Parables of God’s Just Kingdom

Virtual Sunday School — June 10, 2018

Scripture: Matthew 13:24-33

Matthew 13:24-33  He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field,  (25)  but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away.  (26)  So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also.  (27)  And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’  (28)  He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’  (29)  But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them.  (30)  Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, “Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”’”  (31)  He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field.  (32)  It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”  (33)  He told them another parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.”

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Notes

• Metaphor – a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.
• Simile – a figure of speech that expresses the resemblance of one thing to another of a different category, usually introduced by asor like
• Parabales (Gr. parabállō). There is no functional difference between a parable and a simile.
• A parable differs from a fable because a fable contains things impossible. For example, talking animals.
• Jesus is the only one that uses parables to teach in the new testament.
• Parables are used in the old testament. For example, Nathan’s story to David about the rich man and poor man.
• The tares.—No weed is so troublesome to the Syrian farmers as a kind of wild rye-grass, which they call zuwân. It grows abundantly in cornfields, and is so extremely like wheat in its earlier stages that even a farmer’s eye cannot tell the difference with certainty till it is shot.

Apocatastasis

• Schofield: The implication of a converted world in this age (“till the whole was leavened”), is explicitly contradicted by our Lord’s interpretation of the parables of the Wheat and Tares, and of the Net. Our Lord presents a picture of a partly converted kingdom in an unconverted world; of good fish and bad in the very kingdom-net itself.
• Leaven alters the flour. It does not change it from alter it to something else.
• Matthew 7:13-14  “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many.  (14)  For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.