Latest / Reformed Thinking / The Field of Conflict: Sovereignty, Sabotage, and the Patience of God (Matthew 13:24–30)

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The Field of Conflict: Sovereignty, Sabotage, and the Patience of God (Matthew 13:24–30) · Reformed Thinking

• 0:00
  Welcome to Reformed Thinking. You know that feeling it it
• 0:04
  usually hits you late at night. Maybe you're staring at the
• 0:06
  ceiling or you're just scrolling through the news on your phone
• 0:09
  and you just get this, this crushing feeling of dissonance.
• 0:15
  You look out at the world and it's just a wreck.
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  You know, corruption, violence. It feels like the bad guys are
• 0:21
  winning and the good guys are getting crushed.
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  Right. And if you're a believer, you
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  hold this high theology that says Jesus is king, he's on the
• 0:29
  throne. Exactly.
• 0:29
  He has won. But the gap between that
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  theology and, well, your Twitter feed, it's just painful.
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  It's more than painful. It can feel like a genuine
• 0:39
  crisis of faith for people. It keeps people up at night.
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  It is a crisis, and it's what our source material for today
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  actually calls the scandal of the Kingdom.
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  And that's really the hook for our deep dive today.
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  We're going to be looking at a whole stack of resources, but
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  they're all centered on one key text, Matthew 13, and
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  specifically the parable of the wheat and the tares.
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  Or weeds, depending on your translation.
• 1:01
  Right, wheat and weeds. But we're not just doing a, you
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  know, a simple Sunday school recap here.
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  We're looking at this through the lens of Reformed theology,
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  ancient botany, and even church history to try and answer one
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  big question. And that question is?
• 1:15
  If God is sovereign, if he is in control, why is the world so
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  untidy, so messy? The.
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  Question of the Ages. Theologians give it a fancy
• 1:27
  name. The Odyssey.
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  The attempt to justify God's goodness in the face of all the
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  evil we see. Sure.
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  But what's so fascinating about the sources we have today is
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  that they argue this untidiness. It's not an accident.
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  It's not like God just looked away for a second and whoops,
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  things got messy. OK, no, the mess is actually
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  part of a specific defined timeline, and that timeline is
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  called the Inter Advent Age. Inter advent OK, so between the
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  coming. Precisely, we are living in the
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  gap, the time between the first Advent, you know, Bethlehem, the
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  cross, the empty tomb, and the second Advent, which is the
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  final judgement. And the defining feature of this
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  this gap is that it's a mixed field.
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  That's the key image, a mixed field.
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  So our mission today is to really unpack why God allows
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  this mixture, why he permits evil to coexist right alongside
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  the good, and and maybe more pointedly, why our very human
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  instinct to just jump in and fix it right now is actually seen as
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  really dangerous. Dangerous is absolutely the
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  right word, as we're going to see pretty much every time in
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  history that human beings have tried to do the job that's
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  reserved for angels. We just end up creating a
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  bloodbath. That's a sobering thought, OK,
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  lapped into the text itself. Matthew 13.
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  We have a sower, we have a field, and we have a saboteur.
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  But before we do the sabotage part, we have to set the stage.
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  Jesus himself gives us the the dramatis personae, the cast of
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  characters. He does.
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  He lays it all out. So first up, who is the sower?
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  Jesus is very explicit in his interpretation of his own
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  parable. He says he who sows the good
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  seed is the Son of Man. That's Jesus, right?
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  And right off the bat, that one little statement challenges a
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  very, very common misconception. We often think of the Kingdom of
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  God as this, you know, grassroots movement.
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  Like we build it from the bottom up.
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  Exactly. We, the people build the Kingdom
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  through our efforts. But the text says something very
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  different. The Kingdom is a divine
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  planting. It is, to use the theological
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  term monarchistic. OK, that's a $10 theological
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  word. You have to break monarchistic
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  down for us. Sure, it comes from the Greek
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  Amano which means 1 and ergon which means work.
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  So it means it's a one work or a one way.
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  St. God is the active agent.
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  We don't pull ourselves up by our own moral bootstraps to
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  create the Kingdom. The king claims the field and he
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  plants the seed. It's his initiative from start
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  to finish. OK, so the sower is Christ.
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  Now the field. This is the part where I think
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  90% of people, and I'll include myself in this, get this parable
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  wrong. We almost always assume the
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  field is the church. Yes.
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  That's the default application. You know, the idea that, oh,
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  there are fake Christians in the pews next to the real Christian?
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  And while that's a valid secondary application, it's
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  technically not the primary meaning of the parable.
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  Jesus says very plainly the field is the world.
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  The Greek word is cosmos. The world, the whole thing.
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  The whole thing, he is laying a divine claim to the entire
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  created order. So this isn't just about what
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  happens inside the church walls on a Sunday morning.
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  Now, again, there are huge implications for the church and
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  we will absolutely get to those later.
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  But the scope here is global. It's cosmic Christ is sowing his
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  people into the actual world, into politics, into the arts,
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  into neighborhoods, into schools, into every sphere of
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  life. And what about the seed?
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  I'm thinking about the parable of the sower, which comes right
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  before this one in Matthew's Gospel.
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  There the seed is the word of God.
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  But here the metaphor shifts a little bit, doesn't it?
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  It does shift, and that is a crucial detail to catch in this
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  parable. The good seed are the sons of
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  the Kingdom. The seed has become flesh, so to
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  speak. So it's not an idea, it's
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  people. It's people.
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  These are men and women who have been regenerated by the Holy
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  Spirit. So Jesus isn't just dropping
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  Bibles from the sky and hoping for the best.
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  He is planting, living, breathing people into the world
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  to bear fruit for His Kingdom. All right, so we have the King,
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  we have the world as his field, and we have the King's people
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  planted in it. I mean, it sounds like a recipe
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  for paradise. It should be.
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  But then comes the twist, the sabotage.
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  While men slept. That phrase has always sounded
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  so ominous to me. It is, the text says.
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  While men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat
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  and went his way. Now it's important not to
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  misread that sleeping part. Oh.
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  So. Well, some preachers are really
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  beat up on the servants here, saying they were lazy or
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  negligent. But in an Agricultural Society
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  you have to sleep. The work is done during the day.
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  This simply indicates that the sabotage happened at night.
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  It points to stealth. So it was a covert operation.
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  Precisely. And the saboteur, the enemy, is
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  identified as the devil. Our sources make a really big
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  point here by the contrast between the text and a lot of
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  modern theology. You mean how we think about
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  Satan? Exactly.
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  There's a huge push in modern theological liberalism to
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  demythologize Satan, to say, oh, the devil is just a metaphor for
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  systemic injustice, or he's just a symbol of our own internal
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  neuroses. The dark side of the human
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  psyche or something like that. Right.
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  But the Greek word Jesus uses here is ecthros.
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  It means a personal, active, hostile enemy.
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  He's not a concept, he's an agent.
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  And his strategy is absolutely fascinating.
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  He doesn't come in with a torch to just burn the whole field
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  down. He doesn't go for open warfare.
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  No, he engages in what the text calls counter sewing.
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  Which brings us to the botany. I was reading through the
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  research notes on this and honestly, the biology of these
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  tears is the key that unlocks the entire theological dilemma
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  of the parable. It really is.
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  It's the little nugget of information that makes the whole
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  story work. The Greek word used is Zezania,
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  and most botanists agree that this refers to a specific plant
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  called Lolium temulentum, also known as Bearded Darnell.
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  Bearded Darnell. In the Angel world, this stuff
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  was infamous. It was known as a mimic weed.
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  A mimic weed so it looks like wheat.
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  It's almost indistinguishable in the early stages.
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  If you and I were standing in a 1st century field in Galilee
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  looking at all the little green struts coming up, we literally
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  could not tell the difference. The stalk has the same color,
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  the leaves have the same shape. It mimics the wheat perfectly
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  during that initial growth phase.
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  So the enemy strategy isn't to plant, I don't know, giant
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  thorny bushes that are obviously evil and out of place.
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  It's to plant something that looks almost exactly like the
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  real thing. That is correct.
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  The strategy is counterfeit. It's imitation Agustin, the
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  great Church father. He argued that evil is
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  fundamentally parasitic. Satan cannot create his own
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  world. He can only corrupt and mimic
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  God's creation. So he plants people who mimic
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  the language, maybe the behavior, and even the culture
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  of the Kingdom, but their nature, their root system, is
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  fundamentally different. Exactly.
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  And Darnell isn't just a space waster, you know, it's not like
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  a dandelion. That's just kind of annoying.
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  Right, it's not just taking up nutrients.
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  It is actively toxic. The seeds of the Darnell are
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  black and they contain a narcotic poison.
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  A fungus that grows on it is poisonous.
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  If you grind that up with the good wheat and bake it into
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  bread, it causes dizziness, nausea, and in high enough doses
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  it can even cause death. So this was a known thing.
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  Oh, absolutely. The Romans actually had a
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  specific law against sewing Darnell in your enemy's field.
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  It was a known form of agricultural sabotage.
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  Biological warfare, 1st century style.
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  That raises the stakes significantly.
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  We're not just dealing with some annoying neighbors in the field.
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  We are dealing with a genuinely poisonous presence.
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  That deadly presence. OK, so the field is growing,
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  everything looks green and healthy for a while.
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  And then we hit the crisis. The servants finally realized
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  that something is deeply wrong. And that realization only comes
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  with maturity, the text says. But when the grain had sprouted
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  and produced a crop, then the tears also appeared.
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  You can only tell the difference when the fruit comes.
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  You will know them by their fruits.
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  Matthew 7. Correct.
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  Wheat. When it's full of heavy,
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  nutritious grain, it gets heavy, its head boughs down.
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  It has substance, a kind of humility.
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  And the Darnell? Darnell because its seeds are
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  light and empty and black. It stands straight up.
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  It's proud. It's Audi.
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  So suddenly, after weeks of everything looking the same, you
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  have this stark visual contrast in the field.
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  You've got the bowing heads of the wheat and the proud straight
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  stalks of the darnall. Exactly.
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  And the servants see these blackheads popping up all over
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  the master's beautiful field, and they panic.
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  They run to the master, and they ask the question that, let's be
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  honest, every believer has asked at some point in their life.
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  Sir, did you not sow good seed? From where then, does it have
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  terrors? This is the theodicy question
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  again, isn't it? God, you are good.
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  You are all powerful. I thought you were in charge of
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  this project. Why is this happening?
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  Where did this corruption come from?
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  It's the cry of the heart when things don't make sense.
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  It is and look at the masters response.
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  It's so direct. He doesn't give a long
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  philosophical lecture on the problem of evil.
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  He doesn't get into the nuances of free will.
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  He just says an enemy has done this.
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  Short and to the point. It's blunt.
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  He identifies the source of the evil as external to his own
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  design. He doesn't own the evil, he
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  doesn't take credit for it, but he absolutely acknowledges it's
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  reality. But the servants, they're not
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  satisfied with just an explanation.
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  They want to do something, they want to fix it.
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  They immediately say, do you want us to go and gather them?
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  And this right here, this is the instinct for what we could call
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  immediate purgation. Immediate purgation.
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  We see something wrong, something ugly, something that
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  doesn't belong, and our gut reaction is get it out, destroy
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  it, sanitize the field, make it pure again.
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  But it feels righteous, though. That's the tricky part, isn't
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  it? It feels like we would be doing
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  it for God. Lord, just let me clean up this
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  mess for. You.
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  He's like zeal. He feels like holiness.
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  But Martin Luther had a name for this impulse.
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  He called it the theology of glory.
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  OK. You'll have to break that one
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  down. Theology of glory versus I think
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  the other side is the theology of the cross.
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  That's the one. A theology of glory demands A
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  victorious, spotless, perfect scenario.
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  Right now, it wants the crown without the cross.
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  It wants the Kingdom in its final, glorious state.
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  But it refuses to accept that suffering, weakness and
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  ambiguity are part of God's plan for this current age.
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  So the servants want to be agents of wrath.
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  They want to bring the final judgement into the present
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  tense. They want to wield the sickle
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  themselves. And you see this impulse
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  everywhere. We see it in politics all the
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  time. If we can just elect the right
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  people and completely destroy the opposition, then we'll have
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  utopia. We see it in the church.
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  If we can just hunt down every single heretic and get rid of
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  every person who thinks differently, then we will
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  finally be pure. And that desire, that zealous
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  impatience, brings us to the absolute core of the parable.
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  The Masters prohibition, the No, it's not a gentle suggestion.
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  It's a thunderous absolute no. He says no, lest while you
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  gather up the tares, you also uproot the wheat with them.
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  This is the anchor of the whole passage.
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  But why? I mean, honestly, if I have
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  weeds in my garden, I pull them. It's common sense.
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  Why is the wheat at risk here? You have to go back to the
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  botany. The root systems of bearded
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  Darnell are incredibly strong and they actually seek out and
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  intertwine with the roots of the wheat.
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  So. They're tangled together
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  underground. They are inextricably linked,
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  tangled up in a way that you cannot see from the surface.
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  So if you grab that proud stalk of Darnell and you try to RIP it
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  out with force. You're going to tear the roots
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  of the wheat that's standing right next to it.
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  You will kill the wheat. That is such a vivid image, the
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  entanglement. It is, and it just shows the
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  heart of God, doesn't it? This is a picture of the
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  doctrine of the preservation of the Saints.
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  The master is so protective of his wheat of his children that
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  he is willing to tolerate the presence of the poisonous weeds
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  for a time rather than risk damaging even one of his own.
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  He prioritizes the safety of the sheep over the immediate
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  destruction of the wolves. For now, yes, the judgement is
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  delayed, but it is not cancelled.
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  But in this age, his priority is preservation.
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  That completely flips the script on how we normally view the
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  delay of God's justice. We tend to think God is delaying
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  because he's slow, or maybe he's indifferent, or he just doesn't
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  care. But this is just he's delaying
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  because he's being incredibly careful.
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  He is careful and he knows that human beings make terrible
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  reapers. We are not omniscient.
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  We can't see the root systems. We can't see into the human
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  heart. Can't.
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  Bring a mess of. It a total mess if we started to
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  purge. Just think of the collateral
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  damage. How many immature believers, How
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  many people who are struggling with doubt, how many of what the
• 14:00
  Bible calls bruised reeds, would be crushed and destroyed if we
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  started ripping people out of the field based on our fallible
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  judgment? So the command is not to fix it,
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  the command is to wait. Let both grow together.
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  Let both grow together until the harvest.
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  That phrase establishes what one of our sources calls
• 14:19
  eschatological realism. Yeah, eschatological realism.
• 14:23
  That sounds like another seminary term.
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  Translate that for the listener who you know didn't write a
• 14:27
  thesis on this stuff. Fair enough.
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  Eschatology is just the study of the end times, the eschaton.
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  And realism is well, it's about facing facts.
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  OK, so eschatological realism means we have to accept the
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  facts about the age we live in. We live in a mixed field and we
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  cannot create a perfect utopia before Jesus returns.
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  We just can't. So it's a rejection of that
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  utopian impulse. It's a rejection of it on both
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  sides of the aisle. It's a rejection of the social
• 14:51
  gospel on the left, which often thinks we can build heaven on
• 14:55
  earth through enough social programs and activism, sure.
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  But it's also a firm rejection of dominionism on the right,
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  which thinks we can legislate the Kingdom of God into
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  existence by taking over the government and using political
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  force. So both sides are essentially
• 15:09
  trying to clear the field themselves, just using different
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  tools. Correct.
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  Both sides are impatient. Both sides want to skip the
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  groaning of this present age, as Paul calls it in Romans 8, and
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  they want to get straight to the glory.
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  But the text is clear. The mixture is not an accident,
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  it's part of the plan. For now, God has a purpose in
• 15:30
  the delay. What is that purpose?
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  Because honestly, it feels like the weeds are winning.
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  Sometimes it can be incredibly discouraging.
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  It can. The Westminster Confession of
• 15:39
  Faith, one of the key historical documents of Reformed theology,
• 15:43
  talks about God's Providence. It says that he sovereignly
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  orders the world, and in that Providence he permits the tares
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  to grow. He is not the author of their
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  sin, not at all, but He allows it and even uses their presence
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  for His own glory and for our good.
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  For our patience, maybe. For our patience, absolutely.
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  And for salvation, Second Peter chapter 3 verse 9 tells us that
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  the Lord is long-suffering. He's patient, not willing that
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  any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.
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  The delay is not the silence of God, it is the mercy of God.
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  It's giving time for repentance. I want to pivot here and look at
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  the historical angle because even though the master gave a
• 16:23
  very clear no, the church has a, well, a pretty bad track record
• 16:27
  of listening to that instruction.
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  Oh, we've been terrible at it. The history of the church is
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  just littered with well meaning, zealous people grabbing the
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  sickle and trying to hack away at the weeds themselves.
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  The source material we're using points to the Donatus Spirit.
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  Who were they? The Donatists were a group in
• 16:41
  North Africa around the 4th century, and they were rigorous,
• 16:45
  they were zealous, they were purists.
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  They believed that the validity of the Church depended on the
• 16:49
  moral perfection of its members and especially its leaders.
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  So if a priest had sinned and the big sin at the time was
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  buckling under Roman persecution and handing over copies of the
• 17:00
  Bible to be burned. He was considered a traditor, a
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  traitor. So for the Donatus, that priest
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  was out. Done, absolutely done, they
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  said. He is a tear.
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  RIP him out. And by the way, anyone he ever
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  baptized or served communion to, that's all invalid now because
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  his cooties got on them. They demanded a pure, spotless
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  church now. And the result.
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  The result wasn't purity, it was schism.
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  They tore the North African church apart.
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  It was Saint Augustine who had to fight them using this very
• 17:28
  parable, arguing that the visible church on earth is and
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  always will be a mixed body. You can't purify it by force
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  without destroying it. And then of course, the story
• 17:37
  gets much darker. We move into things like the
• 17:39
  Crusades, the Inquisition. That is the ultimate failure to
• 17:42
  listen to the Masters command. That's when the church not only
• 17:46
  grabbed the sickle, but picked up the sword.
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  The text clearly says the Reapers are angels, but the
• 17:52
  institutional church said no. Thanks Lord, we'll handle this
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  for you. And they tortured people, burned
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  them at the stake. All in an attempt to sanitize
• 18:01
  the field of Europe from heresy. They tried to do Angel work with
• 18:05
  human harems and the result was a catastrophe that stained the
• 18:09
  name of Christ for centuries. It's easy for us, you know, in
• 18:12
  the 21st century to look back at the Inquisition and say, well,
• 18:15
  obviously we're not doing that, but our sources point out some
• 18:18
  very modern versions of the same error that are maybe a bit more
• 18:21
  subtle. Absolutely.
• 18:23
  They're still with us. On one hand, you have the error
• 18:25
  of theological liberalism. Liberalism looks at the field
• 18:28
  and essentially says, you know what?
• 18:29
  There are no weeds here. Those aren't weeds.
• 18:31
  That's just a different kind of flower.
• 18:32
  Everyone's fine. So they deny the reality of the
• 18:35
  enemy, and they deny the reality of a final judgement.
• 18:37
  Exactly. And that is a dangerous error
• 18:40
  because it lulls people into a false sense of security when a
• 18:43
  real danger exists. What about on the other side,
• 18:46
  the more conservative side? The source brings up the seeker
• 18:50
  sensitive movement. How does that fit into this
• 18:53
  paradigm? That's an error of optics, of
• 18:56
  pragmatism. It's a form of impatience with
• 18:59
  the slow, organic, often messy growth of real wheat.
• 19:03
  So what do we do? We manufacture plastic wheat.
• 19:06
  Plastic. Wheat We create a church
• 19:08
  environment where we avoid talking about sin, we don't
• 19:10
  mention judgment, we don't get into the hard stuff of the
• 19:12
  gospel because we want the field to look full and successful and
• 19:16
  appealing. Right now, it's focusing on the
• 19:18
  appearance of a harvest rather than the reality of the sea
• 19:21
  taking root. It's faking the fruit to attract
• 19:24
  a crowd. Precisely.
• 19:25
  But the text is crystal clear. The sorting will happen.
• 19:29
  We don't have to force it and we can't fake it.
• 19:32
  There is a harvest coming. Until the harvest.
• 19:34
  That one little word, until it does a lot of heavy lifting in
• 19:36
  this parable, doesn't. It it does, it's a word of
• 19:38
  promise. The Greek word used for the
• 19:40
  harvest time is Intelia. It means the consummation, the
• 19:43
  completion of the age. We are not stuck in this messy
• 19:46
  mixed up loop forever. There's a hard stop to history
• 19:49
  and endpoint. And the agents of this harvest,
• 19:53
  we touched on this before, but it is so crucial.
• 19:55
  They are the angels. The reapers are angels, Not the
• 19:59
  government, not the church elders, not the Internet mob
• 20:02
  with their pitchforks. This final, decisive task
• 20:06
  requires a level of authority and omniscience that only
• 20:09
  supernatural agents delegated by Christ himself possess.
• 20:14
  They know exactly which stock is wheat and which is Darnell.
• 20:17
  There are no mistakes. No mistakes.
• 20:18
  The process is described in three steps.
• 20:20
  We've got binding, burning and the barn.
• 20:23
  Let's talk about the binding first.
• 20:25
  The text says. First gather together the tares
• 20:28
  and bind them in bundles. You know, there's a terrifying
• 20:30
  thought embedded in that phrase that I think we often miss.
• 20:33
  We usually think of hell as isolation, you know, being
• 20:35
  totally cut off from God. And it is that.
• 20:37
  But the text here implies something else.
• 20:39
  The wicked are bound together in bundles.
• 20:42
  Think about that for a second. In this life, sinners often band
• 20:45
  together to mock God and to rebel against him.
• 20:49
  Psalm 2 says the kings of the earth set themselves against the
• 20:53
  Lord in the final judgement. God, in a sense gives them what
• 20:57
  they wanted. They are bound together in their
• 21:00
  rebellion forever. So imagine being locked in a
• 21:02
  room for eternity with a group of people who are defined by
• 21:05
  their selfishness, their pride, their narcissism, their hate.
• 21:08
  With no restraining grace of God left, just the collective
• 21:12
  festering misery of sin bundled together.
• 21:15
  That is a haunting image. It's meant to be.
• 21:18
  And then logically follows the burning.
• 21:21
  Cast them into the furnace of fire.
• 21:23
  Jesus is not men's words. He speaks of wailing and
• 21:26
  gnashing of teeth. This affirms the traditional
• 21:28
  historic doctrine of hell. It does.
• 21:30
  It's not just ceasing to exist what theologians call
• 21:34
  annihilationism. The language points to a
• 21:36
  conscious, painful separation and a final quarantine of evil.
• 21:40
  God is cleaning the cosmos so that the new creation can be a
• 21:43
  perfectly safe and holy place forever.
• 21:45
  But then after the terror, there's the barn.
• 21:47
  Gather the weed into my barn. Then the righteous will shine
• 21:50
  forth as the Son and the Kingdom of their Father.
• 21:54
  This is the glory. This is the hope.
• 21:56
  And the comfort, the massive, unshakable comfort of this text
• 22:00
  is that despite the tangled roots, despite the confusion of
• 22:03
  this age, despite the enemy's best efforts at sabotage, not a
• 22:07
  single grain of wheat is lost. The angels don't make mistakes.
• 22:11
  They do not. If you belong to Christ, you are
• 22:13
  secured in the barn. Period.
• 22:15
  OK, so taking all of this in the botany, the history, the
• 22:19
  terrifying eschatology, how do we actually live this out?
• 22:23
  Let's use our framework for this head, heart, and hands.
• 22:27
  How does this parable shape our thinking?
• 22:29
  Let's start with the hit our doctrine, our theology.
• 22:31
  The first thing this parable does is correct our
• 22:33
  expectations. If you expect the world to be
• 22:35
  fair, you will live your life in a state of bitterness.
• 22:38
  If you expect the visible church to be perfect, you'll become
• 22:41
  cynical. We have to embrace the already
• 22:43
  not yet tension. We have to The Kingdom is
• 22:46
  already here in power, but it's not yet here in its final,
• 22:49
  glorious form. The King has planted his crop,
• 22:53
  but he is not clean house yet. So when you see a scandal in the
• 22:56
  world, or even in the church, don't lose your faith.
• 23:00
  Your first thought should be an enemy has done this.
• 23:03
  Jesus told me there would be weeds in the field.
• 23:06
  It build a kind of resilient realism into your faith.
• 23:08
  OK, that's the head. What about the heart?
• 23:11
  Our affections? Our emotions.
• 23:12
  For the heart, I think the primary application is
• 23:15
  cultivating patients. Real, gritty, long-suffering
• 23:18
  patients. We need to stop being angry that
• 23:21
  God isn't striking down our political or theological enemies
• 23:25
  on our timeline. And start being grateful that he
• 23:27
  didn't strike us down before we were saved.
• 23:29
  Exactly. His patience is our salvation.
• 23:31
  We learn to love His long-suffering nature because we
• 23:34
  are the beneficiaries of it. And there's a big assurance
• 23:37
  piece here too, isn't there? For the person listening who is
• 23:39
  now terrified, thinking, Oh no, what if I'm a weed?
• 23:41
  I struggle with him all the time.
• 23:42
  I look like Darnell some days. That is such a common and tender
• 23:46
  hearted fear. But here's the great comfort of
• 23:49
  this parable. Tears.
• 23:51
  Do not worry about being tears. They stand up straight.
• 23:53
  They're proud, they're self justifying.
• 23:56
  If you are worried, if you are broken over your sin, if you are
• 24:00
  bowing your head and humility and crying out to God for mercy,
• 24:03
  that's what wheat does. The struggle against sin is not
• 24:07
  evidence that you're a tear. It's evidence that you have new
• 24:09
  life within you. Finally, let's get to the hands
• 24:12
  or practice. This is where the rubber meets
• 24:14
  the road. So how do we handle church
• 24:16
  discipline? Because the Bible does tell the
• 24:19
  church to deal with sin. Paul in First Corinthians 5
• 24:22
  tells the church to remove the wicked man from among them.
• 24:25
  Is Paul contradicting Jesus here?
• 24:27
  No, not at all, and this is a vital distinction to make.
• 24:29
  The command let both grow together applies to the field,
• 24:33
  and the field is the world. We do not launch a holy war
• 24:36
  against the culture. We don't try to purge the world.
• 24:38
  But inside the church, the rules are different.
• 24:41
  Inside the covenant community we are called to maintain a degree
• 24:44
  of purity with a very specific limit.
• 24:47
  We are to discipline manifest unrepentant sin.
• 24:50
  So if someone in the church is openly living in rebellion
• 24:53
  against God's word, and when confronted says I don't care
• 24:57
  what Jesus says, I'm going to keep doing it, we have to
• 24:59
  address that, yes. We judge the fruit, the external
• 25:03
  behavior, not the root or the motive.
• 25:05
  We don't try to peel back their skin and see if they have an
• 25:08
  elect stamp on their heart. We don't conduct inquisitions.
• 25:11
  We shepherd. And if a person proves to be
• 25:14
  toxic and stubbornly unrepentant, we remove them from
• 25:17
  the fellowship, not to condemn them to hell, but to protect the
• 25:20
  flock. We leave their final judgement
• 25:22
  to God. We don't burn them, we just put
• 25:25
  them outside the fence of the local church for a time.
• 25:28
  There is a huge application here for our modern world,
• 25:30
  specifically social media. I feel like Twitter or X,
• 25:34
  whatever it's called now, is the new field where everyone wants
• 25:37
  to be a Reaper. It is the great purity spiral,
• 25:39
  isn't it? See someone step out of line or
• 25:41
  phrase something poorly, or have a belief from 10 years ago
• 25:44
  that's no longer acceptable and the digital mob forms instantly.
• 25:48
  Cancel him, uproot her, destroy their reputation.
• 25:51
  That is the spirit of the servants.
• 25:52
  Do you want us to go and gather them?
• 25:54
  It's that same impatient, wrathful zeal.
• 25:58
  And we need to be so careful about joining those mobs.
• 26:01
  We risk destroying people's faith, their livelihoods, their
• 26:05
  families, often based on half truths or out of context clips.
• 26:09
  We are ripping up potential wheat in our zeal to be right.
• 26:12
  And lastly, evangelism. This is the part of the
• 26:15
  application that actually gives me the most hope.
• 26:17
  It's the glorious loophole in the botany of the parable.
• 26:20
  A loophole in the botany. I like that.
• 26:22
  In nature, a stock of Darnell can never ever turn into a stock
• 26:26
  of wheat. The DNA is fixed.
• 26:29
  But in the Kingdom of grace, a son of the wicked one could
• 26:32
  become a son of the Kingdom. That is the miracle of the
• 26:35
  Gospel. The Apostle Paul.
• 26:37
  The Apostle Paul is exhibit A. He was a tear of the highest
• 26:39
  order. He was breathing out threats,
• 26:41
  killing Christians, and then on the road to Damascus, the Sower
• 26:45
  performed a miracle and he became the greatest stock of
• 26:48
  wheat the world has ever seen. So because we don't know who the
• 26:50
  tares are, and because we know God can change them.
• 26:53
  We preach the gospel to everyone.
• 26:55
  We sow the seed indiscriminately.
• 26:58
  We don't look at a person or a group of people and say, oh,
• 27:00
  they're too far gone. They're clearly weeds.
• 27:02
  We don't know that God can change a person's nature, so we
• 27:05
  have to be content with our job. We are sowers, not reapers.
• 27:08
  We keep scattering the seed and trusting the master of the
• 27:11
  harvest with the final results. That's a very liberating place
• 27:14
  to be, isn't it? We do the work that we're
• 27:16
  assigned, and he carries the burden of judgement, which
• 27:20
  belongs only to him. That is exactly right.
• 27:23
  I want to leave you, the listener, with that final image
• 27:26
  we touched on earlier, the bundles.
• 27:28
  It's a really provocative thought to end on.
• 27:31
  The harvest isn't just a judgement, it's a final
• 27:33
  gathering, a separation into two distinct communities.
• 27:37
  The wicked are bundled with the wicked and eternity of
• 27:40
  unrestrained ego and rebellion and misery.
• 27:43
  But the righteous are gathered into the barn, shining like the
• 27:46
  sun and a perfect communion of pure holiness and love.
• 27:50
  And it just begs the final question, doesn't it?
• 27:52
  Which gathering are you preparing for?
• 27:54
  Who are you binding yourself to in your life right now?
• 27:57
  Something to chew on at 2.0 AM instead of doom scrolling.
• 28:01
  Thanks for joining us for this deep dive into reformed
• 28:04
  thinking. We'll see you in the next one.