We are continuing our study of the parables of our Lord in Matthew 13, taking this morning to look at the parable of the hidden treasure and the costly Pearl in verses 44-46. Jesus has been expanding upon the kingdom of heaven, revealing new aspects of the kingdom to his disciples who, by the grace of God, have had their eyes opened and their ears unstopped to hear and understand these vital truths.
The first two parables explained to the disciples that in Christ’s kingdom on earth there would be both believers and unbelievers, something that they had not been expecting at all. The parable of the soils tells us that in this kingdom there will be those whose hearts have been prepared by God to receive the gospel and there will be those who hear the truth of the message of the kingdom and reject it, even if they might seem to accept it for a time. In the second parable of the wheat and the tares we are told that believers and unbelievers will grow together until the end of the age when the judgment of God comes upon the earth. With these two parables we learn that both good and evil will continue to grow in the kingdom.
The second two parables, that of the mustard seed and the leaven, describe the way in which the kingdom will manifest itself upon the earth. Though it had very humble beginnings, having its foundation upon Christ and his 12 apostles, it has grown from a tiny mustard seed into a vast tree that covers the world. Its influence spreading to every part of the earth like a small piece of leaven permeating an entire batch of dough, changing everything that it touches, impacting every aspect of human life.
In the first four parables we are given a description of the nature of the kingdom and a picture of how it will grow. All four of these parables see the kingdom from the outside. They are a picture from above, so to speak, a birds eye view from history and concerning the hearts of mankind.
In these next two parables we are going to see something of how one comes into the kingdom; the price of entrance into the kingdom of heaven. Like the first two sets of parables, this couplet speaks to the same basic subject. The first pair looked at the hearts of men in the kingdom, the second pair saw the growth of the kingdom, and this pair illuminates the entrance fee into the kingdom. Let us read these two short parables here in Matthew 13:44-46.
“The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls, and upon finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.”
As he does with each of the other parables, Jesus presents a simple story that his listeners could understand and easily apply to their life experience. Though none of them may ever have found a hidden treasure in a field, they would have understood the practice of burying valuables only to have them be lost for one reason or another. Though they may not have ever worked as a purveyor of fine gems, they could understand how someone could value something so greatly and see within it the future prosperity it could bring.
Before we go into the spiritual lesson behind these two illustrations of our Lord, as we did last week, I want to give a little bit of the historical context to these parables so that it might help us to get a better understanding of the story itself.
We start with the parable of the hidden treasure. Just one verse but a compelling illustration in part thanks to its simplicity. “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” Again, this would have been a scenario that the disciples listening to Jesus would have been aware of. Today, we store our money in banks or invest it in stocks or securities. In our homes we place items of particularly high value in a safe or if it is precious enough we can take it to a bank and put it in a safety deposit box.
In those days, there were no such secure locations for common people. Banks did exist, but not in the way that we think of them. They were more like loan sharks then the bankers we might be accustomed to dealing with. If you do not have a secure location to keep your valuables, then the best way of keeping them safe is to make sure that nobody but you know where they are. And the best way to do that is to hide it in an obscure place that nobody would think to look.
The area of Palestine has been the center of wars and conquest for millennia. It connects Egypt and Africa to Europe in the Northwest and the rest of the Middle East world and all of Asia in the East. If an army is going to go from one of those major centers of power to another they had to cross right through Israel as we know it today. God chose that tiny patch of land for a reason. It has always been highly trafficked and therefore coveted and fought over.
So when the inevitable conquering army comes through to steal and loot and plunder, you need a place to hide your valuables. What the people would do as danger approached was to take all of the valuable things out of their home, their coins, their jewelry, any special furniture or fixtures made out of a precious metal, and they would take those things out and bury them. To an invader looking to plunder and random patch of upturned soil would a clear sign something was just buried. So where do you bury valuables and disguise the upturned soil? Out in your crop field. It happened often enough that in the attack the owner of the buried treasure would be killed or carried off as a slave and never able to return to his trove and so it would remain buried until someone stumbled into it by accident.
That is what we have in this first parable, a man who is out working in a field. We are not told anything about him other than he works in a field that is not his own. Something like a day laborer or hired farmhand. While working in the field he stumbles over this treasure and sees the value of it is great. He is overcome with joy and so he puts it back where he found it, sells everything that he possesses in the world, liquidates all that he has in order to buy that field so that he may gain the treasure.
Some people find this parable a bit off-putting because it goes against our sense of fairness. He finds a treasure in another man’s field and, from our sensibilities, it seems like he is stealing it out from underneath the rightful owner. The Jews who were listening to Jesus would not have had any such misgivings about the story. It was part of the rabbinical tradition that if you found an item of value that was lost and un-searched for by the original owner it became yours by right. A literal enshrinement of the law “finders’ keepers.” He was not stealing the treasure of the owner of the field because if the buried valuables had belonged to the field owner, he would have retrieved them before he sold the field. We can also see a basic honesty of the man who purchased the field because he did not simply take the treasure but instead went through the effort of buying the field on which the treasure was found so that his claim would be all the more legitimate.
Though we might not agree with the actions of the man in the story by our own standards, by the standards of his culture he was perfectly honest, in fact, even going above and beyond by purchasing the field in the first place. In any case, the morality of the man is not the point. The ethics of this have nothing to do with the main point of the parable. The main point of the parable is “here is a man who found something so valuable that he sold everything that he had in order to possess it.” That is the point of the story. This man was so overjoyed with what he found, so ecstatic that he was willing to divest himself of all of his possessions in order to gain this one thing.
The second parable has a very similar point. “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls, and upon finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it. The Greek word used for “merchant” signifies a wholesale dealer, a traveling merchant. Someone who traveled from place to place buying from the coastal towns where the pearl divers lived in order to sell at a great prophet to in the major cities where the real money was to be made. This was a wholesaler scouring around, seeking fine pearls to take to the rich and make a hefty profit.
Pearls at that time were the highest valued gemstone. Today, pearls are pretty cheap. When I bought CJ’s engagement ring years ago the jeweler threw in this pearl necklace, “a $75 value,” he so brightly exclaimed, I am sure hoping I would come back in the future to by the matching wedding ring. I do not believe CJ has ever worn them, they are not the most shapely pearls and there are on an inexpensive string. But if we were in the Roman Empire during the time of Christ, that string of cheap pearls as we see them would be worth a small fortune. Far more than the ring I purchased that led me to get them as a “free gift.”
We see the value of pearls described many times throughout both the Old and New Testaments. We saw back in Matthew 7:6 the Lord said, “do not cast your pearls before swine.” With this statement, He was trying to compare that which was worthless with the most valuable. Do not give the most precious thing to a pig, it is utter foolishness. Because of the kosher restrictions in the Mosaic Law, Jews could not even touch pigs, let alone eat them. They wouldn’t just be a worthless commodity to own, they would be a major hassle. When people talk about getting to heaven, what is the first thing they see? The “pearly gates.”
Now normally, we warn our children never to put all of their eggs in one basket. No financial advisor would ever tell someone to place all of their money into one property or one investment but that is exactly what both of these men did. The first man sold everything and bought the one field, the second man sold everything and bought the one pearl. The principal from both parables are the same, the immeasurable value of the kingdom of heaven. That it is worth all we can give in order to obtain it.
Both of these parables are given in order to demonstrate the cost of the kingdom of heaven and its incomparable value to man. Of course, as we are talking about the kingdom of heaven, we are describing not just entrance into the church or access to some of the blessings of God but salvation itself. The kingdom of heaven is not just referring to our lives here on earth but eternity. It is Christ Himself and the gift of salvation that he has provided for us. It is the knowledge of God the Father and being adopted into his family. Being called a son or daughter of The Most High and made an equal inheritor with Jesus.
There is nothing on earth, no terrestrial treasure that could compare to the immeasurable value of our entrance into the kingdom of God. All the diamonds in the world are worthless in comparison, all the gold and precious metals in the world will not buy us forgiveness for a single sin and relieve us of its eternal consequences. Even though this message has been preached for 2000 years, even though there are people who sit in pews every Sunday where the gospel is proclaimed regularly, they continue to place temporary and eternally worthless things like cars, houses, money, and fame before the kingdom of heaven.
The world simply cannot understand why an educated, motivated person with so much potential would give up all pursuits of wealth or power in this world to serve in some backwater country as a missionary. They cannot even understand why we would give up sleeping in on a Sunday morning to come and worship our king, let alone take time out of the rest of our week for studying Scripture, waking up early to pray, going to a Bible study.
We have been reading through the book of Ecclesiastes over the last couple of weeks. It is a work dedicated to the futility of this life. Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived and one of the richest was the man most enabled to enjoy this life. He had the means, both financial and mental, to accomplish any desire that he might have and the wisdom to pursue only the best. And yet, we read over and over again as he tests each area of life, money, building, leisure, lust, each of these things are vanity, chasing after the wind.
The value of God’s kingdom exceeds all that this world can offer. All of its wisdom, all of its riches, and all of its fame. Yet God offers this invaluable option to any and all who are willing to pay the asking price. There is only one payment for entrance the kingdom of heaven, one fee, and it is the same for everyone no matter how rich or poor, famous or anonymous, powerful or oppressed, wise or ignorant; it is a fee every human being is able to afford. The cost is all that you are. For those whom God has called to himself, the price for entrance into the kingdom of heaven is all that you have, all that you are, your very soul.
That is the cost of the kingdom, the cost of discipleship. In chapter 16, Jesus will say to his disciples, “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?”
The cost of the kingdom is the willingness to carry your own cross, your own means of execution and when asked, to joyfully lay upon it and give up your life if it is demanded by God. In order to save our life, we must lose it by executing our sinful self and being raised again with Christ. What good is it if we gain the entire world, for 50, 60, 70, 100 years have ultimate wealth and power in this world and yet spend eternity in hell.
What do we obtain for this price? Pure and ultimate joy. “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” It was from joy over the discovery that the man sold all that he had to buy the field that held the priceless treasure. We are creatures designed to seek our own good, to seek out pleasure and enjoyment. That is not in and of itself sinful. Sin, however, distorts our minds and causes us to chase after lesser things.
C.S. Lewis wrote “Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are halfhearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
Psalm 16:11 promises us that in the presence of God is the very fullness of joy, and in his right hand there are pleasures for evermore. We are made to enjoy God and the greatest joy that we might have is when we fulfill our purpose. Man’s chief and is to glorify God, and enjoy him forever. But that joy comes at the cost of our very lives. That is the price that is demanded for entrance into the kingdom.
It is a price that must be paid. In the first two parables that were given, those who were a part of the kingdom are described as seeds being sewn or ground being prepared. They have no action or choice in the matter. The sovereignty of God in election and the total depravity of man teach us that without the grace and mercy of God reaching out to regenerate our spiritually dead hearts, without the Holy Spirit affecting our new birth there is nothing we could do to gain entrance into the kingdom. But once that washing and rebirth are effectuated by the Holy Spirit, we are called to respond in faith.
In these two parables we are now dealing with individuals. Each of these men find something priceless and acts on their desire to possess it. The kingdom is not something that we are born into, it is not something inherited from our parents or grandparents. That is what the Jews thought. They were convinced that they were safe because they were the children of Abraham. They were the chosen people of God and were therefore a part of his kingdom by birth. But that was never God’s plan, even in the Old Testament. In Romans 9, Paul warns that “they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel.” Meaning, not all who are the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are truly a part of the people of God.
No one is born into the kingdom in that sense, but we do encounter the kingdom in different ways. That is what we see with these two men in these two parables. They came across their priceless treasure in different ways. The first man stumbled into the treasure. He was not looking for treasure, he was just going about his life, working in the field.
There are many people who enter the kingdom like that, just going about life when something happens and God reaches out and grabs them, pulling them into himself. There are lots of different ways that this might happen, a man walking down the street hears an open-air preacher giving the gospel message to all who are passing by and decides to listen. Maybe it was someone who would never darken the doors of the church but at the funeral of a friend or loved one hears the warning of the pastor and considers his own mortality and where he will spend eternity.
Maybe they were actively persecuting Christ. That is exactly what happened to the apostle Paul. He was not looking to enter the kingdom, if anything, he was convinced that he was already in it. Paul was not just uninterested in the kingdom, he was actively fighting against it. While on his way to Damascus to kill Christians the Lord appeared to him from heaven and put him flat on his face. There are many stories like that. Think about the Samaritan woman at the well. She was just there for a drink when the Son of God showed up in her life to reveal the gospel.
For others, they are like the man who searched for pearls. He knew what he was looking for. This was not a random encounter so much as it was a sought out one. The pearl merchant was looking for something of genuine value when he finally discovered something of immeasurable value. This is the seeker. Someone like the Ethiopian eunuch of Acts 8. Reading the Scripture, trying to understand and yet whose eyes and understanding are closed until the gospel is finally explained to them.
Now, Romans 3:11 tells us that, “There is none who understands, there is none who seeks for God.” And in and of ourselves that is true. No one is truly seeking God who is still dead in their sins. But that does not mean they cannot be seeking after something that is good, something that is of true value. A man in this position becomes dissatisfied with the trivial and temporal things of this life, pours through different religions and philosophies looking for meaning in this life. They may come across many “pearls” of wisdom and value, but all pale in comparison to the kingdom of heaven.
For someone like this, it is the search itself that is the means through which God brings that person to a knowledge of salvation when they finally here the gospel message preached to them. God uses many different tools in drawing people to the kingdom. Street preachers, a desire for more in life than temporal things, a desire for moral certainty, loving parents who consistently taught the truth of Scripture through a child’s life.
Some come to the kingdom never expecting to find it, not even looking for it. Others come across the kingdom after years of searching having been drawn to the truth by God. Many are a combination of both. The stories are varied from person to person but what remains consistent in each is the acknowledgement that what they have discovered when they finally recognize the kingdom for what it is, they know that it is worth giving up all that they have and all that they are in order to obtain it.