In the End Time period, there is the false church. This false church is a real threat because it hides inside the real church. All around us, everyday, we see the results of Satan driving some of the churches with false teachings and doctrines, giving people lies instead of truths, false hopes instead of strengths.
Some people, without ever studying the Bible, fall prey to the false – trading truth for things like tolerance, trading their eternal heavenly home for legislated rights here on earth such as abortion, alternate lifestyles.
God said that this would happen in the End Times. What His Word tells us will happen in Amos 8:11-12 can be seen going on now – so many cults, so many fake religions that call out “Follow us, follow us”. People do not realize that they are following these false religions straight into hell. They listen to secular humanism, government laws, modern psychiatrists and those teaching the proper civilized way to do things and have traded religion for all of that.
In Matthew 13:24-30, Christ tells the parable of the tares and the wheat in order to make us read it, contemplate on it, meditate so that we can try to get the full meaning. He could have just told us a time was coming when Satan was going to spread discontent, jealousy, bitterness. To make churches fail, fall into ruin. To make the people in them fail. The weeds and tares would eventually do the destructive things they do. However, Christ wanted us to see that none of the weeds and tares would sneak by in the End Times. None will end up in heaven. None will escape punishment.
This parable tells us that it is not our job to weed out and remove the tares. Verse 24 shows us that our job is to sow good seeds – seeds from Scripture for only God’s Word will tell us what the good seed are. These good seeds tell us how to build a church, how to build character both within the church and people, how to fellowship, how to worship and praise God, even how to build the moral fiber of a nation.
Within just the Gospels alone, there is much good seed that can give a good start to plowing, planting and harvesting. However God wants us to know His whole Word so that we can see how Satan sneaks in unawares sowing weeds such as whitewashed morals, watered down ethics, watered down bibles, tolerance.
Anything Satan can hand people and call religion he hands to them. It is easy to see this with cults but it occurs in established denominations and churches as well. Satan will lead people to say they are Christians, they have the right to believe what they want (verse 22). This had let false churches spring up in the middle of good churches leaving nothing but junk and a huge mess. Because people will not let go of their false beliefs, it has even caused some churches to split and divide over issues that never should have been issues if the people had been reading and studying God’s Word. If they had been reading and studying His Word, they would have seen the traps that Satan had laid.
In this parable, we are the servants of the household and our household is the Church. Sometimes we do not understand how a church full of good people can let these tares and weeds grow. It didn’t happen over night but some took 2,000 years and in that time, produced about 3,000 registered Protestant denominations. Some are only cults, some are just secular humanism. There are plenty of tares and God lets us know that we do not have the capability to root out these tares. We can only do the best we can to work around the tares and avoid false teachings and false teachers. Just let God handle the tares.
Verse 30 tells us that He will send out reapers and will gather the tares together to be bound and burned. There will be a day of reckoning and the Great White Throne of Judgment. For us, we need to just read, study, hear, see, believe, trust, obey, and submit to Christ in repentance.
