First, the setting. Jesus tells this as the second of the parables in Matthew 13, and later, in the house, He explains it to His disciples (Matthew 13:36–43). The Son of Man is the sower, the field is the world, and the good seed is “the sons of the kingdom.” The weeds, which older English Bibles call tares and which give this article its title, are “the sons of the evil one.” The enemy who sowed them is the devil, the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels (Matthew 13:37–39).

Years Among the Wheat

Years among believers teach a person the words. Someone who has sat among the wheat for decades hears the prayers, the sermons, and the vocabulary of faith, and can use them fluently and with confidence. A claim is heard in the church, and it starts from that fluency: a person with such years, it is said, speaks with a legitimate and accurate voice on Scripture and godliness.

The claim sounds reasonable, because Proverbs honours age lived well: “Grey hair is a crown of glory; it is gained in a righteous life” (Proverbs 16:31). Paul likewise asks that older men be “sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness” (Titus 2:2). The parable asks whether the years were lived so. If the weeds grow in the same field as the wheat, and show themselves when the grain forms, then years in the field show that a plant was there. What they show about its kind is a further question. Fluency does not answer it, because Scripture shows people who say the right words and are not known by Him (Matthew 7:22–23), and the sections that follow turn to what understanding needs.

That question has a second half, and Jesus answers both. He warns of two figures that look like what they are not: the weeds that grow among the wheat, and the wolves that come “in sheep’s clothing” (Matthew 7:15). Both give an appearance of faith, and both meet fire: the weeds are burned (Matthew 13:30), and the tree without good fruit is “thrown into the fire” (Matthew 7:19), in the teaching that sets the easy way “that leads to destruction” (Matthew 7:13). The servants wished to pull the weeds, and the master told them to wait (Matthew 13:28–30). The church therefore needs to know what to expect when such people speak, how to weigh what they say, what it may do about it, and where it must stop. The Bereans are commended for examining the Scriptures daily to see whether what they heard was so (Acts 17:11), and the same examination is owed here. This article sets what Scripture says to expect against the claim of years, and it asks two things of each passage: what it shows of these speakers, and what it directs or forbids the servants.

The Mixed Field

The parable says three things about the weeds, and each bears on what follows. First, the weeds have a different origin from the wheat. The Son of Man sows the good seed, and the enemy sows the weeds while the men sleep (Matthew 13:25, 37, 39). The two differ as plants sown by different hands. Second, the weeds stand in the same field. Jesus says the field is the world, yet at the end the angels “gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers” (Matthew 13:38, 41). It follows that the kingdom, as it now exists among men, holds more than the sons of the kingdom. Third, the weeds appeared when the wheat bore grain (Matthew 13:26), and the text places the showing at the time of fruit.

This condition is older than the parable. Paul says of Israel that “not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel” (Romans 9:6), and Moses says something close to it at the edge of the land. The people had seen the signs in Egypt, and yet “to this day the LORD has not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear” (Deuteronomy 29:2–4). Paul draws the same line for the church: “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God,” meaning the person without the Spirit, who cannot understand them, since they are discerned spiritually (1 Corinthians 2:14).

Three conclusions follow, and the rest of the article depends on them. Seeing, hearing, and understanding are gifts of God. Exposure to the truth over many years does not bring them of itself. Age may add practical wisdom of the world’s kind, but “the world did not know God through wisdom” (1 Corinthians 1:21). God ordinarily gives them through the hearing of His word (Romans 10:17), yet by His own hand: Lydia heard Paul’s words, and “the Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul” (Acts 16:14). A person may therefore stand a lifetime among the wheat, learn its words, and remain what the enemy sowed. Scripture does not call every long-standing member a weed, and it does not accept years alone as proof that he is wheat.

Honour with the Lips

The wolves come in at Matthew 7, which also says where the wide way ends. Jesus first sets two gates before His hearers: “the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many,” while “the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matthew 7:13–14). He then warns, “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:15–16). The warning is about the clothing. The wolf looks like a sheep, and the test Jesus gives is the fruit.

The appearance has an older form. Isaiah records the Lord’s charge against His people, that they draw near with their mouth and honour Him with their lips (Isaiah 29:13). Jesus quotes the charge against the Pharisees and scribes and calls them hypocrites: “This people honours me with their lips, but their heart is far from me” (Matthew 15:7–9). Lip service, to use the common phrase, has a biblical form. The charge concerns the distance between mouth and heart, and it is made against people who were present, observant, and fluent in the language of worship.

Back in Matthew 7, Jesus describes a day on which that distance is shown.

On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

—Matthew 7:22–23

The speakers cite what they did, and Jesus does not dispute it. His answer turns on whether He knew them, for He had said that not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven, “but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 7:21).

Luke records a second scene, in which the plea is only that He was present. The master of the house has shut the door, and those outside say, “We ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets.” He answers, “I tell you, I do not know where you come from. Depart from me, all you workers of evil!” (Luke 13:25–27). The same move appears in the wilderness, where Korah’s company said to Moses and Aaron, “You have gone too far! For all in the congregation are holy, every one of them” (Numbers 16:3), offering their standing as the ground for questioning the men God had set over them. The three scenes agree on one point: presence, activity, and years among the people of God are things that weeds and wheat can share.

Simeon and Anna

Luke records two witnesses who also waited among the people of God, and the outward facts are similar. Simeon is introduced as “righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him” (Luke 2:25). It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ, and he came in the Spirit into the temple on the day the parents brought in the child Jesus (Luke 2:26–27). He took the child in his arms and blessed God, and the words he spoke are about the child: “my eyes have seen your salvation,” he says, “a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel” (Luke 2:28–32).

Anna is “a prophetess,” of the tribe of Asher, “advanced in years,” a widow until she was eighty-four, and “she did not depart from the temple, worshipping with fasting and prayer night and day.” Luke then records what she did: “coming up at that very hour she began to give thanks to God and to speak of him to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem” (Luke 2:36–38).

Their waiting had an object: Simeon waited for the consolation of Israel, and Anna worshipped night and day among those who waited for the redemption of Jerusalem. When the object came they spoke of it, Simeon as he took the child and Anna at that very hour, and their speech ran toward Him. The plea at the door in Luke 13 points to the table and the street, and speaks of Christ as one who was present and taught. Simeon and Anna speak of Him as the one they had been waiting to see.

Luke’s wording sets Anna’s hearers apart as “all who were waiting,” which leaves room for others who were not. Matthew shows something of that room: the chief priests and scribes answered Herod from the prophet about where the Christ was to be born (Matthew 2:3–6), and Matthew does not record that any of them went to Bethlehem. That silence says nothing of any one of them, but in that account knowing the text did not bring anyone to the child.

Simeon says as much to Mary: “this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed (and a sword will pierce through your own soul also), so that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed” (Luke 2:34–35). The revealing is appointed, and Christ Himself is the means of it. A heart is shown by what it does with Him.

The temple where these two waited was also where the leaders who later opposed Jesus held their place, for “the chief priests and the elders of the people came up to him as he was teaching” there (Matthew 21:23). The field of Matthew 13 gives a way to hold the two together, as an analogue and not an identification. When the Pharisees were offended at His saying, Jesus told the disciples, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up. Let them alone; they are blind guides” (Matthew 15:13–14). His “Let them alone” echoes the master’s word in the parable, “Let both grow together” (Matthew 13:30). To the scribes and Pharisees He said, “you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness” (Matthew 23:28). These are the Lord’s own verdicts, and the church reports them as His. Read as an analogue, Simeon and Anna are what Luke describes, righteous, waiting, and speaking toward Christ, and these leaders are the nearest picture in the Gospels of weeds that look like wheat.

Two cautions keep the analogue honest. Luke 2 does not mention these leaders, and their open opposition comes later in Jesus’ ministry. And the group was not uniform: Nicodemus was “a man of the Pharisees” (John 3:1), Joseph of Arimathea was a member of the council and “a good and righteous man” (Luke 23:50), and “a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith” (Acts 6:7). The harvest sorts persons, as the parable says, and an office or a party does not settle which kind a person is.

Speech as Evidence

Scripture ties that revealing to speech. The weeds and the wolves are two images, and Jesus uses them for different things: the weeds describe where a person comes from, the sons of the evil one, and the wolves describe what a false teacher does to the flock (Matthew 13:38; 7:15; Acts 20:29). The church meets them together, and the same Scripture speaks to both. Jesus states the principle after the Pharisees say that He casts out demons by Beelzebul, the prince of demons (Matthew 12:24): “For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matthew 12:34). He adds that “on the day of judgement people will give account for every careless word they speak,” and that by his words a person will be justified or condemned (Matthew 12:36–37). The words are the evidence, and the heart is the source.

John makes the same connection and applies it to the church’s hearing. “They are from the world; therefore they speak from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us” (1 John 4:5–6). The test has two parts. One part is what a person says, and the other is what he does with the apostolic word, the teaching the apostles gave.

The apostles also say where such speech will arise. Paul warns the Ephesian elders that “fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock,” and then of something nearer: “from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things” to draw away the disciples after them (Acts 20:29–30). He tells Timothy that “the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching” (2 Timothy 4:3), the teaching that keeps to what God has said. John says of some who left, “They went out from us, but they were not of us” (1 John 2:19). Some leave, then, and some stay and speak.

Jude gives the fullest description of those who stay. He writes that “certain people have crept in unnoticed … ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” (Jude 4). He calls them “grumblers, malcontents” and “loud-mouthed boasters” (Jude 16), and says, “It is these who cause divisions, worldly people, devoid of the Spirit” (Jude 19). Two cautions govern how we read him. These people are marked by what they say and do: they turn grace into permission, deny the Master, grumble, boast, and divide. And the verdict “devoid of the Spirit” is Jude’s, given as a writer of Scripture. The church receives it of the people he describes, and does not hand it down to the next person who speaks badly.

Paul adds one more form of speech. Of those who “by their unrighteousness suppress the truth” (Romans 1:18), he says at the close of his indictment, “they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them” (Romans 1:32). Approval is a form of speech, and Paul counts it with the sin it approves. Together these passages tell the church what to expect when weeds and wolves speak: grumbling at what God has said, grace turned to permission, approval of what God condemns, and the setting aside of God’s word for their own rule (Matthew 15:6), all under the appearance of faith. These describe speech and attitude. They do not by themselves identify a person.

Speaking Out of Ignorance

The last section showed what weeds and wolves say. This one asks why it runs against Scripture. Scripture’s main answer is ignorance, and the answer has three parts: the condition, its source, and its limit.

First, the condition, as The Mixed Field set it out. The natural person, the one without the Spirit, is unable to receive the things of the Spirit of God (1 Corinthians 2:14), and Israel, after all the signs and wonders, had still not been given a heart to understand, eyes to see, or ears to hear (Deuteronomy 29:2–4). Both texts place the giving of understanding with God, and years of exposure had not produced it.

Second, the source. Paul says of those who still walk as the Gentiles do that they are “darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart” (Ephesians 4:17–18). The ignorance has a cause, and the cause is a hard heart, which is why Paul can say of such people that they are “without excuse” (Romans 1:20). He also writes that “the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot” (Romans 8:7). In these texts, ignorance and hostility travel together. Jude says of the intruders that “these people blaspheme all that they do not understand” (Jude 10). To blaspheme is to speak against what is holy with contempt, so speaking and not understanding go together as well. The same Scripture states the remedy. God promises, “I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh,” and “I will put my Spirit within you” (Ezekiel 36:26–27).

Third, the limit. Ignorance does not describe everyone who speaks against God’s word. Paul says that some knew God and still did not honour Him as God or give thanks to Him (Romans 1:21). His account covers humanity at large, and the church may take the pattern as fitting some who speak among believers. Their case is a different matter from not having seen. A disciple can also speak wrongly. Peter rebuked Jesus for saying that He must suffer and be killed, and Jesus answered, “you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man” (Matthew 16:23). Peter had just confessed Jesus as “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16), and his speech still ran against God’s purpose. A believer’s stumbling speech and settled resistance to the apostolic word differ in the hearing John describes, whether the person listens when that word is set before him (1 John 4:6). Speech that runs against Scripture is therefore a reason to test what is said, and it does not settle who the speaker is.

What the church takes from this is a measured expectation. Voices without the Spirit speak, in Scripture’s account, out of a blindness that is real and a hardness they cannot soften on their own, and the years they have spent among believers do not change that. Moses and Ezekiel both place the giving of understanding and of a new heart with God. Until He does that work, the servants have a plain question to ask of any voice, which is what Scripture says, and the next section turns to that question.

Scripture as a Rough Guide

One saying gives the last of those marks, the setting aside of God’s word, a form heard in and around the church: people take the Scriptures too seriously, and anyone who lived biblically would be stoning offenders and keeping food laws, so the Bible is best kept as a rough guide to living in love. Jesus answers it at three points.

First, He holds the Scriptures exact: “until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (Matthew 5:18). He rebukes two disciples on the Emmaus road as “slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken” (Luke 24:25), and the fault He finds is believing too little.

Second, the saying skips what the Scriptures say about their own laws. Jesus says, “I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them” (Matthew 5:17). Mark adds of His teaching on what defiles, “Thus he declared all foods clean” (Mark 7:19), and Peter takes the voice that says, “What God has made clean, do not call common,” meaning unclean in the law’s sense, as a word about people: “God has shown me that I should not call any person common or unclean” (Acts 10:15, 28). Paul applies a formula from Deuteronomy that stands beside Israel’s death penalties, “Purge the evil person from among you,” to the church as removal from fellowship (1 Corinthians 5:13). The laws had an aim: Moses ties the clean and unclean animals to Israel’s separation from the nations (Leviticus 20:25–26), and Paul calls such rules “a shadow of the things to come” (Colossians 2:17).

Third, Jesus points to two groups of His day who mishandled the text. The Pharisees had it and made it void by their tradition (Matthew 15:6). “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life,” He tells His opponents in Jerusalem, “yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (John 5:39–40). The Sadducees, who denied the resurrection, put their question from Moses, and He answers, “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God” (Matthew 22:29).

A lack of sight, however, does not by itself mark a weed. Jesus asks His disciples, “Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear?” (Mark 8:18), and they understood the Scriptures when He “opened their minds” (Luke 24:45). Understanding is given. A saying heard once may come from ignorance, and the remedy is to open the Scriptures to the speaker. Said again after the text has been opened, it resembles the refusal of John 5:40.

How Does the Church Weigh a Voice?

First, the standard. The Bereans, whom Luke calls “more noble” than the Thessalonians, received the word eagerly and examined “the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11), and that is the pattern: a voice is weighed against the written word. Jesus adds the test of fruit, “You will recognize them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16), and John writes, “do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1), because many false prophets have gone out into the world. The one who tests is the spiritual person, who “judges all things” (1 Corinthians 2:15), which is to say the believer to whom God has given what the natural person lacks (1 Corinthians 2:14).

Further, the church may judge those inside it, since Paul asks, “Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge?” (1 Corinthians 5:12). It judges what is said and done, and not the standing of a heart. The parable says why the servants wait, the safety of the wheat, and Paul adds a second ground in another place: “do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes,” for He will disclose the purposes of the heart (1 Corinthians 4:5).

The church can therefore say that a teaching is false, or that a pattern of conduct does not fit the fellowship, and it does not say that a person is a weed. A strong suspicion, even a right one, is a reason for watchfulness, and Jesus’ word “Beware” (Matthew 7:15) points the same way. It is not a verdict.

It follows that where teaching or conduct plainly runs against the apostolic word, the teaching the apostles gave, the church’s first step is a warning. Paul tells Titus that a person who stirs up division is to be warned “once and then twice,” and after that the church is to “have nothing more to do with him” (Titus 3:10). He tells the Thessalonians to “warn him as a brother” and not to treat him as an enemy (2 Thessalonians 3:15). Paul’s word to Corinth reaches anyone who “bears the name of brother” and lives in the sins he lists, and the church is “not to associate” with him (1 Corinthians 5:11). The name does not excuse the conduct. John tells the church not to “receive him into your house” when someone comes without the teaching of Christ (2 John 9–10).

This is withdrawal. It falls to the church, it goes by what is said and done, and it declares nothing about the person’s final state, since Paul would have him warned “as a brother” and not treated as an enemy (2 Thessalonians 3:15). It is therefore a different act from the uprooting the master forbade.

The Servants’ Limits

The parable that makes the weeds visible also restrains the servants. They saw the weeds and asked, “Then do you want us to go and gather them?” The master said no, and gave his reason: “lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them” (Matthew 13:28–29). The text states the reason as the safety of the wheat, and it says nothing of any difficulty in telling the two apart.

Scripture also shows a disciple speaking wrongly. After Jesus first foretells His death, Peter takes Him aside and rebukes Him: “Far be it from you, Lord! This shall never happen to you.” Jesus answers, “Get behind me, Satan!” (Matthew 16:22–23). A disciple spoke against the purpose of God, and the Lord answered by calling him Satan. Peter remained among the disciples, and a sentence of this kind, taken alone, does not make its speaker a weed.

Paul’s instruction to Timothy points to the difference. The Lord’s servant is to be “correcting his opponents with gentleness,” in the hope that God may grant them repentance, so that they “come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil” (2 Timothy 2:24–26). Where the correction is heard, the speaker is within reach of repentance. Where it is refused year after year, John’s words about hearing the apostles come into view: “Whoever knows God listens to us” (1 John 4:6).

The removal itself is not the church’s. Jesus says that “the Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers” (Matthew 13:41), and He places the harvest at the close of the age (Matthew 13:39). The sending is His, and it is still to come. Until then the servants may not uproot on their own judgement, and they may not pronounce the harvest early. They hold a firm judgement about what is said and done, and they leave open who is wheat and who is weed.

The Day of Harvest

We return to the field. The master’s word stands as he gave it: “Let both grow together until the harvest” (Matthew 13:30). Until then the plea of long standing can be expected to go on in the church, by some who have a right to make it and by some who do not. Jesus speaks of the end in two figures. The wide way “leads to destruction” (Matthew 7:13), and the reapers gather out of the kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers and throw them into the fiery furnace, and then “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matthew 13:41–43). The appearance lasts while the field stands, and at the harvest the reapers deal with what lies under it.

That is where the church stands. The church is not asked to know every heart, and it is not left without light. It has the marks given by the Lord and His apostles, the limits given by the master, and the pattern of two servants of the Lord who waited for the Christ and spoke of Him when He came. What Scripture gives us here is enough to examine ourselves by and to teach with care, and the harvest will show the rest. Simeon’s words are the ones to carry into the field: “my eyes have seen your salvation.”

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