God’s field is the whole world

“The field is the world, and the good seed stands for the people of the kingdom. The weeds are the people of the evil one ….”   (Matthew 13:38 NIV)

Most of my life I have understood the field in the parable of the weeds in Matthew 13:24 -30 to be referring to the Church and how the enemy comes to plant weeds (false brethren with false doctrine) in the midst of God’s people. This has been the classic focus of interpretation for as long as I have preached or heard others preach from this parable. Indeed this can be a lesson inferred from this story. Yet as I read it again recently, I saw that one obvious key to the interpretation is the explanation of the parable that the Lord himself goes on to give his disciples in Matt. 13: 37- 43. And in his explanation he says this ‘The field is the world …’

The field is the whole world, not just the church. You may wonder why this is important. You see, we often get caught up in the mentality that the only group that our God is involved with, is the Church. And that he has left the world with its madness and only focuses on the Church and those she can win. This is not true. God owns the whole world and is fully involved in it. God loves the whole world and sees it as his field. God is very actively involved in every area of the world right now, because it is his field.. As this parable says, he’s sowing his good seed in the whole world and expecting a harvest from the whole world.

There is a way that when we, as the Church, do not understand that the whole world is God’s field, we begin to withdraw from many segments of the world, and are not available to work with God. God wants his Church to be engaged in every aspect of society, because the world is his field. Yes, the enemy has sown weeds everywhere we look in our society, but God is not going to allow this world just to go to hell. He is going to get a mighty harvest. In the parable we see how careful God is that no one should perish when he says:

“ ‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest.’ ” – Matthew 13:29 -30 NIV

With all the madness going on in our world God is ‘not willing that any one should perish.

What this parable is teaching us, is, that we need to be engaged in the world everywhere from classrooms to boardrooms, because God’s field is the whole world.

We need to have Christians everywhere.  ‘Let them grow together….’ he said. Alas, it’s only by being in the world, and not being of it, that we can determine the size of the final harvest.

When the Lord said “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.” – (Mark 16:15), he was saying “Penetrate all spheres of society and preach the Gospel.”

It means to go into the world of children, and that of retirees; into the world of entertainment and that of politics; into the world of business and that of the unreached in the ends of the earth. The whole world is his field. We must not just think of creating an alternative church-world, but rather think of how to penetrate the whole world. For example instead of Christians thinking of having the Christian political party, there should be on-fire-for-Jesus believers entering the so-called corrupt political parties and being God’s worker there to bring about a harvest from there too. Instead of just building Christian schools we need more Christians called as teacher-missionaries into our public schools.

This is our call – Let us GO INTO ALL THE WORLD. If you have not yet found where you should be penetrating, I challenge you today, to ask God where he wants you to be! I am certain that for most of us we are already in the place, we only need to awake to the reality of our calling and begin to see, for example, that secular school where we work, as our primary calling, and not the worship group we are part of at church. The latter is only where we go to refuel for the real task. Let us GO!