Hello, Readers, and welcome to a new post on Renaissance Woman!

I ended last week’s post by asking how did all I had said in that post relate to the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares?  If you have not read last week’s post, A Vast Inheritance, I recommend doing so before continuing on.  If you are ready for my answer to that question, my answer is “Fruit”.  More specifically, the life of Jesus Christ manifested in us His people of which “fruit” in the scriptures is representative.

Let me explain.

First, I must review some bits of Dora Van Assen’s interpretation of this parable which kicked off my study.  Ms. Van Assen points out Matthew 13:35 quotes Psalm 78:2 saying, “I will open My mouth in parables; I will utter things kept secret from the foundation of the world”.  It is her conviction that, in the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares, Jesus is describing what happened in the Garden of Eden when sin entered into the plan of God.  Ms. Van Assen says the wheat in the parable represents the good thoughts and spiritual understanding planted in the mind of Adam by the Spirit of God while the tares represent evil thoughts and carnal understanding sown into the mind of Adam by the Adversary.  Ms. Van Assen goes on to say these two types of thoughts caused a duality within the mind of Adam which led him to fall into a carnal mind.  This dual mind was capable of bringing forth a harvest of a certain kind of man.  Ms. Van Assen stresses that the “battlefield is in the mind!” (See Kingdom Bible Studies article linked below).

I’ve been meditating on this for weeks now and a passage in James came to the forefront of my mind: “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him.  But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind.  For let not that man suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways” (James 1:5-8).

This has always been a difficult passage for me to understand although I have obeyed the command in it and asked God for wisdom.  I am convinced the wisdom we need is immediately ours, after all it is the Spirit of Wisdom and Revelation who lives in us.  And yet, I am also convinced that, in some cases; that wisdom takes time to be fully realized.  Like building a house, strong foundations must first be laid.  That was my experience with this passage.  There have been glimmers of understanding as I have studied other passages and then, during the weeks of this study on The Parable, I came across a teaching by Don Keathley called “You Ain’t Double-Minded”.  I was instantly uncomfortable because that title seemed to be refuting the Book of James but I was also curious.  I clicked the link. (It’s excellent: I’ve linked Part One below)

Within the first few minutes, Mr. Keathley said something that grasped my attention.  He was describing the Garden of Eden and the various trees growing in it, especially the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  He pointed out there was only one Garden.  There were two Trees growing in it but they grew together in the same Garden.  This is the same picture as both wheat and tares growing in the same field and it made me wonder just what “double-minded” really meant in the Greek.

The Greek word used in James 1:8 is dipsuchos (G1374) and means “two-spirited, vacillating (in opinion or purpose), double-minded”.  The word is formed of dis (G1364) meaning “twice, again” and psuche (G5590) which means “breath, spirit, life, mind, soul”.  The Greek Lexicon of the New Testament defines it as “double-headed people who stagger helplessly here and there in their thinking” and “to be uncertain about the truth of something, doubting, hesitating.” 

 I have heard this passage used against those who doubt their belief in God.  The encouragement is to trust your leader and don’t ask questions.  I am convinced this is not what James is saying.  He begins his sentence with “if anyone lacks wisdom let him ask of God”.  A knowing and trusting of God must already be in place before anyone dares ask Him anything and that knowing and trusting is what James is telling us not to doubt. If we carry around false ideas of who God is and do not think He is trustworthy, odds are we won’t ask Him anything at all. If we did, how could we possibly receive anything from Him because, would we even recognize it? It all comes down to which spiritual influences we are allowing to sow seeds in the fields of our minds.  We must take care because there are many false ideas of who God is and many willing and waiting to sow those ideas in our minds. 

The Knowledge of the nature of God is what I believe is represented by the wheat and the tares.  My studies have brought me across some interesting facts about the darnel which is believed to the tare mentioned in Jesus’ parable.  The seeds of the darnel are poisonous.  Small quantities do actually have some medical benefit and have been used internally to treat dizziness, insomnia, and stomach problems and externally as a poultice to treat skin problems like shingles and ulcers.  The official name of the darnel, L. temulentum comes from a Latin word for “drunk” and, although bread made with darnel seed mixed with wheat is bitter to the taste, both bread and beer have been made with darnel deliberately included to give a special kick.  It’s a dangerous seed to play with though consumption of the darnel in greater quantities causes some of the same symptoms it has been used to treat and can be deadly.  It is a soporific poison causing a sleep that results in death.  It can also cause convulsions leading to death.

The seeds of the darnel are almost indistinguishable from wheat in seed form.  No one deliberately sows darnel in a wheat field and its presence in the field is often not known until the stalks produce fruit.  Then, the wheat and tares are so clearly distinguishable one from the other that a child can go into a field and separate one from the other.  When Don Keathley’s message got me thinking about the Garden of Eden, I remembered the lie used by the Serpent to deceive Eve.  It wasn’t encouragement to lie or cheat or steal or murder or drink or smoke cigarettes or anything else deemed a “sin” by various religious denominations.  The lie that brought sin into the plan of God was to believe a wrong thing about God.  The lie suggested He wasn’t trustworthy and that humankind was better off determining good and evil for themselves.  This same lie is present with us today and such false ideas about God are often difficult to discern because there is a touch of truth to them.   

A passage I’ve quoted portions of in a couple previous posts is 1 John 5.  The last verse of Chapter 5 and thus the entire Epistle, is “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.  Amen.”  Jonathan Mitchell’s New Testament renders this verse as, “Little children (born ones) keep yourselves in custody (or: guarded)!-away from the idols (the external appearances; the forms; or: = false concepts)!  Going back to the passage in James, “such a man is double-minded, unstable in all his ways.”  Keeping false ideas of God in our minds might feel good and even exciting but their fruit is death.

How do we guard ourselves from false concepts of God when the wheat and the tares in seed form are indistinguishable from each other?  How do we know whether or not the ones we are listening to are false teachers?  Jesus answered this in Matthew 7:15: “You will know them by their fruits.” 

An article I found on the Jewish Virtual Library says the darnel seed, while harmful to humans, is not harmful to birds, especially doves.  I tried to verify this with other articles and, while I did find a few that mentioned the seeds not being harmful to birds such as ducks or chickens, the original article (quoting the Mishnah in Kilayim) is the only source stating specifically the darnel seed is not harmful to doves.  I still found it interesting because it is the Holy Spirit is often represented as a dove in the Bible.  This thought brings me such comfort because, no matter how many times tares have been sown into the field of my life, they have not harmed the Spirit within me nor hindered His work in any way.

There have been many times when I have found myself in a situation where the seeds sown in the field of my life have been a mix of wheat and tares: false concepts of God that appeared to be the truth and I could not separate between the two.  At first, I could not distinguish between the fruit either and I ate of mixed bread.  There was euphoric moments I thought were proof of the moving of the Holy Spirit but these moments were always mixed with bitterness.  As I have continued to be guided by the Holy Spirit and have tasted His fruit, which is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control-I quickly became able to distinguish the fruit of the tares from that of the wheat.

That is, of course, not good enough.  No field lies fallow and discerning what type of fruit is growing in the field does nothing to increase either the health of the field or the field’s yield. I want there to be no tares at all sown in the field of my life but the fact remains the seeds of one are almost indistinguishable from the other: I cannot prevent tares on my own.  No matter: the seeds of the tares do not harm the dove who is the Holy Spirit.  He is the Spirit of Wisdom and Revelation lavished upon us by a God of Love who pours out His Spirit even before we ask.  We ask knowing our God, trusting in His love, and assured that what we ask for is ours already.  He is our guide within and He alone reveals to us Jesus who is the Face of God. The Holy Spirit is the only way to distinguish the seed of the wheat from that of the tare.

He guides us into all Truth and we can trust that the One who began a good work in us will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.

Hallelujah!  Amen. 

Unless noted otherwise, all Scriptures are quoted from The Holy Bible, New King James Version, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, Tennessee, 1982

References

KINGDOM BIBLE STUDIES: THE FIRSTFRUITS, THE HARVEST, AND THE VINTAGE by J. Preston Eby (godfire.net)

What Does Tares Mean? Bible Definition and References (biblestudytools.com)

Tares – WebBible Encyclopedia – ChristianAnswers.Net

Tares (jewishvirtuallibrary.org)

Darnel Ryegrass Plant Care & Growing Basics: Water, Light, Soil, Propagation etc. | PlantIn (myplantin.com)

A Short Summary on our Botanical Knowledge of Lolium Temlentum L.

Bearded Darnel – Medicinal Herb Info

Bearded Darnel – Medicinal Herb Info

 You Ain’t Double Minded – Don Keathley – YouTube

Danker, Frederick William, Walter Bauer’s A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Early Christian Literature, Third Edition, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1957, 2000

Green, Jay P. Sr., The Interlinear Bible, Volume 4, Authors For Christ, Inc., Lafayette, Indiana, 1976, 1985

Mitchell, Jonathan, The New Testament, Harper Brown Publishing, 2019

Strong, James, LL.D., S.T.D., The New Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville Tennessee, 1990