The kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a
field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and
for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and
buyeth that field. 45. Again, the kingdom of heaven is
like unto a merchantman, seeking goodly pearls: 46. Who,
when he had found one pearl of great price, went and
sold all that he had, and bought it.'--MATT. xiii. 44-46.
In this couple of parables, which are twins, and must be taken
together, our Lord utilises two very familiar facts of old-world
life, both of them arising from a similar cause. In the days when
there were no banks and no limited liability companies, it was
difficult for a man to know what to do with his little savings. In
old times government meant oppression, and it was dangerous to seem
to have any riches. In old days war stalked over the land, and men's
property must be portable or else concealed. So, on the one hand we
find the practice of hiding away little hoards in some suitable
place, beneath a rock, in the cleft of a tree, or a hole dug in the
ground, and then, perhaps, the man died before he came back for his
wealth. Or, again, another man might prefer to carry his wealth
about with him. So he went and got jewels, easily carried, not
easily noticed, easily convertible into what he might require.
And, says our Lord, these two practices, with which all the people
to whom He was speaking were very much more familiar than we are,
teach us something about the kingdom of God. Now, I am not going to
be tempted to discuss what our Lord means by that phrase, so
frequent upon His lips, 'the kingdom of God' or 'of heaven.' Suffice
it to say that it means, in the most general terms, a state or order
of things in which God is King, and His will supreme and sovereign.
Christ came, as He tells us, to found and to extend that kingdom
upon earth. A man can go into it, and it can come into a man, and
the conditions on which he enters into it, and it into him, are laid
down in this pair of parables. So I ask you to notice their
similarities and their divergences. They begin alike and they run on
alike for a little way, and then they diverge. There is a fork in
the road, and they reunite at the end again. They agree in their
representation of the treasure; they diverge in their explanation of
the process of discovering it, and they unite at last in the final
issue. So, then, we have to look at these three points.
I. Let me ask you to think that the true treasure for a man lies in
the kingdom of God.
It is not exactly said that the treasure is the kingdom, but the
treasure is found in the kingdom, and nowhere else. Let us put away
the metaphor; it means that the only thing that will make us rich is
loving submission to the supreme law of the God whom we love because
we know that He loves us. You may put that thought into half a
dozen different forms. You may say that the treasure is the blessing
that comes from Christianity, or the inward wealth of a submissive
heart, or may use various modes of expression, but below them all
lies this one great thought, that it is laid on my heart, dear
brethren, to try and lay on yours now, that, when all is said and
done, the only possession that makes us rich is--is what? God
Himself. For that is the deepest meaning of the treasure. And
whatever other forms of expression we may use to designate it, they
all come back at last to this, that the wealth of the human soul is
to have God for its very own.
Let me run over two or three points that show us that. That treasure
is the only one that meets our deepest poverty. We do not all know
what that is, but whether you know it or not, dear friend, the thing
that you want most is to have your sins dealt with, in the double
way of having them forgiven as guilt, and in having them taken away
from you as tyrants and dominators over your wills. And it is only
God who can do that, 'God in Christ reconciling the world unto
Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them,' and giving them,
by a new life which He breathes into dead souls, emancipation from
the tyrants that rule over them, and thus bringing them 'into the
liberty of the glory of the sons of God.' 'Thou sayest that Thou art
rich and increased with goods ... and knowest not that thou art poor
... and naked.' Brother, until you have found out that it is only God
who will save you from being bankrupt, and enable you to pay your
debts, which are your duties, you do not know where your true riches
are. And if you have all that men can acquire of the lower things of
life, whether of what is generally called wealth or of other material
benefits, and have that great indebtedness standing against you, you
are but an insolvent after all. Here is the treasure that will make
you rich, because it will pay your debts, and endow you with capacity
enough to meet all future expenditure--viz. the possession of the
forgiving and cleansing grace of God which is in Jesus Christ. If
you have that, you are rich; if you do not possess it, you are poor.
Now you believe that, as much as I do, most of you. Well, what do you
do in consequence?
Further, the possession of God, who belongs to all those that are
the subjects of the kingdom of God, is our true treasure, because
that wealth, and that alone, meets at once all the diverse wants of
the human soul. There is nothing else of which that can be said.
There are a great many other precious things in this world--human
loves, earthly ambitions of noble and legitimate kinds. No one but a
fool will deny the convenience and the good of having a competency
of this world's possessions. But all these have this miserable
defect, or rather limitation, that they each satisfy some little
corner of a man's nature, and leave all the rest, if I may so say,
like the beasts in a menagerie whose turn has not yet come to be
fed, yelping and growling while the keeper is at the den of another
one. There is only one thing that, being applied, as it were, at the
very centre, will diffuse itself, like some fragrant perfume,
through the whole sphere, and fill the else scentless air with its
rich and refreshing fragrance. There is but one wealth which meets
the whole of human nature. You, however small you are, however
insignificant people may think you, however humbly you may think of
yourselves, you are so great that the whole created Universe, if it
were yours, would be all too little for you. You cannot fill a
bottomless bog with any number of cartloads of earth. And you know
as well as I can tell you that 'he that loveth silver shall not be
satisfied with silver, nor he that loveth abundance with increase,'
and that none of the good things here below, rich and precious as
many of them are, are large enough to fill, much less to expand, the
limitless desires of one human heart. As the ancient Latin father
said, 'Lord, Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is unquiet
till it attains to Thee.'
Closely connected with that thought, but capable of being dealt with
for a moment apart, is the other, that this is our true treasure,
because we have it all in one.
You remember the beautiful emphasis of one of the parables in our
text about the man that dissipated himself in seeking for many
goodly pearls? He had secured a whole casket full of little ones.
They were pearls, they were many; but then he saw one Orient pearl,
and he said, 'The one is more than the many. Let me have unity, for
there is rest; whereas in multiplicity there is restlessness and
change.' The sky to-night may be filled with galaxies of stars.
Better one sun than a million twinkling tininesses that fill the
heavens, and yet do not scatter the darkness. Oh, brethren, to have
one aim, one love, one treasure, one Christ, one God--there is the
secret of blessedness. 'Unite my heart to fear Thy name'; and then
all the miseries of multiplicity, and of drawing our supplies from a
multitude of separate lakes, will be at an end, when our souls are
flooded from the one fountain of life that can never fail or be
turbid. Thus, the unity of the treasure is the supreme excellence of
the treasure.
Nor need I remind you in more than a word of how this is our true
treasure, because it is our permanent one. Nothing that can be taken
from me is truly mine. Those of you who have lived in a great
commercial community as long as I have done, know that it is not for
nothing that sovereigns are made circular, for they roll very
rapidly, and 'riches take to themselves wings and fly away.' We can
all go back to instances of men who set their hearts upon wealth,
and flaunted their little hour before us as kings of the Exchange,
and were objects of adoration and of envy, and at last were left
stranded in poverty. Nothing that can be stripped from you by the
accidents of life, or by inevitable death, is worth calling your
'good.' You must have something that is intertwined with the very
fibres of your being. And I, unworthy as I am, come to you, dear
friends, now, with this proffer of the great gift of wealth from
which 'neither life, nor death, nor angels, nor principalities, nor
powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor
depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us.' And I
beseech you to ask yourselves, Is there anything worth calling
wealth, except that wealth which meets my deepest need, which
satisfies my whole nature, which I may have all in one, and which,
if I have, I may have for ever? That wealth is the God who may be
'the strength of your hearts and your heritage for ever.'