And shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
And shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. See the note at Matthew 13:42. We have said that each of these two parables holds forth the same truth under a slight diversity of aspect. What is that diversity? First, the bad, in the former parable, are represented as vile seed sown among the wheat by the enemy of souls; in the latter, as foul fish drawn forth out of the great sea of human beings by the Gospel net itself. Both are important truths-that the Gospel draws within its pale, and into the communion of the visible Church, multitudes who are Christians only in name; and that the injury thus done to the Church on earth is to be traced to the wicked one. But further, while the former parable gives chief prominence to the present mixture of good and bad, in the latter, the prominence is given to the future separation of the two classes.
Remarks on Matthew 13:24-30; Matthew 13:36-43; Matthew 13:47-50 - SECOND AND SEVENTH PARABLES, THE WHEAT AND THE TARES, AND THE GOOD AND BAD FISH
(1) These two parables teach clearly the vanity of expecting a perfectly pure Church in the present state, or before Christ comes. In the latter parable, it is the Gospel net itself that gathers the bad as well as the good; and as it is by this tie that they get and keep their connection with the Church, we cannot expect so to cast that net as to draw in the good only. But, on the other hand, as the presence of tares among the wheat, in the former parable, is ascribed to the enemy of the Church and her Lord, it follows that, in so far as we encourage the entrance of such into the communion of the Church, we do the devil's work. Thus does this parable give as little encouragement to laxity as to a utopian purism in church-discipline.
(2) When the servants, in the former parable, ask liberty to pull up the tares, that the growth of the wheat may not suffer from their presence, and that liberty is denied them, does not this rebuke intolerance in religion, on pretence of purging out heresy?
(3) How grand is the view here given by the Great Preacher of His own majesty, as Bengal remarks! The field of the world into which the seed of the kingdom is cast is "His field" (Matthew 13:24); the angels who do the work of separation at the end of the world are "His angels;" and as it is "the Son of man that sends them forth," so in "gathering out of His kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity," they do but obey His commands (Matthew 13:30; Matthew 13:41.)
(4) The Scripture nowhere holds out the expectation of a millennium in which there will be none but regenerate men on the earth, in flesh and blood-or, in the language of our parable, in which the earth will be one field of wheat without any tares. It would seem to follow that there are but two great stages of humanity under the Gospel: the present mixed state, and the future, final, absolutely unmixed condition; the millennial era being, in that case, but a continuation of the present condition-vastly superior, indeed, and with much less mixture than we now see, but-not essentially differing from it, and so, having no place in this parable at all. The proper place of the millennium, in these parables, is in the next pair.
(5) Do those who talk so much of "the meekness and gentleness of Christ," as if that were the one feature of His character, set their seal to the sharp lines of His teaching in these two parables-on the subject of the tares as "the children of the wicked one," and "the enemy that sows them" being "the devil;" as to the "furnace of fire" prepared for them, the "casting" or "flinging" of them into the furnace, which that gentle Lamb of God shall demand of His angels, and the "wailing and gnashing of teeth" in which this will end? O, if men but knew it, it is just the gentleness of the Lamb which explains the eventual "wrath of the Lamb."