New Thoughts (5/15/07-5/18/07)
Before I turn to what strikes me as the fundamental question regarding this parable, I shall look briefly at the things signified in this pearl. In the current context, the obvious aspect of the pearl is its value. While they are still a valuable gem in our day, they have perhaps fallen out of favor somewhat, at least in comparison with other treasured stones. In that time, before men had learned to cultivate pearls and before they had the means to make diving a less exotic endeavor, the pearl was more valuable simply because it was more difficult to obtain.
Its rarity, and the difficulties one must face to obtain it, gives reason to its symbolic usage. Like the pearl, wisdom is seen as a rarity amongst mankind. It is a rarity because it is not easily obtained and many a man will balk at the challenge of it. Rarity enhances value. It is true for the pearl. It is true for wisdom. While the world would be blessed to be populated by a people uniformly wise, this is not the case. If there is a uniformity, it lies closer to foolishness than wisdom. The wise man is the exception. He is the one who has willingly paid the cost to obtain wisdom, willingly faced the challenges to gain understanding. He is the one who has recognized the worth of what he thus obtained, and will not part with it for any price.
Wise sayings, then, are as pearls of wisdom to the man who lays hold of them. They may seem small things in our ears. They may seem trite or homely. Yet, to the discerning ear, the wisdom they impart is of greatest worth, enriching the soul.
It strikes me that quite often God’s own speech comes in similar fashion. It may seem as nothing to our ears. How often have I heard my daughter ask me what God’s voice sounds like, if I truly hear from Him? This is but a lack of understanding on her part, however. It is not the voice. It is the wisdom the voice imparts. I have known those who have had audible communications from God. It is not that such things are ruled out. He Who spoke to the Old Testament patriarchs and prophets has not changed or gone mute. He is still quite capable of speech. He is not, however, restricted to such modes of communication. For my own part, I find Him more in my thoughts – more precisely, in thoughts that are rather clearly not mine. His ways are beyond mine, and His thoughts above mine. When He chooses to impart His thoughts, it is so clearly above my thinking as to make His presence known, if I will but view my own capacities with humble honesty.
Those moments are such that I could very easily allow pride to consider the thoughts my own thinking. Alternatively, I might pass them off as a runaway imagination. Has I taken such a tack the first time I experienced this, I should quite likely not have come to the salvation of Christ in the first place. It is not as though I am accustomed to being guided by voices in my head, but such was this communication that I never gave a thought to where such an alien thought had come from. The message was phrased quite personally: “Accept that I exist, and accept that there are no coincidences.” I paraphrase, but that was the gist of it. Somehow, such was the working of the Spirit upon me in spite of myself, that I simply agreed to this proposal for the weekend, and thank God I did! God was offering me the proof of Himself, and He proved Himself quite satisfactorily by these twin propositions.
It would have been easy to miss (at least in theory). It would have been easy to blow it off as mere excitement. God’s wisdom is like that when it comes. It would be easy to miss. If we are not listening for the Shepherd’s voice, His commands might go wholly unnoticed. Why do you suppose sheep get lost in the first place? They get so caught up in whatever has captured their wandering attention that they miss the call to move to the next pasture, or the cry of warning as they wander into the thicket. They have tuned out their protector, and it is this tuning out that leaves them exposed to danger. There is a parable for our life. It is when we allow the distractions of life to tune God out that we are exposed to danger. The pearls of wisdom, which are borne of the fear of God, are obtained by swimming through those distractions with our attention on Him. They are obtained by taking every vain imagination captive to kingdom purpose.
We are so caught up in daily life, laboring to earn money. We earn so we can spend, and we do not satisfy ourselves with necessities. We have learned to make every least desire a necessity in our opinion. The perfect lawn in front of the massively oversized house is not just a gratifying of lust, it is a necessity. At least, this is what we try to convince ourselves of. All the while, the world around us supports our ill conceived notions, trying to sell us ever more junk under the guise of necessity. And, all the while, God holds forth a much better goal: Buy truth and hold it. Gain wisdom. Seek instruction so as to attain understanding (Pr 23:23). Even the underlying basics of this advice seem to run counter to what the world tells us. They advise us to buy low and sell high. God advises us to buy without regard for the price – even if it takes all we own. Then, He says to hold. It’s not a holding until the price rises. It’s not waiting for the stock options to mature, or any other such thing. It’s just, ‘hold’. As much as no price was too great to pay for obtaining the things of God, no price is enough to justify selling them off.
This thought of the value of the kingdom is certainly in view with both this parable and the preceding one. In both cases, although the price that is paid consists of everything the payer has, still the return he shall have for his payment exceeds the cost. The treasure in the field will be worth many times more than the price of the field. The pearl will be worth many times more when once it is brought to market far from the oyster beds. Whatever the price that was paid, it’s going to be worth it. This is certainly applicable to the kingdom. Whatever our citizenship in God’s kingdom may cost, it’s going to be worth it. The price may be deepest sorrows in this lifetime. It may cost us friendships, family, income and even life itself, as far as this current age goes. It may lead us through severest trials, tortures and loss. Yet, these things are, as Paul says, as nothing compared to the weight of glory that is stored up for us in heaven. An eternity of richest glory awaits us when once these trials have passed, and it is upon this certain future that we are to focus as we go through the uncertain present.
All this is certainly true and valid. However, I find myself wondering whether Jesus is thinking of the pearl or the merchant as representing the nature of the kingdom. Is this a case where our thinking, our expectations, lead us astray from the real point? It occurs to me, for instance, that both of these men have found something that cannot benefit them so long as they keep it. The treasure in the field is of no earthly use unless spent. The pearl will never feed the merchant, nor cloth him, nor shelter him unless he sells what he has found. The kingdom is assuredly not something to buy and sell in such fashion. No, it is something to buy and to hold. It is the truth and wisdom which the Proverb commends.
If I shift my focus to the merchant, though, what do I then find. The kingdom is like a merchant seeking. The first thing I notice is that the merchant knew what he was looking for. He was in the market for pearls. He had something specific in mind to buy. He was doubtless well-versed on the qualities and characteristics of the pearls he sought. He knew how to assess their worth. Indeed, he doubtless knew better than the locals how that worth would increase when he brought his purchases home.
Now, if our attention is to be upon the merchant as exemplifying the kingdom, something rather wonderful emerges from the parable. The kingdom is seeking us! This is certainly in keeping with Scripture. We are the lost. God is the seeker of the lost. We are the wandering sheep. God is the loving Shepherd who will drop everything to go round up one lost sheep from His flock. He is a merchant seeking pearls, and He knows what He finds. He knows precisely which pearl it is He wishes to make His own, and when He finds that one pearl (not that it was ever hid from Him), He will give everything He has to obtain it.
There in brief is the Cross. Jesus, the Merchant of heaven, came to this land to seek the pearls that grew here. The lives that had faced so many irritants and contained them had grown something precious: souls of great beauty. Of course, they each have their imperfections yet, but this heavenly Merchant knows how to buff those imperfections out without damaging the natural beauty of what He has found. Each of those souls which He has chosen is of great value in His sight. Each and every one of them is, to Him, worth everything He has to obtain. Surely, as He suffered on the cross, God gave everything to obtain those pearls. And, though the agony of that price He paid was beyond our ability to really comprehend, though it pained Him to the point of breaking; yet, He did not break, but faced it if not gladly, then triumphantly, knowing that in His death lay victory; knowing that as He lay down His life, so He would take it up once more, and having done so, would live with these pearls He had purchased forever His own. He had obtained a treasure for Heaven that would not have to be resold to create value. He had come knowing what He was looking for, and He had found it. Having found it, He had paid everything to obtain it. Now, and forever more, what He found is His.
You have been bought with a price, Paul writes (1Co 6:20). He wrote this thinking of the slave markets so common to the time. In his thinking he, too, was a slave to the Master. Yet, Jesus says we are more than slaves. We are family, heirs with Him to the treasures of heaven. If I am seeing this parable truly, we are, in fact the treasures of heaven which we shall inherit. Could there be a greater hope to hold out to a slave? The slave, more often than not, dreamed of the day he could buy his freedom. To know that the price of freedom is ours by inheritance! What joy! It is not that this current enslavement to Christ is burdensome. Not at all. We were glad to receive the mark of lifelong service to His household. This is no enslavement by force. It is subjection by choice to His righteous rule over our lives. Even so, there is this promise that as we come home at the end of our days, the price of our liberty, the treasure in heaven which we have stored up by our lives, is our own inheritance. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (2Co 3:17), and we are destined to come into His house as He has made His home in us.
There is this as well: The merchant knew what he was looking for. He was not uninformed. This, too, is more descriptive of God in His dealings with us than in our own supposed search for God. Those who think themselves to be looking for God rarely if ever have a true conception of Him. Their tendency is to look for something which fits their own notions of what a god ought to be like, or what they would have a god be like. This is something I can recognize from experience. When I was younger, and seeking after some god that would suit me better than the one I learned about in Sunday School, it was not the reality of God I wanted, but something that would put a seal of approval on my choices. The ancients, beset by the challenges of staying alive, looked for gods who could provide them with food. Faced with natural forces that could easily overwhelm and destroy them, they looked for gods who could control those forces.
My, but how little man has changed! Look around today. The gods of the modern man, who thinks himself godless, are no different. He has his gods of commerce, for commerce has become the means of provision. Food and clothing come from places unknown to him through means he has no interest in understanding. So far as he knows or cares, those things are made in the back of the store in which he buys them. They are not the point, because he feels no danger of being unable to find food, clothing or shelter. His fear is for his paycheck and his investments, and it is the god who can ensure these things to him that he will serve. Likewise the environmentalists. Fearing forces of nature that are still quite capable of causing pain and suffering, or at the very least threatening the means of income, they look once again for the one who can control uncontrollable nature. Yet, in all this, they will absolutely refuse to look to the One Who has already proven Himself in all these things.
Here is God, the One who calmed the storms on the Sea of Galilee with a word. Here is God, Who has a track record that stretches over millennia as far as being our Provider. Here is God, Who set the stars in their courses, Who is careful of the sparrow and of each living thing. But, He is so much more than just the Provider, so much more than just the tamer of nature, and it is the more that turns the so-called seeker away from His face. A God of Love we can easily be drawn to. A God of Wrath is a harder sell. A God of Mercy is something we can all use, but a God of Justice? Only while justice is concerned with somebody else, thanks. For ourselves, we’ll keep to the mercy.
No, it would be hard to say that man, when God comes to him, knows what he is seeking. It’s rather like what I found in marriage. When I first met my wife, I had so many ideas of what I was looking for in a partner. It would be hard to find her in describing what I thought I wanted. Oh, but she was everything I needed, and our love for one another has grown deeper with each passing year. It’s like that with God. We have some conception, perhaps, of what we’re looking for in a god, but it has nothing to do with what we need, only what we want. It is the distance between love and lust, and nobody ever really explained the difference to us. We simply do not know just what we are looking for until we have had it thrust before our eyes. Suddenly, we are aware of this woman who has snuck up on us because she is so unlike our expectations. Made aware of her, she is almost immediately all that we can think about. Suddenly, we are aware of this God we could never have imagined, would never have courted if we had somehow imagined Him as He is. As He makes Himself known to us, we find in Him everything we shall ever want or need.
The truth of the matter is that we were not really looking for God. He, however, came looking for us. He was in the market for somebody like us. Frankly, we were not any great prize, but He was looking for us anyway. He knew exactly which market He would find us in, and He knew exactly how much we were worth to Him. Yes, and having found us, He gave everything to make us His own! In the eyes of anybody else, we might have been worthless, but to Him, we were a pearl of great value, worth every cent He would pay.
Now, here it might seem the analogy of the parable fails us, but consider the nature of the pearl. From the oyster’s perspective, the pearl is nothing of any value. It is but an irritant contained. It is a reaction of the immune system. To the merchant, however, that immune response is a thing of rare beauty, and he knows it will be of value to others as well. Many of us could be seen in a similar light. To those who knew us when (and to some who know us now, for all that) we may be little better than an irritant, perhaps an irritant contained, but an irritant nonetheless. We may be looked upon as being of little worth. Yet, God looks down from heaven, seeking just such irritants as us, and He sees in us something that is worth quite a bit.
Think about that oyster and its pearl again. The grain of sand that becomes the center of the pearl is still a grain of sand. What has happened, then, to make it a thing of rare beauty? The oyster has secreted something which covers that grain of sand. It has wrapped that grain in layer after layer of this secretion until the original irritant grain is completely hidden away. It no longer feels an irritation, because it has smoothed out the rough edges of that grain with its wrappings. It is no longer threatened with disease because of this foreign object in its system, because those wrappings have utterly sealed off any ill effect of that grain. When the harvester comes and opens the shell of the oyster, he will see nothing that looks like sand. He will see only the wrappings that have been layered about the grain. There is, in short, nothing to remind us of the grain of sand that was causing problems. There is only the beautiful result.
We are very like that pearl, and Jesus, if you will pardon the comparison, is the oyster. When He comes to find us, we are still irritating grains of sand, and for years after, we may still be recognizable as such. He is, however, slowly wrapping us in layer after layer of His own righteousness. With each layer, the rough edges of our character are being smoothed, the crevices filled and the corners rounded. With each layer, the dark grain of our sinfulness is less and less visible. The old man is being encased in the sheets of righteousness. He is still there at the core, just as the grain of sand remains at the core of the pearl. But, his ability to poison us and spread his sin wider has been eliminated. He has been cordoned off from the body, contained so that he can no longer do us harm. When the Harvester looks down from heaven, that Merchant in search of precious souls, He sees no sign of that old man, however much we may remember him. He sees only that righteous wrapping, which has transformed us into a pearl of great value. He sees something that is worth giving everything He has to obtain, and He is determined that we pearls shall be His.
Lord, thank You for this new perspective! That You look upon me not as an irritant but as a rare jewel is simply amazing. Yes, You are the One who will leave the many secured sheep to go find the one who has wandered. You are the One who considers the end product of Your own efforts in our lives from the very start. Yet, this is such a picture of just how much You care for us. It helps me to understand what empowered You to face the cross that defined Your life and rescued mine. That You should value me so! Oh, Lord, let me look at those You value as much as me and see that same great value. Let me look at those You have not yet purchased as pearls for Your consideration, and give me the desire and the urge to make them presents to You. Let me see these pearls with Your eyes, and not the eyes of an oyster.
With that, let me return to the other picture we have in this parable, the picture of heaven’s worth. Heaven is nothing to be bought and sold, of course. We do not barter for the things of God. But, the value of citizenship in God’s heaven is so transcendent that no price could be too great to obtain it. There is nothing in all this world that can compare to what God offers us, and yet He offers it without cost. It is nothing that money can buy, so we can speak of it as being without cost. It is given as a gift, so there is no demand for repayment. Yet, in the end it will cost us everything we are – at least everything we have been.
Whatever we may have gained in this life we will lose our taste for it, because we have seen something so much better and we know it is now ours. That’s the sense of Paul’s magnificent statement to the Philippians. Whatever I have gained, I now count as loss for the sake of Christ. Compared to the value of having the Christ as my Lord, to being a citizen of heaven, every other thing I might have in this life is worthless. It is rubbish to me, and I will gladly lose them all if by losing them I gain Christ (Php 3:7-8). There is the merchant who has found his pearl. There is the day trader who has found an IPO in the offing. There is so much to be gained by this opportunity that those who find it will gladly sell everything, drop everything to lay hold of it. Having laid hold of it, they will never have cause for regret, for they have bought their own transformation from sandy irritant to righteous pearl. The One they found to be of such surpassing worth looks upon them as being of surpassing great worth to Himself, and He takes each pearl that comes to Him and sets them in His own royal robes, to be clear symbols of His own great glory.
This is what I have found. This is what I have become. I, who spent so much of my youth being an irritant to whomever I could, am made a pearl, a thing of rare beauty to those with eyes to see it. Be sure I still have my irritating ways about me, for the wrappings have not yet been completed. Yet, I know the process is begun and I know the process will continue, for He who began this good work is faithful to complete it. Yes, and I know Who has purchased that finished work. He is a great investor in pearl futures, and He has already prepared a place for me, the perfect setting upon His robes of royalty, where I may shine with His own glory. What better future could a grain of sand ask for?
