Jesus first revealed the seven ages of the Christian dispensation after He rejected the nation of Israel because of their hardness of heart. Once the Jewish leaders accused Him of casting out demons in the power of Beelzebub, they had crossed a line from which they could never retreat. At this point Jesus began teaching in cryptic stories that the Jews could not understand, nor could anyone without the revelation of the Spirit. It is in these stories, or parables, that the Diaspora of Israel is intimated, an era in which the Gentiles would receive His word and be fashioned into His Body. This is why the thirteenth chapter of Matthew is so critical to our understanding of history of the Christian era.
Because of the intransigence of the nation, the promise of the Kingdom was suspended and earthly governance was transferred to the Gentile nations temporarily. It has rested with them for nearly two thousand years, but a change is coming now that Israel is back in the promised land as a legitimate jurisdiction.
Jesus speaks seven (the complete number of spiritual perfection) parables, each predictive of the seven phases of the Christian assembly from the first century to the present. The first (Matt. 13:3-9, 18-23) is the parable of the sower who broadcasted seed that ended up in four places – the wayside, the stony places, the thorny places, and the good ground. This is that initial period of the apostles who followed the Lord’s commission to preach the gospel to and disciple all the nations. This command was fulfilled in the first century, and this is the Ephesian period of the Christian era. We have been taught that this field is any individual confronted by the Word of life and who possesses one of four kinds of heart. Other gospels may allow this straightforward interpretation, but Matthew’s gospel is of the King and His corporate Body, so it is rather what the Psalmist wrote in 78:2 – “I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings of old.” Jesus’ words are cryptic, and they need the fresh guidance of the Spirit to understand; something the Jews had forfeited by their rejection of Him. The kingdom of the heavens, entered into by the Spirit, becomes a mystery, a harbinger of changing conditions of the present age that would face those who would reign with Christ. The Lord warns that the path of life for those who would follow Him would be fraught with much danger of corruption from evil admixtures introduced into the truth. Sadly this corruption comes from nominal Christians – those who have Christ in name only.
The objection is raised that all these parables explain the kingdom of the heavens in a positive way, but that is not the case. John the Baptizer and Jesus came pronouncing the kingdom of heaven to the Jews of Israel, intending that the nation would repent, be born from above, and embrace it. When they did not and accused Jesus of doing His work in the power of Beelzebub, Jesus suddenly shifted His teaching from direct words to parables. The parables hide the truth, especially the truth about the kingdom. From the time Jesus began to speak in parables, the kingdom became mysterious, hidden away and only found by the diligent seeker. To the world’s perspective the kingdom appears to reside with the nominal Christians – the false teachers, the Roman Catholic Church, the Reformation sectarians, or with secularized Christianity – in whatever phase of history they happen to fall. In the current stage we have all four expressions hiding the mystery. That is why in the letters to the seven ecclesias in Asia (Rev. 2 and 3), there is the call to the overcomers, those who would seek the hidden mystery of the kingdom and secure its treasure. Though there is the outward show of the kingdom with all its glitz and glitter and falsehood, there is also the reality of the kingdom (that which Jesus hid away in His parables in Matthew 13) that the diligent and resolute are to seek and find.
The Smyrnan period matched precisely the parable of the tares in Matthew 13. It was during this time of extreme persecution of Christians that tares grew up to confuse and to obfuscate the truth. Gnoticism ran rampant, bringing in cryptic doctrines and mysteries from the East to dilute the truth of Jesus. It became a repository of Jewish, Christian, and Eastern beliefs in an amalgam of intellectualism in direct conflict with the truth of the Scriptures, all shrouded in the alluring bait of “mysteries” and secret societies of “the knowing ones,” the contemporary face of ancient Babylon with Nimrod. It was a terrible period for Christians, who did not yet possess the New Testament in its entirety, and were under severe torment for their faith. It was truly a crucible of confusion and pain.
But, in precedent setting resolve that would persist throughout the Christian dispensation, a group of faithful maintained their relationship with their Lord and with His Body of believers regardless the cost to them. These were the remnant that would someday be counted among the “called and chosen and faithful.” Though the majority of believers allowed themselves to be led astray into apostasy, these separated themselves and willingly took on the brand of heretic or fanatic. They chose rather to live in the simplicity of the Spirit, removed from the temptations of the world, and ever watching for the soon return of their Lord.
Unfortunately, some prominent Christian teachers in Egypt fell under the influence of Gnoticism and tried to incorporate Christian truth with Eastern philosophy, leading them to teach an unscriptural universalism in which every creature is eventually redeemed, even Satan. The Catechetical School at Alexandria produced examples of the influence of the tares sown by the enemy in the wheat field, and it set the stage and sowed the seeds of the Roman Catholic Church, which came to fruition in the fifth century. Everything Jesus said about the wheat field and the evil tares came true in the second and third centuries, making Matthew 13 a major prophecy of the leaders and propagators of the nominal community of Christians growing alongside the true Body of Christ.
It is at this period in the Christian era that Jesus’ third parable (Matt. 13:31-32) – the mustard seed – develops. He relates how a farmer took a mustard seed and planted in his field, but instead of producing an herb good for seasoning, the seed grew into a monstrous tree that provided shelter for the birds of the air. Any one reading this parable with an open mind has to conclude that something is horribly wrong here. The Creator’s laws of creation – “after his kind” – are violated. Herbs do not grow into trees. Birds do not nest in herbs. But the birds, which in the first parable swooped down to devour the good seed, here find homes in the branches of this tree. What do we make of this?
The sowing of grain (first two parables) and the mustard seed are Christ’s Word, and with it the Law of Life contained in it. This Word is sown in the world, but because of the enemy’s efforts, not only do good plants grow out of His sowing, but also the nominal (name only) Christian appears and forsakes the principles of the law of life contained in His Word. By abandoning the truth of Christ, the nominal Christians violate the parameters of the living Word and become something never intended. The mustard plant becomes a hideous tree full of the birds of the air that represent the unseen evil powers in our atmosphere. The fulfillment of this parable is rather obvious.
Not to be redundant, but rather emphatic, I must expose again this critical juncture and its main player Constantine. He was the consummate politician in the early fourth century, not the Christian convert that many would make him out to be. He discontinued the persecution of Christians to bring peace to his empire. It seems as if this is the mustard seed in its proper status, growing in peace and providing benefit to the world. But when Constantine, in a “masterly stroke of policy,” recognized all Christians as citizens with full civil rights, and even made Christianity the religion of the empire, the mustard plant mutated from its humble roots and grew into a great tree. This was a watershed moment for the Christians, for what the enemy of God can’t pull, he will push. The second and third centuries saw a wholesale attempt to destroy the fledgling faith in the cradle, but having failed miserably to arrest its spread, he changed tactics and “pushed” the Christian ecclesia into the world, using Constantine as his instrument. The emperor, who embraced both paganism and Christianity, and could never come down on the side of either, afforded status and wealth to Christian bishops, and, thereby, diluted their love and devotion to Christ. This phony patron of Christianity retained the title of Pontifex Maximus, or High Priest of Paganism, because he sought to consolidate his empire by conflating Christians and pagans.
The offer of status to Christians did not come cheaply. Constantine became the head of the universal ecclesia, and by agreeing to this offer, the bishops delivered their souls to Satan. They used their new positions of power to shift the people’s vision of the heavenly city to the acquiring of the good things of this earthly life, bringing in permanent corruption to the congregations of Christians. Soon the Christian community mimicked the pattern of the empire with its single emperor and governors over the provinces. Bishops became the governors of districts, removing themselves far away from the New Testament model of a plurality of elders to rule each autonomous city congregation. Their newfound power corrupted them. The mustard plant mutated and grew into a monster. What the empire was in its vast hierarchy and bureaucracy, the ecclesia became through its new organization. Nominal Christians were now assimilated into the inner workings of the fourth great empire. The tree was in place, and the birds would follow. Once Christians marry the world, the demons of the air will gather.
The Lord predicted with this tiny parable of the mustard seed/tree that the “mystery of iniquity” (2 Thess. 2:7) would slither itself into the corporate soul of the nominal Christian community and expand and metastasize without abatement until the Day of the Lord when it would culminate in the “man of sin” (2 Thess. 2:3). He also predicted in Matt. 24:37 that “as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.” Noah’s day was remarkable for its apathy, apostasy, violence, and illegal union with the fallen angels. So it will be at the end of the age when “men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away” (2 Tim. 3:2-5). No fair-minded person can deny that this is a description of the present world.
It is easy to see the reality of Jesus’ words in Matt. 13:33 when He says this: “The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.” It is without dispute that leaven in Scripture refers to sin and corruption. It is always a negative and evil term, and it was always forbidden to be in any offering to the Lord, and the Israelites were to put it out of their houses at Passover. When the woman places it in the fine flour, her intention is to corrupt the whole loaf of Christian testimony.
Jesus equated leaven to the teachings of the Pharisees and Saducees and Herodians, the religious conservatives, liberals and earthly secularists of that day. The fine meal is the fruit of the wheat sown in the first parable, good for the nourishment of the people. In reality this is the true teaching – the Bread of Life – communicated to the children of the kingdom. The Woman in this parable is the scriptural metaphor for an organized system apart from God, either religious or secular. She, through her agents the tares, mixed into the truth of Christ and His teachings the vile doctrines of legalism and liberalism and secularism, either to make the true teachings rigid and dead, or diluted and eviscerated, or exclusively earthly and not heavenly. Once Christian leaders in the fourth century accepted the offer of power, honor, and wealth from the Empire, their teachings departed from the simplicity that is in Christ, and mutated into excuses and deceptions to cover their misbehavior. The leaven introduced at this time burst into life and infected the whole of Scriptural truth and the whole of the Christian community, resulting in the doctrine of the “Catholic” Church, the universal and one true ecclesia upon earth, without which no man could ever be saved. This adaptation to the worldly system outside the boundaries of the Spirit was tantamount to committing fornication with the kings of the earth, something we will visit in more detail in chapter 17. Suffice it to say, the evil woman of ancient religion poured into the three measures of fine flour the leavening agent of corruption (Matt. 13:33), plunging the world into abject destitution.
Jesus’ fifth parable in Matthew 13:44 relates to this period of time in Christian history, the time of the Reformers. For a thousand years the Roman Catholic Church hid the Word of God in its monasteries and churches so the common people couldn’t read it and seek freedom from their bondage. Ignorant people are easier to control, and control of the world was and is the intention of the papacy. But whatever the papacy could do to hide away the Word of God, it could not succeed forever. The Word of God is living and operative, and it will not be kept down. By the Lord’s sovereignty and by His perfect timing, His Word was released, and in that Word the treasure chest of priceless treasures was hidden. To my thinking the field in the parable is the Bible containing the riches of Christ. When the reformers, like the man (children of the kingdom) in the field who discovered the buried treasure (the good seed of the Word of God), found this treasure, they gave everything they had to buy the field. In other words they devoted their lives to the Bible, and in that devotion they found Christ hidden in it. Luther found justification by faith; Calvin found eternal security; Arminius found Christian responsibility, etc. These brothers sold out to seize the Bible and to reveal it to the common people. Sadly, it did not end there, nor did the Reformation end well. That is what the letter to Sardis addresses.
As time went on during the time of the Reformation, the Reformers degraded into sectarianism, and allowed themselves to be exalted as teachers and oracles. This fracturing of the Body of Christ into splinter groups sapped the life of the people, and they became dead toward the things of the Lord. Rather than be witnesses to the grand treasure they had discovered, they retreated into their sharply defined, separate groups, all holding the doctrine of the Atonement, but not holding forth the Atoner, and they destroyed the fellowship of the Body, cutting off the flow of life from the Head. This allowed the decadent Roman Church to regain her footing in Europe, driving out the Protestants from certain countries into which the Reformation had spread. The German-speaking nations were strong enough to withstand the assault, due largely to the Pietists and Moravians. In England they resisted Rome with the preaching of John Wesley and George Whitefield among others. But in general the Reformation had degraded into a resistance to Rome, rather than a promotion of Christ and His Word. This wore out the people and they lost their enthusiasm. The Reformation retreated into Protestantism, and into the maintenance of their own teachings at the expense of fellowship with all Christians. The Reformers divided and killed the life of the Body.
In Matthew 13:45-46 Jesus spoke another tiny parable with enormous import in the history of the Christian assembly, viz., “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.” This answers to the era following the Reformation, which is the congregation in Philadelphia, about whom the Lord spoke only praise.
The expensive pearl continues the theme of the other parables and represents the Word of God, the word of truth, except in this parable it is hidden under the restless waters of death inside an oyster. The merchant knew what he was seeking because he was an expert, a purveyor of pearls, a shrewd man of instinct and knowledge. He represents a Christian who is seeking the truth by asking in prayer and knocking in faith at the door of the One who is truth itself. It is shameful, but not surprising, that the truth at that time after the Reformation, and after the resurgence of the Roman Catholic Church, was subsumed under the unsettled waves of death. The Reformation had left the Christian testimony fractured and weak and discredited. The perpetually changing philosophies of secular thinkers, the many different creeds and sects and confessions of Christians, and the cauldron of social unrest, conflated, and buried the Word of Truth under waves of death, inundated by the very floods that will someday disgorge the last great enemy of Christ – the Beast – in a false resurrection from the abyss. Though the world sees nothing but turmoil and confusion all about them, there are divers busy bringing value to the surface, value scrutinized by the merchants – seeking ones who will never be satisfied with human conventions, who will reject the enticements of the world, and who will, in order to obtain the prize, surrender all they have to get it. They are the experts, the dealers in truth, the seekers after reality. They know value when they see it, and they know there is no value in the world and its systems of error.
Who are these merchants? These were the brothers who arrested the slide of Christianity into deadness and mistrust of the people. They were the English Brethren exercising their responsibility before the Lord of examining His Word, allowing the light to shine upon their study and upon their lives. It was unto these brothers that the Word opened up, and thanks to them, seekers from thenceforth have been able to see the truth contained in it. They were for a time the ecclesia in Philadelphia, full of love for one another, and, with their little strength (3:8), held fast the word and did not deny His name. What is our responsibility now that we stand on the shoulders of these giants? We must increase our efforts as the Day approaches, to stand near the rushing torrent going down into destruction, and rescue many before they are carried away. We are to warn of the coming Day, and elucidate the revelations of the Word of God so that many can be spared the coming judgment, and can be prepared and ready to hear the upward call.
Jesus ends the seven parables with Matt. 13:47-50, a story about the fish net gathering all kinds of fish for sorting at the end of the age. What began in the beginning with Satan planting tares among the wheat ends here with the final separation of the wheat and the tares. We’ve seen the great damage these false Christians have dealt to the true saints, but now it is time for the reckoning, the dread time of judgment. The sea here is the home for the fishes, similar to the field, home to the wheat and tares.
The net “was cast into the sea.” The first casters of the net were the apostles when the Lord told them to go forth and disciple all nations. They dragged the net first in Jerusalem, then in Judea and Samaria, and finally, with Paul, to all the nations. That net is still in the sea (world) snagging fish (humanity) until the number is complete that the net was designed to hold. This shows the sovereignty of God in that He knows just how many “good” fish will respond to the gospel message during this present dispensation. The angels sort the fish and put the good into vessels, which correspond to the barn in the second parable (13:30); but the bad are cast away into the abyss, the furnace of fire. This is what awaits every believer and every unbeliever.
These seven parables trace the mysterious kingdom of heaven as it progresses through the Christian dispensation. Because the nation of Israel rejected the offer of the kingdom during the Lord’s ministry, the kingdom became hidden from all those who would not see or seek it. It became mysterious, and that is why the Lord described it in simple stories pregnant with meaning to those who would understand. The Lord sowed the good seed, but, because of the compromised soil of the human heart, most of the seed was unfruitful. Where it did find good soil and took root, the enemy came in and sowed his own seed, his children of wickedness among the children of the kingdom, thereby causing dramatic and debilitating confusion. Because of the influence of these wicked ones, Christian leadership obviated their Christian virtues and embraced the offer of political status, and entered into an ungodly confederation with the world system. This allowed the birds – the devourers of the Word of truth – to nest in her branches. Opening up to such abjection, the hierarchy of the Christian community allowed pagan and diabolical teachings and practices into the assemblies, and they became as cancerous leaven to infect the Word of truth. At this juncture there was a revival that retrieved the Word from darkness via the Reformation (the field reappears); however, like the revival of Judaism under Zerubbabel, it was short-lived, as apostasy set in upon the opinions and divisiveness of the reformers. Under this sea of death in the Christian community and in the world in general, and despite it, some believers refused the order of things and began to diligently search for the pure truth found in the Word, and once they found it, they devoted all they were and had to study it, proclaim it, and dispense it. We are the blessed recipients of their labor and faithfulness. This brings us to the future when the Lord will review the entire Christian dispensation, or economy, and will gather to Himself those who accepted the gospel, and will cast to the furnace of fire those of the world who rejected it. Thus the age comes to an end at His judgment.