Matthew 13

Matthew 13:1-23

THE PARABLE OF AND Mat_13:1-23. JESUS was at Genessaret, a lake some sixteen miles long and six or seven in breadth, famed in Jewish annals and New Testament records. The old Jews believed this body of water was beloved by God above all the waters of Canaan, and the Four Gospels have made it as immortal as are their own records. This is only one of the occasions when, at the edge of this beautiful lake, the multitudes assembled to hear Jesus speak. On other days, the crowd here had been so great that He found it necessary to enter into a boat and push out a little from the shore that He might be freed from the throng for the sake of better addressing them. And, on this day, as on previous occasions, He spake many things unto them in parables. As some one has said, “This parable of the sower is only the first in a string of pearls”.

After all that has been said about audience and auditors by the many speakers and writers who have given tongue and pen to the subject of “attention”, this parable is at once the most complete and impressive of all communications. Under the old Levitical system, when the rams were slain, Aaron and his sons were to have the blood of the second ram “put upon the tip of the right ear of Aaron, and upon the tip of the right ear of his sons”, symbolizing the consecration of that member of the body to the hearing of the Word of the Lord. And, today, whoever would be wholly the Lord’s, given up to His work, must consecrate the ear to His Word. I know of few more important elements in service than this of intelligent, earnest audience.The fourth verse presentsTHE AUDITOR. “Behold, a sower went forth to sow; and when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up.”We have Christ’s own interpretation of this auditor in the 19th verse.“When any one heareth the Word of the Kingdom, and understandeth it not, then cometh the wicked one, and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart. This is he which received seed by the wayside”. There are two or three weaknesses in such an auditor, of which it is worth while to speak.His heart has no hold on the Gospel. The wayside, here, is either the unplowed ground lying along the cultivated area, or else the hard-beaten road that leads beside it. In either case, the ground takes no hold upon the seed sown. When you sow small grain upon ground that has been prepared by plow and harrow, it will not be twenty-four hours until that ground has laid positive hold upon the seed. The wind and the rain will affect the surface and cover the seed out of sight so that the earth has literally gathered it into its bosom to hold it there.This is a wonderful illustration of the hardhearted hearer. There are men who listen to the Gospel, but whose hearts never lay any hold upon it.

The Word of God strikes upon them as the grain of wheat falls on the beaten path to remain on the surface—unreceived. It is related that Jedidiah Buxton, the famous peasant, whose genius for numbers made it possible to multiply nine figures by nine figures, was once taken to see Garrick, the great actor.

He listened to him through an entire evening, and when afterwards some one inquired what he thought of Garrick, he answered, “Oh, I do not know. He is a little man, and strutted about the stage, and repeated 7956 words”. The only impression that was made upon him was that he had been listening to words. Apparently nothing that the great actor said had seriously impressed him; and there are not a few people in the world we may believe, who listen to the Gospel in the same way; the words thereof fall upon the ear, but they never sink into the heart. Such auditors contrast Mary, who, when she heard what Jesus had to say, touching His own Divine appointment, “kept all those things and pondered them in her heart”.Another weakness of such an auditor is this:The Gospel has no hold on his heart. The hold that the ground has upon the sown grain is commonly responded to by the grain which takes hold upon the ground.

While it is putting up the shoot, it is putting down its roots. A few days since I was on a farm, and my friend, the owner of it, spoke of a certain kind of vegetation which grew luxuriantly on the driest and sandiest soil, and he explained that the secret was in the fact that its roots grew down six to ten feet and thereby laid hold upon the moisture.

I have noted, as you have, that the man who is most profited by the Gospel, is the man upon whose nature the Gospel has laid the deepest hold, striking roots into the recesses of his heart, laying hold upon his emotions and his affections.It makes all the difference between profitless and profitable audience whether the Gospel to which one listens lays hold upon his heart or not. Judas Iscariot and John, the Apostle, heard the same Gospel from the lips of the same matchless Man for three long years. With John, that Gospel was a profitable seed. It took root in his life! It changed the rugged fisherman into the Apostle of power. It so transformed the very nature of the man as to make that Son of Thunder the exponent of the Gospel of Love.

It took the hardest features of his character and transformed them into roses of rhetoric, and flowers of the finest feeling. Under its transmuting influences, John became “that disciple whom Jesus loved”.With Judas no such results appeared.

The Gospel to which he listened took no hold upon his heart. Instead of growing better under the preaching of Jesus, he grew worse, and the covetous man became the criminal. The man who began a shrewd money-holder, ended by betraying the Son of God for thirty pieces of silver, and these products of Gospel preaching were prophetic. From that day until this, every man who has faithfully preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ has profited a part of his audience and hastened another part to perdition; for the Gospel is a “savour of life unto life, or of death unto death”.Such auditors of the Word, Satan vigilantly watches.“When any one heareth the Word of the Kingdom and understandeth it not, then cometh the Wicked One and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart”. Many a time on the farm I have beheld the fowls of the air gather about the newly plowed field. I have seen them perch themselves upon the fence, or upon the trees near by, and impatiently wait the sower’s work, and as soon as he had passed by, they would fall upon that seed to consume it. That is the figure the Saviour uses with reference to the profitless auditor.“Then cometh the Wicked One and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart”, and it is the most serious loss any man ever sustains. The robbed citizen, through the aid of the law, may overtake the thief and recover his money or his jewels, but when once Satan has snatched away the Word of God, how shall we ever repair the loss? No man is ever the same after he has once heard the Word of God. If he receives it, it will lift him above his sins. If he rejects it, it puts his soul more effectually under sin’s power. Christ once said of the people who rejected His Word, and hated Him,“If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin, but now they have no cloak for their sins”. The fifth and the sixth verses presentTHE AUDITOR. “Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth; and when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root; they withered away”. Such an auditor gives to the truth a ready reception. Jesus said of him, “The same is he that heareth the Word, and anon with joy receiveth it”. There are men to whom it is easy to preach. They readily agree with you, and quickly open their hearts to your Gospel. When first they hear you, no praise of your preaching is too extravagant to be indulged in. They tell the world that you are a treasure, but their very warmth of reception is calculated to excite in the experienced mind some skepticism as to whether they will be steadfast.It is related that Aruleus Rusticus, when listening one day to a lecture by Plutarch, received from a soldier’s hand, a letter from the Emperor.

Seeing the seal, Plutarch stopped to give Rusticus opportunity to read, but the latter declined, saying he would postpone his letter from the Prince in order to listen uninterruptedly to the lecture of the philosopher. I confess I have always been a little anxious to know whether Rusticus remained an interested auditor.A while ago, I was in a certain city, and after having preached, a woman invited me to dine with her, and I don’t know when I have heard so many good things said about the Gospel as I presented it. Her flattery excited my suspicion, and when the next service was over, I asked the pastor if this sister was one of his faithful workers, and he answered, “No, she is a hinderer rather than a helper”. To give ready reception to the truth is one thing; to stand steadily for the truth, to live constantly in the truth, make heroic sacrifice for the sake of the truth is another thing, and it is not true that every man who does the first of these can be counted upon for the latter.Some auditors of the truth present to it a shallow nature.“Some fell upon stony places where they had not much earth and forthwith they sprang up because they had no deepness of earth”. This reference is to a condition of soil which I have often seen, where great flat rocks have over them a shallow covering of earth, and the very existence of the rocks makes it possible for that earth to warm up quickly, and cause the grain falling upon it to be the very first to sprout and bring forth blades. The illustration is that of a shallow nature where every accomplishment is superficial.Take people who have had some educational advantages, but not the best, and yet are filled with ambition to be regarded as scholarly, scientific, versatile, widely read, and they make a show of their learning, and it is often a poor “side-show” at that.Take people whose social advantages, and whose social fitness is not the best, but who, in their shallowness of spirit, are ambitious to make display, and it is almost pitiful to realize that all their acts and words are performed, or uttered for the sole purpose of impressing their position. Take men of real talent, real ability, and real learning, and study the contrast of all this superficiality.It is related of Lincoln that when a dictionary of Congress was being compiled, the compiler sent him one of the regulation circular letters asking for information as to the date of his birth, character of education, his profession or occupation, and a list of any public positions he might have filled. And Lincoln replied, “Born February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Ky.; education defective; profession, a lawyer; post-master at a very small office; four times a member of the Illinois Legislature, and once of the Lower House of Congress”. Think what a history a superficial man could have made out of that data!But Lincoln regarded it all as poor attainment, and poor progress. He regarded it all as coming short of the Divine expectation and requirement.

In our religious life, we are in greater danger of being superficial than we are of being too sincere. We are in greater danger of thinking too lightly than of thinking too deeply.

We are in greater danger of being mercurial than of being manly. We are in greater danger of being rootless than of being “rooted and grounded in the truth” of God. We may vainly imagine that we are exercising advanced thought when the fact is we are not firmly established in the first elements.John Wesley once preached in Monktown Church, a large, old and famous building. Of his audience, he said, “I suppose this church had scarce had such a congregation during this century. Many of them were gay, genteel people; so I spoke on the first elements of the Gospel, but I was still out of their depths. Oh, how hard it is to be shallow enough for a polite audience!”But the most serious charge against the superficial hearer is voiced in these words,“And when the sun was up, they were scorched. And because they had no root, they withered away”. Christ says, interpreting that,“When tribulation or persecution arises because of the Word, by and by he is offended”. Receptive auditors are not always the most steadfast. John Bunyan, in his Pilgrim’s Progress, sketches this auditor in his character, Pliable. You will remember that when Christian started to the Celestial City, one of his neighbors, Pliable, heard him present his reasons for leaving the City of Destruction, and setting out toward the Wicked Gate.Pliable listened while Christian told him that he sought “an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled and that fadeth not way”. Christian pointed Pliable to the promises of God’s Book to the faithful, and Pliable said, “I intend to go along with this good man and to cast in my lot with him”, and so they set out together. In the early part of the way, Christian told Pliable of the crowns of glory to be given and the spotless garments to be worn; of the state where crying was unknown and sorrow never came; of the company of seraphim and cherubim; of the thousands and ten thousands of the saints; and Pliable answered, “Glad I am to hear of these things; come on and let us mend our pace”. But, presently, you remember, they fell into the Slough of Despond, and there they wallowed for a time, being grievously bedabbed with dirt.

And Bunyan says, “At this, Pliable began to be offended and angrily said to his fellow, ‘Is this the happiness you told me of all this while? If we have such ill-speed at our first setting out, what may we expect between this and our journey’s end?

May I get out again with my life, and you shall possess the brave country alone for me’. And with that he gave a desperate struggle or two and got out of the mire on that side of the Slough which was next to his own house; so away he went and Christian saw him no more”.The world is full of people who can run when nothing hinders, but who are utterly worthless when “tribulation or persecution arises because of the Word”.Hawthorne, in his “Twice Told Tales”, has a strange weird story entitled, “The Snow Image”, in which he pictures some children at play in the snow one afternoon of a cold winter’s day. They did what many children have done, gathered the snow in their little hands and made a snow image— an image of a little girl, and in their childish play, said, “She shall be our sister and shall run about and play with us all winter long”. And, sure enough, when the image was made, it met the children’s expectation, and skipped over the garden with them to their dear delight and to the utter astonishment of the mother who could not believe her eyes. And when the children’s father had come, he gave chase, and getting the little stranger into a corner, caught her, saying as he seized her by the hand, “I have caught you at last and will make you comfortable in spite of yourself”, and so against the will of the little one, and the protest of his children, he carried her into the house and put her on the hearth rug, ‘full before the blazing stove, and you remember the result. She drooped and thawed, and only a pool of water was left.

I don’t know whether Hawthorne had the purpose in mind, but in “The Snow Image”, he was giving an effective illustration of those people who must be kept forever where it is cool; who have no ability to stand before a scorching sun; who perish utterly before the fires of persecution or the flames of tribulation. I used to wonder why Jesus Christ made the conditions of discipleship so stringent.

I used to wonder why He laid this injunction down,“If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me”. I used to wonder why He said,“He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me, and he that loveth son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me”. I used to wonder why He faced those who wanted to become His disciples by saying,“They will deliver you up to the councils, and they will scourge you in their synagogues, and you shall be brought before governors and kings for My sake, and ye shall be hated of all men for My Name’s sake”. I used to wonder why, when a certain man said unto Him,“Lord, I will follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest”, that Jesus replied, “Foxes have holes and the birds of air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head”, and when another in answer to His call, “Follow Me”, said, “Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father”, Jesus said unto him,“Let the dead bury their dead, but go thou and preach the Kingdom of God”; and when a third said,“Lord, I will follow Thee, but let me first go and bid them farewell which are at home at my house”,Jesus said unto him,“No man having put his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God”.I used to wonder why to that rich young ruler, beautiful, enthusiastic fellow that he was, Jesus felt constrained to say,“Go and sell all that thou hast and give it unto the poor, and come and follow Me”,and thereby discourage him altogether from becoming His disciple. But, I think I understand it all this morning. Jesus Christ was at once too wise and too kind to encourage superficial auditors to undertake His service. He knew what sacrifices it would require. He knew what steadfastness it would demand, and He did not want men to begin with Him and go a little way, and then get disheartened and go back, for that would at once hinder His cause, and render their second state worse than the first. The same old principle was employed long ago in Israel when Gideon was face to face with 32,000 men,“And the Lord said unto Gideon, The people that are with thee are too many. * * Now, therefore, go to; proclaim in the ears of the people, saying, Whosoever is fearful and afraid, Let him return.

And there went back of the people, twenty and two thousand; and there remained ten thousand. And the Lord said unto Gideon, The people are yet too many. Bring them down unto the water, and I will try them for thee there”. And you remember at the water’s edge he tested them and found 9,700 of these men of ease, who, in the time of battle, went down upon their knees to drink water. Only 300 of them lapped, “putting their hands to their mouth”.“And the Lord said unto Gideon, By the three hundred men that lapped will I save you, and deliver the Midianites into thine hand, and let all the other people go every man unto his place”. As I study the church of God today, and see her victories and her defeats; as I come more and more into the New Testament meaning of discipleship, I am convinced that our conquest is not with accessions, but rather in consecration”.The Seventh verse presents—THE PRE- AUDITOR. “And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up, and choked them”.Luke says,“And they which have heard, go forth, and are choked with care, and riches, and pleasures of this life, and bring no fruit to perfection”.They are of the customary attendants upon the Word. The charge against them is not that of nonattendance. I believe today that the people who attend church are more largely included in this seventh verse than by any other of the parable. It represents the most industrious class in society. It compasses the men and women who carry the heaviest burdens of life, as well as those who are most eager in their search after pleasure, and it is the industrious, frugal, care-concerned class that goes most to church. There are very few men of leisure, men who have little or nothing to do, who make it their business to attend church, and give audience to the Word of God.

The Lord be praised for that fact. The most cynical, the most critical, the least profitable class of auditors that any preacher ever addressed is the ease-loving, the unemployed, the fortune-retired class.

But, while that is true, it is also true that busy men, and men of affairs, such men as one delights to meet, such men as one must depend upon for counsel and co-operation, are tempted, often-times, to inattention.John Foster tells of one who had been a faithful attendant at church for fourteen years, but who, when he sickened and was about to die, was in despair concerning his soul, and when a Christian neighbor, thinking to comfort him, reminded him of his faithful attendance upon the services, he answered, “Oh, yes! yes! but I do not know that I have heard a sermon in these fourteen years”. “How can that be?” inquired his friend. “Why”, said the sick man, “the truth is, as soon as the preacher took his text, I began to think of my business, and I had acquired such a habit of abstraction that while the preacher was preaching, I could trace out on the panel of the seat before me all the work of the past week, and having reviewed that, could lay all my plans for the week to come, and the consequence is that I do not know that I ever heard a sermon”.Now, I do not say this to condemn any auditor, but I speak it to warn instead. If the minister of the Gospel, while upon his knees in prayer, finds the care of this world crowding in upon his thought, distracting his devotions, and practically destroying that perfect communion which he ought to have with his Lord, how shall he fail to sympathize with the man who finds his attention upon the Word similarly affected. And yet, his very experience at prayer leads him to counsel those whose privilege it is to attend upon the Word, and whose blessing it is if they hear the Word, against our common enemy, whose purpose it is to make the cares of this world, and riches, and pleasures, choke the Word that it bring no fruit to perfection.The pre-occupied auditor also is often impressed by the Word. I do not find the busy man, the man of such large affairs as fill the mind, impervious to the preaching; I do not find the people who love pleasure, and who seek it, utterly hardened against the Word. On the contrary, I notice that when one of these classes hears the Gospel, it gets at his heart, it gives him anxiety, it often brings him to positive conviction. In fact, there are few people who ever attend upon faithful preaching and yet prove themselves indifferent to what the Sacred Scriptures have to say.

The people who are dead to these things are those who go not to church, who seldom hear a sermon, who have ceased from prayers learned at the mother’s knee.But the trouble is, as Frederick W. Robertson once suggested, the impression made when one attends upon the preaching is too often succeeded by another impression of an opposing sort, as when a friend puts his arm in yours and talks of some other matter irrelevant, and thereby obliterates whatever seriousness of mind is produced.It is said that Angelo Mario, a Jesuit librarian at the Vatican, discovered that some of the ancient manuscripts had more than one layer of writing upon them.

The parchment upon which the early writing was done was expensive and scarce, and so when the first manuscript had faded out somewhat, a fresh writing covered and obscured the first. De Quincey, in his Confessions, has used this to illustrate the fact that different layers of thought and emotions, at different times, come upon the mind and heart and the latter impressions obscure, and, to a certain extent, obliterates the earlier. And that is exactly what occurs when a man hears the Word of God, and it makes its impression for good; but very shortly that impression is lost because the overwhelming cares of this world, greed of riches, and the love of pleasures roll in upon him.When Daguerre discovered photography, for a long time he found difficulty to fix the pictures. The image was easily enough made, but it would vanish. At last he came upon the chemical which turned the evanescent into the durable. That is the very process essential for the best results from preaching and hearing—to make the impressions durable, to establish them against the effacing power of worry, and greed, and passion; and I believe that process was long since perfected by the Spirit.

Paul knew how to make religious impressions permanent. When on one occasion he was before Agrippa, he let out the secret, for after having told Agrippa his experience on the way to Damascus, of the light he saw, and the voice he heard, and the command he received, he adds,“Whereupon, O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision”.That is the way to make impressions permanent.

Few men but hear enough truth to save them, but all too many put it to no practice, and consequently they bring no fruit to perfection.Again, too many auditors of the Word carry their impressions immediately into a militating atmosphere. This is suggested by the Master’s comment upon the third class of auditors. Luke’s report of His words is,“And they which have heard, go forth and are choked with care, and riches, and pleasures of this life”.It is not possible to hasten from the presence of God and the proclamation of His truth to the cares of the world, to the getting of gold, to the search after pleasure, as if one were glad to get away from the first and unto the second, and yet retain the good impressions made, and have them grow upon one and lift one Godward. Our fathers put the church-clock outside that they might get to the service on time. Their sons put it inside the house, full before the face of the preacher, that he may not keep them in the presence of God overtime.Barnes-Lawrence reminds us that common air consists of two ingredients—oxygen and nitrogen—the one a supporter of combustion, the other not. As you make one element or the other preponderate, you may of course quicken combustion or repress it.

Introduce a lighted taper into a jar of pure oxygen and it will burn with ten-fold brilliancy. Subject it to the action of unmixed nitrogen and it will gradually expire.

So in like manner it is with that mysterious new life which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it. When this flame is started in any heart by the Spirit of God, it will glow or fade according to the atmosphere by which it is encircled. Prayer, Bible-study, Christian friends, Sabbath peace—surround it with these, and it will burn with steadily augmented brilliancy—“thy whole body will be filled with light”. On the contrary, worldly cares, overmastering greed, passion for pleasures, “the things that are in the world” are to the new life a depressing atmosphere. That is why the Christian is called upon to separate himself from the world; that is why he is enjoined to love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. God knows how deadly they are, so God has said,“If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him”, and, he can “bring no fruit to perfection”.When he is saved it will be so as by fire—a fire which will burn up his works in just so far as they were not wrought for God.But our next verse presentsTHE AUDITOR. “Other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear”.The profitable auditor attends upon the Word understandingly. One of the secrets of good audience is in the word “understandingly”. That term does not so much compass a great mind as an attentive one. There are few people who are unable to comprehend the Word, and yet there are many who, through inattention, fail to do so. When I went from the farm to college, from manual employment to intellectual labor, I found my greatest battle to be the one of attention; to compel the mind which had been wont to wander at will to focus all its energies upon a single thought until it had mastered it. And yet that task had to be accomplished before I could ever become a student, before I could ever read the pages, and the volumes “understandingly”; and one of the highest accomplishments of an auditor is to be able to call in his thoughts from the fields of care, and of gain, and of pleasure, and fix them upon what God has to say in His Word.It is related of Sir William Cecil, at one time Lord Treasurer of England, that when he went to bed at night, he would throw off his gown and say, “Lie there, Lord Treasurer”, as if he was bidding adieu to all state affairs, in order that he might refresh himself in sleep, and so, when we come to attend upon the Word of God, if we can say, “Lie by world; lie by all household matters; lie by all traffic and all thoughts of gain; lie by all projects of pleasure or preference”, we have won the victory, and will receive the Word “understandingly”.The profitable auditor also holds the Word in an honest and good heart.“That on the good ground are they, which in an honest and good heart, having heard the Word, keep it”. F. W. Robertson feels that the word “keep” looks to meditation upon the Gospel. He tells us that one of the greatest of England’s engineers, a man uncouth, and unaccustomed to regular discipline of mind, succeeded in bridging over many impracticable torrents, tunnelling through mighty mountains, and the secret of his success was in the fact that when some peculiar difficulty was to be encountered, he would shut himself up in his room, speak to no one, eat nothing, abandon himself to the contemplation of that upon which his heart was set, and at the end of two or three days, would come forth free and calm and able to give orders which seemed the result of super-human intuition. And so, if we are to make our way in the world, and be able to meet every difficulty as it arises, overcome every obstacle that is thrown across our path, we must take time to commune with God, to meditate upon His Word, and we must realize that time so spent is not a loss but an infinite gain.Gurnall says, “Meditation is to a sermon, what the harrow is to sown seed. It carries down into the bosom those truths which otherwise might be picked or washed away”.

One of the weaknesses of present-day religious life is at this point of failure in meditation. We are such a busy people, we are such a hurried people, we are such a care-worn people, we are so consumed by the greed of gain, and smitten by the passion for pleasure, that we take little or no time to speak with God, and give to Him still less in which to speak to us.

The heathen of Ceylon known as the Joger, will take up his station at the foot of a cypress tree and remain there night and day, heedless of sunshine and of storm, watching for the falling of the leaves, impelled by the tradition that if these fallen leaves are gathered and eaten they will restore to the wasting frame all the energies of youth. And yet, beloved, it is written in the Book that there is a Tree of Life whose leaves are for the healing of the nations, and we know it is not a heathen tradition, but a holy truth; yet how few there are who are willing to wait before God until these leaves, which are indeed from the Tree of Life, have done their work of regeneration, of rejuvenation, and of rehabilitation.You remember what Jeremiah said,“Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and Thy Word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of my heart; for I am called by Thy Name, O Lord of Hosts”.Every man will be called of His name who receives His Word into a good and an honest heart.Such a reception of the Word means profit and praise.“He that received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the Word, and understandeth it; which also beareth fruit, and bringeth forth, some an hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty”.The profit is to be to the auditor; the praise is unto God. Commenting upon Jeremiah’s speech, “Thy Word is the joy and rejoicing of my heart”, the late Dr. McArthur, of New York, said, “When so appropriated, the Word of God illumines the mind, purifies the heart, ennobles the life, and appeals to all that is grandest in human experience. The Bible has given us all that is most enduring in painting, in sculpture, in music, and in poetry. It has developed the highest genius in every department of human endeavor”.

It accounts for such discoverers as Columbus and Livingstone; such scientists as Gallileo, Kepler, Newton, and Michael Farraday; such reformers as Wickliff, Luther, and Knox; such martyrs as Polycarp, Huss, Savonarola; such poets as Shakespeare, Dante and Milton, and such preachers as Peter and Paul.People often speak of faithfulness to God’s Word and fruit-bearing as if it were purely to God’s praise, and yet the first result of all this is the profit to the man himself. If we could call back these from the grave, whose names we have just mentioned, and ask them whether they were rewarded for their service, they would answer in chorus, “Infinitely, above its desert”.

No man ever yet served God for nought. I don’t care what trials he may have passed through; I don’t care what persecutions he may have come to; I don’t care what sufferings he may have endured; I don’t care what death he may have died; he had his reward. He found faithfulness a profitable thing for himself. He learned that life consisted not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth; but is only blessed in so far as it has been lived in holiness, and is only truly favored when faithful to the Father. Have you ever asked yourself why, through all the trials, persecutions, and imprisonments, Paul never uttered a word of complaint. It was because Paul knew that all things were working together for his good.

And I urge you to remember that there is but one blessed life, and that is the life of faithfulness and fruitfulness. The happiest man is the hundred-fold man, and that which is to his profit is to God’s praise!

Matthew 13:13-33

THE OF THE LEAVEN, FISH NET AND Matthew 13:13-33; Matthew 13:47-52THE three parables, of the leaven, the fish net, and the householder, are in the thirteenth of Matthew. That interpretation which brings their teaching into line with the lessons from their five sister parables, appeals to us as the one that has the weight of evidence in its favor. The fact that such an interpretation is unpopular with Bible students is no positive proof against its correctness, since upon many subjects a multitude of teachers have gone astray.What are the lessons from the leaven? What are the facts to be gleaned from the fish net? What are the hints to be had from the householder?LESSONS FROM THE LEAVEN. “Another parable spake He unto them; The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened” (Matthew 13:33).The common rule for interpreting Scripture is to compare Scripture with Scripture; and the way to find out the meaning of a Biblical word is to search the sacred records for its uses, and learn from them the evident intent of its employment.The word “leaven” is known to both the Old and New Testaments. It uniformly suggests “evil”. Its effect, as is well known, is fermentation, another name for decay or corruption. It was on this account that the law of the Lord concerning the great passover feast in Israel was,“Seven days shall ye eat unleavened bread; even the first day ye shall put away leaven out of your houses: for whosoever eateth leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that soul shall be cut off from Israel” (Exodus 12:15).It is a well-known fact that the meal-offering of the Old Testament, the very thing to which the three measures of meal here refer, was prescribed after this manner,“No meal offering, which ye shall bring unto the Lord, shall be made with leaven” (Leviticus 2:11). “This is the law of the meat offering * * it shall not be baken with leaven” (Leviticus 6:14; Leviticus 6:17).The New Testament use of the word conforms to this Old Testament conception. The Master warns His disciples, “Beware of the leaven of the Sadducees and Pharisees”. Mark adds to this report the “leaven of unrighteousness”.

Luke reports Jesus as having defined His own phrase “the leaven of the Pharisees” after this manner: “which is hypocrisy”. Paul, in his First Epistle to the Corinthians, condemns the fornicator, demands that such be delivered over to the judgment, saying,“Your glorying is not good.

Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump? Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us: therefore, let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. I wrote unto you in an Epistle not to company with fornicators” (1 Corinthians 5:6-9).Addressing himself to the Galatian Church, he opposed the imposition of Jewish ceremonies upon Gentile converts, announcing the same as a return to the law of falling away from grace, adding, “This persuasion cometh not of him that calleth you and illustrating, “A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump”. We are not, therefore, to read this parable with a period after the word leaven—“the Kingdom of Heaven is like unto leaven”, but, rather, as the Word puts it, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal until the whole was leavened”, and then ask the questions, What is the Biblical use of the word “woman” in such connection? What is the Divine thought in the meal offering of the Old Testament?

And what is the Biblical suggestion of the introduction of leaven into the same?In answer to these, Campbell Morgan says, correctly, as we think, “The woman is the type of authority and management; leaven, the emblem of disintegration and corruption; the meal, the symbol of service and fellowship”.And to bring the Biblical use of these terms before us is to have our attention called again to three things: The mal-administration of the church, The mixed character of modern Christianity, and The miserly consecration of professed Christians.The mal-administration of the Church. On what grounds does Campbell Morgan say the woman here is “the type of authority and management”?

First of all, on natural grounds. The woman is commonly queen in the home, and the family and society look to her for the administration of purely household affairs. In Scripture, she is made by the prophet Zechariah (Zechariah 5:5-11), the administrator of the false religion also; and strange to say, the woman beheld in his vision is seen, first of all, in an ephah, or the flour measure; and also, with another of her kind, “the ephah is borne between them to a shinar, where it is to be set up in a sanctuary”— a suggestion of idolatry.Do you not recall, also, how in the apocalyptic vision, John beholds a “woman sitting upon a scarlet colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones, and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand, but full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication”,etc., and when he comes to interpret, he says,“The woman which thou sawest is that great city which hath a kingdom over the kings of the earth”.It is a remarkable circumstance that woman, who was made of God, not to be administrator, but subservient in the home, whenever she leaves her Divinely-appointed sphere, becomes at once the symbol of usurpation and social and religious confusion. Eve was created of God and put into the Garden of Eden, and the revelation of the Divine will was given her by Adam, the husband and man of the house, and when she accepted another, and essayed to teach the same, communion with God was broken, and intellectual and moral confusion resulted; and to say the least, it is a significant thing that in these latter times, so full of suggestion of the approaching end of the age, woman should again appear in the ascendancy as religious spokesman, and that such false philosophies as have been preached into the world by the Fox sisters, Mrs. Oliphant, and Mary Baker Eddy, should find a following, create false churches, and enfeeble the faith of the many. Paul, when he wrote to the Corinthians, enjoining silence upon their women, was not so much insisting that a woman should refrain from telling her personal experiences of the grace of God, or publishing the good news of a sufficient Saviour; but, rather, inveighing against the attempt upon the part of his sisters to administer in the Church of God at a time when she was passing through divisions and difficulties. No more important subject ever engages the minds of saints than that of church administration.

A properly administered church enjoys the unity of the spirit, exercises the diversity of gifts, profoundly impresses the world, and equally pleases God! Mal-administration, on the other hand, makes for divisions, results in schisms, incites the world’s scorn, and invites the Saviour’s judgment.But we have also said that the leaven was at work in three measures of meal.The mixed character of modern Christianity.

Three measures of meal, without leaven, made up the acceptable offering to God. That was according to His own Word. But the least leaven introduced vitiated their sacred employment. The thing that keeps our modern Christianity from being wholly acceptable to the Lord, is the world’s leaven working its way in Christian experience and devitalizing the church-membership. Campbell Morgan says a brave thing, and a much-needed thing, when in the “Parables of the Kingdom” he speaks after this manner: “I am often told today—told seriously— that what the Church of God needs in order to succeed is to catch the spirit of the age. I reply that the Church of God only succeeds in proportion as she corrects the spirit of the age.

I am told that if I am to succeed in Christian work, I must adopt the methods of the world. Then, by God’s help, I will be defeated.

We are not in the world to borrow the world’s maxims and spirit. The world would crucify Jesus as readily now as nineteen centuries ago. The Cross is no more popular in the world today than when men nailed Him to it on the green hill outside the city gate nineteen centuries ago”.This is the explanation of much of church failure. When the Israel of the Old Testament effected an alliance with her heathen neighbors, she lost out with God; and when the strictest Jew agreed with his Gentile neighbors upon a compound of religion, he shortly found himself without a laver of cleansing, a table of shew bread, an altar of sacrifice, or a holy of holies; and modern Israel, containing as it does the seeds of the kingdom, fares no better when it is “unequally yoked together with unbelievers”, or finds “its fellowship with the unrighteous”, or brings “its temple into agreement with idols”.In this twentieth century condition one finds the explanation of the next suggestion, namely,A miserly consecration to God’s service. It will be remembered that the meal offering was one wholly consumed upon the altar of the Lord, a suggestion of both perfect and complete consecration in service and fellowship. Who says that complete consecration is not the sorest need of the hour, and for that matter, of every hour of this age of the church?

Separation unto the Lord is the secret of successful service, and that is true, whether the service be one of devotion or duty, of prayer or power, of availing with God or prevailing with men. Truly Abraham and Lot are illustrations of both sides of this statement.

Abraham was an uncompromising servant of God, and Lot was a believer—enamored of the world’s enticements, satisfied with the world’s standards, succeeding by the world’s methods. But when some one must intercede for Sodom, though Lot was its mayor, he had no ability whatever to keep it from the burning, nor even to delay its destruction; but Abraham, the man who walked with God, and whose back was upon the world, won with God, and stayed the flames of judgment until his politically important, yet spiritually poor nephew, could be drawn from the streets of the same by angel hands.Consecration is commonly looked upon as the first duty of the forgiven soul; but let us not forget that it is also that soul’s highest privilege. It is a fact that we belong to God, and ought to give to Him all of self; but it is equally a fact that such consecration best releases our powers and lifts us to office and honor. Truly, as one has written, “We offer burnt offering on the great altar of God when we give ourselves lovingly and wholeheartedly to His service”. Wendell Phillips offered it, when as a boy of fourteen, he threw himself upon his face in his room and said, ‘God, I belong to You. Take what is Thine own.

I ask but this, that whenever a thing be right, it take no courage to do it; that whenever a thing be wrong, it have no power of temptation over me’. David Livingston offered it when he wrote in his diary on his last birthday, save one, ‘My Jesus, my King, my Life, my All, once more I dedicate my whole life to Thee’.

Maltbie D. Babcock offered it when he wrote beneath date and place on the flyleaf of the pocket Bible which he carried at the time of his death, ‘Committed myself again with Christian brothers to unreserved docility and devotion before my Master.But I turn to our second parable in this series, and bring you someFACTS FROM THE FISH NET. “Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a net, that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind: which, when it was full, they drew to shore, and sat down, and gathered the good into vessels, but cast the bad away. So shall it be at the end of the world; the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 13:47-50).The Master was speaking of the end of this age, and His statement involved some certitudes. Fact number one is this: At the end of the age there will be a great gathering together.“The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a net that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind”.“When the Son of Man shall come in His glory, and all His holy angels with Him, then shall He sit upon the throne of His glory, and before Him shall be gathered all the nations” (Matthew 25:31-32).I am persuaded that this gathering together is the one that comes in the very end of the age, winding up the Millennium itself, and is a gathering of judgment. When Christ comes to His throne, His first work is conquest; but before Christ leaves His throne, in other words, His final work will be judgment. The dead, the small and the great shall stand before Him. What a gathering that will be!

Phillips Brooks says of this great event, “We are apt to picture to ourselves a great dramatic scene,—host beyond host; rank behind rank; the millions who have lived upon the earth, all standing crowded together in the indescribable presence of One who looks not merely at the mass but at the individual, and sees through the whole life and character of every single soul”. The picture is sublime, and it is what the words of Saint John intended to suggest. It was of this very scene of which John Newton was speaking when he wrote:“Day of judgment, day of wonders, Hark! the trumpet’s awful sound, Louder than a thousand thunders, Shakes the vast creation round, How the summons Will the sinner’s heart confound! “See the Judge, our nature wearing, Clothed in majesty Divine; You who long for His Appearing Then shall say, ‘This God is mine’, Gracious Saviour, Own me in that day for Thine. “At His call the dead awaken, Rise to life from earth and sea; All the powers of nature, shaken By His looks, prepare to flee, Careless sinner, What will then become of thee? “But to those who have confessed, Loved, and served the Lord below, He will say, ‘Come near, ye blessed; See the Kingdom I bestow, You for ever Shall My love and glory know’”. The last phrase of Newton’s suggests fact number two, found in the parable of the fish net, namely,There will be a careful gathering out.‘Which, when it was full, they drew to shore, and sat down and gathered the good into vessels”.One of the marvels of Scripture—to me, the positive proof of its Divine inspiration;—is the exact use of words to convey exact ideas. The fishermen of this parable “sit down”; they propose to be calm in their work, to gather out the good with painstaking care, to select the last fish fit for use, so that when the rest are cast away, there will be no real loss. One of the anxious concerns of mortal men, dwelling upon the judgment, voices itself in the fear of possible mistake! Even though I be a Christian, might I not be misjudged and condemned? And even though I rejected Jesus, walked in the lusts of the flesh, and finished my life without ever repenting my sin, in the hour of the great assize, may I not be fortunate enough to hide in the crowd of Christ’s accepted ones and be invited to place of honor and joy at His right hand?Neither contingency is possible! God’s judgments involve no mistakes!

When Christ shall descend from Heaven with a shout, every sleeping saint shall hear His voice and shall come forth, changed by the sound of the same, from the corruptible to the incorruptible, and every living saint shall hear it and be changed from the mortal to the immortal. Death will have no more dominion over them!

And when Christ shall sit upon His throne, He will gather out of the throngs that stand before Him to His right hand, all those whose names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, and that without the loss of one. Judgment for them is impossible; His Word will then find its fulfillment, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth My words and doeth them shall not come into judgment”—the blessed experience of God’s own! And His word concerning the unbeliever shall no more fail, “For then will He profess unto them, I never knew you; depart from Me ye that work iniquity”.This involves, as the third fact, a necessary casting away. “But cast the bad away”. What else can you do? Men get troubled upon this subject sometimes; men frame up a philosophy of Universalism; men join with Mr. Tennyson in his larger hope,“O yet we trust that somehow, good Will be the final goal of ill, To pangs of nature, sins of will, Defects of doubt and taints of blood. “That nothing walks with aimless feet; That not one life shall be destroyed Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath made the pile complete. “That not a worm is cloven in vain; That not a moth with vain desire Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire, Or but subserves another’s gain”. But all fires are not fruitless. The gehenna outside the gates of Jerusalem was absolutely essential to the health of the city within; and hell is as needful to the holiness and happiness of Heaven as a sewer is to the health of the house. The only thing that makes Heaven possible is the fact that “the fearful and unbelieving, and all murders, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars” are to be excluded; and the very gehenna necessitated by Satan himself is to do its cleansing work.No man can live in the midst of modern conditions and see how iniquity flaunts itself on every side, without consenting, if he be righteous at all, to the sentiment expressed by Campbell Morgan, when he said, “I sigh for the coming of the angels. I feel increasingly that the government of men is a disastrous failure, and will be to the end. Presently, when the Church is completed and lifted out, angels will take this business in hand, There will be no seducer clever enough to dodge an angel, and there will be no scamp, master enough of traffic, to escape the grip of an angel hand. Blessed be God for judgment, stern judgment!

I am not sure that the world does not need judgment more than mercy”.God was better to men in the day that Sodom was swept with fire than He would have been had He withheld the flames; and, when the parable of the fish net has found its finality, and the good are gathered into His presence, and “the had are cast away”, righteousness will have found its vindication, and only devils could desire to defeat the full and final coming of righteousness.But in conclusion—HINTS FROM THE .“And Jesus said unto them, Have ye understood all these things? They say unto Him, Yea, Lord.

Then said He unto them, Therefore every scribe which is instructed unto the Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old” (Matthew 13:51-52).That is a significant question with which Jesus plied His auditors, “Have ye understood all these things?” Have ye seen in these parables the plan of the ages? Have ye seen the progress of the Kingdom through the sowing of the good seed—the children of God? Have ye seen the unnatural growth of the Kingdom seed through the world’s nurture as set forth in the parable of the mustard seed? Have ye seen the corruption that shall be introduced into the kingdom preparation as revealed into the parable of the leaven? Have ye seen My treasure— Israel—found in the world-field, bought with a great price, hidden yet against the day of My coming?Have ye seen My precious jewel in the Gentiles converted, for whom I paid an equal price? Have ye seen the coming judgment that shall consummate all?

If so, then prove yourselves like the householder, in possession of treasure to be drawn upon at your pleasure, to be passed out to the profit of others.This to me is the meaning of the Master’s words, as He concludes this marvelous series of more marvelous illustrations, and likens His own disciples “to scribes instructed into the Kingdom of God”. The word “scribe” as He employs it is not used in the sense of a mere “reader”, an “interpreter of traditions” such as He had condemned; but in that more ideal way in which Ezra filled up the office, by becoming a good reader of the Word and a faithful interpreter of the same, both by word of mouth and by the works of his life.Three hints from the parable of the householder.First, The wise householder creates a competent treasury.

The figure here is that of a treasure chest in which the rich Oriental laid up the garments against the day when his great company of guests should make heavy demands upon it. The word in the original indicates that they were laid in one upon another. The one who would be a disciple of the Kingdom of God must create a treasury just after the same manner. He is to lay “line upon line, precept upon precept”, storing away the great truths of God, not for his own sake merely, but for the sake of others as well. Our forefathers had a keener appreciation of this necessity than do their children. They tried to steep our souls in a knowledge of the Word of God, by command, by coaxing, by attractive prizes, by words of approval!

They induced us to commit to memory what the Scriptures saith, and to store up passage after passage in the enrichment of life.Some years ago it was my privilege to walk about the old Ruskin manor and estate. John Ruskin was a marvelous man; his mind was perhaps as well stored as that of any man of his century.

It had gleaned from the fields of science, and literature and art. He had made himself master in each. Yet when he comes to speak, this is what he says, “All that I have taught of art, everything that I have written, every greatness that there has been in any thought of mine, whatever I have done in my life, has simply been due to the fact that when I was a child, my mother read daily to me a part of the Bible, and daily made me learn a part of it by heart”.When I was studying for this morning’s discourse, I found six illustrations in my Index Rerum on “The Bible—The Treasure House of God”, but, alas for the mishaps of a library! The volumes in which they occurred could not be found. At first I felt disappointed, but then I suddenly remembered that is not the meaning of the text. It is not how much richness in the Word of God; it is not what stores it contains at all; but the thought is, How much have I taken out of it, treasured up in my own memory?

What went into my own heart and life subject to my own uses as occasion may require? Ah, that is the suggestion!

A man may have a Bible on the center table; it contains all the wisdom of God; but if he has not transcribed it to his own thoughts, if he has not tested it out in his own experience, if he has not tucked it away in the recesses of his own soul, it is for him as if it were not. It is one thing to have a Bible between leather covers; it is another thing to have it stored in the memory, transcribed into heart experience. You remember the folly of the farmer, who, when he had gathered into his barns until they were bursting, said to his soul, “Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry”. There is but one man that can say that, and that is the man who has taken God’s treasures as revealed in Scripture and stored them in the recesses of his own soul.“Father of mercies, in Thy Word, What endless glories shine! For ever be Thy Name adored For these celestial lines. “ ’Tis here the tree of knowledge grows, And yields a free repast; Here purer sweets that nature knows, Invite the longing taste. “ ’Tis here the Saviour’s welcome voice Spreads Heavenly peace around, And life and everlasting joys Attend the blissful sound. “O may these Heavenly pages be My ever-dear delight; And still new beauties may I see, And still increasing light”. But the householder draws upon his treasury at his pleasure. The Christian’s treasury ought to be capable of kindred draughts, and if he have one, it is. Do you remember in Lew Wallace’s “The Prince of India” the Wandering Jew who lived for hundreds of years and traveled through all parts of the earth, and who spent money as liberally as though a Solomon were back of him? It was because he had discovered the place where Solomon had hid his riches, and whenever occasion required, he was wont to go to that treasure chest, and take out priceless jewels and exchange them for the needs of the hour. But Solomon had a richer treasury in the words of Divine wisdom upon which he was invited to draw—the gifts of which may be discovered by others and drawn upon for daily needs as the Prince of India drew upon this limitless fund.George Mueller had discovered the way to that repository. When he was ninety-three years of age, he was engaged to address the yearly meeting of the British and Foreign Bible Society, at the Town Hall, Birmingham.

Failing health prevented his coming, and he wrote, saying, “Let it be said to the assembly that for sixty-eight years and three months, or ever since July 1829, I have been a lover of the Word of God, and that uninterruptedly. During this time, I have read considerably more than one hundred times through the whole Bible, with great delight.

I have for many years read through the whole Old and New Testament with prayer and meditation, four times every year”. No wonder his experience of grace was so rich; nor is it any wonder that he, who had drawn upon the treasury chosen of God, had created a treasury of his own upon which others drew so often and so profitably. In addition to the teaching he accomplished in all parts of the world, the personal testimony he bore upon thousands of occasions, he was enabled himself to circulate in various languages a quarter of a million of Bibles, a million and a half New Testaments, 21,350 copies of the Psalms, and 223,500 other portions of the Holy Scriptures. Truly he drew out of his treasury “things new and old”.One writer has said that this does not suggest that we get out of the Bible new things and old things. That would be a contradiction. But we are to get out things that are supposed to be old, and yet are found to be new. “Old things, new things!” But we dissent from the interpretation.

We candidly believe that the parable holds us strictly to its own language, and that the householder has in his treasury things new and old. There would be occasions when the old clothing would serve the best ends; there would be other times when the new dress was absolutely demanded.

His treasure chest would meet either or both. There are old truths that certain experiences of our lives demand; we have worn them like a garment before; they have taken our shape; they fit us; they bring us needed comfort. Ah, it is an old truth that “God so loved the world”. I tried it out in my boyhood; I clothe myself with it today! It is an old truth that “If we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins”. Not a day but I must draw it forth to hide nakedness from before Him in whose presence I would otherwise be ashamed. The number of the old truths are too many to make mention of them. Then, blessed be God!

I am forever discovering a new one; and as a scribe “instructed unto the Kingdom of Heaven”, it is mine to present it to the people. I believe that I have done that in some of the sentences employed today. And yet the truths are not less needful because they are new. Some of you have heard them for the first time, and yet, I trust, they come to you at the very time when they will be as food and clothing from your Heavenly Father.Ah, the great truth of this entire string of parables—I was about to say, pearls—is this, that with the consummation of the age there is a kingdom coming which shall be established in righteousness, with God’s Son on the throne, and God’s saints in seats of power, and God’s will triumphant in all the world. The Gospel of Grace is great; the Gospel of the Kingdom is greater. Many of you know the story told by Hugh Price Hughes, of how he was standing one day before the window of an art store where was exhibited a picture of the crucifixion of our Lord.

Presently he was conscious of a little ragged lad at his side—a street Arab. Noticing that he was looking intently at the same work of art, he said to him, “Do you know who it is?” “Yes”, he replied, “that is our Saviour”, with a mingled look of pity and surprise that Hughes did not know.

Then, with an evident desire to enlighten Hughes further, he continued, “Them’s the soldiers, the Roman soldiers”, and with a sigh, “that woman there cryin’ is His mother”. He waited for Hughes to question him further. Then, with his hands in his pockets, he said, “They killed Him, Sir! Yes, sir, they killed Him”. Hughes says, “I looked at the little dirty fellow, and said, ‘Where did you learn all this?’ ‘At the mission Sunday School’, he said. I had walked away about a block, leaving him still looking at the picture, when I heard him calling, and with a triumphant sound in his voice, he said, ‘I just wanted to tell you, sir, that He rose again.

Yes, mister, He rose again!’”It is the Evangel of the Risen Christ; it is the good news to a dying world, that One had conquered death and been triumphant over the grave. But there is a better Gospel still, namely the Gospel of the Kingdom, and that is the Gospel to which these parables refer.

That is the Gospel I bring to you today, and I want to tell you that He who rose, ascending to the right hand of God the Father, where this morning He fills His office of intercessor, will descend, and that He who went will come again, and that He who conquered against death and the grave will one day conquer against the adversary himself, the author of death, the digger of every grave, the despoiler of every life, the agent of all sin! The sway of His scepter shall be felt “from sea to sea, and from the rivers to the ends of the earth”, and there “the righteousness shall shine forth as though seen in the Kingdom of the Father!” There is no complete Gospel until one knows about the Coming King and His Kingdom!

Matthew 13:24-30

THE FOUR OF THE FIELD Matthew 13:24-30; Matthew 13:36-40; Matthew 13:31-32; Matthew 13:44-46.THE ministry of Jesus Christ was matchless in many ways. His words so amazed men that they said, “Never man spake like this Man”; His works so impressed them that they remarked, “We never saw it on this wise”; and His ministry was so many-sided that it seemed inexplicable, and in astonishment, they asked, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Joseph?”A few years ago, two of our greatest theological seminaries came into prominent debate. One of them proudly affirmed itself engaged in the larger task of making men ready for the metropolitan pastorates of America, and the other insisted that it was seeking to equip men for any station to which they might be called, high or low, communities of culture or of comparative ignorance, city-centers or country-districts. The latter had evidently undertaken the larger task. The man who is equally adapted to open country and crowded city; the man who can compel audience in either place, is the unusual man— the Spurgeon of his century, the Moody of the moment. Only the truly great can easily adapt themselves to violent changes and varying circumstances. The centuries have known no man who had such messages for the metropolis as did the Man from Nazareth, and yet, perhaps, the greater portion of His ministry was given to the open country, and to the industrial classes. He went to the men in the fields and taught them the greatest moral truths by employing the parables of the field. To four of these we call attention today: the Parable of the Tares, the Parable of the Mustard Seed, the Parable of the Hid Treasure, and the Pearl of Great Price. In these four we find no disconnected argument, but a logical exposition of the Kingdom of God. The first presents The Kingdom—Opposition; the second, The Kingdom—Apostasy; and the third and fourth, The Kingdom—Purchase. THE KINGDOM—.Matthew 13:24-30. This parable, like that of the sower, Christ interpreted to His disciples (Matthew 13:36-43), and thereby provided us with the second illustration of how to interpret parables. By this interpretation He gives such an exposition of the Kingdom-Opposition as clearly reveals the contending forces, the continued conflict, and the Christian’s conquest. The contending forces! The Son of Man on the one side; Satan on the other. The children of the Kingdom on the one side; the children of the wicked one on the other. These indeed are the Captains and armies of all centuries. By comparison, they dwarf to insignificance those that have ever assembled under any other leaders, or for that matter, all other leaders; or contended for any other, or all other fields; or fought over any other, or all other subjects of division. John Milton, in his “Paradise Lost” sees the beginning of this battle in rebellion raised in heaven by him who “set himself in glory beyond his peers, and trusted to have equalled the most High if He opposed; who, with ambitious aim, raised impious war in heaven and battle proud”.

But it took a Christ to properly depict it. What war! The whole world as the prize of the contention! The Son of God, and all good men on one side; Satan and his every duped subject on the other! Christ’s interpretation of this parable is a death-knell of a good deal of New Theology! “The universal Fatherhood of God” is not found here! Men are divided into two camps rather, “the children of the Kingdom”, and “the children of the wicked one”. The first, begotten of God’s own will, by the Word of Truth (James 1:18), and made “good seed”, children of God by being “born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the Word of God” (1 Peter 1:23). The second are of “their father, the devil” (John 8:44), not alone because “conceived and shapen in iniquity”, but by the wilful choice, having made Beelzebub their Captain. Christ’s interpretation of this parable is a blow to “the universal brotherhood” of which men speak. “The children of the Kingdom” and “the children of the wicked one”, while they may be of one blood in natural generation, are made to be of altogether different spirit by the regeneration of the former and the degeneration of the latter. We meet people quite often who tell us they see very little difference between the members of the professing church and the men and women of the world. To this it is sufficient to reply, first of all, that the phrase “the professing church” is not identical with the phrase “the children of God”. And second, the tares and wheat look much alike, to a certain point, but when the tares bloom, then they become not only distinguishable, but prove themselves possessed of a peculiar poison which is borne about over the true wheat destroying even its fruitage. So it is in the Kingdom of God! The blight of many a Christian’s life, the loss of many a believer’s power is directly traceable to his too-close contact with the opposition. That is why the Apostle Paul wrote: “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers, for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness, and what communion hath light with darkness. And what concord hath Christ with Belial, or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?” Little wonder that he quotes his Lord as saying, “Come ye out from among them and be ye separate”. The continued conflict! The contention of these forces is not for a day. Satan will not easily quit the field; the Son of Man will never surrender. The children of the Kingdom multiply; the children of the wicked one increase. No Christian rightly estimates the enemy if he believes that a generation will see the whole world Christianized by present methods; and the Haeckel-Atheist, who thinks that tomorrow will witness the surrender of the “faith once for all delivered”, the repudiation of “the Bible”, and the collapse of the church, is so puny a seer as to be the subject of scornful pity. When Satan undertook the capture of the world, he originated a conflict, the continuance and end of which he himself could scarcely have dreamed.

It is easier to raise rebellion than it is to bring it to an end; it is easier to start war than it is to proclaim peace; it is easier to produce weeds than to grow wheat; but the harvest of the former is frightful to contemplate. Phillip and Edward III could go to battle over throne and crown, but all their followers could not produce peace, or even keep treaties when once they had been made; and so for 116 years, from 1337 to 1453, long after both these men had lain in their graves, the battles waxed and war between France and England went on. Think also of the thirty years’ war, shorter in duration, but more extensive in territory. It involved Austria; it reached England; it covered Holland; it affected Saxony; it swept to Spain; it compassed Switzerland and Sweden; in fact, the known world was caught in its sanguinary swirl. But what are the 116 years beside the thousands on thousands in which the forces of this parable have been in conflict; and what is battle in a dozen of the little states of Europe as compared with the battle that has been waged on every continent and in every island between Christ and the good seed on the one side, and the devil and every degenerate follower on the other? There are those who would make short work of this. They would turn the trick of the Turk and put to death those who did not agree with them; or of the Papist and shed the blood of all such as spoke not their shibboleth; or even as the Protestants who sent to the stake Servetus and his allies. But their conduct is not of the Christ, “Let both grow together until the harvest”.What did Christ mean then, that the church was not to engage in discipline at all; that the unruly were not to answer to officers; that transgressors were never to be brought to trials; that irreconcilibles were never to be excluded? Remember that Christ is not here talking of church discipline at all, but of the great world-field into which the children of the Kingdom and the children of the adversary are to continue to be sown, and to stand side by side and to bear their respective fruits, and to do silent battle ‘till He send forth His angels to cut short the work by gathering degenerates to judgment. This is Christ’s protest against coercion in the name of Christianity; and this is Christ’s repudiation for the post-millennial philosophy that the Kingdom will speedily come through social reconstruction, ethical philosophy, and moral reformation. On the one hand, the Kingdom will never come by the proclamation of the Evangel. The King Himself must come and exalt righteousness and bring unrighteousness to judgment. At the close of summer, there comes a season when the wheat can be separated from the chaff; when the one can be gathered into barns and the other assigned to the flames; so will there be a harvest in the end of the world, when Christ, by His angels, shall gather out His own and judge His opponents. The Christian’s conquest!“Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the Kingdom of their Father”. There are those who upon every observation on the battle between light and darkness, sin and righteousness, the Saviour and Satan, grow discouraged and become pessimistic. They believe that the battle has gone against the Church of God already, and that eventually it will go against the Christian faith, and against Christian fellowship—the cohorts of God. There is no danger! “Prophecy is the mould of history!” The defeat of the devil is as certain today as is the destiny of the Son of Man; the overthrow of His followers as sure as the march of time! The consummation of the age will see the conquest of Christ and His hosts, and it will be complete. In the struggle between light and darkness, life and death, the Son of Man and the Satan of the centuries, the victories shall be to the former. Monkhouse, in his magnificent sonnet, depicts the battle after this manner: “From morn to eve they struggle—Life and Death, At first it seemed to me that they in mirth Contended, and as foes of equal worth, So firm their feet, so undisturbed their breath. “But when the sharp red sun cut through its sheath Of western clouds, I saw the brown arm’s girth Tighten and bear that radiant form to earth, And suddenly both fell upon the heath. “And then the wonder came; for when I fled To where those great antagonists down fell, I could not find the body that I sought, And when and where it went, I could not tell; One only form was left of those who fought, The long dark form of Death—and it was dead”. “Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the Kingdom of their Father”. It is the day of the mighty conquest of the Son of God, and “the manifestation of the sons of God”.THE KINGDOM—. In passing from the parable of the tares to that of the mustard seed, we have our attention turned from the Kingdom—Opposition, to the Kingdom— Apostasy. I am compelled to consent with those who so interpret this parable as to bring it largely into line with its predecessors—the parable of the sower, and the parable of the tares. To be sure, it suggests the rapid and even the unexpected growth of the Kingdom, but it also hints that in that very growth is a sign of weakness rather than of strength, of conflict rather than conquest. We believe it is not straining of Scripture to see in this parable the fungus growth, the false appearance and the foul lodgers. The fungus growth! Campbell Morgan insists that it is unusual for the mustard seed to become a tree; and yet admits that there are exceptional instances. It is unusual for cotton to become trees, but it does so, south of the frost-line. Credible writers declare that in hot countries, with moist atmospheres and rich soil, mustard, like cotton, becomes a perennial; and instances are even cited in which a man’s weight could be supported by the branches; and in the season of its fruitage, birds flocked into it both to feed and rest. The church—the Kingdom in embryo—starting from the first disciples of Jesus, small indeed in pretence and prophecy, found itself at the end of the first century an institution of might, and in the fourth century, under Constantine, sent its branches into all the world. And whatever may be said concerning the genuine growth and progress marking the first century, few thoughtful folk outside of Rome could be found who would approve the ample proportions of the fourth century church—proposed as a world-kingdom. It was only because that seed of the Pseudo-Kingdom was fertilized with the world’s wealth, and enveloped with the world’s atmosphere, and cultivated by the world’s husbandman, that it took on such proportions, and by its very growth brought its own name into disrepute, and raised the question as to its genuine character. The false appearance! The mustard under certain circumstances, assumed to be more than it was. It belongs to the herbs; its very texture is not woody; and yet, its pretence is that of a tree. It professes what it does not possess. The phraseology of religion at the present moment falls into the same hypocrisy. Men talk glibly of “the Kingdom of God”, praise its proportions, reckon up its millions of subjects, prophesy its speedy conquest on the last continent and island, and all with a show, but without the substance, of truth. There is no such Kingdom. There is not even a Christian nation in the world!

Every time you speak of one such, you coerce language. There are nations partially civilized by the touch of Christianity; but even in these, the majority are outside of the church, and the overwhelming majority have no kinship to the Kingdom of God. The three or four hundred millions of people who are in the professing church would be terribly reduced in number if there were applied any Christian test. The so-called Christian governments of the world, in their greed of territory, and in their conscienceless commerce, are illustrating a new cannibalism, more refined, perhaps, but not less consuming than that of the old savagery. R. F.

Horton, the higher critic, is hardly chargeable with chiliasm, and yet, he says, “The sorrow of history is the comparative rareness of humanity in it”. And he adds, “Our own government is partially humane because it is partially Christian.

Some faint aroma of justice and mercy and truth is in our state apartments because the Son of Man has passed through them”. The same writer remarked, “Heaven is a state in which the will of God is entirely done; and earth is a place in which the will of God is habitually violated”. The present constituted society is, as Trench remarks, “like that of the ark, where unclean and clean mingle; like that of the pasture, the goats and the sheep are together; like that of the threshing floor, the chaff and the grain are mixed; like that of the field, the tares and the wheat growing together”. At present, it is like the mustard seed, tree-like in appearance, but weed-like in nature and character. The foul lodgers,“The birds of heaven come and lodge in the branches thereof’. There are two interpretations of this sentence, both of which, in my judgment, are correct. One set of teachers see in this sentence the beautiful shadowing and sustaining character of the Church of God. The world’s needy may find a refuge in it, be sheltered and fed by it; and some have even reminded us that the mustard seed is more than food; it is medicine. Thereby they have made their appeal that the church recognize its social obligations, and intelligently enter into the discharge of them. Another class of interpreters say, “No, birds in the preceding parable were agents of the adversary, and in other parts of Scripture, are commonly described as “unclean”, and the sentence suggests the great fact that the Church of God essaying to be a world-kingdom has been taken possession of by the unregenerate, who build their foul nests in its branches and bring up their broods under its shadow, and turn its beneficent character to the ends of commercial advantage, so that church-membership and corporate wealth are related the one to the other as birds are related to the hospitable, fruitful boughs. Both are correct! The Kingdom of God, so far as it voices itself at all in that Church, which is preparing the way for it, should be a refuge to the world’s needy, clean or unclean. Jesus Christ was no canting Pharisee. He hesitated not to stretch out His hand of help to even the demonized; and He drew not His skirts about Him when the strange woman sought His counsel and begged His forgiveness. The Church of God that does not provide for the “downs and outs”, the branches of which suggest neither lodging nor food, nor medicine for the world’s children, is a poor representative of the Christ who “received sinners”, and did more than “eat with them”; He fed, counselled and healed them. Truly, as Bruce remarks, “The choice few are to seek the good of the many; the fit are to strive to help the unfit. This is their special vocation, and when they cease to do it, they themselves become useless and reprobate!” Yet the other interpretation is equally and even more true. The very methods by which men in modern times have been rapidly increasing the growth of the church, are calculated to call the world into its membership, so that the unregenerate, in the interests of social standing and for the sake of commercial advantage, are joining themselves to the same. A minister told me that he had lost three of his best families to a wealthy neighboring church of the same denomination; that they had deliberately pulled them off through social functions, which tempted women whose husbands were men of moderate means, by offering them a fellowship with the wives of millionaires. This gives an appearance of the coming of the Kingdom, but no promise of it, save as it is a part of the apostasy that is to characterize the consummation of the age. THE KINGDOM-.The third and fourth of these field parables look to the Kingdom purchase—the purchase of the hid treasure and the peerless pearl of great price. The hid treasure!“Again, 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”. A part of this parable has been interpreted for us already. The field is the world; the man is Christ; the price paid is His precious Blood. But what is the treasure hid? Sometimes God hides from the wise and prudent that which He proposes to show to babes. I have read within the week from the pens of almost a dozen men attempting the interpretation of the hid treasure. Many of them were great men, but I found from the pen of one of less learning and less pretense the most intelligent interpretation, namely, that “Israel is the hid treasure”. Again and again in the Old Testament, she is called “God’s treasure”, and that she is hidden away now, in the nations, neither students of history nor prophecy can possibly dispute; and that Christ paid the price of His life for the whole world, knowing that by so doing He could win, first of all, His own, dearer to Him than all others—the treasure, the very attractions of which brought Him from Heaven to earth, is the truth of many a text. Let one read Jeremiah 32:37-42, and let him ponder Ezekiel 37:21-25, and listen to the Psalmist while he sings also (Psalms 135:4),“For the Lord hath chosen Israel for His peculiar treasure” (Exodus 19:5). Paul loved his people with all the ardor of a Jew, and he could say, “I could wish myself accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites”. But Christ loved them even better, and He put His all upon the altar that they might be saved. The peerless pearl! “Again the Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a merchant seeking goodly pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it”. The jewels of Jesus will come out of the Gentile world. If the converts of Paul were his “joy and his rejoicing”, the Gentile converts to Christ shall shine forth with a brilliance beyond the sun in that day when He makes up His jewels. Truly one is justified in changing the hymn and making it read not “I’ve found the pearl of greatest price, My heart doth sing for joy”, but rather, “He found the pearl of greatest price, My heart doth sing for joy, And sing I must for I am His And He is mine for aye”. The price paid in each of these purchases is the same: For the hid treasure “all that he hath”; for the goodly pearl, “all that he had”. When Christ redeemed Israel, it took “all that He had”; when Christ redeemed the Gentile world, it cost “all that He had”. The purchases are not two different ones made at different times; they are the same purchase! “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son”, and Christ so loved the world that “He gave Himself”, and the world is “the Jew and the Gentile”. This purchase was not the barter of a man who was buying something from the Adversary, for Satan never owned the world. As its God, he is a usurper; and the transaction is not that of a son, who is trying to come into the selfish possession as against his father’s ownership, for, from the beginning, the world has belonged to Jesus. He made it. “Without Him was not anything made that was made”. This buying back, then, is the barter of the goel—precious purchase of redemption. In the Old Testament, when for any reason whatever, an estate was lost to the household, the son who was able to redeem it, did so; or if the members of a family went into slavery, the relative who could accomplish it, paid the price of their freedom. Oh, what a Son in the house of our Father, and what a kinsman in the Christ of Calvary!

When my Heavenly estate was forfeited absolutely and I was in spiritual bankruptcy; yea, when I had fallen into the power of the enemy and was stripped of my citizenship, destroyed and stained, He appeared as my kinsman to pay the price and make me free. He is the Goel; He is the Redeemer! Truly, as one says, “His very Name delivers a message and it is this: dark, defiled, demon-haunted spirit, black with venom and despair; you, the worst of men, you are a man, therefore the Son of Man does not despair of you. Rather, He has set His heart on saving you. He has come to seek and to save that which is lost”. Herein is the ground of our hope, the occasion of our confidence, the answer to our need, the redemption from our defilement, the release from our captivity, the establishment of our citizenship in the Kingdom, the pledge of our eternal heritage with Him who loved us and gave Himself for us. Len Broughton tells of a friend he knew in youth who was always seeking, but could never find the Lord. On one occasion, Dr. Broughton went back to preach in the country neighborhood. This young man rushed up to him, flung his arms about him and expressed his joy in seeing him again, and Dr. Broughton said, “You are to spend the night with me”, and he said, “No, I must go back home to my wife and children”. “Well, just send word you are going to spend the night with me. He did so, and we went back into the old room where we used to frolic in bed at night, where we had kicked each other out of bed a hundred times.

There in that old bed, once more boys, I said to him, “Have you ever found Jesus?” He hesitated a moment before he said, “No!” “Have you continued to seek Him?” “Yes, and I expect to be seeking Him until I die! I will never give up”.

I said, “Why haven’t you found Him?” “I do not know! I have thought of your being a preacher and wondered why it was that I just could not find Jesus. I have tried as hard as you ever did and as hard as anybody ever did”. I said, “Will you let me tell you the secret of it?” “Yes, if you can”. “You have not found Jesus because you have not realized the fact that all this time and even before you began to seek Jesus, He was seeking you”. It didn’t take hold of him at first. He asked me some questions about it, and I put it to him again. “Jesus is seeking you. He came to this world to seek and to save that which was lost. Are you lost?” “Of course I am”. “Well, He is seeking you, instead of your seeking Him; you have been running from Him, thinking that you were seeking Him.

You were seeking something else besides Jesus. You have been seeking feeling; you have been seeking somebody else’s experience. Jesus has been seeking you; now stop running after experience and let Jesus find you right here and now”. I gave him John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten San, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life”. In a moment or two I felt an arm slip around my neck and he began to cry; but it was not the cry of the seeker; it was the rejoicing cry of the saved. There in that bed, where we had frolicked in childhood days, he stopped running after an experience and simply let Jesus find him.

Matthew 13:31-32

THE FOUR OF THE FIELD Matthew 13:24-30; Matthew 13:36-40; Matthew 13:31-32; Matthew 13:44-46.THE ministry of Jesus Christ was matchless in many ways. His words so amazed men that they said, “Never man spake like this Man”; His works so impressed them that they remarked, “We never saw it on this wise”; and His ministry was so many-sided that it seemed inexplicable, and in astonishment, they asked, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Joseph?”A few years ago, two of our greatest theological seminaries came into prominent debate. One of them proudly affirmed itself engaged in the larger task of making men ready for the metropolitan pastorates of America, and the other insisted that it was seeking to equip men for any station to which they might be called, high or low, communities of culture or of comparative ignorance, city-centers or country-districts. The latter had evidently undertaken the larger task. The man who is equally adapted to open country and crowded city; the man who can compel audience in either place, is the unusual man— the Spurgeon of his century, the Moody of the moment. Only the truly great can easily adapt themselves to violent changes and varying circumstances. The centuries have known no man who had such messages for the metropolis as did the Man from Nazareth, and yet, perhaps, the greater portion of His ministry was given to the open country, and to the industrial classes. He went to the men in the fields and taught them the greatest moral truths by employing the parables of the field. To four of these we call attention today: the Parable of the Tares, the Parable of the Mustard Seed, the Parable of the Hid Treasure, and the Pearl of Great Price. In these four we find no disconnected argument, but a logical exposition of the Kingdom of God. The first presents The Kingdom—Opposition; the second, The Kingdom—Apostasy; and the third and fourth, The Kingdom—Purchase. THE KINGDOM—.Matthew 13:24-30. This parable, like that of the sower, Christ interpreted to His disciples (Matthew 13:36-43), and thereby provided us with the second illustration of how to interpret parables. By this interpretation He gives such an exposition of the Kingdom-Opposition as clearly reveals the contending forces, the continued conflict, and the Christian’s conquest. The contending forces! The Son of Man on the one side; Satan on the other. The children of the Kingdom on the one side; the children of the wicked one on the other. These indeed are the Captains and armies of all centuries. By comparison, they dwarf to insignificance those that have ever assembled under any other leaders, or for that matter, all other leaders; or contended for any other, or all other fields; or fought over any other, or all other subjects of division. John Milton, in his “Paradise Lost” sees the beginning of this battle in rebellion raised in heaven by him who “set himself in glory beyond his peers, and trusted to have equalled the most High if He opposed; who, with ambitious aim, raised impious war in heaven and battle proud”.

But it took a Christ to properly depict it. What war! The whole world as the prize of the contention! The Son of God, and all good men on one side; Satan and his every duped subject on the other! Christ’s interpretation of this parable is a death-knell of a good deal of New Theology! “The universal Fatherhood of God” is not found here! Men are divided into two camps rather, “the children of the Kingdom”, and “the children of the wicked one”. The first, begotten of God’s own will, by the Word of Truth (James 1:18), and made “good seed”, children of God by being “born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the Word of God” (1 Peter 1:23). The second are of “their father, the devil” (John 8:44), not alone because “conceived and shapen in iniquity”, but by the wilful choice, having made Beelzebub their Captain. Christ’s interpretation of this parable is a blow to “the universal brotherhood” of which men speak. “The children of the Kingdom” and “the children of the wicked one”, while they may be of one blood in natural generation, are made to be of altogether different spirit by the regeneration of the former and the degeneration of the latter. We meet people quite often who tell us they see very little difference between the members of the professing church and the men and women of the world. To this it is sufficient to reply, first of all, that the phrase “the professing church” is not identical with the phrase “the children of God”. And second, the tares and wheat look much alike, to a certain point, but when the tares bloom, then they become not only distinguishable, but prove themselves possessed of a peculiar poison which is borne about over the true wheat destroying even its fruitage. So it is in the Kingdom of God! The blight of many a Christian’s life, the loss of many a believer’s power is directly traceable to his too-close contact with the opposition. That is why the Apostle Paul wrote: “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers, for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness, and what communion hath light with darkness. And what concord hath Christ with Belial, or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?” Little wonder that he quotes his Lord as saying, “Come ye out from among them and be ye separate”. The continued conflict! The contention of these forces is not for a day. Satan will not easily quit the field; the Son of Man will never surrender. The children of the Kingdom multiply; the children of the wicked one increase. No Christian rightly estimates the enemy if he believes that a generation will see the whole world Christianized by present methods; and the Haeckel-Atheist, who thinks that tomorrow will witness the surrender of the “faith once for all delivered”, the repudiation of “the Bible”, and the collapse of the church, is so puny a seer as to be the subject of scornful pity. When Satan undertook the capture of the world, he originated a conflict, the continuance and end of which he himself could scarcely have dreamed.

It is easier to raise rebellion than it is to bring it to an end; it is easier to start war than it is to proclaim peace; it is easier to produce weeds than to grow wheat; but the harvest of the former is frightful to contemplate. Phillip and Edward III could go to battle over throne and crown, but all their followers could not produce peace, or even keep treaties when once they had been made; and so for 116 years, from 1337 to 1453, long after both these men had lain in their graves, the battles waxed and war between France and England went on. Think also of the thirty years’ war, shorter in duration, but more extensive in territory. It involved Austria; it reached England; it covered Holland; it affected Saxony; it swept to Spain; it compassed Switzerland and Sweden; in fact, the known world was caught in its sanguinary swirl. But what are the 116 years beside the thousands on thousands in which the forces of this parable have been in conflict; and what is battle in a dozen of the little states of Europe as compared with the battle that has been waged on every continent and in every island between Christ and the good seed on the one side, and the devil and every degenerate follower on the other? There are those who would make short work of this. They would turn the trick of the Turk and put to death those who did not agree with them; or of the Papist and shed the blood of all such as spoke not their shibboleth; or even as the Protestants who sent to the stake Servetus and his allies. But their conduct is not of the Christ, “Let both grow together until the harvest”.What did Christ mean then, that the church was not to engage in discipline at all; that the unruly were not to answer to officers; that transgressors were never to be brought to trials; that irreconcilibles were never to be excluded? Remember that Christ is not here talking of church discipline at all, but of the great world-field into which the children of the Kingdom and the children of the adversary are to continue to be sown, and to stand side by side and to bear their respective fruits, and to do silent battle ‘till He send forth His angels to cut short the work by gathering degenerates to judgment. This is Christ’s protest against coercion in the name of Christianity; and this is Christ’s repudiation for the post-millennial philosophy that the Kingdom will speedily come through social reconstruction, ethical philosophy, and moral reformation. On the one hand, the Kingdom will never come by the proclamation of the Evangel. The King Himself must come and exalt righteousness and bring unrighteousness to judgment. At the close of summer, there comes a season when the wheat can be separated from the chaff; when the one can be gathered into barns and the other assigned to the flames; so will there be a harvest in the end of the world, when Christ, by His angels, shall gather out His own and judge His opponents. The Christian’s conquest!“Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the Kingdom of their Father”. There are those who upon every observation on the battle between light and darkness, sin and righteousness, the Saviour and Satan, grow discouraged and become pessimistic. They believe that the battle has gone against the Church of God already, and that eventually it will go against the Christian faith, and against Christian fellowship—the cohorts of God. There is no danger! “Prophecy is the mould of history!” The defeat of the devil is as certain today as is the destiny of the Son of Man; the overthrow of His followers as sure as the march of time! The consummation of the age will see the conquest of Christ and His hosts, and it will be complete. In the struggle between light and darkness, life and death, the Son of Man and the Satan of the centuries, the victories shall be to the former. Monkhouse, in his magnificent sonnet, depicts the battle after this manner: “From morn to eve they struggle—Life and Death, At first it seemed to me that they in mirth Contended, and as foes of equal worth, So firm their feet, so undisturbed their breath. “But when the sharp red sun cut through its sheath Of western clouds, I saw the brown arm’s girth Tighten and bear that radiant form to earth, And suddenly both fell upon the heath. “And then the wonder came; for when I fled To where those great antagonists down fell, I could not find the body that I sought, And when and where it went, I could not tell; One only form was left of those who fought, The long dark form of Death—and it was dead”. “Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the Kingdom of their Father”. It is the day of the mighty conquest of the Son of God, and “the manifestation of the sons of God”.THE KINGDOM—. In passing from the parable of the tares to that of the mustard seed, we have our attention turned from the Kingdom—Opposition, to the Kingdom— Apostasy. I am compelled to consent with those who so interpret this parable as to bring it largely into line with its predecessors—the parable of the sower, and the parable of the tares. To be sure, it suggests the rapid and even the unexpected growth of the Kingdom, but it also hints that in that very growth is a sign of weakness rather than of strength, of conflict rather than conquest. We believe it is not straining of Scripture to see in this parable the fungus growth, the false appearance and the foul lodgers. The fungus growth! Campbell Morgan insists that it is unusual for the mustard seed to become a tree; and yet admits that there are exceptional instances. It is unusual for cotton to become trees, but it does so, south of the frost-line. Credible writers declare that in hot countries, with moist atmospheres and rich soil, mustard, like cotton, becomes a perennial; and instances are even cited in which a man’s weight could be supported by the branches; and in the season of its fruitage, birds flocked into it both to feed and rest. The church—the Kingdom in embryo—starting from the first disciples of Jesus, small indeed in pretence and prophecy, found itself at the end of the first century an institution of might, and in the fourth century, under Constantine, sent its branches into all the world. And whatever may be said concerning the genuine growth and progress marking the first century, few thoughtful folk outside of Rome could be found who would approve the ample proportions of the fourth century church—proposed as a world-kingdom. It was only because that seed of the Pseudo-Kingdom was fertilized with the world’s wealth, and enveloped with the world’s atmosphere, and cultivated by the world’s husbandman, that it took on such proportions, and by its very growth brought its own name into disrepute, and raised the question as to its genuine character. The false appearance! The mustard under certain circumstances, assumed to be more than it was. It belongs to the herbs; its very texture is not woody; and yet, its pretence is that of a tree. It professes what it does not possess. The phraseology of religion at the present moment falls into the same hypocrisy. Men talk glibly of “the Kingdom of God”, praise its proportions, reckon up its millions of subjects, prophesy its speedy conquest on the last continent and island, and all with a show, but without the substance, of truth. There is no such Kingdom. There is not even a Christian nation in the world!

Every time you speak of one such, you coerce language. There are nations partially civilized by the touch of Christianity; but even in these, the majority are outside of the church, and the overwhelming majority have no kinship to the Kingdom of God. The three or four hundred millions of people who are in the professing church would be terribly reduced in number if there were applied any Christian test. The so-called Christian governments of the world, in their greed of territory, and in their conscienceless commerce, are illustrating a new cannibalism, more refined, perhaps, but not less consuming than that of the old savagery. R. F.

Horton, the higher critic, is hardly chargeable with chiliasm, and yet, he says, “The sorrow of history is the comparative rareness of humanity in it”. And he adds, “Our own government is partially humane because it is partially Christian.

Some faint aroma of justice and mercy and truth is in our state apartments because the Son of Man has passed through them”. The same writer remarked, “Heaven is a state in which the will of God is entirely done; and earth is a place in which the will of God is habitually violated”. The present constituted society is, as Trench remarks, “like that of the ark, where unclean and clean mingle; like that of the pasture, the goats and the sheep are together; like that of the threshing floor, the chaff and the grain are mixed; like that of the field, the tares and the wheat growing together”. At present, it is like the mustard seed, tree-like in appearance, but weed-like in nature and character. The foul lodgers,“The birds of heaven come and lodge in the branches thereof’. There are two interpretations of this sentence, both of which, in my judgment, are correct. One set of teachers see in this sentence the beautiful shadowing and sustaining character of the Church of God. The world’s needy may find a refuge in it, be sheltered and fed by it; and some have even reminded us that the mustard seed is more than food; it is medicine. Thereby they have made their appeal that the church recognize its social obligations, and intelligently enter into the discharge of them. Another class of interpreters say, “No, birds in the preceding parable were agents of the adversary, and in other parts of Scripture, are commonly described as “unclean”, and the sentence suggests the great fact that the Church of God essaying to be a world-kingdom has been taken possession of by the unregenerate, who build their foul nests in its branches and bring up their broods under its shadow, and turn its beneficent character to the ends of commercial advantage, so that church-membership and corporate wealth are related the one to the other as birds are related to the hospitable, fruitful boughs. Both are correct! The Kingdom of God, so far as it voices itself at all in that Church, which is preparing the way for it, should be a refuge to the world’s needy, clean or unclean. Jesus Christ was no canting Pharisee. He hesitated not to stretch out His hand of help to even the demonized; and He drew not His skirts about Him when the strange woman sought His counsel and begged His forgiveness. The Church of God that does not provide for the “downs and outs”, the branches of which suggest neither lodging nor food, nor medicine for the world’s children, is a poor representative of the Christ who “received sinners”, and did more than “eat with them”; He fed, counselled and healed them. Truly, as Bruce remarks, “The choice few are to seek the good of the many; the fit are to strive to help the unfit. This is their special vocation, and when they cease to do it, they themselves become useless and reprobate!” Yet the other interpretation is equally and even more true. The very methods by which men in modern times have been rapidly increasing the growth of the church, are calculated to call the world into its membership, so that the unregenerate, in the interests of social standing and for the sake of commercial advantage, are joining themselves to the same. A minister told me that he had lost three of his best families to a wealthy neighboring church of the same denomination; that they had deliberately pulled them off through social functions, which tempted women whose husbands were men of moderate means, by offering them a fellowship with the wives of millionaires. This gives an appearance of the coming of the Kingdom, but no promise of it, save as it is a part of the apostasy that is to characterize the consummation of the age. THE KINGDOM-.The third and fourth of these field parables look to the Kingdom purchase—the purchase of the hid treasure and the peerless pearl of great price. The hid treasure!“Again, 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”. A part of this parable has been interpreted for us already. The field is the world; the man is Christ; the price paid is His precious Blood. But what is the treasure hid? Sometimes God hides from the wise and prudent that which He proposes to show to babes. I have read within the week from the pens of almost a dozen men attempting the interpretation of the hid treasure. Many of them were great men, but I found from the pen of one of less learning and less pretense the most intelligent interpretation, namely, that “Israel is the hid treasure”. Again and again in the Old Testament, she is called “God’s treasure”, and that she is hidden away now, in the nations, neither students of history nor prophecy can possibly dispute; and that Christ paid the price of His life for the whole world, knowing that by so doing He could win, first of all, His own, dearer to Him than all others—the treasure, the very attractions of which brought Him from Heaven to earth, is the truth of many a text. Let one read Jeremiah 32:37-42, and let him ponder Ezekiel 37:21-25, and listen to the Psalmist while he sings also (Psalms 135:4),“For the Lord hath chosen Israel for His peculiar treasure” (Exodus 19:5). Paul loved his people with all the ardor of a Jew, and he could say, “I could wish myself accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites”. But Christ loved them even better, and He put His all upon the altar that they might be saved. The peerless pearl! “Again the Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a merchant seeking goodly pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it”. The jewels of Jesus will come out of the Gentile world. If the converts of Paul were his “joy and his rejoicing”, the Gentile converts to Christ shall shine forth with a brilliance beyond the sun in that day when He makes up His jewels. Truly one is justified in changing the hymn and making it read not “I’ve found the pearl of greatest price, My heart doth sing for joy”, but rather, “He found the pearl of greatest price, My heart doth sing for joy, And sing I must for I am His And He is mine for aye”. The price paid in each of these purchases is the same: For the hid treasure “all that he hath”; for the goodly pearl, “all that he had”. When Christ redeemed Israel, it took “all that He had”; when Christ redeemed the Gentile world, it cost “all that He had”. The purchases are not two different ones made at different times; they are the same purchase! “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son”, and Christ so loved the world that “He gave Himself”, and the world is “the Jew and the Gentile”. This purchase was not the barter of a man who was buying something from the Adversary, for Satan never owned the world. As its God, he is a usurper; and the transaction is not that of a son, who is trying to come into the selfish possession as against his father’s ownership, for, from the beginning, the world has belonged to Jesus. He made it. “Without Him was not anything made that was made”. This buying back, then, is the barter of the goel—precious purchase of redemption. In the Old Testament, when for any reason whatever, an estate was lost to the household, the son who was able to redeem it, did so; or if the members of a family went into slavery, the relative who could accomplish it, paid the price of their freedom. Oh, what a Son in the house of our Father, and what a kinsman in the Christ of Calvary!

When my Heavenly estate was forfeited absolutely and I was in spiritual bankruptcy; yea, when I had fallen into the power of the enemy and was stripped of my citizenship, destroyed and stained, He appeared as my kinsman to pay the price and make me free. He is the Goel; He is the Redeemer! Truly, as one says, “His very Name delivers a message and it is this: dark, defiled, demon-haunted spirit, black with venom and despair; you, the worst of men, you are a man, therefore the Son of Man does not despair of you. Rather, He has set His heart on saving you. He has come to seek and to save that which is lost”. Herein is the ground of our hope, the occasion of our confidence, the answer to our need, the redemption from our defilement, the release from our captivity, the establishment of our citizenship in the Kingdom, the pledge of our eternal heritage with Him who loved us and gave Himself for us. Len Broughton tells of a friend he knew in youth who was always seeking, but could never find the Lord. On one occasion, Dr. Broughton went back to preach in the country neighborhood. This young man rushed up to him, flung his arms about him and expressed his joy in seeing him again, and Dr. Broughton said, “You are to spend the night with me”, and he said, “No, I must go back home to my wife and children”. “Well, just send word you are going to spend the night with me. He did so, and we went back into the old room where we used to frolic in bed at night, where we had kicked each other out of bed a hundred times.

There in that old bed, once more boys, I said to him, “Have you ever found Jesus?” He hesitated a moment before he said, “No!” “Have you continued to seek Him?” “Yes, and I expect to be seeking Him until I die! I will never give up”.

I said, “Why haven’t you found Him?” “I do not know! I have thought of your being a preacher and wondered why it was that I just could not find Jesus. I have tried as hard as you ever did and as hard as anybody ever did”. I said, “Will you let me tell you the secret of it?” “Yes, if you can”. “You have not found Jesus because you have not realized the fact that all this time and even before you began to seek Jesus, He was seeking you”. It didn’t take hold of him at first. He asked me some questions about it, and I put it to him again. “Jesus is seeking you. He came to this world to seek and to save that which was lost. Are you lost?” “Of course I am”. “Well, He is seeking you, instead of your seeking Him; you have been running from Him, thinking that you were seeking Him.

You were seeking something else besides Jesus. You have been seeking feeling; you have been seeking somebody else’s experience. Jesus has been seeking you; now stop running after experience and let Jesus find you right here and now”. I gave him John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten San, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life”. In a moment or two I felt an arm slip around my neck and he began to cry; but it was not the cry of the seeker; it was the rejoicing cry of the saved. There in that bed, where we had frolicked in childhood days, he stopped running after an experience and simply let Jesus find him.

Matthew 13:36-40

THE FOUR OF THE FIELD Matthew 13:24-30; Matthew 13:36-40; Matthew 13:31-32; Matthew 13:44-46.THE ministry of Jesus Christ was matchless in many ways. His words so amazed men that they said, “Never man spake like this Man”; His works so impressed them that they remarked, “We never saw it on this wise”; and His ministry was so many-sided that it seemed inexplicable, and in astonishment, they asked, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Joseph?”A few years ago, two of our greatest theological seminaries came into prominent debate. One of them proudly affirmed itself engaged in the larger task of making men ready for the metropolitan pastorates of America, and the other insisted that it was seeking to equip men for any station to which they might be called, high or low, communities of culture or of comparative ignorance, city-centers or country-districts. The latter had evidently undertaken the larger task. The man who is equally adapted to open country and crowded city; the man who can compel audience in either place, is the unusual man— the Spurgeon of his century, the Moody of the moment. Only the truly great can easily adapt themselves to violent changes and varying circumstances. The centuries have known no man who had such messages for the metropolis as did the Man from Nazareth, and yet, perhaps, the greater portion of His ministry was given to the open country, and to the industrial classes. He went to the men in the fields and taught them the greatest moral truths by employing the parables of the field. To four of these we call attention today: the Parable of the Tares, the Parable of the Mustard Seed, the Parable of the Hid Treasure, and the Pearl of Great Price. In these four we find no disconnected argument, but a logical exposition of the Kingdom of God. The first presents The Kingdom—Opposition; the second, The Kingdom—Apostasy; and the third and fourth, The Kingdom—Purchase. THE KINGDOM—.Matthew 13:24-30. This parable, like that of the sower, Christ interpreted to His disciples (Matthew 13:36-43), and thereby provided us with the second illustration of how to interpret parables. By this interpretation He gives such an exposition of the Kingdom-Opposition as clearly reveals the contending forces, the continued conflict, and the Christian’s conquest. The contending forces! The Son of Man on the one side; Satan on the other. The children of the Kingdom on the one side; the children of the wicked one on the other. These indeed are the Captains and armies of all centuries. By comparison, they dwarf to insignificance those that have ever assembled under any other leaders, or for that matter, all other leaders; or contended for any other, or all other fields; or fought over any other, or all other subjects of division. John Milton, in his “Paradise Lost” sees the beginning of this battle in rebellion raised in heaven by him who “set himself in glory beyond his peers, and trusted to have equalled the most High if He opposed; who, with ambitious aim, raised impious war in heaven and battle proud”.

But it took a Christ to properly depict it. What war! The whole world as the prize of the contention! The Son of God, and all good men on one side; Satan and his every duped subject on the other! Christ’s interpretation of this parable is a death-knell of a good deal of New Theology! “The universal Fatherhood of God” is not found here! Men are divided into two camps rather, “the children of the Kingdom”, and “the children of the wicked one”. The first, begotten of God’s own will, by the Word of Truth (James 1:18), and made “good seed”, children of God by being “born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the Word of God” (1 Peter 1:23). The second are of “their father, the devil” (John 8:44), not alone because “conceived and shapen in iniquity”, but by the wilful choice, having made Beelzebub their Captain. Christ’s interpretation of this parable is a blow to “the universal brotherhood” of which men speak. “The children of the Kingdom” and “the children of the wicked one”, while they may be of one blood in natural generation, are made to be of altogether different spirit by the regeneration of the former and the degeneration of the latter. We meet people quite often who tell us they see very little difference between the members of the professing church and the men and women of the world. To this it is sufficient to reply, first of all, that the phrase “the professing church” is not identical with the phrase “the children of God”. And second, the tares and wheat look much alike, to a certain point, but when the tares bloom, then they become not only distinguishable, but prove themselves possessed of a peculiar poison which is borne about over the true wheat destroying even its fruitage. So it is in the Kingdom of God! The blight of many a Christian’s life, the loss of many a believer’s power is directly traceable to his too-close contact with the opposition. That is why the Apostle Paul wrote: “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers, for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness, and what communion hath light with darkness. And what concord hath Christ with Belial, or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?” Little wonder that he quotes his Lord as saying, “Come ye out from among them and be ye separate”. The continued conflict! The contention of these forces is not for a day. Satan will not easily quit the field; the Son of Man will never surrender. The children of the Kingdom multiply; the children of the wicked one increase. No Christian rightly estimates the enemy if he believes that a generation will see the whole world Christianized by present methods; and the Haeckel-Atheist, who thinks that tomorrow will witness the surrender of the “faith once for all delivered”, the repudiation of “the Bible”, and the collapse of the church, is so puny a seer as to be the subject of scornful pity. When Satan undertook the capture of the world, he originated a conflict, the continuance and end of which he himself could scarcely have dreamed.

It is easier to raise rebellion than it is to bring it to an end; it is easier to start war than it is to proclaim peace; it is easier to produce weeds than to grow wheat; but the harvest of the former is frightful to contemplate. Phillip and Edward III could go to battle over throne and crown, but all their followers could not produce peace, or even keep treaties when once they had been made; and so for 116 years, from 1337 to 1453, long after both these men had lain in their graves, the battles waxed and war between France and England went on. Think also of the thirty years’ war, shorter in duration, but more extensive in territory. It involved Austria; it reached England; it covered Holland; it affected Saxony; it swept to Spain; it compassed Switzerland and Sweden; in fact, the known world was caught in its sanguinary swirl. But what are the 116 years beside the thousands on thousands in which the forces of this parable have been in conflict; and what is battle in a dozen of the little states of Europe as compared with the battle that has been waged on every continent and in every island between Christ and the good seed on the one side, and the devil and every degenerate follower on the other? There are those who would make short work of this. They would turn the trick of the Turk and put to death those who did not agree with them; or of the Papist and shed the blood of all such as spoke not their shibboleth; or even as the Protestants who sent to the stake Servetus and his allies. But their conduct is not of the Christ, “Let both grow together until the harvest”.What did Christ mean then, that the church was not to engage in discipline at all; that the unruly were not to answer to officers; that transgressors were never to be brought to trials; that irreconcilibles were never to be excluded? Remember that Christ is not here talking of church discipline at all, but of the great world-field into which the children of the Kingdom and the children of the adversary are to continue to be sown, and to stand side by side and to bear their respective fruits, and to do silent battle ‘till He send forth His angels to cut short the work by gathering degenerates to judgment. This is Christ’s protest against coercion in the name of Christianity; and this is Christ’s repudiation for the post-millennial philosophy that the Kingdom will speedily come through social reconstruction, ethical philosophy, and moral reformation. On the one hand, the Kingdom will never come by the proclamation of the Evangel. The King Himself must come and exalt righteousness and bring unrighteousness to judgment. At the close of summer, there comes a season when the wheat can be separated from the chaff; when the one can be gathered into barns and the other assigned to the flames; so will there be a harvest in the end of the world, when Christ, by His angels, shall gather out His own and judge His opponents. The Christian’s conquest!“Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the Kingdom of their Father”. There are those who upon every observation on the battle between light and darkness, sin and righteousness, the Saviour and Satan, grow discouraged and become pessimistic. They believe that the battle has gone against the Church of God already, and that eventually it will go against the Christian faith, and against Christian fellowship—the cohorts of God. There is no danger! “Prophecy is the mould of history!” The defeat of the devil is as certain today as is the destiny of the Son of Man; the overthrow of His followers as sure as the march of time! The consummation of the age will see the conquest of Christ and His hosts, and it will be complete. In the struggle between light and darkness, life and death, the Son of Man and the Satan of the centuries, the victories shall be to the former. Monkhouse, in his magnificent sonnet, depicts the battle after this manner: “From morn to eve they struggle—Life and Death, At first it seemed to me that they in mirth Contended, and as foes of equal worth, So firm their feet, so undisturbed their breath. “But when the sharp red sun cut through its sheath Of western clouds, I saw the brown arm’s girth Tighten and bear that radiant form to earth, And suddenly both fell upon the heath. “And then the wonder came; for when I fled To where those great antagonists down fell, I could not find the body that I sought, And when and where it went, I could not tell; One only form was left of those who fought, The long dark form of Death—and it was dead”. “Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the Kingdom of their Father”. It is the day of the mighty conquest of the Son of God, and “the manifestation of the sons of God”.THE KINGDOM—. In passing from the parable of the tares to that of the mustard seed, we have our attention turned from the Kingdom—Opposition, to the Kingdom— Apostasy. I am compelled to consent with those who so interpret this parable as to bring it largely into line with its predecessors—the parable of the sower, and the parable of the tares. To be sure, it suggests the rapid and even the unexpected growth of the Kingdom, but it also hints that in that very growth is a sign of weakness rather than of strength, of conflict rather than conquest. We believe it is not straining of Scripture to see in this parable the fungus growth, the false appearance and the foul lodgers. The fungus growth! Campbell Morgan insists that it is unusual for the mustard seed to become a tree; and yet admits that there are exceptional instances. It is unusual for cotton to become trees, but it does so, south of the frost-line. Credible writers declare that in hot countries, with moist atmospheres and rich soil, mustard, like cotton, becomes a perennial; and instances are even cited in which a man’s weight could be supported by the branches; and in the season of its fruitage, birds flocked into it both to feed and rest. The church—the Kingdom in embryo—starting from the first disciples of Jesus, small indeed in pretence and prophecy, found itself at the end of the first century an institution of might, and in the fourth century, under Constantine, sent its branches into all the world. And whatever may be said concerning the genuine growth and progress marking the first century, few thoughtful folk outside of Rome could be found who would approve the ample proportions of the fourth century church—proposed as a world-kingdom. It was only because that seed of the Pseudo-Kingdom was fertilized with the world’s wealth, and enveloped with the world’s atmosphere, and cultivated by the world’s husbandman, that it took on such proportions, and by its very growth brought its own name into disrepute, and raised the question as to its genuine character. The false appearance! The mustard under certain circumstances, assumed to be more than it was. It belongs to the herbs; its very texture is not woody; and yet, its pretence is that of a tree. It professes what it does not possess. The phraseology of religion at the present moment falls into the same hypocrisy. Men talk glibly of “the Kingdom of God”, praise its proportions, reckon up its millions of subjects, prophesy its speedy conquest on the last continent and island, and all with a show, but without the substance, of truth. There is no such Kingdom. There is not even a Christian nation in the world!

Every time you speak of one such, you coerce language. There are nations partially civilized by the touch of Christianity; but even in these, the majority are outside of the church, and the overwhelming majority have no kinship to the Kingdom of God. The three or four hundred millions of people who are in the professing church would be terribly reduced in number if there were applied any Christian test. The so-called Christian governments of the world, in their greed of territory, and in their conscienceless commerce, are illustrating a new cannibalism, more refined, perhaps, but not less consuming than that of the old savagery. R. F.

Horton, the higher critic, is hardly chargeable with chiliasm, and yet, he says, “The sorrow of history is the comparative rareness of humanity in it”. And he adds, “Our own government is partially humane because it is partially Christian.

Some faint aroma of justice and mercy and truth is in our state apartments because the Son of Man has passed through them”. The same writer remarked, “Heaven is a state in which the will of God is entirely done; and earth is a place in which the will of God is habitually violated”. The present constituted society is, as Trench remarks, “like that of the ark, where unclean and clean mingle; like that of the pasture, the goats and the sheep are together; like that of the threshing floor, the chaff and the grain are mixed; like that of the field, the tares and the wheat growing together”. At present, it is like the mustard seed, tree-like in appearance, but weed-like in nature and character. The foul lodgers,“The birds of heaven come and lodge in the branches thereof’. There are two interpretations of this sentence, both of which, in my judgment, are correct. One set of teachers see in this sentence the beautiful shadowing and sustaining character of the Church of God. The world’s needy may find a refuge in it, be sheltered and fed by it; and some have even reminded us that the mustard seed is more than food; it is medicine. Thereby they have made their appeal that the church recognize its social obligations, and intelligently enter into the discharge of them. Another class of interpreters say, “No, birds in the preceding parable were agents of the adversary, and in other parts of Scripture, are commonly described as “unclean”, and the sentence suggests the great fact that the Church of God essaying to be a world-kingdom has been taken possession of by the unregenerate, who build their foul nests in its branches and bring up their broods under its shadow, and turn its beneficent character to the ends of commercial advantage, so that church-membership and corporate wealth are related the one to the other as birds are related to the hospitable, fruitful boughs. Both are correct! The Kingdom of God, so far as it voices itself at all in that Church, which is preparing the way for it, should be a refuge to the world’s needy, clean or unclean. Jesus Christ was no canting Pharisee. He hesitated not to stretch out His hand of help to even the demonized; and He drew not His skirts about Him when the strange woman sought His counsel and begged His forgiveness. The Church of God that does not provide for the “downs and outs”, the branches of which suggest neither lodging nor food, nor medicine for the world’s children, is a poor representative of the Christ who “received sinners”, and did more than “eat with them”; He fed, counselled and healed them. Truly, as Bruce remarks, “The choice few are to seek the good of the many; the fit are to strive to help the unfit. This is their special vocation, and when they cease to do it, they themselves become useless and reprobate!” Yet the other interpretation is equally and even more true. The very methods by which men in modern times have been rapidly increasing the growth of the church, are calculated to call the world into its membership, so that the unregenerate, in the interests of social standing and for the sake of commercial advantage, are joining themselves to the same. A minister told me that he had lost three of his best families to a wealthy neighboring church of the same denomination; that they had deliberately pulled them off through social functions, which tempted women whose husbands were men of moderate means, by offering them a fellowship with the wives of millionaires. This gives an appearance of the coming of the Kingdom, but no promise of it, save as it is a part of the apostasy that is to characterize the consummation of the age. THE KINGDOM-.The third and fourth of these field parables look to the Kingdom purchase—the purchase of the hid treasure and the peerless pearl of great price. The hid treasure!“Again, 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”. A part of this parable has been interpreted for us already. The field is the world; the man is Christ; the price paid is His precious Blood. But what is the treasure hid? Sometimes God hides from the wise and prudent that which He proposes to show to babes. I have read within the week from the pens of almost a dozen men attempting the interpretation of the hid treasure. Many of them were great men, but I found from the pen of one of less learning and less pretense the most intelligent interpretation, namely, that “Israel is the hid treasure”. Again and again in the Old Testament, she is called “God’s treasure”, and that she is hidden away now, in the nations, neither students of history nor prophecy can possibly dispute; and that Christ paid the price of His life for the whole world, knowing that by so doing He could win, first of all, His own, dearer to Him than all others—the treasure, the very attractions of which brought Him from Heaven to earth, is the truth of many a text. Let one read Jeremiah 32:37-42, and let him ponder Ezekiel 37:21-25, and listen to the Psalmist while he sings also (Psalms 135:4),“For the Lord hath chosen Israel for His peculiar treasure” (Exodus 19:5). Paul loved his people with all the ardor of a Jew, and he could say, “I could wish myself accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites”. But Christ loved them even better, and He put His all upon the altar that they might be saved. The peerless pearl! “Again the Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a merchant seeking goodly pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it”. The jewels of Jesus will come out of the Gentile world. If the converts of Paul were his “joy and his rejoicing”, the Gentile converts to Christ shall shine forth with a brilliance beyond the sun in that day when He makes up His jewels. Truly one is justified in changing the hymn and making it read not “I’ve found the pearl of greatest price, My heart doth sing for joy”, but rather, “He found the pearl of greatest price, My heart doth sing for joy, And sing I must for I am His And He is mine for aye”. The price paid in each of these purchases is the same: For the hid treasure “all that he hath”; for the goodly pearl, “all that he had”. When Christ redeemed Israel, it took “all that He had”; when Christ redeemed the Gentile world, it cost “all that He had”. The purchases are not two different ones made at different times; they are the same purchase! “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son”, and Christ so loved the world that “He gave Himself”, and the world is “the Jew and the Gentile”. This purchase was not the barter of a man who was buying something from the Adversary, for Satan never owned the world. As its God, he is a usurper; and the transaction is not that of a son, who is trying to come into the selfish possession as against his father’s ownership, for, from the beginning, the world has belonged to Jesus. He made it. “Without Him was not anything made that was made”. This buying back, then, is the barter of the goel—precious purchase of redemption. In the Old Testament, when for any reason whatever, an estate was lost to the household, the son who was able to redeem it, did so; or if the members of a family went into slavery, the relative who could accomplish it, paid the price of their freedom. Oh, what a Son in the house of our Father, and what a kinsman in the Christ of Calvary!

When my Heavenly estate was forfeited absolutely and I was in spiritual bankruptcy; yea, when I had fallen into the power of the enemy and was stripped of my citizenship, destroyed and stained, He appeared as my kinsman to pay the price and make me free. He is the Goel; He is the Redeemer! Truly, as one says, “His very Name delivers a message and it is this: dark, defiled, demon-haunted spirit, black with venom and despair; you, the worst of men, you are a man, therefore the Son of Man does not despair of you. Rather, He has set His heart on saving you. He has come to seek and to save that which is lost”. Herein is the ground of our hope, the occasion of our confidence, the answer to our need, the redemption from our defilement, the release from our captivity, the establishment of our citizenship in the Kingdom, the pledge of our eternal heritage with Him who loved us and gave Himself for us. Len Broughton tells of a friend he knew in youth who was always seeking, but could never find the Lord. On one occasion, Dr. Broughton went back to preach in the country neighborhood. This young man rushed up to him, flung his arms about him and expressed his joy in seeing him again, and Dr. Broughton said, “You are to spend the night with me”, and he said, “No, I must go back home to my wife and children”. “Well, just send word you are going to spend the night with me. He did so, and we went back into the old room where we used to frolic in bed at night, where we had kicked each other out of bed a hundred times.

There in that old bed, once more boys, I said to him, “Have you ever found Jesus?” He hesitated a moment before he said, “No!” “Have you continued to seek Him?” “Yes, and I expect to be seeking Him until I die! I will never give up”.

I said, “Why haven’t you found Him?” “I do not know! I have thought of your being a preacher and wondered why it was that I just could not find Jesus. I have tried as hard as you ever did and as hard as anybody ever did”. I said, “Will you let me tell you the secret of it?” “Yes, if you can”. “You have not found Jesus because you have not realized the fact that all this time and even before you began to seek Jesus, He was seeking you”. It didn’t take hold of him at first. He asked me some questions about it, and I put it to him again. “Jesus is seeking you. He came to this world to seek and to save that which was lost. Are you lost?” “Of course I am”. “Well, He is seeking you, instead of your seeking Him; you have been running from Him, thinking that you were seeking Him.

You were seeking something else besides Jesus. You have been seeking feeling; you have been seeking somebody else’s experience. Jesus has been seeking you; now stop running after experience and let Jesus find you right here and now”. I gave him John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten San, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life”. In a moment or two I felt an arm slip around my neck and he began to cry; but it was not the cry of the seeker; it was the rejoicing cry of the saved. There in that bed, where we had frolicked in childhood days, he stopped running after an experience and simply let Jesus find him.

Matthew 13:44-46

THE FOUR OF THE FIELD Matthew 13:24-30; Matthew 13:36-40; Matthew 13:31-32; Matthew 13:44-46.THE ministry of Jesus Christ was matchless in many ways. His words so amazed men that they said, “Never man spake like this Man”; His works so impressed them that they remarked, “We never saw it on this wise”; and His ministry was so many-sided that it seemed inexplicable, and in astonishment, they asked, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Joseph?”A few years ago, two of our greatest theological seminaries came into prominent debate. One of them proudly affirmed itself engaged in the larger task of making men ready for the metropolitan pastorates of America, and the other insisted that it was seeking to equip men for any station to which they might be called, high or low, communities of culture or of comparative ignorance, city-centers or country-districts. The latter had evidently undertaken the larger task. The man who is equally adapted to open country and crowded city; the man who can compel audience in either place, is the unusual man— the Spurgeon of his century, the Moody of the moment. Only the truly great can easily adapt themselves to violent changes and varying circumstances. The centuries have known no man who had such messages for the metropolis as did the Man from Nazareth, and yet, perhaps, the greater portion of His ministry was given to the open country, and to the industrial classes. He went to the men in the fields and taught them the greatest moral truths by employing the parables of the field. To four of these we call attention today: the Parable of the Tares, the Parable of the Mustard Seed, the Parable of the Hid Treasure, and the Pearl of Great Price. In these four we find no disconnected argument, but a logical exposition of the Kingdom of God. The first presents The Kingdom—Opposition; the second, The Kingdom—Apostasy; and the third and fourth, The Kingdom—Purchase. THE KINGDOM—.Matthew 13:24-30. This parable, like that of the sower, Christ interpreted to His disciples (Matthew 13:36-43), and thereby provided us with the second illustration of how to interpret parables. By this interpretation He gives such an exposition of the Kingdom-Opposition as clearly reveals the contending forces, the continued conflict, and the Christian’s conquest. The contending forces! The Son of Man on the one side; Satan on the other. The children of the Kingdom on the one side; the children of the wicked one on the other. These indeed are the Captains and armies of all centuries. By comparison, they dwarf to insignificance those that have ever assembled under any other leaders, or for that matter, all other leaders; or contended for any other, or all other fields; or fought over any other, or all other subjects of division. John Milton, in his “Paradise Lost” sees the beginning of this battle in rebellion raised in heaven by him who “set himself in glory beyond his peers, and trusted to have equalled the most High if He opposed; who, with ambitious aim, raised impious war in heaven and battle proud”.

But it took a Christ to properly depict it. What war! The whole world as the prize of the contention! The Son of God, and all good men on one side; Satan and his every duped subject on the other! Christ’s interpretation of this parable is a death-knell of a good deal of New Theology! “The universal Fatherhood of God” is not found here! Men are divided into two camps rather, “the children of the Kingdom”, and “the children of the wicked one”. The first, begotten of God’s own will, by the Word of Truth (James 1:18), and made “good seed”, children of God by being “born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the Word of God” (1 Peter 1:23). The second are of “their father, the devil” (John 8:44), not alone because “conceived and shapen in iniquity”, but by the wilful choice, having made Beelzebub their Captain. Christ’s interpretation of this parable is a blow to “the universal brotherhood” of which men speak. “The children of the Kingdom” and “the children of the wicked one”, while they may be of one blood in natural generation, are made to be of altogether different spirit by the regeneration of the former and the degeneration of the latter. We meet people quite often who tell us they see very little difference between the members of the professing church and the men and women of the world. To this it is sufficient to reply, first of all, that the phrase “the professing church” is not identical with the phrase “the children of God”. And second, the tares and wheat look much alike, to a certain point, but when the tares bloom, then they become not only distinguishable, but prove themselves possessed of a peculiar poison which is borne about over the true wheat destroying even its fruitage. So it is in the Kingdom of God! The blight of many a Christian’s life, the loss of many a believer’s power is directly traceable to his too-close contact with the opposition. That is why the Apostle Paul wrote: “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers, for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness, and what communion hath light with darkness. And what concord hath Christ with Belial, or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?” Little wonder that he quotes his Lord as saying, “Come ye out from among them and be ye separate”. The continued conflict! The contention of these forces is not for a day. Satan will not easily quit the field; the Son of Man will never surrender. The children of the Kingdom multiply; the children of the wicked one increase. No Christian rightly estimates the enemy if he believes that a generation will see the whole world Christianized by present methods; and the Haeckel-Atheist, who thinks that tomorrow will witness the surrender of the “faith once for all delivered”, the repudiation of “the Bible”, and the collapse of the church, is so puny a seer as to be the subject of scornful pity. When Satan undertook the capture of the world, he originated a conflict, the continuance and end of which he himself could scarcely have dreamed.

It is easier to raise rebellion than it is to bring it to an end; it is easier to start war than it is to proclaim peace; it is easier to produce weeds than to grow wheat; but the harvest of the former is frightful to contemplate. Phillip and Edward III could go to battle over throne and crown, but all their followers could not produce peace, or even keep treaties when once they had been made; and so for 116 years, from 1337 to 1453, long after both these men had lain in their graves, the battles waxed and war between France and England went on. Think also of the thirty years’ war, shorter in duration, but more extensive in territory. It involved Austria; it reached England; it covered Holland; it affected Saxony; it swept to Spain; it compassed Switzerland and Sweden; in fact, the known world was caught in its sanguinary swirl. But what are the 116 years beside the thousands on thousands in which the forces of this parable have been in conflict; and what is battle in a dozen of the little states of Europe as compared with the battle that has been waged on every continent and in every island between Christ and the good seed on the one side, and the devil and every degenerate follower on the other? There are those who would make short work of this. They would turn the trick of the Turk and put to death those who did not agree with them; or of the Papist and shed the blood of all such as spoke not their shibboleth; or even as the Protestants who sent to the stake Servetus and his allies. But their conduct is not of the Christ, “Let both grow together until the harvest”.What did Christ mean then, that the church was not to engage in discipline at all; that the unruly were not to answer to officers; that transgressors were never to be brought to trials; that irreconcilibles were never to be excluded? Remember that Christ is not here talking of church discipline at all, but of the great world-field into which the children of the Kingdom and the children of the adversary are to continue to be sown, and to stand side by side and to bear their respective fruits, and to do silent battle ‘till He send forth His angels to cut short the work by gathering degenerates to judgment. This is Christ’s protest against coercion in the name of Christianity; and this is Christ’s repudiation for the post-millennial philosophy that the Kingdom will speedily come through social reconstruction, ethical philosophy, and moral reformation. On the one hand, the Kingdom will never come by the proclamation of the Evangel. The King Himself must come and exalt righteousness and bring unrighteousness to judgment. At the close of summer, there comes a season when the wheat can be separated from the chaff; when the one can be gathered into barns and the other assigned to the flames; so will there be a harvest in the end of the world, when Christ, by His angels, shall gather out His own and judge His opponents. The Christian’s conquest!“Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the Kingdom of their Father”. There are those who upon every observation on the battle between light and darkness, sin and righteousness, the Saviour and Satan, grow discouraged and become pessimistic. They believe that the battle has gone against the Church of God already, and that eventually it will go against the Christian faith, and against Christian fellowship—the cohorts of God. There is no danger! “Prophecy is the mould of history!” The defeat of the devil is as certain today as is the destiny of the Son of Man; the overthrow of His followers as sure as the march of time! The consummation of the age will see the conquest of Christ and His hosts, and it will be complete. In the struggle between light and darkness, life and death, the Son of Man and the Satan of the centuries, the victories shall be to the former. Monkhouse, in his magnificent sonnet, depicts the battle after this manner: “From morn to eve they struggle—Life and Death, At first it seemed to me that they in mirth Contended, and as foes of equal worth, So firm their feet, so undisturbed their breath. “But when the sharp red sun cut through its sheath Of western clouds, I saw the brown arm’s girth Tighten and bear that radiant form to earth, And suddenly both fell upon the heath. “And then the wonder came; for when I fled To where those great antagonists down fell, I could not find the body that I sought, And when and where it went, I could not tell; One only form was left of those who fought, The long dark form of Death—and it was dead”. “Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the Kingdom of their Father”. It is the day of the mighty conquest of the Son of God, and “the manifestation of the sons of God”.THE KINGDOM—. In passing from the parable of the tares to that of the mustard seed, we have our attention turned from the Kingdom—Opposition, to the Kingdom— Apostasy. I am compelled to consent with those who so interpret this parable as to bring it largely into line with its predecessors—the parable of the sower, and the parable of the tares. To be sure, it suggests the rapid and even the unexpected growth of the Kingdom, but it also hints that in that very growth is a sign of weakness rather than of strength, of conflict rather than conquest. We believe it is not straining of Scripture to see in this parable the fungus growth, the false appearance and the foul lodgers. The fungus growth! Campbell Morgan insists that it is unusual for the mustard seed to become a tree; and yet admits that there are exceptional instances. It is unusual for cotton to become trees, but it does so, south of the frost-line. Credible writers declare that in hot countries, with moist atmospheres and rich soil, mustard, like cotton, becomes a perennial; and instances are even cited in which a man’s weight could be supported by the branches; and in the season of its fruitage, birds flocked into it both to feed and rest. The church—the Kingdom in embryo—starting from the first disciples of Jesus, small indeed in pretence and prophecy, found itself at the end of the first century an institution of might, and in the fourth century, under Constantine, sent its branches into all the world. And whatever may be said concerning the genuine growth and progress marking the first century, few thoughtful folk outside of Rome could be found who would approve the ample proportions of the fourth century church—proposed as a world-kingdom. It was only because that seed of the Pseudo-Kingdom was fertilized with the world’s wealth, and enveloped with the world’s atmosphere, and cultivated by the world’s husbandman, that it took on such proportions, and by its very growth brought its own name into disrepute, and raised the question as to its genuine character. The false appearance! The mustard under certain circumstances, assumed to be more than it was. It belongs to the herbs; its very texture is not woody; and yet, its pretence is that of a tree. It professes what it does not possess. The phraseology of religion at the present moment falls into the same hypocrisy. Men talk glibly of “the Kingdom of God”, praise its proportions, reckon up its millions of subjects, prophesy its speedy conquest on the last continent and island, and all with a show, but without the substance, of truth. There is no such Kingdom. There is not even a Christian nation in the world!

Every time you speak of one such, you coerce language. There are nations partially civilized by the touch of Christianity; but even in these, the majority are outside of the church, and the overwhelming majority have no kinship to the Kingdom of God. The three or four hundred millions of people who are in the professing church would be terribly reduced in number if there were applied any Christian test. The so-called Christian governments of the world, in their greed of territory, and in their conscienceless commerce, are illustrating a new cannibalism, more refined, perhaps, but not less consuming than that of the old savagery. R. F.

Horton, the higher critic, is hardly chargeable with chiliasm, and yet, he says, “The sorrow of history is the comparative rareness of humanity in it”. And he adds, “Our own government is partially humane because it is partially Christian.

Some faint aroma of justice and mercy and truth is in our state apartments because the Son of Man has passed through them”. The same writer remarked, “Heaven is a state in which the will of God is entirely done; and earth is a place in which the will of God is habitually violated”. The present constituted society is, as Trench remarks, “like that of the ark, where unclean and clean mingle; like that of the pasture, the goats and the sheep are together; like that of the threshing floor, the chaff and the grain are mixed; like that of the field, the tares and the wheat growing together”. At present, it is like the mustard seed, tree-like in appearance, but weed-like in nature and character. The foul lodgers,“The birds of heaven come and lodge in the branches thereof’. There are two interpretations of this sentence, both of which, in my judgment, are correct. One set of teachers see in this sentence the beautiful shadowing and sustaining character of the Church of God. The world’s needy may find a refuge in it, be sheltered and fed by it; and some have even reminded us that the mustard seed is more than food; it is medicine. Thereby they have made their appeal that the church recognize its social obligations, and intelligently enter into the discharge of them. Another class of interpreters say, “No, birds in the preceding parable were agents of the adversary, and in other parts of Scripture, are commonly described as “unclean”, and the sentence suggests the great fact that the Church of God essaying to be a world-kingdom has been taken possession of by the unregenerate, who build their foul nests in its branches and bring up their broods under its shadow, and turn its beneficent character to the ends of commercial advantage, so that church-membership and corporate wealth are related the one to the other as birds are related to the hospitable, fruitful boughs. Both are correct! The Kingdom of God, so far as it voices itself at all in that Church, which is preparing the way for it, should be a refuge to the world’s needy, clean or unclean. Jesus Christ was no canting Pharisee. He hesitated not to stretch out His hand of help to even the demonized; and He drew not His skirts about Him when the strange woman sought His counsel and begged His forgiveness. The Church of God that does not provide for the “downs and outs”, the branches of which suggest neither lodging nor food, nor medicine for the world’s children, is a poor representative of the Christ who “received sinners”, and did more than “eat with them”; He fed, counselled and healed them. Truly, as Bruce remarks, “The choice few are to seek the good of the many; the fit are to strive to help the unfit. This is their special vocation, and when they cease to do it, they themselves become useless and reprobate!” Yet the other interpretation is equally and even more true. The very methods by which men in modern times have been rapidly increasing the growth of the church, are calculated to call the world into its membership, so that the unregenerate, in the interests of social standing and for the sake of commercial advantage, are joining themselves to the same. A minister told me that he had lost three of his best families to a wealthy neighboring church of the same denomination; that they had deliberately pulled them off through social functions, which tempted women whose husbands were men of moderate means, by offering them a fellowship with the wives of millionaires. This gives an appearance of the coming of the Kingdom, but no promise of it, save as it is a part of the apostasy that is to characterize the consummation of the age. THE KINGDOM-.The third and fourth of these field parables look to the Kingdom purchase—the purchase of the hid treasure and the peerless pearl of great price. The hid treasure!“Again, 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”. A part of this parable has been interpreted for us already. The field is the world; the man is Christ; the price paid is His precious Blood. But what is the treasure hid? Sometimes God hides from the wise and prudent that which He proposes to show to babes. I have read within the week from the pens of almost a dozen men attempting the interpretation of the hid treasure. Many of them were great men, but I found from the pen of one of less learning and less pretense the most intelligent interpretation, namely, that “Israel is the hid treasure”. Again and again in the Old Testament, she is called “God’s treasure”, and that she is hidden away now, in the nations, neither students of history nor prophecy can possibly dispute; and that Christ paid the price of His life for the whole world, knowing that by so doing He could win, first of all, His own, dearer to Him than all others—the treasure, the very attractions of which brought Him from Heaven to earth, is the truth of many a text. Let one read Jeremiah 32:37-42, and let him ponder Ezekiel 37:21-25, and listen to the Psalmist while he sings also (Psalms 135:4),“For the Lord hath chosen Israel for His peculiar treasure” (Exodus 19:5). Paul loved his people with all the ardor of a Jew, and he could say, “I could wish myself accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites”. But Christ loved them even better, and He put His all upon the altar that they might be saved. The peerless pearl! “Again the Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a merchant seeking goodly pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it”. The jewels of Jesus will come out of the Gentile world. If the converts of Paul were his “joy and his rejoicing”, the Gentile converts to Christ shall shine forth with a brilliance beyond the sun in that day when He makes up His jewels. Truly one is justified in changing the hymn and making it read not “I’ve found the pearl of greatest price, My heart doth sing for joy”, but rather, “He found the pearl of greatest price, My heart doth sing for joy, And sing I must for I am His And He is mine for aye”. The price paid in each of these purchases is the same: For the hid treasure “all that he hath”; for the goodly pearl, “all that he had”. When Christ redeemed Israel, it took “all that He had”; when Christ redeemed the Gentile world, it cost “all that He had”. The purchases are not two different ones made at different times; they are the same purchase! “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son”, and Christ so loved the world that “He gave Himself”, and the world is “the Jew and the Gentile”. This purchase was not the barter of a man who was buying something from the Adversary, for Satan never owned the world. As its God, he is a usurper; and the transaction is not that of a son, who is trying to come into the selfish possession as against his father’s ownership, for, from the beginning, the world has belonged to Jesus. He made it. “Without Him was not anything made that was made”. This buying back, then, is the barter of the goel—precious purchase of redemption. In the Old Testament, when for any reason whatever, an estate was lost to the household, the son who was able to redeem it, did so; or if the members of a family went into slavery, the relative who could accomplish it, paid the price of their freedom. Oh, what a Son in the house of our Father, and what a kinsman in the Christ of Calvary!

When my Heavenly estate was forfeited absolutely and I was in spiritual bankruptcy; yea, when I had fallen into the power of the enemy and was stripped of my citizenship, destroyed and stained, He appeared as my kinsman to pay the price and make me free. He is the Goel; He is the Redeemer! Truly, as one says, “His very Name delivers a message and it is this: dark, defiled, demon-haunted spirit, black with venom and despair; you, the worst of men, you are a man, therefore the Son of Man does not despair of you. Rather, He has set His heart on saving you. He has come to seek and to save that which is lost”. Herein is the ground of our hope, the occasion of our confidence, the answer to our need, the redemption from our defilement, the release from our captivity, the establishment of our citizenship in the Kingdom, the pledge of our eternal heritage with Him who loved us and gave Himself for us. Len Broughton tells of a friend he knew in youth who was always seeking, but could never find the Lord. On one occasion, Dr. Broughton went back to preach in the country neighborhood. This young man rushed up to him, flung his arms about him and expressed his joy in seeing him again, and Dr. Broughton said, “You are to spend the night with me”, and he said, “No, I must go back home to my wife and children”. “Well, just send word you are going to spend the night with me. He did so, and we went back into the old room where we used to frolic in bed at night, where we had kicked each other out of bed a hundred times.

There in that old bed, once more boys, I said to him, “Have you ever found Jesus?” He hesitated a moment before he said, “No!” “Have you continued to seek Him?” “Yes, and I expect to be seeking Him until I die! I will never give up”.

I said, “Why haven’t you found Him?” “I do not know! I have thought of your being a preacher and wondered why it was that I just could not find Jesus. I have tried as hard as you ever did and as hard as anybody ever did”. I said, “Will you let me tell you the secret of it?” “Yes, if you can”. “You have not found Jesus because you have not realized the fact that all this time and even before you began to seek Jesus, He was seeking you”. It didn’t take hold of him at first. He asked me some questions about it, and I put it to him again. “Jesus is seeking you. He came to this world to seek and to save that which was lost. Are you lost?” “Of course I am”. “Well, He is seeking you, instead of your seeking Him; you have been running from Him, thinking that you were seeking Him.

You were seeking something else besides Jesus. You have been seeking feeling; you have been seeking somebody else’s experience. Jesus has been seeking you; now stop running after experience and let Jesus find you right here and now”. I gave him John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten San, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life”. In a moment or two I felt an arm slip around my neck and he began to cry; but it was not the cry of the seeker; it was the rejoicing cry of the saved. There in that bed, where we had frolicked in childhood days, he stopped running after an experience and simply let Jesus find him.

Matthew 13:47-52

THE OF THE LEAVEN, FISH NET AND Matthew 13:13-33; Matthew 13:47-52THE three parables, of the leaven, the fish net, and the householder, are in the thirteenth of Matthew. That interpretation which brings their teaching into line with the lessons from their five sister parables, appeals to us as the one that has the weight of evidence in its favor. The fact that such an interpretation is unpopular with Bible students is no positive proof against its correctness, since upon many subjects a multitude of teachers have gone astray.What are the lessons from the leaven? What are the facts to be gleaned from the fish net? What are the hints to be had from the householder?LESSONS FROM THE LEAVEN. “Another parable spake He unto them; The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened” (Matthew 13:33).The common rule for interpreting Scripture is to compare Scripture with Scripture; and the way to find out the meaning of a Biblical word is to search the sacred records for its uses, and learn from them the evident intent of its employment.The word “leaven” is known to both the Old and New Testaments. It uniformly suggests “evil”. Its effect, as is well known, is fermentation, another name for decay or corruption. It was on this account that the law of the Lord concerning the great passover feast in Israel was,“Seven days shall ye eat unleavened bread; even the first day ye shall put away leaven out of your houses: for whosoever eateth leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that soul shall be cut off from Israel” (Exodus 12:15).It is a well-known fact that the meal-offering of the Old Testament, the very thing to which the three measures of meal here refer, was prescribed after this manner,“No meal offering, which ye shall bring unto the Lord, shall be made with leaven” (Leviticus 2:11). “This is the law of the meat offering * * it shall not be baken with leaven” (Leviticus 6:14; Leviticus 6:17).The New Testament use of the word conforms to this Old Testament conception. The Master warns His disciples, “Beware of the leaven of the Sadducees and Pharisees”. Mark adds to this report the “leaven of unrighteousness”.

Luke reports Jesus as having defined His own phrase “the leaven of the Pharisees” after this manner: “which is hypocrisy”. Paul, in his First Epistle to the Corinthians, condemns the fornicator, demands that such be delivered over to the judgment, saying,“Your glorying is not good.

Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump? Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us: therefore, let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. I wrote unto you in an Epistle not to company with fornicators” (1 Corinthians 5:6-9).Addressing himself to the Galatian Church, he opposed the imposition of Jewish ceremonies upon Gentile converts, announcing the same as a return to the law of falling away from grace, adding, “This persuasion cometh not of him that calleth you and illustrating, “A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump”. We are not, therefore, to read this parable with a period after the word leaven—“the Kingdom of Heaven is like unto leaven”, but, rather, as the Word puts it, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal until the whole was leavened”, and then ask the questions, What is the Biblical use of the word “woman” in such connection? What is the Divine thought in the meal offering of the Old Testament?

And what is the Biblical suggestion of the introduction of leaven into the same?In answer to these, Campbell Morgan says, correctly, as we think, “The woman is the type of authority and management; leaven, the emblem of disintegration and corruption; the meal, the symbol of service and fellowship”.And to bring the Biblical use of these terms before us is to have our attention called again to three things: The mal-administration of the church, The mixed character of modern Christianity, and The miserly consecration of professed Christians.The mal-administration of the Church. On what grounds does Campbell Morgan say the woman here is “the type of authority and management”?

First of all, on natural grounds. The woman is commonly queen in the home, and the family and society look to her for the administration of purely household affairs. In Scripture, she is made by the prophet Zechariah (Zechariah 5:5-11), the administrator of the false religion also; and strange to say, the woman beheld in his vision is seen, first of all, in an ephah, or the flour measure; and also, with another of her kind, “the ephah is borne between them to a shinar, where it is to be set up in a sanctuary”— a suggestion of idolatry.Do you not recall, also, how in the apocalyptic vision, John beholds a “woman sitting upon a scarlet colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones, and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand, but full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication”,etc., and when he comes to interpret, he says,“The woman which thou sawest is that great city which hath a kingdom over the kings of the earth”.It is a remarkable circumstance that woman, who was made of God, not to be administrator, but subservient in the home, whenever she leaves her Divinely-appointed sphere, becomes at once the symbol of usurpation and social and religious confusion. Eve was created of God and put into the Garden of Eden, and the revelation of the Divine will was given her by Adam, the husband and man of the house, and when she accepted another, and essayed to teach the same, communion with God was broken, and intellectual and moral confusion resulted; and to say the least, it is a significant thing that in these latter times, so full of suggestion of the approaching end of the age, woman should again appear in the ascendancy as religious spokesman, and that such false philosophies as have been preached into the world by the Fox sisters, Mrs. Oliphant, and Mary Baker Eddy, should find a following, create false churches, and enfeeble the faith of the many. Paul, when he wrote to the Corinthians, enjoining silence upon their women, was not so much insisting that a woman should refrain from telling her personal experiences of the grace of God, or publishing the good news of a sufficient Saviour; but, rather, inveighing against the attempt upon the part of his sisters to administer in the Church of God at a time when she was passing through divisions and difficulties. No more important subject ever engages the minds of saints than that of church administration.

A properly administered church enjoys the unity of the spirit, exercises the diversity of gifts, profoundly impresses the world, and equally pleases God! Mal-administration, on the other hand, makes for divisions, results in schisms, incites the world’s scorn, and invites the Saviour’s judgment.But we have also said that the leaven was at work in three measures of meal.The mixed character of modern Christianity.

Three measures of meal, without leaven, made up the acceptable offering to God. That was according to His own Word. But the least leaven introduced vitiated their sacred employment. The thing that keeps our modern Christianity from being wholly acceptable to the Lord, is the world’s leaven working its way in Christian experience and devitalizing the church-membership. Campbell Morgan says a brave thing, and a much-needed thing, when in the “Parables of the Kingdom” he speaks after this manner: “I am often told today—told seriously— that what the Church of God needs in order to succeed is to catch the spirit of the age. I reply that the Church of God only succeeds in proportion as she corrects the spirit of the age.

I am told that if I am to succeed in Christian work, I must adopt the methods of the world. Then, by God’s help, I will be defeated.

We are not in the world to borrow the world’s maxims and spirit. The world would crucify Jesus as readily now as nineteen centuries ago. The Cross is no more popular in the world today than when men nailed Him to it on the green hill outside the city gate nineteen centuries ago”.This is the explanation of much of church failure. When the Israel of the Old Testament effected an alliance with her heathen neighbors, she lost out with God; and when the strictest Jew agreed with his Gentile neighbors upon a compound of religion, he shortly found himself without a laver of cleansing, a table of shew bread, an altar of sacrifice, or a holy of holies; and modern Israel, containing as it does the seeds of the kingdom, fares no better when it is “unequally yoked together with unbelievers”, or finds “its fellowship with the unrighteous”, or brings “its temple into agreement with idols”.In this twentieth century condition one finds the explanation of the next suggestion, namely,A miserly consecration to God’s service. It will be remembered that the meal offering was one wholly consumed upon the altar of the Lord, a suggestion of both perfect and complete consecration in service and fellowship. Who says that complete consecration is not the sorest need of the hour, and for that matter, of every hour of this age of the church?

Separation unto the Lord is the secret of successful service, and that is true, whether the service be one of devotion or duty, of prayer or power, of availing with God or prevailing with men. Truly Abraham and Lot are illustrations of both sides of this statement.

Abraham was an uncompromising servant of God, and Lot was a believer—enamored of the world’s enticements, satisfied with the world’s standards, succeeding by the world’s methods. But when some one must intercede for Sodom, though Lot was its mayor, he had no ability whatever to keep it from the burning, nor even to delay its destruction; but Abraham, the man who walked with God, and whose back was upon the world, won with God, and stayed the flames of judgment until his politically important, yet spiritually poor nephew, could be drawn from the streets of the same by angel hands.Consecration is commonly looked upon as the first duty of the forgiven soul; but let us not forget that it is also that soul’s highest privilege. It is a fact that we belong to God, and ought to give to Him all of self; but it is equally a fact that such consecration best releases our powers and lifts us to office and honor. Truly, as one has written, “We offer burnt offering on the great altar of God when we give ourselves lovingly and wholeheartedly to His service”. Wendell Phillips offered it, when as a boy of fourteen, he threw himself upon his face in his room and said, ‘God, I belong to You. Take what is Thine own.

I ask but this, that whenever a thing be right, it take no courage to do it; that whenever a thing be wrong, it have no power of temptation over me’. David Livingston offered it when he wrote in his diary on his last birthday, save one, ‘My Jesus, my King, my Life, my All, once more I dedicate my whole life to Thee’.

Maltbie D. Babcock offered it when he wrote beneath date and place on the flyleaf of the pocket Bible which he carried at the time of his death, ‘Committed myself again with Christian brothers to unreserved docility and devotion before my Master.But I turn to our second parable in this series, and bring you someFACTS FROM THE FISH NET. “Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a net, that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind: which, when it was full, they drew to shore, and sat down, and gathered the good into vessels, but cast the bad away. So shall it be at the end of the world; the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 13:47-50).The Master was speaking of the end of this age, and His statement involved some certitudes. Fact number one is this: At the end of the age there will be a great gathering together.“The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a net that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind”.“When the Son of Man shall come in His glory, and all His holy angels with Him, then shall He sit upon the throne of His glory, and before Him shall be gathered all the nations” (Matthew 25:31-32).I am persuaded that this gathering together is the one that comes in the very end of the age, winding up the Millennium itself, and is a gathering of judgment. When Christ comes to His throne, His first work is conquest; but before Christ leaves His throne, in other words, His final work will be judgment. The dead, the small and the great shall stand before Him. What a gathering that will be!

Phillips Brooks says of this great event, “We are apt to picture to ourselves a great dramatic scene,—host beyond host; rank behind rank; the millions who have lived upon the earth, all standing crowded together in the indescribable presence of One who looks not merely at the mass but at the individual, and sees through the whole life and character of every single soul”. The picture is sublime, and it is what the words of Saint John intended to suggest. It was of this very scene of which John Newton was speaking when he wrote:“Day of judgment, day of wonders, Hark! the trumpet’s awful sound, Louder than a thousand thunders, Shakes the vast creation round, How the summons Will the sinner’s heart confound! “See the Judge, our nature wearing, Clothed in majesty Divine; You who long for His Appearing Then shall say, ‘This God is mine’, Gracious Saviour, Own me in that day for Thine. “At His call the dead awaken, Rise to life from earth and sea; All the powers of nature, shaken By His looks, prepare to flee, Careless sinner, What will then become of thee? “But to those who have confessed, Loved, and served the Lord below, He will say, ‘Come near, ye blessed; See the Kingdom I bestow, You for ever Shall My love and glory know’”. The last phrase of Newton’s suggests fact number two, found in the parable of the fish net, namely,There will be a careful gathering out.‘Which, when it was full, they drew to shore, and sat down and gathered the good into vessels”.One of the marvels of Scripture—to me, the positive proof of its Divine inspiration;—is the exact use of words to convey exact ideas. The fishermen of this parable “sit down”; they propose to be calm in their work, to gather out the good with painstaking care, to select the last fish fit for use, so that when the rest are cast away, there will be no real loss. One of the anxious concerns of mortal men, dwelling upon the judgment, voices itself in the fear of possible mistake! Even though I be a Christian, might I not be misjudged and condemned? And even though I rejected Jesus, walked in the lusts of the flesh, and finished my life without ever repenting my sin, in the hour of the great assize, may I not be fortunate enough to hide in the crowd of Christ’s accepted ones and be invited to place of honor and joy at His right hand?Neither contingency is possible! God’s judgments involve no mistakes!

When Christ shall descend from Heaven with a shout, every sleeping saint shall hear His voice and shall come forth, changed by the sound of the same, from the corruptible to the incorruptible, and every living saint shall hear it and be changed from the mortal to the immortal. Death will have no more dominion over them!

And when Christ shall sit upon His throne, He will gather out of the throngs that stand before Him to His right hand, all those whose names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, and that without the loss of one. Judgment for them is impossible; His Word will then find its fulfillment, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth My words and doeth them shall not come into judgment”—the blessed experience of God’s own! And His word concerning the unbeliever shall no more fail, “For then will He profess unto them, I never knew you; depart from Me ye that work iniquity”.This involves, as the third fact, a necessary casting away. “But cast the bad away”. What else can you do? Men get troubled upon this subject sometimes; men frame up a philosophy of Universalism; men join with Mr. Tennyson in his larger hope,“O yet we trust that somehow, good Will be the final goal of ill, To pangs of nature, sins of will, Defects of doubt and taints of blood. “That nothing walks with aimless feet; That not one life shall be destroyed Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath made the pile complete. “That not a worm is cloven in vain; That not a moth with vain desire Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire, Or but subserves another’s gain”. But all fires are not fruitless. The gehenna outside the gates of Jerusalem was absolutely essential to the health of the city within; and hell is as needful to the holiness and happiness of Heaven as a sewer is to the health of the house. The only thing that makes Heaven possible is the fact that “the fearful and unbelieving, and all murders, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars” are to be excluded; and the very gehenna necessitated by Satan himself is to do its cleansing work.No man can live in the midst of modern conditions and see how iniquity flaunts itself on every side, without consenting, if he be righteous at all, to the sentiment expressed by Campbell Morgan, when he said, “I sigh for the coming of the angels. I feel increasingly that the government of men is a disastrous failure, and will be to the end. Presently, when the Church is completed and lifted out, angels will take this business in hand, There will be no seducer clever enough to dodge an angel, and there will be no scamp, master enough of traffic, to escape the grip of an angel hand. Blessed be God for judgment, stern judgment!

I am not sure that the world does not need judgment more than mercy”.God was better to men in the day that Sodom was swept with fire than He would have been had He withheld the flames; and, when the parable of the fish net has found its finality, and the good are gathered into His presence, and “the had are cast away”, righteousness will have found its vindication, and only devils could desire to defeat the full and final coming of righteousness.But in conclusion—HINTS FROM THE .“And Jesus said unto them, Have ye understood all these things? They say unto Him, Yea, Lord.

Then said He unto them, Therefore every scribe which is instructed unto the Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old” (Matthew 13:51-52).That is a significant question with which Jesus plied His auditors, “Have ye understood all these things?” Have ye seen in these parables the plan of the ages? Have ye seen the progress of the Kingdom through the sowing of the good seed—the children of God? Have ye seen the unnatural growth of the Kingdom seed through the world’s nurture as set forth in the parable of the mustard seed? Have ye seen the corruption that shall be introduced into the kingdom preparation as revealed into the parable of the leaven? Have ye seen My treasure— Israel—found in the world-field, bought with a great price, hidden yet against the day of My coming?Have ye seen My precious jewel in the Gentiles converted, for whom I paid an equal price? Have ye seen the coming judgment that shall consummate all?

If so, then prove yourselves like the householder, in possession of treasure to be drawn upon at your pleasure, to be passed out to the profit of others.This to me is the meaning of the Master’s words, as He concludes this marvelous series of more marvelous illustrations, and likens His own disciples “to scribes instructed into the Kingdom of God”. The word “scribe” as He employs it is not used in the sense of a mere “reader”, an “interpreter of traditions” such as He had condemned; but in that more ideal way in which Ezra filled up the office, by becoming a good reader of the Word and a faithful interpreter of the same, both by word of mouth and by the works of his life.Three hints from the parable of the householder.First, The wise householder creates a competent treasury.

The figure here is that of a treasure chest in which the rich Oriental laid up the garments against the day when his great company of guests should make heavy demands upon it. The word in the original indicates that they were laid in one upon another. The one who would be a disciple of the Kingdom of God must create a treasury just after the same manner. He is to lay “line upon line, precept upon precept”, storing away the great truths of God, not for his own sake merely, but for the sake of others as well. Our forefathers had a keener appreciation of this necessity than do their children. They tried to steep our souls in a knowledge of the Word of God, by command, by coaxing, by attractive prizes, by words of approval!

They induced us to commit to memory what the Scriptures saith, and to store up passage after passage in the enrichment of life.Some years ago it was my privilege to walk about the old Ruskin manor and estate. John Ruskin was a marvelous man; his mind was perhaps as well stored as that of any man of his century.

It had gleaned from the fields of science, and literature and art. He had made himself master in each. Yet when he comes to speak, this is what he says, “All that I have taught of art, everything that I have written, every greatness that there has been in any thought of mine, whatever I have done in my life, has simply been due to the fact that when I was a child, my mother read daily to me a part of the Bible, and daily made me learn a part of it by heart”.When I was studying for this morning’s discourse, I found six illustrations in my Index Rerum on “The Bible—The Treasure House of God”, but, alas for the mishaps of a library! The volumes in which they occurred could not be found. At first I felt disappointed, but then I suddenly remembered that is not the meaning of the text. It is not how much richness in the Word of God; it is not what stores it contains at all; but the thought is, How much have I taken out of it, treasured up in my own memory?

What went into my own heart and life subject to my own uses as occasion may require? Ah, that is the suggestion!

A man may have a Bible on the center table; it contains all the wisdom of God; but if he has not transcribed it to his own thoughts, if he has not tested it out in his own experience, if he has not tucked it away in the recesses of his own soul, it is for him as if it were not. It is one thing to have a Bible between leather covers; it is another thing to have it stored in the memory, transcribed into heart experience. You remember the folly of the farmer, who, when he had gathered into his barns until they were bursting, said to his soul, “Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry”. There is but one man that can say that, and that is the man who has taken God’s treasures as revealed in Scripture and stored them in the recesses of his own soul.“Father of mercies, in Thy Word, What endless glories shine! For ever be Thy Name adored For these celestial lines. “ ’Tis here the tree of knowledge grows, And yields a free repast; Here purer sweets that nature knows, Invite the longing taste. “ ’Tis here the Saviour’s welcome voice Spreads Heavenly peace around, And life and everlasting joys Attend the blissful sound. “O may these Heavenly pages be My ever-dear delight; And still new beauties may I see, And still increasing light”. But the householder draws upon his treasury at his pleasure. The Christian’s treasury ought to be capable of kindred draughts, and if he have one, it is. Do you remember in Lew Wallace’s “The Prince of India” the Wandering Jew who lived for hundreds of years and traveled through all parts of the earth, and who spent money as liberally as though a Solomon were back of him? It was because he had discovered the place where Solomon had hid his riches, and whenever occasion required, he was wont to go to that treasure chest, and take out priceless jewels and exchange them for the needs of the hour. But Solomon had a richer treasury in the words of Divine wisdom upon which he was invited to draw—the gifts of which may be discovered by others and drawn upon for daily needs as the Prince of India drew upon this limitless fund.George Mueller had discovered the way to that repository. When he was ninety-three years of age, he was engaged to address the yearly meeting of the British and Foreign Bible Society, at the Town Hall, Birmingham.

Failing health prevented his coming, and he wrote, saying, “Let it be said to the assembly that for sixty-eight years and three months, or ever since July 1829, I have been a lover of the Word of God, and that uninterruptedly. During this time, I have read considerably more than one hundred times through the whole Bible, with great delight.

I have for many years read through the whole Old and New Testament with prayer and meditation, four times every year”. No wonder his experience of grace was so rich; nor is it any wonder that he, who had drawn upon the treasury chosen of God, had created a treasury of his own upon which others drew so often and so profitably. In addition to the teaching he accomplished in all parts of the world, the personal testimony he bore upon thousands of occasions, he was enabled himself to circulate in various languages a quarter of a million of Bibles, a million and a half New Testaments, 21,350 copies of the Psalms, and 223,500 other portions of the Holy Scriptures. Truly he drew out of his treasury “things new and old”.One writer has said that this does not suggest that we get out of the Bible new things and old things. That would be a contradiction. But we are to get out things that are supposed to be old, and yet are found to be new. “Old things, new things!” But we dissent from the interpretation.

We candidly believe that the parable holds us strictly to its own language, and that the householder has in his treasury things new and old. There would be occasions when the old clothing would serve the best ends; there would be other times when the new dress was absolutely demanded.

His treasure chest would meet either or both. There are old truths that certain experiences of our lives demand; we have worn them like a garment before; they have taken our shape; they fit us; they bring us needed comfort. Ah, it is an old truth that “God so loved the world”. I tried it out in my boyhood; I clothe myself with it today! It is an old truth that “If we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins”. Not a day but I must draw it forth to hide nakedness from before Him in whose presence I would otherwise be ashamed. The number of the old truths are too many to make mention of them. Then, blessed be God!

I am forever discovering a new one; and as a scribe “instructed unto the Kingdom of Heaven”, it is mine to present it to the people. I believe that I have done that in some of the sentences employed today. And yet the truths are not less needful because they are new. Some of you have heard them for the first time, and yet, I trust, they come to you at the very time when they will be as food and clothing from your Heavenly Father.Ah, the great truth of this entire string of parables—I was about to say, pearls—is this, that with the consummation of the age there is a kingdom coming which shall be established in righteousness, with God’s Son on the throne, and God’s saints in seats of power, and God’s will triumphant in all the world. The Gospel of Grace is great; the Gospel of the Kingdom is greater. Many of you know the story told by Hugh Price Hughes, of how he was standing one day before the window of an art store where was exhibited a picture of the crucifixion of our Lord.

Presently he was conscious of a little ragged lad at his side—a street Arab. Noticing that he was looking intently at the same work of art, he said to him, “Do you know who it is?” “Yes”, he replied, “that is our Saviour”, with a mingled look of pity and surprise that Hughes did not know.

Then, with an evident desire to enlighten Hughes further, he continued, “Them’s the soldiers, the Roman soldiers”, and with a sigh, “that woman there cryin’ is His mother”. He waited for Hughes to question him further. Then, with his hands in his pockets, he said, “They killed Him, Sir! Yes, sir, they killed Him”. Hughes says, “I looked at the little dirty fellow, and said, ‘Where did you learn all this?’ ‘At the mission Sunday School’, he said. I had walked away about a block, leaving him still looking at the picture, when I heard him calling, and with a triumphant sound in his voice, he said, ‘I just wanted to tell you, sir, that He rose again.

Yes, mister, He rose again!’”It is the Evangel of the Risen Christ; it is the good news to a dying world, that One had conquered death and been triumphant over the grave. But there is a better Gospel still, namely the Gospel of the Kingdom, and that is the Gospel to which these parables refer.

That is the Gospel I bring to you today, and I want to tell you that He who rose, ascending to the right hand of God the Father, where this morning He fills His office of intercessor, will descend, and that He who went will come again, and that He who conquered against death and the grave will one day conquer against the adversary himself, the author of death, the digger of every grave, the despoiler of every life, the agent of all sin! The sway of His scepter shall be felt “from sea to sea, and from the rivers to the ends of the earth”, and there “the righteousness shall shine forth as though seen in the Kingdom of the Father!” There is no complete Gospel until one knows about the Coming King and His Kingdom!