And anybody who is not a child of the kingdom is a child of the wicked one.
There are only two kinds of people in the world. Children of the kingdom, children of the wicked one. And if you're not a child of the king through your submission to the lordship of Jesus Christ, you're a child of the devil.
It's that plain and simple. If you will not obey the lordship of Christ, then working in you is Satan. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. As John's been showing you over the past couple of weeks, if you are in God's kingdom, you have enemies, Satan and those who serve him. So what's the right way to respond to those enemies? How does God want you to deal with them? Well, you'll see how Jesus answers those questions as John continues his study called the parables of the kingdom. Today's message may give you a perspective on Christian living that you've never considered.
Now, just a quick note here. We'll have some important ministry news for you before we end today, so be listening for that. But right now, here's John with the lesson. We come now to the 13th chapter of Matthew. I trust that you have your Bible ready and your mind is open, your heart available to the Lord, because we have some marvelous, marvelous things that God will show us as we look at the second parable in Matthew 13. And it is a parable about judgment, a parable about judgment. It tells us that the Lord is sowing seed.
Where? In His field, in His field. Now, if you'll notice, it says in verse 38, the field is the world. Now, what does He sow? Well, it says the good seed are the children of the kingdom. What this means is that the Lord puts the children of the kingdom in the world.
Very simple. Now, who are we with in the world? Well, verse 38 says, the Darnells or the Terrors, the Zazania, are the children of the wicked one. The devil, it says in verse 39, the enemy that sowed them is the devil. He is the wicked one. He's called that several different places in the New Testament. The wicked one.
And the article there is emphatic. He is the utterly wicked one, the absolutely wicked one, the wicked one of all wicked ones. The very ground of whose being is wretched. He is unmitigated darkness.
He is unalleviated error. And anybody who is not a child of the kingdom is a child of the wicked one. There are only two kinds of people in the world. Children of the kingdom, children of the wicked one. And if you're not a child of the king through your submission to the lordship of Jesus Christ, you're a child of the devil.
It's that plain and simple. You are on his team. You are functioning under his control. Ephesians 2 said, you are directed and moved and motivated and guided by the prince of the power of the air who works in the children of disobedience. If you will not obey the lordship of Christ, then working in you is Satan. John 8 44, Jesus said to those leaders of Israel, you are of your father the devil. In 1 John 3, John contrasts the children of God and the children of the devil and those are the only two kinds there are. Now there is relative evil within that children of the devil category, but they're all children of the devil. Some worse than others, all bad and all representative of Satan himself. That's what it means in 1 John 5 19 when it says the whole world lies in the lap of the wicked one.
The whole world. And there's an interesting statement I think made in 5 37 of Matthew that easily gets overlooked. Here in chapter 5, you know, the Lord is contrasting righteous behavior with unrighteous behavior. And he sort of sums it up at the end of verse 37, whatever is more than these comes from the evil one. In other words, if you go beyond or in contradiction to God's law, it proceeds from the evil one and that is a monumental theological statement. The origin of evil is from the evil one. God is not the author of evil. Evil proceeds from the evil one. He is the enemy who, watch this, over sows in the good field. You see, in creation, chronologically, God sowed, didn't he, children of the kingdom, Adam and Eve. And then came the enemy and in the fall he over sowed.
And the two continue through all human history. And so Satan is the origin of evil. Whatever is not of God, it says in 5 37, cometh from the evil one. People always ask the question, where did evil come from?
That's where it came from. The evil one. And so then, back to Matthew 13, the Lord sows believers, subjects of the king, in the world and Satan over sows his own children. So the world then is commingled, subjects of the king, the subjects of the usurper, the marauder, the enemy, the devil himself.
And by the way, devil in verse 39, diabolos means enemy, adversary. So we're mingled in the world. Now that's very important. This is how it has been. And this is how it will be in the mystery kingdom.
A commingling. Now there's several things we need to note. Satan, it says that the enemy, when he came and sowed, he sowed among.
And he uses a very, very strong term, very comprehensive thought everywhere. And we have to just note here that Satan really has his people everywhere. I mean, he is really sowing them. In fact, in some parts of the world, they are the whole area.
You'd look a long time to find in there some wheat. And he does sow them in the church. He does sow them in the church because it says in Matthew 7, Depart from me, those who say we did this, we did this in your name, depart from me, ye that work lawlessness, you who work iniquity. He's got his iniquitous workers sown right in the church. Now when we find them here, we do have biblical instruction to put them out.
The New Testament is clear on that. Now what is it trying to say to us? It says we exist together. We breathe the same air. We eat the same food. We drive the same highways. We live in the same neighborhoods. We work at the same factories. We go to the same schools.
We visit the same doctors. We entertain ourselves with the same entertainment. We're under the same sky. We enjoy the same warm sun.
We breathe the same air. The just and the unjust are rained upon in this era because it's all commingled until the end. And that's where we come to verse 39.
Very important. The harvest is the end of the age. Why does He say that? Because you see the disciples were ready to put in the sickle right now. And I get that way.
I confess. Sometimes when you see the wickedness and the rejection and the unbelief and the grief that the world causes the church and the Lord's purposes and people, you just say, God, would you just come down and wipe it out? And you understand David, don't you, when he cries for God to destroy his enemies. And you understand those people under the altar pleading with God to do something. But here the Lord says, don't be impatient. The harvest waits till the end of the age. A very important phrase used several times in Matthew speaks of ultimate consummation in judgment.
It speaks of that final time when God judges. Now at this juncture, we would interject the part of the story where they said, do you want us to pull the weeds up? We can see who they are now. They've grown up. We see the manifestation.
We know who they are. You want us to yank them out? And the Lord says, no, don't do that. Because if you yank out the darnells, you're liable to do what?
Yank out some wheat also. You say, what in the world is he saying? What is he saying? I think he's simply saying, if you go about trying to judge the world without divine insight, you're going to wind up condemning the Christians.
You can't do that. God didn't call the church of Jesus Christ to judge the world. God doesn't want us in a position of political power destroying unbelievers.
Because we don't have the discernment to know what's going to go on in reality anyway. That is not the church's function. To go around ripping out the tares and the darnells of the world. That's not what we've been called to do. We are not to attack the world. God hasn't given us that ministry. We're going to grow together and Satan is going to sow and over sow even in the church because he loves imitation.
But it's not for us to go ripping the tares out. And wherever in history the church became a political power, it invariably was prone to corrupt that power. To destroy, quote unquote, the apostates. Think about the inquisition. You ever read Fox's book of martyrs? All of those martyrs of Christ that were slaughtered were slaughtered by, quote unquote, Christians.
They claimed that anyway. Read the Crusades, one of the most abysmal points of human history. Crusaders in the name of Jesus Christ in Europe were going to go to take the holy places of Israel back from the Turks and in the process they massacred people all across Europe. In one village alone they trampled with their horses three thousand Jews because they said they were apostates.
This is not the age of judgment. What was the Lord Jesus Christ attitude towards those people? Simply ask yourself this, how did he treat publicans and sinners? With meekness and love and kindness, right? How did he treat Judas?
And Judas was there in his presence and he didn't devastate, he didn't go and blow him over with fire. He was patient and this is the time of patience. He was tolerant and this is the time of tolerance.
He was gracious and this is the time of grace. And while some people are running out trying to destroy the Darnells, they may be forgetting the fact that they were once a Darnell and maybe God knows they need time enough to become wheat. See, if we go out destroying everybody, we may be totally out of line with God's plan. You see, the Lord knows how many people belong in the kingdom and he, like he said in the book of Acts, I have much people in that city.
He knows who it is that is to believe and that is working its way out. And if we acted as a church against the ungodly of the world, we would be interfering with God's patient gracious waiting for those people to come to him in his good time. That's not our calling. We are not to do that and the spirit of that means we are not to damn the unbelievers of the world either. We are not to pray that God would destroy them. We are to pray that God will what?
Save them. That he will save them. That he will redeem them.
That's the only proper attitude. That was the attitude of the Lord Jesus Christ, the night in which he was betrayed. He took the sop, which was the sign when you gave it to the person next to you that this person was the honored guest and who did he give it to? Judas. He was still wooing Judas with love.
Judas and Jesus, an illustration of how it is in the commingling in the age of grace. We cannot act as executioners. We must be lovingly, patiently, graciously tolerant like our Lord was. And you know something else? If we tried to act in judgment, we might be sparing some of that rocky soil stuff and some of that weedy ground stuff because we can't tell the difference. And we might be uprooting some of the real stuff. So we have a heart of compassion, not a heart of condemnation.
You know, you can take it a step further. We can't apply spiritual principles that we live by in the kingdom to the rest of the world. You can't say, we've got to get rid of these people. They're messing up our world. They're just doing what comes naturally. I mean, you cannot walk up to these people and say, I wish you people would do what you should do and that's impossible for them.
Because they're doing the only thing they know how to do. That's behave as the children of the devil. And if you go and try to enforce upon the world our standards, you are casting your pearls before what?
Swine. Remember that in Matthew 7 where he talks about in the first six verses of Matthew 7, he talks about how we are not to judge one another but we're to be careful. We look at our own lives and before we get a splinter out of another guy's eye, we get a two by four out of our own eye.
And then he talks about how we deal with each other and how we treat each other and so forth. And then he says right in the next verse, don't bother to try this stuff on the world. That would be casting your pearls before swine. And you can back up and take the whole Sermon on the Mount there and what he's saying is don't take these principles of the Sermon on the Mount and try to enforce them on a society of ungodly people because they can't handle it. And so we don't damn them when they don't do it.
You understand? We love them and we call them to Christ. Salvation then calls us to a place that is in a sense precarious because we're commingled in the world.
But listen to this very carefully. I don't think the Lord is greatly disturbed by that because the nature of the wheat is that it cannot be changed. We may be next to the darn elves but they can't change our nature if we're wheat, right?
But the converse is not necessarily true. Their nature can be changed by the influence of godliness. And so we are called then to be patient. Now that brings us to the climax in verse 39. Remember in the parable he said, just let it go until it's time for the harvest and the reapers will come and they'll do the separating. And verse 39 says, the reapers are the angels.
Now listen to me. Angels are called to judgment. Christians are called to righteous influence. We are not called to judgment. We are not called to condemn the world. Now we want to preach against its sins. We want to preach against its evils. But we want to love its sinners and evildoers and be gracious and patient with them. We are not God's executioners. That is not our task. We have an inadequate knowledge in the first place.
We might wind up making terrible mistakes as has been done so much in history. So the Bible is saying God's going to judge. He's going to judge in the end of the age and angels are going to be the reapers. And you can see over and over again in the New Testament from Matthew to Revelation how that God has called the angels to reap.
In Matthew 16, 27 it says He'll come in glory, the glory of His Father with His angels. In Matthew 24, I think it's verse 31, He'll send His angels to gather the elect and so forth. The gathering process of the elect and the gathering process of those to be judged is done by the angels. And you see it also in Revelation as you read the 14th chapter particularly and in the 19th chapter that angels are God's agents of judgment, not men. That's not our task. So He says to these guys in the parable, you're the sowers.
I've got some other folks for reapers. Verse 40, when the angels come, the reapers, therefore the Darnells are going to be gathered and burned in the fire and it'll be that way in the end of this age. We have to wait until the King comes back with His angels for this to happen. And by the way, that's precisely what 2 Thessalonians 1, 7 says. When the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels in flaming fire, taking vengeance on them that know not God and obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power.
When's that going to happen? When He shall come to be glorified in His saints. He'll come to be glorified in His saints and when He comes at that time with His holy angels, He'll burn in unquenchable fire all those children of the wicked one. Now notice verse 40. It shows us the Darnells are gathered out and burned.
That's the picture. And verse 41 explains it. The Son of Man shall send forth His angels. They shall gather out of His kingdom. And there the term kingdom sees the whole world.
It's all His field. And He pulls in the net, as it were, pulling them all in together like unclean animals and clean in the same ark, goats in the same pasture with sheep, bad fish in the same net with good fish, chaff on the same floor as the grain, vessels to dishonor in the same house as vessels to honor. He pulls them all in and all that offend and all that do iniquity or do lawlessness, the same phrase as Matthew 7 23, those that do lawlessness. Pulls them all in and all of them, verse 42, are cast into the furnace of fire and their reaction to that is wailing and gnashing of teeth. And so there's coming an inevitable judgment when the Lord sends His angels, pulls all of them out of the kingdom that offend Him.
And anything that is sinful, unbelieving, offends Him. All those who work iniquity, just two ways of defining sinful people, and they're all thrown into a furnace of fire. Now fire is the most horrible death that man ever experiences. And fire is the imagery of eternal hell. It speaks of the terrible and everlasting doom of the unrighteous, the sons of Satan.
It's used again and again in Scripture. We read in the Scripture about weeds being burned, about chaff being burned, about barren branches being burned, even in the Old Testament of trees being burned. And here we see the Darnells being burned. The idea that the ungodly will be consumed in fire. It pictures the same thing the furnace of fire does as the lake of fire of Revelation 19, of the unquenchable fire of Mark 9, the everlasting fire of Matthew 25. It is the consuming, burning fire of hell.
It is the same fire of Malachi 4, the same devastating judgment fire that Daniel alludes to in Daniel 12 verse 2. It's eternal punishment in hell. And the reaction in verse 42 is so frightening. Grinding of teeth and piercing shrieks is what it really says.
That's the reaction. Grinding of teeth and piercing shrieks. People think they're going to be in hell and everything's going to be fine.
They're going to be with their friends and they'll love it down there. And this verse tells us that not only is hell a fire, but it tells you what your reaction is going to be. Grinding teeth and piercing shrieks. Painful, eternal, inevitable, inescapable judgment. And the Lord is saying to the disciples, look, for now wait, for now be patient, for now influence, for now coexist while the plan is working out. And finally, the judgment will fall. And after it falls, verse 43, then, mark that word, then, not now but then, shall the righteous shine forth. Then comes the holy glory, you see.
Then comes the anticipated kingdom. Then comes the righteous Shekinah, lighting the face of all the saints for all the ages. They'll shine like the sun in the kingdom of their father. Then, so He says, that part of its future, but it is coming just as surely as the judgment. In fact, Daniel 12, 3 says, they'll shine like stars.
They'll shine as the brightness of God's glorious and marvelous heaven. The last point is the application, verse 43. Who hath ears to hear? Let them hear.
That's the application. You say, what does it mean? Simply, it means what I used to hear a school teacher say when I was little. Johnny, you better what? Listen. You better listen. You better listen.
What are you listening to? Well, ask yourself this first. Are you wheat?
I mean, you ought to know that to start with. Are you wheat? Or are you Darnell?
Are you Tares? Are you a child of the kingdom or are you a child of the enemy? If you're a child of the enemy, then listen. This is a time of patience. This is a time of grace.
But judgment is inevitable, eternal, painful. You better check and you better listen. You say, I'm not a Darnell. I'm wheat.
Then you better listen to this. You're to coexist in this world and you're to influence the world for good, not be influenced by it. You're to be used by God to reach that Darnell near you that's going to become wheat. So use it as an opportunity not to condemn the world, not to blast the world, not to judge the world. That's God's business. But to love them while condemning their sin, loving the sinner. That's the plan.
Are you doing that? Are you planted in the world for good and for God and for salvation? The parables of the kingdom. That's John MacArthur's current study on Grace to You.
It's a look at the stories with hidden meanings that Jesus taught in Matthew chapter 13. Now, as I mentioned at the top of the broadcast, we have something important to announce. We've been getting the word out about our upcoming Truth Matters conference for a couple of weeks, and if you'd like to attend, registration is now open. And John, this is going to be a great three days of looking to God's word to help the church recover a biblical worldview. That's the focus of the conference, and we're going to be doing it in a first-time-ever setting for Truth Matters conferences.
Yeah, that's right. This is the first time we will have a Truth Matters conference, not at Grace Community Church. This time it's going to be in Williamstown, Kentucky, and it's going to be May 18 to 20, 2022. And we're going to be meeting at the Answers in Genesis conference center at the now world-famous Arc Encounter. Grace to You has had Truth Matters conferences going back to 2011, and they all feature some very vital issue that the church is facing at a given time. Now, the theme of the 2022 conference is recovering a biblical worldview. And I know biblical worldview is thrown around a lot.
What it basically means is seeing the world through the lens of an accurate interpretation of Scripture. We hear so much about gender, sexuality, critical race theory, intersectionality, social justice, all these kinds of things that have taken a terrible toll, not only on our culture, but on the church as well. And so we're going to be addressing those from a biblical viewpoint. And I'll be speaking along with Justin Peters, Ken Ham, Jeff Williams, Don Green, Mike Ricardian, of course, Phil Johnson. And our good friend Darryl Harrison will be podcasting live at the conference.
It's going to be a great time. Again, the dates May 18 to 20, 2022 at the Answers in Genesis conference center. You can register now. Go to the website gty.org and reserve your spot today.
Yes, and friend, the last Truth Matters conference filled up so fast. I encourage you to register now. The dates again May 18 through 20. Sign up today at our website. Our website address? gty.org. And we would love for you to join us in Williamstown, Kentucky at the Answers in Genesis conference center, where you'll enjoy three days of Bible teaching, fellowship, and singing, and with teaching on such a practical theme, recovering a biblical worldview. It's an event you won't want to miss.
For all the details and to register, go to gty.org. And friend, for an event like this, we need your prayers. For the speakers, for all the logistics, and pray that the people who attend will walk away encouraged. Thanks for bringing our needs before the throne of grace. Also, if you'd like to download John's current study on the parables of the kingdom, every message is free in audio or transcript format at our website, gty.org. In fact, our entire sermon archive, 3,500 messages covering all of the New Testament and much of the Old, is free to download at gty.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson, reminding you to watch Grace to You Television this Sunday on DirecTV channel 378, or check your local listings, and then be here tomorrow for another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.
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