Reading time: 5 minutes
Some treasure you have to go back for.
It’s Sunday morning and my friend is preaching about the Kingdom of God, and as I sat there chewing on my church sweets, something dawned on me.
“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” (Mt 13:44) One little verse, but it got my attention.
‘Someone’ had ventured onto a nearby property, complete with metal detector, found some “stuff”, leapt around for joy, and after a few moments an idea dawned on them. So he buried it again, covered it back up, counted the paces to the nearest olive tree, and went off to the estate agent’s…
Was it an honest transaction? Yes. Jesus’s hearers knew that treasure discovered in someone else’s field didn’t automatically belong to the finder. It belonged to or in the ground, and the ground itself, belonged to its owner. The only above-board way to claim the shiny treasure was to buy the field itself, not steal the treasure or sneak it out at night. As we know, its exactly what the cunning man does. That process would have taken some time. He sells everything he owns, including his iPad, Samsung TV, Ford Fiesta, and the child who annoyed him most, and buys the field at whatever it was worth as a field. He isn’t cutting corners. Legally, He’s doing the one thing that makes the treasure legally his.
Did he tell the owner what he’d found? The text is silent, and that silence is deliberate. He wasn’t selling the treasure. The owner was selling the field. Two different transactions. He had no more obligation to disclose what he’d discovered than a buyer today, has to tell a seller the land might be worth more than they think. Think old people selling land they have had for years and purchased for a small sum.
The treasure, was it lost or stolen? Lost. Hidden treasure usually meant somebody, generations back, buried valuables during war or invasion, intending to return, and never did or forgot how many paces it was from the Olive tree.. No living owner. No claim on it. And did the new owner find it again? He didn’t need to. He covered it back up the moment he found it, which tells you he already knew exactly where it was.
Now put this next to two Old Testament men who also buried something in the ground.
Jacob could have simply settled his land, the way plenty of ancient nomads did. Instead, “Jacob… bought the piece of land on which he had pitched his tent from the hand of the sons of Hamor.” He pays the full price so no one, including his own conscience, can ever question the claim. It’s the same instinct as the man in the parable. When something is worth having, you don’t cut corners to get it.
That’s your take-away for today, dwell on it as you drink your coffee.
The we have the flip-side of the coin; Achan (Joshua 7:1-26), takes what was devoted to the Lord and “hid them in the earth inside his tent.” Buried treasure again, almost the same words. But everything else is topsy-turvy. He didn’t buy anything, he violated the covenant. He acted in secrecy and fear, not joy, and it cost him his life. The contrast is massive, one man buries treasure and it becomes his greatest joy, another buries treasure and it destroys him. The burying was never the issue. What stood behind it was everything.
Proverbs tells you what this was pointing to all along. “If you seek it like silver and search for it as for hidden treasures, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God.” This was never really about silver. It’s about what happens when a person finally begins to see God’s worth, and stops treating that discovery as one more thing to squeeze into an already crowded life.
What are we to make of this? We have to be pedantic when we come to God’s Word – nothing is added as filler or to make the drama more exciting. Listen to what Jesus actually said; ‘like’. “The kingdom of heaven is like.” Jesus never once said the kingdom is silver, is a field, is a man burying treasure. He said like. It’s a comparison, not a photograph. Which means the moment somebody gets lost arguing about property law or whether the man should’ve left a note for the landowner, they’ve wandered off into the trees and forgotten why Jesus planted the wood in the first place.
He wasn’t running a seminar on conveyancing. He was trying to get one truth through to your heart: some things, once you see them clearly, are worth losing everything else to keep.
And for most people reading these posts, you already have it. Treasure it.
