The parables of the treasure in the field and the pearl of great price are often treated like they are mainly about people searching hard enough for God. Jesus certainly calls His people to seek Him, love Him with all the heart, soul, and mind, and go all in, lock, stock, and barrel. Christ does not ask to be one religious piece among many pieces of life. Christ calls for the whole life, because “if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”

The cross does not simply mean having a hard week or suffering through life’s troubles. The cross means death. No one picked up a cross, went out to the hill, and came back for dinner. Jesus calls His people to die to themselves and follow Him with every fiber of their being. The question, then, is not whether Jesus gets a charm on the bracelet of life. The question is whether Jesus is the bracelet that holds the whole thing together.

The two short parables press even deeper than that. The treasure in the field and the pearl of great price are not finally about human seeking. Christ is the seeker. The Son of Man came “to seek and to save the lost.” Ezekiel 34 shows Yahweh saying again and again, “I myself will search for my sheep,” “I will seek the lost,” “I will bring back the strayed,” and “I will bind up the injured.” God is the actor from cover to cover. Adam and Eve hide, and God comes looking.

Jesus takes that Ezekiel language into Himself when He says, “I am the good shepherd.” Yahweh comes as Yeshua, the good shepherd who lays down His life for the sheep. Jesus is not murdered like a helpless victim. Jesus gives up His life with authority, and He has authority to take it up again. The shepherd seeks the errant sheep by dying for them and rising for them.

The treasure in the field is the sinner Christ came to buy. The field is the world, and God so loved the world that He gave His only Son. Romans 5 makes the Gospel blow the mind: while people were weak, ungodly, sinners, and enemies, Christ died for them. Peace with God comes through the blood of Jesus, not through human lovability.

The all-in Christian life grows from that astonishing love. The Holy Spirit alone molds and shapes a person into the 100 percent Christian God desires. God takes a person right where that person is at, but He never wants to leave that person there.