The Best Deal You'll Ever Make

In 1986, a man named Roy Whetstine walked into a rock show in Arizona with a collector's eye and a little bit of luck. Sorting through a Tupperware container of stones, he spotted one, about the size of a small potato, dull and a little scuffed up. The seller wasn't impressed with it either. "I'll tell you what," the seller said, "I'll let you have it for $10. It's not as pretty as the others."

Roy said yes. He knew what he was looking at.

When he cleaned it up and took it to a jeweler, that unglamorous potato-shaped stone turned out to be one of the largest star sapphires ever found, assessed at over $2 million. Roy himself said it best: "When a man places a price on something he sells, that's what it's worth to him." The seller just didn't know what he had.

That story could have come right out of Matthew 13.

Two Little Stories, A World of Meaning

In Matthew 13:44-46, Jesus tells two of his shortest parables back to back. They're easy to breeze past, but they're worth slowing down for.

The first: "The kingdom of heaven is like treasure, buried in a field, that a man found and reburied. Then in his joy he goes and sells everything he has and buys that field."

The second: “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls. When he found one priceless pearl, he went and sold everything he had and bought it."

Two men. Two discoveries. One response. Everything they had – gone, for the thing they found.

Notice that Jesus doesn't say the kingdom of heaven is like the man who found the treasure. He says it's like the entire situation, the whole experience he's describing. The emotions, the discovery, the reckless joy of the transaction. That's what the kingdom is like.

The Kingdom Is Waiting to Be Found

Both the treasure and the pearl were already there. They didn't appear out of nowhere when someone happened to be looking. They were waiting, maybe for a very long time, to be discovered.

The word used in both parables for "find" comes from the Greek root behind the word eureka, that famous exclamation meaning "I have found it!" Made famous by Archimedes, it captures exactly the feeling Jesus is describing. Not a slow, gradual realization, but a moment of sudden discovery. There it is.

God tells us in Jeremiah 29 that when we seek him with all our heart, we will find him. In Acts 17, Paul tells a crowd of Greek philosophers that God placed each person in their specific time and place so that they might seek after him. The kingdom isn't hiding from us. God isn't playing an impossible game of hide-and-seek. As Jesus put it in the Sermon on the Mount, "Seek and you will find."

But here's what's interesting: the two parables describe two very different kinds of seekers.

The man in the field stumbled onto the treasure. We don't even know what he was doing there. Maybe working someone else's land. Maybe just passing through. He wasn't on a treasure hunt. And then, thunk, his shovel hits something. Some people come to faith exactly like this. A conversation they didn't expect. A moment of crisis. An experience that breaks everything open. They weren't looking, and then suddenly they were found.

The merchant, on the other hand, was actively searching. He knew pearls. He'd seen a lot of them. He was experienced enough to recognize something extraordinary when it finally appeared. Some people seek through every philosophy, every religion, every framework life has to offer, and in their deliberate searching, they land on Christ. Lee Strobel is one of the more famous examples, a self-described atheist who set out to disprove Christianity as a journalist and ended up writing The Case for Christ instead.

Two paths, same destination. The kingdom wants to be found.

The Kingdom Demands a Response

Both men, once they discovered what they had found, did something. They didn't pause, deliberate for years, or hedge their bets. They sold everything and bought the thing.

And notice that the first man does it in his joy. He's not grinding out a reluctant sacrifice. He's liquidating everything he owns with a smile on his face. Responding to the kingdom with joy rather than obligation isn't optional or extra credit. It's the natural response of someone who actually understands what they've found.

The discovery also changed who these men were. The day laborer, or whoever he was, was now a landowner. The merchant, the buyer and seller, no longer needed to be a merchant at all. He was done. Whatever their lives had been before the discovery, those identities no longer defined them. Paul describes this same kind of transformation in 1 Corinthians 6, running through a list of past identities and behaviors before saying, simply: "Such were some of you."

Were, past tense. The kingdom rewrites the story.

The Kingdom Is Worth It

Here's where Jesus subverts what might seem like an obvious reading of these parables. At first glance, both men look like they're making an enormous sacrifice. Everything they had, gone. But that's not actually what's happening.

Roy Whetstine didn't sacrifice $10 for that star sapphire. He made the deal of a lifetime. The cost was real, but the word "sacrifice" doesn't quite fit when what you're getting back is worth infinitely more.

Jim Elliot, the missionary who was killed in Ecuador in 1956, put it this way: "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." That's exactly the logic of these parables. What we hold in our hands right now, whether possessions, reputation, comfort, or control, is temporary. What the kingdom offers is not.

Paul says in Romans 8 that our present sufferings aren't worth comparing to the glory that awaits. Jesus tells his disciples in Matthew 19 that anyone who has left house, family, or livelihood for the kingdom will receive a hundred times as much in return. This isn't sacrifice. It's a deal.

Turn the Jewel One More Time

Dallas Willard once said that Jesus was "the brightest man and the most capable and creative teacher who has ever lived." These parables reward the kind of slow, patient turning that a diamond deserves.

So turn it once more. What if, in these stories, we are the treasure? What if Christ is the man who saw the value others passed over, who gave everything to purchase the field, not for the field itself, but for what was buried in it?

One scholar put the question this way: "What if I am the pearl of great price?" What if I'm the one nobody else wanted to buy, the one with too high a price tag, and Jesus came and said, you're worth it?

Philippians 2 tells us he emptied himself, took on the form of a servant, and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. And Hebrews 12:2 says he endured the cross "for the joy set before him." Not just grimly. For joy. He saw the treasure. He knew what he was buying.

That's the deal on the table. He gave everything to have you. The only question is whether you know what you have in him.

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This post is part of the Plot Twist sermon series on the parables of Jesus. You can listen to the full sermon at tulipstreet.com/sermons or on our podcast.