Matthew 13:45,46

D. THE INESTIMABLE VALUE OF THE KINGDOM: THE PRICE OF TRUTH

2. THE PARABLE OF THE PRECIOUS PEARL

TEXT: 13:45, 46

45 Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is a merchant seeking goodly pearls: 46 and having found one pearl of great price, he went and sold all that he had, and bought it.

THOUGHT QUESTIONS

a.

Why is it so very important that Jesus reveal to His disciples, even in this veiled way, that His Kingdom could only be discovered after diligent search on the world market? What was there in their background that called for this sort of information?

b.

How would you summarize the fundamental message of this story?

c.

Is the search for God's rule in your life the one absorbing passion of your existence, or does the cry of other things demand so much of your attention that you wonder who really is in control? What are you going to do about it?

d.

Are you willing to liquidate the whole collection of lesser values in your life to purchase the blessings of God's good government at whatever expense? Can you truthfully say, When it comes to the Kingdom of God, cost is no object?

PARAPHRASE

In a similar way, God's Kingdom is similar to the situation of a pearl merchant searching for exquisite pearls. When he found one pearl of inestimable, value, he liquidated his entire collection and bought that one.

SUMMARY

The Kingdom of God is worth all it costs! When a connoisseur seeks it with all diligence, its value will be so obvious and desirable that he will instantly recognize its preciousness and expend all his resources to gain it. The Kingdom consists in releasing our entire, miserable collection of lesser values in order to be filled with all of His.

NOTES

Matthew 13:45 The kingdom of heaven is like unto a. merchant seeking goodly pearls. This man, in contrast to the coincidental. discoverer of the treasure in the preceding story, is an expert engaged in regular commerce on the pearl market. In his search he perhaps thought to be able to purchase the best ones with the cash he had in hand. This would leave his other possessions intact and still his own. Apparently, he had not yet imagined himself coming across a specimen so precious that it would cost him not only his present collection, but all that he had. That is, he could not conceive it until he saw it. But his wisdom, developed over the years in this field, recognizing the excelling worth of this one pearl, demanded that he give up further search in order to possess this one at the expense of all else.

Had Jesus furnished us an interpretative key to this story, perhaps He would have said, The goodly pearls are all the higher values of this life. The pearl merchant is a dedicated seeker of righteousness, service, virtue, peace, love, science, art, beauty and such. The one pearl of great price is the Kingdom of God. As the pearl merchant sold all that he had and bought it, so the disciple of the Kingdom gives up searching for satisfaction in those other worthy endeavors outside the Kingdom, only to rejoice that in possessions of the Kingdom all that was lovely or of value in them he now possesses in the Kingdom.
Here again appear the three basic steps:

1.

The expert search. Do we see here Jesus-' appreciation of the artists, the scientists, the philosophers, the poets, the philanthropists, etc., who are regularly, sometimes painfully, engaged in developing all that enriches life and elevates conduct, hoping to find satisfaction there? If so, each can find in the Kingdom of God that rare and infinite preciousness in comparison with which the relative value of all else pales into insignificance. Are these people well-rounded individuals who, despite their wealth in many human joys and fulfillment, suspect that some higher fulfillment, some superior happiness must exist without which all the others wane into mediocrity? Could absolute good ever become the actual experience of human beings? These hunger and thirst after righteousness (even if they cannot satisfactoricallly define it) and set out on an unrelenting quest until they should discover it. Perhaps they too do not yet believe, as they begin their quest, that their very search, when realized, will revolutionize their entire perspective, and, consequently, everything else.

2.

The wisdom to evaluate the superiority of the Kingdom. The uniqueness of the single pearl did not deny the worth and loveliness of all other pearls, for they too had intrinsic value. All that made the smaller, less valuable pearls desirable, however, is present absolutely in this flawless exemplar. Its advantage lies in the fact that it possesses perfectly each good quality only partially or imperfectly realized in the inferior specimens. The good, however; are always the enemy of the best and we must choose between the very good and the best! We cannot content ourselves with mediocrity. This parable illustrates by contrast the case of the Jews who had a zeal for righteousness, but who, when they saw God's most precious pearl, Jesus Christ, they refused to surrender their self-righteousness and all else they considered precious to save Him. Cornelius (Acts 10:1 to Acts 11:18) is a better example, as is Mary of Bethany (Luke 10:38-42) and the Ethiopian official (Acts 8:26-40)

3.

The unhesitating readiness to release one's grip on anything else he deems of more importance or higher in value. The rich young ruler, by contrast, balked at accepting Jesus as the Lord and Master of his life, clutched his paltry collection of inferior pearls and stalked away. This is the critical decision faced by all would-be disciples. (See notes on Matthew 8:18-22.) When we have seen the supreme value of the Kingdom and the necessity of a personal response to the mercy of its gracious King, we must then, immediately, seize the opportunity before it pass forever beyond our reacheven if that means leaving the loved, the known and the apparent security of our present situation.

THE SCANDAL CAUSED BY THESE TWO STORIES

It must have been frankly unexpected to hear the Nazarene speak of His Truth and His Kingdom as a commodity on the world market to be handled, evaluated, bought and sold like cabbages, as if it were somehow in competition with everything else that vies for men's attention and interest. For people who had just always supposed that, at the manifestation of the Messiah, the Truth of God would be equally evident and equally precious to everyone, this parable must have been, bluntly, unbelievable. The modern reader of both these parables about the hidden treasure and the pearl can sense only second-handedly the disappointment they caused for Jesus-' original hearers, primarily because he is personally living in the time-period to which Jesus alludes and, because of this fact, has become accustomed to it. But the Twelve and the others lived before the arrival of these days, and their preconceptions about them were based upon their reading of the ancient prophecies and upon the then-current popular interpretations. Whether the mute multitudes grasped the full details of these stories or not, the quicker thinking among them must have been puzzling: What kind of a kingdom does that Nazarene intend to represent to us anyway, if its preciousness is hidden from everyone but a fortunate finder who stumbles onto it quite by accident, or perhaps the unexpected find of one carefully scouring the market? Or if, as we have believed, the Kingdom of the Messiah is to bring unprecedented wealth to the Hebrew people after centuries of suffering and sacrifice, how can Jesus affirm that the Kingdom is so expensive to its adherents that it will actually cost them everything they can scrape together to make it their own? This exaggerated idea of continued personal sacrifice is incompatible with our ideas of the Messianic Paradise wherein everyone will sit under his own vine and fig tree to be served by the kings of the earth who pour into Jerusalem bearing their wealth to contribute their glory to the Kingdom of Israel. Besides, if God intends to give the Kingdom to Israel as a natural right, why should it be thought necessary that ANY HEBREW should be imagined as required to decide whether he would BUY the Kingdomand at extreme expense at that! It is precisely at this point that any given hearer must decide whether he thinks Jesus knows what He is talking about. He must overcome the disappointment of his false hopes and the Lord's rejection of is mistaken conception of the Kingdom. Tragically, many never would.

And lest we smile at their incomprehension and difficulties, let us count the Demases who are willing to resell the Kingdom to repossess their lesser values! (Cf. 2 Timothy 4:10; 2 Peter 2:1-22) Count the Christians who rightly think that salvation is free but are aghast to learn that it costs everything we have to obtain it, and who begin to put price ceilings on what they are willing to expend to have God's best. (See Special Study The Cost of Our Salvation after Matthew 16:24-28.) It was to this unpreparedness that Jesus addressed His challenges of the high cost of discipleship (Luke 14:25-33; Luke 9:23-26; Luke 18:29-30). Just how far the Church is from understanding her Lord here is measurable in terms of the humanitarian projects, the philanthropic enterprises, the social welfare schemes that are substituted for, rather than occasioned by, the realization of the Christ-life in her. Such projects may be expected as the natural outgrowth of the Rule of God in and through the Church. But when these projects and their supposedly Christian proponents in the name of the Kingdom of God categorically exclude the very means by which the spreading of the Kingdom is to take place, i.e., by proclaiming the whole counsel of God, then they have at that point cashed in the Kingdom in order to purchase goodly pearls of far less value.

Consider also the fact that the glory of God's government is actually hidden in our world even today. Men still blindly stumble past the Church, supposing it to be only another social betterment society with metaphysical overtones. Men also fail to recognize the principles, order and beauty of God's total control over the earth, because they are blinded by their own rebellion and their struggle with Nature in revolt. But, bless God, this all contributes to make faith real, since sight is impossible. (Romans 8:18-25) Even when men come face to face with the Kingdom message they still must decide whether it is worth surrendering their partial plans, their inadequate goals, their incomplete wisdom, their transitory joys, their ethereal hopes to obtain something which their faith only partially helps them to understand! (Hebrews 11:3; 1 Corinthians 1:18 to 1 Corinthians 2:10)

So the scandal is still there, because even during this Church-age, God has not permitted us personally to experience the glory of His final plans. A serious look at the world must lead to more doubts than solid optimism. But this very human uncertainty guarantees the absolute freedom of our choice and the moral quality of our decision to believe on good evidence what we can yet only imagine. (Cf. Ephesians 1:17-23; Ephesians 3:14-19; 2 Corinthians 4:16 to 2 Corinthians 5:7; Titus 2:11-14; 1 Peter 1:3-9)

WHAT IS THE HIDDEN TREASURE, THE PEARL OF GREAT PRICE?

1.

The Kingdom represented in the person of the King Himself, Jesus Christ. (Cf. 1 Peter 2:4; 1 Peter 2:7) Everything that God treasures most is bound up in Jesus. (Colossians 2:2-3)

2.

The realization of the Kingdom on earth is the realization of its ideal, the developing of everything Christ like in us. Morgan (Matthew, 171) is right to say that We who come to Him worthless and base, are changed into worth and preciousness because He communicates to us His own infinite value. and this results in a peace of mind because we have peace with God, a clean heart, a renewed mind, a hope in death and a heaven of glory. What lay formerly so far beyond our reach is now actually attainable by faith. (Romans 5:1 ff; Colossians 1:27-28. The entire Ephesian epistle helps us to appreciate this.)

3.

Since the subjective realization of God's rule in the world is to be through the Church of Jesus Christ, no one can claim to have submitted himself to the rule of God, hence, in the Kingdom, who claims to love Jesus but detests or ignores the Church which He purchased with His own blood. (Acts 20:28; Ephesians 1:18; Ephesians 2:10; Ephesians 3:10; Ephesians 3:21; Ephesians 5:25-30)

4.

God's government of the universe is reality, truth itself. Any world-view or philosophy that is not big enough to take in this reality nor humble enough to let God be God in every aspect of every minuscule part of His Kingdom is just not grand enough for a believer. Contrarily, the believer who has accepted this truth by faith is able to see further, learn truth faster and master reality like no unbeliever ever could. The degree to which this is not true of the believer is the degree to which he is yet controlled by something other than Truth.

The choice between these interpretations makes no significant difference, since he who has the King as Sovereign is in the Kingdom, and he who buys the Kingdom at so great expense does so by joyfully acknowledging the King. Only such a mind is open to all truth and can live as a citizen at home in the universe, because he has become the son of its Owner and Governor. And, not at all least, he engages in an active campaign with others to make men holy. This is the Church.

JESUS HAD SAID ALL THIS BEFORE

The supreme value of the Kingdom and the necessity that each individual make it his own by decisive action had already been implied in Jesus-' earlier teaching. In the Sermon on the Mount, He had insisted that men make heaven their highest treasure because of the uncertainties that attend all material wealth. (Matthew 6:19-21) Further, there is no possibility of compromise whereby one could hope to serve God while devoting himself to material wealth: they are two irreconcilable masters. Hence, a decisive choice between the two is imperative, because loving devotion can be rendered only to one. (Matthew 6:24) Then, after Jesus had assured men that the regular preoccupations of life are already the concern of a loving heavenly Father, He ordered them to seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well. (Matthew 6:33; Matthew 7:11) The limitation of the choices to two is understood by the Lord's description of only two ways, as well as by His closing the Kingdom of Heaven to any who do not do God's will. (Matthew 7:13-23)

FACT QUESTIONS

1.

State in one well-chiselled sentence the meaning of the Pearl Parable.

2.

What reality is symbolized by the following:

a.

The pearl merchant?

b.

The goodly pearls?

c.

The pearl of great price?

d.

The pearl merchant's other possessions (all that he has)?

3.

What single point does the parable about the pearl share with that of the happy discoverer of the treasure?

4.

What difference of emphasis is evident in the parable of the pearl?

5.

What passages in the Sermon on the Mount indicate that Jesus had already taught much of this same truth before, however in unparabolic language?