Bible Study · Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Wheat And Tares: Why Jesus Said Let Both Grow

A field, a saboteur, a weed that looks exactly like wheat, and an owner who will not let his workers start pulling. Jesus explained this parable Himself, and His explanation is not the one most of us were handed.

By Pastor Johnny Ova · Sound of Heaven · 10 Min Read

The Short Answer

Let Both Grow Until The Harvest

Straight Answer

The parable of the wheat and tares is Jesus' story about a field where an enemy sows darnel among good wheat, and the owner forbids his servants to pull it up. The field is the world, and the sorting belongs to the Son of Man, not to the servants.

The harvest Jesus names is the end of the age, the close of the old covenant order that reached its climax when Jerusalem fell in AD 70. It is not a picture of the last day of the planet, and the fire is destruction, not endless torment.

The rest of this study shows why each piece holds, starting with the plant itself, because the plant does half the teaching.

The Plant

What A Tare Actually Was

GreekZizaniaζιζάνια8 Uses, All In Matthew 13

The word

Zizanion, plural zizania. It appears eight times in the New Testament and every one of them is inside this parable, from Matthew 13:25 to 13:40. Older English Bibles said tares. The NIV says weeds.

The plant

Almost certainly darnel, Lolium temulentum, a ryegrass that has followed cultivated wheat for thousands of years as a weed of the grain field.

The disguise

Darnel is a wheat mimic. While both are green blades, telling them apart is very hard, which is exactly what Matthew 13:26 describes: the weeds showed up when the wheat formed heads.

The danger

Its grain is often toxic because of fungi of the genus Epichloë living inside the plant, close relatives of the ergot fungus. Milled with the wheat, it contaminates the flour.

We have mostly forgotten it. A 2016 paper in the Journal of Ethnobiology by Howard Thomas and colleagues calls darnel “a wheat mimicker” and notes that it is now classified as extinct in the United Kingdom and other developed countries with intensive agriculture. Jesus' first hearers knew it well. Most of us have never met it.

The enemy in the story is not far fetched either. Roman law had a case for it. The jurist Celsus, cited by Ulpian in the Digest of Justinian at 9.2.27.14, asks what legal remedy applies if someone throws darnel or wild oats into another man's crop to spoil it. The sabotage in the story was a real crime.

We have covered the sower and the four soils and the mustard seed separately, and why Jesus taught in parables at all is its own study. Here the question is narrower: what do you do about weeds you cannot safely pull?

The Key

Jesus Explained This One Himself

This is one of the few parables where Jesus hands over the key. The disciples asked in private (Matthew 13:36) and He answered piece by piece, so we do not need to guess, and we are not free to improve on His answers.

“The one who sowed the good seed is the Son of Man. 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, and the enemy who sows them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels.”

Matthew 13:37-39

The sower · The Son of Man

Jesus' favorite title for Himself, drawn from Daniel 7. More on the Son of Man title here.

The field · The world

Not the church. Jesus says it outright, and that one line settles most arguments about this parable.

The good seed · People of the kingdom

The kingdom already has people in it while the story runs. The kingdom of God is present and growing now.

The weeds · People of the evil one

People shaped by the lie instead of the truth. From a distance they look the part.

The enemy · The devil

In Scripture the devil is the accuser and the adversary, the opposition to God's work. The adversary works by counterfeit: plant something that looks right and let confusion do the rest.

The harvesters · Angels

The messengers of the Son of Man. Notice who is missing: the servants.

Look at what verse 41 says the angels do. They weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin. Out of His kingdom. The kingdom is already standing when the harvest comes. This is a kingdom already planted, growing next to its counterfeit, until the counterfeit is removed.

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The Timing

The End Of The Age, Not The End Of The World

This is where most readings go wrong, and it starts with a translation. The King James Version renders Matthew 13:39 as “the harvest is the end of the world.” Generations of readers took that at face value.

The Greek phrase is synteleia tou aionos. Synteleia means completion or consummation. Aion means age, an era of time, and it is a different word from kosmos, which Jesus uses one verse earlier when He says the field is the world. Jesus used two words because He meant two things.

Before Jesus' Ministry

John At The Jordan

The ax is already at the root, and the coming one will gather His wheat into the barn and burn up the chaff (Matthew 3:10-12).

Matthew 24:3

The Disciples' Question

Right after Jesus predicts the temple's fall, they ask about the end of the age. Same Greek phrase, tied to the temple. See the Olivet Discourse.

Matthew 24:34

The Time Stamp

“Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.”

AD 70

The Harvest

Rome destroys Jerusalem and the temple, and the old covenant order of priesthood and sacrifice ends.

Where We Stand, Plainly

Sound of Heaven reads the harvest in this parable as the close of the old covenant age, fulfilled within the generation that heard Jesus and reaching its climax in AD 70. That is our position, and we hold it with confidence because the text keeps pointing there.

Hebrews 9:26 settles it for us. Paul writes that Christ appeared at the culmination of the ages, using the same word, synteleia, about his own time. The apostles believed they lived at the close of the age.

The strongest objection is Matthew 28:20, where Jesus says He is with them always, to the very end of the age. Did His presence end in AD 70? No. He promised men facing that violent transition that He would not leave them in it, and He reigns in the kingdom that came through it.

We also refuse the opposite overreach. Reading the harvest historically does not make the parable a museum piece. The patience of God, the counterfeit beside the real, and servants who are not allowed to sort: that is how the kingdom still works.

In Matthew 13:39, what does the Greek word behind “age” refer to?

The physical planet and everything on it

An era of time, a different word from the kosmos of verse 38

The lifetime of each individual believer

Jesus calls the field the kosmos in verse 38 and the harvest the synteleia of the aion in verse 39. The King James rendering blurred the two, and a lot of speculation grew from that blur.

The Fire

What The Furnace Means

Matthew 13:42 says the angels throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. That verse has frightened a lot of people, so it deserves a careful reading.

What Gets Preached

The furnace is a place of endless conscious torment, and the weeping never stops because the people in it never stop existing.

What The Image Says

Weeds are tied in bundles and burned. A farmer burns darnel so it is gone. The picture is removal and destruction.

The Old Testament background points the same way. Malachi describes the coming day with this exact image.

“Surely the day is coming; it will burn like a furnace. All the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble, and the day that is coming will set them on fire,” says the Lord Almighty. “Not a root or a branch will be left to them.”

Malachi 4:1

Stubble does not burn forever. It burns up. John the Baptist used the same picture for chaff, and Jesus' furnace belongs to that family. It is the language of perishing. Those who refuse life do not live forever in pain. They perish. The longer case is in the Gehenna question.

The weeping and gnashing of teeth is grief and rage at the moment of loss, not an unending condition. In Matthew 8:11-12 the same phrase describes the subjects of the kingdom thrown outside while outsiders feast with Abraham. It is covenant language: the shock of people who assumed their place was secure.

Then the line people skip: the righteous will shine like the sun. That echoes Daniel 12:3, and Daniel places that shining at the time the power of the holy people is finally broken. It comes with the shattering of the old order.

Takeaway

The furnace is a picture of weeds being removed, not weeds being preserved. The fire ends something. It does not keep it going forever.

The Misuse

The Self-Appointed Weed Pullers

Now the part that matters most on a Sunday morning. The servants want to fix the field. Their instinct is not wicked. They saw a real problem and wanted to protect the crop. The owner says no.

“‘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

Here is the misuse we need to name. Church members read this parable, decide they can tell wheat from darnel, and appoint themselves to do the pulling. They whisper about who is really saved and push out the person with the messy past, the new believer who still talks rough, the one who asks hard questions, and call it protecting the harvest. Jesus told a story specifically to forbid that.

It lands on the people least able to push back, and the owner's warning comes true. The roots come up tangled with wheat. People who were growing get torn out, and some never walk into a church again. Jesus' warning about judging others sits right beside this.

The temptation is old. In 1644 Roger Williams, banished from Massachusetts, wrote The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution against punishing people for their faith, arguing from this parable that Christ commanded the tares and wheat “should be let alone in the World, and not plucked up untill the Harvest.”

The field is the world

You have not been assigned to decide who in the row beside you is real.

Matthew 18 is a different arena

When a brother or sister sins against you, Jesus gives a process aimed at restoring them, starting one to one. That is care inside a family, not a verdict on who is saved.

Refuse the opposite error

Letting both grow is not permission for harm. In 1 Corinthians 5 Paul tells a proud church to remove a man openly continuing in sexual sin. A church that shelters someone hurting others and quotes this parable has misread it too.

If You Were Pulled Up

If a church once treated you like a weed and pushed you out, hear this plainly. That was not Jesus sorting you. The servants were never given that job, and the people who pulled you did not have His permission.

The one who sowed good seed is still patient with His field, and He has not changed His mind about you. If you want someone to talk with or pray with, our prayer team would be glad to hear from you.

Where This Lands

Patience Is The Point

Strip away the arguments about timing and fire, and the center of this parable is the character of the owner. He knows there is an enemy. He knows exactly what the weeds are. He chose patience anyway, because He cared more about the wheat than a tidy field.

That is Jesus. The one who ate with tax collectors while the religious experts kept score. The one who kept Judas at the table until the last night.

So the job left to us is smaller and better than weed pulling. Be wheat. Grow. Put your roots down in the goodness of God, bear fruit that feeds people, and let the Son of Man do the sorting. The harvest of that age came as He said it would. The kingdom He planted is still growing, and it is still His field.

For related ground, see Matthew 24 explained, the parable of the ten virgins and what the Bible says about patience, and if you want to see this lived out in a real church family, plan a visit.

The Whole Thing In One Line

An enemy sowed darnel in the Son of Man's field, the owner forbade His servants to pull it, the harvest came at the close of the old covenant age with a fire that destroys rather than torments, and the job left to us is to grow as wheat instead of appointing ourselves weed pullers.

If A Church Ever Treated You Like A Weed

You were never the servants' to pull. Send a prayer request or a question and somebody at Sound of Heaven will reach back out to you.

Questions People Ask

Questions About The Wheat And Tares

What is the meaning of the wheat and tares parable?

Jesus explains it Himself in Matthew 13:37-43. The sower is the Son of Man, the field is the world, the good seed is the people of the kingdom, and the weeds are people shaped by the evil one. An enemy sows darnel among the wheat, and the owner forbids his servants to pull it, because they would uproot the wheat too. The sorting belongs to the Son of Man at the harvest. The point for us is patience, not policing.

What are tares in the Bible?

Tares is the older English word for the Greek zizania, used eight times in the New Testament, all in this parable. The plant is almost certainly darnel, Lolium temulentum, a ryegrass that mimics wheat while it is young and is hard to tell apart until the heads form. Its grain is often toxic because of fungi of the genus Epichloë that live inside the plant. Modern translations usually say weeds.

Is the field in the parable the church or the world?

Jesus says plainly that the field is the world, in Matthew 13:38. The parable is not a set of instructions for sorting a congregation into real and fake believers. Inside the church, Jesus gives a different process in Matthew 18, aimed at restoring a brother or sister who has done wrong, one conversation at a time. Using this story to purge a church, or to excuse real harm inside one, both misread Jesus.

What does the end of the age mean in Matthew 13?

The Greek phrase is synteleia tou aionos, the completion of the age. The King James Version translated it the end of the world, but aion means age, a different word from kosmos, the world. The disciples used the same phrase about the temple in Matthew 24:3, and Jesus said that generation would see it. We read it as the close of the old covenant age, which reached its climax when Jerusalem fell in AD 70.

Does the blazing furnace mean eternal torment?

No. The image is weeds tied in bundles and burned, which is how a farmer destroys darnel so it is gone. Malachi 4:1 uses the same furnace picture and says not a root or a branch will be left. The language is perishing, not endless suffering. At Sound of Heaven we hold that those who reject the gift of life perish rather than live forever in pain. Eternal life is a gift found in Jesus.