I answer: search into the parable, and ask when was it that the servants first complained of the tares to the householder, but when they appeared or came in sight, there being no interim, wherein the servants could not tell what to make of them, but doubted whether they were wheat or tares, as the answerer implies.
Hypocritical Christians.
Secondly, when was it that the householder gave charge to let them alone, but after that they appeared, and were known to be tares; which should imply by this interpretation of the answerer, that when men are discovered and known to be hypocrites, yet, still such a generation of hypocrites in the church must be let alone and tolerated until the harvest, or end of the world; which is contrary to all order, piety, and safety, in the church of the Lord Jesus, as doubtless the answerer will grant. So that these tares being notoriously known to be different from the corn, I conclude that they cannot here be intended by the Lord Jesus to signify secret hypocrites, but more open and apparent sinners.[108]
CHAP. XXI.
The tares cannot signify hypocrites.
The second reason why these tares cannot signify hypocrites in the church, I take from the Lord Jesus’s own interpretation of the field, in which both wheat and tares are sown, which, saith he, is the world, out of which God chooseth and calleth his church.
Two sorts of hypocrites, 1. In the church, as Judas, Simon Magus; and these must be tolerated until discovered, and no longer. 2. Hypocrites in the world, which are false Christians, false churches; and these the Lord Jesus will have let alone unto harvest.
The world lies in wickedness, is like a wilderness, or a sea of wild beasts innumerable, fornicators, covetous, idolaters, &c.; with whom God’s people may lawfully converse and cohabit in cities, towns, &c., else must they not live in the world, but go out of it. In which world, as soon as ever the Lord Jesus had sown the good seed, the children of the kingdom, true Christianity, or the true church, the enemy, Satan, presently, in the night of security, ignorance, and error, whilst men slept, sowed also these tares, which are anti-christians, or false Christians. These strange professors of the name of Jesus the ministers and prophets of God beholding, they are ready to run to heaven to fetch fiery judgments from thence to consume these strange Christians, and to pluck them by the roots out of the world. But the Son of man, the meek Lamb of God—for the elect’s sake which must be gathered out of Jew and Gentile, pagan, anti-christian—commands a permission of them in the world, until the time of the end of the world, when the goats and sheep, the tares and wheat, shall be eternally separated each from other.
The field by most, generally, but falsely, interpreted the church.
Peace. You know some excellent worthies, dead and living, have laboured to turn this field of the world into the garden of the church.[109]