What Does Matthew 13:40 Mean?
As therefore the weeds are gathered and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of this age.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world.THE KEY
The KJV’s “end of this world” carries the sense of an age reaching its completion, when the gathered tares meet the fire.
THE MEANING
This verse places before you the stark image of tares gathered and burned; the destruction is not softened. The judgment arrives at the completion of the age, after a season of growing together. The age has a boundary, and the mixture does not last forever.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that what is harmful can remain mixed with the good forever without ever meeting judgment.
THE ROOT
συντέλεια
sunteleia
GROWS FROM
τέλος
telos
Completion, goal, or outcome toward which something reaches.
The phrase συντέλεια τοῦ αἰῶνος (sunteleia tou aiōnos) carries the sense “completion of the age”: τέλος (telos) names completion or goal, and αἰών (aiōn) means age or era. English “end” can sound like a bare stop, while the Greek places the tares’ burning at the age’s consummation.
ALSO GROWS
teleō: Bring to completion; finish.
τελέω
This verb shows telos as reaching the completion of an action; here the age reaches its completion.
teleioō: Bring to completion; make complete.
τελειόω
This branch carries the sense of something arriving at its full measure, illuminating the age’s completion in the verse.
THE PATTERN
At the appointed completion, what is gathered for judgment is decisively consumed or removed.
For, behold, the day shall come, burning like an oven, and all the seething ones, and all who do wickedness, shall be stubble. The coming day shall set them ablaze, says the LORD of hosts, leaving them neither root nor branch.But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens shall pass by with a rushing roar, and the building blocks shall melt in scorching heat; the earth also, and the works in it, shall be burned down.THE THREAD
The enemy who sowed them is the Slanderer; the harvest is the end of the age; and the reapers are messengers.Verse 39 names the harvest as συντέλεια τοῦ αἰῶνος (sunteleia tou aiōnos), “the completion of the age,” and identifies the reapers as angels. Verse 40 carries that same completion into the tares’ burning, placing the fire within the harvest’s sorting.
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