Updated July 8, 2023

According to Matthew 6:33, “Seek first kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things [material needs] will be added to you.” Simple enough in principle, but just what is this kingdom, and what does it mean to seek it first? Jesus explained the kingdom in a number of parables.

Matthew 13 contains several parables Jesus used to teach about the kingdom of heaven. He preached some of them to crowds, probably several times each. He taught some to his disciples privately. Matthew has placed them in a logical order. The three of them in Matthew 13:24-43 have undertones of trouble in the kingdom as we experience it on earth.

They are undertones, however, and easy both to miss and to overemphasize.

The wheat and the tares, or, The kingdom of heaven can be compared to a man

A man sowed good seed in his field. Now, this parable comes right after Jesus’ explanation of the parable of the sower. It seems safe to conclude that the seed in both cases is the word of God. But this time, the man explicitly planted wheat. An enemy came and planted tares, also known as darnel.

As these two plants grow, they look very much alike, but while wheat is nourishing, darnel is poisonous. When the two plants ripen, the weight of the wheat causes the stem to bend over. Darnel, on the other hand, remains upright. When it’s easy to tell the two apart, it is possible to harvest and destroy the tares and then go back to harvest and store the wheat.

A parable is not the same as an allegory, but Jesus explained this parable as an allegory. He himself was the sower in this case. The field is the world. The good seed represents the children of the kingdom of God and the bad seed represents the children of Satan. The harvest is the end of this age, when angels will harvest the crop. The children of Satan will be consigned to blazing fire.

The kingdom of heaven has started on earth now. Jesus has planted his word and brought forth a crop of believers. The unrighteous live among the righteous. God in his foreknowledge knows who is who, but until the crop is ripe, no one else can know.

Everyone in the world wants to eradicate evil, but the righteous and the unrighteous both have different ideas of what evil means. So as long as we live in the world, we will have conflict.

The allegorical significance of the man who sows

But Jesus compared the kingdom not to the wheat, but to the man who sowed it. What do we see when we look at him?

• The man has a sneaky enemy. Just as Satan entered the garden and corrupted God’s creation, he continues his attacks on God’s word. So the kingdom is under attack.
• The man cares about the wheat and is unwilling to risk losing any of it. God’s concern for both his creation and his word is plainly evident throughout Scripture
• The man is supremely patient and is quite willing to let the tares grow with the wheat until their two different natures become obvious. The devil has sown counterfeit word, counterfeit saints, counterfeit gospel. . . You name it; if God has created something, Satan has made a counterfeit. His counterfeits are everywhere. If anyone wonders why God doesn’t wipe them out, remember that Jesus is comparing his kingdom to this man who deliberately waited.
• The man will be ruthless to the tares once their true character is revealed. He will burn them up. Jesus came to destroy Satan’s works. His earthly ministry prepared the way for the final destruction that will take place at the end of time.

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed

Jesus points out how small a mustard seed is. It grows very large. Therefore the most obvious interpretation of this parable is that small beginnings have large results. Let’s not stop with the obvious.

First of all, mustard, like wheat, is a seed. Nothing happens to it while it’s in a bucket of mustard seeds. Everything Jesus ever said about seeds in general apply here. The seed must be sown in the ground—either by a person or some natural process–in order for it to grow. There, it dies. Part of any seed sown actually begins to rot from the moisture in the soil, but the life hidden in the seed also begins to soak up the moisture and becomes a new living being.

A seed sown in the ground is hidden. No one can see it at work. Actually, until the first tiny bit of green appears above ground, no one has any evidence that it is even there. A mustard seed becomes a very large bush, and the birds build their nests in it.

That’s all very good if someone plants mustard and it grows where it’s intended. Otherwise, it grows like a weed and becomes a nuisance. So another less obvious application of this parable ties in with the previous one. Jesus plants his crop and Satan plants his weed.

Some thoughts about the birds

Among the various cross references is Ezekiel 31:6, “All the birds of the heavens nested in its boughs, and under its branches all the beasts of the field gave birth, and all great nations lived under its shade.” Here, and also in Daniel 4:12, the bird seem comparable to the nations. Birds come from all around and often migrate long distances. They are not only local birds.

Therefore, if the kingdom is like a mustard seed that becomes home for birds, it also becomes home for people from all around. Jesus taught that the kingdom is not just for the Jews, or just for a chosen few, but for anyone at all who comes to seek shelter.

The kingdom of heaven is exclusive only by excluding everyone who chooses not to become a part of it. No person in the kingdom has any right to seek to expel or exclude anyone else.

But let’s not neglect the menacing aspect of “birds of the air.” Old Testament prophets frequently warned that the birds of the air would eat the corpses of those who failed to heed God’s word.

And let’s not forget that in the parable of the sower, the birds came and ate the seed. In Jesus’ explanation of that parable, they represent the devil taking the word out of people with hardened hearts. Those birds would be more like sparrows than vultures, but they also represent a menace to the kingdom.

Taken together with the parables of the sower and the wheat and tares, we can see the weedlike aspect of mustard and the menacing aspect of birds as additional signs of corruption within the kingdom of heaven as manifested in the earthly church.

The kingdom of heaven is like leaven

I don’t know how women made bread in Jesus’ day, but I suspect that the basic principles have not changed. When I bake with yeast, I don’t put the yeast directly into the flour. I dissolve it in water and add it along with other wet ingredients. It would make sense if the ancients used something like a sour dough starter.

Here’s what’s important: Once the yeast (or the baking powder for that matter) go into the dough, the leavened dough looks no different from unleavened dough. Like the mustard seed planted in the garden, you can’t tell it’s there. You can’t see it at work. After a while, though, the dough has risen.

The illustration of leaven, therefore, has many of the same implications as the growth of the mustard seed, but there is this difference: The mustard seed growing into a mustard plant changes only whatever part of the garden it was planted in. It’s probably impossible to stir yeast in so that it is present everywhere in the dough, but by the time the dough rises, not a bit of the flour and other ingredients remain unchanged.

This parable also ties in with the parable of the wheat and tares, but again, there’s a difference. You can separate wheat from weeds if you wait long enough, but you can never separate leaven from bread dough once you have put it there.

I once heard a sermon on the radio from someone who insisted that Bible imagery must be interpreted the same way every place it occurs. Since leaven often stands in for sin, and Eve, a woman, originated sin, he said that some wicked woman infected the kingdom of heaven with all this sin.

I thought it was one of the most ridiculous teachings I had ever heard. But now that I have noticed the undertone of corruption in the parables of the wheat and the mustard, I recognize that the leaven can also have the same undertone.

I do not believe that Jesus intended corruption within the kingdom as the primary message of these parables, but anyone who looks at the church today ought to notice that not all is right. The New Testament has plenty of prediction and explanation of it. These three parables, then, take their place among those passages.

The kingdom Jesus commands us to seek

So back to Matthew 6:33, Jesus tells us to put our top priority on seeking a kingdom where

• the king is patient and loving;
• the kingdom has a sneaky enemy;
• the king will utterly defeat the plans of the enemy;
• small beginnings grow very large;
• whoever will may come and find acceptance;
• its inner workings are hidden from view; and
• nothing that it touches can remain unchanged.

That verse gives us plenty of incentive to seek both the kingdom and its righteousness. Unfortunately, we are unrighteous by nature. These parables not only describe the kingdom and point us to it. They warn us of how unrighteousness in the kingdom as it now exists on earth corrupts it.

And the good news? God ultimately defeats the corruption.

Photo credits:

Wheat plant Some rights reserved by Garry Knight
Mustard seed Some rights reserved by Quinn Dombrowski
Dough ready for rising Some rights reserved by mia.judkinsi