Trinity Fellowship

Providence is the word we use to describe how God governs, attends to, watches over, and cares for His creation. When Jesus sees that the shepherds have left the sheep to fend for themselves, He has pity and compassion on them. He finds us lost, vulnerable, and hungry, but sees to it that we are gathered in, protected, and well-fed. He calls and equips under-shepherds to carry out His work, but everything ultimately comes from His hand. When we are fed by Jesus, our supply never runs out. In His ministry as the great shepherd, Christ shows us that He is not only the true and better Moses, but also the true and better Elisha, healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, raising the dead, producing life from His grave, and providing for our needs from a never-ending storehouse. Receive His rest and His gifts with thankfulness.

The account of John the Baptist's beheading lays out the most obvious of contrasts. John is right with God and as a result has a peace and a confidence that allows him to be bold and clear even when calling the most powerful men to repentance. Herod and his household are not right with God and as a result, they have an unstable and double-minded spirit that leads to cowardice and panic. God made both church and state to function alongside and in harmony with each other, both under His sovereign authority. In order for us to enjoy the blessing of a calm and peaceful social order, we will need the courage of a clear conscience. This will not and cannot happen apart from the gospel of Jesus Christ. The blessing of a free and stable state has only come when the church has taken her prophetic role seriously. On the personal or on the corporate level, forgiven men are free men, and free men create free societies. Let us all find the calm, cool assurance in the gospel that makes our peace and our freedom contagious.

Today we conclude the third extended teaching section in the gospel of Matthew. Jesus teaches in parables in order to conceal truth to those who have not been given understanding, but to reveal truth to those who have. In our text today Jesus delivers four short parables in private to his disciples. From the first two we learn of the exceedingly great worth of the kingdom, the pursuit of which is indeed worth every sacrifice. This is supplemented with a view towards the final judgment, when the righteous and the wicked will be separated. And having been given this understanding, like the disciples, we too are given the responsibility and privilege to share our treasury of truth with others. Like Jesus, when we are criticized and rejected (even by those closest to us), we must remember that the worthy pursuit of the kingdom is most assuredly worth it.

The Christian cannot be satisfied so long as any human activity is either opposed to Christianity or out of all connection with Christianity. Christianity must pervade not merely all nations, but also all of human thought. The Christian cannot therefore be indifferent to any branch of earnest human endeavor. It must all be brought into some relation to the gospel. It must be studied either in order to be demonstrated false or else in order to be made useful to the kingdom of God. The kingdom must be advanced not merely extensively, but also intensively. The church must not only seek to conquer every man for Christ, but also the whole of the man." – J. Gresham Machen

Christ's kingdom parables frequently encourage us to both patience in adversity and confidence over it. The patience and the confidence are both the fruit of trusting in Christ's settled victory over all things and all history. Imposters, false teachers, ungodly people, the spiritually indifferent, and antichrist ideas are all growing alongside and among the crop of God's kingdom. We must ever be on guard, honing our discernment according to the Word of God so that we will tell the true from the false in due time. As we wait for the fruit to give evidence of the root, we have opportunity to learn this patience and this confidence in God's purposes. We can neither advance or delay His timing with our efforts, so our charge is to diligently man our stations, to obey Christ's instructions, to take sin seriously, and to never despair. It has been said that the good soldier fights not so much because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him. We are commanded to hate the weeds, and this hatred is proper because the weeds corrupt what is lovely. May God give us a heart that rightly tackles the weeds because of our overwhelming anticipation and love for the bountiful harvest of His kingdom.