We won't finish up Matthew 13, but we will finish the kingdom parables in chapter 13. So, Matthew 13, we're gonna start reading at verse 47 and read through verse 52. Again, the kingdom of heaven, is like a dragnet that was cast into the sea and gathered some of every kind, which when it was full, they drew to shore, and they sat down and gathered the good into vessels, but threw the bad away. So it will be at the end of the age, the angels will come forth, separate the wicked from among the just, and cast them into the furnace of fire. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Jesus said to them, have you understood all these things? They said to him, yes, Lord. Then he said to them, therefore, every scribe instructed concerning the kingdom of heaven is like a householder. who brings out of his treasure things new and old. We're gonna take these last two parables in Matthew 13 together. Remember, the entire chapter is what we would call kingdom parables. The kingdom of heaven is like, they're comparing simple well understood events or circumstances or activities to truths about the kingdom of heaven. So there was the sower and the soils, the gospel of the kingdom goes out and the hearts of men receive it differently. There was the parable of the wheat and the tares, the good and bad will grow grow together until the harvest time when they're all collected and separated. There was the parable of the mustard seed that teaches us don't judge the kingdom by what you see because the nature is that it's small and it gets bigger and that went on to the leaven. The kingdom not only gets bigger, but it also expands purposefully and imperceptibly. Then there was the parable of the hidden pearl or the hidden treasure and the priceless pearl, both of them teaching that obtaining the kingdom is worth everything you have. This parable of the dragnet, has similarities to the parable of the wheat and the tares. They teach the same basic truth, but you'll see that the Lord Jesus makes an application that is slightly different. The truth that it teaches is that God is slowly but surely drawing the world toward a day of judgment. We're gonna look at this parable in the following three ways. First, we'll see the process they already knew. Second, the lesson that they needed to know. And third, the application they should take to heart. The process they already knew, verses 47 and 46. Again, The kingdom of heaven is like a dragnet that was cast into the sea and gathered some of every kind, which when it was full, they drew to shore and they sat down and gathered the good into vessels, but threw the bad away. the disciples of Jesus, most of them, or at least many of them, were fishermen at this point. They would have been well acquainted with the fishing methods that were used in the Holy Land at this time. Not everybody fished in the same way every time. There were several methods of fishing, but really, there were three that were the most common. One was hook and line fishing. Look forward to chapter 17 for just a moment. The occasion in Matthew chapter 17 is that they've come near to a synagogue in which every male citizen is expected to financially support the local synagogue and a portion of that goes to the temple as a temple tax. Jesus had essentially moved his base of operations to Capernaum on the north side of the Sea of Galilee. He would come and go from that village quite often, and apparently, while gone, he had missed tax time. So in verse 24 of chapter 17, it says, when they had come to Capernaum, those who received the temple tax came to Peter and said, does your teacher not pay the temple tax? Peter, you'll see in the next verse, right away answers, of course he does. And then sidles over to Jesus and is like, hey boss, do we pay the temple tax? I'm not actually sure. We're not gonna try to learn everything that gets taught in chapter 17, we'll see that later. But remember what Jesus told Peter to do in verse 27. Nevertheless, lest we offend them, go to the sea, cast in a hook, and take the fish that comes up first. And when you have opened its mouth, you will find a piece of money. Take that and give it to them for me and you." That is the first traditional kind of fishing. If you're hungry and you need a meal, or in this case, you got to pay your tax. Go get a hook and a line and throw it out into the water and catch you some dinner. But remember, fishing wasn't simply a hobby for them. It was a career. You were not, suffice it to say, you were not going to get a coin out of a fish's mouth every time you pulled one out of the water. Right? You're certainly not going to be so successful hook and line fishing that you're going to get commercial endorsements. Right? There's no Jewish men out there with Berkeley fishing caps and an Evinrude trolling motor and a Bass Pro logo on the side of their boat making money by hook and line fishing. It was fun. You could catch dinner. But if you were really serious about fishing, you had to use a different method. That would be cast net fishing. I won't make a turn there, but back in Matthew chapter 4, you'll remember that as Jesus is going along the seaside, he begins to call his disciples and he walks by the water at Capernaum, probably very close to not exactly where Peter would later catch that fish in chapter 17. But in Mark chapter 4 it says Jesus walking by the Sea of Galilee saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea for they were fishermen. This kind of fishing happened with a large net, circular in shape, right? The outside edges of the net would have little weights on it so that the fishermen could take it, throw it in like this tossing, spinning motion, and centrifugal force, the weights would pull the net open. As it spun, it would hit the water, it would start to sink on the outside, and there was a rope attached to the center of the net. So as they let it sink and they start pulling up the rope, everything in the net just collapsed around whatever it was thrown on. And they could pull up the fish. This was a pretty targeted method. They would stand in the water or in a boat and they wouldn't cast out blindly, they would wait for a school of fish to swim by so that they could throw that net where they saw the fish. This is certainly what was being used when Jesus called the fishermen to be disciples, because that is what commercial fishermen did. This is the method they would use, and in fact, it's probably what was used after the resurrection when Jesus met up with the disciples again and from the shore tells them, have you caught anything? Why don't you throw your nets out the other side of the boat? And they catch this massive, miraculous catch of a lifetime. Those two methods, hook and line fishing and cast net fishing, are probably the ones you're most familiar with. Neither one of those methods is what's being described in our text. Hook and line fishing is what you would do by yourself. Cast net fishing is what a handful of workers in a boat doing commercial fishing would do. But there is a third style being described in Matthew 13, and it is drag net fishing. Drag net fishing couldn't happen alone. And it wasn't for business, commercial efforts. Most often, dragnet fishing was scheduled as a community event. A village that lived by a creek or by a river or by the seaside would schedule a day where they would do this together. And that's the kind of fishing Jesus is talking about in this parable. We know this for a couple of reasons. First, the word for dragnet in verse 47, or net in verse 47, is different than the net described when Jesus called the disciples in Matthew 4. This is a word, segane. which means a seine or a seine net. Sometimes it's called a trawl. And we know this because also the method described in verse 48 requires several men to draw this net back to the shore. So these nets were massive. I want you to picture this because it's important to understand the lesson. Nobody would have been tossing one of these nets one-armed out into the water. It's not that kind of net. Many commentaries say these would be commonly up to about a half mile long. So we're talking about very long nets. It just about takes a village to do this kind of fishing. These massive nets would be attached on shore to something sturdy, like a tree. And a boat would take the other end, or multiple boats would take the other end, and start rowing out into the water. And this long net would have floats attached to one side. And it would have weights attached to the other side. So it was creating like this wall of net as they pulled it out into the water. Those boats or a boat would extend the net all the way out. And once they were all the way out, they would start making this long, vertical wall of net and start circling around until they get the boats back to shore somewhere down river or down the seaside. So that out in the water, you've got this half mile circumference of net that has caught everything inside. The floats keep things from going over the top. The weights keep fish from being able to skid under the bottom. This group of men, which would often be a dozen or more, would start slowly dragging the net in and then they would sort through the results. They would have to sort through the results because once you get that net in, you've got sticks and you've got seaweed. If it was today, we'd end up with Coke bottles and Twinkie wrappers, right? You'd have shellfish, you would have swimming fish, you would have creepy crawly things that weren't even fish. Anything and everything gets caught in a drag net. And so Jesus says in verse 47, the end of verse 47, they gathered some of every kind, which when it was full, they drew to shore and they sat down and gathered the good into vessels, but threw the bad away. This long process of sorting involved separating everything into two groups. the useful and the useless, the good and the bad. Some fish might've been tasty to them, but if they were Jewish, there were things that they would not know they were tasty because they were never allowed to eat them anyway. So for example, fish without scales were not allowed to be eaten. So catfish would go into the bad pile, right? Fish without scales didn't meet the standards. Doubtless, they had their own version of Asian carp, which they might could have eaten, but nobody would want to. So the good fish, the eating fish, would be collected, kept in water, in some sort of way, an area. This would be the vessels that Jesus is talking about. They'd be kept in vessels. And the bad would be cast away. They would be discarded. They would be disposed of. The kingdom of heaven is like this, he says. Now he says that, he gives that comparison, the kingdom of heaven is like. Sometimes he does that in this chapter and we just have to sit and think about, well, okay, how is the kingdom of heaven like that? And other times, he gives an explanation. This time, he gives an explanation. So there's the process they already knew. Jesus explains the lesson they needed to know in verses 49 and 50. So it will be at the end of the age, the angels will come forth, separate the wicked from among the just, and cast them into the furnace of fire. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. I know some folks who will be very disappointed to learn that Jesus is not telling this parable to say the kingdom of heaven is like this because once you get to heaven, you get to go fishing every day if you want to. This parable is not about fish. It is about people. In fact, up in verse 47, that would have already been obvious to the folks who were listening to Jesus because he uses a word there that's interesting. And when he says in verse 47 that they gathered some of every kind, the word he uses there is genos, which is used in the New Testament in other places to talk about kindreds or nations. This is a weird way to talk about fish, but it's a perfectly normal way of describing all kinds of people. Can I just tell you what I really want to do with this parable? All my pre-trib friends who insist with absolute assurance that the rapture is gonna take place at the beginning of the tribulation, where the Lord's gonna come and he's gonna collect all the good, and then it's gonna be seven years later, and then he's gonna come and deal with the unjust. I don't see that here. Interestingly enough, this parable, as well as the parable of the wheat and the tares, describes the just and the unjust together until both are collected at essentially the same time. So if we extend this parable out, we can extend this parable out and say, look, this proves a post-tribulation rapture. But, we can't really extend parables out that way as much as we want to when it's convenient for us. I wanna be fair and consistent in the interpretation process. There's really nothing here to indicate that Jesus is focused on telling us about the timing of the rapture. Again, you can't just take parables and run with any point until you reach some bizarre conclusion, right? For example, if you take this parable too far, you think about the description of the event Jesus is describing culturally, what they would do is collect everything and they would separate the good from the bad and then what happens to the good? It gets eaten. And so clearly what Jesus is teaching is that the kingdom of heaven is teaching that someday he's gonna come with his angels and he's gonna separate the good from the bad and the angels are gonna eat all the good people. Like this is not the way you interpret parables, okay? You have to just understand the main point is the point. In Jesus's explanation of this parable, there appears to be two main areas that he's focused on. There's the indiscriminate nature of the dragnet's collection, and then there is the separation process that happens after the net is on shore. So follow this. First, think about the indiscriminate nature of the dragnet's collection. You realize that Jesus, could have used the cast net method of fishing as a parable. The ones the disciples in front of him were most used to, they had done for much of their lives. Jesus could have used that as a parable. And certainly when you did cast net fishing, you sometimes got more than you bargained for. I'm certain the disciples in their experience had times where they had to take some bad stuff out of the net and throw it away. But a cast net would not have adequately pictured God's plan for the future because a cast net was still targeted at a school of fish. It was targeted, the goal was to collect the good stuff. And Jesus here intends to teach a lesson to the bad fish here. He's not going to give the impression that at some point in the future there's gonna be judgment because the wicked people are just gonna get caught up as God's trying to collect the good ones. He's saying God's got a plan where it's going to collect all people. That is his intention. Jesus uses this dragnet because it is massive. It is inescapable. I doubt the disciples had ever spent a lot of time thinking about fishing from the fish's perspective, but when people listening hear Jesus guide their minds toward these fish, they'll understand, as we've said, these fish are people. Those fish are them. It's us. And then, When we understand that, this dragnet becomes one of the more frightening and intimidating ideas in all of Christ's parables. This dragnet is massive. It is inescapable. You cannot get over it. You cannot get under it. Friends, even at this moment, God's dragnet of eternity is slowly closing in around you. You're not going to escape it. Some people would hear that and go, well, it doesn't seem that way. Well, sure, it's not fast. To a fish, this would have seemed like an almost imperceptible event. But my beloved little fish, even without you having given it a thought, you are being dragged to the shoreline of God's eternal plan. The sovereignty of God has engulfed you. You are already caught. And then what? Well, you go into that separation process that happens when the net gets to the shore. This is, as I said, this is very similar to the parable of the wheat and the tares. Look up at verse 41. As Jesus explains the parable of the wheat and the tares, he says, the son of man will send out his angels. And they will gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and those who practice lawlessness, and will cast them into the furnace of fire. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. It's the same phrase that he uses here. Then the righteous will shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their father. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. So in that parable of the wheat and the tares, the farmer had sowed good seed, but some enemy had come along and put in the tares, the weeds, Right? And the plan was not go in and yank them up now because you'll destroy what's good. Jesus said, let them grow together and they'll be collected at the harvest and separated at that time. In both parables, the time is coming when the Lord sends his holy angels to make a worldwide collection and the separation process begins. Now for Jesus's disciples who wanted the kingdom to come immediately, these parables taught that the gathering of the Lord's elect is not yet come. It is coming, but it is not yet come. And he'll not only gather his elect to bless them, but he'll gather the unrighteous to punish. Even though right now, they're growing in the same field. Right now, they're swimming in the same water. These people, they live under the same roofs, they work at the same office, they go to the same grocery store, they attend the same church, they sit at the same family dinner table, but there is a day of separation that's coming. And pay attention to this. Do you see which side of that separation Jesus is stressing? In both of these parables, the wheat and the tares and the dragnet, Jesus is stressing the punishment of the wicked. It has been said Jesus had far more to say about hell than he did about heaven. That is undeniably true. He taught about hell a lot. Here he graphically calls it a furnace of fire where there's wailing and gnashing of teeth. There's constant weeping and sorrow and grinding of teeth and pain. While here he describes hell as a furnace of fire, most often he described it even more colorfully. Oftentimes Jesus would use the word Gehenna, which refers to the valley of Hinnom over the western side of the city of Jerusalem off Mount Zion. It was essentially, idolatrous Jews in the past had used it as a place of sacrificing humans to idols. It was therefore a place that was hated. It was considered unclean. It became the place which trash and dead animals and even unclean bodies were burned. The fire never stopped burning and the worms never stopped eating. Several times Jesus used that real place of eternal punishment to say, hell is like that. Hell is like God's eternal burning trash heap. And there is no escape from this dragnet. You will be collected, you will be judged, but there is a way to avoid the fiery torment of hell. The same Jesus who is relating this parable is soon gonna go to the cross to die for unrighteousness. On that cross, he's going to suffer all the torment and wrath due for sin. He will shed his own blood, he will die on the cross, and he will rise from the grave three days later. The kingdom of heaven, he says, will be fully revealed when the king returns in his glory. And at that time, all people will be gathered in this divine dragnet and judged according to, did they repent of their sins and put their faith in Jesus? Did they return from their wickedness and embrace the eternal life that comes through loving Jesus and living for him? to teach us that unbelievers will be judged harshly when he returns. He gives this parable of the dragnet to emphasize the days coming when all mankind is collected by God and the separation takes place. And that separation is a theme of Jesus's ministry throughout his ministry. When we get to Matthew chapter 25, he's not gonna teach him parables there anymore. He's going to say, very straightforward, in two different times, the king will say to those on his right hand, come to you, blessed are my father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. And then he will say to those on his left hand, depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels. and you will be gathered to God's judgment. You will hear the Lord Jesus say either, come, you blessed, and inherit the kingdom that was prepared for you, or depart from Me, you worker of iniquity, into everlasting fire. Whether it is in His example, in His teaching, in His parables, He's clear about this. You must repent of your sins and trust your life to Him in order to escape the wrath to come. I want you to see the application that Jesus makes to this. Remember where we are in this chapter. Jesus is not, at this point, speaking directly to the crowds that had a bunch of unbelievers in it. He's actually teaching his disciples. Brace yourself because to make the application of this truth, Jesus utilizes yet another parable, although it's very short. In verse 51, it says that he asked them, have you understood all these things? They said to him, yes, Lord. Now the word understood there is literally describing piecing things together. And so I think it means all of the parables in Matthew 13, not just this final set of parables. The Lord Jesus here is asking his disciples. Have you put together that it is your job to spread the Word like a farmer spreads seed and watch it as it gets received differently in different hearts? Have you grasped that the kingdom will include bad and good, and that God is going to sort out those wheat and tares? At the end, do you believe that the kingdom, which seems insignificant now, is like a mustard seed that's gonna grow into something massive, that the kingdom is like yeast that's in bread dough, it's gonna permeate this world, it's gonna expand slowly even if you can't see it's happening. Have you put together that the kingdom of God is like a priceless pearl or a hidden treasure, it's worth everything, you could possibly be asked to give up for it. And now, do you understand that the world is already caught in God's divine dragnet, and at this moment, already, it is being sovereignly drawn to the ultimate moment of separation. Jesus is asking that, like, have you put all those puzzle pieces together, fellas? And their response is, oh yeah, sure, we get it. Maybe. So in verse 52, he said to them, therefore every scribe instructed concerning the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure things new and old. Okay, if you've put all that together, you're a scribe. What a surprise it would have been for the disciples of Jesus to hear that. You are scribes. The word there is grammateus, which means an educated person, a learned teacher. He says those who get this are scribes and they are like a householder, a master of a storehouse. And in that storehouse are new things and old things and he brings out the new and the old both at the time in which they are useful. Now this could have been a dig at the scribes as they existed in Jesus's day, right? He's telling his disciples, you're scribes who are smart enough to know that there is the old and there is the new and you can teach both. Because the scribes in Jesus's day would only rely on what was old. Jesus is not interested in the kind of replacement theology that says the revelation of Christ has negated and removed all of the Old Testament word. He's the one who said, I didn't come to destroy the law and the prophets, I came to fulfill them. And a good scribe, a good teacher can explain, here's what is old, here's how it pointed to Jesus, here is the new, and how he has fulfilled all of those things. And yet essentially the lesson in verse 52 is a disciple of the Lord Jesus, whom he has given these parables to, he has educated his disciples to make them into scribes. The scribes learned in order to teach others. As an educated scribe of the kingdom, you have this storehouse of truth that you are expected to dip into and bring it out to teach people as they need it. Now this is gonna involve, different things at different times. Sometimes it's the old, sometimes it's the new, right? If you've got somebody who's weak and needs milk, you bring out the bottle and the formula. If you have somebody who's learned and they need strength, you grill them up a steak. When they're past the point where they think their, when they think their hope is lost and they've reached that point, you point them to the treasure of Christ's promises. And most importantly in this context, When they're lost and dying, you tell them they are caught in the dragnet of God's judgment, you warn them of the consequences of sin, and you proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ as the only hope for sinners. The parables of the kingdom in Matthew 13. Like in recent weeks as we've covered them, I hope you've enjoyed them, but you have to understand these parables do not exist to entertain you, nor do they exist to merely inform you. They teach you about the kingdom of heaven, Jesus said, so that you can be a scribe. You can be one who has learned with the purpose of taking what you've learned and teaching it to others. You, not saying me, you, you can teach that God is slowly but surely drawing the world toward a day of judgment. You can tell people that their only hope to avoid the wrath to come, which Jesus describes is a furnace of fire where there's wailing and gnashing of teeth. The only hope is to repent of sins and turn to him. The purpose of the kingdom parables is not just information, it's motivation. It teaches us so that we can turn and teach others. This is how Jesus concluded all those parables to ask, do you understand them? Because if you understand them, you're a scribe and you're responsible for bringing these things out to others.