When I read Scripture, I look for repeats. Repetition is something used to drive home a point. Jesus repeated Himself as He taught parables. One set of repetitions had to do with the function of angels at the end of the world. 

“The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will remove from his Kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil” (Matthew 13:41). The removal will take place from within the Kingdom of God those who cause sin and all who do evil.

One repeat occurs in verses 49-50, “That is the way it will be at the end of the world. The angels will come and separate the wicked people from the righteous, throwing the wicked into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”  After these repetitions, the Lord asked His disciples,” Do you understand all these things?” (vs. 51).

Jesus had just taught three parables – the parable of wheat and weeds, the mustard seed, and how yeast works. The Lord comes back to the parable about the wheat and weeds and what will happen when the wheat is separated from the weeds that grew among the wheat. At the end of time, “Then I will tell the harvesters to sort out the weed, tie them into bundles, and burn then, and to put the wheat into the barn” (vs. 29). These repetitions describe what will happen, “at the end of the world.”

Within God’s Kingdom, weeds are growing among us. We cannot always determine a weed from wheat. Only the harvesters, the angels of God, will ultimately know how to rightly perform this eternal separation. While we should rightly judge the behavior of those among us, it is only God who can determine who will be in the barn and who will be burned. 

These uncomfortable words of Jesus will take place without our permission or agreement. Our faith should reflect on the consequence of allowing ourselves to become a weed in the field of wheat. It’s not about fear, but faith and trust in the Lord. It is a humble understanding that the Kingdom of God is more serious and impacting than we can imagine. Only by exercising daily humility before Jesus will we be defined as wheat. As the Lord asked His disciples two thousand years ago, I want to ask the same question of us today, “Do we understand all these things?”