employed by the Lord in the interpretation of the parable, we learn that
all classes and all ranks are on this side exposed to danger. This is
not a rich man's business, or a poor man's; it is every man's business.
The words point to the two extremes of worldly condition, and include
all that lies between them. "The care of the world" becomes the snare of
those who have little, and "the deceitfulness of riches," the snare of
those who have much. Thus the world wars against the soul, alike when it
smiles and when it frowns. Rich and poor have in this matter no room and
no right to cast stones at each other. Pinching want and luxurious
profusion are, indeed, two widely diverse species of thorns; but when
favoured by circumstances they are equally rank in their growth and
equally effective in destroying the precious seed.
In two distinct aspects thorns, growing in a field of wheat, reflect as
a mirror the kind of spiritual injury which the cares and pleasures of
the world inflict when they are admitted into the heart: they exhaust
the soil by their roots, and overshadow the corn with their branches.
1. Thorns and thistles occupying the field suck in the sap which should
go to nourish the good seed, and leave it a living skeleton. The
capability of the ground is limited. The agriculturist scatters as much
seed in the field as it is capable of sustaining and bringing to
maturity. When weeds of rank growth spring up, their roots greedily and
masterfully drain the soil of its fatness for their own supply; and as
there is not enough both for them and the grain stalks, the weakest goes
to the wall. The lawful, useful, but feeble grain is deprived of its
sustenance by the more robust intruder. Under the ground as well as on
its surface, might crushes right. Robbers fatten on the spoil of loyal
citizens, and loyal citizens are left to starve. Moreover, the weeds are
indigenous in the soil: this is proved by the simple fact of their
presence, for certainly they were not sown there by the husbandman's
hand. The grain, on the other hand, is not native; it must be brought to
the spot and sown; it must be cherished and protected as a stranger. The
two occupants of the ground, consequently, are not on equal terms; it is
not a fair fight. The thorns are at home; the wheat is an exotic. The
thorns are robust and can hold their own; the wheat is delicate and
needs a protector. The weeds accordingly grow with luxuriance, while the
wheat stalks in the neighbourhood, cheated of their sustenance under
ground, become tall, empty, barren straws.
2. Thorns and thistles, favoured as indigenous plants by the
suitableness of soil and climate, outgrow the grain both in breadth and
height. The outspread leaves and branches of the weeds constitute a
thick screen between the ears of corn and the sunshine. Under that
blighting shadow, although the stalks may grow tall and the husks
develop themselves in their own exquisite natural forms, no solid seed
is formed or ripened. On the spot which the thorns usurped, the reaper
gathers only straw and chaff.
How vivid on both its sides is the picture, and how truthfully it
represents the case! The faculties of the human heart and mind are
limited, like the productive powers of the ground. Neither the
understanding nor the affections are endowed with an indefinite capacity
of reception. The soil, even where it is rich and deep, may be soon
exhausted, especially where the more gross and greedy weeds have taken
up their abode. You are convinced of sin and begin to cry for pardon;
you plead the Redeemer's sacrifice and righteousness; you grieve over
your own backsliding, and come anew to the blood of sprinkling; the twin
emotions, confession and prayer, struggle together in your breast,
"Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief." Thus far, it is well. The
field has been broken; the seed has been covered in the ground; the
covered seed has sprung; the sprung seed has grown apace and now seems
near maturity. The evil spirit that seeks to spoil this fair promise
seldom comes in the form of speculative unbelief. When you begin to fall
away, you do not begin by abjuring your religion, or denying the Lord.
You do not pull the grown but unripe corn up by the roots and cast it
over the hedge: the harvest is marred in a more secret and silent way.
The kingdom of the wicked one, cunningly in this matter imitating the
kingdom of God, "cometh not with observation." Weeds spring up among the
wheat. At first they are small and scarcely perceptible; the
inexperienced, apprehending no danger, are put off their guard. The
first leaves which these bitter roots put forth are generally smooth,
tender, and apparently harmless, giving to the inexperienced eye no
indication of their rough and ravenous nature. But these thorns, if they
are not watched, curbed, and killed, may yet cause the loss of the soul.
If you are poor, anxieties about work and wages, clothes and food, wife
and children, become the thorn plants, harmless in appearance at first,
which in the end may choke the seed of grace in your heart. If you are
rich, the pleasure which wealth may purchase, or love of the wealth
itself, may become the bitter root, which in its maturity may overpower
all spiritual life within you, and leave only chaff, to be driven away
in the great day of the Lord. Watch and pray: these cares and pleasures
present themselves at first in humble and submissive guise; it is by
their gradual growth that they are enabled to inflict a deadly injury.
Their roots, if not checked, silently drain all the sap of your soul,
and the kingdom of God within you, although never formally abjured, is
permitted to sink into decay. Your time, your memory, your imagination,
your affections, your thoughts, late and early,--all that constitutes
your life, instead of being devoted first to the kingdom of God and his
righteousness, are usurped and absorbed by the things that perish in the
using. When you betake yourself to the word, to prayer, to communion,
your heart, already searched, drained, scourged by the greedy roots of
rank earthly lusts, is a sapless, impoverished, shrivelled thing, where
faith in God and loving obedience to his law can no longer grow. Thus
perish many bright promises; and high above the ruin, living and abiding
for ever stands the word of Christ a witness against all who have been
undone by neglecting it, "No man can serve two masters."
Worldly cares nursed by indulgence into a dangerous strength are further
like thorns growing in a corn field, in that they interpose a veil
between the face of Jesus and the opening, trustful look of a longing
soul. It is the want of free, habitual exposure to the Sun of
righteousness that prevents the ripening of grace in Christians. Unless
we turn our eye often upward, and expose the struggling, springing seed
of faith to the beams of the Redeemer's love, there will be no steady
growth of grace, and no ultimate fruit of righteousness. It is thus that
insinuating, overspreading, domineering cares quench both hope and
holiness: they hinder the simple, tender, confiding look unto Jesus
which is necessary to the increase or maintenance of spiritual life. The
love of Christ freely streaming down from heaven through the Scriptures
and by the ministry of the Spirit, when freely admitted into an open,
willing heart, by degrees turns fear into hope, doubt into faith, and
the feeble struggle of a child into the strong man's glorious victory;
as unimpeded sunlight converts the minute mustard seed into a towering
tree, and the tender sprouts of spring into the golden treasures of
harvest. A thickly woven web of cares and pleasures interposed between
the soul and the Saviour is a chief cause of failure in "God's
husbandry."
Nor is the harvest safe although the thorny shade that overhangs it be
not completely impervious and constant. Fitful glances of sunshine now
and then will not bring the fruit to maturity. Stand beneath the
branches of a forest tree on a day that is at once bright and breezy:
you may observe on the ground at your feet a curious network of
flickering light trembling and dancing about in perpetual motion. The
sunbeams that penetrate at intervals through openings among the agitated
branches are barren though beautiful. The grass that gets no other
light grows slim and pithless, bearing no seed-knot on its slender top.
Sunlight admitted now and then through apertures in the leafy awning is
not sufficient for the processes of nature; the grain field must get its
bosom opened without impediment permanently to the sun. It is thus that
snatches of spiritual exercise do not avail to promote the growth, or
even to preserve the life of grace in a heart that in the main is
habitually overshadowed by a crowd of overgrown imperious worldly cares.
Evening and morning you may open the Bible and bend the knee, but the
tender plant of righteousness in your heart is not effectually revived
by these brief and fitful glances. Before the drooping leaves have had
time to feel the genial warmth, another cloud has closed the orifice and
left them again in the chill damp shade. Even the Lord's day, as a gap
left open between earth and heaven, is not by any means so wide as it
seems; for the memory of the past week's business and pleasure stretches
over on the one side, until it meet, or almost meet, the anticipation of
the next week's business and pleasure, so that even on the Sabbath the
world still overshadows the soul of its votary. Shut out, except at
short and uncertain intervals, from the Light of Life, he passes through
the summer of his probation with a well-proportioned but empty form of
godliness; and the Lord, when he comes at the close to gather the wheat
into his garner, finds on that portion of the field only the rustling
chaff of a hollow profession, instead of the fruit unto holiness that
grows on living souls.
Some lessons suggest themselves in connection with this portion of the
parable, and claim a brief notice at our hand.
1. As the thorns are indigenous and spring of their own accord, while
the good seed must be sown and cherished; so, vain thoughts, lodged in
our hearts from the dawn of our being, have the advantage of first
possession, and get the start of their competitors in the race for
supremacy. Lurking unobserved between the folds of nature's faculties,
before the understanding is developed, they come away early and grow
rapidly, and obtain a firm footing before the saving truth, the seed of
the kingdom, has burst the kernel and broken through the ground. Crucify
the flesh with its affections and lusts; begin that work early, and
persevere in that work to the end.
2. As long as the weeds live they grow. Every moment, until they are
cast out of the field, they spread themselves more widely over its
surface and drain away more of its nutritive juice. Delay is dangerous.
If it be painful to pull out the root of bitterness from your heart
to-day, it will be more painful to-morrow. Take for example the love of
money: we know well that though money is a useful servant it is a hard
master; be assured if it get and keep the mastery of a soul, its little
finger in the end will be thicker than its loins were at the beginning.
Avarice chastises its slave in middle life with whips; but if he abide
its slave, it will chastise him when he is old with scorpions.
3. The thorn is a prickly thing; it tears the husbandman's flesh, as
well as destroys the fruit of his field. In like manner the care of the
world and the deceitfulness of riches lacerate the man who permits them
to grow rank in his heart. The vain man is continually meeting with
slights, or suspecting that his neighbours are about to offer them. The
miser is always losing money, or trembling lest he should lose it in
the next transaction. The world itself knows, and in its proverbs
confesses, that around the most coveted pleasures are set sharp thorns,
which wound the hand that tries to pluck the rose.
4. It was where the seed and the thorns grew together that the mischief
was done. If the grain is permitted to occupy alone the heart of the
field, the thorns that grow outside and around it may constitute a hedge
of defence, not only harmless but useful. There is a place for cares,
and for riches too,--a place in which they help and do not hinder the
kingdom of God. Kept in its own sphere, the lawful business of life
becomes a protecting fence round the tender plant of grace in a
Christian's heart. Permit not the thorns to occupy the position which is
due to the good seed. Not as rivals within the field, but as guards
around it, earthly affairs are innocent and safe. "Seek first the
kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be
added unto you."
5. When the husbandman perceives a huge prickly weed in the midst of his
field robbing and overshadowing the corn, he sends his servant to cast
out the intruder. In such a case, a bare spot is left where the thistle
grew; but at this stage experiences diverge and travel on different
lines towards opposite results. In some cases the blank is soon made up
again, and the corn waves level like a lake over all the field, so that
none could tell where the thistle stood: in others, the blank caused by
the removal of a rank weed remains a blank throughout the summer,
presenting to the reapers in harvest only a spot of bare ground. Why do
opposite effects proceed from similar operations? Time was the turning
point. In the one case the weed was torn out at an early period of the
summer; in the other case it was torn out too late.
We have often seen a soul placed in imminent danger by the overgrowth of
cares or pleasures that threatened by their rankness to choke the seed
of the word; and we have afterwards seen that soul delivered from the
danger, by a stroke of God's providence that plucked out the weeds in
time. Many of the saved both in earth and in heaven now praise the Lord,
because he tore the idols from their hearts and spared not for their
crying. The love of Christ that had been planted in their youth, and
had, though hard pressed, still kept hold, soon spread again and
occupied all the empty space, whence the fortune, or fame, or living
treasures dearer still, had been plucked. When he came to himself, that
disciple, afflicted sore but comforted again, clearly saw and gladly
sang the mercy and judgment joined together that had cleared the room
for Christ in his heart. But examples of an opposite experience, here
and there one, stand on the edge of life's crowded highway, ghastly as
the pillar of salt on the plain of Sodom, burning into the soul of the
passenger the warning word, "Be in time." An old man has, by the hand of
the Lord in providence, been stripped of all his treasures. These
treasures, whether they were in themselves the noblest or the
meanest,--for when a man made in the likeness of God abandons himself to
the worship of an idol, it matters little whether the idol be made of
fine gold or of dull clay,--these treasures possessed and filled his
heart. Round them his understanding and affections had closely clasped,
so that his whole nature had taken the mould of the object which it
grasped. In this attitude the man grew old: the faculties of his mind
became hard and rigid like the members of his body. The bosom, no
longer pliable to open by gentle pressure, was rudely rent, and its
portion in one lump wrenched away. A deep, broad, dark chasm, like the
valley of the shadow of death, was left: and the chasm remained dark and
empty to the end; for neither the affections of the old man's soul nor
the joints of the old man's frame would fold round another portion now.
Ah! the cares and pleasures that drove Christ from the heart may be cast
out too late for letting Christ come in again to occupy the empty room.
"Now is the accepted time; now is the day of salvation." "To-day, if ye
will hear his voice, harden not your hearts."
IV. THE GOOD GROUND.--Guided by the Great Teacher's own interpretation,
we have travelled through the series of successive obstacles which
hinder the growth and mar the fruitfulness of God's word in the hearts
of men,--travelled through, weeping as we went. At the close of this sad
but instructive journey, a beauteous sight bursts into view: it is a
field of ripe grain on a sunny harvest day. The ground was ploughed, and
the seed sank beneath it from the sower's hand in spring; the earth was
soft and sapful to a sufficient depth, and the roots of the springing
corn found ample room to range in; the soil was clean, and its fatness,
not shared by usurping weeds, went all to the nourishment of the sown
seed: therefore in the balmy air and under the beaming sun it is ripe
to-day, and ready to fill the reaper's bosom. It is a refreshing,
satisfying sight; but, fair though it be, we shall not now linger long
to gaze upon it. By the parable the Master meant mainly to teach us what
things are adverse to his kingdom. Having learned this lesson from his
lips, we go away grateful for his pungent, deeply-traced, and memorable
warnings, without pausing to examine minutely the glad prospect to which
our thorny path has led. The traveller who has come safely through many
dangers by flood and field, narrates at large, with burning lips and
throbbing heart, the varied toils of the journey; but his home,--he does
not describe, he enjoys it.[10]
[10] It is not intimated by the parable that our Father the
Husbandman finds any of the good ground in us: the ground, like the
tree in another analogical lesson of the Lord, is not good until it
is _made_ good. It is beyond the scope of this parable to explain
how the ground is rendered soft and kept free from thorns. The
Teacher was content in this lesson to tell us what the good ground
produces; we must discover elsewhere in the Scriptures whence its
goodness is derived. "...The similitude from nature is no longer
applicable to the mystery of the kingdom of heaven; as a parable, it
has already reached its limits, when the truth goes beyond the
similitude. There is a _miraculous_ seed superior indeed to all
natural seed, so powerful that by its growth it can and will choke
all thorns. Nay more, it can also break through the rock in striking
its root down into the earth, and can make that to be again a field
of God which was a way for the feet of the prince of this
world."--_Stier in loc_.
Among the many incidental and collateral applications of which this
parable is susceptible, one of the most interesting and instructive
is--That every man has within himself the elements of all the four
kinds of ground. The conception is thus presented by Fred. Arndt:
"At the outset, the word of God finds all in the first unreceptive
condition; we go away without experiencing its power, and remain in
a state of nature, unconverted. Next, the word begins to take effect
upon us, and we are awakened. Oh now the word of the Lord burns with
a holy glow in our hearts! We give ourselves over with our whole
souls in those first days of love. We have found heaven; we have
seen it opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on
the Son of man. But this condition does not endure. The fightings
begin from within and from without, and the flame is quenched. The
heart becomes cold and empty. The life of faith becomes silent and
slow in its course. We become languid in watching and prayer; the
love of the world and its sinful pleasures awakes again; and before
we are aware, we are trying to serve both God and the world. Then
the war bursts out: this moment God is above us, the next beneath
us, and we get no rest until we have renounced the world, and
surrendered our heart and life to God wholly, and to God alone. Thus
we pass, in the faith-school of the Holy Spirit, through all the
four classes, deceiving ourselves and being deceived, until at last,
after many a bitter experience, we strike upon the narrow way, and
through the strait gate."--_Die Gleichniss-reden. Jes. Chr._
While all the ground that was broken, deep, and clean in spring and
summer, bears fruit in harvest, some portions produce a larger return
than others. The picture in this feature is true to nature; and the fact
in the spiritual sphere also corresponds. There are diversities in the
Spirit's operation; diversities in natural gifts bestowed on men at
first; diversities in the amount of energy exerted by believers as
fellow-workers with God in their own sanctification; and diversities,
accordingly, in the fruitfulness which results in the life of
Christians. While all believers are safe in Christ, each should covet
the best gifts. No true disciple will be contented with a thirtyfold
increase of faith, and patience, and humility, and love, and usefulness
in his heart and life for the Lord, if through prayer and watching--if
by denying ungodliness and worldly lusts--if by sternly crucifying the
flesh and trustfully walking with God, he may rise from thirty to sixty,
and from sixty to an hundredfold in that holy obedience which grows on
living faith.
II.
THE TARES.
"Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven
is likened unto a man which 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 blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit,
then appeared the tares also. So the servants of the householder
came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy
field? from whence then hath it tares? He said unto them, An enemy
hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we
go and gather them up? But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the
tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow together
until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the
reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in
bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.... Then
Jesus sent the multitude away, and went into the house: and his
disciples came unto him, saying, Declare unto us the parable of the
tares of the field. He answered and said unto them, He that soweth
the good seed is the Son of man; the field is the world; the good
seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children
of the wicked one; the enemy that sowed them is the devil; the
harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels. As
therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it
be in the end of this world. The Son of man shall send forth his
angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that
offend, and them which do iniquity; and shall cast them into a
furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then
shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their
Father. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear."--MATT. xiii. 24-30,
36-43.
As the main design of the first parable is to exhibit the kingdom in its
relation to unbelieving men, who, in various forms and with various
measures of aggravation, ultimately reject it; the main design of the
second is to exhibit the kingdom in its relation to the wicked one, who
endeavours, by cunning stratagem, to destroy it. In either case there is
a conflict: in the first, the conflict is waged chiefly between the
word, which is the seed of the kingdom, and the various evil
dispositions which impede its growth in the hearts of men; in the
second, the conflict is waged chiefly, as in the mysterious temptation
in the wilderness, between Christ, man's Redeemer, and the devil, the
adversary of man. In the first parable the obstacles to the progress of
the kingdom lay in the heedlessness, the hardness, and the worldliness
of men; in the second, the old serpent is the opposer, and wicked men
are wielded as instruments in his hands.
The picture is sketched from nature; the lines are very few, but each
contributes a feature, and all, together, make the likeness complete.
A Galilean countryman, after having fenced and ploughed and cleaned his
field, has watched the condition of the soil and the appearance of the
sky, until he has found a day on which both were suitable for the grand
decisive operation of the season, the sowing of the seed. With anxiety,
but in hope, this critical and cardinal act is performed; the seed is
committed to the ground.