Where Are We Sitting in the Kingdom

The Text

We are taking three pieces of Matthew 13 today. Verse 2, then verses 9 to 17, then verses 31 and 32. The parable of the sower is being stepped over on purpose, because I have already taught it to these same people and they have it. Today we are not watching the parable. We are watching the people who were standing there while He told it.

The Word

The word to hold is closed, in verse 15, and it is stronger than it looks in English.

The Greek is kammyo, and what I give you is what the lexicons give. They give it as to close or shut the eyes. And what I make of it, together with the fact that the verse puts the closing in the people’s own hands, is that this is not eyes drifting shut or clouding over with age. The eyelid comes down, and somebody brings it down.

The lexicons list the word only twice in the New Testament, here and in Acts 28:27, where Paul quotes this same passage of Isaiah to a room in Rome. Both times it is a people shutting their own eyes.

So read the verse again and watch who is doing what, their hearts have grown dull. Their ears are hard of hearing, and their eyes they have closed. Nobody closed them for them.

The Point

The kingdom of heaven does not stay still. That is the mustard seed, and Jesus says it. And here is the question I am putting to myself out of that, and it is mine. Not whether I came, but what has grown since I got here. Start with where He was sitting.

The Proof

He did not call a meeting and He did not send word ahead. He went out and He sat down by the sea, and they came. Matthew does not tell me why they came. What I think brought them is that they knew He always had something to say, and that is my thinking and not his report.

And look at the picture in verse 2, because the whole question is standing in it. He is sitting, and they are standing, there is water in between.

Who came is worth knowing. Great multitudes, Matthew says, and the whole multitude stood on the shore. He gives no number and he does not say how long they stood. And the dullness in verse 15 is said of THIS PEOPLE in Isaiah’s words, not counted head by head on that beach, and the same chapter says of the disciples that their eyes see. So let me say it as I mean it. Among that crowd were hard ears, weighted hearts and shut eyes, and still they came out. And that is the thing I keep looking at. They came out.

And to that crowd, in verse 9, He called out over the water, He who has ears to hear, let him hear. Not to the twelve. To the multitude. Matthew does not tell me the spiritual state of the people standing there, and I am not going to sort them for you. The invitation went out to the whole crowd, and what each one did with it came after.

Then the disciples asked Him why He spoke in parables, and His answer in verses 10 to 13 must be heard in the right order. And I will tell you plainly before I go further that this passage is argued over. Verse 13 gives a because. The Isaiah quotation carries a lest they should turn. Men who have studied it far longer than me land in different places, and I am not going to settle it for you. Here is how I hold it. I read the hardness as being there first, with Isaiah having said it centuries before that morning came, so the parables came to a people already like that.

And here is my picture of it. Speak plainly to a closed door and nothing gets in at all. A parable slips past a closed door, goes in, sits in a person, and works on them later. Matthew does not describe that happening, and in this very chapter he describes the opposite, the wicked one snatching away what was sown. So I do not read the parables as Him giving up on that crowd, and the reading is mine.

And then comes verse 15, and the mercy is in the tail of it.

See with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, turn. And I should heal them.

I hear the whole road still standing open in that sentence, and it is my reading. You do not shut your eyes against something that could not save you.

That was spoken to Israel at the dedication of the temple, to a people already inside the covenant, not to the far off but to the near. And that I hear it as the same road, turn and I will heal, is my joining. Chronicles is speaking to Israel at a temple dedication, and Matthew is on a shore, and neither one points at the other. And that both are people God was speaking to is the whole of what I am leaning on.

The Meaning

Here is the hard word, and I will say it plainly and then I will answer it.

A person can know all the gestures of a true kingdom worker and not be in the kingdom.

They came, and they stood, and they were there for the teaching. The gestures of a hearer were on that beach, and Isaiah’s words about shut eyes were spoken over that same gathering.

So how does anybody know, including about themselves? He answers it in verse 12.

To him more will be given, and he will have abundance. Now Jesus does not call that a test for knowing whether a man is in the kingdom, and He does not mention a seed there. That I hear growth in it, and carry it over to the seed, is my bridge.

And that is where the mustard seed comes in, and where the two parables come together.

A man took a mustard seed and sowed it in his own field, the least of all seeds, and it grew until it was greater than the herbs and became a tree, and the birds of the air came and nested in its branches. Now go back to that first seed in verse 4.

The birds came and devoured them.

The same bird language, both times. And here is where I have to stop and be honest with you. Jesus interprets the birds in the first parable, in verse 19, the wicked one snatching away what was sown. He does not interpret the birds in the second one at all, and He never tells me to read the one by the other. I am the one setting these two pictures side by side.

In one they came and took it away. In the other they came and moved in and stayed.

In my picture nothing changed about the birds, birds do what birds do. What changed was what they landed on. A seed lying on a hard path, and they carried it off. A grown tree, and they built a home in it.

And look at the two grounds while you are standing there. One fell beside the road, where the feet pass. One was put in his own field, on purpose.

I heard it said that the kingdom is not a monument, it is a movement. And it is, but here is what I have found. It is a movement because it moves in us, and then it moves with us.

And notice what He calls it, not the kingdom of earth, the kingdom of heaven. That is His wording. And here is mine. A thing named after heaven and planted in dirt is going to keep moving, because it did not come from the ground. Heaven’s kingdom, growing into shelter.

The Heart

The birds are coming, in the picture I have been holding. The question is what they find when they get here.

Are we still a seed lying on a path, or have we grown into something that can hold somebody?

And I have to ask that of myself before I ask it of anybody else, because I have been on that shore. I have come out to hear and stood there with everything in me shut down. The gestures were all in place and the eyes were closed.

But look at what He said to the ones who stayed near Him.

Prophets wanted this, righteous men wanted this. They wanted it and they did not get it, and it is sitting open in our hands this morning.

Lord, open my eyes, and let there be something growing in me that somebody else can rest in.