might include gold, silver or any articles of value, and so be of a very mixed nature; but the beauty and value of the pearl depends entirely on its being all of one substance. So we find that in the second parable the merchant is especially said to have found "one pearl of great price."
The image carries its own history. No one mines or mints a pearl. It comes out of deep water, and it costs the life of the creature that made it.
This Church is one — one pearl. The pearl is brought up out of the deep sea. It is taken out of the rough shell that first encased it. And it is taken at the cost of the life of the creature that gave it being. So the pearl is a fitting picture of the Church. She has been drawn out of the sea of Gentile waters, and out of the roughness of her natural condition. It cost the life of Him in whom she was seen and chosen before the foundation of the world.
The next verse says the merchant sold all that he had. Applied to Christ, that word "all" runs deeper than we can measure.
But who can measure how poor He became? To have that pearl, so precious to Him, He sold all that He had. He freely laid aside all the glory of heaven, all the joys of His eternal home, and all that was due to Him there as Creator and God. He took on all the sorrow, suffering, and shame of bearing witness here on earth. And He took all the judgment due to sin — our sin — on the cross. Who can measure that "all"?
On the main point the writers here agree: the buyer is the Lord, and the price He paid was Himself.
- Seeker. The merchant is not the sinner but Christ. A lost person never went hunting for fine pearls, and has nothing to pay with but sins.
- Sight. He alone could value the pearl, seeing what God purposed His saints to be.
- Single. "One pearl" says what treasure could not. Not just precious saints, but one Church, whole and beautiful.
- Sea. The pearl comes from deep water and out of its rough shell, and it costs the life that formed it.
- Sold. He gave up heaven's glory and bore the judgment of the cross — and so the pearl is His.
and having found one pearl of great value, he went and sold all whatever he had and bought it.
A pearl dealer finds one pearl worth more than his whole stock. He sells everything he owns to buy it. Everything in the parable turns on one question: who is the buyer? Is the sinner buying Christ, or is Christ buying what He was looking for?
Commentators here read the merchant as Christ. They argue it from the word "seeking."
It could not be fully said of a man awakening to believe the gospel that he is seeking fine pearls. Here it is one who seeks "fine pearls," which no unconverted man ever really sought. There is no possibility of applying these parables except to the Lord Himself.
The common reading fails at the same point: the buyer must have something to sell.
People usually take the pearl to be Christ, and say the sinner sells all to have Him. Such a thought has no foundation at all in Scripture. What has the sinner to sell? Nothing, unless you count his sins as being worth something, which is worse than folly. The sinner is guilty, defiled, ruined, bankrupt, lost, and dead in sins.
A dealer is no lucky passer-by. He buys by expert judgement.
He knew what he was about. He had taste, discernment, knowledge, about what he sought. It was the well-known beauty of the thing that caused his search... And he buys nothing else along with it... Until He found this pearl, He had no reason to sell all that He had. As soon as He sees it He decides; He gives up everything for it.
The parable just before this one spoke of treasure, which comes in many parts. A pearl is one whole thing.
This stresses the unity of the assembly too, for it is "one pearl of great value." "Treasure," on the other hand, is no doubt made up of various parts, as there are twelve tribes in Israel... The best pearls take long to make, and God's grace has worked for long centuries to do His great work in the assembly. In the end she will be presented to the Lord Jesus as an adornment, to be worn near His heart forever.
A pearl has a strange beginning. It grows out of an injury.
It forms in the depths of the ocean, inside the shell of the pearl oyster, when some foreign matter gets in. The irritation this sets up calls out the best energies of the creature. It cannot throw the intruder out, so it covers it with fine layers of pure pearl. So out of what seemed only evil comes one of the purest, most beautiful and most valuable things in creation.
Writers here apply that picture to the Church herself.
She herself is only the offending object that caused the sufferings and death of the Lord of glory. But she is clothed with radiant beauty, the work of God's sovereign grace and wisdom.
Two details matter here: where this trader came from, and how he sells.
The "merchant" here is literally "a man on a journey," one who has come from far. He had come all the way from heaven's highest glory, down to seek pearls in the depths of the sea of the nations... This is not the word used of the man who sold all to buy the field in verse 44. It is our word piprasko, "to sell as a slave." The Merchantman not only sold all, whatever He had, but He sold Himself as a slave. "He emptied Himself, taking a bondman's form" (Phil. 2:7; the ESV reads "the form of a servant"), and bought the pearl.
The list of what He gave up is a list of things He could have had instead.
To bring peace and righteousness on the earth, to rescue as the second Adam everything the first Adam lost from the grip of the enemy, to have Israel hail Him as king, to sit on the throne of His father David — all these were pearls in Messiah's crown. But to bring many sons to glory, and more, to bind them into one body by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit... THIS is the pearl of great value.
The purchase is not the end of the story. One writer follows the pearl to the city at the end of the Bible.
"The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each of the gates made of a single pearl" (Revelation 21:21). What first meets the eye as you approach a walled city is its gate. So at every approach the pearl shines out from the surrounding wall of the divine glory. It is the chosen symbol of what the Church was to Christ, and of His own special delight in it as He saw it in eternity.
- Seeker. The merchant travels and searches. No unconverted person goes looking for fine pearls, so the seeker must be Christ Himself.
- Sight. He buys as an expert, not a bargain-hunter — He values the pearl before He owns it, and He buys nothing else alongside it.
- Source. A pearl grows in dark water around an intruder. What looked like pure damage becomes one of the most beautiful things in creation.
- Sale. The word for His selling is the word for selling into slavery: He gave up the throne, the kingdom, and Himself.
- Setting. What He paid everything for shines at every gate of the city. From every direction, all see what she was worth to Him.