154 - Throwing Alongside

You pick up your Bible and wonder, is there more here than meets the eye?

Is there anything here for me? I mean, it's just words printed on paper, right? Well, it may look like just print on a page, but it's more than ink. Join us for the next half hour as we explore God's Word together, as we learn how to explore it on our own, as we ask God to meet us there in its pages.

Welcome to More Than Ink. Well today in Matthew's Gospel, Jesus is going to start teaching us with parables. And what's a parable? It's a little nugget of a story that hides deeper truth. Why would Jesus do that?

Yeah, it's a curious change, but what we can do is see what the effect is on the people who are listening to him. Let's look at that today on More Than Ink. Well, yes, here we are again around our dining room table. I'm Jim. And I'm Dorothy. And we're glad you're with us again.

I hope you're enjoying what we're enjoying. We're going through the book of Matthew and we're heading into one of Jesus's, I guess maybe his second most well-known teaching passage. I mean, the first one was when you got into chapter five on the Sermon on the Mount, but now we get to the thing called the kingdom parables. And Matthew collects a lot of them in one place. We don't know that he actually told all these stories all at once, but he probably told them repeatedly. But about a third of Jesus's teachings are in the form of a parable. And so today we start into the biggest chunk of them that Matthew records.

Yeah, and they're really fun. So this is a thinking cap. You got to put your thinking caps on.

You can't just listen. You've got to think your way through these. But just in these initial parables, he'll explain them to us. So he'll give us the idea how we're supposed to do this. But a little later on, he'll bring us some parables that he doesn't explain for us. So then we really got to put our thinking caps on.

Right. Well, because when they come to him after this one and Mark records this, that they say, okay, so explain the parables to us. And he says to them in Mark 4-13, well, you didn't understand that one.

How will you understand any of them? So there's something fundamental about this first one that helps us understand all the parables. And a parable, we probably should say right at the get go, is just a story that puts one thing alongside another for the purpose of teaching. It is an illustration, a story that causes you to think more deeply. And the great thing about the parables is that they're just these little nuggets of stories.

They're simple, they're memorable, they're portable, they're about every day items and circumstances that everybody can relate to. And yet, the way Jesus tells them, it causes you to think, oh, well, maybe there's something bigger because he says, the kingdom of heaven is like this, every day common thing. And then you're forced to think, well, how is that? So what he's really on a call to do is to listen thoughtfully.

Yeah, it's all about how you listen. And if you're into English grammar, these are not technically allegories. They're not technically metaphors. No, they're comparisons.

Yeah, they're comparisons. And even that whole idea of a parable, the English word parable is almost a direct translation of the sound in Greek because there was a verb called parabalo and parabalo is when you would bring a ship up alongside and parallel to another ship so you could shoot at them. Or today, if you're going to dock a boat, you bring it up parallel to the dock.

Yeah, you come alongside. So the verb is parabalo. But then once you get there and they're in parallel, then you say, now we've got ourselves a parable. That's a parable.

So that's what we're doing here. He's deliberately bringing these stories up alongside a greater truth for you to think thoughtfully about what's being said. So the first one's like a training parable for us because he'll explain it.

That's a good way to put it. So he had been inside a house of some kind teaching, as we recall, because then it says his mother and brothers came to the house and asked to see him, right, if you remember that from the end of chapter 12. So here we start into chapter 13, that same day, Matthew tells us. So this one happened this way. Let's start reading in verse one.

Are we ready? Okay, so here comes the parable. That same day, Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea and great crowds gathered about him so that he got into a boat and sat down and the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying, a sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path and the birds came and devoured them. Other seeds fell on the rocky ground where they didn't have much soil and immediately they sprang up since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched. And since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns and the thorns grew up and choked them.

Other seeds fell on good soil and produced grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. He who has ears let him hear. Well, I have ears. Well, do they just adorn the side of your head? Or for women, are they just a place to hang your earrings?

Well, no. Or we talk about things going in one ear and out the other and we sing. We do that naturally.

What he wants to say is, if you've got an ear, you need to really give some listen. Is it connected to your thinking and to your heart? Right, right.

Don't let it just bounce off or go in one ear and out the other. That's right. Do you have a spiritual appetite? Right, right. That's what he's asking.

That's right. So, it's just a nice setup when it begins is he comes out of the house where his mom and his brothers had come. He comes out of that house and then there's so many people around.

He needs to actually get out in a boat and push away from the shore and people aren't going to stand in the water. So they'll stand on the beach. So there's a little separation. A little separation. So they're not just crowding up close. So we're having problems with the numbers of people. And as a pastor, I like the fact that in this particular case, Jesus is sitting and the congregation is standing throughout the entire thing.

So that probably would decrease the amount of people that fall asleep. But that's just the setup. So here's Jesus in the boat and he's telling this. And he just launches off in this parable.

And there he goes. And he talks about a sower who went out to sow. And he comes up with four contexts. And they knew about this agriculturally, four contexts in which if you put the seed in these different places, they have different results in terms of sprouting. And that's a general truth that everybody recognized, right?

I'm a gardener. These things are still true today, right? It just makes sense. But he says, now this story is about the Kingdom of God. There's something happening here. And if you've got ears, if you have a spiritual appetite, are your ears connected to your understanding? Then listen up.

So we're not going to explain it just now, because he's going to explain it later in a few minutes here. But just remember, the seed is being sown in four different kinds of soil. Different kinds of soil. Yeah.

And some of them will promote growth and some won't. And somehow there's a gigantic spiritual connection to this very ordinary, commonly seen thing. And we'll just reveal them quickly and then we'll just push on.

How about that? So the first soil is on a path. Path is always trodden down and it's hard. You're not going to grow too many seeds. It's a public place. On hard soil. It's either going to get crushed underfoot or the ground's too hard, all that kind of stuff.

Not going to happen. And then as a result of that, the seeds are wasted. The birds just come and pick them off the ground and eat them. I'm acquainted with that. Yeah, yeah.

We have a problem with that. And then the second one is that the seeds go into rocky ground. So there's fertile ground underneath it, but it's kind of rocky. And the seeds will germinate, but because of the rocks and stuff, the roots just don't go very low. And so if the weather gets bad or you need water in a drought, the roots are going to say, we can't help you out and the plant just dies. And then the third situation is where you cast it in, again, in very fertile soil. So fertile, in fact, that weeds are growing all over the place. But now when it germinates, it's going to compete for resources in the soil. One plant versus the other plant.

Well, in a specific kind of weeds, he says thorns. Yeah, yeah. So that's a problem.

They get choked out basically. But then, finally, in the fourth one, it's good. It's fertile ground. There's no weeds.

There's no rocks. And then it sprouts and it grows ahead with more seeds so that it multiplies 100 fold, 60 fold, 30 fold. So we say, yeah, okay, great. So what's this got to do about anything? Because at this particular parable here, in Matthew's narrative, it doesn't say that he started it by saying the kingdom of heaven is light. No, that's true.

That's true. He will now because he's going to ask. They say, why do you keep talking to us in parables? So let's just keep that under our belts for a second and he'll explain it for us as we move on in the passage. So let's go to verse 10.

Okay. Then the disciples came and said to him, why do you speak to them in parables? Okay, so this is probably after the whole series of parable teaching. So why do you speak to them in parables? And he answered them, to you it's been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to the one who has, more will be given and he'll have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables.

Well, now, wait a minute. That's not very straightforward. Verse 13, this is why I speak to them in parables because seeing they do not see and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. Indeed, in their case, the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled saying, you will indeed hear but never understand. You will indeed see but never perceive for this people's heart has grown dull and with their ears they can barely hear and their eyes they have closed lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn and I would heal them. But blessed are your eyes for they see and your ears for they hear for truly I say to you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see and did not see it and to hear what you hear and did not hear it.

Wow, isn't that fascinating. He's saying that he deliberately uses this technique so that those who need to understand will and those who don't need to understand won't. And this sets up a really interesting thing about parables is that they are deliberately designed to puzzle, right? So that those with an appetite for spiritual truth will dig in. And those who can just dismiss it without even giving it a second thought, oh, it's a cute little story, but it's irrelevant to me. So parables are designed both to reveal truth and to conceal it. Why would God hide a truth in order to cause us to need to dig it out? Yeah, and Jesus is very deliberate here. Both of those things are operating here. Right. And I would almost say the second one about removing the truth from the foreground is a big deal. It is.

So why would God deliberately hide truth from people who don't want it? That's the question. Isn't that an interesting thing?

You know, do you want to talk about that? Yeah, just a little bit because I think that's what makes people trip on this passage more than anything else. That's a really important idea that if you have dismissed this and said there's nothing of any value here, Jesus knew that this people was going to reject him nationally. Right.

Right. And so by veiling the truth, those who were already inclined to reject would be less guilty because they would not have really thoroughly understood what it was they were rejecting. It's sort of a mercy toward those with hardened hearts so that it would avoid adding more condemnation to the rejection of the truth in a way. And yet the truth is there to be dug a hidden like an Easter egg. Right, right. And those who are motivated and want to gain deeper understanding will dive into it, use what they know in order to untangle what's there and they'll get it.

But for the ones who just don't care, who just, you know, just want to let it go, it'll just go right over there. So the thing is that truth once rejected makes it a little easier to reject the next time. Yeah. And so there's this kind of hardening process going on. Yes. If you reject the truth, you become a little more hardened to it, a little easier to dismiss it next time you heard it. Yeah, yeah. In fact, in some of the people we know in our area here who have become believers, many times there was this point in their conversion process where they say, and they say this deliberately, they say, I gave myself permission to question or to doubt or to look into, to look deeper. And that's what we're seeing right here as well. If these people who were had been hardened had said, no, wait, I'm going to give myself permission to actually listen to this and consider this, but they've already come into it saying, I'm not going to consider this.

Yeah. I don't care who this Jesus guy is. And so I'm not going to listen to what he says. Well, and there's an appeal to the understanding. He says, you know, if you, if you see with perception and hear with open ears, your understanding will be affected.

And are you willing to respond to the truth that you then understand? Right, right. So that's how the parables function. And Jesus says very clearly, that's why I'm telling them this story. Cause it's going to separate those with a spiritual appetite from those who have none. Right, right. And it's, it's both those sides. It's both those sides. And by the way, Jesus kind of hinted at this during the Sermon on the Mount when he talked about throwing your pearls before swine.

That kind of an idea is, is sort of included right here as well. So Jesus uses this very clever technique of being able to satisfy the desires of those who want more deep understanding as all, as well as sort of avoiding more hardening on the part of those who are already hardened. So what do you make of it when he says in verse 12, to the one who has more will be given and he'll have an abundance, but the one who has not, even when he has will be taken away. Yeah, well the first one's easier because you know that it takes some pre-knowledge about the kingdom in order to untangle these.

A little bit of knowledge of what's going on to make that connection. But the fact that people who reject it, that they'll actually lose what they already know, is sort of a, it actually hints at many things, but one of them to me hints at the fact that what you do know about the kingdom, about what Jesus is all about, if you don't revisit it and reapply it, you start to, it starts to get soft in your head, it starts to fade, you forget. And it fades away naturally because we live in a physical world that tends to kind of crowd it out, and so your understanding of the kingdom just tends to fade. Okay, so it's not just that way with spiritual truth, it's that way with math. Yeah, exactly.

At least that's a word for me, right? If I didn't continually revisit and redo those problems and understand those concepts, then by the next, you know, you take the summer off, you come back in the fall, you're like, oh wait, what was that? We all need to be continually reminded to build on the truth that we know in order to cement it one level deeper. Yeah, and so as we read this, listeners, this is a fun way to take what you already know about the kingdom, about who Jesus is, and apply it and kind of scratch your head and think big thoughts and try and find why Jesus is taking this story and bringing it in parallel alongside of what you already know and what it means to you. Because like I say, next time we get together, he's going to give us some parables he's not going to explain for us, and it'll cause us a twist a little bit, and that's good, that's really good. Now, I want to also notice that he quotes Isaiah 6, which is an interesting passage.

It is. Because it is immediately after God calls Isaiah to be a prophet, and Isaiah has this kind of, oh, I'm in heaven, I'm going to die, I can't see God, and God says, no, I'm going to call you to go out there. But immediately he quotes this to Isaiah and says, you're going to go out there and speak for me, but by the way, they have ears, but they're not going to listen to you. Right.

It's miserable news. God says, here, I'm sending you to this people, but they're blind and deaf and they're not going to listen. And Isaiah's response is, well, how long? Well, what?

Yeah, so we'd encourage you to look at that. It's in Isaiah 6, and it's just fascinating. It's right after he calls Isaiah.

It won't take you long to read it. Yeah, it's just a few verses. It also kind of opens the idea that this understanding that God's people had grown dull of hearing and hard of seeing had been going on for centuries. It is a recurrent theme in the book of Isaiah and in Jeremiah, even Ezekiel talks about it.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, Isaiah's five centuries before Jesus. So they were thoroughly kind of hardened into a particular expectation of Messiah according to their own desires by this time Jesus came. Which again explains why they received Jesus with such violence, because he was just way outside the lines.

Outside what they wanted or expected. Yeah, right. But he does encourage them in 16 when he comes out of the passage in Isaiah 6 and verse 16, but blessed are your eyes. Hey, they see, your ears, they hear. And truly, and this is a wonderful statement. I say there were many prophets and righteous people who long to see what you see and they didn't see it and to hear what you hear and they didn't hear it. So for us, what a great encouragement. What you are reading on these pages is truth that people long ago yearned to understand, but they never saw it.

They never saw it. And he's saying this to the 12, so maybe he was saying it personally to them, you have me and you have these three years when you have access to me. You can come and ask me, hey, wait, what did that mean?

And I will tell you. But we now have the Holy Spirit of this same Lord Jesus resident in us. And when we apply our open minds and hearts and say, Lord, I don't understand this.

What does this mean? Jesus said, the Spirit will teach you. He'll bring to your remembrance. He will give you understanding. Everything I said, yeah. Yeah. Well, we said that this was a training parable. Okay. Because he will explain it to us.

So if you're curious about the seeds in these four different soils, well, what does this all mean? Here comes his explanation. Here's the number one parable in order to help you figure out how you do this.

Should I read this? Yeah, go ahead. Okay. So here's our explanation. Verse 18. So he says, so hear then the parable of the sower. By the way, that's what this is known as, the parable of the sower.

19. So when anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches it away, snatches away what has been sown in his heart. This is what was sown along the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy. Yet he has no root in himself, but endures for a while.

And when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, well, immediately he falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word and it proves unfruitful. And as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it. He indeed bears fruit and yields, and in one case, a hundredfold and another 60 and another 30.

What a great explanation. Well, it makes a great deal of sense, right? Because he's just describing the four different kinds of soil. The seed is the same, the sower is the same, but their response is different.

And you know... In fact, in all four cases he starts with, they heard the word. Right, they heard the word.

They heard the word. And I'm really intrigued by this very first one when he says, when anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, right? Well, to understand something requires thinking. It requires applying your mind to it and letting it penetrate you, right? Which is the problem with seed on the path. There's no place for that seed to penetrate.

It doesn't stay long before the bird snatches. Even though the seed still contains all of the truth, all of the potential, all of the future possibilities, but just sits there ungerminated because of the hardness of the soil. Yeah, yeah. So we've identified that the seed itself is the word about the kingdom. It's the understanding, right? And the soil is, well, it's the receptivity inside people to that word. Right, right.

So it gets snatched away. Let's go on to the rocky ground. Okay. Yeah. So the rocky ground, they hear the word and they receive it with joy.

They receive it. Yeah, wow. It germinates and springs up fast, but there's no deep root. It doesn't take root, yeah. So when things get hard, the sun shines down hot, the water is scarce. Yeah. And they know, again, with plants, if it doesn't have a deep root, if the outside environment gets really bad, if it gets harsh, drought and stuff like that, without the water in the dirt and without a root to tap into it, you're just gonna wither.

And that's what he's talking about here. Deep taproot. Now, this is an interesting idea because this deeply rooted into the groundwater shows up in Psalm 1. It shows up in Jeremiah 17, this idea of being deeply rooted into a water source that is below the surface.

Like a tree planted by the water. Right. Yeah, yeah. So that's an important thing. So again, it's not the ineffectiveness of the seed itself.

No. It's the receptivity to it. And although it was received initially with great enthusiasm, it wasn't nurtured. So they understood it kind of, but then it wasn't nurtured, so it didn't grow deep.

And he says specifically when tribulation, hard times because of it, or persecution, those are things that target that little weenie seed. Right, right, right. Yeah. And they make things hard for it.

And they threaten your understanding and even your acceptance of what you heard about the word. Right. Yeah. And that commonly shows up today when people say, I became a Christian, but then my life got hard and I figured God didn't love me anymore. Right. Or God didn't care. That kind of thing is what happens.

So he goes into the third case. Which is sown among thorns. Thorns, yeah. Again, he hears the word. So hears it with understanding and receives it, but Jesus says, the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke it out. Yeah. So it's a competition in this fertility of the ground. So again, you can receive the gospel, but then other things in the world call out to you and end up consuming your resources and your attention and your ability to nurture them.

And they might deliver a faster, immediate return for the kind of delight I'm looking for. Yeah. So this is not a problem of like drought-like circumstances where you don't have a tablet.

This is about where you have a very fertile area and you let other things grow instead. Right. It has the same effect on that seed. It just chokes it out. Chokes it out.

Yeah. But in the final assessment, you have the good soil. Hear the word, you understand it. Let it penetrate. And you let it grow past just germination, but up until full height with wheat, that's like a meter tall.

That's a yard tall. And then it puts on heads and then more seed come out of it. So he's showing about how the gospel, when it actually finds fertility in people's hearts, it multiplies not only in your hearing and your understanding, but how you propagate it to other people.

It's as easy to propagate as speaking the word all over again. But it's interesting too that there's this little detail about there's a variety of fruitfulness. Yeah. Right. That's true. And it's all good. Yeah. Right. But some bears 30, some bears 60, some bears 100 times.

It's just, there's no way of predicting. And we've seen this in the lives of people we've known over decades where the gospel takes root and some of them, they just go on fire and they're like, we know some are traveling around the world right now who just speak about the gospel and we're talking about 100 fold stuff. Others it's a little more limited and there's nothing wrong with that. But it is an interesting thing.

It's just like a seed, a simple seed that was planted and then the outgrowth of the fruit is unpredictable and varied and that's okay. That's great. You know, I might mention while we got just a couple seconds left, there's another interesting parallel idea. If you read Isaiah 55 where he talks about his word coming out of heaven and watering the ground. It's not a perfect parallel to this, but I'm just suggesting there's a connection. There's another parable to bring alongside of this. If you want to, it's in Isaiah 55 verse eight for a couple of verses starting in verse eight. And it's an interesting kind of side thing if you're looking for a way to compliment this parable all by itself. Well, Matt, that says something wonderful about the word of God that it never goes forth without accomplishing God's purpose. Right, right.

And I might add one more thing here. We've been talking about the apostles being trained to be sent out and do stuff. This is a wonderful investment in them in order of lining up their expectations. They're going to go to different places around the world and they're going to sow the same seed over and over and over again. And the responses are going to be varied and they need to understand that this is not their failure as they do this.

That there just is going to be a varied response. And Jesus says it has nothing to do with the quality of the seed that you're spreading. Nor the activity of the sower. Exactly.

It has everything to do with just the receptivity of the heart. So what a great way for Jesus to kind of set their expectations and say it's going to be good in some places but others not. So get used to it because that happened with Jesus as well. So before we run completely out of time, I just want to circle back to this particular parable. A question worth asking is what kind of soil are you?

That's the big question. Are you one that the seed will penetrate and germinate or not? And so we'll lay down some guidelines for understanding the parables in the coming weeks as we talk about some more. But this is a good one to begin with. In terms of personal application, what a great start.

What kind of soil are you? Well, so anyway, we're out of time. I'm Jim. And I'm Dorothy. And we're glad you joined us here. Come back as we continue the Kingdom parables next week on More Than Ink. There are many more episodes of this broadcast to be found at our website, morethanink.org. And while you're there, take a moment to drop us a note. Remember, the Bible is God's love letter to you. Pick it up and read it for yourself and you will discover that the words printed there are indeed more than ink.