Parable of the Hidden Treasure and Parable of the Pearl of Great Price

The first century Christians would not exchange their lives for their souls because they had found that treasure, and they had found the pearl of great price. And they were willing to lay down their lives because they realized that in their whole lives there was nothing so precious, nothing so valuable as to possess Him. There are many things that we value in this life, some of them good, others that are pushed on us, that tempt us from the world. But there is something that we should value even above our own lives, as you heard R.C. Sproul say, and that's the pearl of great price.

And that's not a jewel, it's a person. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind, and I'm glad that you're with us for this Friday edition. As we live in a world that is filled with many competing value systems, it's important to re-evaluate our own priorities to ensure they align with the Bible. Today's message from Dr. Sproul aims to help you do just that.

But before you hear it, I do want to remind you that today is the final day to request R.C. Sproul's entire study of Jesus' parables at renewingyourmind.org. Well, here's Dr. Sproul on the parable of the hidden treasure and the parable of the pearl of great price. In this session of our study of the parables, we're going to look at two similar but very short parables that Jesus gave His disciples, and they're found in Matthew chapter 13, beginning at verse 44 and reading through verse 45. And these two parables are called the parable of the hidden treasure and the parable of the pearl of great price.

I'll read them briefly and then comment on them. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and hid. And for joy over it, he goes and sells all that he has and buys the field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls, who when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it.

Now, both of these parables are concerned with Jesus teaching us something about the kingdom of God, or as Matthew calls it, the kingdom of heaven. But both of them are concerned with the question of value. And that's an idea that is discussed frequently in our modern world, particularly when there are political campaigns to be undertaken. You will hear candidates referring to problems of value of family values or national values or whatever other kind of values that they may be concerned about. And what concerns me in the way this word is used in the contemporary culture is that so often the idea of value or values is used as a synonym for ethics.

But they are not the same thing. Values have to do with subjective appraisals of something's worth to an individual. That is to say, what we hold to be important to ourselves or worth to ourselves or something to be deemed significant.

And that can be simply a matter of personal preference. In the science of economics, we learn of the subjective theory of value. Nobody can tell me what my car's value is to me.

You can tell me what its value might be to you if you wanted to purchase it. But we don't have exactly the same value systems. This is one of the reasons, for example, that how money is spent and used within the family is the number three cause, according to people's statements, for divorce in America, arguments over money. Because when two people marry, they don't bring the same exact value system into the marriage as their partner does. And every marriage, whether it's the marriage of billionaires or of paupers, involves the joint property that is finite in value.

And so every time a dollar is spent on one thing, that is a lost opportunity for it's being spent on something else. And if you have a finite amount of money in your house, and the man wants to buy golf clubs and the woman wants to buy new sheets for the bed, you can have a conflict over that because the man values golf clubs more than sheets, and the woman tends to value sheets more than golf clubs. And so we have this problem of value. And where it relates itself to ethics is that ethics has to do not with that which is subjective, but that which is objective. Ethics has to do not with so much what we esteem or what we hold in high worth or value, but ethics has to do with what we ought to do. Now when we relate these two questions, we see that God has a value system, and we have our value system, and our value systems don't always agree with the value system of God.

And where this matter becomes ethical is as Christians, we have an imperative, an ethical imperative, to bring our personal values into line with the values that God Himself assigns to things in this world. Now Jesus, in giving His announcement of the breakthrough of the kingdom of God, is announcing something here of inestimable value to people who, for the most part, do not place a high value upon it. And so He gives these two brief parables to illustrate His point. The first is of a man who finds a great treasure in a field. Now we have movies and novels about treasure hunts and about pirates in the Caribbean who bury great hoards of treasure on some remote island, and then they leave a map so that they can recover that at a later date, and X marks the spot, and then their ship goes down, and nobody knows what happens to the map, and sooner or later somebody finds the map, and they get all excited, and so they go on a treasure hunt, hoping somehow to rediscover the buried treasure. Well, in the ancient world, it was not uncommon for vast hoards of money and jewels and treasure to be hidden secretly in fields where people would know where they buried it and keep it safe from others.

They didn't go down to the First National Bank of Jericho and deposit their valuables in their safety deposit box. They hid their money frequently by digging a hole in the ground, and only they knew it. Well, then a person dies and never recovers the treasure, and time passes, and everybody's forgotten about it, and this man just happens to be working in a field one day, and he hears a clank with his shovel, and he sees that he's uncovered a treasure chest of a vast multitude of valuables contained within it. And apparently he doesn't know the owner of the field or any of that sort of thing, and Jesus doesn't go into great detail here other than to tell us that the man goes and sells everything that he has, all of his possessions, because he has one burning passion, and that is to raise enough capital so that he can go by that field where he knows the treasure is hidden. And once he then owns the field, then the treasure that is buried there becomes his possession. So he doesn't steal the treasure. He simply tries to find a way to earn enough money to buy the field.

I recently saw a film that put the ancient parables in modern context, and in this particular parable it showed the man who was a struggling realtor who was trying to sell a bleak piece of property near an inner city and by an interstate, and he tried to pitch to his people who came to look at the property, which was seedy and run down and hadn't been occupied for over fifty years. He tried to sell them on its potential. People would take one look at this rat trap and laugh at him and leave. And he was in his frustration, he was ready to leave the site when he dropped his cell phone on the ground, and when he picked it up, he was like Jeb Clampett in the Beverly Hillbillies. His cell phone was covered with oil. So he starts turning over rocks and doing some more investigation, goes to an analyst and finds out there's this huge reservoir of oil beneath this abandoned property. And so he tries to convince his wife that they need to raise the money to buy the property. And the story goes how he has a yard sale, and they put their refrigerator and their stove and their television set and their car. They have a for sale sign on their house. They have their clothes out there, their jewelry, everything. And they're selling everything, total liquidation, because they need to sell everything that they have in order to get the money they need to buy the property where he knows the oil is underneath. Now what's interesting in this particular modern-day version of the parable of the hidden treasure is the reaction of the man's friends and even family. They think that he has lost his mind.

Why are you selling everything? He said, because I'm going to make an investment in an oil field. They said, do you know how many people go broke investing in oil where the holes come up dry?

You're insane. This is just utterly irresponsible. But he won't listen to them. He's bound and determined, and sure enough, he raises the money that he needs, and he buys the property. And it's a bonanza of oil that makes him as rich as Jeb Clampett so they can move to Beverly Hills with the rest of the Beverly Hillbillies.

That's the idea. Well, there's nothing untoward or unethical about this man's procedure here, but the point of the parable is a very simple one. That this man found something that was so valuable that nothing would do for him that he might possess it. He would give up everything that he had, sell everything that he could, so that he could buy that field because he knew there was treasure here, so that he could buy that field because he knew there was treasure there of inestimable value. And Jesus gives another parable right alongside a bit of a jewelry merchant who majors in the selling of pearls.

And in this part of the ancient Near East, pearls were much more rare than they are today, and pearls could be seen as having greater value than even diamonds and rubies and emeralds and gold and silver. And this man had a magnificent collection of pearls, and then one day he came upon this exquisite pearl that was so lustrous, so marvelous, so beautiful that all the rest of the pearls in his collection seemed to fade into insignificance. And so the man said, I have to own that pearl. So he sold his whole collection of jewels, his whole business.

Now I've asked that of himself of everything to one end. I must have that pearl, that pearl of great price. Now see the common point in both of these, that you have something extremely valuable that is worth selling everything that you have so that you may possess it. And Jesus is saying, this is how valuable the kingdom of God is. Now you go back to the subjective theory of value and questions that we deal with in debates all the time about profit, for example, in business.

I used to give economics lessons to students in the classical Christian school, and I would ask them simple questions like this. If a shoe manufacturer manufactures a pair of shoes, and it costs them $10 to make a pair of shoes, and he takes that pair of shoes and he sells it at the wholesale price of $15 to a shoe store operator, and he makes $5 on the transaction, I say, who profits? And then I say, then the shoe store owner marks the price up to $25. He bought it for $15. He's selling it now for $25, and when he sells it to the customer, who profits? And so I'll ask the students in this illustration, what people in this story make a profit? And it's easy for them. They say, well, obviously the shoe manufacturer made a profit when he sold his shoes to the retail store owner.

Yeah. And the retail store owner made a profit when he sold those shoes to the customer that came in the door. And I say, that's right. And I say, okay, well, who else profit?

And they give me a blank stare just like you are. Who else? We discovered everybody that made a profit.

I said, no, no, no, no, there's still somebody else. Who makes a profit in this transaction? They said, who? They said, the customer. Well, how does a customer make a profit? Well, the minute the shoe store operator puts a price tag on his shoes that's higher than the customer values those shoes, what will the customer do? He won't buy them. But if the price is $25 and he wants the shoes more than he wants the $25 in his pocket, he'll make the deal.

That's the way it's supposed to work. It used to be that way when we bartered. You know, the man who was the cattle raiser would have to make a deal with the shoemaker. The shoemaker was hungry. He had a hundred pairs of shoes. He couldn't wear all those shoes.

The cattle rancher had thousands of stakes in his freezer, but his feet were cold. So they got together and they decided to make a deal trading stakes for shoes. And it's simple in that kind of a transaction to see that there was mutual profitability going on there. But we often miss the point that in a free economy, and no one tells you you have to buy something, when you make a purchase, you are exercising your system of values. Now Jesus goes further with this when He talks about our individual subjective values. When He's talking about swapping out or purchasing, right, or exchanging, and He gets questions about rates of exchange. He asks this question, what will a man give in exchange for his soul?

Which is simply asking how much value do you put on your soul? Suppose you had this situation arise in your life. Suppose the fire department called you and said, a fire has broken out in your house.

We're not going to be able to save the house. You have five minutes to go in there and get anything you can to save from the contents of your house before it would be too late. So you know you have five minutes of a window of safety to retrieve from your home things that are valuable to you.

What would you get? Would you go run to the garage and get your car? Run to the dresser and get your jewels? Have you ever thought about that? I know exactly what I would get if I had five minutes to save whatever I had in my house.

I would get some rare books and some paintings that I own in that five minutes and a box of letters that my dad wrote me from World War II. Why would I rush and get those things? Because they can't be replaced. They can never be replaced.

And so I put a lot of value on things that can't ever be replaced by going to the store and buying another one, so to speak. But we all have different sense of values, and we've seen many fictional accounts of the devil engaging in an exchange, trying to purchase people's soul. One of my favorite plays of all time was entitled Damn Yankees, which I saw on Broadway in New York. And the hero there was an avid fan of the Washington Senators.

And every time they played the Yankees, they got beat. And he sold his soul to the devil so he could become a baseball star and lead the Washington Senators to the World Series. Faust, Dr. Faustus, in these things, they have the same kind of a story. And so Jesus said, What's your value, sister? How important to you is your soul? We know that your body is very important to you. We know that the medical professionals have become the high priests of our modern culture.

And we know that from an economic system, physicians are much more highly valued in our culture than ministers. It has to say something about the degree to which we consider the worth of our souls. Jesus said, What are you going to trade? What will you give in exchange for your soul? What would you trade for your salvation?

I can't imagine a Christian being willing to trade anything. The first century Christians would not exchange their lives for their souls because they had found that treasure. And they had found the pearl of great price. And they were willing to lay down their lives because they realized that in their whole lives there was nothing so precious, nothing so valuable as to possess Him. You know, the pearl of great price isn't even a jewel.

It's a person. And if you have Him, you have everything. And we need to hear these parables because Jesus is saying in the value system of God, the kingdom of God that is brought through Jesus Christ is the thing that surpasses every other thing, any stuff that we can accumulate in this world. And as Edwards used to say, following Jesus' teaching, that the believers press into the kingdom of God. We must have the pearl of great price. We must have that treasure that's hidden in the field because there is nothing we can compare with it in terms of its value.

We need to have an audit, I think, rather regularly of our value systems. And to see whether our values line up with the values of God. We're called to seek to have the mind of Christ, and that means to love what Jesus loves and to hate what Jesus hates, to pursue what Jesus pursues, and to flee from what Jesus flees. That's what Jesus that's what the life of a Christian is all about. With the new year almost upon us and many using that occasion to reflect on priorities for the year to come, it's an especially fitting time to heed the message of these parables and R.C.

Sproul's challenge to take an audit of our own value systems. This is the Friday edition of Renewing Your Mind, and that was R.C. Sproul from his Parables of Jesus series. Today is the final day to request the entire 12-part series, Walking Through Jesus' Parables, along with digital access to the study guide. So please, give your year-end gift at renewingyourmind.org while there's still time, knowing that your support in these final days of 2023 make a significant impact upon the outreach plans for Renewing Your Mind and Ligonier Ministries in 2024. Every gift, large or small, really does make a difference. So we'll send you this DVD on the Parables of Jesus to thank you for your generosity. And if you call us at 800 435 4343, you can even choose to only receive digital access to help your donation go even further. Thank you for your support. Next time, we'll begin the year with a study on the New Testament Epistles. So join us, New Year's Day, here on Renewing Your Mind. New Year's Day.