WWUTT 2151 The Parable of the Sower (Mark 4:1-12)

WWUTT Podcast

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:01

Jesus spoke to the crowds in parables, and he explained to his disciples that the reason he spoke in parables is because to them it was given to know the mysteries of the kingdom, but to others it was not given to them to know, when we understand the text.

00:25

Many of the Bible stories and verses we think we know, we don't. When we understand the text is committed to teaching sound doctrine and rebuking those who contradict it.

00:34

Visit our website at www .wutt .com. Here once again is Pastor Gabe.

00:40

Thank you, Becky. In our study of the Gospel of Mark, we are up to chapter 4, where Mark gives his account of Jesus' parable of the sower, or as it may also be known, the parable of the soils.

00:52

So let me read through the whole parable here and its explanation. This is going to be verses 1 through 20 out of the

01:00

Legacy Standard Bible. And he began to teach again by the sea.

01:07

And such a very large crowd gathered to him, that he got into a boat in the sea, and sat down, and the whole crowd was by the sea on the land.

01:15

And he was teaching them many things in parables, and was saying to them in his teaching,

01:21

Listen to this, Behold, the sower went out to sow, and it happened that as he was sowing, some seed fell beside the road, and the birds came and ate it up.

01:33

And other seed fell on the rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it sprang up, because it had no depth of soil, and after the sun rose, it was scorched, and because it had no root, it withered away.

01:47

And other seed fell among the thorns, and the thorns came up and choked it, and it yielded no crop.

01:53

And other seed fell into the good soil, and as they grew up and increased, they were yielding a crop, and produced thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold.

02:05

And he was saying, He who has ears, let him hear. And when he was alone, his followers, along with the twelve, began asking him about the parables, and he was saying to them,

02:17

To you has been given the mystery of the kingdom of God, but to those who are outside, everything comes in parables, so that while seeing they may see and not perceive, and while hearing they may hear and not understand, lest they return and be forgiven.

02:35

And he said to them, Do you not understand this parable? How will you understand all the parables?

02:41

The sower sows the word, and these are the ones who are beside the road where the word is sown, when they hear, immediately

02:50

Satan comes and takes away the word which has been sown in them. And in a similar way, these are the ones being sown on the rocky places, those who, when hearing the word, immediately receive it with joy, and they have no root in themselves, but are only temporary.

03:07

Then when affliction or persecution arises because of the word, immediately they fall away.

03:14

And others are those being sown among the thorns, these are the ones who have heard the word, but the worries of the world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the desires for anything else, enter in and choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful.

03:31

And those are the ones which were sown on the good soil, they who hear the word and accept it, and are bearing fruit thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold.

03:46

This is, of course, a very popular parable. In Matthew's gospel, it is the first parable.

03:51

It is often called, as is probably the case in the Bible that you have, you probably have a heading there on Mark 4 that says, it is the parable of the sower.

04:02

But I think it is more fitting to call it the parable of the soils, because that's really the emphasis of the parable.

04:09

It's not the sower himself, the sower goes out to sow. The sower may be Christ, the sower could be the apostles, the sower could be a preacher that is preaching the word.

04:18

The sower is not the emphasis in this parable, it is what is being represented by the soils.

04:24

And you have three categories of people that hear the word, but nothing comes of it, and it is unfruitful.

04:31

And then, of course, you have the fourth category of persons, which represents the good soil, on which the word comes, or probably better said, in which the word is sown, and it produces much.

04:43

You are able to see evidence of the belief of the faith in that person by what is produced.

04:49

And even crops that are produced 30, 60, and 100 -fold, that could be a reflection of maturity.

04:56

It could also be a reflection of someone that goes out and tells others the gospel. There are persons that will have large platforms and others that won't have as much.

05:04

But nonetheless, you will still recognize them by their fruits, as Jesus has said elsewhere.

05:10

So between today and tomorrow, let's consider what we're reading here regarding these parables in chapter four.

05:16

There are other parables that will come after this. So again, at the very beginning here, he began to teach by the sea, and a very large crowd gathered to him, and he got into a boat in the sea and sat down, and the whole crowd was by the sea on the land.

05:31

Now this is picking up after what we had read in chapter three, and we read about the crowds being so large that Jesus and his disciples couldn't even get a moment to themselves.

05:41

They didn't even have enough time to sit down and eat. So here Mark is continuing with that.

05:46

Wherever Jesus goes, crowds are following him. They want to see miracles. That's what most of the crowd is there for.

05:54

But there is still something intriguing by the teaching as well. Miracles are probably the first thing that are on their mind, but they're still there to hear teaching also.

06:04

Now Jesus doesn't mean to teach every person who is there, hence why he gives the explanation of the parables the way that he does.

06:12

We'll get to that a little bit later. But again, that's to say that Jesus' main argument is his disciples.

06:19

That word meaning learner, so they are there to learn. That's what disciple means. It means learner.

06:25

They're the ones who are going to listen, and they are the ones to whom Jesus is showing the message of the kingdom.

06:31

Not everybody will receive that or understand it, but Jesus' disciples will. So we have this statement in verse two, he was teaching them many things in parables and was saying to them in his teaching, verse three, listen to this, behold, the sower went out to sow.

06:50

Now I've shared this story before. The first time on this podcast that I deviated from a book study.

06:56

So the very first book study that I did on the What podcast was Philippians.

07:03

And I can't remember, right after Philippians, did I go into Colossians? I don't quite remember exactly.

07:09

That was almost 10 years ago now. We've been doing this. This is our ninth year that we've been doing this podcast. So that's long enough now,

07:15

I don't remember when that was. But when I went away from a book study and I just wanted to do something kind of short term, the first thing that I taught on that wasn't a book of the

07:26

Bible was the parable of the sower, according to Matthew chapter 13. And when

07:31

I taught on that parable, then I remember saying this, that the concept of broadcasting comes from sowing.

07:41

I've been a broadcaster for many years. I was in radio for 22 years before I became a pastor.

07:47

And even after becoming a pastor, I thought my broadcasting days were behind me. But no, there's still found ways for broadcasting to be incorporated into my ministry, whether that was my sermons being posted online.

08:01

I did some ads on radio for various people. I did some devotional thoughts that we get aired on radio stations.

08:07

And then I discovered podcasting and I discovered, hey, I can apply the experience that I had in radio, combine it with what

08:14

I'm doing now as a teacher of the word. And here I can put out teaching every single day through a podcast that was amazing to me.

08:21

Podcast, of course, is a reinvention of the word broadcast. And that was the word that was applied to whenever a message went out on the airwaves, whether that was radio or television or what have you, the message would be broadcasting.

08:37

And like I said, that word came from sowing. It came from a farmer sowing in a field because whenever he would dip his hand in his seed bag and he would cast the seed from his hand into a freshly plowed field, that action of casting the seed was called broadcasting.

09:01

And so when it came to deciding what are we going to call this action of sending out a message over airwaves, they borrowed from what had been known from agriculture is broadcasting.

09:12

And they applied that to sending out a message in the air, just like you would scatter seed into the air that it may fall into the soil and produce a crop.

09:23

So that term was applied to casting a message into the air that would fall on the ears of the listeners.

09:29

It was called broadcasting. Now, of course, we call it podcasting, or at least as it pertains to doing a podcast, which is uploaded to your phone and you listen to it that way.

09:40

And that word, of course, was what was invented by Apple because they had the podcast.

09:45

They came up with the iPod. And then when you wanted to do a talk show of some kind or something like that, people would download and listen to well, that that earned the term podcast, and that is derived from broadcasting.

09:58

So now you know where broadcasting comes from. And that's exactly what Jesus is talking about here.

10:04

It has roots in, no pun intended, the parable of the sower, because he's talking about this sower casting seed.

10:12

And as he says in the explanation of the parable, that the seed he is casting is the word.

10:18

So this sower is broadcasting. This is an illustration.

10:23

Of course, he is telling a parable, which is a metaphor. It is a story that is going to convey a lesson.

10:31

And as I've said previously about parables, there's one lesson to derive from that parable. Sometimes a parable can be so heavily overanalyzed that you kind of lose the message.

10:43

You lose the intention of why Jesus was giving this parable in the first place. Well, in this case,

10:49

Jesus tells his disciples exactly what the parable means. So you can't go beyond the definition that Jesus gives of this parable, that he speaks to the crowds.

11:00

So again, he says in verse three, listen to this, behold, the sower went out to sow.

11:07

And it happened that as he was sowing, some seed fell beside the road and the birds came and ate it up.

11:14

Now, some translations will say path, that the seed fell along the path and not just the road.

11:21

When we're describing it as a road, I think the picture is like a farmer's walking down a dirt road and he's trying to cast seed in his field that's by the road.

11:32

But that's not really what's going on here. So a farmer will have freshly plowed his field.

11:37

He will have hitched a plow up to a mule or an ox or something like that. He will go up and down the rows, plowing up the soil until you have these nice cut rows of dirt with the soil turned up, the fresh soil underneath, kind of like the ground is opened up a little bit to be able to receive the seed that will fall into it.

11:58

And so just shallow enough into the ground, but close enough to those nutrients that the seed is still able to get water and sunlight, but can put down roots and begin to begin to sprout up.

12:10

So first of all, it begins with tilling up the ground. And you will have in a farmer's field, you will have these paths along the plowed rows and the paths will probably be like packed down dirt.

12:24

And it's not that when the farmer is plowing up his field that he's leaving room for paths.

12:31

Maybe he does. Maybe he only plows a certain number of rows, 10 rows, narrow path, 10 more rows.

12:37

Maybe he does it that way, but he's most likely going to plow up all of it. And then there will be a space where he will just simply walk.

12:45

And in his walking, he's going to pack down the soil and it's going to produce a kind of a path that he can walk on.

12:53

That's not where the seed is meant to fall. The seed is meant to fall into the plowed rows, but even there where he has packed down the dirt, he's going to use those paths even as the crop begins to grow, because he'll walk in those paths to check the plant or treat the plants, pull up weeds, things of that nature.

13:12

So the path is not just useful for when he is casting seed. It's also useful for the way that he would inspect his crops.

13:20

So it's not technically a road. It's not like he's walking down a dirt road and casting seed into just this field over here.

13:27

But he has packed down this dirt into these paths and that's what is being referred to here.

13:32

So that when the seed is being cast, some of it, as it scatters from his hand, is going to fall along those paths or road as it's translated here.

13:43

And that soil is packed down. So it's not falling into good soil where the nutrients have been exposed.

13:50

And again, the seed can take root or anything like that. It's not going to go down into the dirt at all.

13:55

It's right there on the surface of the ground. So that's perfect for the birds. It happened that as he was sowing, some seed fell beside the road and the birds came along and ate it up.

14:05

And then other seed, verse five, fell on the rocky ground where it did not have much soil and immediately it sprang up because it had no depth of soil.

14:15

Now the rocky ground, the rocky ground and the thorny ground won't necessarily be there in the place where the farmer or the sower has tilled up the ground.

14:25

It's probably there on the outskirts of the field, as you're picturing this in your mind anyway.

14:31

This is a parable, of course, so you don't want to get too literal, but that's the way that the field would be laid out.

14:37

He's already taken care of there being rocks or thorns in his field. So if there are rocks and thorns that are going to be on the outskirts, yet even as he's casting the seed, it's not all going to fall exactly where he wants it to go.

14:49

That seed is being scattered to the wind. So some of it is going to end up in the rocky places and into the thorns.

14:56

So here he says some of that seed is going to fall into the rocky soil where it did not have much soil and immediately it sprang up because it had no depth of soil.

15:11

So there's no time passing here where the plant is receiving water and sunlight and then it starts to grow.

15:17

Well, it's right there on the ground. So it's already exposed to the elements and that seed is already breaking open and a plant is beginning to emerge, but there's no root.

15:26

Immediately it sprang up because it had no depth of soil. But after the sun rose, it was scorched because it had no root and it withered away.

15:36

All of this, of course, is pointing to something. Jesus is going to get to the explanation here in a moment. So now verse 7, other seed fell among the thorns and the thorns came up and choked it and it yielded no crop.

15:48

In both of these two soils, whether it's the rocks or the thorns, there's a plant that grows up.

15:56

There is a plant that emerges and it doesn't last very long among the rocks. It is scorched by the sun and it withers away.

16:04

Even among the thorns, it's implied there's something that grows up there. So it's not just that the seed falls there and nothing happens with the seed.

16:11

There's a plant that is produced, but it is choked out and it yields no crop.

16:17

It hasn't had time to mature that there would be a harvest. So those two soils in particular, we do have something that emerges, whereas in the seed that falls along the path, nothing comes of it because the birds just come right away and snatch it up and eat it and nothing happens.

16:37

But the seed that falls into the rocks and the seed that falls into the thorns, there is something that happens and yet it just doesn't mature.

16:45

It doesn't produce a harvest. There's no fruit that is yielded from this. There's a plant.

16:52

It looks like something for a time. It looks like something is going to happen, but there's no way for it to grow and to flourish.

16:59

That's important to remember when we come into the explanation of the parable. But then we have in verse eight, other seeds fell into the good soil and as they grew up and increased, they were yielding a crop and produced 30, 60 and a hundred fold.

17:21

Now is there any relevance to those numbers? Why 30, 60 and a hundred fold? I don't know.

17:27

I tried looking that up one time and I never was able to find a commentary that gave a theory on that, on why

17:33

Jesus would specifically choose the numbers 30, 60 and a hundred fold. Is there any relevance to that?

17:39

If you find something on that, let me know. I would be curious to know. But there is here a difference in the parable as we read it from Mark compared with what we read from Matthew.

17:52

When Matthew got to the end of the parable, he said that the good soil produce a crop some a hundred fold, some 60, some 30.

18:01

Mark goes in the other order. He starts on the low end and goes up some 30, some 60, some a hundred fold, if that might be interesting to you.

18:08

But with regards to this, John Gill said the following, the soil brought forth some 30, some 60 and some a hundred, that is so many fold.

18:18

In some, the word of God produced larger and greater effects. The grace of God was more in exercise in some than in others.

18:26

And some were more fruitful and useful, yet in all of them, there was true grace and a measure of it, some degree of lively exercise and some usefulness.

18:40

We're going to get to the explanation of the parable of the soils tomorrow. But first of all, finishing up this portion here, as Jesus ends by saying in verse nine, he who has ears to hear, let him hear.

18:53

And then in verse 10, when he was alone, his followers, along with the twelve, began asking him about the parables.

19:00

Now, as I've said, as I've said elsewhere, Jesus had more disciples than just the twelve.

19:05

There was the twelve who would be called the twelve apostles. We read about that back in chapter three.

19:11

There was that inner group of the twelve. And even among the twelve, you had three who were closer than the rest.

19:18

And that was Peter, James and John. But there were other disciples beyond this, beyond the twelve.

19:24

Even when Jesus was with the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane, we'll see this later on in the

19:30

Gospel of Mark, but there's indication there that there were more disciples than just the twelve. When Jesus was with his disciples in the upper room, that was likely just twelve.

19:39

Sometimes it's indicated to us that it's just Jesus and the twelve. But then there are other occasions where we see that there were other disciples present and this being one of those times.

19:49

So several of the disciples are coming to Jesus and asking him about the parables. And Jesus says in verse 11, to you, it has been given the mystery of the kingdom of God.

20:00

But to those who are outside, everything comes in parables. Everything comes in these word pictures.

20:07

And that is in fulfillment of what is said in the scriptures, in the Psalms, it is said that Jesus would open his mouth when the

20:13

Savior comes. He would open his mouth and teach in a parable. Verse 12, so that while seeing they may see and not perceive, and while hearing they may hear and not understand, lest they return and be forgiven.

20:26

And that is in Isaiah 6, 9, where God had said to the prophet Isaiah, go and tell this people, keep on hearing, but do not understand.

20:35

Keep on seeing, but do not know. Render the hearts of this people insensitive, their ears dull and their eyes dim, lest they see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their hearts and return and be healed.

20:50

There are those whom God means to save, but there are those whom he will not save, but actually bring into judgment and that being a display of his glory as well.

21:02

There are those whom he has elected for salvation and others whom he has not chosen, but they will continue in their sin and their hardness of heart to their destruction, that the full range of God's glory might be displayed.

21:17

And we would indeed praise God forever. We will praise him for his mercy and his deliverance of us.

21:24

And we will also praise him because he had poured out his judgment upon his enemies. So the parables are given in such a way that only those to whom

21:34

God means to show the mysteries of the kingdom will understand them.

21:40

And indeed, I've heard many teachers expound upon parables in ways they were not meant to be understood.

21:46

And you might be hearing from that preacher. I won't say this is the case every time because sometimes a preacher just may simply be mistaken.

21:53

But sometimes you are hearing from that preacher, a demonstration that they are not meant to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God.

22:00

Sometimes they are ignorant and maybe somebody can take them aside and show them what it is that they do not understand.

22:07

But as Peter said in 2 Peter 3 16, those who are ignorant and unstable twist the word to their own destruction as they do the rest of the scriptures.

22:17

So we must be careful in the way that we handle it. And we're going to get a lesson into the meaning of the parable of the soils tomorrow.

22:25

Let's finish here with prayer. Heavenly father, we thank you for what you have shown us in your word.

22:31

And may we have your spirit that we may discern and understand these things. For as is said in first Corinthians chapter two, that the naturally minded man cannot understand spiritual things for they are spiritually discerned.

22:45

It is by your holy spirit that dwells within us that we may understand your word and even know how to apply it to our lives.

22:52

God, I pray today that we would desire to be fruitful, that we grow in the maturity of our understanding of the word, and that we may also take this word and teach it to others so that they may hear of their sinfulness and need of a savior.

23:07

And Jesus Christ is that savior ultimately in this word that's being sown. It's the message of the gospel so that those who have ears to hear may know of their sin and the solution has been given in Jesus Christ so that all who believe in him will not perish, but have everlasting life.

23:28

Thank you God for your mercy and your grace toward us today and may we extend it to others in Jesus name, amen.

23:36

Thank you for listening to When We Understand the Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. If you'd like to support this ministry, visit our website www .tt

23:44

.com and click on the give tab in the top right corner of the page. Join us again tomorrow as we continue our