Well, another of his stories comes to mind. And this one has always seemed a little strange to me as well.
Here it is: Matthew 13:24-30.
He told another story. "God's kingdom is like a farmer who planted good seed in his field.
That night, while his hired men were asleep, his enemy sowed thistles all through the wheat and slipped away before dawn.
When the first green shoots appeared and the grain began to form, the thistles showed up, too.
"The farmhands came to the farmer and said, 'Master, that was clean seed you planted, wasn't it? Where did these thistles come from?'
"He answered, 'Some enemy did this.' "The farmhands asked, 'Should we weed out the thistles?'
"He said, 'No, if you weed the thistles, you'll pull up the wheat, too.
Let them grow together until harvest time. Then I'll instruct the harvesters to pull up the thistles and tie them in bundles for the fire, then gather the wheat and put it in the barn.'" (The Message)
However you understand the weeds (ideas, sins, people), the fact remains. Jesus said we are to leave the weeding up to him.
But what about....?
I don't know. I just see here that Jesus is more worried about the life of the wheat than the death of the weeds.
By the way, I see a similarity with 1 Corinthians 3:12-15 where Paul talks about “gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble”, where God will identify what is good and what isn't.
Yes, he definitely wants us to be of value, to be legitimate and 'rightly divide the word of truth'. But I've seen an awful lot of un-Christlike attitudes and actions masquerading as an obsession with truth.
And my hope that people learn to get along (last post) means that both you and I will have to be less concerned about fault finding, and more concerned about encouraging each other—even if we don't agree. That's easy for me to encourage you to do, but not nearly so easy to encourage myself to do.
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2 comments:
Amen, may it be so! Thanks Al.
Leave it to a Canadian to always be blogging about weed.
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