Stories Jesus Told: A 6-Day Reading Plan Sample

The Parable of the Wheat and Weeds

In this parable, Jesus warns of Satan’s strategies to hinder the work of God. He compares the kingdom of heaven to a farmer who sowed good seed in his field, but then an enemy came in behind him and sowed weeds. The weeds Jesus spoke of could have been a plant called darnel. Today, most people are unfamiliar with darnel, but in Jesus’s day, His audience would’ve been familiar. Darnel is a plant that is related to wheat and looks similar, but unlike wheat, darnel is poisonous. Roman law forbid sowing darnel in someone else’s field. Wheat and darnel become intertwined at the root, and it’s difficult to uproot the weeds without damaging the wheat. So to protect the wheat, a wise farmer allows the two to grow together.

The disciples went to Jesus with their questions about the parable. We believe in Jesus, but too many of us don’t go to the Word of God or to prayer with our questions. We’d do well to follow the lead of the disciples and converse with Jesus in prayer and seek His Word for the answers to the questions we are asking.

When Jesus’s disciples approached Him asking questions about the parable He’d told, He explained that the wheat and weeds represent good and evil in the world. Many Jews who’d been waiting for the coming of the Messiah anticipated that when He came, He would immediately eradicate evil from the world, but that wasn’t God’s plan. So, some were confused and questioned Jesus’s authority. But in this parable, Jesus demonstrated He was not the source of evil. The entire world belongs to God, and the enemy has no right to bring evil into the world, and the Son of God will assert His authority over the world at the time of judgment. But for now, there’s a combination of both good and evil in the world.

A time is coming on the kingdom calendar when God will judge all sin. Then, every sin ever committed will either be covered by the blood of Christ, or the person who committed the sin will stand in judgment before God—there will be no exceptions. Until then, it is our responsibility to abide in Jesus and be on guard against evil.