The Pearl

"Again, the kingdom of Heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which when a man has found it, he hides it, and for the joy of it goes and sells all that he has, and buys that field. 

Again, the kingdom of Heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls; who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it."  - Mat 13:44-46

Pretty much anyone who has walked in the Gospel for a while knows these parables, and it is unlikely I can say anything new about it, but I believe it is good to remind ourselves what the Kingdom of heaven is all about, and maybe see it from a different viewpoint.

For those of you who have read my blog posts from the beginning, read my post on the manifold nature of God, and how Scripture is so deep that often it has multiple meanings.  I believe in these parables of the Kingdom of Heaven there are at least two meanings, and I want to talk about them.

A pale comparison of what heaven truly looks like.

First, let's look at the most common teaching on this, and that is this truth that the Kingdom of Heaven itself is the great pearl, a sort of reward for our lives given to Jesus.  I have been preaching on consecration so much lately that it seems only natural to tie that in here.

Salvation is indeed free, and yet Jesus asks us for our entire lives in order to live in heaven on earth and enter in to His eternal rest on the other side.  When the farmer sold everything he had, or the merchant, he had to make a sacrifice.  He gave up multiple good things, multiple pleasures, in order to obtain one ultimate pleasure.  That is Jesus.

In order to be disciples of Him we offer everything.  He may not ask us to move away, change jobs, or much of our external life, but regardless of that you have transformed from a doorway of sin and darkness to a gate of light that pours into the world around you.  No matter your physical surroundings everything changes spiritually.  The pearl of great price will draw looks, criticism for selling everything for that one object of your desire, and yet the joy the merchant feels conquers all those things.

"Many waters cannot quench love, nor will the rivers overflow it. If a man would give all the wealth of his house for love, it would be scorned."  - Song of Solomon 8:7

The lover here knows exactly what the merchant and the farmer feel, and I believe it is a parallel truth.  What we give up for Jesus, what we give up for love, in truth is nothing but junk anyway.  While other people may gape and laugh at us for loving Him to the extreme, in our minds we scorn the things we abandoned, just like Paul did.

"But no, rather, I also count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them to be dung, so that I may win Christ."
- Philippians 3:8

Paul was as blunt as can be, saying he considered anything that had nothing to do with Jesus to be dung.

How about we flip the coin and look at this from a different angle.  What if when Jesus was speaking to the crowd, trying to explain the what the Kingdom of Heaven was like, none of them or us really caught His heart in the message?  Being the human beings we are, we tend to look at things only one way, or the way we have been taught all our lives.

What if we are not the farmer or the merchant?  What if we are the pearl and the field?  Consider this:  Jesus is the merchant in heaven, doing perfectly fine as He was.  He really had no need for the pearl, it didn't make him any richer because the value of what He sold was equal to the value of the pearl, yet the pearl had much greater sentimental value because of his desire for it.  Jesus sees you, the pearl, and recklessly abandons even heaven itself, goes through the poverty, the pain, and by His blood He pays the ultimate price for that which He must have, you.

You are so precious to Him that He held back nothing.  How does that add in to the Kingdom of Heaven?  Well, because in God's eyes the Kingdom of Heaven just isn't the same without you, His most prized possession.