Let God pull the weeds (The wheat and tares Matthew 13:24-30)

Have you ever had someone throw something away that they thought it was junk, but it had great value? There are individuals known as professional scavengers and essentially what they do is go through people’s trash and find items that they can resale or have value to them. They find antiques, old trading cards, art works, rare books, precious metals, and at times cold hard cash that was disposed of by people who either had no idea what they were trashing and or they did not realize the value of what they were throwing out. In the parable of the wheat and tares we see that the owner of the field is unwilling to allow the servants to pluck up the weeds that the enemy had planted in his field because he is concerned that they may also pluck up some wheat with them. The owner of the field wants to make sure that what he values is not accidently plucked up and thrown out with the things that have no value to him. In other words, in order to preserve what I value we will put up with what we know has no value until the time of the harvest.

I have seen this over and over in my life as a Christian within the church, an individual will raise up who thinks it is their responsibility to separate the wheat from the tares in the church. They want to separate the true believers from the pretenders, and I have to say that when this happens there is always a spirit of religion and arrogance that is behind it, not God. If you noticed from the parable the servants were told to not to try and separate the wheat from the tares and to wait until the time of the harvest so they could be properly separated by the harvesters. We do not have the authority to eliminate people from the kingdom of heaven because they do not look like us, worship like us, read the same translation of the Bible we do, or because they go to a different denomination than we do. We do not have that authority, only God does and only God is qualified to make the judgments of who enter His kingdom and who does not. There are times in the church where loving correction is needed to be rightly administered by church leadership but in modern times, we are seeing more and more individuals and groups who simply have an elitist attitude of it is our way or the highway. They feel they have it all figured out and if you are not doing it their way then you are out. This type of attitude is what drove the Pharisees and Sadducees of Jesus’s time and caused them to look down upon those around them instead of showing them the love of God. It is never our job to determine who qualifies and does not for God’s grace and mercy, leave that to the one who is qualified, GOD.