Cultivating Christianity

Text: Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Focus: Although evil exists, God is the judge.

Function: To help people see that God is the Judge

Form: Topical

Intro:

Sometimes, in a sermon, one has to go right for the jugular. Sometimes, the faithful preacher has to start right where we find the worse, or most uncomfortable part of a passage.

Let me reread verses 41-42: ⁴¹The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. ⁴²They will throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Judgment.

Judgment from God.

Judgment day.

Those are, or at least they should be, chilling words.

When I think of judgment, when I think of God's judgment, when I think of Judgment day, I get this sort of knot in my stomach.

My daddy never really preached about hell. But, in my childhood, I heard a lot about it.

I had this picture in my mind of an exacting God who really didn't tolerate much deviation. He was and is the standard of perfection and it was/is up to us to live up to that standard. That is, if we really loved Him.

And right here we see it. Verse 42: “...thrown into the blazing furnace... ...weeping, gnashing of teeth....”

Hell fire. Again scary stuff.

And to make it worse, part of my theological formation in preaching and ministerial training was “being the preacher with enough guts to never water down these passages... ...if not, God would place me in the darkest, or hottest, places of hell, for eternity.”

So. Let me tell you the truth without fear of retribution or reprisal. I promise to use scripture instead of per-conceived notions to preach on it. OK?

I spoke of heaven in one sermon about 20 years ago. A few years later, at the age of about 19, a youth came forward to be baptized.

It was a wealthy Church. I remember we were in a capital campaign to raise money for a new building and I told them: “Good news, we already have enough money to build. The problem is, it is still in your bank accounts....”

So, I was preaching about laying up for ourselves eternal, instead of earthly rewards, and since there were savvy investors, I was explaining how eternal treasure is a much better investment than earthly pleasure or reward. I was preaching Matthew 6:19-21, “where our treasure is, our heart will be also.” The passage is an admonition to place our heart where God wants it to be: with Him.

I described eternity like this: “Suppose an eagle would take 1,000 years to fly from earth to the other side of the sun. And on every trip, he would bring just one beak full of earth to the other side of our orbit. By the time the eagle completely moved earth to the other side, eternity would still be just beginning. If you lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, you will have them for eternity. Doesn't that make more sense? Why waste it on the passing pleasures of this life? Or do you really believe?”

I wouldn't use that kind of manipulation anymore.

And so, the young man, who came forward to be baptized testified this at his baptism: “If I die and go to hell, it is for eternity, and if a giant eagle would take a speck of earth....”

I was shocked!

Conversions that are merely a “fire escape from hell” are based on a god of fear, instead of the Biblical truth “God is love.” 1 John 4:8

I realized that I had misused God's Word to raise money for the Church. The passage is about the real treasure that being in God's family is. It isn't there to raise money for the Church.

God forgive me. I suppose I deserved that twisting of the illustration I used.

But hell is here in this passage: "Everything that causes people to sin...”, like, for example, the love of money, and “all the people who do evil...” are destroyed in the end.

I have had to look at what the Bible actually says about hell throughout out my career as a preacher.

This passage says nothing about a prayer of salvation, like I prayed at age 4. No, it indicates that evil people, and sinful vices, will be destroyed, by God.

And, this passage does not say evil people will suffer eternal torture. And someone can say, “it doesn't say they won't, either. Pastor.”

True.

And this isn't a sermon about hell. It is a sermon about judgment and more specifically, it is about who does the judging.

And the answer, btw, is God, not us.

“Leave the weeds alone...,” the Master says. “If you uproot them, you can destroy the tender plants.”

Let God do the cultivating. Pulling the weeds is God's job, not ours.

How many tender plants were destroyed because we, at times, have taken it upon ourselves to be the gardeners weeding the garden instead of God and His angels?

Too many.

God loves the tender plants more than He worries about the awful way sin destroys and evil people conduct themselves. It isn't our place to judge. It is God's place.

I served my chaplain residency at the community hospital downtown Indianapolis. I served the emphysema ward. I tell you, a powerful way to get someone to think about their nicotine habit is to tour that ward and see how awful a way it is to die -drowning in your own phlegm.

An elderly man was there dying and he had something to say to me, the young upstart preacher. He said: “at age 12, a couple of boys sneaked a pack of cigarettes and went behind the shed at Church to smoke them. The preacher caught us, drug us before the congregation and railed on us about how evil we were. I made my mind up that day to do two things: 1), never go to church again, and 2) never to stop smoking.

The destruction of that tender plant is exactly what Jesus meant when He commanded us through this story to let God alone be the judge.

God is the judge, and God is a fair judge.

So what about hell?

I tell people that hell is “the just response of a loving God on behalf of all the victims.”

You know the theory. If I, as a father, permit one child to bully another child, I have not loved either Child. Love must include a sense of justice for the victim.

And God is just.

As a matter of fact, in this passage, the word translated as “righteous” is diakonos.

Diakonos is translated almost exclusive as Just in every other language than English.

We read the text about Joseph, when he forgave Mary, it says, “Joseph because was a good man decided to keep Mary.” Matthew 1:19

The righteous are better known as “the Just.”

In English translations, because of the history of King James who authorized his own translation, we see the word translated as righteous, as if they are the saved.

Biblical scholars, true to the Word and its original intent, question the intent of this translation in the King James because it appears to have been used to justify Colonization.

The idea being that if we are “the righteous” then, God prefers us to others and what we do to them, how we treat them, is less important to God since we are “the saved.”

During this time of colonization, the doctrine of hell gained emphasis for Imperialistic reasons because if God has assigned to them such a terrible future, then how badly we treat them is less significant.

But almost every other language translation correctly translates diakonos as Just, or good. This translation is largely unique to the English language.

And this passage does not contrast believers with unbelievers. It contrasts evil people with good people.

And it states that: The good people are God's people.

Evol people are condemned because they are evil.

God is good. God is just and God is love.

God will punish evil, because God is just. And, God will punish evil according to God's goodness.

One thing that is important to understand from this passage is that Evil exists. And, in the parable, evil is personal. The weeds are planted by the Evil one.

The weeds are both things that cause us to sin and evil people. The weeds are both personal and impersonal. And that is the nature of Evil.

From the parable, it is established that Evil is real.

At times, my wife accuses me of being to naïve. I would always rather err on the side of giving the benefit of the doubt than questioning the intent of others.

It is my personality that does this.

So, I have to remind myself that evil exists.

And in this world, there is evil. It exists inside of people and it is a force to be reckoned with.

One of my favorite hymns is “This Is My Father's World.” There is a line in there that says: “and though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.”

We are not called to decry the evil of the weeds.

We are not called to uproot the weeds. That is God's job.

Falsely, we have been given the task of “taking a stand against sin” as if somehow that will accomplish God's purpose.

But Jesus is clear. God is the judge. We are not called to curse the darkness. We are called to shine the light.

So what about Hell?

It is God's prerogative.

In this passage, the evil is thrown into the fire where it ceases to exist. There is no mention of eternal torture.

Eternal torture is inconsistent with the concept of a loving God.

In Genesis 18:16-33, Abraham bargains with God in an attempt to save Sodom and Gomorrah. He convinces God to save the cities if God can find at least 10 good people living there.

As it turns out, there are only 3 and they are kept safe while the rest die.

But Abraham's argument toward God is that God is fair, and God will never put out a disproportionate judgment.

Whatever hell it, it is not disproportionate, it is fair and it is just.

No where does it say that the soul will exist forever in torment. Mark 9:48, where it says “
their worm shall not die and the fire will never go out” is a direct quote from Isaiah 66:24 that states “the worm that eats them will not die and the fire will never be quenched.”

Perhaps this means that there will be an eternal testimony God's destruction of evil.

Now, one might say this: “The pastor is preaching against the reality of hell.”

What I am saying is that nowhere in the Bible do we find the idea that hell is eternal torture for the damned.

But we do see the Bible telling us that heaven is eternal bliss.

We do see the Bible telling us whatever God's judgment is, it will be fair.

And most importantly, the judgment is left to God.

That is why we are not to take our own revenge. We are commanded to let God be the administrator of vengeance. Romans 12:19.

Let God do it. God will do it more completely, but most importantly, God will do it with complete fairness. God will do it with His love and mercy in mind.

Let me reiterate what we have learned from this parable:

Evil exists and will be punished.

The enemy sows the evil in our midst.

God alone is the judge.