The comparison here and elsewhere set forth between the great mixed community of man and the vegetable kingdom presents many points of striking and obvious parallel. Sowing the seed growing until the harvest the unsparing universality of the reaping the final separation.
I. This present life is a time of intermixture. Take a family a household and see what diversity of character it presents. So complete is the intermixture, that of the larger part it would be impossible to decide whether they belong to the class indicated as wheat or tares. And we are not called upon to do so. "Let both grow together until the harvest." And nothing is more arrogant and presumptuous, nothing can be less in harmony with the Spirit of Christ, than the gratuitous and peremptory manner in which some people pronounce upon this matter anticipating the verdict of the Almighty, and drawing a line of demarcation which as yet exists nowhere else than in the mind of God.
II. But neither does this growing together continue long, nor does this incapacity to discriminate extend to the Searcher of Hearts. "The Lord knoweth them that are His." He arranges the most complex circumstances that influence our lives. He at once unravels all the intricacies of our mixed, imperfect, and entangled motives; and at once detects whether they are to be assigned to selfishness and self-aggrandisement, or to the generous principles of love, honour, and integrity which Christ has taught. And as even now with an unerring eye He distinguishes His loyal subjects from others, so hereafter with unerring hand He shall wave aside the chaff from the wheat. And this is the great harvest which is the end of the world.
III. The great practical lesson to be connected with this contemplation of the great harvest is this: That if our last hour may be compared to the gathering in of the wheat, whether it be good or bad, so the present hour is for every one of us a time for growing and ripening.
W. H. Brookfield, Sermons,p. 239.
References: Matthew 13:30. Preacher's Monthly,vol. vi., p. 189; R. D. B. Rawnsley, Village Sermons,3rd series, p. 43.