LIKE UNTO A NET … CAST INTO THE SEA

This, the last of the seven parables of ‘the kingdom of the heav­ens’, stands alone. The first two ‘sowing’ parables represent the commencement and course of the kingdom. The ‘mustard seed’ and the ‘leaven’ picture Christendom’s progressive outward growth, yet inward corruption. The hidden ‘treasure’ is Israel, and the ‘pearl of great price’, developing unseen in the ocean, the church. Before these twin divine treasures are publicly dis­played at the end of the age, there will intervene the seven-year tribulation period, represented by this parable of the draw-net.

Though limited in time to the end of the tribulation, this par­able is not only cosmic in scope, but mind-boggling in scale. ‘Net’, Gr. sagene, denotes a capacious net let down to enclose a huge volume of water, and drawn in a vast semicircle back to land. ‘Full’ indicates that all peoples of all nations, ‘the sea’, will be captured in its folds. The greatest congregation ever seen on earth will be dragged irresistibly to the ‘shore’, vv. 2, 48, the land of Israel. They will be composed of myriads, ‘which no man can number’ of the tribulation years, who have obeyed the world­wide preaching of the 144, 000 sealed Jewish evangelists. Mixed with them in the net will be deluded atheists, agnostics, Satanists, humanists, idolaters, and Laodicean-type professors, who refused the gospel prior to the rapture. All will be brought before the King, in one vast throng, Matt. 25. 32.

The angels will ‘come forth’ visibly, in an unprecedented mass appearing. They will separate the ‘good’, edible fish from the ‘bad’, unclean, noxious, scavengers of the depths. The ‘good’, the saved of earth, will be collected into ‘vessels’, possi­bly according to their ethnic or cultural families, to be settled as nations in the millennial earth. The ‘bad’, the wicked, will be cast into ‘the furnace of fire’, a place of conscious and eter­nal torment.

The account of the householder tells of our practical respon­sibility today, while the King is absent, to bring out of our ‘treasure’ ‘things new and old’ - kingdom truths concerning both Israel and the church, teaching relating not only to their chequered past, but also to their glorious and eternal futures.