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This is my final instalment on the Gospel reading for the Eighth Sunday after Trinity (Year A) for 2023, Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52.
Part 1 contains the Gospel reading and covers verses 31 through 33. Part 2 discusses verses 44 through 46.
This post examines verses 47 through 52. Readers might find it useful to acquaint themselves with the reading for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity, Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43. That reading mentions hell at the Second Coming and so do today’s verses. Jesus spoke about hell twice in Matthew 13.
This is His first mention (emphases mine):
13:40 Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age.
13:41 The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers,
13:42 and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
13:43 Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!
This is His second:
13:49 So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous
13:50 and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
13:51 “Have you understood all this?” They answered, “Yes.”
Commentary comes from Matthew Henry and John MacArthur.
Matthew Henry’s commentary states:
Note, Christ himself preached often of hell-torments, as the everlasting punishment of hypocrites; and it is good for us to be often reminded of this awakening, quickening truth.
John MacArthur says something even more striking:
Our Lord spoke very much and very often about hell. He said many things about the abode of the damned, the wicked, the Christ rejecters …
It seems strange to us to hear words like that coming from the mouth of the Lord Jesus Christ. For we don’t associate the Lord Jesus Christ with hell, as often as we ought. He said more about hell than he did about love. He said more about hell than all the other biblical preachers combined. And if we are to model our preaching after His, then hell is a major theme for us.
I did not hear anything about hell in the sermon on Sunday when this Gospel passage was read.
Let us look at this final parable in Matthew 13.
Jesus was explaining the situation of the kingdom of heaven as it was and as it will remain until His Second Coming in glory. God gave the Old Testament prophets that knowledge, but He did not give them insight into this long interregnum where Jesus rules in absentia. Jesus called this period ‘the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven’.
It is unfortunate that the Lectionary compilers left out two important verses from Matthew 13 that explain what He was saying. The KJV expresses verses 10 and 11 better than the NIV:
10 And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables?
11 He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.
Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven can be compared to a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind (verse 47).
Henry tells us that this great net, or dragnet, describes the world:
(1.) The world is a vast sea, and the children of men are things creeping innumerable, both small and great, in that sea, Ps 104 25. Men in their natural state are like the fishes of the sea that have no ruler over them, Hab 1 14. (2.) The preaching of the gospel is the casting of a net into this sea, to catch something out of it, for his glory who has the sovereignty of the sea. Ministers are fishers of men, employed in casting and drawing this net; and then they speed, when at Christ’s word they let down the net; otherwise, they toil and catch nothing. (3.) This net gathers of every kind, as large dragnets do. In the visible church there is a deal of trash and rubbish, dirt and weeds and vermin, as well as fish.
With that in mind, MacArthur puts this parable into context for us. He preached this sermon in 1982, by the way:
This is a parable in which our Lord warns about hell. Now remember, in these parables the Lord is telling us what it will be like in this period of the world’s history, this form of His rule. He is the King and He rules in the world. And He is allowing, in this period of time, good and evil to grow together as we saw in the parable of the wheat and the tares … He’s tolerant of the good and evil through this period. But in the end will come a judgment. And that’s why this is the last parable.
We have now swept through the parables that describe the nature of the kingdom, the power of the kingdom, the personal appropriation of the kingdom. And now we come to the climax and the end and the judgment. And it is a warning. It is a fearful warning that in the end there will be an eternal separation of the damned from the redeemed.
And the world, you see, is moving toward this. Every human life is moving toward that inevitable hour. Today, at least 5,282 people in the United States alone will die and enter eternity; most of them will go to hell. And this final parable brings us up short with a sense of severe warning.
MacArthur explains how dragnet fishing — from which trawling developed — works. Before that, he introduces the two more basic types of fishing:
Fishing in our Lord’s time was a common enterprise. Fishing was a way of life. Fishing for some of the disciples was their way of life, so they would understand very clearly of which He spoke. Basically there were three ways to fish. And these three ways are still being used in that country in the Lake of Gennesaret, the Sea of Galilee.
First was with a line and hook which caught fishes one at a time …
The second kind of fishing was a casting net. Amphiblstron is the word in the Greek. And it was a very special net. It was a net that was like a large circle and on the outer perimeter of the circle were weights. It was pulled together in the middle. And there was a rope attached to the arm of the fishermen.
The net was draped over the shoulder. And as the fishermen came to the shore he threw the net, and had become, of course, so deft at it that it would go into its entire circular form. And it would hit the water as a large circle and as it sunk toward the bottom it would capture in it, as the lead weights pulled down the edges, all the fish that were in that area.
So the fisherman would watch until he saw the school of fish, and then he would spin that thing and it would open its full circle and capture the fish. And then that cord attached to his wrist would be pulled tight and it would pull the net together until he had a sack and he would drag the net onto the shore full of the catch. And that is the net our Lord used to speak of being fishers of men. Throw out the net and catch men for Christ and pull them in.
But that is not the net that is used here. This is a completely different Greek term. This term is a unique term. It is the term sagn, and it has to do with what we’ll call a seine net, or a troll net. It’s a very distinct term. It speaks of a very, very large net.
Now when I say very large, I mean very large. Lenski, the commentator, says that some of these nets covered one-half mile of area, very large nets. A net that could not be worked with the hand of a man. How it was used is very simple to understand. One end of this large net was attached to the shoreline. The other end was attached to a boat.
As the boat left the shore, it pulled the net into a form where the net was stretched between the boat out in the lake and the net hooked to the shore. Then the boat would begin to move in a circle. And as it moved in a circle, it would sweep into this massive net, all the life in front of the net.
It would complete an entire circle, come all the way back to where it was attached, and would have gathered into that entire net all the life that was in the sea covered by that net. Because the top of the net had floats, it floated on the surface of the water. The bottom of the net had weights, it sunk to the bottom so that the net moved through the sea like a vertical wall capturing everything.
Now, what our Lord wants us to understand in this net is basically two things. One is the immense size of the net. And two, is the fact that it brings in everything, a conglomerate inclusive catch. Now, once this has happened and the boat has moved through the sea, and this great vertical wall has swept up everything, living and dead.
I have seen British fishing documentaries that show how trawling is done. Those nets really do pick up everything in immense quantities.
Jesus said that when the net was full, the fishermen drew it ashore, sat down and put the good fish into baskets but threw out the bad (verse 48).
Henry explains how the good and bad will be parted at our Lord’s Second Coming:
(4.) There is a time coming when this net will be full, and drawn to the shore; a set time when the gospel shall have fulfilled that for which it was sent, and we are sure it shall not return void, Isa 55 10, 11. The net is now filling; sometimes it fills faster than at other times, but still it fills, and will be drawn to shore, when the mystery of God shall be finished. (5.) When the net is full and drawn to the shore, there shall be a separation between the good and bad that were gathered in it. Hypocrites and true Christians shall then be parted; the good shall be gathered into vessels, as valuable, and therefore to be carefully kept, but the bad shall be cast away, as vile and unprofitable; and miserable is the condition of those who are cast away in that day. While the net is in the sea, it is not known what is in it, the fishermen themselves cannot distinguish; but they carefully draw it, and all that is in it, to the shore, for the sake of the good that is in it. Such is God’s care for the visible church, and such should ministers’ concern be for those under their charge, though they are mixed.
MacArthur continues with his description of what happens on the shoreline. Today, this takes place on the trawler:
Now, the central figure of the parable is a group of fishermen. They’re on the shore in verse 48. And lying there at the edge of the water is this recently drawn massive net. And it is literally soaking and teeming with life, filled with the conglomerate of creatures taken from the water.
And then begins a very slow, deliberate careful, patient, unhurried, accurate, knowledgeable, skillful process of sorting out the good from the bad. They sat down. It was something they did very carefully, very patiently. Now this scene would be very common to the people to whom our Lord spoke, particularly the disciples.
They would take the good and put it into some vessels, very often water-contained vessels, to keep the fish alive if they were to be transported. If they were immediately to be used in some form, they could be put in another vessel. The bad was just thrown away.
Jesus said that this will happen at the end of the age, meaning when this mystery period — not revealed to the Old Testament prophets — is over; angels will come out to separate the evil from the righteous (verse 49).
MacArthur says:
Now, the picture is very clear, isn’t it? Let’s look secondly, at the principle, verse 49. And here is our Lord’s own interpretation. “So shall it be at the end of the age: the angels shall come forth and separate the wicked from among the righteous.” We can stop at that point.
There’s a lot that you could say about that parable. There’s a lot you could do with it. There are some interesting possibilities. But the Lord is only interested in one element and that is the separating process that went on on the shore as a picture of the angelic separation in judgment. That’s what He’s after.
You see, all along in this era, as we’ve been learning, the good and the evil go together and God tolerates the evil. But the time is coming when He will make a separation between those who know the King and are subjects of the King and know the Lord Jesus Christ, and those who do not.
And that separation is inevitable and it is ultimate. And little by little, imperceptibly and silently, that net moves through the sea of time drawing all men to the shores of eternity for that inevitable separation. That is the principle. The net draws in all kinds of fish. It is indiscriminating in the sense that it just catches everything in its way.
And so it is, it says in verse 47, “The kingdom of heaven is like that net.” It moves silently through the sea of life, drawing men, almost without them knowing it, to the shore of eternity. And by the time they awaken to what is happening it is too late. They’re already there. They are drawn to the separation.
Now, this same truth was taught in the parable of the wheat and the tares, as you can go back to verse 41 and see. “The Son of Man shall send His angels, and they’ll gather out of His kingdom all things that offend and them that do iniquity, and they shall be cast into a furnace of fire where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.” Same idea, but the Lord repeats it. Now, the only spiritual thing that the Lord pinpoints in this parable is that last act of the fishermen. Everything else passes without comment.
And I think we ought to leave the rest without comment and just take what our Lord meant to teach. When He spoke of the casting net, He used that in a positive way to speak to the disciples of catching men for Christ. When He speaks of this dragnet, as it’s called, or this troll net, or seine net, or sagn net, He is talking about gathering men for judgment.
Look at verse 49. “So shall it be at the end of the age.” When man’s day is over and Jesus returns to set up His glorious kingdom, then comes the judgment. Now, this is not a…a technical, chronological, eschatological layout. This is not trying to pinpoint every element of judgment, every time and place and are we talking about the great white throne, or the sheep and the goats, or the bema seat judgment or whatever.
This is just a general statement that all in the world are caught ultimately in the net of judgment, to be separated in the end. And you notice again, would you please, in verse 49, that the angels are the executioners? The angels are the separators, just as we saw in verse 41, just as we see in Matthew 24; the angels come with the Lord to act out judgment …
Now some people have asked, “Why this parable is included if the basic idea of separation is even also included in the parable of the wheat and the tares?” And the answer to that is several things. Number one, it is repeated because the wheat and the tares emphasize particularly the co-existence. This emphasizes only the separation. It is repeated also because the Lord has a compassionate heart and He wants to add one more warning.
This is not the only time Jesus spoke of this judgement:
Just as we see in Matthew 25, just as we see repeatedly in Revelation, particularly chapter 14. The angels are the agents of God’s judgment. So while the kingdom may, for a while, tolerate good and evil growing together, the separation is moving closer and closer all the time. Jesus spoke of this same thing, in Matthew chapter 25, when He said in verse 31, “The Son of Man shall come in His glory and all the holy angels with Him; then shall He sit on the throne of His glory.”
And what will He do when He comes? It says, “And before Him shall He gather all the nations and He shall separate one from another ”. Separation. “And He’ll say to them, on His right hand, ‘Come ye blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.’ And He’ll say to them on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, ye cursed into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’”
And Jesus said, in John chapter 5, that “there’s coming a resurrection of all men. Some to the resurrection of life and some to the resurrection of damnation.” There will be a final separation, and eternal destiny will be determined for every soul that has ever lived on the face of the earth …
That’s typical of our Lord. He warned about hell many times, many times, so concerned was He that men not go there. Many times He said, “Watch, watch, for you know neither the day nor the hour in which the Son of Man comes.” Many times He warned the people not to take lightly their sins because there would be the inevitability of the accounting that God would make.
He talked about the days of Noah, that men would be living in ease and apparent prosperity, and happiness, going through the motions of life, and there would come horrifying judgment. He warned again and again and again. He told men that through His prophet, John the Baptist, that He would come with unquenchable fire to burn up those that were lost.
He looked out at the world, in Matthew 9, and He saw a harvest moving toward judgment. He was compassionate enough to see men on the way to damnation and call to them. And so that’s why this is here. It emphasizes the separation that is the end of this age, and it gives the Lord a chance to release that compassionate heart.
See, the Bible says God has no pleasure in the death of the wicked. The Bible says that He is not willing that any should perish. The Bible says that God our Savior will have all men to be saved. Jesus wept over Jerusalem and said, “0h, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how oft I would have gathered thee as a hen gathereth her brood, but you would not. You will not come unto Me,” He said pensively, “that you might have eternal life. His heart of compassion is one that warns because He loves.
Now look again. The kingdom of heaven is like a net, and you can see the vividness of this imagery. That net moves through the world. It is invisible to those around who can’t yet see it. And if perchance it touches the back of a fish, the fish simply flits a little further ahead and enjoys the freedom he things is his permanently.
And men live in this world imagining themselves to be free, moving about, fulfilling their own desires, going here and going there as they will, with little knowledge that the net comes closer and closer and closer. People float about in the liberty of the wide deep sea of life, not knowing the invisible lines of judgment move closer and closer and closer. And each time they are touched by it, they move a little further away. And they’re touched again and they move a little further away.
And, finally, they’ve moved one time and they’ve hit it on the other side because it’s moving toward the shore. And then wildly the fish may dart for the sea only to be caught again in the same net, finally to be dragged into shore in the last throws of a flailing and flipping, enter into a silent death.
And that’s how it is. Men may not perceive the kingdom, they may not see God moving in the world, but He is moving. And men very often when touched by the gospel of Jesus Christ, or threatened with the threat of judgment, dart into the freedom they think is ahead of them. But sooner or later they run right back into the same net because there’s no freedom there. And they are inexorably moving toward inevitable judgment. All men are gathered in the net. The kingdom will ultimately engulf them all. And God with His angels will separate.
The angels will throw evildoers into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth (verse 50). The traditional version I heard in my childhood had ‘wailing’ instead of ‘weeping’, and I do believe that ‘wailing’ is the better word.
Henry says:
Note, Everlasting misery and sorrow will certainly be the portion of those who live among sanctified ones, but themselves die unsanctified.
MacArthur says:
… the peril, the peril. Verse 50, “And shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.” Now that is a fearful verse. And I confess to you that it affects me just as it affects anybody. It is a horrifying, fearful verse.
And if there’s any doctrine in the Bible that you wish were not there it is the doctrine of hell, but that does not eliminate it. It is there. And this is the heart of the matter. Cast into the furnace of fire. Those are terrifying words from our Lord. And yet He spoke more of hell than anybody else.
MacArthur explains why that was so:
I think that if Jesus hadn’t taught us about hell, we wouldn’t believe whoever did. It had to be Him. It is so inconceivable, it so causes us to be revulsed. We cannot conceive of eternal damnation. And it had to be our Lord who said this or we never would have been able to accept it. It was His own special emphasis. And He was a preacher of hell. More than anything else, He threatened men with hell. And if you don’t think He did then you haven’t been carefully noting His ministry.
Here are more examples:
… in Matthew 5:22. He said, “Whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.” In verse 29 of chapter 5, “If your right eye offend you, pluck it out and cast it from you for it is profitable for you that one of your members should perish, and not your whole body should be cast into hell.”
Verse 30, “If your right hand offend you, cut it off, throw it away, for it is profitable for you that one of your members should perish and not that your whole body should be cast into hell.” In chapter 7, verse 27, He said, “And the rain descended and the flood came and the wind blew and beat on that house and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”
And that’s an allusion to damnation as well. In chapter 8 verse 12, “The sons of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness, there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Chapter 11 in verse 20, “He began to upbraid the cities in which most of His mighty works were done because they repented not.” And He says to them, “You will be brought down to hell.”
Serious, serious words from our Lord. The same thing is true in chapter 12. He says in verse 36, “Every idle word that men shall speak, they will give account of it in the day of judgment, for by thy words thou shalt be justified and by thy words thou shalt be damned,” or condemned. He talks about a demon who leaves a man and then seven more come back in more wicked than himself, and the last state of that man is the first, even so shall it be unto this wicked generation.
In chapter 18…and these are examples…it says, “Whosoever offends a little child who believes in Me, it would be better off if a millstone were hanged around his neck and he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” And then He goes back into talking about being cast into everlasting fire, verse 8, into everlasting hell fire, verse 9, chapter 18.
This was a constant part of what our Lord taught. And you go into chapter 21, verse 43, “The kingdom of God shall be taken from you and given to a nation, bringing forth the fruits of it and whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken, but whomsoever it shall fall it will grind him to powder.”
Chapter 23 talks about hell repeatedly. Chapter 24, chapter 25, Mark chapter 9, Luke chapter 6, Luke chapter 12, Luke chapter 16. It just goes on and on. Jesus told a whole story [Dives and Lazarus] about a man that died and went to hell, being in torment and screamed for someone to come with water and cool his tongue.
Now if you, then, are to evaluate what should be the emphasis of preaching, based on the example of Christ, it should be preaching on hell. Our generation doesn’t do that. It’s convicting that we say so little about hell.
We see more about hell from cartoonists than we hear from clerics.
Over the past 50 or 60 years — certainly most of my lifetime — most Westerners have come to see hell as a recreational playground.
MacArthur recounts an interview with a punk musician from Los Angeles. In the early 1980s, punk was still very much alive and well in America’s largest city. Punk lasted far longer there than it did in its homeland, the United Kingdom. LA punk music is a big part of the soundtrack of the 1984 film Repo Man, a stroke of secular genius from the British director Alex Cox, who really tapped into contemporary Americana as well as sci-fi conspiracy tales. I’ve seen it a dozen times, many of those in the cinema, and can highly recommend it.
But I digress.
MacArthur tells us:
The other night I heard a teenage punk rocker being interviewed. And the reporter said to her, “What are you looking forward to? What is in the future for punk rock?” She said, “Death. I’m looking forward to death.” He said, “Why?” She said, “I want to go to hell. Because hell will be fun. I hope I go to hell. I want to die so I can get to hell and have fun.”
Hell will not be evening cocktails and a seven-course dinner. It will have no beauty. There will be no relief from its ugliness. There will not be friendships or relationships. It will be sheer torture, every millisecond for eternity. Eternity is impossible to comprehend, but it is something to bear in mind. Where do we want to spend the afterlife — forever?
Admittedly, we can only paint a mental image of hell from our Lord’s warnings in Matthew 13 and elsewhere as well as verses from other sources in the Bible.
MacArthur puts those passages together and gives us his portrait of hell. Hell-deniers, take note:
Number one, hell is a place of unrelieved torment. It is a place of unrelieved torment. It is a place of a horrible misery. And the Bible defines it as darkness, outer darkness. That is deep-pit darkness, darkness that’s way out from the light, impenetrable darkness, darkness that closes in. And it is darkness without the hope of light forever. Have you ever been in the darkness and longed for the daylight?
Have you ever been in the darkness and longed for someone to turn a light on? To be in that encroaching, encompassing, moving kind of darkness and know that for all the eons of eternity, you will never see light is how our Lord describes hell. Unrelieved darkness forever, with no hope of the light, no hope of the dawn.
And the Bible also says it is a fire. Now, it is not a fire that we would know as fire, to burn something in this world. But fire is God’s way of describing it because it is a tortuous, unrelieved kind of fire, more terrible than any fire that we would ever know. But fire describes the torment of the damned; blackness describes the torment of the damned, no light, no light ever, ever. No relief from the suffering, the agony and the pain, forever. And there’s only two times in all of Scripture that we have any insight into how people respond to hell.
The one is the Lord’s parable in Luke 16 where He says the man cried out in torment and said, “Cool my tongue for I’m tormented in this flame.” And the other is that constant statement of our Lord, “There will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.” The response to hell is not fun. It is weeping. That’s crying, wailing, screaming and grinding of teeth in pain. That’s what the Bible says. That’s hell. It is a place of unrelieved torment.
Secondly, it is a place of unrelieved torment for both body and soul, for both body and soul. Soul being the inner part. When a person dies, their soul goes out of the presence of God, into the torment of hell. It may not be the full final lake of fire that comes after the judgment in the great white throne, for that needs a transcendent body to endure it.
But it is a torment just as well as illustrated by the rich man who in hell was tormented. When a person dies now, their soul descends into that torment. In the future, there will be a resurrection of the bodies of the damned. They will be given a transcendent body that will then go into a lake of fire. It will be a body not like the body we have now. It will be a very different one. They will be resurrected just like we will, as Christians.
We will be resurrected because this body could never live eternally in heaven, right? We have to have a transcendent body, a glorified body, a different body, and so do the damned. And they will be raised, John 5, they will be raised in new bodies for the single purpose of being punished forever in those bodies.
That’s what the Bible says, tormented forever. They have to have a body to fit that eternal torment. And that’s why Jesus in Matthew 10:28 said, “Fear not them that can destroy the body, but fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” You see, hell is soul and body.
Some people think it’s just bad memories. No, it isn’t just bad memories. It isn’t just the inner thinking processes; it is that body as well. Transcendent, eternal bodies, greater than anything we have on this earth, are going to be given to the damned so that they can suffer in those bodies forever. And that’s the only reason that they’ll have those bodies.
With the present body, man couldn’t endure hell. You…the body that we have now would be consumed in a moment. So as God fits the redeemed with new bodies for heaven, He fits the damned with new bodies for hell. We know a little about that from two things the Lord said.
He said, first of all, the worm dieth not. Now what did He mean by that? When a body goes into the grave, into decay, worms descend into that body. And they begin to consume that body, and the worms will die when the food is gone. So once the body is consumed, the worms die. But in hell, the worms never die because the body, though it is continually being consumed, is never consumed. So the worm never dies.
In other words, the Lord was saying the unrelieved torment of body goes on and on. And it says, also, the fire is not quenched. Now a fire always goes out when the fuel is gone. But the fuel will never be gone. Though the burning goes on, the fuel is never consumed. And so you have unrelieved torment of body and soul.
And that brings me to the third thought. You have in hell a place of relieved torment of body and soul in varying degrees, in varying degrees. In other words, for some people, hell will be worse than others. For all who are there, it will be horrible. It will be ultimate suffering.
There will be no relief for that, but there will be even more severe degrees of suffering for some. It says in Hebrews 10, “Of how much more severe punishment shall they be thought worthy who have trodden underfoot the Son of God and counted the blood of the covenant an unholy thing.” People who have stepped on Jesus Christ, who have rejected his cross, will know a greater hell than those who have not.
There will be degrees, just as there will be degrees of reward in heaven. We saw that, also, I think, in Matthew chapter 11, when it said, “It will be more tolerable for Sodom than for you.” In other words, it’s only relative. It isn’t going to be tolerable for anyone, but it will appear to be more tolerable for them than for you because of what you have experienced.
You had Jesus Christ in your city, they didn’t. You rejected Him with more light; therefore, hell will be more severe for you. And then you have, of course, that incredible parable in Luke 12 where the Lord says, “To the servant who knew and didn’t do right, many stripes. To the servant who didn’t know and didn’t do right, a few stripes.” So hell will be unrelieved torment of body in soul in varying degrees …
And fourthly, hell is a place of unrelieved torment for body and soul in varying degrees endlessly, endlessly. The worm never dies, the fire never goes out, the light never breaks, the sweet relief of death never comes. Endlessly. The only reason or the only way in which we in this life can even make it through trials and pain and suffering and disease is because we believe there will be an end to it.
But they won’t have that. You can imagine the resultant insanity that will come. And you say, “Are you sure it’s everlasting?” It’s just as everlasting as heaven is because in the same verse, the Lord used the same terms. Matthew 25:46, “These shall go away into everlasting punishment, the righteous into everlasting life.” Whatever everlasting life is in terms of its length, so is everlasting punishment. That’s hell.
God never prepared it for people. He prepared it for the devil and his angels. But people choose to go there. Inconceivable misery. Some people have been in this kind of torment in their souls waiting for that body for thousands of years, and they’re no closer to the end then they were when they began. No wonder Jesus had to teach this doctrine.
You say, “Well, how do you avoid hell?” You avoid hell only by the receiving of Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. If you don’t appropriate the kingdom, you see, if you don’t take the treasure, if you don’t purchase the pearl of great price, there’s no way out.
After Jesus told all of His parables about the kingdom of heaven, He asked the disciples if they understood what He had said; they answered in the affirmative (verse 51).
MacArthur explains:
Literally, the verb “understood” is “put it together.”
Have you put all this together? Have you got this all put together in your minds that this form of the kingdom has good and evil going together? That the good is going to continue to permeate, continue to grow, continue to influence? That in order to be a part of the kingdom you have to purchase by giving all you have for all Christ is?
Have you put it all together? And do you see that it’s going to go along like this with good and evil until the end and then comes a final separation? Do you have it? “And they said unto Him, Yes, Lord.” We understand it. We understand it. And I believe He accepted the correctness of their affirmative answer, otherwise He couldn’t have said what He did in verse 52.
Jesus, acknowledging their answer, concluded by saying that every scribe — see how He gives them an elevated status of a proper scribe, not those who worked with the Pharisees — trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old (verse 52).
In the simplest terms, remember going to your grandparents’ homes at holiday time or for a special occasion and wondering what traditions would be observed and what pleasant, new surprise they might show the family. Remember how delightful an experience it was?
Henry says:
In bringing forth, things new and old do best together; old truths, but new methods and expressions, especially new affections.
MacArthur gives us the Greek from the manuscript and contrasts the disciple scribes from the Jewish establishment scribes:
And so, this is what He says, “Then here’s what you’re like – ” verse 52 – “every grammeteus – ” that’s a word that we translate scribe, but it means a learner, a teacher, an interpreter of the law, the Old Testament – “every trained teacher is instructed – ” and that’s from the verb mathteu, is discipled – “concerning the kingdom of heaven.”
Now, He’s discipled them concerning the kingdom, so He’s talking about them. “Every one of you, prepared, trained learners, have been discipled in the things of the kingdom of heaven. You’re trained now; you’re prepared now.” That…that’s what He’s saying.
In fact, you could translate it, “You are now discipled, biblical scholars and teachers.” That’s what a scribe was, really. He was a student, an interpreter, a transmitter of Scripture, he was known as a theologian, a lawyer and a teacher and preacher. They were members of the Sanhedrin. They were acknowledged authorities on the Old Testament and tradition. They were called Rabbi. They were influential.
And He’s saying, “I’ve done the same to you, just like the Jews do with their scribes, I’ve discipled you, I’ve made you into discipled, biblical scholars and teachers. And now, here’s what you’re like – ” verse 52 – “You’re like a man who is the head of a house who brings out of his storehouse things new and old.”
What does that mean? The Lord says, “Now I’ve discipled you, I’ve trained you, I’ve prepared you, I’ve nurtured you so that you could be the laborers to go into the harvest and warn men. And now you are like a man who is the head of his house.” And the man who was the head of his house has a storehouse and out of that storehouse he dispensed to people their needs.
They needed a certain kind of food, they needed a certain kind of clothing, they needed a certain kind of care, whatever it was they needed, he dispensed. And he was wise enough to dispense the new and the old. So he didn’t always give out the new so that the old ultimately became useless.
It’s kind of like the leftovers, you know. Once a week you’re going to get them, because if you don’t get them they’re going to get thrown away ultimately. And the wise head of a household dispenses the old with the new in balance, being a steward of everything that he possesses. And the Lord says, “This is what you’re like. Now you have a storehouse and that storehouse is filled with old and new.”
Ultimately, through these parables, Jesus revealed to His disciples the mystery of the interregnum period, before the time when peace truly will reign — peace with God through His Son. That was more than the scribes of the day knew — and more than the prophets of the Old Testament knew. Now all of our Lord’s disciples had to do was proclaim this revelation:
They were one up on the scribes. All the scribes had was the old stuff, the old stuff, the old stuff.
But He says, “You’re the householder who has the old and the new and in perfect balance. God called you, and trained you, and prepared you to spread it out.” That’s an interesting verb that’s used there, it says the man who is a head of a house brings forth. It literally means to fling out, or to scatter abroad.
In other words, you’ve got all this treasure now, fling it out. It talks about liberality and richness. There’s a lot there. Now that you’ve been discipled and now that you are trained biblical scholars and teachers, fling it out. Give them the Old and the New in perfect balance, that which God said in the past and that which is new in the form of the kingdom.
Now, do you see what He’s saying to them? This all comes out of chapter 9 verse 38; men are on the way to hell. Now I want you to see how the kingdom is going to be. Good and evil, but ultimately it’s going to end in a separation. And now you know this, now dispense it, proclaim it.
And, once they received the Holy Spirit on that first Pentecost, what a proclamation that was, eventually spreading around the globe — from the Middle East and North Africa to Europe and beyond.
I hope everyone reading this will think carefully about the glories of the kingdom to come and the deeply unwelcome prospect of hell.
End of series
Yesterday’s post covered the first three verses of the Gospel reading for the Eighth Sunday after Trinity (Year A, July 30, 2023): Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52.
You can find the full Gospel reading there and links to my other exegeses on the many parables about the kingdom of heaven in Matthew 13.
Jesus was explaining the situation of the kingdom of heaven as it was and as it will remain until His Second Coming in glory. God gave the Old Testament prophets that knowledge but He did not give them insight into this long interregnum where Jesus rules in absentia. He called this period ‘the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven’.
It is unfortunate that the Lectionary compilers left out two important verses from Matthew 13 that explain what He was saying. The KJV expresses verses 10 and 11 better than the NIV:
10 And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables?
11 He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.
This post continues with verses 44 through 46.
Commentary comes from Matthew Henry and John MacArthur.
Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven can be compared to treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid, then in his joy goes to sell all that he has to buy that field (verse 44).
The previous two parables — that of the mustard seed and of the leaven — were about tiny things that grew to be great. The mustard seed can produce a large tree and a small amount of leaven can raise a large amount of flour for bread.
Jesus then shifted His emphasis to great things with value beyond compare.
Matthew Henry explains how great a treasure Christianity is in its various components (emphases mine):
1. Jesus Christ is the true Treasure; in him there is an abundance of all that which is rich and useful, and will be a portion for us: all fulness (Col 1 19; John 1 16): treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Col 2 3), of righteousness, grace, and peace; these are laid up for us in Christ; and, if we have an interest in him, it is all our own.
2. The gospel is the field in which this treasure is hid: it is hid in the word of the gospel, both the Old-Testament and the New-Testament gospel. In gospel ordinances it is hid as the milk in the breast, the marrow in the bone, the manna in the dew, the water in the well (Isa 12 3), the honey in the honey-comb. It is hid, not in a garden enclosed, or a spring shut up, but in a field, an open field; whoever will, let him come, and search the scriptures; let him dig in this field (Prov 2 4); and whatever royal mines we find, they are all our own, if we take the right course.
3. It is a great thing to discover the treasure hid in this field, and the unspeakable value of it. The reason why so many slight the gospel, and will not be at the expense, and run the hazard, of entertaining it, is because they look only upon the surface of the field, and judge by that, and so see no excellency in the Christian institutes above those of the philosophers; nay, the richest mines are often in grounds that appear most barren; and therefore they will not so much as bid for the field, much less come up to the price. What is thy beloved more than another beloved? What is the Bible more than other good books? The gospel of Christ more than Plato’s philosophy, or Confucius’s morals: but those who have searched the scriptures, so as in them to find Christ and eternal life (John 5 39), have discovered such a treasure in this field as makes it infinitely more valuable.
4. Those who discern this treasure in the field, and value it aright, will never be easy till they have made it their own upon any terms. He that has found this treasure, hides it, which denotes a holy jealousy, lest we come short (Heb 4 1), looking diligently (Heb 12 15), lest Satan come between us and it. He rejoices in it, though as yet the bargain be not made; he is glad there is such a bargain to be had, and that he is in a fair way to have an interest in Christ; that the matter is in treaty: their hearts may rejoice, who are yet but seeking the Lord, Ps 105 3. He resolves to buy this field: they who embrace gospel offers, upon gospel terms, buy this field; they make it their own, for the sake of the unseen treasure in it. It is Christ in the gospel that we are to have an eye to; we need not go up to heaven, but Christ in the word is nigh us. And so intent he is upon it, that he sells all to buy this field: they who would have saving benefit by Christ, must be willing to part with all, that they may make it sure to themselves; must count every thing but loss, that they may win Christ, and be found in him.
John MacArthur explains the history behind burying treasure, something that people frequently did because there were no banks to cater to them:
Now this is very common parlance to the people in our Lord’s time and not so common to us. We put our money in the savings and loan, or we put our money in the bank, or we put our money in stocks and bonds or securities or…or real estate or whatever, whatever. That is if we have any money to put anywhere.
But in those days there…they had no banks as such for common people, and banks weren’t necessarily good places to put all of your resources. And so it was usual that men took whatever they considered of great value and they buried it in the earth. Particularly was this the case in Palestine because Palestine was a place of war. It was a battleground. Its history is literally filled with the record of one battle after another, one war after another.
And there were inevitably conquering peoples and those who came in to steal and to loot and to plunder. And so very often when a battle was on the horizon, the people would take the valuable things out of their home, take them out into the field and in a marked place where they could recover them again, they would bury them in the earth. Very commonly done. The earth was a veritable storage house …
Josephus said…the historian in that time…“The gold and the silver and the rest of that most precious furniture which the Jews had and which the owners treasured up underground was done to withstand the fortunes of war.” And so, this was a very, very common thing to do. And there would be people plowing in the field, or there would be people digging in the field for other purposes. And they would inadvertently come across this treasure from time to time.
MacArthur takes us to the parable and answers questions about the man and the circumstances:
And so here is a man who is in the field. And we don’t know but that he works in the field or that he is, for some reason or another, in that field which belongs to another man, perhaps employed by the man who owns the field. And as he is working in that field, maybe he’s plowing or maybe he’s tilling the ground, or whatever, he comes across a treasure buried in the ground. And immediately he puts it back where he found it and sells every single thing he possesses in the world, liquidates all that he has and buys that field in order that he may gain that treasure …
Now at this juncture the parable introduces an ethical situation. People have said, “Look, this guy didn’t do right. How can you have Jesus telling a story in which there’s an unethical activity? How can you have Jesus telling a story in which a man does something that is wrong? I mean, the guy uncovers a treasure, and then he hides it without telling the man who owns the field, and he goes to buy the field. What he should have done in discovering the treasure was pick it up and take it and say, ‘Here’s a treasure I found in your field.’ ” And so some people have been struck by what appears to be unethical.
Well, let me help you with that, although that isn’t the main point. If we don’t get past that some people kind of choke on that and don’t get the rest of the message. First of all, Jewish Rabbinic law said, “If a man finds scattered fruit or money, it belongs to the finder.” Now that is what the law said. If you find lost fruit or money, it belongs to the finder. So the man is within the permission of the Jewish Rabbinic law. So the Jews listening to Jesus would not have perceived this man as unethical.
Secondly, that which was hidden in the field did not belong to the man who owned the field. If it was his, he wouldn’t be selling his field without digging it up. He didn’t know it was there. He had not gone to the effort to uncover it and dig it out. No doubt it belonged to a previous owner of that same field who had buried it there, died in battle, or died by accident, unable to recover it and so it was no more the number one’s owner than it was the number two’s owner. So he had no prior right to it. And the man who had uncover it…uncovered it by Jewish law did have the claim on it. The other man had not done that.
Now, thirdly, this man was very equitable; this man was very fair. If this man was not an honest man when he found the treasure what would he have done? I mean, he would have split. He would have packed up his treasure and been long gone, and put it in his own field. Why go to all the trouble of buying the entire field when you’ve got the treasure in your hand? You say, “Well, maybe his conscience bothered him. Or maybe it was his father-in-law or some relative” …
He knew he had more or at least equal right to it with the man who owned the land. He put it right back in the ground, never even used any of it for the purchase, liquidated every single thing he had on the face of the earth in his possession and went and bought the entire field just so that he could do what was right to get that treasure. No lack of ethics here. No one was defrauded.
Now, having said that, none of that is the point of the parable. That’s just free for nothing. The point of the parable is here is a man who found something so valuable that he sold everything that he had to get it. That’s the point of the parable. He was so overjoyed, he was so ecstatic that he was willing to do anything to get that treasure.
I hope that Henry’s and MacArthur’s explanations clarify the parable for us.
Jesus gave the disciples another parable, of the merchant in search of fine pearls (verse 45) who found one of great value and sold everything he had in order to buy it (verse 46).
Pearls were that era’s diamonds. Today, women prefer gemstones, diamonds in particular, but back then pearls were the ne plus ultra of jewels.
Henry provides this analysis:
… the pearl of price (v. 45, 46), which is to the same purport with the former, of the treasure. The dream is thus doubled, for the thing is certain.
Note, 1. All the children of men are busy, seeking goodly pearls: one would be rich, another would be honourable, another would be learned; but the most are imposed upon, and take up with counterfeits for pearls.
2. Jesus Christ is a Pearl of great price, a Jewel of inestimable value, which will make those who have it rich, truly rich, rich toward God; in having him, we have enough to make us happy here and for ever.
3. A true Christian is a spiritual merchant, that seeks and finds this pearl of price; that does not take up with any thing short of an interest in Christ, and, as one that is resolved to be spiritually rich, trades high: He went and bought that pearl; did not only bid for it, but purchased it. What will it avail us to know Christ, if we do not know him as ours, made to us wisdom? 1 Cor 1 30.
4. Those who would have a saving interest in Christ, must be willing to part with all for him, leave all to follow him. Whatever stands in opposition to Christ, or in competition with him for our love and service, we must cheerfully quit it, though ever so dear to us. A man may buy gold too dear, but not this pearl of price.
MacArthur gives us the historical context:
“The kingdom of heaven is also like a merchant man,” and that is a wholesale merchant, emporos in the Greek, has to do with a wholesale man who would go around and buy things on a wholesale basis and then sell them to somebody who’d retail them. So this wholesaler’s scouring around, seeking fine pearls. This is very common in those days for a man to do who was a sort of entrepreneur.
Allow me to digress for a moment. When I was growing up, I used to visit an aunt and uncle who lived in the San Francisco Bay area. (No, they weren’t flaky.) My aunt loved shopping at the now-defunct The Emporium, a department store chain widely advertised on the airwaves. I can still remember the jingle but couldn’t understand why the founder gave it such a peculiar name. I was too young to understand that ’emporium’ means market place or a store that sells a variety of goods. Thank you. That is all.
Now back to MacArthur, who describes the danger in pearl diving at the time:
He would be in the pearl wholesaling business and he would find that there would be a diligent search on his part to gain the pearls that he was desiring to gain. Many people, in diversifying their investments, put their investments in pearls. Pearls would be the equivalent of diamonds today. Pearls were the most valuable gem available at that time in the world. And if you had pearls, you had a fortune.
It was incredible the extent to which people went in those days in pearl hunting. They would search in…particularly, in the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. And there were pearls to be found there but they were to be found at great price and many people died gaining them. They actually were unable to use any what…what we would know as modern paraphernalia to do the pearl diving.
Basically, what they did was tie rocks to their body and then jump off the side of the little boat and go to the bottom amidst all the monsters of the deep that they would know little about, and the sharks and whatever else, and they would scour the bottom in the mud trying to come up with those oysters, holding one long deep-drawn breath, and fearing lest they go too deep and burst and die. And they would come up with these treasures.
And when once discovered, a pearl that was of perfection and beauty would be worth literally an unnamed price, incredibly valuable. So valuable are they that the Talmud says, “Pearls are beyond price.” So valuable were they that the Egyptians actually worshiped the pearl and this came over into Roman life. So valuable were they that when women wanted to show their wealth, according to I Timothy 2:9, they put pearls on their head.
And it was said of one lady by the name of Lollia Paulina, the wife of the emperor Caligula, that at one event, she had $36 million worth of pearls all over her. In fact, the historian says she had pearls on her head, she had pearls on her hair, she had pearls on her ears, she had pearls on her neck and she had pearls on her fingers. She could have stood in for one of the gates of heaven.
But this was how pearls were perceived in those days. Pliny, the historian says that Cleopatra had two pearls, each worth a half a million dollars and that was in a day when money was 20 times greater in its buying power than it is today. And when the Roman emperors wanted to demonstrate their incredible wealth and show how filthy rich they were, they dissolved pearls in vinegar and drank them in their wine. So pearls were very valuable.
Our Lord in Matthew 7:6 says, “Don’t cast your – ” what? – “pearls before swine.” Because He is trying to compare the worst with the most priceless. You don’t give the most valuable thing to a pig. That’s foolish. And so pearls were really perceived like we perceive diamonds today, very, very, very valuable. In fact, even going into the book of Revelation, we find that when God begins to describe heaven, it is as pearls in its beauty.
MacArthur explains the meaning of this parable and has more on the one of the buried treasure. He says much the same as Henry:
And so, here is a man who went around seeking fine pearls. And he would market them because they were good investment, they went up in value and you could diversify, you could put some of your money in the ground, some of your money in pearls, some of your money in property and whatever else and that’s the way people ran their businesses. The one thing you didn’t do, I understand if you’re a smart investor and still don’t, is to put everything into one investment.
But isn’t it interesting that in both cases that’s exactly what these two did. The first man sold everything and bought the one field, the second man sold everything and bought the one pearl. Now, what are the principles from the two parables? You understand them now. What are the principles? I’m going to give you six principles. Listen carefully.
Number one, the kingdom is priceless in value. The kingdom is priceless in value. Both parables are designed to teach us the incomparable value of the kingdom of the Lord. And when we talk about the kingdom of the Lord, we’re talking about salvation; we’re talking about Christ Himself and the gift of salvation that He gives. The knowledge of God through Jesus Christ, the preciousness of what it is to be in His kingdom, the preciousness of fellowshipping with the King, the preciousness of being a subject of the sovereign.
The blessedness of the kingdom is so valuable that it is the most valuable commodity that can ever be found, and only a fool is not willing to sell everything he has to gain it. Nothing comes close in value. In Christ and in His kingdom there is a treasure. There is a treasure that is rich beyond comparison. There is a treasure that is rich beyond conception. There is a treasure that is incorruptible, undefiled, unfading, eternal.
There is a heavenly treasure lying in the field of this poverty-stricken, bankrupt, accursed world, a treasure sufficient to eternally enrich everyone of earth’s poor, miserable, blind and naked inhabitants. Salvation and forgiveness and love and joy and peace and virtue and goodness and glory and heaven and eternal life, all are in that treasure. And the treasure is that salvation and the pearl is that salvation that is equivalent to being in the kingdom …
Secondly, this lesson, the kingdom is not superficially visible. The treasure was hidden, right? And the pearl had to be sought. It isn’t just lying around on the surface. The treasure is not obvious to men. The value and the preciousness of the kingdom of heaven, the value and the preciousness of salvation is not viewed by men, they don’t see it although it stands there and looks them in the eye.
The world looks at us and they don’t understand why we’re all about this business of worshiping God. They don’t understand why we want to give our lives to Jesus Christ. They don’t understand why we want to live and obey a code of ethics and rules that goes against the grain of our deepest lusts and drives. They don’t understand why we price this so highly when it means so little to them. No, the kingdom is not superficially visible.
It says in 1 Corinthians 2, “The natural man understandeth not the things of God, they are foolishness to him.” And in II Corinthians 4, it says, “That the god of this world has blinded the minds of them that believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ should shine unto them.” So, it isn’t that apparent. Even though the message is here and the Word is here, they don’t see it …
And there have been multitudinous times that I and you, as well, have gone and given the description of the treasure and the pearl to people who have turned their backs and walked away. And they do not care. They do not want that. They do not understand its inestimable value. It is not superficially perceived. That is why it says in Matthew 7:14, “That narrow is the way and few there be that find it.” And that is why it says in Matthew 11 that the kingdom is taken by the violent who take it by force. In other words, it must be pursued …
… That’s why it says in Luke 13:24, “Strive to enter in at the narrow gate for many I say will seek to enter in and shall not be able.”
Even the pearl gives this same idea. The pearl, while it is not hidden in the sense that the man doesn’t have to dig it out of someplace, it still, originally, had to be gained at the most incredible kind of circumstance, where the person dives into the sea, digs it out of the bottom, opens the shell, finds it there. And now the man pursues it all over the world till he finds it.
Third thought. The kingdom is personally appropriated, and this is the crux of the parables. The kingdom is personally appropriated. Now the previous two parables give us the idea that the kingdom is just influential, or it’s just large. It doesn’t say anything about the personal appropriation. And that’s why our Lord gives us these two. You have a man in verse 44. You have another man in verse 45. Now we’re dealing with individuals. And each of them finds something specifically for himself and appropriates it unto himself. Very important.
Now listen. This is to show us that you can be sort of in the kingdom, under the dominion of God and not be a member of the kingdom …
The wide world is under the rule of Jesus Christ, but not a part of His true kingdom …
It is not enough to be under the influence of the kingdom. It is not enough to just be under the influence of the church, or the influence of Christianity. It is not enough to just, as it were, lodge in the branches or be touched by its permeating influence. There must be personal appropriation. And at some point in time, in order to do that, men and women must come to the point where they realize the value of it.
You know, people spend their time looking for what is not valuable. I mean, it’s incredible. Now if you just boil it back down, it was pearls in those days, but today its diamonds …
And I picked up an article that came out of the Los Angeles Times [in 1982, the year of this sermon], describing how Consolidated Diamond Mines finds diamonds. And this, of course, is done on the seacoast of Southwest Africa and is an unceasing night and day hunt for diamonds. The article says, “Diamonds are found embedded in what are called marine terraces, ancient Atlantic beaches of wave-rounded boulders, stones, gravel and sand congeal into a concrete like substance called conglomerate …
“The sweepers may themselves find up to two thousand diamonds a week. And after it is scraped and dug and brushed and dynamited from bed rock, the conglomerate is hauled to a processing plant where its boulders, gravel, sand are pounded, milled washed, bounced crushed and grated away. And the remaining 15 percent concentrate is sluiced into a pharasilicone solution with a 3.0 specific gravity.” As if anyone cared. “And then anything with a 3.5 specific gravity sinks to the bottom and they separate it.”
Now, they go through what they call a spot-fluorescent operation, to find the diamonds and it goes into a bin and is sifted and sorted and cut and all of this and the end of it all, the managing director says, “We treat 180 million parts of material to get one part diamond” …
You know, basically, when you have a diamond, you know what you have? You have a diamond. That’s what you have. And it can’t do anything for you. Can’t make you feel better. Can’t give you peace. Can’t solve your problems. You just have a diamond …
And the things that people go through. And then in Job 28, after all of that, he says in verse 12, “Now that you’ve been looking for all that stuff, let me tell you this. What’s really valuable you never bother to look for, and that’s wisdom.” If you want to know the real value of things in life you’re not going to find them in those places. “You’re going to find them in the revelation of God,” the chapter goes on to say. You see, God offers men what is really valuable. And it’s incredible the extremes they go to to find what’s worthless.
As Henry says, ‘counterfeit’.
This ties in beautifully with the alternative First Reading for this Eighth Sunday after Trinity in 2023, 1 Kings 3:5-12, when God asked what Solomon wanted as king, excerpted:
3:6 And Solomon said, “You have shown great and steadfast love to your servant my father David, because he walked before you in faithfulness, in righteousness, and in uprightness of heart toward you; and you have kept for him this great and steadfast love, and have given him a son to sit on his throne today.
3:9 Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil; for who can govern this your great people?”
3:10 It pleased the Lord that Solomon had asked this.
3:11 God said to him, “Because you have asked this, and have not asked for yourself long life or riches, or for the life of your enemies, but have asked for yourself understanding to discern what is right,
3:12 I now do according to your word. Indeed I give you a wise and discerning mind; no one like you has been before you and no one like you shall arise after you.
MacArthur gives us the final three lessons of these parables:
… fourthly, the kingdom is the source of joy. If you’ll look at verse 44, it was for the joy that the man had when he found the treasure that he sold everything to buy it. It was joy. Now that is a very, very insightful addition to this Parable. It doesn’t have to say that in there. But it does and it’s very, very important. Because the Lord is acknowledging something that I have believed to be true all my life. And it’s confirmed here.
The basic desire of all human beings on the face of the earth is to be happy. That’s it. You say, “Well, I know some people who love misery.” Yes, they are happy being miserable, but it is happiness that they’re after. I don’t understand that approach, but if misery makes them happy, it still proves the point. The world is seeking for happiness, for joy. People want to feel good. The Lord knows that. Joy …
The Lord wants us to rejoice. The Bible says, “Rejoice always and again I say, Rejoice.” We should be the most rejoicing of all people, for we have found the treasure.
There’s a fifth principle, and this is a very, very helpful one. The kingdom may be entered from different circumstances. The kingdom may be entered from different circumstances. Now, there are some similarities. In both cases you have a man, both cases they find something of great value, both cases they understand its value, and in both cases they are willing to pay any price for it. So they’re very similar, aren’t they?
But there’s one big difference. In case number one, the man just comes across the treasure. In case number two, the man knows exactly what he’s looking for. Now even if number one was a treasure hunter, he didn’t know what he was looking for. Number two did.
Now, what does this tell us? Well, the man in the field, most likely, was not looking for treasure. He was going through whatever routine he went through, working, or plowing a field, or building something, or preparing some of the soil for whatever. And he was in the field and he was going along seeking sustenance for his life, doing what he did and he stumbled across a fortune.
Now, there are people who enter the kingdom like that aren’t there? Sure there are. The apostle Paul, was he seeking to enter the kingdom? Not on your life. He thought he was in it. He was on his way to Damascus to kill Christians. The next thing he knew, God blasted him out of heaven, he landed in the dirt, and he was redeemed. He was just doing his thing. He was just plowing his field and he stumbled into a fortune.
Well, how about the Samaritan woman? She was thirsty. She came down to a well to get a drink of water, went home redeemed. And then there was the man born blind, and all he really wanted out of life was to be able to see and he went away redeemed also. And, you know, there are some people who come to church to mock the preacher. And then they get saved. So you better be careful. There are people who aren’t particularly seeking that but they stumble into the treasure …
Now the last point. Now you get this one because this is so important. The kingdom is made personal by a transaction. The kingdom is made personal by a transaction. In both of these cases, the word buying or bought is involved. Now some people just really get nervous here and they say, “Wait a minute. You’re not telling us you buy your salvation. You’re not telling us they bought their salvation.”
Listen carefully. In a sense, the Bible says they did, but you have to understand in what sense. Now certainly, the story itself is a…a real treasure bought with money, a real pearl bought with money. But that’s only the story. The kingdom of God is bought, but you don’t take the money out of the parable into the kingdom. So whatever the exchange is here, it wouldn’t be money.
In fact, the Bible says you can’t buy your salvation with money. A rich man can no more buy his way into the kingdom than you can shove a camel through the eye of a needle. That isn’t the point. And the Bible tells us that salvation is God’s free gift, Romans 3. And it is not of works lest any man should boast. We don’t purchase it on our own with our own goods. But it is bought nonetheless …
… The transaction is this. You give up all you have for all He has. Did you get that? That is the essence of the transaction of salvation. I give up all I have and God gives me all He has.
Remember the accounts of the three men who asked Jesus if they could be His disciples. Jesus turned down each of them. One man did not want to give up his personal comforts. Another wanted to first ‘bury his father’ — wait for his inheritance. The third said he wanted to go home and say goodbye to his family.
MacArthur tells us why Jesus turned each of them down:
If you are not willing to give up, if it needs to be given up, your family, then you’re not going to enter the kingdom. “He that taketh not His cross and followeth after Me is not worthy of Me.” And here it comes, “He that findeth his life shall – ” what? – “lose it, and he that loseth his life, for My sake, shall find it.” There’s the transaction. You give up all you are and you receive all He is. That’s salvation. In Matthew chapter 16…and I could go on forever with scriptures on this. But 16:24, Jesus said unto His disciples, “If any man desires to come after Me – ” here is the transaction – “let him deny – ” whom? – “himself” …
We exchange ourselves, our sin, our will, our control of our lives for Christ’s leadership. Now, I don’t think that people who are saved, at the moment they’re saved understand all the ramifications of that. I don’t think they understand all the elements of that. But I believe true salvation is marked by a willingness to do that as that understanding unfolds.
Paul, a proud Pharisee as Saul, experienced that after his Damascene conversion:
An illustration of this is in Philippians chapter 3, and I want you to listen carefully to it. Here’s Paul. It says that he’s going to tell you what he had in his flesh. This was what he had that he would consider his riches. This would be his all that he possesses. This was his stuff. He says, “I was circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel. I was of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, as touching the law, a Pharisee.”
In other words, the stuff that was in his account was his Jewishness, his belonging to the tribe of Benjamin. And that was important because Benjamin was one of the good tribes, historically. And so he was identified as a true Jew, as a Pharisee. “He had zeal. He was righteous, according to the law, and he was blameless.” Boy, my Judaism, my self-righteousness, my holiness, and all of these things, that was my stock in trade. That was my reservoir.
But when confronted with Christ, what happened? “Those things that were gain to me, those I counted – ” what? – “loss.” And that’s the transaction. “Yes, I count all things but loss; I count them dung, manure, that I may gain Christ.” You see, there’s the man buying the treasure, right? There’s the man buying the pearl. He will liquidate everything. All of his self-righteousness, all of his own resources, all of his own self-will is abandoned to the affirmation of the lordship of Jesus Christ.
Tomorrow’s post concludes with the remaining verses from today’s reading.
I ended my post yesterday wondering what sort of sermons would be preached this Sunday. The one I heard was very Anglican, avoiding all the parables for a book reading about a very holy fictional lady who entered heaven. Hmm.
If you heard an equally lacklustre sermon on these important parables, I hope that the insight here from Matthew Henry and John MacArthur has been enlightening.
Forbidden Bible Verses will appear on Tuesday.
The Eighth Sunday after Trinity is July 30, 2023.
Readings for Year A can be found here. These are different to the ones I posted in 2020.
The Gospel is as follows (emphases mine):
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
13:31 He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field;
13:32 it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”
13:33 He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”
13:44 “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
13:45 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls;
13:46 on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.
13:47 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind;
13:48 when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad.
13:49 So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous
13:50 and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
13:51 “Have you understood all this?” They answered, “Yes.”
13:52 And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”
Commentary comes from Matthew Henry and John MacArthur.
Gospel readings for the past three Sundays in 2023 have come from Matthew 13, which has parables from our Lord from beginning to end. For years, I did not understand these pearls of wisdom. However, I do now and, if you are like me, you will, too. Properly explained, they make perfect sense. The first two are about the qualities of soil and crops. The second discusses what happens when weeds are thrown into the mix:
Readings for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity — Year A — and exegesis on the Gospel, Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23 (July 16, 2023, Parable of the Sower and significance of Matthew 13)
Readings for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity — exegesis on the Gospel, Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 (July 23, 2023)
It is important to keep in mind the two verses excluded from the Lectionary, Matthew 13:10-11. The King James Version has the better translation:
10 And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables?
11 He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.
In the Old Testament, God revealed to the Prophets His kingdom in all its fullness. However, only the New Testament tells us of the times in which we are living, where Christ rules in absentia.
John MacArthur explains:
Small things, profound results.
That’s really the lesson of these parables. And if you understand that you will understand what these parables are teaching. Now let me give you a little bit of background so that you’ll be able to feel with the disciples what they felt as Jesus was teaching them. The disciples, basically, believed that Jesus was the Messiah, the King. Messiah means anointed one and that implies King, that He was the greater Son of David, that He was the promised King who would set up the kingdom.
And for them, the kingdom had very clear definitions. It would come in glory. It would come in power. There would be pomp and circumstance. There would be great cataclysmic events. There would be the punishment of evil doers. They were looking for the music and the horses, the triumph, the wonder, the glory, the show, the publicity.
They really anticipated a blazing display of power and glory and majesty and might as the Messiah established His kingdom. But it didn’t happen that way. And that’s why they kept asking themselves, “Was this the Messiah?” They struggled with that all the way along. And He would tell them again and again that He was and they would still struggle with it. And all the way into the book of Acts they are still asking, “Will You at this time bring the kingdom?”
I mean, they never quite understood because their expectations were so different from what they were seeing …
… You see, they were looking for a kingdom of glory, a kingdom of power, a kingdom of majesty, a kingdom of worldwide wonder, a kingdom where the unbeliever and the rejecter was immediately devastated and destroyed. And it didn’t happen. And so Jesus teaches them why in Matthew 13.
He says, “Before that comes, here is a form of the kingdom which now exists which you must understand so you’re not confused.” And He calls it the mystery form, verse 11. That means it’s something that isn’t clear in the Old Testament. It was not laid out so clearly that you would understand.
It was hidden. And now I will unfold it to you. This is a form of the kingdom you never really understood. And so He gives them seven parables which explain to them the kingdom in its mystery form, prior to the millennial blaze of glory that they were anticipating.
Jesus put before them another parable, comparing the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed that someone sowed in his field (verse 31).
Although it is the smallest of seeds, when it has grown, it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches (verse 32).
Matthew Henry’s commentary explains how great things come from small beginnings:
That it is commonly very weak and small at first, like a grain of mustard-seed, which is one of the least of all seeds. The kingdom of the Messiah, which was now in the setting up, made but a small figure; Christ and the apostles, compared with the grandees of the world, appeared like a grain of mustard-seed, the weak things of the world. In particular places, the first breaking out of the gospel light is but as the dawning of the day; and in particular souls, it is at first the day of small things, like a bruised reed. Young converts are like lambs that must be carried in his arms, Isa 40 11. There is a little faith, but there is much lacking in it (1 Thess 3 10), and the groanings such as cannot be uttered, they are so small; a principle of spiritual life, and some motion, but scarcely discernible.
MacArthur recaps the aforementioned parables about the soil and how Jesus shifted to a different set of comparisons about the kingdom:
The first two parables talk about the conflict. They talk about the antagonism of evil and good in the kingdom. They talk about the right and the wrong fighting one another. But the next two talk about the victory of the right. That, in the end, the little tiny mustard seed fills the earth, the little piece of leaven, leavens the whole loaf of bread.
What started very small ends up profoundly influencing everything. And so, we move now…watch this carefully…from the two parables that describe the nature of the kingdom; it will be with believers and unbelievers, side by side, to the two parables that describe the power of the kingdom, the power of the kingdom. In spite of its smallness, it will sweep the world.
You know, there’s another way to look at this. And I was kind of struck by this as I thought through so many things regarding these parables. The first parable of the soils talks basically about the breadth of the kingdom. The seed is sown in the field and the field is the what? The world, the breadth of the kingdom. The second parable talks about the length of the kingdom. It will go on until the harvest. The third parable, the parable of the mustard seed talks about the height of the kingdom. We could talk about extent. The fourth parable of the leaven talks about the depth of the kingdom as it is hidden in the dough and influences from within.
So, you have the kingdom seen in its breadth and its length and its height and its depth. The Lord is describing it in every dimension. And after He has done all of this, the next two parables He talks about its personal appropriation in the life of an individual, after having described its general characteristics, marvelous progression of thought.
The mustard seed was highly valued in our Lord’s day not only for its value as a flavouring for food but also certain medicinal purposes. Out of all the seeds that were planted in that part of the world for edible purposes, the mustard seed was the smallest.
Everyone knew the potential for the mustard seed, as MacArthur explains:
This particular mustard seed causes to grow a bush, a shrub we would call it, like a garden plant. Normally it grows to about seven to eight feet in height. And that’s a good size garden plant. That’s a good size herb, and you’ll notice it’s put in the herb family, lachanon in the Greek, and we’ll discuss that in a moment.
But very frequently it will grow to 12 to 15 feet in height. And there are many testimonies that have been written by eyewitnesses in the east who have seen these fields, both now and in past generations, who have testified to the fact that they get to be 15 feet high. One writer talks about them being higher than a horse and rider. Another writer says that the horse and the rider can ride under the branches of the mustard bush. Now, that’s a big bush.
And what the Lord is saying is you have no real connection apparent between the smallness of the seed and the largeness of the end result. You have the very smallest seed issuing in the very largest bush that can grow. You can plant a barley seed and you’ll get a barley plant that’s fairly good size. You can plant a seed of wheat or of corn and you get a fairly good size thing. But you plant this seed and you get a 15-foot high bush big enough to ride a horse under. That’s His point.
Detractors say that Jesus did not know what He was talking about when he said that the mustard seed was the smallest of seeds.
MacArthur refutes that by saying He spoke of seeds yielding edible things, not just any plant:
I say He’s right. Can we prove that? I think so. Notice in verse 32 the word herbs, lachanon. That word refers to garden vegetables, garden greens that are grown purposely to be eaten. It is used in Romans 14 in that regard. It refers to that which is planted as a crop to be eaten, in opposition to wild plants. These are plants sown purposely. So the seed, then, is a seed sown, agriculturally, to produce edible vegetables and greens.
Now listen, of all of the seeds that were sown in the east, or are sown there today, in 1982, to produce edible products, the mustard seed was and still is the smallest. Jesus is speaking within a framework in which what He says is exactly correct. And recently this was affirmed by a man by the name of Dr. L.H. Shinners. He’s the director of the herbarium at SMU in Dallas. They have the largest herbarium in the southwest, 318 thousand botanical specimens from all over the world. He is a regular lecturer at the Smithsonian Institute.
And he said, quote, “The mustard seed would indeed have been the smallest of those to have been noticed by the people at the time of Christ. The principle field crops, barley, wheat, lentils and beans, have much larger seeds as do other plants which might have been present as weeds and so forth. There are various weeds and wild flowers belonging to the mustard, amaranth, pigweed, chickweed family with seeds that are small or smaller than mustard, but they would not have been known or noticed by the inhabitants. They are wild and they certainly would not have been planted as a crop.”
Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t it wonderful when Jesus talks about seeds, He’s right? If I can trust Him with seeds, I can trust Him with eternity. Shinners went on to say, “The only modern crop plant…the only modern crop plant in existence with smaller seeds than mustard is tobacco, and this plant of American origin wasn’t grown in the old world until the sixteenth century or later.” So, when Jesus said a man sowed the smallest seed that’s ever sowed, He was dead right.
Henry discusses the mustard tree and compares it to the Church:
The church is like a great tree, in which the fowls of the air do lodge; God’s people have recourse to it for food and rest, shade and shelter. In particular persons, the principle of grace, if true, will persevere and be perfected at last: growing grace will be strong grace, and will bring much to pass. Grown Christians must covet to be useful to others, as the mustard-seed when grown is to the birds; that those who dwell near or under their shadow may be the better for them, Hos 14 7.
MacArthur says that this mustard tree of Christianity has benefited both believers and unbelievers alike in Western society:
Now that’s what you have to understand that as you teach the kingdom, sometimes the kingdom refers, specifically, to the true saints in the kingdom. Sometimes it’s bigger than that. And in this sense, it’s bigger. You’re looking at the kingdom in terms of God’s sovereign rulership over everything. And think of it this way. Wherever Christianity flourishes, the people who climb in the branches prosper because of the flourishing of Christianity even though they don’t know Christ.
America is what America is today because of its Christian heritage and there are lots of birds in our bush. They’re not Christians but they benefit, don’t they? The dignity of life in America, the jurisprudence system, the law, the sense of right and wrong that’s traditionally been ours, education, free enterprise, the dignity of a woman, the caring of children.
All of these rise out of Christian truth, every great reformation, every reform movement in history has had at its roots biblical truth. Wherever the kingdom has extended, you have an environment of protection for the people who aren’t even in that kingdom truly. It’s kind of like in…in macrocosm what I Corinthians 7:14 is in microcosm, where it says if you’re married to an unbeliever and the unbeliever wants to stay, let him stay because he is sanctified in the presence of a believer.
In other words, an unbeliever married to a believer benefits just by hanging around somebody receiving the blessing of God. I mean, if I’m married to you and you’re not a Christian and God’s pouring out blessing on me, you’re going to get some of it, if only for here and now. And so you’re sheltered in my tree. And on a macrocosm level, when the kingdom expands around the world, the people who find lodging within that kingdom…listen, you can look at it anyway you want. It all comes out the same…are the most blessed people in terms of human life.
You contrast what it is to be in part of western culture under the influence of Christianity as opposed, for example, to being in India or being in an aboriginal part of the world where Christianity’s never been, where the mustard seed bush hasn’t grown. That’s what He’s saying. The kingdom will grow so that many will find lodging in its branches.
And what the parable is trying to tell us is that in spite of the opposition, in spite of the three bad soils, in suite of the presence of the darnels [weeds], we’re going to win. The kingdom is going to grow and grow and grow and grow and grow. That’s the promise of the Lord to encourage us.
MacArthur says that Jesus wanted His disciples to grasp that this would not be the messianic kingdom foretold in the Old Testament. This mystery period of the Church would begin in a small and unassuming way then grow to be something impressive:
It’s going to start small. Can you imagine how this is important to tell the disciple? I mean, they were standing in a little group, being literally smothered by oppression and rejection and blasphemy, and they were saying, “Well, there’s just a little handful of us against the whole world.” And Jesus says, “It’s okay. That’s the plan. Everything starts from something very, very small.” And boy, they were small.
They were indeed small, as Jesus was when He came to earth to save us. That, too, took time:
Think of a manger, a feed trough. Think of a stable, smelly animals, people wandering around ankle deep in the manure of that filthy place, and a baby born in obscurity in a country that was nothing but an infant wiggling in the arms of imperial Rome, with two districts, Judea and Galilee, that were just dots on the earth. And Samaria which was less than the other two. And think of Nazareth where Jesus spent thirty years uncouth, uncultured, uneducated Nazareth.
And think of the disciples. All of them put together wouldn’t add up to a mustard seed. They were so small, so inadequate, so inconsequential, so unqualified, so fearful, so faithless, so weak. And that was the kingdom that was planted. But in the breast of that little infant in that feed trough in the manger was eternal life that would burst forth into an eternal kingdom. The seed was planted, small beginning.
You see, this is a marvelous truth because this is not seen in the Old Testament. This is mystery revealed. It starts small, just that little tiny group. And when Jesus ascended back into heaven, there were just 120 of them. If you talk to a pastor today who has a church of 120, he feels cheated. You’ll hear people, “Well, our church is so small, we’ve only got 120.” But when the kingdom started it only had 120, and so far it’s doing very well. Before it’s done it will cover the entire globe.
MacArthur brings us to the enormity of Christianity around the globe:
That takes us to the second lesson. The kingdom started very small, the kingdom ends very large. Very simple outline, right? It started very small, ends very large. The prophets saw a great kingdom. I mean, if you go through the Old Testament prophets and you read about what they looked for in the kingdom, it’s…its extent is staggering. For example, in Psalm 78…in 72 rather, verse 8, it says, “He shall have dominion from sea to sea, and the abundance of peace as long as the moon endures. He shall have dominion from sea to sea from the river to the ends of the earth that they dwell in the wilderness shall bow before Him, and His enemies shall lick the dust.
“The kings of Tarshish and of the islands shall bring presents, the kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts. All kings shall fall down before Him, all nations shall serve Him.” Now that’s the extent of the kingdom. That’s how big the bush gets. I mean, from a very little seed to a massive bush and that’s the thing the Lord wants you to see. That you get the largest result from the smallest beginning in the case of the kingdom.
Isaiah saw the same end result. Chapter 54 of Isaiah verse 2, “Enlarge the place of thy tent, let them stretch forth the curtains of thine habitation, spare not, lengthen thy cords and strengthen thy stakes.” You better get this tent bigger and bigger and bigger, something is expanding. “Thou shalt break forth on the right hand, thou shalt break forth on the left, thy seed shall inherit the nations.” Messiah’s kingdom shall extend from shore to shore, from one of the globe to the other. Jeremiah saw it. Amos saw it. Micah saw it. Zechariah saw it.
And I could read you scripture after scripture after scripture that the kingdom of Jesus Christ, the kingdom of God would stretch from sea to sea, from land to land, cover the globe. And we know this to be true, don’t we? Ultimately, the millennial kingdom comes; Jesus reigns over the whole earth. That’s coming. In fact, it says in Revelation 11:15, “The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever.”
Then Jesus told them another parable, of the woman who made bread by mixing yeast with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened; such is the kingdom of heaven (verse 33).
Yeast is used in good and bad examples in the Bible, especially in the New Testament. The idea is that yeast is an influencer — for good and bad, depending on the situation.
In that era — and, in fact, throughout most of history — leaven was used to make bread rise. Yeast was not properly invented for baking until relatively recently. French speakers will know that ‘levain’ means ‘leaven’. It refers to sourdough, not modern yeast. ‘Levure’ is the French word for yeast. Professional French bakers will tell you there is a big difference between the two, and it is not unusual for them to incorporate some sourdough into their doughs for extra flavour and a better all-round texture, including crust.
But I digress.
Henry describes this parable as spiritual leaven working on the soft — rather than the hard — human heart, readying it to receive Christ:
The leaven was hid in three measures of meal. The heart is, as the meal, soft and pliable; it is the tender heart that is likely to profit by the word: leaven among corn unground does not work, nor does the gospel in souls unhumbled and unbroken for sin: the law grinds the heart, and then the gospel leavens it. It is three measures of meal, a great quantity, for a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump. The meal must be kneaded, before it receive the leaven; our hearts, as they must be broken, so they must be moistened, and pains taken with them to prepare them for the word, that they may receive the impressions of it. The leaven must be hid in the heart (Ps 119 11), not so much for secrecy (for it will show itself) as for safety; our inward thought must be upon it, we must lay it up, as Mary laid up the sayings of Christ, Luke 2 51. When the woman hides the leaven in the meal, it is with an intention that it should communicate its taste and relish to it; so we must treasure up the word in our souls, that we may be sanctified by it, John 17 17.
Henry tells us how spiritual leaven works:
The leaven thus hid in the dough, works there, it ferments; the word is quick and powerful, Heb 4 12. The leaven works speedily, so does the word, and yet gradually. What a sudden change did Elijah’s mantle make upon Elisha! 1 Kings 19 20. It works silently and insensibly (Mark 4 26), yet strongly and irresistibly: it does its work without noise, for so is the way of the Spirit, but does it without fail. Hide but the leaven in the dough, and all the world cannot hinder it from communicating its taste and relish to it, and yet none sees how it is done, but by degrees the whole is leavened.
No doubt we feel as the disciples did, sometimes hopeless at seeing and hearing about all the wickedness in the world.
MacArthur tells us that the disciples had it even worse trying to reconcile their belief in Jesus as the Messiah with all the rejection He received. This, too, is relevant to the parable of the leaven:
And that is why in Romans 14:17, Paul says, “The kingdom of God is not food and drink, it is not outward, it is righteousness and joy and peace in the Holy Spirit.” It is internal. You see on another occasion, in Luke 17:20, they said to Him, in effect, “Well, if You’re a King, where’s the kingdom?” And He said, “The kingdom of God is – ” where? – “within you.” In your midst; you just don’t perceive it because it isn’t discerned by human perception, but I’m a King nonetheless.
Now, the disciples are sort of scratching their heads and saying, “He’s the King. You can’t deny it. But where’s the kingdom?” Because they were looking for the outward display and they have just gone through the horrible rejection of chapter 12 where He’s been blasphemed and called Satanic. And so the Lord says, “Look, I’m going to teach you now how to understand this period of My reign, this period of My kingdom.”
The future will yet unfold the full glory of the kingdom in its outward early millennial majesty, such as Zechariah and Micah prophesied. But for now, there is a form of the kingdom which He calls, in verse 11 of Matthew 13, the mystery.
MacArthur sums up our Lord’s teaching thus far in Matthew 13:
The first two describe the nature of the kingdom, the nature of the kingdom. The parable of the soils, the parable of the wheat and the tares, and the nature of the kingdom is that good and evil will co-exist. There will be soil that rejects; there will be the true soil.
In other words, there will be people who refuse the kingdom, people who receive the kingdom. The second parable says and they should grow together until the final judgment. So, you’re not to expect the rebels to be condemned, you’re to expect the rebels and Christ rejecters to be devastated, burnt up, consumed or whatever. They’re going to go along together. Now, having said that, He then discusses the power of the kingdom in the next two.
And He says, “In spite of that, in spite of the coexisting of the good and the evil, in spite of the tremendous power of sin and the power of Satan, in spite of the very massive oversowing of tares and the wheat, in spite of the fact that three of the four soils are evil and rejecting, still the power of the kingdom is so great it’s going to grow. From a small beginning like a mustard seed, it will become a massive tree. From the littlest seed it becomes the biggest bush. And like a little tiny piece of leaven, hidden in a massive pile of dough, it permeates everything, and influences everything.
Now, this is a hopeful word, beloved, after two parables that were not hopeful at all. The first two parables told us we’re going to have to allow evil to go along in this world. And I’ll be very honest with you, I hate sin. And there are many times when I sense that Davidic heart where David cried out for God to destroy the sinner and destroy sin.
And there are times when you just wish you could just act as God’s executioner and purge. But the first two parables said no. No, that’s not for you to do. This is the time of God’s grace. Judgment awaits the future. So they go together. That’s a message of…of fearfulness, of intimidation, of distress because we tolerate all this stuff.
But the message of hope comes in the next two parables. In spite of that the kingdom’s going to grow, and finally, it’s going to fill the earth. And I believe these two parables actually usher us right into the millennium when the bush is at its largest and the trees are…and the tree is filled, as it were, with birds, when the leaven has leavened the entire lump. And we look forward to that. And so these are parables of great hope, great hope.
By the way, the next two parables also have a common subject. They’re about the person appropriation of the kingdom. The first four see the kingdom in general; the next two see it in specific. So the first two parables speak of the nature of the kingdom, the next two the power of the kingdom, and the next two the appropriation of the kingdom. That’s very important. Because when you interpret this parable, you want to interpret it in the homiletic consistency that our Lord uses as He unfolds these parables.
In discussing the parable of the leaven, MacArthur says that the amount is quite small compared to the large amount of flour:
Now, the leaven is a very small piece, very small. But you’ll notice that it is hidden in three measures of meal.
Now, that is a massive amount of dough. You want to know how much? Three measures of meal is the equivalent of an ephah. Aren’t you happy about that? And by the way, it was not uncommon for them to prepare that much bread. Because it was the staple of life and the families were large, and the servants in the house and everybody, and so they made great amounts of bread.
Just as a footnote I did a little checking when I first saw that three measures of meal, I was sort of stunned by it. I mean, it would make bread that would be just an almost inconceivable amount. And so I went back and found that when the Lord and two angels in Genesis 18 visited Sarah and Abraham, Sarah made bread. You know how much she used? Three measures of meal.
And then I went into Judges chapter 6, verse 19, and I found in the case of Gideon that bread was prepared using three measures of meal, or one ephah. So this must have been the common recipe. I mean, if that’s the way Sarah made bread for God, no matter…no wonder they just kept it up, right? Now, the large amount of meal, I think, is indicative of the tremendous enormity of the task accomplished by a little bit of leaven.
It’s very parallel to the smallest seed resulting in the largest bush. Here you have the little tiny piece of leaven, ultimately extending its impact and effect to a massive amount of dough …
But, here’s another thing to keep in mind. The leaven influences a massive amount of dough. Secondly, it influences it positively. It has a positive affect. It makes it better and makes it more tasty. It has a good influence, ultimately, on it. Makes the bread better.
Another thing we see here is that she hid this…this in it. The leaven has to be inserted; it can’t sit on the counter and yell at the bread. God didn’t approach His extending…His influence in the world by standing on a cloud and hollering down, you see. The leaven has to be injected. It has to be placed within, and then it begins to permeate, and permeate and permeate. Now this was something that every Jew would know, everyone would understand, this is not very difficult.
MacArthur gives us the lessons from this parable, which, apparently, confuses a lot of Christians:
What are the lessons? It’s a very simple story with very simple lessons. And yet I’m telling you, so far of all the parables I’ve studied, people are more confused on this one than any other parable, and it is so simple. If I didn’t tell you what the alternative view was to what I’m going to give you and you had never heard it, I don’t believe you’d ever guess it. It’s that obscure in my thinking. But I’m going to tell you what it is so in case you’re confronted you can help those folks who don’t agree with me.
Now key truths. Here we go. Here are the lessons. Number one, the power of the kingdom is great. That’s the lesson. The power of the kingdom is great. I mean, a little tiny bit of leaven influences the whole mass of dough. That’s what He’s saying. The fact that the kingdom begins small is not necessarily debilitating because it has the power to influence everything.
The meal [flour] here, the measures of meal, the dough is like the world. And you plant the kingdom of heaven in the middle of the world, and as small as it is, it will influence the whole thing because inherent in it is a bubbling, fomenting, supernatural power. I believe, without question, the leaven represents the good influence of Christ, His kingdom, His gospel, His subjects in the world.
First of all, I believe that because of the way the Lord laid out the parables. The first two have spoken of the nature of the kingdom. The next two, I believe, of its power to overcome the evil that is present. Now some people, at this point…I’ll tell you the other and more dominant view. Some people think the leaven means evil and that what the parable is teaching is that evil is going to be in the kingdom permeating the kingdom.
Well, I have several problems with that. Problem number one, it doesn’t fit the layout of the parables. We’ve already dealt with the evil in the world in the first two parables, now we’re dealing with the power of the kingdom to overcome that. So, it’s inconsistent with our Lord’s pattern.
Secondly, the verse says this, “The kingdom of heaven is like – ” what? – “leaven.” Now if I just asked you, plain and simple, what the leaven refers to based on that statement, what would you say? The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, therefore the leaven refers to what? Good, class, the kingdom of heaven. And you really don’t have to be Phi Beta Kappa to figure that out.
And it seems to me patently obvious that the kingdom of heaven is like leaven which means that the leaven refers to the kingdom of heaven. And I have to believe that, in that sense, He is seeing the kingdom of heaven in its good sense. The kingdom of heaven is good, and its influence is that which makes what it influences better as leaven does with bread.
At this point, now, we want to keep in mind what is the major argument of those who make leaven be evil here. And this is their argument. That leaven everywhere else in the New Testament always refers to evil; therefore, here there must be consistency. And they will say that Jesus even uses it to refer to evil. Now let me take issue with that. Hang on to your seats, those of you who have taught that that way. Leaven inherently never refers to evil. That is not its intention.
You say, “Oh, wait a minute. It says in Luke 12:1, Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees which is hypocrisy.” Listen, the leaven there is not so much the hypocrisy itself as the influence that it has. You see, leaven is only an analogy that is good when applied to permeating influence. You understand? So the point of using the leaven to describe the hypocrisy of the Pharisees was that the hypocrisy of the Pharisees affects them the way leaven effects bread.
It permeates everything they do. So that leaven is not an illustration of sin, it is an illustration of permeation. That’s very important. They…they were permeated with hypocrisy of which leaven is an apt analogy, so that the analogy is an analogy of permeation. Now if you take leaven any further than that, you’ve destroyed its analogy. It is not simply an analogy of something evil.
Now when the Bible wants to talk about something that’s evil it calls it darkness, or blackness, right? We…we see those terms for evil. The absence of light, because that’s a sort of static definition of evil. But when the Bible uses leaven as an illustration, it’s talking about something that permeates. That is the usefulness of that analogy, and I believe that’s the way we have to see it here. It speaks of something that permeates.
Now may I add another footnote? And this is something you might…it might go right by some of you, but for some of you it will be helpful. You don’t take analogies and absolutize them into theological terms. In other words, leaven is only an illustration and does not have an absolute theological meaning. You can’t…you can’t assign it an absolute theological meaning so that every time you have leaven, you got sin. I mean, that’s only an analogy. That’s only an illustration.
Some of us rightly wonder about the use or prohibition of leavened and unleavened bread in the Bible.
MacArthur helps us out:
… you’ll really have a lot of trouble when you get into the Old Testament and you get to the feast of Pentecost [Shavuot] and all the Jews are commanded by God to offer God leavened bread. Now you’ve got a problem. Are they offering evil to God? You see, you can’t do that with a simple analogy or illustration. So you’ve got to go beyond the term itself. Its basic meaning is permeation; that is the analogy in its usefulness.
And as you look in the New Testament, it’s used several times. It’s used of different sins. Not just hypocrisy but different things. It’s used of…of legalism in Galatians 5:9. It’s used of immorality in I Corinthians 5. So it could be hypocrisy, or legalism, or immorality. It could be anything that influences, that permeates. That’s the reason leaven is used. It is only an illustration of that which permeates. So, when you come here, you can’t take leaven and give it an absolute theological meaning of evil, you have to use it as an analogy.
And it is an analogy of that which permeates. And there’s just as much right to use it of an…as an analogy of that which permeates for good as an analogy of that which permeates for evil, even though it may never have been used anywhere else in the New Testament as an analogy of that which is good. Do you understand what I’m saying? The Lord can still use it once for that. So you can’t extrapolate off of the other uses.
Now let me give you another reason why. Look at 1 Corinthians chapter 5, 1 Corinthians chapter 5. And I’ll just give you an insight that might help you to see this. Verse 6, Paul in indicting the Corinthian church for their sin, uses an illustration here of leaven. He says, “Don’t you know – ” verse 6, 1 Corinthians 5 – “that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?”
Now that is simply a proverbial statement. That’s just a saying. It’s a saying that…it’s an excellent analogy. You get a little bit of influence and it’s going to mess up a whole lot of stuff. Now we have a very similar one that the Bible doesn’t use, our little analogy is one rotten apple what? Spoils the barrel. Only our analogy goes further because we’ve got what kind of an apple? A rotten one. So it influences for evil.
But leaven is neutral. It depends on how you want to apply it. Leaven really makes bread better but it can be used to speak of anything that ultimately influences a large mass from a small beginning. Permeating influence. But look at this. Now he applies this in verse 7. Here’s how he uses the analogy. “Purge out the old leaven that you may be a new lump.” Now, you’ve a lump of dough, right? And what is he talking about?
He’s saying, “You’re a Christian now. You’re a new lump of dough, right? Don’t put into that new lump leaven.” Now where did that leaven come from? It comes from an old loaf, right? So when you were baking bread back here, you took off a piece, put it aside and let it ferment, and you stick it in that new one. You know what Paul is saying? You’re a new creature in Christ. Don’t bring any of the stuff from that former life in to influence that new life. See what he’s saying? Beautiful illustration.
It’s the illustration of continuity. Cut off the continuity is what he’s saying. Because when you bake bread, you’d bake this loaf, pull off a little piece, start the next. That’s what’s called…and people who bake bread talk about starters, don’t they? And you just keep…one is coming from another. He says, “Cut it off right there. And start here with a brand new loaf.”
And verse 8…or verse 7, rather. “For Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us so let us keep the feast – ” now he’s talking in spiritual terms – “Not with old leaven, malice and wickedness, the stuff of our former life, but with unleavened bread.” Now what is this all about? Boy, every…every Jew who read that would know. Christ is our Passover. Well, what does he talk about that for?
Now listen very carefully. Back in Exodus chapter 12…don’t look it up, just listen…God said, “You’re going to leave Egypt, I’m going to take you out of Egypt, out of captivity, been here 400 years. And when you go I want you to have a Passover feast.” Remember that? And the angel of death will come by, and the blood on the doorpost, and so forth, you’ll be safe. “When the angel comes by, and so forth, you’ll be passed by, but I want you to keep a Passover feast to remember that the God of grace passed over you, spared you in mercy.”
Now, when you keep the Passover feast, you use what kind of bread? Unleavened bread. And you keep that feast for seven days; unleavened bread for seven days. Why? Well, Exodus 12:39 talks about the fact that they had to leave in haste. But more than that, there was symbolism there as interpreted by I Corinthians chapter 5. What was the symbolism? You’re leaving Egypt. Here’s Egypt, you’re leaving Egypt. You are a new people. You’re going to a promised land.
Don’t make leavened bread. Why? Because if you make leavened bread out here, where is your little lump of leaven going to come from? The bread you made where? In Egypt. Cut off the cord. You see, the unleavened bread became a symbol of the disconnection from Egypt. Cut that off. And after seven days, then you can begin again to make your leavened bread.
And then in Leviticus it says, “When you finally come to the time of the feast of Pentecost – ” Leviticus 23 – “then offer to Me that leavened bread.” Now if leaven was always sinful, there’s no reason why God would have them offer it to Him. And there’s no reason why God would limit that unleavened bread thing to a seven-day period. Because if leaven always meant evil then they went through the rest of their life demonstrating God’s tolerance for evil every time they made bread.
But you see, it was a point of continuity. And the reason they were to cut off that leavening process was to symbolize that they were starting all over again with no Egyptian influence. They had a tough time letting go of Egypt, didn’t they? They got out in the wilderness, they started complaining ... But they wanted to go back and get all the stuff they had in Egypt. And the Lord wanted to cut that cord, you see. That was the whole point.
Now when you come to 1 Corinthians 5, you understand what he’s saying. Now in a spiritual sense, Christ is our Passover, right? He has delivered us. And now that we’ve been delivered out of our old life into a new life, don’t take any of that leaven with you. So leaven is not so much the definition of a sin as such, but of the permeating influences that come from our past life. Don’t…don’t influence your present life with the stuff from the past.
So, leaven speaks of that permeating influence. You know, the Rabbis used to have sayings about that. The Rabbis used to talk about the fact that leaven was not necessarily negative, but even positive. One Rabbi said this, “Great is peace in that peace is to the earth as leaven is to the dough.” See, they used it in a good sense. It was proverbial and could be used in any way.
You might want to know another interesting little note. When a Jewish mother’s daughter was getting married, the mother would give her gifts. And one of the gifts that a mother gave a Jewish girl was a little piece of leaven from the last dough made before the wedding. And the girl was to start her first loaf in her new marriage with that starter from her mother. What did that symbolize? It symbolized that all the best, all the good, all the blessedness of that family was to be carried into the next family. And the passing of a righteous seed on to the next generation was symbolized in that very simple Jewish custom of passing on leaven to the daughter. It speaks of continuity at that point.
All I’m saying is that the way leaven is used in the Bible is very broad. And it is a very excellent analogy of permeating influence. And so, we see that our Lord uses it, I believe, in that very same manner here. Sure it’s used in the New Testament to speak of evil and its permeating influence but are we saying that God can’t use it, also, to speak of the influence of good? Especially when He says, “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven,” and especially when it’s in a couplet of parables which obviously are geared to show how the kingdom’s power is extended as over against the influence of evil given in the first two parables.
I’ll stop here and continue tomorrow.
How many Sunday sermons will have this much detail in them? I doubt very many will.
Be blessed knowing that you have a good explanation of our Lord’s parables thus far from Matthew Henry and John MacArthur over the past three Sundays. I wish I had known this information decades ago.
My ongoing series on Nigel Farage’s bank account debacle continues.
Congratulations to him, because not only did Dame Alison Rose resign as the head of NatWest, but the head of their subsidiary Coutts, Peter Flavel, resigned on Thursday, July 27, 2023.
I wrote about Dame Alison Rose’s resignation yesterday. Paul Thwaite has replaced her as interim NatWest CEO.
Little did I know that more news would follow that afternoon.
Peter Flavel resigns
Yesterday, I wrote:
The Times‘s view — the main editorial — also points the finger at Coutts’s chief Peter Flavel, who has managed to keep an exceedingly low profile throughout all of this …
As usual, Guido Fawkes beat many in the mainstream media in giving us breaking news.
At 14:11 on Thursday, he posted ‘Coutts CEO Peter Flavel Resigns’ (red emphases his):
Coutts chief executive Peter Flavel has resigned, less than 48 hours after his boss Alison Rose also quit for briefing false information – and breaching client confidentiality – to the BBC about Nigel Farage’s finances. He announced the inevitable this afternoon:
In the handling of Mr Farage’s case we have fallen below the bank’s high standards of personal service. As CEO of Coutts it is right that I bear ultimate responsibility for this, which is why I am stepping down.
Another scalp for Nigel…
Guido later posted Farage’s tweet at the news:
Guido ended his post with this:
NatWest Group chairman Howard Davies is still clinging to his job. For now…
More on Sir Howard Davies below.
At 2:15, The Telegraph published ‘Coutts chief steps down over Nigel Farage de-banking scandal’ (purple emphases mine):
Peter Flavel, who became boss of Coutts in 2016, said the treatment of Mr Farage had “fallen below the bank’s high standards of personal service.”
Paul Thwaite, the interim chief executive of NatWest, which owns Coutts, said: “I have agreed with Peter Flavel that he will step down as Coutts CEO and CEO of our Wealth Businesses by mutual consent with immediate effect.
“Whilst I will be personally sorry to lose Peter as a colleague, I believe this is the right decision for Coutts and the wider group” …
Mr Flavel said: “I am exceptionally proud of my seven years at Coutts and I want to thank the team that have built it into such a high performing business. In the handling of Mr Farage’s case we have fallen below the bank’s high standards of personal service. As CEO of Coutts it is right that I bear ultimate responsibility for this, which is why I am stepping down.”
His column inches are so short because he lay below the radar the whole time. Yes, he should have responded to Nigel Farage about his account closure. However cowardly his behaviour was though, he is the sort of man who believes that discretion is the better part of valour. No doubt he will get a nice payoff and be off to equally sunny climes in his career sooner rather than later. I’m not saying that in support of him, but discretion and integrity are important in life. It’s a pity he lacked integrity.
Note that NatWest’s first rule is to act with integrity. It’s a shame the person who posted this screenshot did not highlight the fourth point:
GB News reaction
On Thursday evening, GB News had several fascinating discussions on the Farage farrago.
On Dewbs & Co, Michelle Dewberry had as her panel Lord Moylan and historian David Starkey. Talk about a dream team. A woman even emailed Michelle to say how much she enjoyed listening to the two men:
They discussed Farage and NatWest in the opening segment, which begins at the 6:03 mark. Starkey criticised people like ex-BBC presenter Emily Maitlis for decrying Farage in this scandal.
Starkey is a Coutts customer. He said that the bank sent a letter to its customers saying that the bank ‘must not be brought into disrepute’ and said that the word ‘disrepute’ was used rather broadly there. He said he was surprised he hadn’t been cancelled. He is rather controversial on the conservative, traditional side of things.
He said that, when looking at the timeline of events, it was only when Farage threatened to go public that NatWest offered him an account with them to replace his Coutts accounts. Starkey then discussed Sir Howard Davies saying that he got the sack from the London School of Economics, which he headed, for giving Colonel Gaddafi’s son an unearned PhD in return for a sizeable donation from Gaddafi’s son’s foundation.
I mentioned this yesterday:
Alistair Osborne, one of The Times‘s business columnists, predicts ‘NatWest clearout looms after Farage fiasco’:
…
As for Davies, who’s on his way out anyway, his judgment has proved a throwback to the days when, as director of the London School of Economics, he accepted a £300,000 donation from a foundation run by Colonel Gaddafi’s son. The rest of the board — mainly a bunch of bankers, including Mark Seligman, ex of Credit Suisse, as the senior independent director — have also shown themselves incapable of governing a bank. Farage reckons they should all go. Again, he’s right. After this fiasco, a clearout looms.
Then Starkey told us that Davies was the first head of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)! Talk about failing upwards.
Both Starkey and Moylan emphasised how important client confidentiality was in banking. Moylan said that he worked for NatWest for a time 30 years ago. Staff received a regular employee bulletin. Under the social news of who got married was a list of people who were no longer employed by the bank. Moylan said that list of people either ‘had their hand in the till’ or broke confidentiality rules. Interesting.
Farage was up next. He was live in Bury that evening:
His editorial (5:43 mark) was about his lack of contact with Peter Flavel. At the 8:30 mark, he discussed Barclays’s call with shareholders that took place earlier that day and said that every question the shareholders asked was about de-banking.
Jacob Rees-Mogg’s State of the Nation followed:
I’ve posted the whole video because it’s excellent. In his editorial, he debunks the latest climate change report, then goes on to discuss climate change with his sister Annunziata and the founder of Labour’s radical wing, Momentum. Later on, he has a woman from PETA discussing Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s household rule that the Starmers’ children were not allowed fish or meat protein until they reached the age of 10. Rees-Mogg reminded his sister of how fond she was of processed ham as a youngster: ‘She could eat it by the hundredweight’.
The pertinent segment here is his discussion about ESG with businessman and ex-MEP Ben Habib:
Habib says that ESG runs everything and that the FCA have a prominent part to play in financial companies’ adherence because of reporting laws made in 2006 and 2008. That, incidentally, was when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did their turns as Labour Prime Ministers. Habib says that financial corporation reports must include a section on how well the firms comply with ESG and how they will improve their adherence. He thinks the Government should change the law to relax the hold that ESG has on not only finance but other sectors of our society. He said that it should go by its other name, Diversity, Inclusion and Equity, because DIE is what is killing our social relationships. He said that he had been raised colour-blind — the way Martin Luther King advocated — but said that every aspect of DIE is advancing one group of people or policies over another.
On that note, NatWest is ‘purpose’-driven. Here is a screenshot I obtained which shows Dame Alison Rose championing ESG:
It is also a huge deal to qualify as a B Corp in the UK. They espouse ESG and DIE values and have given them the clever name of JEDI, the ‘J’ referring to ‘justice’, as in social justice.
Dan Wootton’s show came next. His editorial took issue with left-wing journalists and Labour politicians criticising Farage and saying that Dame Alison Rose’s dismissal was unfair, especially as she is a woman:
Unfortunately, GB News did not include the panel discussion afterwards. Conservative MP Dame Andrea Jenkyns said that she had had bank accounts closed. She has a damehood. What hope for the rest of us? She assumes this was because the bank deemed her to be a PEP, a politically exposed person. Someone else reminded her that she was a doughty supporter of Brexit, which might have been another factor.
Wootton interviewed Lord Frost:
The discussion about Farage only lasts the first couple of minutes. Frost is delighted that Farage and GB News are bringing this to light. The rest of the time is about how Frost has been labelled a climate change denier for saying that warmer temperatures would probably help Britain’s economy. They certainly would. Right now, it’s freezing. I’m sitting here in a long-sleeved shirt and a sweater.
Anyone wondering if Lord Frost will stand as an MP should know that he probably will. He tells Wootton that is where he can effect change. It’s a matter of not if but when. However, he quashes rumours that he wants to head the Conservative Party.
Headliners, which features comedians discussing the next day’s headlines, had a brief discussion on Emily Maitlis, who now has a podcast that airs on LBC. She said that Nigel Farage is trying to paint himself as the victim and is trying to ‘whip up a populist storm’. You can read more in a Telegraph article.
The Headliners headliners, even though they are left-leaning, took strong exception to Maitlis’s comments. Good for them:
On Friday morning, July 28, Breakfast discussed NatWest’s incredible profits over the past six months and Howard Davies’s questionable desire to remain as the banking group’s chair until his scheduled retirement in or around July 2024:
NatWest is 39% taxpayer-owned via the Government. We bailed it out after the 2008 banking crash.
Telegraph readers’ reactions
On Friday morning, The Telegraph published a selection of readers’ comments, ‘Nigel Farage de-bank, wildfires in Europe and “lazy girl” TikTok trends spark discussion’.
The first comment on Farage says:
Nigel Farage is right – the entire NatWest Board should go. They are responsible and accountable. That’s what being a senior director is. And now we need an investigation into all the banks, big and small, as this type of discrimination could well be embedded in the sector.
The second reads:
These top executives really don’t get it. Dame Alison Rose may well have achieved great things at the bank but her behaviour and that of the board reveals that such people are removed from the fundamental concerns of ordinary people – people who work just as hard, people who are just as capable, as Dame Alison but who are not remunerated with absurd salaries of £5.2 million.
Why they did not immediately understand that you cannot breach client confidentiality in the way she did as CEO and stay in post is an appalling indictment of their professional judgement. They are out of touch with the concerns and values of their customers; instead of listening to their marketing departments and pandering to the likes of Stonewall, they should get their hands dirty and go and work in a branch every once in a while.
The third says:
The so called highly ethical culture of banking which punishes the average man by closing accounts with no explanation or assistance is now truly exposed because NatWest took on a client too big to get away with their behaviour.
I am hoping this harsh treatment of Rose will give the banking sector the much needed shake up it needs for punishing the little man and forcing them out of the system effectively for minor mistakes made in everyday life.
This is a classic case of my enemies’ enemy is my friend, so Mr Farage hence has my full support and I am delighted to see a few senior banking heads roll.
Sir Howard Davies: sad but not sorry
On Friday morning dawned, The Telegraph reported on what NatWest’s chair had said to the media in a conference call. He spoke to shareholders afterwards:
Sir Howard Davies said he serves “at behest of shareholders” but intends to stay on despite the botched handling of the departure of chief executive Dame Alison Rose …
Asked if he has reflected on his position this week, Sir Howard said: “It would be surprising if I hadn’t reflected on my position. So the answer is yes.”
Sir Howard, a former deputy governor of the Bank of England is already preparing to step down by mid-2024 when he will have reached the maximum permitted length of his tenure as chairman – a role he assumed in 2015.
He was speaking as the bank revealed it increased pre-tax operating profit by nearly £1bn year-on-year to £3.6bn in the first six months of 2023.
The results were higher than forecast.
The Guardian‘s live coverage began earlier. Highlights follow, green bolds in the original:
At 6:49:
… NatWest is due to release its financial results at 7am. City analysts predict it will post an operating pretax profit of £1.49bn for the second quarter of 2023.
That would take earnings so far this year up to £3.3bn, up from £2.6bn in the same period last year.
NatWest, which has lost its CEO Alison Rose and the head of Coutts, Peter Flavel, in the last two days, may try to restore a sense of order as it updates investors about its performance …
At 7:20:
… NatWest has announced an interim dividend of 5.5p per share this morning, which will return around £492m to shareholders.
As the UK government owns 38.53% of NatWest, this means £190m will go to the government on 15th September.
Good.
At 8:18:
Speaking to reporters this morning, Davies says NatWest’s board met yesterday and agreed to the terms of reference for an independent review into the handling of Nigel Farage’s accounts at Coutts.
This review will examine the way in which information about that issue has been handled within the bank. The terms of reference of that review will be released today and the finding will be released “in due course”, says Davies.
He adds:
My intention is to continue to lead the board and ensure that the bank remains sound and stable and able to support our 19 million customers.
At 8:26:
Davies: political reaction forced “great leader” Alison Rose out
… He told reporters:
We took the view on Tuesday that even though mistakes had been made, it was on balance right to retain Alison Rose as our CEO.
But the reaction was such as to convince her and the board that her position was untenable.
Davies added that:
I clearly regret the way things have turned out. We’ve lost a great leader as a result, but I now have to look forward.
He was only sorry they got caught!
Also at 8:26:
When asked whether Farage’s accounts at Coutts had been reinstated, Howard Davies says it is “not appropriate for me to speak about the state of his accounts”.
At 8:39:
… Howard Davies says the bank always has an emergency plan ready for unexpected departure.
This plan was considered a few months ago, and NatWest decided Thwaite was the right person to be emergency successor.
This was discussed with Paul himself, Howard Davies says; Thwaite obviously wasn’t expecting this to happen, but was prepared to take the role on.
This position was also discussed with regulators, Davies adds, as they would expect a bank to have a succession plan in place.
At 8:43:
Davies says NatWest’s independent review into the closure of Nigel Farage’s Coutts account will have three dimensions.
It will cover: the decision to close the accounts of Mr Farage; the circumstances around the BBC article (which initially said it was a commercial decision); and to review other Coutts account closures.
At 8:45:
And with regards to the Financial Conduct Authority’s involvement on the Farage bank account debacle, Howard Davies confirms the regulator have raised concerns with the bank.
With regard to account closures, these issues should be independently reviewed; we can certainly assure that will happen, Davies adds.
At 9:02:
NatWest is also asked about Alison Rose’s exit pay, following reports that she could receive a ‘multi-million-pound pay-off’.
Howard Davies says he can’t say precisely when details of the package will be published, explaining:
The independent review will take place and then we’ll have to consider it.
Davies adds that he doesn’t see a reason to depart from the normal practice of reporting executive pay.
He also explained, earlier in the call, that decisions on Rose’s pay can’t be made until the independent review has been completed.
At 9:19:
NatWest has appointed law firm Travers Smith to independently probe its handling of the Farage affair, our City editor Anna Isaac explains.
… One of its more sensitive tasks will be to put a spotlight on the circumstances and nature of any leaks to the press, and what confidential information may have been passed from the banking group to the media, including the BBC.
Beyond the handling of Farage’s accounts, the probe will also look at all accounts closed at Coutts over the past 24 months. It will follow a similar approach as with the Farage-specific investigation: looking at questions of how and why accounts were shut, and what was said to all other customers whose accounts were shut down.
And on a related topic, albeit with a different bank, this news emerged at 10:41:
Politicians on the right of the political spectrum aren’t the only ones to fall victim to ‘debanking’, it seems.
According to the BBC, anti-Brexit campaigner Gina Miller was told a bank account for her political party would close without explanation.
The BBC reports:
Monzo initially refused to tell Ms Miller why her “True and Fair” party account would be closed in September.
After the BBC contacted the bank about the case, it said it did not allow political party accounts and had made a mistake in allowing it to be opened.
Monzo said it recognised the experience would have been “frustrating for the customer and we’re sorry for that”.
More here.
At 13:12, we learned that the Bank of England is bringing in Ben Bernanke to review its dismal forecasting:
Newsflash: Dr Ben Bernanke, the former head of America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, is to lead a review into the Bank of England’s forecasting.
The BoE says the review will aim to “develop and strengthen” the Bank’s support for the Monetary Policy Committee’s approach to forecasting and monetary policy making in times of uncertainty.
This follows criticism that the Bank failed to predict the surge in inflation over the last year or two, meaning it was too slow to tighten monetary policy by raising interest rates …
A month ago, the Bank’s chief economist, Huw Pill, said the Bank’s forecasting models became become “unworkable” in the current crisis, as they failed to fully appreciate the the interaction of high energy prices and a tight jobs market.
At 14:29:
Farage supports Gina Miller over bank account access
The row over access to UK bank accounts is creating some unlikely alliances.
Nigel Farage has thrown his backing behind anti-Brexit campaigner Gina Miller, after it emerged this morning that Monzo bank is to close the bank account of Miller’s True and Fair party.
Farage says he stands with Miller, who famously challenged the UK government in 2016 over its authority to trigger the process of leaving the European Union without parliamentary approval.
Miller warned this morning that “we don’t have a functioning democracy” if new political parties cannot access banking services.
At 14:53:
Nils Pratley: It will be surprising if NatWest’s Howard Davies hasn’t gone by Christmas
Can Howard Davies cling onto the top job on the NatWest board until 2024?
Our financial editor, Nils Pratley, thinks not – even though Davies himself hoped to hang on until July 2024, before the Farage bank row blew up.
Nils writes:
Davies has probably escaped the need for an instant resignation only by virtue of the fact that he was going anyway. Plan A, which pre-dates the Coutts fiasco, was for him to leave by July next year for the conventional reason that his nine-year term will be up at that point. An obvious strategy now would be to accelerate the timetable and get out as soon as is practical.
Since the search for a new chair has already been running for a few weeks, it should not take ages to find a new face, even if the pool of likely volunteers may have shrunk over the past week. One suspects Davies will want to be out in the autumn, or at least to have named his successor by then. And it will be amazing if he’s still there by Christmas. Under a new chair the necessary broader overhaul of the boardroom after the incompetence of the past month can begin.
I hope Nils Pratley is right. GB News has reported that Davies does not have the Prime Minister’s support.
At 15:09:
… NatWest cut its forecast for its net interest margin (the gap between what it charges borrowers and pays savers); a sign that some people have been running down their savings or moving them to more lucrative accounts …
Hmm.
Is this yet another case of ‘go woke, go broke’?
We shall see.
For now, I have one more banking post to come next week.
Yesterday, I wrote at length about Dame Alison Rose’s departure from the NatWest Group.
Opinions in print and on air continued into the evening and into Thursday morning, July 27, 2023.
Rose loses government appointments
Christian Calgie, a Guido Fawkes alumnus who now writes for The Express, told us ‘Humiliated Alison Rose sacked from two major Downing Street roles’ (purple emphases mine):
The now-former CEO of NatWest has suffered yet more career setbacks this morning, as the Government confirms she’s been ditched as a top advisor.
Dame Alison Rose had been appointed to an Energy Efficiency Taskforce within the Net Zero department in February and as a member of the PM’s Business Council just last week.
The Express understands she’s now been let go from both positions.
A No. 10 spokesperson said: “Following her resignation as CEO of NatWest Group, the Government has confirmed that Dame Alison Rose is no longer a member of the Prime Minister’s Business Council.”
Separately, a spokesperson for the Department for Net Zero has told the Express: “Following the news overnight, the Secretary of State has asked Dame Alison Rose to step down from her roles as co-chair of the Energy Efficiency Taskforce and as a Member of the Net Zero Council and she has resigned” …
Just last week she was also pictured laughing with Rishi Sunak at Downing Street, where she had been invited as part of the launch of Rishi Sunak’s new Business Council to help “turbocharge economic growth”.
At the time, Dame Alison said: “Partnership between government and business is the cornerstone of a sustainable growth economy.”.
“That’s why I’m delighted to be part of the Prime Minister’s Business Council for 2023. Working together we can face into the nation’s challenges to unlock investment, drive enterprise, grasp the opportunity of climate transition and ultimately, help UK economy to thrive.”
Dame Alison’s fate appeared sealed late last night after both Rishi Sunak, Jeremy Hunt and multiple Cabinet Ministers let it be known they had either lost faith in her continuing in the role or had serious concerns …
Political pressure forced the NatWest board, which had only hours before declared confidence in their CEO, to reconvene, leading to her resignation in the early hours.
The Government should encourage her to give up her damehood. She does not deserve it.
Early on Thursday, The Times reported that Rose could receive a whopping year’s salary. Sadly, this will surprise no one:
Dame Alison Rose’s departure from NatWest was under fresh scrutiny last night after it emerged she may be in line for a multimillion-pound payoff.
The 54-year-old chief executive left her position at the bank by “mutual consent” over the Nigel Farage debanking scandal. Her resignation was announced after a late-night board meeting, convened when Downing Street, the chancellor and other senior cabinet ministers put pressure on her to quit.
Analysts said the fact that Rose had agreed with the board to leave with immediate effect suggested she would receive pay in lieu of working notice. NatWest’s annual report indicates that the bank can make a payment in lieu of 12 months’ notice, signalling that she is in line to receive a year’s salary.
Rose’s pay package last year was £5.25 million, which included a £1.1 million base salary and the same amount again in shares, as well as an annual bonus and performance-related stock awards. NatWest had indicated that it would look to curb parts of Rose’s pay after she admitted leaking confidential information about Farage to the BBC.
NatWest declined to comment on her payoff, but sources said its stance remained the same, suggesting the bank would look to limit her remuneration.
Farage told The Times: “She should not be getting a payoff at all. She has breached the most basic rule of banking and brought the NatWest group into disrepute. It’s a reward for failure.”
My concerns are a) what will she do next and b) how soon will she take up another job? If I were a NatWest decision maker, I would put in writing that she cannot work for twelve months. If she does, she would have to return the payout they gave her. (Personally, I don’t think she should get anything, but the world doesn’t work the way it should.)
These were the final hours before her resignation early on Wednesday:
An hour-long virtual meeting between board members ended the 31-year NatWest career of Dame Alison Rose.
The hastily convened 10pm conference came less than five hours after Sir Howard Davies, the NatWest group chairman, had pledged the board’s “full support” to its beleaguered chief executive. But the members decided she had to go and released a statement, with words from both Davies and Rose, confirming the news at 1.29am …
The final blow was the revelation that Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, and Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, had significant concerns about her remaining in her job. Behind the scenes there was a flurry of calls between senior government officials and the bank to relay a similar message.
Andrew Griffith, City minister, pressed on the late-night exchange of views, said: “There’s always a dialogue between typically Treasury officials and senior people in all of the big major banks. The prime minister and the chancellor have been clear throughout about the principle at stake here, which is that nobody should have their bank account removed as a result of something they’ve said or something that they believe in.”
When questioned over whether he had put in a call to NatWest, Griffith added: “I’m not going to comment on individual conversations that may have happened over the last 24 hours.” He said it was right that Rose had stepped down.
The political fallout from the earlier statement had prompted the NatWest board to reconvene. Then came the early morning U-turn confirmation.
The 1.29am statement said that Rose had agreed to step down by mutual consent and appointed Paul Thwaite, CEO of the bank’s commercial and institutional business, to take over.
[NatWest chairman Sir Howard] Davies, still defending his colleague, said: “It is a sad moment. She has dedicated all her working life so far to NatWest and will leave many colleagues who respect and admire her.”
More about him below.
On Wednesday, British banks were read the riot act by City Minister Andrew Griffith MP:
Leaders from Britain’s biggest banks admitted yesterday that the Farage debanking fiasco had tarnished the sector’s reputation with the public as they were hauled into a meeting with the City minister, Andrew Griffith. Griffith told banking chiefs, including those from NatWest, HSBC, Lloyds, Barclays and Nationwide, that the idea a customer could be debanked over their views was “wholly unacceptable”.
Also:
The Information Commissioner’s Office has announced an investigation into whether any rules were broken. NatWest shares fell 3.7 per cent yesterday.
The Telegraph had more on the Information Commissioner’s Office in ‘NatWest may have broken the law over Farage Coutts scandal’:
On Wednesday, senior Conservative MPs demanded that Dame Alison forgo any severance pay. The bank declined to say whether she will receive an exit package.
John Edwards, the information commissioner, said on Wednesday: “The banking duty of confidentiality is over a hundred years old, and it is clear that it would not permit the discussion of a customer’s personal information with the media.
“We trust banks with our money and with our personal information. Any suggestion that this trust has been betrayed will be concerning for a bank’s customers, and for regulators like myself.”
The ICO said that if the bank could not resolve a complaint made by Mr Farage, it would begin its own inquiries.
Mr Edwards warned banks against holding excessive information on their customers after The Telegraph revealed NatWest had accumulated a 40-page dossier on Mr Farage to feed back to its Wealth Reputational Risk Committee. That dossier could be in breach of data protection rules …
The ICO can bring criminal prosecutions, although it is more likely that NatWest would face a civil penalty, sources said.
It can issue fines of up to four per cent of a company’s worldwide turnover, which in the case of NatWest could run into hundreds of millions of pounds.
GB News reaction
Nigel Farage devoted the bulk of his show to Wednesday’s developments:
While Farage was happy that Rose resigned, he said in his editorial that Sir Howard Davies and the board of directors should also stand down. He also said that he would be developing a website dedicated to people who have had their bank accounts closed for no good reason. Former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng was Farage’s first guest. Kwarteng said that banks’ targeting of individuals and closing their accounts is something new and he was not aware of it until recently, especially with small businesses. He was grateful that Farage is shining a light on this parlous business practice. Conservative MP Royston Smith was the next guest. He said that TSB had closed his account a year ago for no apparent reason then had the affrontery to send him a cheque for the balance. He had nowhere to cash it, so he tried to contact the bank to no avail. It was only when he tweeted recently about his situation that TSB finally contacted him. The situation is still unresolved.
Afterwards came a vox pop. GB News had interviewed people working in the City of London, the financial centre. The verdict was about 50/50 on Rose’s resignation. Some, including a lot of Europeans, said that it was an overreaction. Britons, however, by and large, said it was the right thing to do. Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle, not a natural fit with Farage, appeared next. His name has not helped people with whom he has been associated. A charity reluctantly told him he could not be associated with them because he is too controversial, or so their bank thought, and his lodgers (renters) have had the same experience with their banks, one of which was Santander. He will support Farage’s quest to stop this happening.
Countess Alexandra Tolstoy came on next. I discussed her case in my July 12 post, and she related much the same to Farage. Here again, NatWest was the culprit. The Times featured her story today, Thursday, July 27. Farage’s last segment concerned the mysterious case of a bank branch in Reading, Berkshire, found guilty of mishandling loans to medium-sized businesses. The bank in question, HBOS owned by Lloyds, agreed to lend them money. Once a company had spent the money, the bank would call in the loan, forcing the company to go bankrupt. The bank then got the assets of that company and made millions. This happened during David Cameron’s and Theresa May’s premierships. A cabinet secretary said he would look into it and then said he had been advised not to talk to former Thames Valley Police and Crime Commissioner Anthony Stansfeld who had raised the issue with him. Stansfeld told Farage this scam was well into the hundreds of millions of pounds. The Prime Ministers did not want to know. The network also involved other banks in other cities, but their police forces ignored the story. Stansfeld said it took three years to solve the case, held before a jury, and put things to right thanks to the chief constable. It seems part of this investigation is still ongoing in Bristol, where Lloyds says it is still investigating, but, for now, denies any wrongdoing.
Jacob Rees-Mogg was next:
The discussion about Farage’s bank account started at the 20:21 mark. Rees-Mogg said that taxpayers lost £325m that day on Rose’s resignation. A former Coutts employee, Oliver Lewis was a guest. He had left the bank to write a biography of George Orwell, oddly enough. Lewis left in 2015 when Rose was appointed the head of wealth management. He was amazed to find out that all this had happened, because she was so professional and diplomatic.
Toby Young of the Free Speech Union took issue with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) complaining about the Government urging Rose’s resignation. This is because Farage had no due process; Coutts’s decision, Young said, was overridden by ideology. Oliver Lewis said that he used to write meeting minutes but never would have written Farage’s report in such a brusque way with so many accusations. Conversation then turned to Brexit Derangement Syndrome — Rees-Mogg’s words — about Nigel and Boris Johnson. Toby Young said that unwarrented bank account closures could happen to anyone. He praised Keir Starmer for finally condemning Coutts’s conduct in this affair. Rees-Mogg wondered what would happen if former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had been debanked.
All hoped that banking would return to normal soon. Lewis said that banking at NatWest is not 100% commercial because of the government bailout after the 2008 banking crisis — the taxpayer still owns 39% of the banking group — but also because government basically guarantees banking rights, at least in principle.
Dan Wootton devoted two segments to the Farage farrago.
In his editorial, he said it is important that people continue to speak up about it, otherwise we will be walking into enforced personal silence and control. He said that the criticisms of GB News are actually criticisms of the majority of the British people. Like Trump was for many Americans, GB News was ‘only in the way’. The people are the target:
Wootton also spoke with The Telegraph‘s Celia Walden — Mrs Piers Morgan — who finds the situation appalling. She thinks our banks’ social policy practices came over from the United States:
On Thursday morning, Spiked‘s Fraser Myers told the channel’s Breakfast show that Coutts probably thought it was doing its notional duty by closing Farage’s account, which, he said, was ‘a scary thing’:
What this mean for the future of ESG?
On Thursday, The Times posted ‘What does the Farage v Coutts row mean for ESG?’
Opinions in the legal world are divided, but law firms and other businesses have been moving towards ESG in recent years:
For some commentators it was only a matter of time that unbridled enthusiasm for the creation of standards for ethical corporate behaviour backfired. Even at the end of 2021 litigation was emerging around ESG that involved arguments over the boundaries of liability.
Nonetheless, the ESG bandwagon has continued to collect passengers, including many prominent law firms. In February the Anglo-US law firm DLA Piper was placed top of an inaugural ESG league table for the legal profession compiled by Impactvise, a consultancy that specialises in corporate ethics. The consultancy, which is based in Switzerland, was founded by two lawyers: Yannick Hausmann and Adrian Peyer, both of whom had worked at Zurich Insurance.
Impactvise certainly talks the ESG talk, saying that “legal service providers — particularly, lawyers at law firms and in-house corporate counsels — are key players in the modern value chain, and have a unique position to support the move towards a sustainable future”. But with rumblings that Farage could take legal action against Coutts over its approach to him and his account, many law firms may be having second thoughts about how closely they want to stand next to their clients’ ESG schemes, or indeed whether they should have their own.
Jean-Pierre Douglas-Henry, the managing director of sustainability and resilience at DLA Piper, acknowledges the conundrum. He says: “Businesses are increasingly being asked by policymakers to be aware of the impact of sustainability issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss.
“In some countries businesses are being required by law to factor these risks into their operations at every level, while in others they are just waking up to the risks involved.”
Others argue that it is wrong to label Farage’s row with Coutts as having its roots in the ESG movement. “The issue in the Farage case is that a risk-based decision about a politically exposed person had nothing at all to do with ESG and corporate values . . . and yet Coutts appears to have conflated the two things,” says Michael Evans, a former head of communications at Baker McKenzie in London and now a director at Byfield, a litigation and reputation consultancy.
Evans argues that Coutts’s risk committee was “very selective in identifying Farage as posing a reputational risk to the bank and its inclusive values when you look at some of its other current and former clients. In dropping Farage as a client, this was an example of virtue signalling gone too far by Coutts” …
The Coutts case is also interesting because of Farage’s use of a subject access request under freedom of information law to get a report from Coutts’s reputational risk committee used to justify the closure. Tony Williams, a former Clifford Chance managing partner who is now the director of the legal profession consultancy Jomati, says that the use of that facility represents a “ticking time bomb that many organisations may have if they prepare profiles of their customers”.
Williams speculates that law firms “will become rather more circumspect as to certain clients they act for, but inevitably will make some commercial decisions and recognise the reality that if every client was perfect they probably wouldn’t need lawyers very much”.
As to whether the Farage-Coutts saga will hole ESG below the waterline, Evans is doubtful. “That is not to say the anti-ESG backlash isn’t real, but the legal sector’s view to date has very much been that a firm must have its own house in order so that they can be taken seriously by big corporate clients grappling with ESG-related issues,” he says. “This view seems unlikely to change any time soon.”
Ben Marlow, The Telegraph‘s chief City commentator, says ‘The NatWest debacle exposes the bone-headedness of corporate moralising’:
There needs to be a thorough rethink of the bank’s pious posing and how its devotion to the corporate “purpose” movement led it to make such a series of terrible decisions.
The bone-headedness of corporate moralising is as much to blame for this debacle as the poor judgement of senior executives. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that the bank would ever have picked a fight with the former UKIP leader in the first place if it hadn’t well and truly disappeared down a rabbit hole of hypocrisy.
This is an organisation that harps on endlessly about diversity and inclusion, yet went to great lengths to come up with reasons to dissolve its relationship with one person on the basis that his personal views didn’t fit with their interpretation of the world. What could be less inclusive than that?
As Farage correctly points out, the problem with so much of the Ethical, Social and Governance (ESG) fanaticism that companies have been captured by is that our values and the politics that underpin them are, erm, diverse.
And because ESG is essentially an ideological leap of faith, its most committed proponents struggle to accept anyone challenging their stance.
The experience of Reverend Richard Fothergill is no less troubling than Farage’s. The clergyman was allegedly de-banked by Yorkshire Building Society after 17 years as an account holder for asking its customer services department whether promotion of LGBT causes was a good use of its time …
Banks have turned contempt into an art form and suspicions of profiteering during a cost of living crunch are hard to avoid. Customers want rip-off charges to end, and fairer savings rates, particularly when they’ve suddenly found themselves on a mortgage that is no longer even remotely affordable …
If NatWest is to recover quickly from this damaging episode it needs to abandon the moral crusade and rediscover – yet again – the old-fashioned and boring business of being a bank.
On Thursday morning, The Telegraph reported that NatWest and Barclays received the most complaints about account closures:
NatWest was the subject of the joint most complaints over decisions to close bank accounts last year, data show, a day after its boss resigned following a scandal over the closure of Nigel Farage’s Coutts account.
Customers complained about NatWest and rival Barclays 274 times each in 2022/23, figures supplied to Bloomberg showed. This includes cases linked to NatWest’s Royal Bank of Scotland brand.
The data from the Financial Ombudsman Service, the independent body that settles issues between customers and lenders, show NatWest was the most complained-about bank for the past three years in terms of account closures, although the absolute number for all the lenders is a fraction of the millions of accounts they each service.
It comes after Dame Alison Rose resigned on Wednesday after discussing Mr Farage’s account with a BBC journalist, wiping £850m off the value of the lender.
Should the NatWest board go?
It isn’t just Nigel Farage saying that Sir Howard Davies and NatWest’s board of directors should go.
On Thursday, The Times posted ‘Investor’s ire at “appalling” bank board’:
In a blistering broadside, Martin Walker, head of UK equities at Invesco, a NatWest shareholder, said, “there is clearly a problem in this business with governance.
“Frankly, I am appalled at both management and board behaviour in this whole episode. NatWest is a good business that has many strengths and when the governance isn’t robust within a business, then those strengths will never be reflected in the share price.”
Walker’s intervention increases the pressure on Sir Howard Davies, the bank’s chairman, who already faces scrutiny over the chaotic departure of Rose, the lender’s chief executive …
“Her role was clearly untenable,” Walker said. “You have to call into question the judgment of the board here” …
Walker said the Farage affair raised concerns beyond Rose’s departure. Invesco owns a stake in NatWest worth about £128 million, a portion of which is managed by Walker.
Davies, apparently, was already scheduled to leave NatWest:
A source at the bank insisted that Davies, who was already due to step down by the middle of next year, had “absolutely engaged” with the government. NatWest shares fell by 9½p, or 3.7 per cent, to close at 241¾p yesterday as investors digested the developments.
Alistair Osborne, one of The Times‘s business columnists, predicts ‘NatWest clearout looms after Farage fiasco’:
The taxpayer owns 39 per cent of NatWest, the continuing legacy of 2008’s £45.5 billion bailout in the lender’s previous guise as Royal Bank of Scotland. So didn’t Davies check whether the board’s contentious backing of Rose had the support of No 10 and No 11? Apparently he did speak to senior individuals in the Treasury more than once in the 24 hours before Tuesday’s 5.45pm announcement. But there must have been some horribly crossed wires.
No sooner was the bank’s ludicrous statement out than The Times found the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, had significant concerns. Ditto three other cabinet ministers. One delivered some home truths: that Rose has “no integrity”, the chairman has “lost his credibility” and “the whole board has got to go if it wants to defend her”.
The upshot? A screeching U-turn at 1.30am with Rose going by “mutual consent”, replaced for an initial 12 months by commercial chief Paul Thwaite. Davies called it a “sad moment”. It is for the contrite boss, who’d worked for the bank for more than 30 years and whose as-yet undisclosed payoff may still stoke fresh controversy. But, with the Financial Conduct Authority and Information Commissioner’s Office poking around, a row over debanking clients and Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer agreeing she had to go, her position was untenable. The shares fell 3.7 per cent to 241¾p.
As for Davies, who’s on his way out anyway, his judgment has proved a throwback to the days when, as director of the London School of Economics, he accepted a £300,000 donation from a foundation run by Colonel Gaddafi’s son. The rest of the board — mainly a bunch of bankers, including Mark Seligman, ex of Credit Suisse, as the senior independent director — have also shown themselves incapable of governing a bank. Farage reckons they should all go. Again, he’s right. After this fiasco, a clearout looms.
Alistair Osborne’s colleagues, Dominic O’Connell and Emma Duncan, gave their views in ‘Fiasco in the boardroom: Times writers’ verdicts on Alison Rose’s resignation’.
Dominic O’Connell says:
given what has happened with Rose a wider shake-up of the board is likely.
Emma Duncan says in the aftermath of Rose’s resignation:
The question now is whether Sir Howard Davies, the bank’s chairman, will survive …
The Financial Conduct Authority has demanded an independent review of Rose’s actions, and says ominously that it “will decide if any further action is necessary”.
Davies, however, said that the board had “full confidence” in her. That was, frankly, bizarre.
The Times‘s view — the main editorial — also points the finger at Coutts’s chief Peter Flavel, who has managed to keep an exceedingly low profile throughout all of this:
Also in the crosshairs for this debacle, together with the NatWest chairman, Sir Howard Davies, is Peter Flavel, head of Coutts. His company profile lauds him for making the image of the inclusive-yet-exclusive cash warehouse “more warm and modern”.
GB News’s hedge fund owner makes fortune
And, finally, a GB News’s co-owner, who also owns the hedge fund Marshall Wace, made millions for the fund by betting against NatWest, The Telegraph reported on Wednesday:
GB News owner Sir Paul Marshall’s hedge fund has made a multi-million pound gain on its bet against NatWest shares following the exit of Dame Alison Rose.
Regulatory filings show that Marshall Wace has the biggest short position in the lender’s shares meaning it stands to gain from falls in the bank’s market price.
The fund netted paper gains of around £5m on Wednesday after NatWest’s share price slumped more than 3.7pc after the departure of its chief executive Dame Alison Rose, which wiped more than £850m off the value of the lender.
While the gain represents a tiny sum relative to Marshall Wace’s more than $60bn in assets under management, it may give Sir Paul extra satisfaction given his stance against “woke” business culture …
Sir Paul, whose son Winston was a member of the band Mumford and Sons, has been a prominent backer of Brexit, calling it “a huge opportunity for the UK”.
Ahh, that explains why Winston is a regular GB News guest.
This bet was computer-driven and placed before the Farage farrago:
The hedge fund has software it calls TOPS (Trade Optimised Portfolio System), which analyses the views of analysts and economists and gives indications where to invest.
Marshall Wace first disclosed that it was building a short position against NatWest in March, when fears were growing over the health of the global financial system following the collapses of Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse.
At the start of last month it had borrowed 0.8pc of the shares to profit from price falls, but has since trimmed the bet to 0.59pc, according to data from the Financial Conduct Authority.
Last year, alongside Legatum, a Dubai-based group founded by the billionaire Christopher Chandler, he bought out the US entertainment giant Warner Bros. Discovery and GB News co-founders Andrew Cole and Mark Schneider of their stake in the news network.
Last year, Sir Paul shared a pot of more than £720m with a group of 23 partners after his London-based hedge fund posted a surge in profits.
Marshall Wace declined to comment.
Another update will come in due course.
What a happy day Wednesday, July 26 turned out to be.
The head of NatWest Group, Dame Alison Rose, resigned in the early hours of the morning:
Somewhere in The Telegraph it said (H/T to a Guido Fawkes reader, purple emphases mine):
Victoria Scholar, head of investment at Interactive Investor, said:
As the first woman to take the top job at one of the big four UK banks back in 2019, this is a sad moment for female representation …
It certainly is. Women are no purer than men when they’re in a position of responsibility or prominence. For anyone doubting that, think Hillary Clinton.
I will go into Dame Alison’s resignation in more depth, but what follows are discussions and reports leading to her exit.
Boris Johnson gives his view
On Friday, July 21, The Times reported that NatWest was likely to face a deluge of subject access requests from angry ex-customers:
NatWest is set to be deluged with demands from “debanked” customers attempting to discover why they lost their accounts.
A Facebook group of 10,000 people, claiming to have had their NatWest accounts shut, has been filled with customers sharing templates and instructions on how to get hold of data held about them.
It comes after Nigel Farage used the “subject access request” (SAR) — a data protection right — to obtain a 40-page dossier outlining the reasons behind Coutts’s decision to drop him. It led to an apology from NatWest Group’s chief executive yesterday …
Writing on the Facebook group called “NatWest closed down my account” one former customer said: “I have just submitted a subject access request on NatWest, here is a link. I encourage everyone on this group to do so, let’s keep them busy.”
Another shared a template of a request sent directly to Dame Alison Rose, NatWest’s chief executive. He said: “I strongly believe that we all have the right to know why our accounts were closed. If you’re in the same situation, I encourage you to send a similar request to NatWest …”
NatWest said: “We would always encourage customers who have any queries about their accounts to contact us directly in the first instance.
“Customers who wish to obtain a SAR have a right to access and receive a copy of their customer data, and can do so by visiting natwest.com.”
The following graphic came from another source, but these sections of the GDPR (data protection law) may be relevant:
That evening, The Times posted another article, ‘Nigel Farage: Boris Johnson points finger at NatWest boss Alison Rose’:
Boris Johnson has called for the banking chief at the heart of the Nigel Farage fiasco to lose her job if she leaked confidential information, as MPs challenged her lucrative bonus.
The former prime minister said he would “wager the entire contents of my own personal bank account” that Dame Alison Rose, chief executive of NatWest Group, had discussed Farage’s account at Coutts, a subsidiary, with Simon Jack, the BBC’s business editor.
The journalist and the banking executive sat next to each other at a BBC correspondents’ charity dinner at the five-star Langham Hotel across from Broadcasting House on July 3.
It was one day before Jack published a story suggesting Farage had not met the wealth threshold for Coutts – a claim later proven to be false.
Johnson, writing in The Daily Mail, said: “I would bet my house that it was no coincidence that the following day Simon Jack ran a BBC story claiming that the decision by Coutts to whack Farage was nothing to do with politics.
“Is there anyone who seriously thinks that Alison Rose was not involved — especially since neither party is now willing to comment?”
Johnson called for Andrew Griffith, the City minister, to establish the facts about “how a false impression of Farage’s financial circumstances was given to the media”.
He added: “I am afraid that if Dame Alison was in any way responsible then she really needs to go” …
Johnson said he “vehemently” supported Farage over the row. He added: “This is about far more than the bank account of one person. It is about freedom under the law, for everyone in this country.
“It is about the freedom to think and say what you believe — provided you don’t break the law — without the fear of open or covert persecution.
“That freedom made our country great. It is under threat. It is time to fight.”
Meanwhile, Rose had been seen at various public events just before the Farage farrago broke. Fellow guests were bemused:
Yesterday, it emerged that Rose had raised eyebrows at the sustainability event for the space industry just 24 hours before the Farage scandal broke.
She mingled with guests including astronauts Tim Peake and Chris Hadfield at the Buckingham Palace event on June 28.
It was hosted by the King as part of his Sustainable Markets Initiative, of which NatWest is a member, which aims to accelerate the world’s transition to a sustainable future.
The event was to encourage the global private sector to align space exploration with sustainability.
One source claimed that “no one knew” why Rose was there and that other guests were “bemused” by her presence.
It was her second climate change event of the day, June 28, after she attended the Bloomberg Sustainable Business Summit in the morning.
During an interview at the summit, she said the “climate emergency” was the “biggest challenge we are going to face”.
The article reminded us of her enormous salary and sizeable bonus — as well as the banking group’s priorities, which are not in maximising profits. It is worth remembering that since the banking debacle of 2008, part of NatWest Group has been owned by the taxpayers. Currently, we own 39% of NatWest:
In February, she took home a bonus of £643,000 — split half in cash and half in shares. Last year, she earned £5.2million. She was the first NatWest Group chief executive since the 2008 taxpayer bailout to get an annual cash bonus.
Craig Mackinlay, a Tory MP, said: “Going along to various fringe events in the net zero and sustainability field does not sound to me like attempts to maximise profits for shareholders.
“She is being paid a very, very generous salary and it is obvious that the bank is off on a strange path under her watch. There should be question marks over her future bonuses” …
A source close to the bank defended supporting climate change, describing it as a “growth lever”.
In addition to Net Zero, there is another aspect to the bank’s policies:
James Clarry placed his role as the Coutts & Co diversity champion front and centre of his professional responsibilities at the bank (Tom Witherow writes).
The former chief operating officer, 50, wrote on his LinkedIn profile that he “founded allyship programmes” and “won multiple awards in recognition of inclusive leadership” — above other attributes such as “delivering growth” and “generating revenue”.
The executive, who lives with his wife Annie, told followers online he had been hailed as “Champion Ally” at the 2021 Ethnicity Awards. His name came to the fore after Coutts told a client of almost 30 years that accounts of clients under suspicion of racial or discriminatory conduct would be referred to the senior leadership team, including Clarry, for a “final decision”.
Clarry, a former head boy at a grammar school in Buckinghamshire, studied law at the University of Nottingham in the 1990s, beginning his career at Allen & Overy, a “magic circle” law firm (one of the five most prestigious London-headquartered multinational law firms). His first job at the Royal Bank of Scotland was as a solicitor in its global banking and markets division. He rose through the ranks before transferring to Coutts — which was owned by the RBS Group — in 2011 where, as its general counsel, he was treated to regular travel to Jersey, Switzerland and Asia. As the chief operating officer, he was the chairman of the wealth businesses risk committee, a member of the reputational risk committee and a regular among those attending the Coutts risk and audit committee. He listed “awareness raising” among his “skills” online.
One wonders whether he was still in charge of the wealth business risk committee and a member of the reputational risk committee when Coutts made the decision to close Farage’s accounts.
Clarry has since moved on from Coutts to charity:
Last month he left to take up a job at social justice charity Justice and Care, which tackles modern slavery. On leaving, he wrote: “I have many incredible memories, but I am particularly proud of our work on gender and ethnic equity.”
The Sun reacts
On Sunday, The Sun‘s veteran columnist Trevor Kavanagh wrote:
NIGEL FARAGE has not just blown the bloody doors off Coutts bank and its Stasi-style spying.
He has exposed a conspiracy to shift this country permanently to the left — through Whitehall, the police, town halls, the BBC and the boardrooms of Britain.
Coutts’ dossier of lies, cover-ups and officially sanctioned surveillance provide a devastating glimpse of the Brussels-loving, Brexit-hating, woke-worshipping Blob at work.
Coutts, favoured by the very rich, from Mafia crooks to the King of England, has been caught with its pants down, in flagrante.
It is not just Farage who has been singled out for expulsion from woke society.
Tens of thousands more have found their banking lifeline cut off for no reason.
Kavanagh blamed a British organisation called Common Purpose:
… they may actually be victims of another shadowy organisation, known as The Octopus, set up in the Blair era, whose tentacles reach into every nook and cranny of our daily lives.
Its real name is Common Purpose.
You have almost certainly never heard of it.
But it has grown in two decades from a small group of influencers under middle-class networker Julia Middleton into a global multimillion pound charity with leverage in the highest places.
In 1988, she spelled out how to do it.
“A small, committed and co-ordinated group of people producing pressure from the outside,” she said.
“Two or three determined fifth columnists on the inside. And the stamina from both groups to keep on and on and on putting them on the agenda until they eventually had to be discussed.”
Even she might be surprised how successful these plans would prove.
Kavanagh cited examples of the organisation at work over the years in many areas of public life:
CP’s luminaries include ex-Met boss Cressida Dick, ex-EU Commissioner Chris Patten, council bosses and top civil service mandarins who pay £5,000-plus for lessons on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, the issue at the heart of the Coutts row with Farage.
Its clients may also include Coutts itself, just as its relation, the Royal Bank of Scotland, was before being bailed out by the Goverment in 2008.
The Sun last week asked Coutts if any senior figures — including chief executive Dame Alison Rose — have attended such courses.
So far, no response.
The same question could be put to Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, which also designated EDI [Equity, Diversity and Inclusion] as its primary goal — apparently ahead of cutting inflation.
The BBC is certainly a supporter.
During his time at the Beeb, ITV’s political editor Robert Peston recalls a CP course which ended “with a collective wail about the irresponsibility and excessive power of the media”.
Talking of irresponsible media, Alison Rose is the alleged source of inaccurate claims (aka “lies”) peddled by the BBC’s Simon Jack that Farage did not have enough cash to justify his Coutts account.
Both Rose and Jack now risk losing their jobs.
Common Purpose ranges far wider than Brexit-bashing, Gay Pride, trans issues and Net Zero.
It is closely linked with anti-press hypocrites Hacked Off, who want newspapers regulated by the state.
Political censorship is also backed by another totalitarian group, which pressures advertisers to withdraw business from media whose views they disagree with.
They’re the modern equivalent of book burners.
They bully advertising agencies into denying publicity for organisations deemed to be on the wrong side of the culture wars — such as The Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Express and GB News.
Kavanagh pointed out that Labour had no comment on the Farage farrago or woke banking:
Interestingly, Sir Keir Starmer’s press-bashing Labour Party has had absolutely nothing to say about this scandal.
As for woke banking, it has been going on in the US for some time as well. In that sense, I’m not sure that Common Purpose is all to blame. I’m pretty sure this originated in the US.
In my post on Friday, I cited The Telegraph‘s Alison Pearson, who discussed Environmental, Social and Governance — ESG — policies and scores:
So alarming is the tentacular stranglehold this philosophy has over financial institutions that, back in the spring, Governor Ron DeSantis took steps to ban ESG in Florida. He called it “woke banking”. “What it’s evolved into is a mechanism to inject political ideology into investment decisions, corporate governance, and really just the everyday economy,” said DeSantis. ESG policies were enforced by “elites” in financial institutions to push “woke” political agendas which did not not prioritise financial interests.
The BBC apologises to Farage
My last post on Farage’s bank account was dated Friday, July 21. At that point, Conservative MPs were aghast that the head of one of the UK’s largest banking groups would discuss a former customer’s account with a BBC reporter, especially over dinner. While Dame Alison had apologised, the BBC had not.
On Monday morning, July 24, The Express reported that a former BBC newsreader urged the corporation to apologise to Farage for its error in reporting the story:
A former BBC newsreader has called on one of the corporation’s journalists to apologise to Nigel Farage over a story about his bank account being shut.
Nicholas Owen made the comment about a report by the BBC‘s business editor Simon Jack that the ex-Ukip and Brexit Party leader had been cut off by Coutts because he did not meet the wealth threshold.
But it has since emerged that Mr Farage’s account was closed because his views did not “align” with the prestigious private bank, which is owned by NatWest.
The BBC journalist sat next to NatWest chief executive Dame Alison Rose the night before the article was published earlier this month.
Mr Owen told GB News: “Simon Jack is a jolly good journalist, jolly good at his job, and he sits next to a banker who gives him a line on the Nigel Farage story, well, of course, he’s going to go with that, it’s a jolly good source.
“But if that source turns out to be wrong, the facts are simply the other way round as Nigel himself has now discovered in great detail, then for goodness’ sake, just put your hands up. Simon, come on lad, just say ‘Sorry, got that wrong’.”
Mr Farage has written to the head of the Beeb demanding a formal apology over its reporting on the closure of his Coutts bank account.
In his letter to director-general Tim Davie, he said he had faced “humiliating” publicity due to the corporation’s article.
It cited a source as saying the move to close his account was a “commercial” decision rather than political reasons as he was claiming.
The BBC has since published an update to the original story by business editor Simon Jack, admitting it “turned out not to be accurate”.
Yet, an apology had not been forthcoming. The ‘turned out not to be accurate’ statement appeared on a previous evening news bulletin and on the corporation’s webpage, without a personal admission to Farage himself.
It was only late on Monday afternoon that reporter Simon Jack finally apologised to Farage:
Guido Fawkes noted (red emphases his):
Took him long enough. Nige’s legal threats probably woke him up a bit…
Farage tweeted his thanks for Jack’s apology and said that the BBC News CEO Deborah Turness also apologised to him:
Farage covered the corporation’s apologies on his GB News show that evening, acknowledging them as ‘fulsome’ and ‘very, very rare’. He then turned his attention to Coutts’s head, Peter Flavel, from whom he has heard nothing, and said he wants to get ‘the absolute truth’ on what happened. Farage said he has now put in a subject access request to NatWest, his previous one had been to Coutts, which produced the shocking 40-page report, which I covered on July 20. Farage ended by thanking Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Andrew Griffith MP for their support:
On Tuesday, a BBC report told us:
Mr Farage said he accepted the apologies “with good grace”, but said questions for Coutts remained.
He thanked BBC News CEO Deborah Turness – who has written to him – and business editor Simon Jack – who has tweeted – for their apologies.
“It’s not often that the BBC apologise. But for the BBC to apologise, I’m very, very pleased,” Mr Farage said.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme, Mr Farage said he had had to publish a lot of material in order to clear up misinformation in the wake of the 4 July story.
“I had to go to very great lengths and great personal damage to undo the story,” Mr Farage said.
“There is no fault or no blame on the BBC. This now goes right back to the Natwest Banking Group [owners of Coutts].
“Someone in that group decided it was appropriate, legal and ethical to leak details of my personal financial situation.
“That, I think, is wrong on every level – and that is where the spotlight should be and it will.”
Mr Jack, who tweeted his apology, said his story had been “from a trusted and senior source”.
“However, the information turned out to be incomplete and inaccurate. Therefore, I would like to apologise to Mr Farage,” Mr Jack continued.
Mr Farage later said: “Jack says, in the tweet, that his information came from a trusted and senior source. I would suggest that it may well have been a very senior source.”
On 21 July, the BBC updated its original article to say it had “not been accurate”. Mr Farage then asked for a formal apology from the BBC.
On Monday, the BBC said on its Corrections and Clarifications website: “We acknowledge that the information we reported – that Coutts’ decision on Mr Farage’s account did not involve considerations about his political views – turned out not to be accurate and have apologised to Mr Farage.”
The de-banked Anglican priest
On Tuesday evening, The Telegraph published the Revd Richard Fothergill’s story about his cancellation by Yorkshire Building Society, ‘Not even Reverends like me are safe from the banks’ woke purge’. I covered his story on July 6.
He says that, as a Yorkshireman, the building society had always been a part of his life. His father had an account there for a quarter of a century, and he had an account there for 17 years, then:
Like millions of savings account holders, I received an email from them nearly every month saying “How are we doing? We want to hear from you!”. In May one such message came through promoting the upcoming LGBTQIA+ Pride month in June, so I used this as an opportunity to offer feedback.
I wrote back two paragraphs expressing two views. One: was promoting Pride really such a good use of their time? Were there not implications for their brand?
Second: as a Minister in the Church, I expressed a strong ethical concern about the ‘T’ element of LGBT, particularly given how transgender ideology impacts children.
I thought nothing of it, and was pretty sure their Customer Relations department would just ignore me. At best, I assumed, if another 100 YBS customers pushed back, perhaps next year they would dial it down? I was obviously polite in my message to them, and lawyers who have seen both our pieces of correspondence confirm this.
I heard nothing from them for two weeks. Then a rather sharp letter suddenly arrived. It declared: “Your comments will not stand” and “we must protect our workforce from prejudice”. Then, rather cryptically – given this was the first I had heard about it – it added: “The relationship between us has irrevocably broken down.”
Remember, I wasn’t criticising them for how they manage money or any particular individual; I was merely challenging their straying into contentious social issues pushing on us customers a particular worldview. They asked for feedback and I gave them some – it’s just that my comments were the wrong sort.
Afterwards, he got in touch with Toby Young’s Free Speech Union:
Initially I was going to ignore all this. But as I prayed, I came to feel the right thing to do was to stand up against this intolerance and bullying. I talked to my friends at the Free Speech Union and they put me in touch with an excellent journalist who wrote up my story accurately, and off we went. It has struck a chord with the public …
As a Church leader, I want to flag up the insidiousness of this cause which none of us had ever heard about five years ago. I believe we should all stand up against this woke worldview and be confident we are in the right, not being ‘discriminatory’, ‘intolerant’, or ‘bigoted’ for doing so. Far from it, we are protecting future generations from a creed which I and many others firmly believe puts minors on a pathway to gender altering surgery, sterility and much mental trauma.
I have great hope that Britons will not allow this to happen and that woke thinking will be removed wholly from our culture. In my view, a just, fair, tolerant culture is one based on the revelations of God through Jesus Christ. It says in the Bible, ‘it is for freedom’s sake that Christ has set you free’ and that applies to all aspects of life – freedom from bullying, freedom from fear, freedom to think for yourself, freedom to choose, freedom to worship and associate with whom you like.
Let’s not let a narrow group of woke extremists take that away. Let’s return to our foundations as a nation – one that knows and trusts in God.
I fully agree, but our nation is no longer ‘one that knows and trusts in God’, hence the problem!
Tuesday’s spotlight on Coutts and NatWest
Articles and commentary continued to emerge about Coutts and parent company NatWest on Tuesday, July 25.
In the late afternoon, The Telegraph published ‘Nigel Farage accuses Coutts boss of being “asleep at the wheel”‘, which concerns its chief, Peter Flavel:
Nigel Farage has accused the boss of Coutts of being “asleep at the wheel” throughout the scandal over its decision to “de-bank” him because of his political views.
Mr Farage, the former Brexit Party leader, said he had written to Peter Flavel three times but has yet to receive a reply, calling his handling of the situation “an absolute disgrace” …
Mr Farage was placed on a “glide path to exit” by the institution in March, and it is now set to pull down the shutters on his account within weeks.
The politician, who says he has been refused accounts at 10 other banks, has told Mr Flavel that he plans to turn up at a branch and withdraw his money in cash on the final day.
In an email sent to the Coutts CEO on April 19, he wrote: “I retired from active politics in January 2020, so doubt I can still be a politically exposed person.
“My recent business activity has been quite normal. Whilst I have no desire for this event to be in the public arena, I can’t help wonder that there may be some prejudice here.
“If other banks decided that I am too high profile, then both of us would be in a very interesting public position. What on earth is going on?”
The first paragraph of that email, dated April 19 — which is in the article — reads:
I have banked with Coutts for some years, both business and personal, and prior to that with Natwest since 1980. My personal manager, Mark Pierce, with whom I organised a mortgage repayment etc. left some months ago. A new man, Min Fung, replaced him, to whom I have never spoken before despite expressing to one of his juniors that I should. Out of the blue I receive a phone call to say the accounts will be closed, followed by a letter. No explanation is offered.
The bank’s head of client coverage, Camilla Stowell, got in touch with Farage. This means that Flavel had seen Farage’s email and passed it on.
On May 1, Farage wrote Flavel saying, in part:
As explained to her I have been rejected by several banks. On current course I will be at your branch on…the final date, wiht [sic] a security van to collect approx [the account’s balance] in cash.
I look forward to seeing you there.
Came there no reply.
On Monday, July 24, Farage wrote Flavel again, mentioning the BBC’s coverage and the subject access request (SAR) from Coutts. His message ended:
Not only was that briefing inaccurate and wrong but it was in clear breach of my confidential information. Despite all of this I still have heard nothing from you. Are you asleep at the wheel? Do you simply not care?
The article concludes:
Mr Flavel joined the high-end bank, owned by the NatWest group, in 2016. Before that, he worked for JP Morgan and Standard Chartered in Asia.
Mr Farage said he should be under pressure alongside Dame Alison Rose, the NatWest Group boss, who is fighting for her job amid speculation that she briefed the BBC.
He said of Mr Flavel: “It’s his people that wrote this document. It’s a pretty appalling report. I think it’s an absolute disgrace. I think his position is even more vulnerable than hers. This guy is directly responsible and has done and said nothing – it’s not good enough.”
Coutts has been contacted for comment.
That afternoon, reports had been coming in saying that Dame Alison had admitted she was the BBC’s source for the Farage story and that she had the banking group’s directors’ full support. This Twitter thread is from The Sun‘s political editor Harry Cole, a Guido alum:
A Telegraph article provoked an immediate angry response of 2,000 tweets within 50 minutes:
GB News shows featured updates as well as damning indictments from its presenters and panellists.
Nana Akua, substituting for Patrick Christys mid-afternoon, said that, whether or not the identity of the leaker emerged soon, Farage would pursue it to the end, then asked if Rose was responsible:
Michelle Dewberry said that she herself is a NatWest customer and disagrees with the directors saying that it is in the interest of ‘all’ customers and shareholders that Rose remain in place, when she had broken confidentiality laws. She questioned whether any of the people at the top of NatWest Group were ‘fit for purpose’:
Farage’s show followed. His editorial opened with the statement by NatWest’s chair, Howard Davies, that the bank’s board of directors had concluded Rose should remain as the CEO, ‘as demonstrated by our results’ over the past four years. He added that a review of account closure arrangements at Coutts would take place, the findings of which would be made public once complete. He said that the terms of reference and lead firm conducting the review ‘will be announced shortly’. Farage said:
‘NatWest CEO Dame Alison Rose, NatWest Group chairman Howard Davies and Coutts CEO Peter Flavel have all failed. Frankly, they should all go.’
Nigel Farage says NatWest are ‘doing their best to prop up Alison Rose’ after they refused to sack her over her BBC leak debacle.
His show had four more segments on his banking situation which followed: Conservative MP David Davis was on next, then a member of the Chartered Banker Institute, a business consultant discussing many SMEs who find it hard to get a business account and, finally, The Sun‘s former editor Kelvin Mackenzie, who minced no words. Mackenzie is, incidentally, a Coutts customer himself:
Jacob Rees-Mogg’s show followed. Rees-Mogg has been a Coutts customer since the age of 13. He discussed Rose’s position with former Channel 4 correspondent Michael Crick and former Conservative MP Jerry Hayes, who still works as a barrister. All lamented the deplorable situation of Farage’s account closure and agreed that, under the circumstances, Rose would have to go, either on Wednesday, when City Minister Andrew Griffith was holding a special banking meeting that day or, at the latest, on Friday. They agreed that Wednesday would probably be the day, because it was unlikely Rose would show up at Andrew Griffith’s meeting:
Dan Wootton’s programme followed. He opened with an editorial saying that politically-oriented bank closures must stop, otherwise we will find ourselves in a Chinese-style social credit score system:
As GB News’s broadcasts continued, The Telegraph had more news about Rose and her future.
The paper published ‘Dame Alison Rose’s statement in full: “I made a serious error of judgment”‘, the highlights of which follow:
I recognise that in my conversations with Simon Jack of the BBC, I made a serious error of judgment in discussing Mr Farage’s relationship with the bank. Given the consequences of this, I want to address the questions that have been raised and set out the substance of the conversations that took place.
Believing it was public knowledge, I confirmed that Mr Farage was a Coutts customer and that he had been offered a NatWest bank account.
How would the public know that Farage banked with Coutts? He only said so after the BBC did!
Even if we all knew that fact, which we didn’t, she just should have said she doesn’t discuss business, because it’s confidential. I worked briefly for a retail bank, and that was rule number one!
A former Coutts employee told Farage the same thing, saying that a cashier — teller, in American parlance — would be sacked for breaching client confidentiality:
She also said:
… I recognise that I left Mr Jack with the impression that the decision to close Mr Farage’s accounts was solely a commercial one.
I was not part of the decision-making process to exit Mr Farage. This decision was made by Coutts, and I was informed in April that this was for commercial reasons. At the time of my conversations with Mr Jack, I was not in receipt of the contents of the Coutts Wealth Reputational Risk Committee materials subsequently released by Mr Farage. I have apologised to Mr Farage for the deeply inappropriate language contained in those papers and the Board has commissioned a full independent review into the decision and process to ensure that this cannot happen again.
Put simply, I was wrong to respond to any question raised by the BBC about this case. I want to extend my sincere apologies to Mr Farage for the personal hurt this has caused him and I have written to him today.
I would like to say sorry to the Board and my colleagues. I started my career working for National Westminster Bank. It is an institution I care about enormously and have always been proud to be a part of. It has been the privilege of my career to lead the bank and I am grateful to the Board for entrusting me with this role. It is therefore all the more regrettable that my actions have compounded an already difficult issue for the Group.
The article also has the full statement from Sir Howard Davie, her boss, which Farage discussed in his aforementioned editorial.
A short time later, while Farage’s show was airing, the Telegraph View — the main editorial — stated ‘Alison Rose’s position is clearly untenable’:
… She had made a “serious error of judgment in discussing Mr Farage’s relationship with the bank”, she admitted, but had not revealed any personal financial information about him. She put the problem down to her leaving Mr Jack “with the impression that the decision to close Mr Farage’s accounts was solely a commercial one”.
Does she really think that is good enough? If her explanation was apparently so innocent, why did she not admit to the conversation last week, the first time she apologised to Mr Farage?
While the chairman of NatWest, Sir Howard Davies, last night expressed the board’s confidence in its chief executive, many investors and customers will consider Dame Alison’s behaviour to have brought the bank into disrepute. Not only was Mr Farage’s Coutts account closed because of his political views – a fact that NatWest only belatedly seemed to acknowledge – but its chief executive has allowed herself to be dragged into the row. Would Dame Alison accept such behaviour from her more junior employees? At best, her leadership of the bank looks stunningly inept.
Indeed, her position is clearly untenable. Banking might have been transformed by the digital age, but the relationship between customer and institution still depends, ultimately, on trust. She has surely sacrificed the trust of swathes of the public horrified by the treatment of Mr Farage.
The British state retains a substantial stake in NatWest, part of the legacy of its bailout during the financial crisis. If Dame Alison cannot see that her continuing as chief executive has become a distraction for a business that still has not fully recovered from its near-collapse in 2008, the Government should force the board’s hand and replace her.
By the time Dan Wootton was into the first half-hour of his show, Conservative MPs were weighing in on the situation. The Telegraph posted ‘NatWest boss’s Farage leak admission prompts “significant concern from No. 10″‘:
… Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt are understood to have “significant concerns” about Dame Alison staying in her post. There is expectation within the Government that she will have to quit …
Dame Alison is a member of the Prime Minister’s Business Council, and is set to attend a meeting of bank leaders with Andrew Griffith, the economic secretary to the Treasury, in Downing Street on Wednesday.
In further pressure on the NatWest boss, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the banking watchdog, revealed that it had raised concerns about breaches of confidentiality by Coutts and its parent company NatWest and said it had “made clear” to the bigger bank the need for an independent review.
On Tuesday night, senior Conservative MPs demanded that Dame Alison resign or be fired from her job at a bank that is 39 per cent owned by the taxpayer.
Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former business secretary, said: “She has to go. She has admitted it and she has to go. She has broken one of the fundamental codes of banking and therefore she must go.”
A City chief executive said: “She has broken the cardinal rule of banking. An FCA investigation is inevitable now. Her position is untenable and she should resign. It’s ridiculous the board is backing her given the seriousness of the offence.”
That evening, The Times had an article about concerned MPs, ‘De-banking furore grows as MPs start investigation’:
MPs have expressed concerns that high street lenders are “freezing, withdrawing or withholding bank accounts” from businesses with “little or no explanation”.
The all-party parliamentary group on fair business banking is examining “how and why banking facilities are being denied” …
The issue of businesses being de-banked is thought to be a widespread problem and is often linked with lenders’ perception of the risk profiles of companies or their directors. A desire not to fall foul of anti-money laundering rules is often said to lie behind banks’ closure of business accounts.
Lenders also say they are often forbidden from explaining why they are closing accounts because of rules about “tipping off” potential offenders.
UK Finance, the banking trade body, said lenders “understand the impact of account closures on businesses, and any decision is only taken after extensive review and analysis. Banks will consider a number of factors including compliance with applicable laws and regulations, as well as a firm’s own risk management.”
Andrew Griffith, economic secretary to the Treasury, has written to lenders to say the government is proposing that banks provide 90 days’ notice of account termination in most cases and that they improve transparency so that customers have a “clear understanding” of the reason for closure, unless providing one would be unlawful.
As Wednesday’s papers were being delivered to London’s newsstands, The Times posted ‘Downing St puts NatWest boss Alison Rose under pressure to resign’:
The Times has been told that Downing Street and Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, have significant concerns about Rose remaining in post. Three other cabinet ministers said that Rose’s position was untenable.
Downing Street’s concerns are particularly significant as taxpayers have a 39 per cent stake in NatWest, which owns Coutts.
One cabinet minister said: “She has got to go. She has no integrity and has done material damage to the bank and its reputation. The chairman has also lost his credibility by saying it’s in the interests of customers and shareholders to keep her. Frankly the whole board has got to go if it wants to defend her.”
A second said that her apology was “not enough” and that it is “difficult to see how she can survive”, while a third said that “she’s got to go”.
“She hasn’t understood from the outset just how serious this is,” they said. “She’s obfuscated at every turn.”
Farage last night called for both Rose and Davies to quit. He said: “Dame Alison Rose has now admitted that she is the source. She broke client confidentiality, and is unfit to be CEO of NatWest Group.”
Two front pages featured Rose and NatWest. Note how much smaller the Financial Times headline is than The Telegraph‘s. This shows you everything you need to know about the FT — a Remainer newspaper:
Wednesday morning’s news
And now we come back to where this post started, with the FT‘s tweet that Rose had resigned.
The Telegraph featured live coverage and the effect her resignation had on UK markets.
At 6:49:
Good morning
Thanks for being with us. The City minister will meet bank bosses today to discuss concerns about closing customer accounts over their political views.
The gathering comes as the banking sector reels from the resignation of NatWest chief executive Dame Alison Rose following weeks of controversy over the decision by Coutts to “de-bank” Nigel Farage.
At 7:13:
Mr Farage has called for a “cultural change” at the bank and within the wider industry, as he promised to continue to campaign on account closures.
He told the PA news agency he wanted a “cultural change within NatWest, they ought to go back to being a bank, rather than being a moral arbiter for political positions”.
He added: “But I think this culture runs deep through the entire banking industry. I think there is a massive anti-Brexit prejudice and I think the whole thing needs to change.”
At 7:19:
… Andrew Griffith, the City minister, has said it was “right” for NatWest boss Dame Alison Rose to step down, writes our politics live editor Jack Maidment …
At 7:25:
… Mr Farage said that he believes Dame Alison Rose had effectively tried to “lie her way out” after it emerged Coutts had “debanked” the former Ukip leader over his political views, rather than commercial reasons.
He told GB News:
When (Dame Alison) was caught having breached confidentiality, she tried – supported by her board – to frankly lie her way out.
I thought the statement that came out at 6pm last night … was rather reminiscent of the Premier League football club that’s in crisis that says ‘we have every confidence in our manager’.
I didn’t think she could last beyond the end of the week. We have, on Friday, the half-yearly figures coming. There is an investor meeting at 9.30 that morning.
So, she’s gone, and that’s a start, but I have to say that (Coutts chief executive) Peter Flavel … (NatWest chair) Howard Davies … it was the board that sanctioned this culture that talks about diversity and inclusion, and actually is very divisive.
In my case, as you can clearly see, pretty poisonous stuff. I think any board member that endorsed that statement last night, where they said ‘yes, she breached confidentiality, but she can stay in her post’… frankly, I think the whole board needs to go.
Guido has the video clip:
Guido’s post says, in part:
So far the Labour front bench have kept quiet, although Starmer is on Radio 5 Live at 10a.m. You can’t barrage the Farage…
UPDATE: Rose has also been told to step down from Downing Street’s Business Council and Energy Efficiency Taskforce. Finished…
Returning to The Telegraph, a 7:33 entry says that Farage also spoke with Sky News.
At 7:42:
Bank chiefs will be quizzed by the City minister today to discuss concerns about closing customer accounts over their political views.
The summit with Andrew Griffith will hold extra weight after NatWest chief executive Dame Alison Rose quit overnight after admitting that she leaked private banking information about Nigel Farage to the BBC …
Mr Griffiths meeting with bank bosses comes ahead of proposed government reforms requiring banks to explain and delay these decisions.
At 7:44, the entry said that Farage told Sky News he still did not have a replacement bank account. (He has approached ten banks [see 7:53], all of which said no. Presumably, the offer of a personal account at NatWest still stands?)
At 7:49:
A No10 source said Rishi Sunak “was concerned about the unfolding situation” and “Alison Rose has done the right thing in resigning”, writes Jack Maidment.
The source said: “Everyone would expect people in public life – whether that’s in a business leadership role or otherwise – to act responsibly and with integrity.”
At 8:03:
Shares in NatWest dropped by 4pc as markets opened in London, following the resignation of chief executive Dame Alison Rose.
It helped drag down the FTSE 100 by 0.2pc to 7,667.34, while the midcap FTSE 250 was flat at 19,155.06.
At 8:14:
Policing Minister Chris Philp said a lot of MPs or their families have been turned down by banking services because of “politically exposed persons, or pep, rules”.
Mr Philp told Sky News:
(The rules) were designed to stop essentially members of foreign governments who had obtained their money dishonestly from using the UK banking system to essentially launder it.
So, the rules are set up for the right reasons but MPs quite often get caught by these pep rules because they’re applied kind of overzealously.
It is not spoken about much but if you look at almost any MP they will have had an experience like this, I think the Nigel Farage case is an extreme one, but I’m afraid it’s not unique.
When asked if he has had difficulty accessing financial services, Mr Philp said: “My family have actually, I don’t want to go into detail.”
I’ll leave it there for now, but anyone who thinks Farage will be re-entering politics will be disappointed. Guaranteed bank accounts, within legal reason, are his new cause:
You can hear a clip of that interview here. Robinson treated Farage appallingly, then said he was ‘only teasing’. Typical BBC. How I wish we were no longer obliged to pay the licence fee: a mandatory tax.
We are fortunate to have Nigel Farage as the people’s champion. First, Brexit and, now, bank accounts. Thank you, Nigel!
Yesterday’s post was about last Thursday’s three by-elections in England in Conservative-held seats.
Conservatives and Labour are both drawing conclusions about each party winning one of the three seats with the Lib Dems winning the third.
For both the two main parties, climate change — Net Zero — is important. It’s important for Lib Dems, too, but they are now in a distinct minority in the House of Commons. In terms of MP count, Scotland’s SNP is the third largest party after Labour.
However, other considerations will play a part in the general election (GE) to come either later in 2024 or at the last possible moment in January 2025.
This post will review the minor ones first, then move on to the larger ones.
By-elections: everything and nothing
All three parties are mulling over the by-elections.
If one looks at constituency by-election votes, readily available on Wikipedia, a lot of the time they are a protest vote before voters resume the status quo at the next GE.
A case in point from 2019 was the by-election in the Welsh constituency of Brecon and Radnorshire. On August 2 that year, Lib Dem supporter Mike Smithson, founder of Political Betting, gloated over his party’s win, ‘The LDs overturn the Tory 19.5% majority to win the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election’:
However, just four months later, on December 12, 2019, in the general election, Conservative candidate Fay Jones defeated the Lib Dem incumbent Jane Dodds, leader of the Welsh Lib Dems. In 2021, Dodds was elected as the only Lib Dem member of the Welsh Senedd.
Another factor is a much smaller turnout in by-elections than GEs. In 2022, Labour’s Paulette Hamilton won in Birmingham Erdington, continuing the party’s legacy after her predecessor Jack Dromey — Harriet Harman MP’s husband — suddenly died. Only 27% of voters made their way to the polls.
Are the doomsayers who predict that the Conservatives under Rishi Sunak will lose a GE correct? Only time will tell.
Rishi was upbeat as he shared breakfast on Friday morning with Uxbridge and South Ruislip’s latest Conservative MP, ex-postman and councillor Steve Treadwell.
Guido Fawkes brought us a video clip and soundbite from the Rumbling Tum café:
Rishi said (purple emphases mine):
Westminster has been acting like the next election is a done deal. The Labour Party’s been acting like its a done deal. The people of Uxbridge just told all of them that it’s not. No-one expected us to win here. But Steve’s victory demonstrates that when confronted with the actual reality of the Labour Party – when there’s an actual choice on a matter of substance at stake – people vote Conservative.
The Guardian also reported on the breakfast:
Rishi Sunak is in Uxbridge with Steve Tuckwell, the victorious Conservative candidate, PA Media reports. They arrived in a cafe to loud clapping and cheering. PA says:
The prime minister chatted to people sitting at the tables, celebrating the result which saw Tuckwell hold on with a majority of just 495, down from the 7,210 Boris Johnson secured in 2019.
“Are you all pumped?” Mr Sunak said to one group as he thanked Tory campaigners.
He also joked: “Normally when I get woken up at three in the morning it’s only bad news. So, it was a welcome change.”
Well, if Rishi wants to win, he will have to move his party back to core values, those that are truly conservative, not those of either Labour or the Lib Dems. As it stands, many Conservative MPs are more like Lib Dems, championing all the social issues without considering those of their voters. I could name names at this point, but why bother? Unless people watch BBC Parliament on a regular basis, most won’t know the personalities involved. That said, I am happy for readers to comment here on Conservatives who are clearly not conservative.
Incidentally, Boris Johnson — the best campaigner the Party has had in decades — tweeted his congratulations:
Just over a year ago, in June 2022, when Boris was still Prime Minister, the Conservatives suffered two stunning by-election defeats in Tiverton and Honiton in the West Country and in Wakefield in West Yorkshire. The first went to the Lib Dems and the second returned to Labour. On June 24 that year, The Telegraph reported that, while all was not lost historically, it was time for the Conservatives to pay attention:
In November of 1991, the Tories lost Kincardine and Deeside to the Liberal Democrats, as well as Langbaurgh to Labour.
Five months later, however, Sir John Major regained both seats en route to a surprise general election victory …
One of the many reasons that by-elections make for rather erratic tools of prediction is that, by their nature, the random seats at stake tend not to be all that representative.
Indeed, many go entirely unremarked upon because they are safe seats, where the incumbent party holds on without any trouble at all – and with an abysmally low turnout to boot.
Of the 36 by-elections between 2010 and 2019, the seat changed hands in only seven. Of those, perhaps only the two victories by Ukip in October and November 2014 proved to be of any long-term consequence.
Yet what is going on now seems altogether different. For one, the two by-elections held on Thursday could not have been better selected to target Conservative worries.
Wakefield was the archetypal Red Wall seat picked up by the Tories in 2019. Tiverton and Honiton was a previously impregnable Conservative fortress in the south-west.
… these two defeats are starting to fit into a pattern. They join the two enormous swings of more than 30 per cent to the Liberal Democrats in Chesham and Amersham, as well as North Shropshire.
This would appear to be evidence of genuine unpopularity, rather than mere by-election grumpiness. The three Liberal Democrat victories are all in the 20 biggest ever by-election swings of all time.
The pace of defeats is ramping up too. The Conservatives lost only five seats between 2010-19 period, but they have now lost four in just 12 months …
These defeats don’t defy the rules of politics, they fit well within them. That is not good news for the Prime Minister.
Rishi, take note.
Indeed, were Nadine Dorries to resign her Mid-Bedfordshire seat, as she said she would a several weeks ago, Labour could win, according to The Telegraph on July 1, 2023:
A survey by Opinium found that Labour would overturn Nadine Dorries’ 24,664 majority in a seat that has been held by the Tories since 1931.
The defeat would shock many Conservative MPs, raising the prospect that other seats thought to be “safe” may now be at risk …
Last week, Ms Dorries confirmed that she will be “gone long before the next election”, having announced on June 9 that she planned to trigger a by-election.
Labour commissioned the Opinium poll last month following anecdotal reports by canvassers that voters appeared to be deserting the Conservatives in vast numbers …
The poll put the Conservative candidate Festus Akinbusoye on 24 per cent, Labour on 28 per cent, and the Lib Dems on 15 per cent … while Reform UK’s candidate, David Holland, was on 10 per cent.
That’s pretty high for Reform, the former Brexit Party.
The youth factor: inexperience or opportunity
Keir Mather, 25, now representing Selby and Ainsty in North Yorkshire, is now the baby of the Commons, the youngest MP.
Labour’s Nadia Whittome now has a colleague younger than she.
During the campaign, Mather was somewhat unconvincing.
Guido Fawkes gave us the low down and a video:
Guido told us (red emphases his):
Labour’s candidate, the youthful Keir Mather, made a somewhat unconventional pitch for constituents to “lend me your vote”:
In about 12 months time we’ll have a general election. And if you’re not happy with how I’ve done as your MP, you’ll have a chance to have your say again…
It hardly fills you with confidence…
When you look at what voters already think of their candidate, the approach seems even more questionable. In Lord Ashcroft’s focus group, voters were concerned that Keir “looks about twelve” and that “he’s not very assertive. He might get eaten alive.” Leading with a pitch of ‘it’s only a year, what’s the worst that can happen’ won’t help assuage those doubts…
We shall see how he does in Parliament. After all, he was fortunate enough to attend Oxford University and be catapulted from there to Labour MP Wes Streeting’s office, where he has worked until now. No doubt Wes will be keeping a helpful eye on his protégé.
On July 18, two days ahead of the by-election on July 20, The Guardian went to take the constituency’s temperature. Conservatives there were deeply disappointed that Nigel Adams, who won by an amazing 20,000 majority in 2019, threw everything in the bin because Boris Johnson had not recommended him for a peerage. Stupid — and proud — man. He was old enough to know better. MPs do not automatically get peerages, and Nigel Adams was hardly up there with Conservative greats. (Nor is Nadine Dorries, for that matter, another one upset because she was not made a Baroness.)
The article said:
It is Sunak’s top priority out of the three contests, according to a senior ally of his who has helped rally the troops. Mark Crane, a Conservative councillor and leader of Selby district council for 20 years, also admits “Rishi will personally feel it” if the Tories lose …
“A lot of people are upset at the way Nigel resigned,” said Crane, sipping coffee on a bracing summer day in Selby town centre. “It was extremely disappointing that with about a year to go in this parliament, that he should seek to stand down and cause us what can only be a difficult byelection.”
Crane, who has been at the centre of the local political scene for decades, acknowledged apathy among Tory voters is likely to be a major problem. “It will happen. It’s just a case of how many thousands of people,” he believes.
I digress, but that was only to show that Conservatives probably stayed at home.
Back to Mather’s youth. On Friday morning, July 21, The Guardian reported on Conservative MP Johnny Mercer’s interview on Sky News that day. He criticised Mather’s lack of experience:
You’ve got to have people who have actually done stuff. This guy has been at Oxford University more than he’s been in a job.
You put a chip in him there and he just relays Labour lines, and the problem is people have kind of had enough of that.
They want people who are authentic. People who have worked in that constituency, who know what life is like, understand what life is like to live, work and raise a family in communities like theirs.
Well, Mather is from the constituency, even if he hasn’t worked there in a significant capacity.
Fortunately, Conservative Party chairman Greg Hands, who I am assured from one of his constituents is an excellent MP, knew better than Mercer:
Asked if he thought Mercer’s comment was appropriate, he told LBC: “I welcome young people coming into politics. We’ve got young Conservative MPs ourselves, young MPs in their 20s.”
Indeed.
Sara Britcliffe, 28, is one of the 2019 Conservative intake. She represents Hyndburn in Lancashire, ably winning the seat at the age of 24 from Labour’s much older Graham Jones, first elected in 2010. Britcliffe turned the seat Conservative for the first time since 1992, with a majority of 2,951.
Her father Peter had served as a Lancashire County Councillor and had been mayor of Hyndburn from 2017 to 2018. As he was a widower, Sara served as mayoress during his term in office. She then served as a councillor for Hyndburn Borough Council between 2018 and 2021, at which time she stood down because she was a sitting MP. Her only private sector employment was as manager of a sandwich shop in Oswaldtwistle.
Moral of the story: youth and inexperience are no barriers to entering Parliament. Britcliffe does very well as a backbencher and, as such, proves that a twenty-something can do a good job serving constituents.
Net Zero and ULEZ
Now we come to the heart of the matter: climate change policies.
Politicians from both the Conservative and Labour parties are wise to begin rethinking Net Zero by 3030.
Pundits said that ULEZ — Ultra Low Emission Zone — was a peculiarly London issue. Nothing could be further from the truth. Elsewhere in the UK there are LEZ cities which will also charge motorists for being in the wrong type of vehicle.
On Friday, the day after the by-election, an article appeared, ‘UK clean air zones: the cities adding low emissions zones in 2023 and how to check if you are affected’:
Drivers are being urged to check if they are affected as a number of UK cities introduce or expand their low-emissions zones in the coming months.
Two cities will introduce all-new clean air zones in 2023, with another due to tighten restrictions and the possibility of a fourth coming into force as local authorities look to cut pollution. The changes have prompted a warning to drivers to check nearby local restrictions or face potential fines.
The ULEZ (ultra low-emission zone) in London has caused much controversy, with locals angered over the plans to cut down on cars in the capital. Labour even pointed towards this – a policy of Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan – as one of the reasons the party was unable to pick up an extra seat in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election.
Clean air zones apply charges to vehicles which do not meet minimum emissions standards. Most charge tolls of between £7 and £50 on non-compliant vehicles, although fines for non-payment can reach £2,000.
The minimum standards are petrol cars and vans which meet Euro 4 standards; Euro 6-compliant diesel cars and vans; HGVs, buses and coaches that meet Euro VI and Euro 3-compliant motorbikes.
The article has a map of the English and Scottish cities that have either introduced or plan to introduce LEZs or clean air zones.
In England, they are — in addition to London — Tyneside (Newcastle), Bradford, Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Bristol, Bath and Portsmouth.
In Scotland, Glasgow’s LEZ came into force on June 1, 2023. Three other cities will follow in the months ahead: Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen.
There are other notionally eco-friendly — less human-friendly — measures being employed elsewhere. During the summer of 2020 in one of the daily coronavirus briefings, then-Transport Secretary Grant Shapps introduced the concept of the ’15-minute city’ as a reassurance that the pandemic was not going to waste, because England would ‘build back better’ in the years that followed.
Oxford will be trialling the ’15-minute city’ concept in 2024 by implementing six different zones.
Toby Young, founder of The Daily Sceptic and a graduate of Oxford University, was apoplectic. On December 5, 2022, he had a news round-up in ‘Oxford County Councillors to Introduce Trial Climate Lockdown in 2024’. He featured Watts Up With That‘s post:
Oxfordshire County Council yesterday approved plans to lock residents into one of six zones to ‘save the planet’ from global warming. The latest stage in the ’15 minute city’ agenda is to place electronic gates on key roads in and out of the city, confining residents to their own neighbourhoods.
Under the new scheme if residents want to leave their zone they will need permission from the Council who gets to decide who is worthy of freedom and who isn’t. Under the new scheme residents will be allowed to leave their zone a maximum of 100 days per year, but in order to even gain this every resident will have to register their car details with the council who will then track their movements via smart cameras round the city.
Oxfordshire County Council, which is run by Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party, secretly decided to divide-up the city of Oxford into six ‘15 minute’ districts in 2021 soon after they were elected to office. None of the councillors declared their intention of imprisoning local residents in their manifestos of course, preferring to make vague claims about how they will ‘improve the environment’ instead.
Every resident will be required to register their car with the County Council who will then monitor how many times they leave their district via number plate recognition cameras. And don’t think you can beat the system if you’re a two car household. Those two cars will be counted as one meaning you will have to divide up the journeys between yourselves. 2 cars 50 journeys each; 3 cars 33 journeys each and so on.
Watts Up With That introduced the following news items about Oxford, dated October 25:
This story is so crazy, I wanted corroboration. This is the same story published in the Oxford Mail:
ROAD blocks stopping most motorists from driving through Oxford city centre will divide the city into six “15 minute” neighbourhoods, a county council travel chief has said.
And he insisted the controversial plan would go ahead whether people liked it or not.
Duncan Enright, Oxfordshire County Council’s cabinet member for travel and development strategy, explained the authority’s traffic filter proposals in an interview in the Sunday Times …
People can drive freely around their own neighbourhood and can apply for a permit to drive through the filters, and into other neighbourhoods, for up to 100 days per year. This equates to an average of two days per week.
Toby Young commented:
This story is flat out insane. Why on earth would the residents of Oxford tolerate these sandal-wearing dictators? More to come on this, I’m sure.
Stop Press: Oxfordshire County Council has put out a statement to address concerns and ‘misunderstandings’ about the plans. Read it here.
The Telegraph‘s Zoe Strimpel wrote about the plan on December 11: ‘The green war on cars is about to take a mad new turn’.
In February 2023, Oxford residents rightly protested, so whatever the County Council did to allay fears and ‘misunderstandings’ did not work very well:
From this, we can see that clean air zones are the latest craze. They will certainly generate money.
Returning to the by-elections and eco-friendliness, Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg appeared on the BBC last Friday morning to discuss these topics. The Guardian reported:
Jacob Rees-Mogg says Uxbridge result shows why Tories should drop ‘high-cost green policies’, including those in energy bill
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Tory former business secretary, is a Somerset MP, and he is being interviewed on the Today programme. Nick Robinson points out to him that, if the swing in the Somerton and Frome byelection were replicated in his seat at the general election, he would be out.
Rees-Mogg says byelections are not always a good guide to what will happen in a general election. He says his message is “don’t panic”.
He says in 1992 the Tories won back all the seats they had lost in byelections in the preceding parliament.
And the Tories should learn a lesson from Uxbridge.
Q: What lesson is that?
Rees-Mogg replies: “That high-cost green policies are not popular.”
Q: Greg Hands earlier defended government policy on the transition to green energy.
Rees-Mogg says he agreed with what Hands said about going with the grain of human behaviours. He suggests there is no need to rush the phasing out of petrol and diesel cars.
He repeats the point about the need for his party not to panic. They should support Rishi Sunak, he says.
Q: You used to criticise him as socialist.
Rees-Mogg says he wants the Tories to win the next election. No Conservative would want Keir Starmer in Downing Street …
UPDATE: Rees-Mogg said:
You should learn from where the government has done surprisingly well against the form book, and learn there that high-cost green policies are not popular.
I think the government should take away the power for these Ulezes, which is provided for by legislation … You should go with the grain of what voters are doing anyway. Voters are year in, year out, buying cleaner cars with cleaner engines. The development of engines in recent decades have been phenomenal.
You can do this by osmosis, rather than by hitting people, because actually all these charges hit the least well-off motorist rather than the rich motorist who buys a new car every few years anyway.
Lord Frost was the next to urge Rishi and the Government to ease up on green policies:
David Frost, the former Brexit minister, is also urging Rishi Sunak to scale back net zero policies. He tweeted:
I didn’t think much of Frost’s ten-point plan, most of which we’ve read before, but his point about Net Zero is worth noting:
3. Delay the net zero 2050 target. Abolish the deadlines on boilers and EVs. Get fracking and build low-carbon modern gas power stations and zero-carbon nuclear. Stop wasting money on green levies and if we must use renewables make them stand on their own two feet.
On Friday afternoon, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, defended his plans to expand ULEZ to the capital’s outer boroughs:
Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor of London, has defended his decision to extend Ulez (the ultra-low emission zone) to outer London. This will lead to drivers with polluting cars having to pay £12.50 a day to drive them in places like Uxbridge, and campaigning against the move was almost certainly the factor that enabled the Tories to hold the seat.
Khan justified the Ulez extension, saying he was “determined to clear the air” in London …
Labour’s National Policy Forum met on Friday for a weekend-long session, and The Guardian pointed out that not everyone was on board with schemes such as ULEZ:
Alan Wager, a politics academic, argues that the Uxbridge result could make it easier for those in the party wanting to push back against more radical policy options.
Labour MP Emily Thornberry, shadow attorney general, gave her view on ULEZ that afternoon:
… Thornberry suggested the implementation of the policy was a problem. In an interview with the [BBC] World at One she said:
I think it’s the right policy – I suspect it’s the way it’s being done [that is problematic]. And I hope that Sadiq will look at it again, I know that we’re asking him to.
Thornberry also said that the government had given cities like Birmingham, Bristol and Bradford money to help fund scrappage schemes as part of low-emission policies, but that London had not received this help. She urged central government to work with the London mayor to ensure that air quality could be improved.
Just after 2 p.m., Keir Starmer had a message for Sadiq Khan about ULEZ:
Starmer urges Khan to ‘reflect’ on Ulez implementation, saying it was reason for Labour losing in Uxbridge
Keir Starmer has also urged Sadiq Khan to “reflect” on the implementation of the Ulez extension. Referring to the result in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, he told broadcasters:
We didn’t take it in 1997 when we had a landslide Labour victory. And Ulez was the reason we didn’t win there yesterday.
We know that. We heard that on the doors. And we’ve all got to reflect on that, including the mayor.
Asked what “reflect” meant and whether the scheme should now be scrapped, Starmer replied:
We’ve got to look at the result. The mayor needs to reflect. And it’s too early to say what should happen next.
Guido picked up on the quote in a post that afternoon and gave us deputy Party leader Angela Rayner’s opinion:
Senior party figures have been quick to turn on Sadiq and his punitive policy. This morning, Angela Rayner told BBC Breakfast that Labour should “listen to the voters” adding:
People are really concerned about how, during a cost of living crisis, that they’re going to be imposed with a Ulez charge that they can’t afford.
Early this week, it was the Conservatives’ turn to battle over Net Zero policies.
On Monday, July 24, Guido reported on Andrew Mitchell MP, who had the news round that morning:
The government’s policy to ban new petrol cars by 2030 appeared to stall this morning, as Andrew Mitchell couldn’t confirm they would stick to the eco-austerity plan. Speaking on the Today programme, Mitchell spluttered when asked if the ban would remain in place for the future:
All I can tell you is it is in place… But I’m afraid I can’t prophesy for the future
Start your engines…
On Tuesday morning, it was Michael Gove’s turn for the news round. He was adamant that Net Zero was firmly in place:
Michael Gove has insisted the government’s plan to ban new diesel and petrol cars will come into effect from 2030 after all, despite Andrew Mitchell stalling on the issue yesterday morning, and Rishi Sunak himself prevaricating on the question just hours later. As of today, it’s still pedal to the metal according to Gove…
Speaking on Times Radio, the Levelling Up Secretary gave an “absolute guarantee” the ban was going ahead:
I do agree that it’s important that the government does press ahead with thoughtful and important steps in order to safeguard the environment…
Asked if it was “immovable“, Gove gave an unequivocal yes – twice. Something two of his government colleagues didn’t do yesterday…
Hmm.
Gove’s comments on Monday about building more homes met with a crisp riposte from backbencher Anthony Browne, who represents a Cambridgeshire constituency. Guido has the story:
Michael Gove has just wrapped up his planning reform speech, vowing to build Britain’s “Silicon Valley” in Cambridge with 250,000 new homes and tear up red tape to tackle the UK’s housing shortage. Although not before Tory backbencher Anthony Browne tweeted he would do everything to stop “nonsense plans to impose mass housebuilding” on his own patch, obviously…
Gove confirmed the government would push ahead with plans to relax planning rules in city centres, allowing empty retail outlets to be converted into flats and houses with less pointless bureaucracy in the way:
We are unequivocally, unapologetically and intensively concentrating our biggest efforts in the hearts of our cities,” Mr Gove said in a speech. Because that’s the right thing to do economically, environmentally, and culturally. [We will] use all of the levers that we have to promote urban regeneration rather than swallowing up virgin land… We will enable brownfield development rather than greenbelt erosion.
He assured he was still committed to building 300,000 homes a year – without specifying which year – although someone should let CCHQ know before the next by-election leaflets are posted out. The PM himself also weighed in this morning, claiming it’s important to build “in the right way“, and “in the right places with the support of local communities and not concreting over the countryside“.
Everyone says Gove is so ‘intelligent’ and that he did a marvellous job as Education Secretary years ago.
Gove’s words put up a red flag for me. I suspect I am not alone.
Conclusions
Net Zero policies will divide Conservative and Labour MPs alike in the months to come, just as Brexit did.
The Conservatives have a chance to reverse punitive climate change policies such as ULEZ and make them a winning campaign issue for the middle and working classes. However, the question remains: will they take advantage of that golden opportunity?
On Thursday, July 20, 2023, England held three by-elections as a result of Conservative MPs who had stood down for various reasons.
These were held in London (Uxbridge and South Ruislip), the West Country (Somerton and Frome [pron. ‘Froome’]) and North Yorkshire (Selby and Ainsty).
Happily, these produced a win for each of the three main parties in England.
I stayed up until the early hours of the morning reading The Guardian‘s live coverage, excerpts of which follow — including tweets — purple emphases mine.
This was the paper’s summary at 1:50 a.m. on Friday morning:
A reminder of the stakes as we prepare to (probably) learn the results in two of tonight’s three seats at around 2am BST, in ten minutes’ time:
-
-
Uxbridge and South Ruislip, on the fringes of London: Boris Johnson’s seat. Labour is the favourite to win. The Tory majority in 2019 was by just 7,210 votes.
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Selby and Ainsty, in Yorkshire in the north of England: Labour would need to defeat the Tories by more than 20,000 votes here. According to Britain Elects, this would be the largest numerical majority overturned by Labour ever in the party’s history.
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Somerton and Frome, southwest England. The Liberal Democrats are so confident of their win that they declared it tonight two hours after polls closed. That is not an official declaration. The 2019 Tory majority is 19,213 votes.
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Uxbridge and South Ruislip
I was especially eager to find out who won Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Boris Johnson’s old seat.
At 1:18 a.m., Labour were less confident of a win:
Evening Standard political correspondent Rachael Burford says, quoting a Labour source, that the Uxbridge result could be “recount territory”.
We’re hearing both the Uxbridge and South Ruislip and the Somerton and Frome results could be declared in the next ten minutes.
Minutes later, a recount was announced:
Recount granted in Uxbridge and South Ruislip
A recount has been requested in Uxbridge and South Ruislip – and that call has been granted, Lloyd White, the returning officer in Uxbridge has just said, per the BBC …
At 2:09:
Sky News political correspondent John Craig says, “We’ve been picking up Labour jitters throughout the evening” in Uxbridge and South Ruislip – and that those “jitters may be turning to panic”.
At 2:33, the candidates were called to hear the results:
Both the Tory and Labour candidates have arrived at the count in Uxbridge and South Ruislip:
At 2:40, we discovered that the Conservatives won — by 495 votes:
Uxbridge and South Ruislip results: Conservatives win
The Conservatives have held onto Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Boris Johnson’s former seat. Labour was hoping to win, with the Tories being holding the majority in 2019 by just 7,210 votes.
Conservatives: 13,965
Labour: 13,470
LibDem: 526
Independent: 91
I was thrilled. All the pundits had said earlier in the week that the Conservatives would lose.
The winner, Steve Tuckwell, a former postman, said that the election fight was over the imminent expansion of ULEZ — the Ultra Low Emission Zone — into outer London:
‘Sadiq Khan has lost Labour this election,’ says Uxbridge Tory candidate
Conservative candidate Steve Tuckwell is making his victory speech in Boris Johnson’s former seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip on the outskirts of London.
“Sadiq Khan has lost Labour this election,” with the Ulez policy, Tuckwell says.
Indeed, that was the issue that carried into the following week. To ULEZ or not to ULEZ, that is the question.
Most of the candidates campaigned on it:
Many of the seat’s candidates focused their campaign on London mayor Sadiq Khan’s plans to extend the ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) to Uxbridge and South Ruislip.
Here is part of the Press Association’s (PA’s) analysis. Note that even the Labour candidate backed off from the ULEZ extension:
Here is some more analysis, via PA:
The Tories have held on to Boris Johnson’s former seat in a blow to Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.
Labour had hoped to take Uxbridge and South Ruislip, which the former prime minister held with a majority of 7,210 in 2019, but Tory Steve Tuckwell managed to retain it for Rishi Sunak’s party.
The Conservative victory means that Sunak has been spared the prospect of being the first prime minister since 1968 to lose three byelections on the same day.
London mayor Sadiq Khan’s policy of expanding the Ulez low emission zone to outer boroughs – including Uxbridge and South Ruislip – has been blamed for the party’s failure to take the seat.
Labour candidate Danny Beales had distanced himself from the policy, saying it was “not the right time” to expand the £12.50 daily charge for cars which fail to meet emissions standards.
The failure to overturn the Tory majority in the seat was dubbed “Uloss” by a party insider in a sign of the unease at Mr Khan’s plan.
In public, senior Labour figures acknowledged Ulez had been a factor in the vote.
At 3:02, we discovered that Labour had missed their targeted swing in the vote:
There was 6.7 percentage point swing in the share of the vote from Conservative to Labour in Uxbridge and South Ruislip.
Labour needed a 7.6 point swing to take the seat.
At 3:22, The Guardian‘s Mabel Banfield-Nwachi analysed the result:
Labour had been expected to comfortably win Uxbridge, where Johnson’s majority had dwindled to 7,210 in the 2019 general election – his first as prime minister.
There was sufficient disbelief in the Labour camp that they had not in fact won the byelection that party officials demanded a recount. The second round delivered the same result: a slim Conservative victory, majority 495.
Former postman Steve Tuckwell, the local Conservative councillor who will now take Johnson’s place in Westminster, had declared the vote a “referendum” on London’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) …
Banfield-Nwachi had more to report at 5:00:
Steve Tuckwell, the winning Conservative candidate for Uxbridge and Ruislip, said on stage after the victory was declared, “This message from the Uxbridge and Ruislip election is clear. Sadiq Khan has lost Labour this election and we know that it was his damaging and costly Ulez policy that lost them this election.”
Tuckwell argued that this byelection result boiled down to Ulez, and Labour’s “tactic … not to push Ulez” is what led to his victory.
“I’ve campaigned tirelessly to ensure that the voices of Uxbridge and South Ruislip have been heard. We’ve been ignored for many many months now, even years on a lot of issues that have come out of Sadiq Khan and City hall.
Asked whether Boris Johnson had any influence on the result, Tuckwell said: “Boris Johnson’s name was not on the ballot paper, mine was so there’s no influence there at all.
“From the outset of this campaign, I have been the underdog. The polls, the pundits have predicted a big labour win.
“I think there’ll be Labour MPs in outer London boroughs who will be looking at these results tonight with sweaty palms.”
“This election result is now the voice of the people of Uxbridge and South Ruislip and he [Khan] has to listen.”
Neighbouring MP David Simmons voiced his congratulations:
David Simmonds, the Conservative MP for neighbouring Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner, said he is delighted with the results and believes Tuckwell won because he is a “community person first”.
“It shows the power of the local community, the strength of the feeling against Ulez, but also the sense that people have a high degree of confidence in the Conservatives.
The Tory’s win in this byelection should be seen as a “turning point”, Simmonds said. “I think this is yet another message that says that the Conservative party has a lot to offer this party and we will continue to work to show that message.”
Labour’s Danny Beales left after the count was announced.
At 5:19, the PA gave their analysis, which included this:
Uxbridge and South Ruislip has been held continuously by the Conservatives since the seat was created in 2010 and new MP Steve Tuckwell is the third Tory to represent the area, after John Randall and former prime minister Boris Johnson.
At 6:17, we got the full vote totals. Note that Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party beat the Lib Dems:
Good morning. I’m Andrew Sparrow, and I will be covering the reaction to the most important byelection results of the year.
But, first, here are the results in full. In all three byelections there were a lot of minor party candidates and so you might not have seen the numbers in full yet.
Here are the results for Uxbridge and South Ruislip.
Steve Tuckwell (C) 13,965 (45.16%)
Danny Beales (Lab) 13,470 (43.56%)
Sarah Green (Green) 893 (2.89%)
Laurence Fox (Reclaim) 714 (2.31%)
Blaise Baquiche (LD) 526 (1.70%)
Steve Gardner (Soc Dem) 248 (0.80%)
Kingsley Anti Ulez (Ind) 208 (0.67%)
Count Binface (Binface) 190 (0.61%)
No Ulez Leo Phaure (Ind) 186 (0.60%)
Richard Hewison (Rejoin) 105 (0.34%)
Piers Corbyn (LLL) 101 (0.33%)
Cameron Bell (Ind) 91 (0.29%)
Enomfon Ntefon (CPA) 78 (0.25%)
Rebecca Jane (UKIP) 61 (0.20%)
Ed Gemmell (Climate) 49 (0.16%)
Howling Laud Hope (Loony) 32 (0.10%)
Seventy-seven Joseph (Ind) 8 (0.03%)
Conservative majority: 495 (1.60%)
Electorate 67,067; Turnout 30,925 (46.11%, -22.37%)
2019 result: Conservative majority 7,210 (14.96%) – Turnout 48,187 (68.48%) Johnson (C) 25,351 (52.61%); Milani (Lab) 18,141 (37.65%); Humphreys (LD) 3,026 (6.28%); Keir (Green) 1,090 (2.26%); Courtenay (UKIP) 283 (0.59%); Buckethead (Loony) 125 (0.26%); Binface (Ind) 69 (0.14%); Utting (Ind) 44 (0.09%); Yogenstein (ND) 23 (0.05%); Burke (Ind) 22 (0.05%); Smith (ND) 8 (0.02%); Tobin (ND) 5 (0.01%)
The next bit came from a campaigner for Laurence Fox. The campaigner was deeply unhappy — and rightly so — that the BBC did not deign to interview Fox. As the lead in the detective series Endeavour and now a broadcaster on GB News, he has a rather high profile.
This post came a few days before the by-election:
At the election count, Fox himself tweeted:
At 8:10, The Guardian showed us Rishi Sunak’s congratulatory tweet:
Rishi Sunak has posted a message on Twitter congratulating Steve Tuckwell, the Conservative candidate who won the Uxbridge and South Ruislip byelection.
Someone from the Conservatives rang Rishi at No. 10 around 3 a.m. Rishi got up and enjoyed breakfast with Tuckwell in Uxbridge a couple of hours later at the Rumbling Tum café. This photo, I believe, was taken earlier in the morning (the sun rose around 5 a.m.), although it is time stamped at 9:12. Note that Rishi’s sleeves are rolled up to show he is a man of the people (oh, please).
Selby and Ainsty
At 2:14, no one knew who would win Nigel Adams’s seat. He stood down as an MP because he was expecting a peerage in Boris’s honours list. The man is old enough to know that most MPs do not get bumped up into the House of Lords. Conservative voters were not best pleased, Guardian political correspondent Helen Pidd said:
To Selby now, where counting is still in the early stages.
I’ve just been having a chat with Andrew Jones, the scrupulously polite Conservative MP for Harrogate and Knaresborough, who has been overseeing much of the Tory campaigning in Selby.
He said he was surprised how “policy-light” discussions had been on the doorstep, with “the main talking point being why we’re having this byelection in the first place, and that’s Nigel Adams’ resignation.” People are “really disappointed” that Adams quit in a huff because he didn’t get a seat in the lords, said Jones. So, added Jones, was he.
Both he and Judith Cummins, the Labour MP for Bradford South, who has been running the Selby campaign for the red team, agreed that by far and away the biggest concern among the electorate was the cost of living.
“It’s getting to a tipping point where it’s too much for everybody,” said Cummins.
She said she took heart from how many voters were willing to give Labour a hearing. “To be in with a fighting chance of winning here, shows such a massive improvement over the four years of Keir Starmer’s leadership. Making in-roads in a rural community like this is massive for us.”
Neither Jones nor Cummins could be drawn on who they think will win Selby. The wait continues.
At 4:06, the results were in:
Labour win Selby and Ainsty
Labour have won Selby and Ainsty, achieving a historic result by winning despite the Tories having a majority of more than 20,000 votes. Labour now has a majority of 4,161 – and the youngest MP in parliament. Keir Mather, 25, is officially the baby of the house.
35,886 votes were cast, with 69 ballots rejected.
The results are as follows:
Labour: 16,456
Conservatives: 12,295
Yorkshire party: 1,503
Reform UK: 1,332
Independent: 99
Shortly afterwards, Keir Mather spoke:
“People opened their doors to us and embraced our positive vision for the future,” Mather says.
“For too long, Conservatives up here and in Westminster, have failed us. And now that changes. It’s time for a fresh start,” he says.
He thanks his partner Euan, too.
He says he has encountered “so much hardship” while campaigning – hardship caused by the Tories.
Labour were pleased with the result, to be sure:
Labour win Selby, overturning largest numerical majority in post-war history
Labour’s victory in Selby and Ainsty is the “largest numerical majority overturned by Labour in post-war history,” according to Britain Elects’ Ben Walker.
Helen Pidd says that the highest Labour victory was more than 30 years ago:
More on what makes the Selby result historic: gaining Selby sets a record for the size of majority overturned by Labour at a byelection, according to Dr Hannah Bunting and Prof Will Jennings, Sky election analysts. The highest majority the party has overturned at a byelection is 14,654 votes in Mid Staffordshire more than 30 years ago.
It was good news for Keir Starmer, too:
Labour’s victory means Keir Starmer has become the first party leader since [then-Lib Dem leader] Paddy Ashdown in the 1990s to win four byelections, PA reports.
Keir Mather is another MP who has never had a real job. After he graduated from Oxford, no less, he went straight into the public sector:
He is a former researcher for shadow health secretary Wes Streeting.
As to why the Party leader and the new MP share the same first name:
Mather was named after Keir Hardie, the first leader of the Labour Party.
At 6:21, we received the full vote count, which did not look good for the fringe party Reform, of which Nigel Farage is president:
And here are the Selby and Ainsty results in full.
Keir Mather (Lab) 16,456 (45.96%)
Claire Holmes (C) 12,295 (34.34%)
Arnold Warneken (Green) 1,838 (5.13%)
Mike Jordan (ND) 1,503 (4.20%)
Dave Kent (Reform) 1,332 (3.72%)
Matt Walker (LD) 1,188 (3.32%)
Nick Palmer (Ind) 342 (0.96%)
John Waterston (Soc Dem) 314 (0.88%)
Sir Archibald Stanton (Loony) 172 (0.48%)
Guy Phoenix (Heritage) 162 (0.45%)
Andrew Gray (ND) 99 (0.28%)
Tyler Wilson-Kerr (Ind) 67 (0.19%)
Luke Wellock (Climate) 39 (0.11%)
Labour majority: 4,161 (11.62%)
Electorate 80,159; Turnout 35,807 (44.67%, -27.00%)
2019 result: Conservative majority 20,137 (35.69%) – Turnout 56,418 (71.67%) Adams (C) 33,995 (60.26%); Rofidi (Lab) 13,858 (24.56%); Macy (LD) 4,842 (8.58%); Jordan (Yorkshire) 1,900 (3.37%); Warneken (Green) 1,823 (3.23%)
At 7:04, we saw the congratulatory tweet from Sir Keir Starmer, who visited the constituency with deputy leader Angela Rayner several hours later:
Keir Starmer has posted a message on Twitter saying the result in Selby and Ainsty shows “how powerful the demand for change is” …
Somerton and Frome
The Liberal Democrats were confident that they would win this West Country seat from the Conservatives.
Edinburgh’s Christine Jardine, one of their few Scottish MPs, was on hand to give support. At 2:22, we received an update with an incoherent Lib Dem tweet. I wonder why Jardine was wearing red rather than the traditional Lib Dem yellow-orange:
We’re still expecting a declaration in Somerton and Frome within the hour – and likely sooner rather than later – where the Liberal Democrats remain confident of their victory.
At 2:51, the results were in:
Liberal Democrats win Somerton and Frome
The Liberal Democrats were right about that tractor – they have swept Somerton and Frome with more than 20,000 votes – a majority of 11,008 votes over the Conservatives.
Liberal Democrats: 21,187
Tories: 10,179
Labour: 1,009
Independent: 635
The Lib Dems have done well in the West Country in by-elections in this Parliament, which is not surprising, as recent history shows that many of the seats there are held by either them or the Conservatives.
At 2:56, the winner, Sarah Dyke, spoke:
LibDem candidate for Somerton and Frome, Sarah Dyke, says that the victory is that of her loved ones as much as it is hers.
“The Liberal Democrats are back in the west country,” says Dyke.
She thanks lifelong Conservative voters for voting LibDem for the first time. “I will not let you down,” she says.
“There is no doubt that our electoral system is broken, but your vote has shown the Conservatives can still be beaten under it.”
The party was quick to tweet the victory. Dyke is pictured with Lib Dem Leader Sir Ed Davey:
A victory tweet:
The victory was bad news for the Conservatives:
Tory result in Somerton and Frome is worst in history of the seat
Sammy Gecsoyler
In Somerton and Frome, the Liberal Democrats overturned a near 20,000 majority to flip their fourth Tory seat since 2019.
The Lib Dems won 21,187 votes with a 28-point swing while the Tories achieved their worst result in the history of the seat with 10,179 votes and 26% of the vote. Labour also achieved their worst result ever in the seat with 1,009 and 2.6% share of the vote, being beaten out by Reform UK who won 1,303 votes.
Spirits were high early on among the Lib Dems with party sources briefing they had “romped home” before counting had officially begun.
David Warburton, the former Conservative MP for the constituency, resigned last month after being suspended from the party in April 2022 amid claims of drug use and sexual harassment. He admitted the former but denied the latter. The allegations were being investigated by the independent complaints and grievance scheme (ICGS) at the time of his resignation.
Unlike other contests won by the Liberal Democrats this parliament which saw the party flip true-blue seats orange, Somerton and Frome had a Liberal Democrat MP between 1997 and 2015.
At 5:27, the PA gave their analysis:
Somerton and Frome is the fourth seat the Liberal Democrats have taken from the Conservatives at a byelection since the 2019 general election. All of the seats have changed hands on huge swings in the vote.
The swing at Somerton was 29.0 percentage points, or the equivalent of a net change of 29 in every 100 people who voted Tory in 2019 switching sides.
This is well above the 14.9 point swing the Lib Dems needed to win the seat.
Ed Davey is following in his predecessor Paddy Ashdown’s footsteps:
Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey is the first leader of any political party to win four byelections since Paddy Ashdown – founding leader of the Lib Dems – did so in the early 1990s, PA reports.
The Conservatives were defending a majority at Somerton of 19,213 and it is one of the largest of its kind to be overturned at a UK byelection since 1945, sitting just outside the top five.
The result means the Lib Dems have regained a seat they first won at the 1997 general election and then held for 18 years – one of a number of constituencies in south-west England that once made up the party’s “yellow wall”, which was wiped out by the Conservatives in 2015.
However, new Lib Dem MP Sarah Dyke will soon face a fresh challenge, as Somerton and Frome is one of a number of seats being abolished at the next general election due to boundary changes.
It is being split in two to form the new constituencies of Glastonbury and Somerton and Frome and East Somerset.
At 6:19, we received the full Somerton and Frome results. Fringe third parties did badly:
Here are the full results from Somerton and Frome.
Sarah Dyke (LD) 21,187 (54.62%)
Faye Purbrick (C) 10,179 (26.24%)
Martin Dimery (Green) 3,944 (10.17%)
Bruce Evans (Reform) 1,303 (3.36%)
Neil Guild (Lab) 1,009 (2.60%)
Rosie Mitchell (Ind) 635 (1.64%)
Peter Richardson (UKIP) 275 (0.71%)
Lorna Corke (CPA) 256 (0.66%)
Lib Dem majority: 11,008 (28.38%)
Electorate 87,921; Turnout 38,788 (44.12%, -31.46%)
2019 result: Conservative majority 19,213 (29.61%) – Turnout 64,896 (75.58%) Warburton (C) 36,230 (55.83%); Boyden (LD) 17,017 (26.22%); Dromgoole (Lab) 8,354 (12.87%); Dexter (Green) 3,295 (5.08%)
Stay tuned for the conclusions about the implication of these by-elections, more about which tomorrow.
The three-year Lectionary that many Catholics and Protestants hear in public worship gives us a great variety of Holy Scripture.
Yet, it doesn’t tell the whole story.
My series Forbidden Bible Verses — ones the Lectionary editors and their clergy omit — examines the passages we do not hear in church. These missing verses are also Essential Bible Verses, ones we should study with care and attention. Often, we find that they carry difficult messages and warnings.
Today’s reading is from the English Standard Version Anglicised (ESVUK) with commentary by Matthew Henry and John MacArthur.
A Good Soldier of Christ Jesus
2 You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus, 2 and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. 3 Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. 4 No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him. 5 An athlete is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules. 6 It is the hard-working farmer who ought to have the first share of the crops. 7 Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything.
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Last week’s post discussed Paul’s mention of three men, two of whom had deserted him — Phygelus and Hermogenes — and the third, Onesiphorus, who remained faithful, to the point of seeking him out in prison in Rome to spend time with him.
At the end of 1 Timothy, Paul tells his protégé (1 Timothy 6:20, emphases mine):
20 O Timothy, guard the deposit entrusted to you. Avoid the irreverent babble and contradictions of what is falsely called “knowledge”,
Timothy is ministering in Ephesus on Paul’s orders. He is to rid the churches there of the false teachers who had arisen in their midst and the sin that had resulted in Paul’s absence.
This was a trying assignment for Timothy, who was in his mid-30s at this time and considered young by Greek cultural standards. He had to stamp his own authority, passed on by Paul, onto the congregations. He was also beset by personal trials at this time.
John MacArthur explains:
You remember that this wonderful second epistle to Timothy is written to Paul’s son in the faith, who at the time was giving leadership to the church at Ephesus. The church at Ephesus, which was actually founded and pastored by the apostle Paul, had fallen into error doctrinally and sin in terms of behavior. There were leaders in the church who had no business being in leadership. They were teaching error, and they were living ungodly lives.
So, Paul, after being released from his first imprisonment, places Timothy in Ephesus and says to him, “Set things in order in the church.” He wrote in 1 Timothy to tell him what to do, and he writes back to him a little later this second epistle to strengthen Timothy, because in the doing of the duty there, Timothy had run into some tremendous opposition and was weakening. He was going through a time in his life when he was not functioning on all cylinders. He had fallen into weakness.
And so, the heart of this whole epistle comes to us, in the second chapter, with the words in verse 1, “Be strong.” That’s really what Paul wants to say to Timothy in this chapter. In fact, it’s really the whole idea of this second letter. Paul now is writing the last letter he will ever write. He will give his life in the cause of Christ momentarily. He wants to pass the baton to Timothy, and he doesn’t want Timothy to take it in weakness.
He wants him to be strong because he knows the Church is in the midst of persecution from the Roman government. He knows that Timothy is being hit with those who don’t want the change that Timothy wants to bring. He realizes Timothy is facing sophisticated philosophical opposition, which is hard to handle. He knows he’s young. He knows he is by nature a rather timid young man, and he wants him to be strong.
Paul also wants Timothy to complete his assignment quickly:
It is essential, then, that Timothy hold to true doctrine and that he pass it on to the next generation. And do you realize that the historical setting here demands that Timothy hurry up with the task because Paul wants him to come to Rome. Over in chapter 4 verse – I think it’s verse 9, “Make every effort to come to me soon.” And what he would like is for Timothy to come. Verse 21, he repeats it, “Make every effort to come before winter.” So, if Timothy is going to come, he’s going to have to get moving on leaving the truth with some other folks.
Chapter 2 picks up where Chapter 1 left off.
Paul begins with ‘You then’, or ‘therefore’, and, referring to him affectionately as ‘my child’, gives an imperative to be strengthened in the grace that is in Christ Jesus (verse 1).
Matthew Henry’s commentary says that this is a statement saying that Timothy can be strengthened only by relying on divine grace rather than his own efforts:
Observe, Those who have work to do for God must stir up themselves to do it, and strengthen themselves for it. Being strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus may be understood in opposition to the weakness of grace. Where there is the truth of grace there must be a labouring after the strength of grace. As our trials increase, we have need to grow stronger and stronger in that which is good; our faith stronger, our resolution stronger, our love to God and Christ stronger. Or it may be understood in opposition to our being strong in our own strength: “Be strong, not confiding in thy own sufficiency, but in the grace that is in Jesus Christ.” Compare Eph 6 10, Be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. When Peter promised rather to die for Christ than to deny him he was strong in his own strength; had he been strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus, he would have kept his standing better. Observe, 1. There is grace in Christ Jesus; for the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ, John 1 17. There is grace enough in him for all of us. 2. We must be strong in this grace; not in ourselves, in our own strength, or in the grace we have already received, but in the grace that is in him, and that is the way to be strong in grace. 3. As a father exhorts his son, so does Paul exhort Timothy, with great tenderness and affection: Thou, therefore, my son, be strong, etc.
MacArthur reminds us that this grace is a free, unmerited gift:
Now, grace operates in two ways: one, the grace of forgiveness; two, the grace of power. It is God’s undeserved, unmerited grace that grants you the power to serve Him, just as it’s God’s grace that grants you forgiveness. Paul says in Romans 5:2, “- this grace in which we stand.” This time he means we’re fixed in it; we exist in it; we exist in an atmosphere of grace, and it is God’s unmerited, undeserved assistance and help because we’re united with Christ that enables us to serve.
So, God’s grace is there for forgiveness, and God’s grace is there for power. It is God’s grace applied to my sin. It is God’s grace applied to my service. So, I live in a sphere of grace. I don’t deserve to be forgiven, and I don’t deserve to be used by God. Right? So, it is grace that forgives me, and it is grace that uses me.
In my own strength, I can offer God nothing. In my own strength I can do nothing. “Not by might nor by power, but by thy spirit,” says the Lord. So, it is grace that forgives me, and it is grace that empowers me. I need grace for constant forgiveness. I need grace for constant power. And when I confess my sin to the Lord, that grace of forgiveness cleanses me and makes me useful, and the grace of power then enables me to serve Him, and that’s what he’s talking about here, the grace that is available to us for service.
Paul tells Timothy that he must entrust what the Apostle has taught him in the presence of many witnesses — i.e. guard the deposit entrusted to you (1 Timothy 6:20) — to faithful men who are capable of teaching others (verse 2).
In other words, Paul wants Timothy to pass on the baton of ministry to qualified men — and sooner rather than later.
Henry explains:
Here we have, 1. The things Timothy was to commit to others—what he had heard of the apostle among many witnesses; he must not deliver any thing besides, and what Paul delivered to him and others he had received of the Lord Jesus Christ. 2. He was to commit them as a trust, as a sacred deposit, which they were to keep, and to transmit pure and uncorrupt unto others. 3. Those to whom he was to commit these things must be faithful, that is, trusty men, and who were skilful to teach others. 4. Though men were both faithful and able to teach others, yet these things must be committed to them by Timothy, a minister, a man in office; for none must intrude themselves into the ministry, but must have these things committed to them by those already in that office.
MacArthur focusses on teaching in that verse:
Although it comes at the end of the verse, the most important term here is to teach. It really describes the point of the whole verse. It’s all about the teacher. The picture is a picture of teachers in process Paul’s saying, “I taught you; you teach faithful men and able men who will teach others also.” Four generations: Paul to Timothy to faithful men to others also. See yourself as the teacher. The teacher is a living link in a chain that goes all the way back to Jesus Christ.
By the way, that’s the only true apostolic succession. Jesus taught, and He taught His Twelve. And His Twelve taught the next generation, and they taught the next, and they taught the next, and they taught the next, and the living chain has gone on and on until somebody taught me, and I’m teaching somebody else. And somebody taught you, and you’re to teach somebody else. We’re in a living chain that takes us link by link all the way back to Jesus Christ. That’s why Luke writes, at the beginning of the book of Acts, “The former treatise have I made, O Theophilus” – referring to the Gospel of Luke – “about all that Jesus began.” He finished the work on the cross. He only began the work of teaching and preaching, and the chain has gone on and on and on and on.
The men must be faithful in order to ensure the chain of succession remains unbroken.
MacArthur took sports seriously in his younger years and has long recognised the importance of teamwork. He shares what happened during a relay race he took part in during his college days:
I was running in the Orange County Invitational Relay. And we were running the mile relay, and I ran one leg, and I ran basically second man. The first man gets the lead, second man loses it; you have two to make it up. That’s the philosophy. But I ran second man. I was basically a baseball player, but they’d throw me in on a relay because I could run pretty well.
… there were many colleges and universities involved – 35 or so. We got into the finals of the mile relay. We were excited; we thought we had a shot at it. Our first man ran a great leg … Our first man ran a great leg, came in, we made a perfect baton pass. I ran the best leg I’d ever run in my life. Came in, in dead heat, for first place to make the pass to the third man. And we knew he was good, and the fourth man was a blur, and we really thought we were where we wanted to be. I put that baby in the hand of the third guy. He went around the curve, came down the back stretch, stopped, walked off and sat on the grass. The race kept going.
I was horrified, and so were the other guys on the team. We thought he’d pulled a hamstring or something. I ran across the grass. I’ll never forget it. I said, “What happened? What happened?”
He said, “I don’t know; I just didn’t feel like running.”
I confess to you my thoughts were all carnal. I mean you can’t do that. You’re not in this by yourself. You can’t do that. Do you realize the effort that is already been put out, and the training? You can’t do that; too much has been invested in you.
That illustrates, albeit in a different sphere, what happens when we rely on the wrong people. We think we’ve left the baton in safe hands only to lose the race because that person gave up.
This is why Paul is telling Timothy to buck up:
Paul is saying to Timothy, “You can’t do that either. Don’t tell me you’re bailing out. Don’t tell me you’re slowing down. Don’t tell me you’re walking away from this thing. Don’t tell me you’re going to give up your ministry; you can’t do that. You don’t have that right. You’re not in this alone. The things which you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses you must commit to faithful men who then must teach others also.”
You’ve got to keep this thing going; it’s not going to stop with me. I don’t want to be the broken link. It’s got to keep going. I don’t want to walk off the track. You have to pass on what you’ve been taught.
MacArthur then discusses the sacred deposit:
… he’s saying, “Everything that I entrusted to you as the revelation of God you must entrust to others.” Now, this is a very interesting thing. The verb he uses here is the verb paratithēmi which means to deposit for safekeeping. And the noun form of it has already been used in chapter 1 where he talks about the treasure, in verse 14, which was entrusted to you. It’s the same word usage there, “The deposit which was deposited with you.” Back in verse 12, “Guard what I have deposited with you, just like the Lord will guard what you have deposited with Him.”
Paul says, “The Lord’s going to guard what I deposit with Him” – that’s my life, verse 12 – “you guard what He’s deposited with you” – that’s his Word, chapter 6, verse 20 of 1 Timothy said the same thing, “Guard what has been deposited to you.” The treasure, the truth, the sound words. “Hold onto those sound words,” he says in verse 13 of chapter 1. “Guard that truth” …
God deposits His Word with us to be guarded, kept pure, and we deposit it with someone else intact, with no impurity. Boy, what a sacred trust.
Paul tells Timothy to share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus (verse 3).
That verse reminds me of Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film, If, about an insurrection at an English public (i.e. private) school. The film won the Palme d’Or (Golden Palm) award at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival.
In one chapel scene, the school chaplain, who was also in charge of the cadet corps, tells the young men:
Jesus Christ is your Commanding Officer.
When I first saw the film decades ago, I laughed when I heard that line, which was the reaction the director wanted. Now, having read the New Testament more closely, including this passage, I realise that the chaplain was correct.
Serving Christ, just as one would serve in the armed forces, involves hardship and suffering.
Henry explains:
All Christians, but especially ministers, are soldiers of Jesus Christ; they fight under his banner, in his cause, and against his enemies, for he is the captain of our salvation, Heb 2 10. 2. The soldiers of Jesus Christ must approve themselves good soldiers, faithful to their captain, resolute in his cause, and must not give over fighting till they are made more than conquerors, through him that loved them, Rom 8 37. 3. Those who would approve themselves good soldiers of Jesus Christ must endure hardness; that is, we must expect it and count upon it in this world, must endure and accustom ourselves to it, and bear it patiently when it comes, and not be moved by it from our integrity.
Paul tells Timothy this because he senses his protégé’s weakness.
MacArthur says:
Timothy has come to a point in his life where he’s functioning really in his human strength. As a result of that, he is weak. He has no courage. He is failing to use his gift in the fullness of its capability. He is fearful of the enemies that he’s facing while he’s ministering there in Ephesus, where he was when Paul wrote him this letter. It’s a very difficult time. He seems to be demonstrating a tendency to be ashamed of the gospel, seems to be maybe even not holding to the true faith fully as he should …
So, this is a word to us about how to be a strong Christian. The issue here, the elements of strong spiritual life. That’s what we’re looking at.
Paul reminds Timothy that no soldier gets involved with civilian pursuits — the trivia of everyday life — because his aim is to please the one who enlisted him (verse 4).
MacArthur gives us this analysis:
This is a call to recognize that you’re a soldier. You’re in a spiritual war, and you are called to be at the forefront of battle. Verse 3, “Suffer hardship, along with us” – or me; there is no pronoun in the original text – “as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No soldier in active service entangles himself in the affairs of everyday life so that he may please the one who enlisted him as a soldier.”
Now, what he is saying here, first of all, is that we have to see ourselves as soldiers. First we have seen ourselves already as teachers. That’s our identity. That’s who we are. We have been given truth to protect and pass on. Secondly, we are soldiers, and that implies that we are in a war. That’s a reminder to us that we mention earlier in Ephesians 6 – 6:10, “Be strong in the Lord and the power of his might. Take unto you the whole armor of God, that you may stand against the schemes of Satan. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but” – he goes on to describe the demon hosts against whom we do battle, spiritual conflicts, spiritual war, in Ephesians 6, and then describes our armor.
In the Corinthian letter, the 2 Corinthian letter, chapter 10, verse 3 to 6, he talks about our warfare, and he says the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly but supernatural, as it were, to the pulling down of satanic fortresses. We are soldiers. That is the intent that Paul has in mind for us to understand. Not just soldiers. Would you look at verse 3? We are to be good soldiers. That wonderful, beautiful word kalos, which means noble or excellent. We’re not just dutiful soldiers; we are excellent soldiers. We’re not just functionary soldiers; we are noble soldiers. If you will, we are heroic soldiers. We are the kind of soldiers who are rewarded, who bear the badges and the medals of valor and honor …
Now, being a soldier involves several things. Look at verse 3. The first thing, he says, is “suffer hardship along with” – or it could be translated perhaps best – “endure affliction together” – or – “take your share of suffering” – or – “take your share of rough treatment” – as J. N. D. Kelly likes to translate it.
In other words, look, this is war, and you expect that you’re going to get your share of suffering. You’re going to have your wounds and your pain. It’s just how it is in war. You need to understand it. Boy, that’s important for us to understand. I think there are people running around, purveying the idea that when you become a Christian, everything is just perfect, that all Jesus wants you to do is come to give your life to Him, and He’ll take away all anxiety, all difficulty, all trial. I don’t hear anybody saying, “Come to Christ and pick up your armor and go to the frontline and fight a lifelong war with the demons of hell.” But that’s the issue. That’s the reality. And this kind of cheap approach to salvation that asks people to come to Jesus so that they can eliminate all conflict out of their life is just not true. It piles a lot of false disciples up, but it’s not related to truth. Paul is calling for you to recognize that you’re in a war. And that provides a lot of very important perceptions that you must have.
First of all, for example, in verse 4 he mentions the word “active service.” This is what you’re in. There are no people who are in R&R in this army. No people are back at the base. No people are unenlisted, undrafted, untrained, ununiformed, or uninvolved. You’re in the war.
And do you want to know something else? There’s no place but the frontline. This war only has a frontline, and we’re all in it together. And so Paul says, “Since we’re all in active service all the time, and we’re all always on the battlefront, then we all expect hard times. It’s a beautiful word, that word sugkakopathēson. It’s a long word because it’s a combination of several words, and it literally means to suffer along with everybody else. You think you should be free from an suffering? You think you should avoid any conflict in your life? Wrong. You take your fair share of difficulty just like all the other soldiers on the frontline. And there is nowhere but the frontline. Nowhere …
Secondly, not only do we take our fair share of suffering because we’re in engaged on the frontline in active service all the time, and that’s going to go on all our life till we leave this world, but secondly, he says, verse 4, “No soldier in active service entangles” – or interweaves is that word emplekō, interweaves, and we get the word “implicate” from it. “No soldier in active service entangles himself in the pragmateia of everyday existence” – bios – the pragmatics, the stuff, the affairs of life. That’s a very, very important thought. The practical stuff of life is minimized. And he’s not necessarily talking about evil things; he’s just talking about the stuff of our existence …
Thirdly, at the end of verse 4, he says he does what he does “so that he may please the one who enlisted him as a soldier.” The soldier really does what he does to please the Commander-in-Chief. The one who enlisted him here is the Commander-in-Chief. That’s what the writer has in mind – Paul. He does what he does to please his Lord. He is loyal to his Lord. Like Paul said in Acts 20:19, “Serving the Lord with all humility of mind. And then in verse 24, he said, “Look, I know you keep telling me bonds and afflictions await me, but I don’t care. I just want to finish the ministry the Lord gave me.” That’s the spirit. That’s the spirit.
I want to be a faithful steward. I want to discharge my responsibility. Christ, of course, was the perfect example of whom His Father said, “I am well pleased.” And the greatest joy of the soldier would be to hear from his Commander-in-Chief, “Well, done, good and faithful soldier.”
Paul then moves on to an analogy involving an athlete; an athlete is not crowned unless he has competed according to the rules (verse 5).
MacArthur explains:
Paul goes to a third picture, a second metaphor in verse 5, that of an athlete. The athlete. He refers elsewhere to athletes. In fact, in Ephesians 6, he refers to wrestlers. In 1 Corinthians 9, he refers to boxers and runners. But here it’s kind of generic. It’s just the verb athleō in general. So, he says, “If anyone competes as an athlete, he doesn’t win the prize unless he competes according to the rules.”
So, he says, “You’re not only a teacher whose primary job is to guard and pass on truth, but you’re a soldier, and you must understand you’re in a war. Furthermore, here’s another picture; you’re an athlete.” So “and also” connects his list of metaphors. And then he says, “If anyone competes as an athlete” – the verb athleō means to compete in a contest. He says, “If you’re going to be an athlete, there’s a basic principle that you must adhere to.” He says, “You cannot win the prize unless you keep the rules.” And the statement is loaded with instructive information.
First of all, the very essence of athletics is effort. What separates the winners from the losers is not always talent, but it is always effort. And not just the effort of the event itself, but the effort long before the event ever began. If anyone is going to compete as an athlete, there is a tremendous price to pay in terms of discipline, in terms of preparation. Just very basic. An athlete wants to win the prize …
There is a lot involved: training, stamina, patience and a competitive spirit.
MacArthur continues, giving us the rules for the Greek contests of Paul’s era:
… if he’s going to win the prize – the stephanos, the runner’s crown, it’s the word for the runner’s crown, not diadēma, which is the king’s crown – if he’s going to win the prize, he has to keep – what? – the rules. Now, that goes beyond just the rules of the event. Let me give you a little idea of what it means – nomimōs athlēsē. What does it mean he has to keep the rules? What is he really saying here?
Well, in the Greek games – Olympian Games, Isthmian Games – whatever games there were, and they had many of them – there were three prerequisites that every athlete had to fulfill. Number one, he had to be a true-born Greek. He had to be a true-born Greek. Number two, he had to prepare for ten months and stand before a statue of Zeus and swear that he had prepared for ten months. And if he had not, then he gave Zeus the liberty to take his life. Thirdly, he had to stay within the rules of his event. And if he was found not to be a true-born Greek, if it was found that he had not prepared for a full ten months, if it was found that he had in any way violated the rules of his event, he was disgraced and instantly disqualified.
It is that picture that Paul has in mind in 1 Corinthians 9:27, by the way, when he says that he, as a runner and as a boxer, had a fear that in ministering to others he himself would be disqualified. Those Greeks had to keep the rules: the rules of training, the rules of birth, and the rules of competition.
Now, this describes a professional athlete, not an amateur. This is one who for ten months was professionally involved in training for his event. The picture, then, is very clear. The strong believer must be a true-born Christian. The strong believer must have trained in the matters of self-denial, given over himself full-time to spiritual training. He must be eager to compete. He must be compelled to win. He must be motivated by reward. And when those things are in place, he’s going to be a disciplined competitor. The victory belongs to the disciplined. That’s right.
MacArthur gave this sermon in 1987. It includes an anecdote about the former Bruce Jenner:
I remember standing with Russ Hodge in the infield at the University of Oregon, watching the triangular decathlon meet between U.S.S.R., Poland, and the United States. Russ was the coach of the American team. He’s now involved in our sports ministries program at The Master’s College. He was a former world record holder in the decathlon. And I was standing there with him, watching these – the greatest athletes in the world preparing to begin the meet. And there were great Russian athletes. There was one who was a massive, giant of a man who was just an awesome human specimen. There was a great Polish athlete, and there were some tremendous Americans.
And I said to Russ, “Who’s the greatest athlete here?”
He pointed to a rather slender, lithe young man. He said, “He’s the greatest athlete here. He, by the way, is an outstanding Christian.”
And I said, “That’s wonderful to know? Will he win?”
He said, “No, he won’t win.”
And I said, “Well, what do you mean he won’t win? If he’s the greatest athlete here, who will win?”
He said, “See that guy running around the track, that rather short guy with a blonde wife? You never heard of him. His name is Bruce Jenner. He’ll win.”
I said, “Well, why will he win if he’s not the greatest athlete?”
He says, “Because though he doesn’t have the greatest sheer talent, he’s the most mentally tough competitor I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Sure enough, the second day, in the twilight, as he finished the distance event, number ten event in the decathlon, he came through the winner. And two years later, the whole world knew who he was as he circled the “O” in Montreal with a flag in his hand; he had won the gold medal in the Olympics and was named the greatest athlete in the world.
And I said to Russ that day, “How do you get to that point?”
He said, “It’s about eight hours a day for about six years of effort, sacrifice, training in all the ten different events. It’s the result of tremendous work and tremendous internal compulsion.”
Paul had those traits. He was indefatigable in the service of Christ, often referring to endurance, running a race, staying the course — until the very end. Was there an Apostle who suffered as much as he did in spreading the Gospel? Probably not.
Paul ended his analogies with that of the farmer; the hard-working tiller of the soil should have the first share of his crops (verse 6).
Henry tells us:
If we would be partakers of the fruits, we must labour; if we would gain the prize, we must run the race. And, further, we must first labour as the husbandman does, with diligence and patience, before we are partakers of the fruit; we must do the will of God, before we receive the promises, for which reason we have need of patience, Heb 10 36.
Farmers are taken for granted, even though we rely on their output in order to live.
MacArthur says that farming is lonely work, which also defines ministry:
The farmer, he plows and sows and tends and reaps, early and late. He fights the frost; he fights the heat. He fights too much water, too little water, bugs, weeds. Patiently, patiently waits, works to see the crop come in, and mostly does it all by himself. No great excitement, no great thrill, perpetual humdrum routine, duty. That’s another part of ministry. I understand these pictures. I know what it is to each and pour your life into others who will teach. I know what it is to be on the edge, and in the battle, and to see the fury of the battle, and to bear the scars and suffer the hardship. I understand that. And I understand what it is to win and wear the crown and know the thrill of seeing victory. I understand that.
But I’ll tell you something; mostly I understand that ministry is perpetual humdrum. It’s routine. It’s duty. You plow; you sow; you tend; you reap. You wait; you pray; you hope. There’s no exhilaration to speak of. There’s no competition to get your adrenaline moving. It’s just hard work. That’s right.
I hear young men say, “Oh, I don’t want to go to that ministry. Boy there are a lot of problems there.” All the more reason to go there. A lot of people afraid of hard work.
I’ve said to so many young men, “The thing you have to be committed to, to be successful in the ministry, is a lot of exhausting hard work. Toil. By yourself, all alone. And sometimes the crop comes in the way you hoped, and sometimes it doesn’t. And nobody’s going to clap when it does, and nobody’s going to come help you when it doesn’t.
MacArthur explains the meaning of the verse:
Verse 6, “That kind of hardworking farmer” – then he uses the particle dei – “it is necessary for him to be the first to receive his share of the crops.” In other words, what Paul is saying is, “Look, the guy who worked the hardest gets in line first to get the fruit.” That’s why he does it. Blessing awaits the one who works the hardest. You want God’s blessing on your ministry? And I’m not talking about the future; I’m talking about now and future. You want God’s blessing on your ministry? Work hard at it. Be diligent.
I would venture to say that very few people – very few people know what it is to literally exhaust themselves in the work of the kingdom. And as a result, few people know what it is to share the great fruitfulness that the Lord would bring. I don’t want to go beyond the Scripture, but I’ll tell you, all other spiritual things being equal, I believe the greatest rewards come to those who work the hardest. That’s right. There are always those people sitting around, waiting for their ship to come in. It never comes. It never comes. Then there are others who are, all their life, building it. And I’m not as – again I say, I’m not saying this is future reward; I’m talking now. You want to have a life and a ministry that is blessed of God now and will be also eternally rewarded? Then work hard. Work till you’re exhausted. Pour your life into it.
So, the strong Christian then sees himself as a farmer, willing to work hard, exhausting himself to see results, patient until success comes, filled with anticipation of the joy of the fruit now and forever. I’ll tell you, ministry is so exciting because you can share the fruit. And then, when you think that someday the Lord will reward us, and we can cast those rewards at His feet in adoration, what a privilege.
MacArthur sums up Paul’s analogies:
… The Lord is calling for us to give ourselves away here.
To look at it from another viewpoint, there are some things we have to endure in giving ourselves away: suffering, discipline, exhaustion. There are some things we have to avoid. All the entanglement of the world and breaking the rules, unholiness, sin. There are some things we have to obey, and that is the rules that God has set down, and the orders of our Commander, and the laws of sowing and reaping. And there are some things that we are to enjoy: victory, fruit.
And so, we are called to be strong in the Lord. It’s a rich picture here, and there’s no way that Paul wants Timothy or us to miss it.
Paul ends this part of the letter asking Timothy to think over — to ponder — what he has written in these verses, for the Lord will give him understanding in everything (verse 7).
Henry says:
The apostle further commends what he had said to the attention of Timothy, and expresses his desire and hope respecting him: Consider what I say, and the Lord give thee understanding in all things, v. 7. Here, 1. Paul exhorts Timothy to consider those thing about which he admonished him. Timothy must be reminded to use his considering faculties about the things of God. Consideration is as necessary to a good conversation as to a sound conversion. 2. He prays for him: The Lord give thee understanding in all things. Observe, It is God who gives understanding. The most intelligent man needs more and more of this gift. If he who gave the revelation in the word does not give the understanding in the heart, we are nothing. Together with our prayers for others, that the Lord would give them understanding in all things, we must exhort and stir them up to consider what we say, for consideration is the way to understand, remember, and practise, what we hear or read.
MacArthur points to heavenly rewards in these analogies:
“Consider what I say.” Consider it. How do you match up? And then comes this word, verse 7, “For the Lord will give you understanding” – in every respect is what he means. You think about it and the Lord will give you the answer. You sit back and contemplate it and He’ll show you where you are. Listen, I’m through at this point; it’s up to you. If you have the spiritual integrity to do an inventory on your life, the Lord will show you right where you are. He’ll give you understanding. He’ll open your mind.
Psalm 119:73, the psalmist said, “Give me understanding, that I may learn Your commandments.” Think about it. Take a look at yourself, and the Lord will show you what is there. The common thread through all of these – really wonderful; really wonderful – it’s reward. The teacher is rewarded in discipleship. The soldier is rewarded in victory. The athlete is rewarded in winning. The farmer is rewarded in tasting the fruit.
“And so, implied in all of these, Timothy, there’s something wonderful out there.” It’s reminiscent of Hebrews 6:10, “For God is not unjust so as to forget your work and the love which you have shown toward His name, in having ministered and in still ministering to the saints.” Isn’t that wonderful? The Lord will not forget your labor. The Lord will not forget your ministry if you’re a strong Christian. He’ll reward you for that.
In closing, I wanted to end with an interesting anecdote of MacArthur’s on the need for self-control, to guard against acting on impulse. Impulse is something many people act upon with dire consequences:
… discipline is the mark of spiritual maturity. The disciplined person has control of his affections. He has control of his emotions. He has control of his moods. He has control of his priorities. That’s the disciplined person.
There was a study done of delinquent and non-delinquent young people in Philadelphia. One line out of that study fascinates me. They said, “The difference between the delinquent and the non-delinquent young person was the pause between the temptation and the act.” Isn’t that interesting? The difference between a delinquent and a non-delinquent was the pause between the temptation and the act. What you do in the pause is the issue. The delinquent young person followed the impulse. The non-delinquent made a right choice. Self-discipline acts in that gap. And the disciplined person in the pause between the temptation and the act makes a right choice. That’s a disciplined life. He says no to things that harm his competitive edge. He says no to things that take away his strength.
And so, this calls for self-restraint.
Paul has more advice for Timothy, recalling some of the advice he had given him in the first letter.
Next time — 2 Timothy 2:16-19
The Seventh Sunday after Trinity is July 23, 2023.
Readings for Year A can be found here. They differ to the ones I posted in 2020.
The Gospel reading is as follows (emphases mine):
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
13:24 He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field;
13:25 but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away.
13:26 So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well.
13:27 And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’
13:28 He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’
13:29 But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.
13:30 Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’“
13:36 Then he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples approached him, saying, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.”
13:37 He answered, “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man;
13:38 the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one,
13:39 and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels.
13:40 Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age.
13:41 The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers,
13:42 and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
13:43 Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!
Commentary comes from Matthew Henry and John MacArthur.
Last week’s reading, also from Matthew 13 — verses 1-9 and 18-23 — was the Parable of the Sower.
Of today’s reading, John MacArthur says:
You’d be amazed how complex people have made this parable. I’ve heard people…well, most commentators that I read…and I read probably 20 different books on this particular passage…most of them said the field is the church. And that the…in the church the wheat and the tares grow together. And you’ve all heard that, that’s been the common interpretation. Jesus said in verse 38, “The field is the world.”
Now, it doesn’t seem too difficult, does it? You say, “But you have to interpret what He meant.” No, He just interpreted what He meant. First of all, the field was a field, just a field with a guy sowing. And then He said the field means the world. And now, you say the world means the church. Somebody else might come along in the next generation and say the church means the Baptist church. And then the next generation it means the Baptist church in the corner over…you can’t do that. You just leave it where it is. The Lord said the field is the world and He knows the word “church,” and if He wanted to use it, He’d have used it. The field is the world.
What is it saying? God sows His children of His kingdom throughout the world. Now, the disciples could handle that. Sure, it’s going to be an earthly kingdom. God is going to put His people all around the world. We don’t have a problem with that. By the way, if you make it the church, you will wind up with such chaos in trying to interpret the parable that it’s hopeless.
Because later on when the servants say, “Can we pull out the darnels [weeds]?” and the Lord says, “Don’t pull them out, let them grow together,” if that’s the church then we have no right to church discipline, we have to right to expose a heretic, we have no right to deal with the sin. And that’s not what the epistles tell us. If you make this field the church, you’ve really got problems. Leave it the way Jesus interpreted it. It’s the world.
After Jesus related the Parable of the Sower, He put before the multitude gathered another parable, comparing the kingdom of heaven to someone who sowed good seed in his field (verse 24).
Matthew Henry’s commentary tells us that Jesus spoke in parables as a fulfilment of Scripture:
… the reason here given is, That the scripture might be fulfilled. The passage here quoted for it, is part of the preface to that historical Psalm, lxxviii 2, I will open my mouth in a parable. What the Psalmist David, or Asaph, says there of his narrative, is accommodated to Christ’s sermons; and that great precedent would serve to vindicate this way of preaching from the offence which some took at it.
Jesus said that, while everybody — i.e. on the sower’s estate — was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and then went away (verse 25).
Other words used for ‘weeds’ here are ‘tares’ and ‘darnels’, depending on the Bible translation.
MacArthur explains the verse and tells us that this happened during that era:
… the man … sows good seed in his field. Seed that he gained from the crop past, the best of the seed for the crop of this year. Then verse 25, “While men slept – ” And this indicates that he had a crew to help him. He must have been a wealthy man. He had a lot of folks helping him with the sowing, and they were sleeping. It isn’t because they were lazy, it’s because it was night. And a man who works hard has the right and the privilege to enjoy his sleep. And so at night – “his enemy came and sowed tares,” literally zizania.
They knew it as a darnel, which is the common term for it rather than tares. “But he sows darnels among the wheat – ” and the word “among” there is in a very strong Greek expression, I mean, he sowed them all throughout – “and then went his way. Now, you say, “What in the world is this guy doing?” Well, it tells us he was an enemy. And one good way to ruin a man’s crop is to sow his field full of weeds. You say, “Did they do that very often?” Common enough so that the Roman government had a law against it which prescribed a certain kind of punishment if you did that.
That was a really great way to ruin your neighbor, just oversow his field with weeds. And that is exactly what this enemy did. And then he stole off into the night. He went his way. He was a subtle man who operated in stealth and secrecy and he did an awful thing. By the way, the word there in the Greek has a sort of a Hebrew equivalent. As far as some are concerned, zizanion, some associate with zanah in Hebrew, which means to commit fornication.
You cannot tell the weed — or darnel, or tare — from the wheat until both are grown, which happens at approximately the same time:
And so this became known as bastard wheat.
And its amazing property is that you can’t tell it apart from wheat. It looks exactly the same until the head finally matures.
Therefore, this became apparent when the plants began to bear grain, at which point the weeds appeared (verse 26).
MacArthur says:
It became obvious at one point in the growth that this was not wheat.
The slaves of the man who sowed the good seed mentioned to him what he had sown and asked him where the weeds could have originated (verse 27).
MacArthur explains:
Now, they’re shocked. And they wouldn’t have been shocked if there were just a few of these darnels because they were common to the area. It’s a grassy kind of weed, and it grows wherever it wants to grow. And they wouldn’t have been shocked if there were a few of them because they always had a few weeds in the crop that they had to deal with. But they were shocked because the whole thing was full of them.
The sower replied, saying that an enemy had done it; his loyal slaves asked if they should uproot the weeds (verse 28).
MacArthur tells us:
Now, we can recognize them now because the heads have matured and we can tell the difference. The color was even different; they were a slate gray color by now. And so, they said, “We can tell them apart, we’ll go through the field and we’ll tear them up.”
The master refused their offer, saying that they might uproot good crops along with the weeds (verse 29).
He told them to let the two grow together until harvest time, at which point he would tell his reapers to collect the weeds first, binding them in bundles to be burned, but to gather the wheat into the barn (verse 30).
Jesus left the multitudes and went into the house where He had been staying; His disciples approached Him and asked for an explanation of the parable of the weeds of the field (verse 36).
Henry says the disciples wanted to make sure they fully understood it:
It is probable they apprehended the general scope of the parable, but they desired to understand it more particularly, and to be assured that they took it right. Note, Those are rightly disposed for Christ’s teaching, that are sensible of their ignorance, and sincerely desirous to be taught. He will teach the humble (Ps 25 8, 9), but will for this be enquired of. If any man lack instruction, let him ask it of God. Christ had expounded the foregoing parable unasked, but for the exposition of this they ask him. Note, The mercies we have received must be improved, both for direction what to pray for, and for our encouragement in prayer. The first light and the first grace are given in a preventing way, further degrees of both which must be daily prayed for.
MacArthur points out notable aspects of this verse:
Now, note the question they asked. They identify the story, He doesn’t. He doesn’t give it a title, they did. The title they gave it was the parable of the darnels. So they knew that was the main feature. They knew the story was about those things that didn’t belong in the field and how in the end they were going to get burned up. They knew that. That was the feature that they attached importance to. And so after they are together and they ask the question, the Lord answers the question. And they really needed an answer because of the confusion over the form of the kingdom in which they were existing.
The Old Testament prophets said, as did John the Baptist, that when the Messiah came, the wicked — the weeds of the parable — would be punished. The disciples were thinking along those lines — summary justice:
You know what their reaction would have been, just as a footnote? If you’d have said to them, “Now look, we’ve got these three soils that don’t believe and we’ve got this one soil that really does, what do you want to do with the three soils?” I know what they’d say. And I can even guess who’d say it. James and John. And you know what they’d say? “Send down fire from heaven and burn ‘em up.” How do you know they’d say that? They said that before once already. You see, they reacted in that manner to unbelief.
And that was a sort of a proper zeal. Just burn them up, Lord. And they thought they stood on pretty good ground. John the Baptist said when He’d come He’d do that. Have you ever felt that about the unbelieving world? God, wipe ‘em out. And so that’s where they are in their thinking, you see. “God, we’ve got a great idea, burn ‘em all up and give us the kingdom.” Let’s go for the whole thing. And so they needed a little help.
As to why Jesus sent the crowds away, MacArthur reminds us of earlier verses in Matthew 13:
He sent the multitude away. Why did He do that? Go back to verse 10. The disciples had said to Him when He began to speak in parables, “‘Why are You teaching in parables? He answered and said to them, ‘Because it’s given to you to know about the mystery form of the kingdom, but to them it is not given.’”
Why? Well, because of verses 13 to 15. They do not believe, they do not see, they do not hear, they do not understand. Their hearts are fat, their ears are dull, their eyes are blind. In other words, because they don’t believe in Me, I will not explain the truth to them and that is why I’m talking to them in parable. “But to you – ” verses 16 and 17, He says – “it is given to know these things. Blessed are your ears for they…your eyes for they see and your ears for they hear.” And you’re going to understand.
So, He takes them apart from the rest, just the disciples; went back into the house. What house? The house He came out of. Very likely Simon Peter’s house in Capernaum. They went back in the house.
Jesus began His explanation by saying that the one who sows good seed is the Son of Man, Himself (verse 37).
MacArthur says:
That’s His common title for Himself. He uses that more than any other title to refer to Himself. In fact, only one time in the New Testament is that phrase ever used by anybody else of Him. Every other time it’s His phrase for Himself. And He uses it because it identifies Him in His incarnation. It identifies Him in His humanness.
It identifies Him as He truly participates in our life. It identifies Him to be all that a man could be, the perfect man. It identifies Him as the second Adam the representative of the race. It is His unique incarnation term. But it is also Messianic. In Daniel 7:13, the Messiah is said to be called the Son of Man. So He is identifying Himself as the Messiah, God incarnate, in that title. It’s a marvelous title.
The Jews knew that it was a Messianic title and we know that from Luke 22:69. Jesus before the Sanhedrin says, “Hereafter shall the Son of Man sit on the right hand of the power of God.” And they said, “Art Thou, then, the Son of God?” He said He was the Son of Man, they said He was the Son of God. They must have known the Son of Man was a Messianic reference. And so, we see that the sower is the Lord Jesus Christ. He’s the farmer sowing the seed.
Jesus went on to say that the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom, but the weeds are the children of the evil one (verse 38).
MacArthur gives us this analysis:
Now, what does this tell us? There’s some lessons here, we’re going to get some lessons as we go through. It tells us that the Lord is sowing seed. Where? In His field. In His field. Now if you’ll notice it says in verse 38 the field is the world. So, the Lord is sowing seed in the world. And may I hasten to add that the world is His field. It belongs to Him. He is sovereign. He is monarch. He is King of the earth.
He holds in His hand the title deed even though He hasn’t really laid claim to it fully as He will in Revelation 6 when He unrolls the scroll that’s the title deed to the earth and takes back the earth. It is His nonetheless. It is His nonetheless. And all creation – ” by the way – “groans, – ” doesn’t it, Romans 8, waiting for Him to take possession of what is rightly His?
So we see, then, the Lord is sowing seed in the world which belongs to Him. It’s His field. It’s His kingdom. I mean, He made it, didn’t He? And He planted Adam and Eve in it. And Satan came along and usurped everything. But it’s still His. He created it and He will reclaim it, and it’s His in the meantime. So the Son of Man, the Lord Jesus Christ, sows in His own field.
… We’ve been planted in the world. So, in this kingdom, we’re going to be planted all throughout the world and we’re there for many reasons. First of all, we’re there to be matured by the trouble the world gives us, right? First Peter 5:10, “After you’ve suffered a little while, the Lord will make you perfect.”
“In this world you’ll have tribulation but be of good cheer – ” John 16:33 – “I have overcome the world.” And James said that that trial and that trouble and those things that happen in the world are what mature you and build you up. So the Lord plants us there so we can develop. He also plants us there…are you ready for this…so that we can influence, so that we can influence …
… We’re in the world to influence for good the darnels or the tares. Did you know that everybody who is wheat was once tares? True? We were all bad seed before we got converted, right? Somebody said, “Well no, if you take this in a Calvinistic predestination sense, we were planted as good seed and we just grew as good seed.” No, no, no. No matter what you believe about the sovereignty of God, no matter what you believe about predestination, we were all bad from the beginning.
Therefore, while a weed cannot be turned into a productive plant, we are different, having the God-given ability to influence others towards belief in Christ:
So the Lord puts us in the world not only to be perfected and to be matured by the pressure that it brings, but to influence the tares into becoming wheat like we did. Our redemption must be at work and that’s why Jesus said in John 17, you see, “I pray not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world but that when they’re in the world Thou shouldest keep them from – ” what? – “the evil one.” You can’t take them out; we’re supposed to be in the world.
Jesus said that the enemy who sowed the weeds is the evil one; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels (verse 39).
MacArthur discusses Satan, the evil one who sows tares amongst the wheat:
… verse 38 says the darnels or the tares, the zizania, are the children of the wicked one. That’s ho ponros again, the wicked one, the devil. It says in verse 39, “The enemy that sowed them is the devil.” He is the wicked one. He is called that several different places in the New Testament. The wicked one. And the article there is emphatic. He is the utterly wicked one, the absolutely wicked one, the wicked one of all wicked ones.
The very ground of whose being is wretched, he is unmitigated darkness. He is unalleviated error. And anybody who is not a child of the kingdom is a child of the wicked one. There are only two kinds of people in the world, children of the kingdom, children of the wicked one.
And if you’re not a child of the King through your submission to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, you’re a child of the devil; it’s that plain and simple. You are on his team; you are functioning under his control. Ephesians 2 said “You are directed and moved and motivated and guided by the prince of the power of the air who works in the children of disobedience.” If you will not obey the Lordship of Christ then working in you is Satan.
John 8:44, Jesus said to those leaders of Israel, “You are of your father, the devil.” In I John 3, John contrasts the children of God and the children of the devil and those are the only two kinds there are. Now, there is relative evil within that children of the devil category, but they’re all children of the devil. Some worse than others, all bad, and all representative of Satan himself. That’s what it means in 1 John 5:19 when it says the whole world lies in the lap of the wicked one, the whole world.
And there’s an interesting statement, I think, made in 5:37 of Matthew that easily gets overlooked. Here in chapter 5, you know, the Lord is contrasting righteous behavior with unrighteous behavior. And He sort of sums it up at the end of verse 37, “Whatever is more than these comes from the evil one.” In other words, if you go beyond or in contradiction to God’s law, it proceeds from the evil one. And that is a monumental theological statement. The origin of evil is from the evil one.
God is not the author of evil. Evil proceeds from the evil one. He is the enemy who…watch this…oversows in the good field. You see it in creation, chronologically. God sowed, didn’t He, children of the kingdom, Adam and Eve. And then came the enemy and in the fall he oversowed, and the two continue through all of human history. And so, Satan is the origin of evil. “Whatever is not of God – ” it says in 5:37 – “cometh from the evil one. People always ask the question, “Where did evil come from?” That’s where it came from. The evil one.
And so then, back to Matthew 13, the Lord sows believers, subjects of the King, in the world and Satan oversows his own children. So the world, then, is comingled: subjects of the King, the subjects of the usurper, the marauder, the enemy, the devil himself. And by the way, devil in verse 39, diabolos, means enemy, adversary. So, we’re mingled in the world. Now that’s very important. This is how it has been and this is how it will be in the mystery kingdom, a commingling.
… We breathe the same air, we eat the same food, we drive the same highways, we live in the same neighborhoods, we work at the same factories, we go to the same schools, we visit the same doctors, we entertain ourselves with the same entertainment, we’re under the same sky, we enjoy the same warm sun, we breathe the same air. The just and the unjust are rained upon in this era because it’s all commingled until the end.
‘Mystery kingdom’ means what happens on earth until the end of the world, something that God did not reveal to prophets. They spoke of the peace that the Messiah would bring — which will come, but not until the Second Coming and, then, only for believers through the ages. Last week’s post discussed this mystery kingdom in more detail.
Then we come to the harvest at the end of the age:
And that’s where we come to verse 39, very important. “The harvest is the end of the age.” Why does He say that? Because, you see, the disciples were ready to put in the sickle right now. And I get that way, I confess. Sometimes when you see the wickedness and the rejection and the unbelief and the grief that the world causes the church, and the Lord’s purposes and people, you just say, “God, would You just come down and wipe it out.” And you understand David, don’t you, when he cries for God to destroy His enemies? And you understand those people under the altar pleading with God to do something.
But here the Lord says, “Don’t be impatient; the harvest waits till the end of the age.” A very important phrase used several times in Matthew, speaks of ultimate consummation in judgment, speaks of that final time when God judges. Now at this juncture, we would interject the part of the story where they said – “Do you want us to pull the weeds up? We can see who they are now, they’ve grown up, we see the manifestation and we know who they are, you want us to yank them out? And the Lord says, “No, don’t do that.”
Because if you yank out the darnels, you’re liable to do what? Yank out some wheat also. You say, “What in the world is He saying? What is He saying?” I think He’s simply saying if you go about trying to judge the world, without divine insight, you’re going to wind up condemning the Christians. You say, “Wait a minute, what does that mean?” Let me explain. Do you know what the church has done throughout its history? Just that.
Remember how gracious our Lord was to Judas, whom He knew would betray Him from the beginning:
Simply ask yourself this. How did He treat publicans and sinners? With meekness and love and kindness, right. How did He treat Judas? And Judas was there in His presence and He didn’t devastate, He didn’t go “whoosh,” and blow him over with fire. He was patient. And this is the time of patience. He was tolerant. And this is the time of tolerance. He was gracious. And this is the time of grace.
And while some people are running put trying to destroy the darnels, they may be forgetting the fact that they were once a darnel and maybe God knows they need time enough to become wheat, see. If we go out destroying everybody, we may be totally out of line with God’s plan. You see, the Lord knows how many people belong in the kingdom. And He, like He said in the book of Acts, “Thou hast much people in that city.” He knows who it is to believe. And that is working its way out.
And if we acted as a church against the ungodly of the world, we would be interfering with God’s patient, gracious waiting for those people to come to Him in His good time. That’s not our calling. We are not to do that. And the spirit of that means we are not to damn the unbelievers of the world either. We are not to pray that God would destroy them. We’re to pray that God will what? Save them, that He’ll save them, that He’ll redeem them. That’s the only proper attitude.
That was the attitude of the Lord Jesus Christ the night in which He was betrayed. He took the sop, which was a sign when you gave it to the person next to you that this person was the honored guest, and who did He give it to? Judas. He was still wooing Judas with love. Judas and Jesus, an illustration of how it is in the commingling in the age of grace.
We cannot act as executioners. We must be lovingly, patiently, graciously tolerant like our Lord was. And you know something else? If we tried to act in judgment, we might be sparing some of that rocky soil stuff and some of that weedy ground stuff because we can’t tell the difference, and we might be uprooting the real stuff. So, we have a heart of compassion, not a heart of condemnation.
You know, you could take it a step further. We can’t apply spiritual principles that we live by in the kingdom to the rest of the world. You can’t say, “We ought to get rid of these people, they’re messing up our world.” They’re just doing what comes naturally. I mean, you cannot walk up to these people and say, “I wish you people would do what you should do.” And that’s impossible for them, because they’re doing the only thing they know how to do, that’s behave as the children of the devil.
The ultimate message is that we are not the Lord’s executioners. That is the task of His angels:
… verse 39 says, “The reapers are the angels.” Now listen to me, angels are called to judgment. Christians are called to righteous influence. We are not called to judgment. We are not called to condemn the world.
Now we want to preach against its sins, we want to preach against its evils. But we want to love its sinners and evil doers and be gracious and patient with them. We are not God’s executioners. That is not our task. We have an inadequate knowledge in the first place; we might wind up making terrible mistakes, as has been done so much in history …
And you can see over and over again in the New Testament, from Matthew to Revelation, how that God has called the angels to reap. In Matthew 16:27 it says, “He’ll come in glory, the glory of His Father with His angels.” In Matthew 24…I think it’s verse 31, “He’ll send His angels to gather the elect,” and so forth.
The gathering process of the elect, and the gathering process of the…of those to be judged is to be done by the angels. You see it, also, in Revelation as you read the fourteenth chapter, particularly, and then the nineteenth chapter, that angels are God’s agents of judgment, not men. That’s not our task. So, He says to these guys in the parable, “You’re the sowers; I’ve got some other folks for reapers.”
Jesus said that as the weeds are collected and burned by fire, so shall it be at the end of the age (verse 40) — at His Second Coming.
MacArthur elaborates:
Verse 40, “When the angels come – ” the reapers – “therefore, the darnels are going to be gathered and burned in the fire and it will be that way in the end of this age.”
We have to wait until the King comes back with His angels for this to happen. And, by the way, that’s precisely what II Thessalonians 1:7 says. “When the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels and flaming fire, taking vengeance on them that know not God and obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power.” When’s that going to happen? When He shall come to be glorified in His saints. He’ll come to be glorified in His saints and when He comes at that time, with His holy angels, He’ll burn in unquenchable fire all those children of the wicked one.
Now, notice verse 40. It shows us the darnels are gathered out and burned. That’s the picture.
Jesus confirmed this by saying that He — the Son of Man — will send His angels and they will collect out — remove from — His kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers (verse 41).
MacArthur says:
… verse 41 explains it. “The Son of Man shall send forth His angels, they shall gather out of His kingdom.” And there the term “kingdom” sees the whole world, it’s all His field, and He pulls in the net, as it were.
Pulling them all in together, like unclean animals and clean in the same ark, goats in the same pasture with sheep, bad fish in the same net with good fish, chaff on the same floor as the grain, vessels to dishonor in the same house as vessels to honor.
The angels will throw the evildoers into the furnace of fire — hell — where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth (verse 42).
I prefer the traditional version:
42 And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
‘Wailing’. That’s what I heard as a child and that’s what I remember.
MacArthur has more. Hell will not be a time of endless gins and tonic and getting together with friends:
He pulls them all in and “all that offend and all that do iniquity – ” or do lawlessness, the same phrase as Matthew 7:23, those that do lawlessness – “pulls them all in, and all of them – ” verse 42 – “are cast into the furnace of fire.” And their reaction to that is “wailing and gnashing of teeth.”
And so there’s coming an inevitable judgment when the Lord sends His angels, pulls all of them out of the kingdom that offend Him. And anything that is sinful, unbelieving offends Him. All those who work iniquity…just two ways of defining sinful people…and they’re all thrown into a furnace of fire. Now, fire is the most horrible death that man ever experiences. And fire is the imagery of eternal hell. It speaks of the terrible and everlasting doom of the unrighteous, the sons of Satan. It’s used again and again in Scripture.
We read in the Scripture about weeds being burned, about chaff being burned, about barren branches being burned, even in the Old Testament of trees being burned. And here we see the darnels being burned. The idea that the ungodly will be consumed in fire. It pictures the same thing…the furnace of fire does…as the lake of fire of Revelation 19, of the unquenchable fire of Mark 9, the everlasting fire of Matthew 25.
It is the consuming burning fire of hell. It is the same fire of Malachi 4, the same devastating judgment fire that Daniel alludes to in Daniel 12 verse 2. It’s eternal punishment in hell. And the reaction in verse 42 is so frightening. Grinding of teeth and piercing shrieks is what it really says. That’s the reaction, grinding of teeth and piercing shrieks.
People think they’re going to be in hell and everything is going to be fine. They’re going to be with their friends and they’ll love it down there. And this verse tells us that not only is hell a fire, but it tells you what your reaction is going to be. Grinding teeth and piercing shrieks. Painful, eternal, inevitable, inescapable judgment. And the Lord is saying to the disciples, “Look, for now wait, for now be patient, for now influence, for now coexist while the plan is working out.
Jesus said that ‘then’ — on His Second Coming — the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father, ending with a stern call to attention (verse 43): ‘Let anyone with ears listen!’
How much clearer does our Lord have to make it?
MacArthur concludes with this:
And finally the judgment will fall. And after it falls, verse 43, “Then – ” mark that word – “Then – ” not now, but “Then shall the righteous shine forth.” Then comes the holy glory, you see. Then comes the anticipated kingdom. Then comes the righteous Shekinah, lighting the face of all the saints for all the ages. “They’ll shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father,” then. So, He says, “That’s part of it’s future.” But it is coming, just as surely as the judgment. In fact, Daniel 12:3 says “They’ll shine like stars. They’ll shine as the brightness of God’s glorious, marvelous heaven.”
The last point is the application, verse 43. “Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.” That’s the application. You say, “What does it mean?” Simply it means what I use to hear a schoolteacher say when I was little, “Johnny, you better – ” what? – “listen.” You better listen. You better listen. What are you listening to?
Well, ask yourself this, first. Are you wheat? I mean, you ought to know that to start with. Are you wheat? Or are you darnel, are you tares? Are you a child of the kingdom, or are you a child of the enemy? If you’re a child of the enemy, then listen. This is a time of patience, this is a time of grace, but judgment is inevitable, eternal, painful. You better check and you better listen.
You say, “I’m not a darnel, I’m wheat.” Then you better listen to this. You’re to coexist in this world and you’re to influence the world for good, not be influenced by it. You’re to be used by God to reach that darnel near you that’s going to become wheat. So use it as an opportunity. Not to condemn the world, not to blast the world, not to judge the world. That’s God’s business. But to love them while condemning their sin and loving the sinner. That’s the plan. Are you doing that? Are you planted in the world for good and for God and for salvation?
There is much to contemplate in this parable in the week ahead.
Churchmouse Campanologist 