Seeking the Truth of the Kingdom, chapter five
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5. A TREASURE FOUND AND HIDDEN
“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.” (Matthew 13:44)
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| The chapter is taken from this book |
THE PLAN OF GOD IS NEVER
FRUSTRATED
If you carefully study the
four teachings that we have presented to this point, you will see that they
have a prophetic touch, but the two, which follow, do so even more. We have the
present parable only in Matthew and I think that we will see that it is fitting
to his Gospel, because it presents Christ, in a special way, as the King of the
Jews. I believe that this parable has to do with Matthew’s people and their
Messiah. We do well to understand that the gospel is a message “to the Jew
first and also to the Greek” (Ro. 1:16 - in this verse, as well as in other
places in the New Testament, Greek is synonymous with Gentile, or
non-Jew). Peter said this in Jerusalem, “It is you who are the sons of the
prophets…, For you, first, God raised up His Servant and sent Him to
bless you by turning every one of you from your wicked ways” (Ac. 3:25,26). So
Matthew first preaches his Gospel to the Jew.
Jesus is the Sower in
three previous parables and in this one He is the man who buys a field. The act
of finding a treasure and hiding it again makes it very improbable that any
common mortal should represent the main character in the story or that the
treasure should represent Christ, the gospel, or salvation. I don’t think that
we can find a good biblical reason for finding, then hiding, any of these. It
also collides with the presentation of the gospel as a free gift that cannot be
bought, but must be received on the basis of pure grace. To preach that one has
to sell all and buy Christ, the gospel or salvation, runs the risk of
satisfying the religious pride of man, who wants to do something in order to
gain his salvation. The New Testament condemns these efforts “so that no one
may boast” (Eph. 2:9).
The protagonist, who
carries out the will of God in each parable, is the God/Man, Jesus Christ.
Precisely for that reason He came, not to do His own will, but that of the
Father. The truth of the matter is that no one else is capable of doing it.
Again, we persist in standing by His teaching: “Without Me, you can do
nothing.” Therefore, every effort of man is false and in vain, if he does not
walk hand in hand with Jesus. He must be permitted to exercise complete
lordship over His work.
As a 12-year-old, Jesus
said, “I must be about my Father’s business” (Lk.2:49-KJV). In this parable,
how does Jesus do the will of His Father? He does so by joyfully selling all
with the purpose of buying the field. The symbolism remains constant, so the
field, as in all the parables, is the world, which He buys in this case. Paul
describes to us perfectly how He did that: “God was in Christ, reconciling the
world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Co. 5:19). We
also quote the apostle John: “He Himself is the propitiation (something or
someone who appeases wrath) for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for
those of the whole world” (1 Jn. 2:2). Jesus bought the entire field, to
acquire the treasure that was in the field, but not to save the whole field.
Consider Exodus 19:5: “You
shall be My special treasure among all the peoples, for all the earth is Mine,”
said God to Moses, referring to Israel. The verse demonstrates that God had to
buy the earth in order to appropriate the treasure. The result in the end was
that the non-Jews, as well, received salvation, but Jesus came precisely “to
His own” (Jn. 1:11). All doubt concerning this is taken away, when we read what
Jesus told the Canaanite woman: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house
of Israel… It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the
dogs” (Mt. 15:24,26). He, who is not a Jew, must consider himself unworthy to
be able to participate in the riches of God’s promises.
That is clearly the
teaching of Paul to the Gentiles in Ephesians 2: You were at that time separate
from Christ, excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the
covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (vs. 12). In
Romans 11, Paul compares Christians, who are not Jews, to branches from a wild
olive tree, grafted into a holy olive tree, which is Jewish. Paul warns us not
to boast, because some of the original branches were removed: “Do not be
conceited, but fear” (vs. 17,20).
So that we never arrive at
the conclusion that God has abandoned the Jews, Paul made the following
questions and assertions: “What advantage has the Jew?... Great in every
respect…” (Ro. 3:1,2). “God has not rejected His people, has He? May it never
be!... God has not rejected His people whom He foreknew… (11:1,2); I say then,
they did not stumble so as to fall, did they? May it never be!” (11:11); “From
the standpoint of God’s choice they are beloved for the sake of the fathers” (11:28).
Paul teaches that, as God
could graft the Gentiles into the olive tree, He is powerful enough to once again
engraft the Jews: “How much more will these who are the natural branches be
grafted into their own olive tree?” (11:24). He assures us that this actually
will happen: “If their transgression is riches for the world and their failure
is riches for the Gentiles, how much more will their fulfillment be!... For if
their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance
be but life from the dead?... So all of Israel will be saved…” (11:12,15,26).
It was prophesied that Christ would leave His glory to obtain their redemption:
“The deliverer will come from Zion, He will remove ungodliness from Jacob. This
is My covenant with them, when I take away their sins” (11:26-27). God found
his people in Egypt, when they had no homeland and He brought them out. For 40
years they wandered in a wilderness, before they entered the Promised Land.
Christ came to Israel, a tiny country, still hidden and insignificant in the
eyes of the world and dominated by the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, His own rejected
Him and lost their preeminence as God’s people (not without purpose, but under
the wise, divine plan). In this way, Israel is like the treasure “hidden in the
field, which a man found and hid again”. When Jesus comes to reign in the
Millennium, Israel will be rediscovered in the purpose of God.
We will let three verses
tell us briefly the whole history, as well as the future: “The Lord has chosen
Jacob for Himself, Israel for His own possession” (Ps. 135:4). “The kingdom of
God will be taken away from you and given to a people, producing the fruit of
it” (Mt. 21:43). “I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants
of Jerusalem, the Spirit of grace and of supplication, so that they will look
on Me whom they have pierced; and they will mourn for Him, as one mourns for an
only son and they will weep bitterly over Him like the bitter weeping over a
firstborn” (Zec. 12:10). The Jew finally will come to recognize his Messiah and
enter again into the plan of God, exactly at the hour, which He has already
established.
God does not have a “Plan
B”. What He has determined in the beginning is what He will bring to pass. He
does not change, adjust or step back. What He has begun, He will finish. It
continues to develop and become more perfect before our eyes. Personally, it
has been of great benefit to me to meditate upon the faithfulness of God to His
people Israel. It assures me, since He is a God who does not change, that He
will be faithful to us, the Gentiles, and, in particular, to me. For that
reason, in this chapter, it will be my pleasure to present the promises of God
given to Abraham, beginning in the book of Genesis, and show how He has brought
them to pass.
God called Abraham to
enter His eternal purposes and took him to the land, where that plan could take
place. He said to him, “Lift up your eyes and look from the place where you
are, northward and southward and eastward and westward; for all the land which
you see, I will give it to you and to your descendants forever” (Gen. 13:14-15).
Although God would work through Abraham and his descendants, He Himself
possessed this land in a special way. The land was His and still is. Many
generations later, when the children of Israel were about to enter it, God made
them understand clearly that the rights to the land belonged to Him. “The land,
moreover, shall not be sold permanently, for the land is Mine” (Lev. 25:23).
Israel was not a good
example of obedience and cooperation with God. Before they entered the Promised
Land, Moses gave them a list of the consequences that would come, if they would
not fulfill His commandments. We can look at them in the book of Deuteronomy,
chapter 28. He is faithful, not only to bring his promised blessings to pass,
but also to fulfill the curses.
A great percentage of the
Bible is prophetic and, like no other book, all of its prophecies reach
fulfillment. It is one of the great proofs that we are involved with a perfect,
supernatural book that is worthy to be called, “the Word of God”. First, we
will look at the punishment that was prophesied and then we will see exactly
what took place centuries later.
PROPHECIES FULFILLED FOR MISFORTUNE
AND FOR GOOD
“The Lord will bring you
and your king, whom you set over you, to a nation which neither you nor your
fathers have known, and there you shall serve other gods, wood and stone” (Dt.
28:36). Jeremiah gives us the account in his day of what was already history in
chapter 39:1-9: Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon and all his army came to
Jerusalem and laid siege to it… When Zedekah the king of Judah and all the men
of war saw them, they fled and went out of the city at night… But the army of
the Chaldeans pursued them and overtook Zedekiah in the plains of Jericho; and
they seized him… Then the king of Babylon slew the sons of Zedekiah before his
eyes… He then blinded Zedekiah’s eyes and bound him in fetters of bronze to
bring him to Babylon… As for the rest of the people who were left in the city,
the deserters who had gone over to him and the rest of the people who remained,
Nebuzaradan the captain of the bodyguard carried them into exile in Babylon.”
Moses prophesied that the
people of this invading nation would be “of fierce countenance, who will have
no respect for the old, nor show favor to the young” (vs. 50). Jeremiah in his
Lamentations described what actually happened: “Princes were hung by their
hands; Elders were not respected. Young men worked at the grinding mill, and
youths stumbled under loads of wood” (5:12-13).
We will include one more
detail of the prophecy of the Babylonian invasion of Israel in Deuteronomy 28: “You
shall eat the offspring of your own body, the flesh of your sons and of your
daughters whom the Lord your God has given you, during the siege and the
distress by which your enemy will oppress you” (vs. 53). We return to the book
of Lamentations, chapter 4, verse 10: “The hands of compassionate women boiled
their own children; they became food for them because of the destruction of the
daughter of my people.”
In Deuteronomy 28:64-66, a
change takes place. Now, the prophecy does not have to do anymore with Babylon,
but goes beyond to a day when Israel would be scattered over all the earth: “The
Lord will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other
end of the earth; and there you shall serve other gods, wood and stone, which
you or your fathers have not known. Among these nations you shall find no rest,
and there will be no resting place for the sole of your foot; but there the
Lord will give you a trembling heart, failing of eyes and despair of soul. So
your life shall hang in doubt before you; and you will be in dread night and
day, and shall have no assurance of your life.”
For fulfillment of this
prophecy, we cannot go to another part of the Bible, because it happened after
the Gospels were written, after the coming of the Messiah and His rejection by
His people. Jesus Himself prophesied, weeping over Jerusalem: “The days will
come upon you when your enemies will throw up a barricade against you, and
surround you and hem you in on every side, and they will level you to the
ground and your children within you, and they will not leave in you one stone
upon another, because you did not recognize the time of your visitation” (Lk.
19:43-44). History tells us that 37 years later the Roman general Titus came to
Jerusalem, leveled the city and burned it, perfectly fulfilling what Jesus had
said. The Romans persecuted the Jews and scattered them throughout the world.
They lost their nation and lived as strangers in all parts of the earth. It was
in this way that the treasure was hidden once again.
They existed in these sad
conditions century after century, despised, fearful and insecure among the nations
until the Second World War. We know well the history concerning their
persecution, especially in Europe, where the Jews were sought out by the Nazis,
corralled like cattle, sent to concentration camps and finally to the gas
chambers. Six million Jews were assassinated by Hitler in his intent to wipe
them off the face of the earth. They also received tremendous persecution from
Stalin in Russia. Nevertheless, this did not become the end of their story, nor
was it their ultimate destiny, because God had inspired prophets to write of
eternal plans that He had for them.
About 2,500 years ago,
Ezekiel came to know the following: “Thus says the Lord God, ‘I will gather you
from the peoples and assemble you out of the countries among which you have
been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel” (11:17). Once again, in
20:34, 41 and 42, we read: “I will bring you out from the peoples and gather
you from the lands where you are scattered, with a mighty hand and with an
outstretched arm and with wrath poured out…As a soothing aroma I will accept
you when I bring you out from the peoples and gather you from the lands where
you are scattered; and I will prove Myself holy among you in the sight of the
nations. And you will know that I am the Lord, when I bring you into the land
of Israel, into the land which I swore to give to your forefathers.” Once
more in 36:24: “I will take you from the nations, gather you from all the lands
and bring you into your own land.”
A PROPHECY TO BE FULFILLED IN THREE
STAGES
In Ezekiel 37, God let his
prophet know that this renovation would take place in three stages. First, he
compared Israel to a valley of dry bones, during the time of their dispersion
among all the nations and then asked, “Son of man, can these bones live? (vs.
3)… these bones are the whole house of Israel…I will cause you to come up out
of your graves and I will bring you into the land of Israel (vs. 11,12)… I will
take the sons of Israel from among the nations where they have gone, and I will
gather them from every side and bring them into their own land” (vs. 21)… I
prophesied as I was commanded; and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and
behold, a rattling; and the bones came together, bone to its bone” (vs. 7). The
first phase consisted in opening the graves, which meant, they were going to be
allowed to leave the nations, where they had been scattered for so long a time.
Then, the dry bones would be united once again in the land that had been
promised to Abraham and his descendants.
More or less at the
beginning of the 20th century, a movement began that continues to this day.
Many Jews began to leave all of earth’s continents, where they had wandered, in
order to repopulate their ancient land once more. Just as Abraham entered as a
stranger, so thousands and later millions of the scattered people arrived anew
in a land that was not yet under their control. It was not too many years ago
that Russia opened its doors and thousands of Jews, which lived there,
returned. How can it be that after so many centuries a people should decide to
return to live again in the land of their ancestors? It was all directed by the
hand of God, who in these last days put it in the heart of every one to fulfill
His eternal plan.
The second phase had to do
with the following: “I will put sinews on you, make flesh grow back on you,
cover you with skin…” (vs. 6). “… I looked and behold, sinews were on them, and
flesh grew and skin covered them; but there was no breath in them” (vs. 8).
This meant: “I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of
Israel; and one king will be king for all of them; and they will no longer be
two nations and no longer be divided into two kingdoms” (vs. 22). So, not only
were they to return to the land, but they were to form one nation, as a totally
independent government. For 2,500 years, since the time that Babylon led them
captive, Israel had not been self-governing. In the time of Jesus, they were
still not a free or independent nation, because they were under Roman
domination. Some were hoping that, if Jesus were the Messiah, He would free
them from this oppression.
However, in these days we
can testify that this phase has also been fulfilled. This to me is very
exciting, because we are not talking about ancient history, but a time, which
some of us can remember. I would like to direct you to Isaiah 66:8, where this
prophet also speaks of the renovation of Israel: “Who has heard such a thing?
Who has seen such things? Can a land be born in one day? Can a nation be
brought forth all at once?” It is a national miracle that has never occurred
before at any point of history. An old people, scattered throughout the earth,
return to the land of their patriarchs and inhabit it again. They speak their
old language and practice their ancient customs. Can a land be born in one day?
Can a nation come into being so quickly? Well, we know this: May 14, 1948, is
the exact day, when the prophecy of Isaiah, written 2,700 years ago, came to
pass. This date marks with all certainty the fact that we are rapidly
approaching the end of this age.
The third phase: “I will
cause breath to enter you that you may come to life” (vs. 5). Now we observe
the Lord God passionately commanding Ezekiel to prophesy: “Prophesy to the
breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, ‘Thus says the Lord God,
“Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on this slain, that they come
to life”’” (vs. 9 – Without a doubt this is the breath of the Spirit of God).
We see the same passion that motivated the Merchant to possess the treasure: “From
joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” The prophet
responds, “I prophesied as He commanded me, and the breath came into them, and
they came to life and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army” (vs. 10).
We see the meaning already in chapter 36: “I will put My Spirit within you and
cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My
ordinances” (Ez. 36:27). In 37:23, the Lord confirms this transformation.
The fulfillment of this
third phase will take place when Christ appears again, this time as King of
Kings and Lord of Lords, sitting upon the throne of David in Jerusalem to reign
over the world for a thousand years. The hidden treasure will once again be
discovered and the plan of God to reform his people, bought by His Son Jesus
Christ, will go forward.
The prophet Amos spoke of
these days: “I will restore the captivity of My people Israel, and they will
rebuild the ruined cities and live in them; they will also plant vineyards and
drink their wine, and make gardens and eat their fruit (Amos 9:14). This
prophecy has already been fulfilled, because Israel is now among the most
productive fruit-growing nations in the world. Through Amos, God assures us of
their future in the following verse, the last in his prophecy: “I will also
plant them on their land, and they will not again be rooted out from their land
which I have given them, says the Lord your God.” Through the nation of Israel,
we see the unfailing, unmovable faithfulness of the Lord.
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