When Jesus was asked why He spoke in parables, He told His apostles, “Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand” (Matthew 13:11–13). Parables are a way of opening gospel mysteries to those with the Spirit and keeping the mysteries of the kingdom of God closed to those who are not ready to receive them. In this revelation, the Savior interprets the parable of the wheat and the tares.

As the Lord explains, the field refers to the world, and the sowers represent the Apostles. In the original parable, the Savior identifies Himself as the sower. But by the end of His ministry, He gives the charge to His Apostles to “go ye therefore, and teach all nations” (Matthew 28:19), enlisting them to serve as sowers as well. However, after the apostles had “fallen asleep,” or died, “the apostate, the whore, even Babylon” sowed tares. A tare is a kind of weed that looks like wheat in its early stages but ultimately chokes the wheat it grows around. In a revelation given just a few weeks later, Christ identifies the tares as “that great church, the mother of abominations, that made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, that persecuteth the saints of God, that shed their blood—she who sitteth upon many waters, and upon the isles of the sea” (D&C 88:94).

Beyond interpreting the parable, the Savior, more importantly, witnesses that the early Christian church apostatized. The true church of Jesus Christ was driven into the wilderness, causing the need for the Restoration of the gospel through the work of Joseph Smith and others called in the latter days.

With the Restoration of the true Church of Jesus Christ, there is new hope and a new harvest of wheat to be gathered. The “harvest” symbolizes the day of Christ’s return in glory to the earth. Until that day, God allows the wheat and tares to grow alongside each other. The Lord even goes so far as to say that if the tares were plucked up too soon, the wheat might be destroyed. Even the wicked (the tares) play a role in helping the righteous (the wheat) undergo the tests and trials they need to become purified and refined.

Given the foreknowledge of God, people sometimes ask why God allows wicked people to remain on the earth where they can harm or cause grief to the righteous. If God knows whom He will eventually exalt and whom He will not, why did He not just assign His children to their final places of glory without sending them to earth first? The answer is set forth in the explanation given of the parable. Tares must have the time to fully become tares, and wheat must to have the time to fully mature as wheat. The issue at hand is not God’s omniscience but the agency and accountability of mankind. God might know all things, but we do not. He allows us a chance to use our agency to develop and become what we choose to be: a purified person who is worthy of God’s kingdom or a person who chooses a different path outside of the Lord’s presence. The passage even suggests that the wheat need the tares to fully mature.

The time is drawing nearer when both the wheat and the tares must come to a full reckoning of what they really are. Speaking of the angels “crying . . . day and night” to be sent forth to reap, President Wilford Woodruff declared, “God has held the angels of destruction for many years, lest they should reap down the wheat with the tares. But I want to tell you now, that those angels have left the portals of heaven, and they stand over this people and this nation now, and are hovering over the earth waiting to pour out the judgments. And from this very day they shall be poured out. Calamities and troubles are increasing in the earth, and there is a meaning to these things. Remember this, and reflect upon these matters. If you do your duty, and I do my duty, we’ll have protection, and shall pass through the afflictions in peace and safety.”¹

1. Discourses of Wilford Woodruff, 1946, 229–30.

The final part of this revelation pivots from explaining the parable of the wheat and the tares to directly calling the descendants of the House of Israel to come forward and take part in the great and last Restoration. Shortly after he was ordained as the first patriarch of the Church, Joseph Smith Sr. pronounced the following blessings on his son Joseph: “I bless thee with the blessings of thy fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and even the blessings of thy father Joseph, the son of Jacob. Behold, he looked after his posterity in the last days, when they should be scattered and driven by the Gentiles, and wept before the Lord: he sought diligently to know from whence the son should come who should bring forth the word of the Lord, by which they might be enlightened, and brought back to the true fold.”²

Joseph Smith was just one of a multitude of descendants of the House of Israel whose lineage was preserved and kept hidden from the world so that he and others could play their part in restoring the covenants given to Israel. The descendants of Israel who honor their heritage and those who join Israel’s descendants by adoption will be the instruments God uses to set up his kingdom in the last days. There is no distinction in the blessings God gives to a person who is a literal descendant of Israel or to a person who adopted into Israel’s linage through the sacred covenants of the gospel. Later revelations given to Joseph Smith explain how members of the Church in the latter-days mirror the work of the Savior of all mankind by becoming saviors of their ancestors as well.

2. Blessing from Joseph Smith Sr., 9 December 1834, p. 3, JSP.