Why Parables?

His own contemporaries said of him, no man has ever taught the way he does. And even some of his enemies said that he speaks as one who has authority and not like the scribes and the Pharisees. The teaching of Jesus is not frivolous.

It's not superficial. There's not a desultory word that ever comes from his lips. Everything that he says has substance to it. Everything that he says carries the very weight of his own authority. During his earthly ministry, Jesus was a masterful teacher.

As you just heard from R.C. Sproul, his teaching even caught the attention of his enemies. But did he always teach in order that all of his hearers would understand? Welcome to a new week on Renewing Your Mind. This week, Dr. Sproul will be walking us through several of Jesus' parables. These messages are from his 12-part series, The Parables of Jesus, and we'd like to send it to you along with his title, What Do Jesus' Parables Mean?

So please be sure to call us this week with a donation of any amount at 800-435-4343, and we'll get this resource bundle in the mail for you. So what are parables? Are they like an illustration in a sermon so that everyone can better understand the meaning of the teaching, or is there more to their purpose?

Here's Dr. Sproul. Tonight we're going to begin a brand new series entitled, The Parables of Jesus. And what I intend to do in our times together is first of all give a brief explanation and definition of what a parable is and how those parables were used by Jesus in his earthly ministry, and then after that brief introduction, it is my plan to give an exposition of eleven parables that I have selected for this course.

Now Jesus gave many more parables than those eleven, but in the time constraints that we have for this series, we're going to focus our attention on just eleven of them. Let me begin by saying I think that it's safe to say that our Lord Jesus Christ was the greatest teacher that ever walked on the face of the earth. And I say that not only because He was the very incarnation of truth, and so that the content of His teaching was altogether impeccable and was of divine origin. But not only was He the greatest teacher that ever lived because of the supreme content that He delivered, but also He was a master pedagogue. That is, His style of teaching was extraordinary. His own contemporaries said of Him, no man has ever taught the way He does. And even some of His enemies said that He speaks as one who has authority and not like the scribes and the Pharisees.

Now let me just pause for a second and comment briefly on that statement that Jesus spoke as one having authority. The word there that is translated by authority in some instances is the Greek word which I will transliterate here, exousia. Exousia.

It's usually translated by the English word authority, but it can also be translated by the English word power. And this interesting word is made up of a prefix, ex, and the root –ousia. And I think you know what that prefix ex means.

If you're ever in a difficult situation and the theater you're in catches on fire, you look for the sign that says exit because you know that that's the way to get out. And so the prefix ex means simply from or out of. But what I'm most interested in is the root of this word exousia. The word ousia is the present participle of the Greek verb to be. And so it can be translated by the word being or essence or substance or even more crudely simply stuff. And so if we look at the etymology of this word that is translated authority, it means literally out of substance, out of stuff, out of essence, out of being. And the idea here is that the teaching of Jesus is not frivolous.

It's not superficial. There's not a desultory word that ever comes from His lips. Everything that He says has substance to it. Everything that He says carries the very weight of His own authority. And so we understand that Jesus uniquely taught from this standpoint of authority, the authority of God Himself. He said, I say nothing on my own authority, but I only say that which has been given to me by the Father. Now in His unique proclamation of truth with authority in His pedagogical style, He's perhaps most noted for His use of parables.

And a brief comment on that. First of all, the idea of the parable is not something that began or was invented by Jesus. There was a tradition among the Pharisees and the rabbis of that day to use parables, but their use of parable was different slightly from Jesus' use of it.

The use of the Pharisees was to explain or to illustrate the meaning of the Old Testament mosaic law. Jesus' use of parables was not simply to illustrate previous revelation that had been given and delivered through Moses and the prophets of the Old Testament, but His use of parable was to give new revelation, revelation that was heretofore unknown. And so it was an important difference from His use of parable and that of the Pharisees. Second of all, you won't find a parable anywhere in the New Testament outside of the gospels. The gospels are filled with the use of parables, but they are strangely absent from the rest of the New Testament.

And they're most infrequent in the Old Testament. Perhaps you will remember the most famous parable of the Old Testament, and that was the one delivered by the prophet Nathan when he came to David after David's sin with Bathsheba. And he told them the story of this rich man who had many sheep, and he took this one sheep from the poor man who loved this sheep dearly and arrogated it to himself. And when David heard that story, he was outraged. And he said, who is that man? Find me that man.

Bring him here. I'm not going to put up with that in my kingdom. And so even with the use of the parable by the prophet Nathan, David didn't get it until Nathan got in his face and said, David, you are the man. Now I mention that famous parable of the Old Testament because in that case, Nathan came to David with judgment.

He came in a moment of crisis. And this is one of the ways in which parables function so richly in the New Testament. The very word parable, if we break it down, it comes from the Greek parabalo. Para again is the prefix, and you're familiar with it. You have paralegals, parachutes, paraministries, para this and para that, and a para means something that is alongside something else.

Paralegal works alongside the lawyer as a helper to assist them in a certain way. And the root of that word parable, balo, or balao, means to throw or to hurl. And so if you break the word down, parabalo means something that is thrown alongside of something else.

And we see how Jesus uses it. He is teaching an important concept, and in order to clarify His teaching and His meaning, He throws the parable alongside of it to illustrate the truth that He's given. It's been said that in real estate there are only three important factors that determine the value of a property. The first one is location, and the second one is location, and the third one is location.

So we say it comes down to location, location, location. It's been said of preachers that the most important part of their proclamation is illustration, illustration, illustration. But again, we try to use illustrations to simplify, to clarify, to heighten people's ability to understand what we are saying. And there is an element of that contained in the use of parable by Jesus.

However, there is another element, an element that is somewhat mysterious and sometimes gives us pause. Some people find it objectionable, but we'll look at that in Mark's gospel in the fourth chapter. Right after Jesus had preached His famous parable of the sower, He said at the end of that parable, He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

Now why would a speaker ever make a statement like that after he tells a story? If I give an illustration in my sermon, do I say at the end of it to you, He who has ears to hear, let him hear, because we're almost a hundred percent certain that everybody who's present in the congregation has two ears. They may have a percentage of those who can't hear and are hearing impaired, but again the vast majority of people who are sitting under the sermon are able to hear the sound waves that come through the ears. And so why would Jesus say, He who has ears to hear, let him hear? Well, He's obviously not talking about a simple response to an impact on the auditory nerve in the ear.

He's talking about people who have an ability to hear, to understand, and to embrace the truth of it, to hear not simply the audible sounds that are being made, but to get it and to embrace it. In fact, there's a strange phenomenon in the Greek language with respect to hearing. The verb to hear is the verb akuene, from which we get the English word acoustics. And the word for obedience in Greek is hupakuene.

And that prefix hupo is the prefix from which we get the English word hyper, or the word super. And so it's interesting, in the Greek language there's hearing, and then there's obeying what you hear. And obeying what you hear means really hearing it, a hyper-hearing, a super-hearing. And so when Jesus gives this statement, He who has ears to hear, let him hear, what He's basically saying is that He understands that there were people there hearing His teaching who didn't hear it.

It never really pierced their understanding or their heart. And so Jesus makes a distinction between those who hear and those who don't hear. And we get further explanation of that in this strange passage in Mark chapter 4 where we read these words. After Jesus said to them, He who has ears to hear, let him hear. But when He was alone, those around Him with the twelve asked Him about the parable. And He said to them, to you it has been given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God. But to those who are outside, all things come in parables so that, He says, seeing they may see and not perceive, and hearing they may hear and not understand, lest they should turn and their sins be forgiven them. So what's going on here is that to those who have ears to hear, the parable is an instrument that Jesus uses to give a deeper understanding of the things that He's saying. But to those who don't have ears to hear, the parable is actually an instrument of concealment. It's not simply given to make everything clear to people, but it is to obscure to those who are the outside that are not given the understanding of the mystery of the kingdom of God.

Now that sounds somewhat harsh, isn't it? That Jesus comes and He not only comes to instruct and to help people understand the kingdom of God for those who have ears to hear it, but also His coming is a kind of judgment on those who don't want to hear the truth. Remember, in our fallen condition, we're described in New Testament terms that we by nature do not want to have God in our thinking. We don't want to hear His Word.

We have no desire to understand His Word. We're fugitives from His Word and enemies of that Word, and because of that, whenever God speaks His Word, which is redeeming to some, it is an expression of judgment on others. Let's go back just for a moment to the prophet Isaiah, to his call in the sixth chapter of the book that bears his name. After he has the vision of the Lord high and lifted up, and he hears the trisagion, the song of the seraphim, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, and he's overwhelmed and pronounces a curse on himself, and then God instructs the seraphim to take a burning coal from off the altar and come and sear his lips, and while he's trembling before the holiness of God, in profound anguish and horror and terror, God says, whom shall we send?

And who will go for us? And Isaiah, through those blistered lips that had just been cauterized by that hot coal, says, here am I, send me. And so what does God say to his prophet? He says, oh Isaiah, that's a wonder, I'm so glad you volunteered for this mission. I'm going to anoint you with my Holy Spirit.

I'm going to make you the most popular evangelist that ever walked the face of the earth, and the crowds will be streaming into arenas in order to hear every word that comes from your mouth. That's not what God said. Rather, he said to him, go and tell this people, keep on hearing, but do not understand.

Keep on seeing, but do not perceive. Make the heart of this people dull, their ears heavy, and shut their eyes, lest they see with their eyes and hear with their ears, understand with their heart, and return and be healed. Isaiah, I'm commissioning you to shut the eyes of the people, to stop the ears of the people, that their hearts may be hardened, lest they repent and be healed. In other words, your mission is to be my instrument simply of judgment.

And it's a judgment in kind, a kind of poetic justice. These people don't want to hear my word, that I'm going to give them over to their antipathy to my word and not give them the ability to hear my word. They don't want to look at me. I'm going to shut their eyes. I'm going to make their hearts fat, lest they hear the good news and be converted. And when Isaiah heard those terms of his vocation, he cried out in anguish, Lord, how long?

How long am I going to preach to a people that don't want to hear it? God answered. He said, until the cities are laid waste and without inhabitant, until the houses are without a man and the land is utterly desolate, the Lord has removed men far away and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land, but yet a tenth will be in it and will return as the terebeth tree or an oak whose stump remains when it is cut down, so the holy seed shall be my stump.

I've kept for myself a remnant of my people who will hear what you say and who will be given ears to hear. There's an interesting word in the New Testament that is used that really describes Jesus' entrance into the world, and it's the Greek word kresis, kresis. Now that word is translated by the English word judgment. We bring it over into our language by a different word, the word kresis, and the greatest kresis that the world ever experienced was the advent of Jesus. He came for a rising and a falling of many in Israel. He said, I came not to bring peace but a sword to set father against mother and husband against wife and parents against children. He's the rock of stumbling, the stone of offense. To those who love Him, He is the aroma of salvation.

To those who oppose Him, He's the grounds for their condemnation. And all of this is seen in His use of the parable. He would take His disciples aside and say, to you is given the mystery of the kingdom of God.

Finally this. When we go through the parables, you will see there are many different themes, but one of the most common themes of the parable is the theme of the gospel of the kingdom of God. The term gospel is used three ways in the Bible. One way is to describe a particular literary form, the gospels, the books that tell us about Jesus and His life and ministry. But in the first instance, the gospel that is defined and proclaimed by John the Baptist and then by Jesus is the good news of the kingdom of God. And later in the epistles with Paul, for example, he talks about the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ so that the content of that gospel is Jesus, His person and His work. But that transition comes from the initial announcement of the good news, which is the announcement by John and the announcement of Jesus of the breakthrough of the kingdom of God. And so over and over and over again throughout His parables, Jesus will say, and the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven is likened to this. And He would throw along with that announcement the parable that we might understand the mystery of this kingdom.

That was R.C. Sproul beginning this week's study of Jesus' parables on this Monday edition of Renewing Your Mind. So there's more to parables than them merely being illustrations. And as you'll hear this week, even a simple parable is filled with deep meaning and application.

That's why I really do encourage you to request the series so that you can have R.C. Sproul walk you through 11 of Jesus' parables. And if you prefer to read, this week we'll also send you his title, What Do Jesus' Parables Mean? Make a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800 435 4343 and the two DVD set and booklet will be yours. Plus you'll be able to stream the series and read the study guide in the free Ligonier app. If your church or small group have never used teaching from Ligonier before, this is an easy series to integrate that has teaching relevant for both new and seasoned Christians. Visit renewingyourmind.org or use the link in the podcast show notes to request this resource bundle today. When we return, R.C. Sproul will begin looking at individual parables and their meanings starting with the parable of the Pharisee and the publican. So join us tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind. R.C. Sproul.