<p>13:38 <em>The field-</em>&nbsp;The emphasis is repeatedly on the fact that it is&nbsp;<em>His</em>&nbsp;field (:24,27,31). The Lord often speaks as if He has already overcome the world, even though the cross was still future for Him. So confident was He that the Father would bring Him through to inherit all things.</p>
<p><em>Is the world-</em>&nbsp;In the first instance, the Jewish world.&nbsp;</p>
<p><em>And the good seed, these are the sons of the kingdom-</em>&nbsp;We would expect the good seed to represent God&rsquo;s word, as it does in the earlier parable of the sower. And in a sense, it does; but the word becomes flesh in those who truly respond to it, and therefore the Lord interprets it as individual believers. Being &lsquo;children of&rsquo; something suggests that we have that thing as our family of origin, our parent. And this is how we should feel towards the things of God&rsquo;s Kingdom. &ldquo;The Kingdom&rdquo; is placed in contrast with &ldquo;the wicked one&rdquo;. The plants are the children or offspring of whoever sowed them. The weeds were sown by the wicked one, and the good seed were sown by the Lord Jesus; but He is styled &ldquo;the Kingdom&rdquo; in that as King of that Kingdom, this is a legitimate title for Him. He was and is the essence of the Kingdom.&nbsp;</p>
<p>It is our attitude to God's word which is the fundamental indicator of our spirituality. The sower parable teaches this by its equation of the seed / word and the types of ground. In the next (but related) parable of the tares, &quot;the good seed are the children of the Kingdom&quot; (Mt. 13:38)- i.e. the seed / word is people. In the sower parable, we read of &quot;He which received seed by the way side&quot; (Mt. 13:19), connecting the believer with a type of ground which receives the seed, whilst Lk. 8:12,13 speak of the people as the seeds rather than the types of ground: &quot;Those (seeds) by the way side are they... they on the rock are they...&quot;. Mt. 13:19 speaks of people receiving seed by the way side, but Mk. 4:15 likens their&nbsp;<em>heart</em>&nbsp;to the way side, where the seed was sown. In God's sight, a person&nbsp;<em>is</em>&nbsp;his heart or way of thinking (Prov. 23:7); and to God, a person's attitude to the word&nbsp;<em>is</em>&nbsp;his mind.<br />
The RV translates the parable of the sower as if the seed sown is the convert: &ldquo;he that was sown&hellip;&rdquo; (Mt. 13:19 RV). And later on in Mt. 13:38 we are told so again: &ldquo;the good seed are the children of the Kingdom&rdquo;. Yet the seed was a symbol of the word of God. The parallel between the seed and the convert is such as to suggest that the word of God will produce converts in some sense; it will not return void (Is. 55:11). The apparent dearth of response to some&nbsp;preaching therefore poses a challenging question. Are we preaching the word of God alone, or our own ideas? Does God withhold blessing for some reason unknown to us? Is this parable only part of a wider picture, in which somehow the word&nbsp;<em>does</em>&nbsp;return void due to man&rsquo;s rejection? Thus the word of God was &lsquo;made void&rsquo; by the Pharisees (Mk. 7:13 RV- a conscious allusion to Is. 55:11?)&hellip;. This is perhaps one of the most defiantly unanswerable questions in our experience. As an aside, one possible explanation is that &ldquo;the word&rdquo; which is sent forth and prospers, achieving all God&rsquo;s intention, is in fact Messiah. The same word is used about the &lsquo;prospering&rsquo; of the Servant in His work: Is. 48:15; 53:10 cp. Ps. 45:4. Another is to accept the LXX reading of this passage: &ldquo;&hellip;until whatsoever I have willed shall have been accomplished&rdquo;. Here at least is the implication that&nbsp;<em>something</em>&nbsp;happens and is achieved when we preach God&rsquo;s word. The same idiom occurs in Ez. 9:11 AVmg., where we read that &ldquo;the man clothed with linen&rdquo;- representing Ezekiel or his representative Angel- &ldquo;returned the word, saying, I have done as thou hast commanded me&rdquo;. The word &lsquo;returned&rsquo; in the sense that someone, somewhere, was obedient to it even if others weren&rsquo;t. We must believe, really and truly, that the word will not return void, but it will accomplish what it is intended to achieve. We are not scattering seed with the vague hope that something might sprout up; we are planting, fully expecting to see a harvest. &ldquo;The word of God grew and multiplied&rdquo; (Acts 12:24) surely means that the number of converts to the word multiplied- for the same word is repeatedly used in this sense (Acts 6:1,7; 5:14; 9:31; 19:20). Thus &ldquo;the word of God&rdquo; is put by metonymy for &lsquo;the response to the word of God&rsquo;, as if the word will inevitably bring forth response.&nbsp;</p>
<p><em>And the weeds are the sons of the evil one</em>- I have demonstrated throughout the exposition of this chapter, beginning with the parable of the sower, that the adversary to the growth of the word of Jesus in the first century was initially the Jewish system. They are here personified as 'the wicked one'. And the noun is used elsewhere in this context by the Lord; He speaks of not resisting the evil one [s.w.] when the disciples were hit on the cheek, which was distinctly a synagogue punishment for uttering heresy (Mt. 5:39). Judaism understood 'the wicked one' as a personal Satan figure, but the Lord is redefining it- as they themselves. On a wider scale, the New Testament does this masterfully, redefining the common understanding of 'Satan', the adversary, the wicked one, as a personification of you yourself. The Lord specifically defines the Jewish religious leaders as 'the wicked one' in Mt. 7:11: &quot;If you then, being evil [Gk. 'the wicked one']...&quot;. Earlier that same day (Mt. 13:1) the Lord had three times called them &quot;evil ones&quot; and an &quot;evil generation&quot;, using the same word <em>poneros</em>&nbsp;(Mt. 12:34,39,45; John's Gospel likewise records the Lord calling the Jewish world &quot;evil&quot; in Jn. 3:19; 7:7). They were the personification of 'the wicked one' because they had 'evil' [s.w.] in their hearts (Mt. 9:4 &quot;why do you think evil in your hearts?&quot;); for moral 'evil' comes from the heart (Mt. 15:19). Later in this chapter He uses the word to speak of how the 'wicked ones' will be separated from the righteous at the last day (Mt. 13:49). Clearly 'the wicked ones' are people- and not&nbsp;supernatural beings. Note how the very same word and grammatical construction is used to describe a church member as &quot;the wicked one&quot; (1 Cor. 5:13; 2 Thess. 3:2). The term does not of itself require any reference to a supernatural being.</p>
<p>We shouldn&rsquo;t seek to over-interpret every element of a parable- although such approaches often yield very fruitful lessons. Indeed, here is the difference between parables and allegories- an allegory requires every symbol to be interpreted, but parables aren&rsquo;t like this. It&rsquo;s a different genre. The focus is often on the end stress, not the details of the parable itself. And so I submit that rather do we need to seek to perceive the main issues which the Lord is seeking to get over to us, through these special features of His stories. Indeed, when the Lord&nbsp;<em>does</em>&nbsp;give interpretations of His parables, He doesn&rsquo;t give interpretations of every feature which formed the furniture of the parable. When He gives quite a detailed interpretation of the parable of the wheat and tares, He doesn&rsquo;t comment on the significance of the servants sleeping, the barn, the<em> bundling&nbsp;</em>of the weeds, etc.</p>